Questions to Luce Irigaray

This article traces the “dialogue” between the work of the philosophers Luce Irigaray and Emmanuel Levinas. It attempts to construct a more nuanced discussion than has been given to date of Irigaray's critique of Levinas, particularly as formulated in “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas” ( Irigaray 1991 )-It suggests that the concepts of the feminine and of voluptuosity articulated by Levinas have more to contribute to Irigaray's project of an ethics of sexual difference than she herself sometimes appears to think.     

The Unacknowledged Socrates in the Works of Luce Irigaray

In Luce Irigaray's thought, Socrates is a marginal figure compared to Plato or Hegel. However, she does identify the Socratic dialectical position as that of a ‘phallocrat’ and she does conflate Socratic and Platonic philosophy in her psychoanalytic reading of Plato in Speculum of the Other Woman. In this essay, I critically interpret both Irigaray's own texts and the Platonic dialogues in order to argue that: (1) the Socratic dialectical position is not ‘phallocratic’ by Irigaray's own understanding of the term; (2) that Socratic (early Platonic) philosophy should not be conflated with the mature Platonic metaphysics Irigaray criticizes; and (3) that Socratic dialectical method is similar in some respects with the dialectical method of Diotima, Socrates’ instructress in love and the subject of Irigaray's “Sorcerer Love” essay in An Ethics of Sexual Difference.     

Crossing Lovers: Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions

Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions could be read as a response to Merleau‐Ponty's article “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible. Like Merleau‐Ponty, Irigaray describes corporeal intertwining or vision and touch. Counteracting the narcissistic strain in Merleau‐Ponty's chiasm, she assumes that sexual difference must precede the intertwining. The subject is marked by the alterity or the “more than one” and encoded as a historically contingent gendered conflict.     

Of Waters and Women: The Philosophy of Luce Irigaray

This article reviews three recent books that enhance our understanding of the work of French feminist Luce Irigaray: Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche and The Irigaray Reader (both by Irigaray), and Philosophy in the Feminine, a commentary on Irigaray's work by Margaret Whitford. The author emphasizes a dynamic reading of Irigaray's philosophy and integrates theoretical concepts with poetic/utopian passages from the works.     

The Diabolical Strategy of Mimesis: Luce Irigaray's Reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty

In this essay I explore the dynamic between Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as it unfolds in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993). Irigaray's strategy of mimesis is a powerful feminist tool, both philosophically and politically. Regarding textual engagement as analogous for relations between self and other beyond the text, I deliver a cautionary message: mimetic strategy is powerful but runs the risk of silencing the voice of the other.     

A solution to a problem raised in Luce and Marley (2005)

Luce and Marley [2005. Ranked additive utility representations of gambles: Old and new axiomatizations. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 30, 21-62] examined various relations between mathematical forms for the utility of joint receipt ⊕ of gambles and for the utility of uncertain gambles. Their assumptions lead to a bisymmetry functional equation which, when the gambles are ranked, is defined on a restricted domain. Maksa [1999. Solution of generalized bisymmetry type equations without surjectivity. Aequationes Mathematicae, 57, 50-74] solved the general case and Kocsis [2007. A bisymmetry equation on restricted domain. Aequationes Mathematicae, 73, 280-284] presents the solution for the ranked case. The latter solution allows us to solve open problem 5 in Luce and Marley (2005) by showing that the assumptions of their Theorem 19 for an order-preserving ranked additive utility (RAU) representation U imply that U is a ranked weighted utility (RWU) representation that is additive over ⊕.     

All too familiar: Luce Irigaray's recent thought on sexuation and generation

In recent works, Luce Irigaray offers arguments for the establishment of sexed rights that rely upon certain presuppositional accounts of the development of relational sexuate identity and difference. The paper advances a series of objections to these accounts, in addition to examining some of Irigaray's proposals concerning women's indefinition, the category of the neuter, and female genealogy. Supplementing Luce Irigaray's argument that mother-daughter genealogy is under-symbolized in present Occidental cultures, it suggests, for reasons consonant with Irigaray's general project, additional corrective representation of paternal genealogy in terms of father-daughter relations.     

Dancing Contact Improvisation with Luce Irigaray: Intra‐Action and Elemental Passions

This article takes as its point of departure Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions, in which a woman‐speaker tries to make her lover and the discipline of philosophy understand that she is not how they have imagined her to be; that she is not at all but that she keeps becoming through perpetual movement. The article investigates Irigaray's investment in a form of materialist difference feminism that offers conceptual links to the posthumanist work of Karen Barad's agential realism, especially her theorization of intra‐action. The link between Irigaray and Barad is established via a diffractive reading that incorporates the dance/movement research practice of Contact Improvisation. Although expressed through written language, Elemental Passions creates the impression of the woman‐speaker dancing, of encountering herself, her environment, and her lover through moved and moving contact, searching for a practice of moving‐together, feeling‐with, and feeling‐between that can be experienced in an improvised dance duet. Exploring how touch and the sharing of weight in Contact Improvisation challenges boundaries and establishes ever‐changing configurations and entanglements between dancers, the article proposes that Irigaray's woman‐speaker envisions herself as a posthuman/ist woman and that improvised dancing offers a practice of intra‐action through which she can encounter the world in her becoming.     

The Divine Horizon: Rethinking Political Community in Luce Irigaray's “Divine Women”

The question of the transcendent, that which operates above and beyond the material stuff of the world, remains an enduring one for feminism, bound up as it is with the foundations of feminism's corporeal politics and the definition of its political subject. With the specificity of the situated and meaningful body grounding feminist politics, the universal and neutral status of the speaking subject has been diagnosed as masculine, and unable to properly account for sexed differences. On this basis, political community, collectivity forged along the lines of a common identity, is considered important in the realization of feminist political goals, yet is also problematic in view of its reliance upon a universal category of identity through which to motivate for political change. Acknowledging these tensions, this paper revisits Luce Irigaray's essay “Divine Women” to suggest that in her rethinking of the divine as a shared horizon through which women can potentially achieve autonomy, the nature of the transcendent, the universal, and the identity of the feminine are also reconfigured in surprising ways. In a specific address to the dilemma of political community, Irigaray makes available a notion of the divine that is already differently inhabited.     

When Equality Justifies Women's Subjection: Luce Irigaray's Critique of Equality and the Fathers' Rights Movement

The “fathers' rights” movement represents policies that undermine women's reproductive autonomy as furthering the cause of gender equality. Khader argues that this movement exploits two general weaknesses of equality claims identified by Luce Irigaray. She shows that Irigaray criticizes equality claims for their appeal to a genderneutral universal subject and for their acceptance of our existing symbolic repertoire. This article examines how the plaintiffs' rhetoric in two contemporary “fathers' rights” court cases takes advantage of these weaknesses.