The reception of Luce Irigaray's ideas about feminine identity has centered largely on questions of essentialism, whether criticizing this as a destructive flaw or interpreting it in strategic or pragmatic terms. Staking out an alternative approach, Virpi Lehtinen finds in the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty a framework for what she characterizes as dynamic essentialism, which seeks to account for the complex networks of lived experience: embodied, affective, and spiritual relations to oneself, to others, and to the world. Rather than prescribing one norm to which all women should conform, Lehtinen argues, Irigaray's work exemplifies how each individual woman in her own way contributes to a norm of femininity that is both unique and singular but also connected to the existential styles of past, present, and future others.

Luce Irigaray is one of the world's most influential theorists. From her early ground-breaking work on linguistics to her later revolutionary work on the ethics of sexual difference, Irigaray has positioned herself as one of the essential thinkers of our time. This collection of key writings, selected by Luce Irigaray herself, presents a complete picture of her work to date across the fields of Philosophy, Linguistics, Spirituality, Art and Politics. An indispensable work for students of philosophy, literary theory, feminist theory, linguistics and cultural studies.

An ideal introduction to Igigaray's whole corpus, which includes previously untranslated texts.

Luce Irigaray (1932-) is the foremost thinker on sexual difference of our times. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference Irigaray speaks out against many feminists by pursuing questions of sexual difference, arguing that all thought and language is gendered and that there can therefore be no neutral thought. Examining major philosophers, such as Plato, Spinoza and Levinas, with a series of meditations on the female experience, she advocates new philosophies through which women can develop a distinctly female space and a "love of self". It is an essential feminist text and a major contribution to our thinking about language.

Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray famously insisted on their philosophical differences, and this mutual insistence has largely guided the reception of their thought. What does it mean to return to Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray in light of questions and problems of contemporary feminism, including intersectional and queer criticisms of their projects? How should we now take up, amplify, and surpass the horizons opened by their projects? Seeking answers to these questions, the essays in this volume return to Beauvoir and Irigaray to find what the two philosophers share. And as the authors make clear, the richness of Beauvoir and Irigaray's thought far exceeds the reductive parameters of the Eurocentric, bourgeois second-wave debates that have constrained interpretation of their work. The first section of this volume places Beauvoir and Irigaray in critical dialogue, exploring the place of the material and the corporeal in Beauvoir's thought and, in doing so, reading Beauvoir in a framework that goes beyond a theory of gender and the humanism of phenomenology. The essays in the second section of the volume take up the challenge of articulating points of dialogue between the two focal philosophers in logic, ethics, and politics. Combined, these essays resituate Beauvoir and Irigaray's work both historically and in light of contemporary demands, breaking new ground in feminist philosophy.

This study examines Luce Irigaray's oeuvre through the question of the divine, focusing upon her contention that women need a female divine if they are about to become subjects. It attempts to demonstrate that the issue of the divine should not be considered as one aspect of her thought but that it is central to her philosophy of sexual difference. Hence Irigaray's critique of patriarchy is presented as a critique of the dominance of a religion of masculinity that favours a single universal. Her proposal for two sexed universal divines is explored, along with her specific suggestions for female divine ideals. Particular emphasis is given to her engagements with Marx, Nietzsche, and Hegelianism, and to the mode of her adoption of Christianity. The study applauds the radical profundity of Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference, while remaining critical of the universalism in her notion of the divine for the doubt it casts upon the realization of a sexed culture.

Divine love explores the work of Luce Irigaray from the perspective of religious studies. The book examines the development of religious themes in Irigaray’s work from Speculum of the Other Woman, in which she rejects traditional forms of western religion, to her more recent explorations of eastern religions. Irigaray’s ideas on love, the divine, the ethics of sexual difference and normative heterosexuality are analysed and placed in the context of the reception of her work by secular feminists such as Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell and Elizabeth Grosz, as well as by feminists in Religious Studies such as Pamela Sue Anderson, Ellen Armour, Amy Hollywood and Grace Jantzen. Finally, Irigaray’s own spiritual path, which has been influenced by eastern religions, specifically the disciplines of yoga and tantra in Hinduism and Buddhism, is evaluated in the light of recent theoretical developments in orientalism and postcolonialism.

A broad exploration of Irigaray’s philosophy of life and living. Featuring a highly accessible essay from Irigaray herself, this volume explores her philosophy of life and living. Life-thinking, an important contemporary trend in philosophy and in women’s and gender studies, stands in contrast to philosophy’s traditional grounding in death, exemplified in the work of philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Schopenhauer. The contributors to Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray consider Irigaray’s criticisms of the traditional Western philosophy of death, including its either-or dualisms and binary logic, as well as some of Irigaray’s “solutions” for cultivating life. The book is comprehensive in its analyses of Irigaray’s relationship to classical and contemporary philosophers, writers, and artists, and produces extremely fruitful intersections between Irigaray and figures as diverse as Homer and Plato; Alexis Wright, the First-Nations novelist of Australia; and twentieth-century French philosophers like Sartre, Badiou, Deleuze, and Guattari. It also develops Irigaray’s relationship to the arts, with essays on theater, poetry, architecture, sculpture, and film. “This is a very timely text; it places Irigaray scholarship in conversation with the lively field of feminist philosophies of life, and this is a really wonderful, fruitful match. The collection itself contains many marvelous pieces. Luce Irigaray’s essay is strong and pithy—she reiterates a number of her important ideas, in accessible language, and places them in the context of pertinent questions in feminism.” — Sabrina L. Hom, coeditor of Thinking with Irigaray

A brilliant new work by Luce Irigaray, one of the greatest living French thinkers, in which she deepens her arguments in relation to sexuate difference.