Between East and West

by Luce Irigaray

With this book we see a philosopher well steeped in the Western tradition thinking through ancient Eastern disciplines, meditating on what it means to learn to breathe, and urging us all at the dawn of a new century to rediscover indigenous Asian cultures. Yogic tradition, according to Irigaray, can provide an invaluable means for restoring the vital link between the present and eternity―and for re-envisioning the patriarchal traditions of the West.

Western, logocentric rationality tends to abstract the teachings of yoga from its everyday practice―most importantly, from the cultivation of breath. Lacking actual, personal experience with yoga or other Eastern spiritual practices, the Western philosophers who have tried to address Hindu and Buddhist teachings―particularly Schopenhauer―have frequently gone astray. Not so, Luce Irigaray. Incorporating her personal experience with yoga into her provocative philosophical thinking on sexual difference, Irigaray proposes a new way of understanding individuation and community in the contemporary world. She looks toward the indigenous, pre-Aryan cultures of India―which, she argues, have maintained an essentially creative ethic of sexual difference predicated on a respect for life, nature, and the feminine.

Irigaray's focus on breath in this book is a natural outgrowth of the attention that she has given in previous books to the elements―air, water, and fire. By returning to fundamental human experiences―breathing and the fact of sexual difference―she finds a way out of the endless sociologizing abstractions of much contemporary thought to rethink questions of race, ethnicity, and globalization.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst and cultural theorist. She is best known for her works Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One. Presently, she is active in the Women's Movements in both France and Italy.

Reviews

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

The necessity of seeing spirituality as two instead of submitting to the one. Even Buddhism submits to singularities of impermanence, desire, attachment, craving, and suffering. You need to go back to the contemplatives of Hinduism if not before monotheism all together to find the kind of polyvocality she’s talking about with these pronouns. When “I” and “we” can mean different things depending on who is saying it. Then you have a spirituality that invites all subjects. I like how she talks about breathing in one’s subjectivity. The breath is a common feature of many religions. Something that can restore emotional agency. Can bring awareness to presence when there are so many facets of comparing one moment to the next which miss the essence of simply being.

[Dieter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Important. Makes a subtle argument. Loses some in its esoterism. But philosophically I think what she is doing is very crucial in terms of what sexual difference means and what it is tied to culturally.

[Sachin · Rating 2 out of 5]

What exactly does the good lady want to say by the way? Sounded good but cant make a head or tail out of it.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can't decide if Irigaray's a provocative genius or a heteronormative etc. At least she's into yoga.

[Desca Ang · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The body is then no longer just a more or less fallen vehicle, but the very site where the spiritual to be cultivated resides. The spiritual corresponds to an evolved, transmuted, transfigured corporeal…(what is) also too neglected in our Western (ized) teaching, is that love come to pass between two freedoms. …Love is presented there as union, regressive in a way but ecstatically spiritual,… But the union of two lovers, man and woman, free with respect to genealogy, can realise something other in the incarnation of human love. Each lover, woman or man, can contribute to the rebirth of the other as both human and divine incarnation. In this case, the carnal union becomes a privileged place of individuation and not only of fusion, of regression, or of the abolition of polarities and differences. In love, women and men give back to one another their identity and the potential for life and creation that the difference of identity between them makes possible.”
- Luce Irigaray on Between East and West
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