Conversations

by Luce Irigaray

Conversations is an important collection of interviews in which Luce Irigaray discusses the full range of her work and ideas with leading academics in the fields of Continental Philosophy, Feminist Theory and Critical Theory. Covering all the key topics that have been central to her work in the last thirty years, such as feminism, spirituality, difference, politics, education, and 'being two', this book offers essential insights into Irigaray's career as one of the world's most important contemporary thinkers.
Topics and theorists approached philosophy, universality and difference, motherhood and gendered subjectivities, cultivation of desire and love, the other and others, globalization and ethics, politics and human rights, spirituality and religion, and, of course, being and becoming woman.

Genres: Philosophy, Feminism

202 pages, Hardcover

First published September 8, 2008

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

[Kamakana · Rating 5 out of 5]

130916: this is a later review: my first review did not save, server stopped or something- so i will try and do this by memory! lost a lot...

first review: i really want to talk to her now, though i do not know if she would find this useful. in the various conversations she covers a wide field of interests, always from the stance of 'sexuate' difference for boys and girls, men and women, that sometimes strikes me as 'biological essentialism', though she claims it is not. some claims of social/education differences mean a tendency of girls to use subject/subject relations and boys subject/object, thus 'horizontal' relations even with the mother vs 'vertical' relations with the male 'law', boys with other boys, with difference, but i do not/have not read or studied this...

there is 'thinking life as relations' in females said to be much easier, primordial... there is critiquing the definition of philosophy not as 'love of wisdom' but 'wisdom of love', which is denigrated as all emotions in western logos, which insists original value of love/closeness/relations... there is her interest in yoga and 'breathing' and 'being two' rather than reduction of alterity to an absolute one or 'the One'... there is maternal relations of 'becoming' and how women have a more immediate sense of rhythmic life, how girls are more adept at lit and art, but all this starts to shade into that dreaded 'essentialism'... there is a conversation on the 'feminine' ideal in catholicism which basically goes by ignorant me... there is critique of architecture and 'space' needed for both man and woman... there is critique of vision-centric phenomenology vs 'the caress' and original flesh to flesh of merleau-ponty and heidegger and the whole tradition of master/slave dynamic... then 'global being' as recognition of others... then challenges of education... a long bit in which ir announces how to become woman is different than de beauvoir and different than deleuze...

i give this a five not because i agree with it all, but because it stimulates, it interests, it gives me a whole new perspective to look at ways of thought. i would like to believe my sex does not determine my way of being but it is the 'situation' i am thrown into. so who knows. it is the first or second question asked of a newborn... i know some men, some women, who are disturbed with this essence-argument or overly committed to it, who want it to be a sort of short-cut to who they are and how they relate to the world, the others, themselves... but as always already the answer is to read more, to read and read and think yourself free...