Engaging the World: Thinking after Irigaray

316 Pages·2016·1.084 MB·English

by  Mary C. Rawlinson (editor)

ENGAGING THE WORLD
SUNY series in Gender Theory
——————
Tina Chanter, editor
ENGAGING THE WORLD
Thinking after Irigaray
Edited by
MARY C. RAWLINSON
State University of New York Press
Cover art: If This Love Grew, Megan Craig, 2013
oil on panel, 46.5 (cid:61) 48 inches
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2016 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Engaging the world : thinking after Irigaray / edited by Mary C. Rawlinson.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in gender theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-6027-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-6029-1 (e-book)
1. Irigaray, Luce. 2. Feminist theory. 3. Philosophy. I. Rawlinson, Mary C.,
editor.
B2430.I74E54 2015
194—dc23 2015017383
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Mary C. Rawlinson
I. TIME, SPACE, AND THE UNIVERSAL
In Search for the Mother Through the Looking Glass:
On Time, Origins, and Beginnings in Plato and Irigaray 11
Fanny Söderbäck
Place, Interval: Irigaray and Ronell 39
Rebecca Hill
Further Speculations: Time and Difference in
Speculum de l’autre femme 51
Anne van Leeuwen
Game Change: Philosophy after Irigaray 65
Mary C. Rawlinson
II. LANGUAGE, ART, AND WRITING
Irigaray and Kristeva on Anguish in Art 79
Elaine P. Miller
A Love Letter from Beyond the Grave: Irigaray, Nothingness
and La femme n’existe pas 91
Claire Potter
Wonder and Écriture: Descartes and Irigaray, Writing at Intervals 115
Perry Zurn
CONTENTS
vi
Creating Inter-Sexuate Inter-Subjectivity in the Classroom?
Luce Irigaray’s Linguistic Research in Its Latest Iteration 135
Gail Schwab
III. SCIENCE, CULTURE, AND TECHNOLOGY
Irigaray and Darwin on Sexual Difference: Some Reflections 157
Elizabeth Grosz
What Kind of Science? Reading Irigaray with Stengers 173
Margherita Long
Toward a Feminist Epistemology of Sound: Refiguring Waves in
Audio-Technical Discourse 195
Tara Rodgers
Luce Irigaray and Anthropological Thought 215
Mary Beth Mader
IV. PSYCHOANALYSIS IN PRACTICE
Desire at the Threshold: “Vulvar Logic” and Intimacy between Two 233
Cheryl Lynch Lawler
Gendering Drives: Amae, Philotes, and the Forgotten Mystery of
Female Ancestry 265
Britt-Marie Schiller
Psychoanalysis and Yoga: The Feminine and the Unconscious
between East and West 281
Sara Beardsworth
List of Contributors 297
Index 301
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editor would like to thank Caleb Ward, Eva Boodman, and Sara Mac-
Namara for their excellent work copyediting the manuscript.
Many thanks to Tina Chanter, the editor of the SUNY Series in
Gender Theory, for her continuing support of the Irigaray Circle.
On behalf of the contributors, the editor would like to express our
profound thanks to Luce Irigaray, whose work has inspired and nourished
us all. We hope that she will find this volume some small payment toward
our immense debt.
vii

INTRODUCTION
Mary C. Rawlinson
The essays in this volume explore the opportunity and task opened up by
Luce Irigaray’s thought on the irreducibility of sexual difference. Each essay
follows Irigaray in engaging the world, deploying the resources of her work
toward a rethinking of philosophical concepts and commitments to expose
new possibilities of vitality in new forms of relationship to nature, to others,
and to oneself.
Irigaray’s writings reinterpret the history of philosophy in light of
sexual difference, rethinking philosophy’s basic concepts under the figure
of an indelible twoness or multiplicity that cannot be absorbed by the logic
of the same. At the same time, her work addresses the most pressing social
and political issues of our time: the threat of nuclear catastrophe, environ-
mental degradation and climate change, AIDS and other health crises, war,
domestic violence, racial and ethnic violence, social and economic inequity,
the failure of democratic processes, and the commodification of the body and
human relationships under the “unconditional power of money” (Irigaray
1993a, 76). Addressing these crises, Irigaray argues, will require more than
the redistribution of goods or changes in law and public policy. She links
these ills directly to the philosophical repression of sexual difference and to
the hegemony of Man as the figure of the human. “It has always been men
who spoke and, above all, wrote: in science, philosophy, religion, politics”
(Irigaray 1993c, 121). Currently, the discourse of the universal belongs to a
“masculine imaginary” authorizing the laws of property and sexual propriety,
the mastery of nature, war, and the regularized violence of sovereign power.
These narratives have erased sexual difference, subjected the generativity of
women to the interests of property and capital, and denied women a voice
in the councils that determine the future. In Irigaray’s analysis, our current
crises originate here.
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