Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and 'the Greeks' (SUNY series in Gender Theory)
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 1438431007
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A transdisciplinary reader on Luce Irigaray’s reading and rewriting of ancient Greek texts.
In this definitive reader, prominent scholars reflect on how Luce Irigaray reads the classic discourse of Western metaphysics and also how she is read within and against this discourse. Her return to “the Greeks,” through strategies of deconstructing, demythifying, reconstructing, and remythifying, is not a nostalgic return to the ideality of Hellenocentric antiquity, but rather an affirmatively critical revisiting of this ideality. Her persistent return and affective bond to ancient Greek logos, mythos, and tragedy sheds light on some of the most complex epistemological issues in contemporary theory, such as the workings of criticism, the language of politics and the politics of language, the possibility of social and symbolic transformation, the multiple mediations between metropolitan and postcolonial contexts of theory and practice, the question of the other, and the function of the feminine in Western metaphysics. With a foreword by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and a chapter by Irigaray responding to her commentators, this book is an essential text for those in social theory, comparative literature, or classics.
“This is no doubt a state-of-the-art edited collection which will make a major contribution not merely to existing Irigaray scholarship and to the fields of feminism, gender and queer studies but, more widely, in contemporary critical and cultural theory.” — Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
“The real strength, and rare quality, of this book lies in its willingness to engage in a nuanced—at times, even critical—approach to Irigaray’s feminism.” — New Formations
“This singular volume begins to take account of the enormous influence and range of the work of Luce Irigaray. Taking as a point of departure the key critical writings on Greek philosophy that form the basis of Irigaray’s theories of sexual difference, the sexed body, and writing, this anthology brings Irigaray’s Greek legacy into the present to consider feminist philosophy as a critical rereading of philosophy’s foundations. Here we see that the departures from that important tradition are as important as the debts we owe. Once again we see that to read Irigaray means learning to read in both directions at once. As well, we see in vivid terms that Irigaray’s work poses an enormous challenge for rethinking relations of eros and love, recrafting philosophy through new textual and corporeal practices, both embodied and critical. The volume recognizes Irigaray as a feminist philosopher whose work has itself produced an impressive legacy of diverse and vital criticism among major contemporary thinkers. This is an invaluable text for those who wish to understand just how radically feminist thought intervenes in questions of history, love, embodiment, and critical readings in philosophy.” — Judith Butler, author of Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
“This book will captivate feminist scholars and classicists alike, presenting the complex panorama of an interdisciplinary study in which the primacy of the ‘text’ (be it Irigaray’s or that of the ancient tradition) is at the same time confirmed and trespassed.” — Adriana Cavarero, author of Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender
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might at first appear to be similar to Agamben’s Heideggerian project. Both Agamben and Irigaray maintain the importance of the question or the problem of life. For Agamben this problem was once partly open to view. Like Heidegger, Agamben draws on the ancient Greek text and vocabulary in order to look back to a time when present distinctions or divisions were not yet drawn. Once there was a clear sense of the difference between a natural life that unfolds from itself and technologies that created
Lacan’s. But can it be read? In order to suggest the problems involved, I will briefly compare the styles of Irigaray and Lacan and the very different ways readers are drawn into their texts. The Text of Jouissance Lacan aims to rescue the psychoanalytic unconscious from the grips of any theory of the subject in thrall to the ego. Hence his expressed desire, particularly from the 1960s on, to thwart the tyranny of rational meaning. In the later writings, the relationships between sentences, even
to her perception of her sex as she can come, she writes/masturbates/sees without deferring to received conceptions of her sex: her citation of perception “re-produces from nature” and avoids reproducing the prevailing (phallic) conception of nature. Acker concurs with Irigaray that for women to come into their own in language, they must do more with language than mime phallogocentric discourse, however parodically. To rediscover material of its own, woman’s 54 Dianne Chisholm writing must be
a trope but from its intended metaphorical meaning or destination, Derrida reminds us again in “White Mythology.” And perhaps metaphors have a special charm for Irigaray because, for all their complicity with metaphysics, they nonetheless retain a trace or a memory—they are indeed a memorial—of the materiality from which they allegedly abstract themselves: they might be, in short, specters (only specters but enduring specters) of the mother’s body. Critics have commented on Irigaray’s metaphoric
the necessary, albeit unspeakable and illegible, exclusion that 4 Athena Athanasiou and Elena Tzelepis enables this economy to proceed and operate in a legible fashion. The feminine is excluded and, at the same time, phantasmatically associated with materiality and corporeality, Irigaray argues. The feminine is erased and excluded as incoherent, excessive, and uncontainable “matter,” a matter figured as receptivity. Reading the figurations, or dis-figurations, of the disavowed feminine through
