An Ethics of Sexual Difference

✍ Scribed by Luce Irigaray

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 1993
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 232
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume continues and completes Irigaray's writing on "sexual difference" by addressing the ethical implications of her work. Irigaray speaks out against the egalitarian project of feminism important to the Anglo-American school of women thinkers; instead she pursues questions of sexual difference, arguing that all thought and language is gendered and that there can therefore be no neutral thought - philosophy, science or psychoanalysis. Counterposing classical philosophical texts - including those of Plato, Spinoza and Levinas - with a series of meditations on the female experience, she shows that traditional philosophical concepts are problematic. She advocates new philosophies grounded in women's experience, through which women can develop a distinctly female space and a "love of self". Only then can love become ethical and the basis of a transformed ethics of sexual difference. This volume provides a major contribution to an expanding feminist and philosophical discourse and should be of value to feminists, literary critics and philosophers.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 5
Translators' Note......Page 7
1. Sexual Difference......Page 15
2. Sorcerer Love: A Reading Plato, Symposium, "Diotima's Speech"......Page 30
3. Place, Interval: A Reading of Aristotle, Physics IV......Page 44
4. Love of Self......Page 69
5. Wonder: A Reading of Descartes, The Passions of the Soul......Page 82
6. The Envelope: A Reading of Spinoza, Ethics, "Of God"......Page 93
7. Love of Same, Love of Other......Page 107
8. An Ethics of Sexual Difference......Page 126
9. The Invisible Flesh: A Reading of Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, "The Interviewing- The Chiasm"......Page 161
10. The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, "Phenomenology of Eros"......Page 195