Those unfamiliar with Plato, Descartes, Freud and Lacan will find great challenges in understanding this rather poetic book. Irigary examines these figures in light of the "symbolic order" to detail phallocentricism in the development of Western thought in general as well as psychoanalysis, revealing what is, according to the author, the nature of feminine sexuality and gender identity. Reading this text, written by a former student of Lacan's expelled over ideological differences, was transforming and has left a permanent perspective from which to percieve and critique philosophical arguments as well as science, medicine, and psychotherapy.

The first section is especially wonderful: a complete analysis of Freud's construction of women's sexuality and development. She has a great style with many a qwirk to keep you entertained. The second section includes free-form essays on Aristotle, Kant, Plato, Descartes and other representatives of the Western male philosophical canon. The last section is a complete analysis of Plato's Hystera. This is a good text for those of us who need to read the foundations of feminist thought . . . though some American feminists (such as myself) may find themselves annoyed with her "essentialism". Enjoy!

The prose of Irigaray unsettles the calm assuredness with which the realms of spirituality and the feminine have so often been rendered as subjects without agency, the weaker and subordinate opposite of material,tangible reality. Irigaray demonstrates how to dislodge, disrupt, and destabilize the barriers founded by certain academic standards. She dares to use words to describe the futility of words.
"...if your words have such seductive power, such a potent charge of investment, is it not because they come to fill the place of a desire deprived of words? Borrowing their strength from energy free from any declaration. A fundamental misunderstanding lies within your language: what it carries of persuasive power does not belong to speech but to what it covers in silence."(36)
Another way Irigaray problematizes the othering of the spirit world is through exploding linear, normative conceptions of time and space in her reconstruction of infinity. She speaks of the current model of time as something which holds power by relying on a timeless void as its opposite. She defies this dualistic construction, describing not an abyss which relies on fullness and definition, but a fullness so vast it has the capacity to lodge emptiness within it.
"That invisible presence bearing you, supporting you there where you set up an opposing illusion of indifference as limit to your own desire. As a stasis at each point, guarding against the risk of overflowing which would lead to your downfall. Your vanishing into the immense space where you place that void which maintains your coherence." (Passions, 20)
This book is a delightful contrast to the cold, hard and cerebral discourse most noted for contemporary theories of psychology, philosophy, feminism, and politics!

Dear Sir,

I wish to know the addresses of following writers email/residential addresses with phone number 1. Luce Irigaray 2. Julia Kristeva 3. Helene Cixous

You are requested to mail it to me at the earliest my email address is rkpanja@sansad.nic.in.

Submitted for an early response from your side.

Smt. S. Chatterjee

Luce is lucid, floating in transcendence and below to reason to teach us all how to catch the ride of life lived out in love.

A must read for those interested in Femenist Theory. Travelling across Freudian and Lacanian perspectives, this book seriously explains, with accesible language, the female sexuality. It simply expresses very difficult theories, and guides the reader with accesible terminology from the outset. In my opinion, after reading this text, one can be said to be fluent in femenist issues. I also think it is an extraordinary and seamless translation.

I *personally* didn't like this book, but I think it has some utility, so before I criticize, let me tell you what to look for:

In the past couple of decades, we've seen Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Judith Butler, and others advance a conception of feminism based on radical existentialist and poststructuralist critiques of truth, meaning, representation, and subjectivity. These feminists have come to be known as French Feminists, and what's exciting about them is their ability to link struggles over gender with struggles over sexuality, and their way of thinking heterosexism and sexism as part of a larger problem with Western industrial culture. French Feminism has done a great deal of good by bringing feminist perspectives into debates over issues ranging from psychoanalysis to science to architecture. To put it (over)simply, the French Feminist project is that of uncovering the way in which not just sexism, but the notion of gender itself, is involved in every corner of Western culture. So you want to learn about French Feminism? Luce Irigaray is a great place to start, as she's probably the most unique feminist thinker in the world. While THE SEX THAT IS NOT ONE is clearly Irigaray's magnum opus, this is a great introduction to Irigaray's thought. Irigaray essentially criticizes the way in which Western philosophy excludes and does violence to femininity, and seeks 'an ethics of sexual difference' that would help us to establish a better relationship between the genders in the Western imaginary. She accomplishes this via a wide review of the history of Western philosophy in which she makes a lot of connections that have never been thought of before. In that respect, this book is very novel and its originality is really refreshing.

That said, I'll say that Irigaray is crazy. The basis of Irigaray's philosophy could best be described as a hodgepodge of Heidegger, Freud, and Lacan. Irigaray begins with what are essentially phenomenological concepts concerning Western theories of space, time, difference, dialectics, etc., and then relates these concepts to what she sees as being the corresponding psychological concept. Space becomes the uterus, difference becomes heterosexuality, etc. I was getting a little iffy when I got this far. Then things got worse. She started relating space-time and motion to mucous membranes. That's right. Mucous. As in the mucous that lubricates sexual contact.

Essentially, Irigaray imagines that every time we make a statement about space, we're expressing our unconscious relationship to the uterus; whenever we conceive of motion, we're expression an unconscious association with lubrication.

Wow, what nonsense! Irigaray's bad habit of assuming that the psychological and the phenomenological form a lateral continuum leads to disaster, for example, in her discussion of Descartes. Descartes advances a vaguely Heideggerian analysis of "wonder," which occurs upon encountering unprecedented difference. This is a purely phenomenological concept that is based on Descartes' subject-object formulation. Irigaray, however, thinks that this phenomenological state is now encroached upon by psychological states of lust, etc... as though there are both phenomenological and psychological moods... not one or the other.

This may or may not be valid, but what it represents is Irigaray's carelessness. She's content to string together Spinoza, Hegel, and Freud simply by associating them, without paying attention to the legitimacy of their connections. This allows her to pull [stuff] like talking about how space is conceived of as the uterus, which leaves women without a "place." Um, OK. The solution apparently is some kind of revolution in our understanding of philosophy that we're too assume is going to trickle down to our psyche and make us not lustful little bastards. Again, um, OK.

Irigaray is crazy. Crazy, crazy, crazy. This book is interesting but there's not a trace of academic rigor anywhere in it. It's totally extravagant, verging on totally ridiculous. I'll be sure to fantasize about the vagina next time I read my physics textbook on two-dimensional motion.

I applaud Luce Irigaray for her work to decenter the mono subjective, mono sexualized, patriarchal and phallocratic ontology "suspending the authority of the one" - man. In this courageous work "An Ethics of Sexual Difference" Ms. Irigaray engages with Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Merlau-Ponty and Levinas. Taking apart the core duality of inside/outside and subject/object. Her aim is clearly the dislodging the "model of the one" by dislodging "man" as the center of discourse and the recognition of "woman" as the "other", equal in the discursive process. She does not reduce the two to one, the "other" as the "same" - two separate and distinct. However, by doing so, is she reducing the discourse of ontology down to just two? Can her dream of intersubjectivity include more players? Is she reducing the discourse to the tyranny of the model of two? Her deconstruction is through the "suspending of the authority of one" begins, in her own words in a separate article "The Question of the Other":

"The principal focus of my work on feminine subjectivity is, in a way, the inverse of de Beauvoir's as far as the question of the other is concerned. Instead of saying, "I do not want to be the other of the masculine subject and, in order to avoid being that other, I claim to be his equal," I say, "The question of the other has been poorly formulated in the western tradition, for the other is always seen as the other of the same, the other of the subject itself, rather than an other subject, irreducible to the masculine subject and sharing equivalent dignity. It all comes down to the same thing: In our tradition there has never really been an other of the philosophical subject, or, more generally, of the cultural and political subject."

The problematic for Irigaray then is the starting point is the masculine. Not to reduce her thesis but to jump to a broader thesis - can the problem of "intersubjectivity" be reduced to the masculine contra the feminine? In a truly intertextual and intersubjective world, where we find concentric discourses and discourses within discourses, the duality of the model of two - despite their own space - seems limiting.

In "Place, Interval" her reading of Aristotle, she outlines:

"If I may return to the parallel I have been drawing between the issue of place and issue of sexual difference, I shall affirm that the masculine is attracted to the maternal-feminine as place. But what place does the masculine offer to attract the feminine? His soul? His relation to the divine? Can the feminine be inscribed or situated there? Is this not the only place where he can live, contrary to what has always been assumed? For the masculine has to constitute itself as a vessel to receive and welcome. And the masculine's morphology, existence, and essence do not really fit it for such an architecture of place." p. 39.

As much as she finds de Beauvoir's and Aristotle's Otherness problematic, I too find her "model of two" problematic. However, discussion of these and related issues via books like "The Ethics of Sexual Difference" is a step in the right direction. Caution, lest we limit ourselves to the model of two.

Miguel Llora

Irigaray's `rewriting' of philosophy and philosophers is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy these days. It is also a refreshing breath of thought on `Feminism'. The concept of `Place'is presented as Woman, a return to the primordial feminine via `deconstruction' (in the best possible way) of western patriarchial hegemony. Besides the radical content, it is is beautifully written - clear and profound. Read this book!

There is a hole left by Western philosophy in its (absent) discourse of the body. Recent fascinations with Merleau-Ponty and a phenomenological approach only really go so far to rectify this, but require a reaffirmation of the subject and of subjectivity.

Deleuze (the first half of the book) and Irigaray (the second) are good antidotes to this. There is much there to investigate in terms of something more 'visceral', but this does not mean simply a 'philosophy of the body'. It discusses and develops ideas going around this set of problematics, looking at metaphors of fluidity and bodily experience, as well as theorisations of overcoming and transforming the bodily.

I am well-read in Deleuze, so Lorraine's treatment was a little basic, but would serve as a good introduction to some of the most important ideas, including the famous 'body without organs'. But I didn't know Irigaray well, and this book was a useful platform from which to jump into much of the relevant material. Lorraine quotes often and well, right from across the respective oeuvres, and so would be useful for someone who is not widely-read in this area to launch right in. It helps, too, that Lorraine writes clearly and understandably, and is able to convey some of the most complex of ideas in a comprehensible manner.

"Why Different?: A Culture of Two Subjects," is a collection of interviews with Luce Irigaray. The book is edited by Irigaray and Sylvere Lotringer. Camille Collins is credited as primary translator, although there are a few sections that have others credited as translators.

The introduction by Irigaray (dated 1998) discusses the relationship of interviews to written texts. The interviews in this book generally discuss her own corpus of written texts.

Overall, I found this book very thought-provoking. Irigaray discusses feminism, mother-daughter relationships, language, and spirituality. Particularly fascinating are her observations on the "sexed" nature of language; this material reminds me somewhat of the debates over Black English. Also intriguing are her discourses on the significance of her other books' titles. She draws on an eclectic body of knowledge, citing Marguerite Yourcenar, Heidegger, Greek mythology, Marx, the life of Jesus, etc.

At times she strikes me as overly fixated on "sexual difference" as a "universal reality." Nevertheless, I still find the book intriguing and worthwhile.

I have located several misquotations and several mispellings of what little Greek she uses. Apart from it being gruesomely written, I suspect this woman does not know Antigone in Greek--she quotes widely from other sources but prefers to stay away from the original. I am tempted to at a later date say with Voltaire "I am sitting in the smallest room of the house. I have your book in front of me--soon it will be behind me"

Judging from the reader reviews on this website, Judith Butler has yet again succeeded in provoking the outrage of several diehard and blue-in-the-face classics scholars. Those classicists who feel outraged by her work might consider her illuliminating comments on Hölderlin's own translation of Antigone, translations that themselves were received as scandals in their time and that continue, like Antigone in Butler's view, to provoke critical thought. If you think Antigone belongs on the shelves of a dusty library, you might as well leave this book alone, since here she's haunting queer bars and dining at the most interesting and vital family meals imaginable, where queer sons and daughters struggle together with their just as queer parents to figure out how it is that we might say our word to a world that persists in ignoring what it is that we have to say.

Some of the previous reviewers' responses to this book might give an idea of what's so interesting and provocative about it, and about Butler's work overall. Even if you're not a classicist with too much time on your hands.