Irigaray offers the clearest available introduction to her own work. Focusing on power, women, gender and patriarchal mythologies, she lays out what for her has become the central problem for women in the modern world.

The first communication between human beings, the one between the newborn and the mother, happens through touch. Strangely this first way of relating to each other  has barely been considered by our education and our culture, which have favoured sight to the detriment of touch. And yet touching and being touched means experiencing ourselves as living beings. For lack of such a touch, we do not perceive the limits nor the sensitive potential of our bodies. Then we remain immersed in a natural or a cultural universe, incapable of reaching our own individuation and of knowing our fundamental difference from the  other(s). Desire, in particular sexuate desire, is a call for touching one another anew. But this touch  requires us to have gained our autonomy and to be able to open up to and  commune with the other as transcendent to ourselves while staying  in ourselves. This book unveils and explores how touch can act as a basic living mediation in love and, more generally, in our comprehensive individual and collective human becoming. It also considers how touch can contribute to founding  a culture respectful of difference instead of subjecting them to an ideal of sameness. We need touch as mediation to fulfil our humanity and to build a truly human thinking and world. 

In "Democracy Begins Between Two, " Luce Irigaray calls for a radical reconsideration of the relation between sex and democracy. In order to look on ourselves as fully democratic, she argues, we must first grant full recognition to both genders, male and female, that contribute to the functioning of society. This recognition must take the form of specific civil rights guaranteeing women a separate civil identity of their own equivalent to--though not simply the same as--that enjoyed by men.

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Why broach and challenge the question of neutrality? For some urgent reasons. The neuter is generally considered to be the condition of objectivity. However, historically, this is asserted by a subject which is masculine and not neuter. Claiming that truth and the way of reaching it are and must be in the neuter amounts to a misuse of power and a falsification of the real. Living beings are not naturally neuter; they are sexuate somehow or other. Subjecting them to the neuter as a condition of their objective status transforms living beings into cultural products deprived of their own origin and dynamism, and builds a world in which the development and the sharing of life are impossible. In this book, four contributors explore this basic mistake of our culture starting from the work of Heidegger and his insistence on maintaining that our being in the world - our Dasein - must be in the neuter. They question the nature of the truth which is then at stake and the political mistakes that it can cause. It is not here a question of sexuality strictly speaking nor of sexual choice. The concern of the two men and the two women who participate in this volume is with the sexuate determination of all living beings. Is not Heidegger's Dasein, as neutered and supposedly neutral, a kind of technical device which prevents living beings from entering into presence? If so, where might that ultimately lead?

Luce Irigray's Zaharoff lecture is the latest episode in an extraordinary intellectual adventure begun with Speculum. De L'autre femme (1974) and continued in Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (1977) and Ethique de al difference sexuelle (1984). The present volume not only contains the text of Le Partage de la parole itself but also reprints two earlier essays that bear upon the same topic. Irigaray is a feminist philospher whose work has always had a practical dimension. In this latest collection, her arguments are underpinned by empirical research on the language of schoolchildren and will have wide implications not only for a range of academic disciplines but for educational policy-makers and for feminism as a political force.

"Elemental Passions" explores the man/woman relaitonship in a series of meditations of the senses and the formal elements. Its form resembles a series of love letters in which, however, the identity-and even the reality-of the adressee are deliberately obscured.

In A New Culture of Energy, Luce Irigaray reflects on three critical concerns of our time: the cultivation of energy in its many forms, the integration of Asian and Western traditions, and the reenvisioning of religious figures for the contemporary world. A philosopher as well as a psychoanalyst, Irigaray draws deeply on her personal experience in addressing these questions. In her view, although psychoanalysis can succeed in releasing mental energy, it fails to support physical and spiritual well-being. In pursuit of an alternative, she took up the bodily practices of yoga and pranayama breathing, which she considers in light of her analysis of sexuate belonging and difference. Reflecting on these practices, Irigaray contrasts yoga's approach to the natural world with how the Western tradition privileges mastery over nature. These varied sources provoke her to question how a tradition imagines transcendence and the divine. In the book's final section, she reinterprets the figure of Mary through breath, self-affection, and touch, recalibrating her physicality within a natural world. A reflection on the liberation of human energy, this book urges us to cultivate an evolutionary culture in harmony with all living beings.

With an original introduction by Luce Irigaray, and original texts from her students and collaborators, this book imagines the outlines of a more just, ecologically attuned world that flourishes on the basis of sexuate difference.

Speculum of the Other Woman by Luce Irigaray is incontestably one of the most important works in feminist theory to have been published in this generation. For the profession of psychoanalysis, Irigaray believes, female sexuality has remained a "dark continent," unfathomable and unapproachable; its nature can only be misunderstood by those who continue to regard women in masculine terms. In the first section of the book, "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry," Irigaray rereads Freud's essay "Femininity," and his other writings on women, bringing to the fore the masculine ideology implicit in psychoanalytic theory and in Western discourse in general: woman is defined as a disadvantaged man, a male construct with no status of her own.

In the last section, "Plato's Hystera," Irigaray reinterprets Plato's myth of the cave, of the womb, in an attempt to discover the origins of that ideology, to ascertain precisely the way in which metaphors were fathered that henceforth became vehicles of meaning, to trace how woman came to be excluded from the production of discourse. Between these two sections is "Speculum" ten meditative, widely ranging, and freely associational essays, each concerned with an aspect of the history of Western philosophy in its relation to woman, in which Irigaray explores woman's essential difference from man."

Whilst he broaches the theme of the difference between the sexes, Hegel does not go deep enough into the question of their mutual desire as a crucial stage in our becoming truly human. He ignores the dialectical process regarding sensitivity and sensuousness. And yet this is needed to make spiritual the relation between two human subjectivities differently determined by nature and to ensure the connection between body and spirit, nature and culture, private life and public life. This leads Hegel to fragment human subjectivity into yearnings for art, religion and philosophy thereby losing the unity attained through the cultivation of a longing for the absolute born of a desire for one another as different. Furthermore, our epoch of history is different from the Hegelian one and demands that we consider additional aspects of human subjectivity. This is essential if we are to overcome the nihilism inherent in our traditional metaphysics without falling into a worse nihilism due to a lack of rigorous thinking common today. The increasing power of technique and technologies as well as the task of building a world culture are two other challenges we face. Our sexuate belonging provides us with a universal living determination of our subjectivity - now a dual subjectivity - and also with a natural energy potential which allows us to use technical resources without becoming dependent on them.

In A New Culture of Energy, Luce Irigaray reflects on three critical concerns of our time: the cultivation of energy in its many forms, the integration of Asian and Western traditions, and the reenvisioning of religious figures for the contemporary world. A philosopher as well as a psychoanalyst, Irigaray draws deeply on her personal experience in addressing these questions. In her view, although psychoanalysis can succeed in releasing mental energy, it fails to support physical and spiritual well-being. In pursuit of an alternative, she took up the bodily practices of yoga and pranayama breathing, which she considers in light of her analysis of sexuate belonging and difference. Reflecting on these practices, Irigaray contrasts yoga's approach to the natural world with how the Western tradition privileges mastery over nature. These varied sources provoke her to question how a tradition imagines transcendence and the divine. In the book's final section, she reinterprets the figure of Mary through breath, self-affection, and touch, recalibrating her physicality within a natural world. A reflection on the liberation of human energy, this book urges us to cultivate an evolutionary culture in harmony with all living beings.

Why broach and challenge the question of neutrality? For some urgent reasons. The neuter is generally considered to be the condition of objectivity. However, historically, this is asserted by a subject which is masculine and not neuter. Claiming that truth and the way of reaching it are and must be in the neuter amounts to a misuse of power and a falsification of the real. Living beings are not naturally neuter; they are sexuate somehow or other. Subjecting them to the neuter as a condition of their objective status transforms living beings into cultural products deprived of their own origin and dynamism, and builds a world in which the development and the sharing of life are impossible. In this book, four contributors explore this basic mistake of our culture starting from the work of Heidegger and his insistence on maintaining that our being in the world - our Dasein - must be in the neuter. They question the nature of the truth which is then at stake and the political mistakes that it can cause. It is not here a question of sexuality strictly speaking nor of sexual choice. The concern of the two men and the two women who participate in this volume is with the sexuate determination of all living beings. Is not Heidegger’s Dasein, as neutered and supposedly neutral, a kind of technical device which prevents living beings from entering into presence? If so, where might that ultimately lead?

In This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray elaborates on some of the major themes of Speculum of the Other Woman, her landmark work on the status of woman in Western philosophical discourse and in psychoanalytic theory. In eleven acute and widely ranging essays, Irigaray reconsiders the question of female sexuality in a variety of contexts that are relevant to current discussion of feminist theory and practice.

Among the topics she treats are the implications of the thought of Freud and Lacan for understanding womanhood and articulating a feminine discourse; classic views on the significance of the difference between male and female sex organs; and the experience of erotic pleasure in men and in women. She also takes up explicitly the question of economic exploitation of women; in an astute reading of Marx she shows that the subjection of woman has been institutionalized by her reduction to an object of economic exchange. Throughout Irigaray seeks to dispute and displace male-centered structures of language and thought through a challenging writing practice that takes a first step toward a woman's discourse, a discourse that would put an end to Western culture's enduring phallocentrism.

Making more direct and accessible the subversive challenge of Speculum of the Other Woman, this volume skillfully translated by Catherine Porter (with Carolyn Burke) will be essential reading for anyone seriously concerned with contemporary feminist issues."

Blossoming from a correspondence between Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being is an intense personal, philosophical, and political meditation on the significance of the vegetal for our lives, our ways of thinking, and our relations with human and nonhuman beings. The vegetal world has the potential to rescue our planet and our species and offers us a way to abandon past metaphysics without falling into nihilism. Luce Irigaray has argued in her philosophical work that living and coexisting are deficient unless we recognize sexuate difference as a crucial dimension of our existence. Michael Marder believes the same is true for vegetal difference. Irigaray and Marder consider how plants contribute to human development by sustaining our breathing, nourishing our senses, and keeping our bodies and minds alive. They note the importance of returning to ancient Greek tradition and engaging with Eastern teachings to revive a culture closer to nature. As a result, we can reestablish roots when we are displaced and recover the vital energy we need to improve our sensibility and relation to others. This generative discussion points toward a more universal way of becoming human that is embedded in the vegetal world.

A passionate celebrator of "sexual difference," Luce Irigaray was never simply after the social equality that her generation so publicly demanded. She was seeking more fundamentally a society that celebrated the differences between the genders and their coming together in a union without hierarchy. As she formulates it in this compellingly readable introduction to her own thought, Irigaray is writing about how "I" and "You" become "We." Exploring along the way women's experiences of motherhood, abortion, the AIDS crisis and the beauty industry, this book presents one of the most important thinkers of our day in her own words.

"According to the words of Phaedrus in the Symposium of Plato, Love, sometimes named Eros, has no parents, no age, no history, and its origin remains unknown to anyone. Love, whose destiny is said to be unique amongst the gods and humans, perhaps embodies desire for a conjunction always in search of its happening. Love would represent a dynamism longing for the copula incarnating the transcendence of our being. As such, Love would remain the everlasting yearning for the accomplishment of the ecstatic destiny of humanity." In this book, Luce Irigaray - philosopher, linguist, psychologist and psychoanalyst - proposes nothing less than a new way of conceiving what a human being is as well as a means to ensure our individual and relational development from birth. Unveiling the mystery of our origin is probably what most motivates our quests and plans. And yet such a disclosure proves to be impossible. Indeed we were born as one from a union between two, and we are forever deprived of an origin of our own. Hence our ceaseless search for roots: in our genealogy, in the place where we were born, in our culture, religion or language. But a human being cannot develop from its own roots as a tree does. As humans, we must take responsibility for our own being and existence without any given continuity with our origin and background. How can we achieve that? First by cultivating our breathing, which is more than a means to come into the world and to exist; breathing also allows us to transcend mere survival to secure for ourselves a spiritual becoming. Taking on our sexuate belonging is the second element which enables us to assume our natural existence. Indeed, this determination at once brings us energy and provides us with a structure which contributes to our individuation and our relations with other living beings and the world. Our sexuation can compensate for our absence of roots too by compelling us to unite with the other sex so that we freely approach the copulative conjunction from which we were born; that is, the mystery of our origin. This does not occur through a mere sexual instinct or drive, but requires us to cultivate desire and love with respect for our mutual difference(s). In this way we can give rise to a new human being, not only at a natural but also at an ontological level.

Blossoming from a correspondence between Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being is an intense personal, philosophical, and political meditation on the significance of the vegetal for our lives, our ways of thinking, and our relations with human and nonhuman beings. The vegetal world has the potential to rescue our planet and our species and offers us a way to abandon past metaphysics without falling into nihilism. Luce Irigaray has argued in her philosophical work that living and coexisting are deficient unless we recognize sexuate difference as a crucial dimension of our existence. Michael Marder believes the same is true for vegetal difference. Irigaray and Marder consider how plants contribute to human development by sustaining our breathing, nourishing our senses, and keeping our bodies and minds alive. They note the importance of returning to ancient Greek tradition and engaging with Eastern teachings to revive a culture closer to nature. As a result, we can reestablish roots when we are displaced and recover the vital energy we need to improve our sensibility and relation to others. This generative discussion points toward a more universal way of becoming human that is embedded in the vegetal world.

Published in France in 1980, "Marine Lover" is the first in a trilogy in which Luce Irigaray links the interrogation of the feminine in post-Hegelian philosophy with a pre-Socratic investigation of the elements. Irigaray undertakes to interrogate Nietzche, the grandfather of poststructuralist philosophy, from the point of view of water.

According to Irigaray, water is the element Nietzsche fears most. She uses this element in her narrative because for her there is a complex relationship between the feminine and the fluid. Irigaray's method is to engage in an amorous dialogue with the male philosopher. In this dialogue, she ruptures conventional discourse and writes in a lyrical style that defies distinction between theory, fiction, and philosophy.

In the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray is one of France's most versatile feminist critics. "Sexes and Genealogies, "a collection of lectures delivered throughout Canada and Europe, introduces her writing to a wider American audience.

Irigaray's most famous work, "Speculum of the Other Woman, "prompted her expulsion from the Lacanin Ecole Freudienne because of its searing depiction of Platonic and Freudian representations of women. Now "Sexes and Genealogies "analyzes sexual difference according to what she terms the double dimension of gender and ideology.

Irigaray covers major issues in religion, the law, psychoanalysis, and literature, such as: the continued neglect by psychoanalysts of the sexual and gender dimensions of therapy, the urgency of female divinity for contemporary feminist movements, and a reconsideration of women's relation to the market economy. "Sexes and Genealogies "also includes Irigaray's dazzling reading of the "Oresteia, "Body Against Body: In Relation to the Mother," "now acknowleged as a feminist classic.

French philosopher Luce Irigaray has become one of the twentieth century's most influential feminist thinkers. Among her many writings are three books (with a projected fourth) in which she challenges the Western tradition's construals of human beings' relations to the four elements--earth, air, fire, and water--and to nature. In answer to Heidegger's undoing of Western metaphysics as a "forgetting of Being," Irigaray seeks in this work to begin to think out the Being of sexedness and the sexedness of Being.

This volume is the first English translation of L'oubli de l'air chez Martin Heidegger (1983). In this complex, lyrical, meditative engagement with the later work of the eminent German philosopher, Irigaray critiques Heidegger's emphasis on the element of earth as the ground of life and speech and his "oblivion" or forgetting of air.

With the other volumes (Elemental Passions and Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, published elsewhere) in Irigaray's "elemental" series, The Forgetting of Air offers a fundamental rereading of basic tenets in Western metaphysics. And with its emphasis on dwelling and human habitation, it will be important reading not only in the humanities but also in architecture and the environmental sciences.