Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray

172 Pages·2023·2.676 MB·English

by  Emma R. Jones

Being as Relation
in Luce Irigaray
Emma R. Jones
Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray
Emma R. Jones
Being as Relation in
Luce Irigaray
Emma R. Jones
Livermore, CA, USA
ISBN 978-3-031-19304-0 ISBN 978-3-031-19305-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19305-7
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks are due to the friends and colleagues who have supported
this work over the years. I began writing this book during my time at the
University of Oregon, where Al Frankowski and Jessica Sims were espe-
cially supportive during the writing process. Many thanks also to John
Lysaker for his inspiring course on Heidegger and, for their intellectual
companionship, to the many individuals impacted by the work of Luce
Irigaray whom I met during that time at conferences around the world,
especially Anne van Leeuwen and Andrew Robinson. Thank you also to
Claudia Baracchi, whose courses on Ancient Greek thinking and French
Feminism at the New School captivated my interest decades ago in a way
that has never ceased.
Thank you to Luce Irigaray for sharing of herself via her writings, her
seminar in which I participated at the University of Nottingham in 2010,
and for our correspondence over the years.
Finally, thanks to those who always serve as humbling reminders of my
own specificity and their irreducible, and wonderful, otherness – my
family, close friends, and psychotherapy clients.
Portions of this research were supported by the Oregon Humanities
Center, who granted me a Graduate Student Research Support Fellowship
during the academic year 2011–2012.
v
vi Acknowledgments
Portions of Chapter Four appeared as “The Future of Sexuate
Difference: Irigaray, Heidegger, Ontology, and Ethics,” in L’Esprit
Createur, Vol. 52, No. 3, Fall 2012.
Portions of Chapter Five appeared as “Finding/Founding Our Place:
Thinking Luce Irigaray’s Ontology and Ethics of Sexuate Difference as a
Relational Limit” in Building a New World, Eds. Luce Irigaray and
Michael Marder (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Contents
1 Introduction: Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray 1
Reading Irigaray, Listening 2
Terminology: Ontology, Subjectivity, Ethics 5
Relational Limit 7
Chapter Summaries 9
References 12
2 Muted Receptions: Identity and Sexuate Difference 15
The Philosopher Who is Not One 17
Irigaray’s Three Phases 24
Femininity and The Transformation of “the Subject” 30
Identity Vs. Relation 37
References 39
3 Relation and Refusal: Irigaray with Lacan 43
Lacan on Language, Subjectivity, and Sex 47
God or the Jouissance of the Woman: Irigaray and Lacan on
Sexual Difference 54
The Psychosis of the Masculine 68
References 71
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viii Contents
4 Hearing Silence, Speaking Language: Irigaray with
Heidegger 73
Note on Terminology 76
Living Within Language as a Call to Respond: A Reading of
Heidegger’s “Language” 78
On the Way to the Other 91
References 99
5 The Enunciation of Place: Irigaray on Subjectivity 101
Aristotle’s Impasse of Place 103
Relational Limit: A “Double Loop” of Places 107
Speaking at the Limit: The Sharing of Speech 111
References 127
6 Toward a Relationally Limited Future 129
“Woman’s” Lack of Place: An Act of Violence 131
Identity (and) Politics 142
Encountering the World as a Sexuate Subject 145
Conclusion 157
References 160
I ndex 163
About the Author
Emma R. Jones is a psychotherapist in private practice in the San
Francisco East Bay Area. She was educated at the New School; the
University of Oregon, where she earned her PhD in philosophy; and the
California Institute of Integral Studies, where she earned her clinical
degree. She is the author of several articles engaging the work of Luce
Irigaray as well as phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and Ancient Greek
philosophy.
ix
Abbreviations1
SOW Speculum of the Other Woman
SAF Speculum de l’autre femme
TS This Sex Which Is Not One
CS Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un
WOL The Way of Love
STW Sharing the World
ESD An Ethics of Sexual Difference
CV Conversations
ILTY I Love To You
JLI “Je- Luce Irigaray” (Interview)
TBT To Be Two
TBB To Be Born
STF Sharing the Fire
1 Texts By Luce Irigaray.
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