Table Of ContentBuilding a New World
Palgrave Studies in Postmetaphysical Thought
Series Editors: Michael Marder and Santiago Zabala
This book series aims to respond to what remains of thinking and what remains
to be thought after the ‘end of metaphysics’. How to proceed philosophically
without the familiar support structures of metaphysical categories: Ideas, God,
Spirit, Substance, Thing, or Subject? How to inherit the mixed legacies of these
jaded philosophical keywords ‘after’ the depletion of all metaphysical possibili-
ties? And what is the fate of thinking – philosophical and extra-philosophical – in
the twenty-first century?
Titles include:
BEING SHAKEN: Ontology and the Event
Michael Marder and Santiago Zabala (editors)
Palgrave Studies in Postmetaphysical Thought
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Building a New World
Luce Irigaray: Teaching II
Edited by
Luce Irigaray
National Centre for Scientifi c Research, Paris, France
and
Michael Marder
IKERBASQUE Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country,
Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
Selection and editorial matter © Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder 2015
Individual chapters © respective authors 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-45301-3
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First published 2015 by
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements vii
Notes on the Contributors xiii
Part I P hilosophy: Birth or Rebirth through Cultivating
Nature and Sexuate Intersubjectivity
1 A Philosophy Faithful to Happiness 3
Lucia Del Gatto
2 F inding/Founding Our Place: Thinking Luce Irigaray’s Ontology
and Ethics of Sexuate Difference as a Relational Limit 15
Emma R. Jones
3 Becoming Two: This Existence Which Is Not One 31
Emily Anne Parker
4 Intersubjectivity and ren: A Cross-Cultural Encounter 44
Gu Keping
5 C ultivating Difference with Luce Irigaray’s Between East
and West 58
Laura Roberts
6 E nabling Education: Rethinking the Teacher–Student
Relationship through Luce Irigaray’s Ethics of Difference 77
Tomoka Toraiwa
Part II T heology and Spirituality: Reading Sacred Texts and
Traditions with a Feminine Belief
7 Maria Redux: Incarnational Readings of Sacred History 95
Abigail Rine
8 S ensible Transcendental: Recovering the Flesh and Spirit of
Our Mother(s) 108
Zeena Elton
9 G odly Virtues: Ethical Implications of Our Conception of
the Divine 126
Elizabeth Lee
10 Language and Love in an Age of Terror 141
Lisa Watrous
v
vi Contents
Part III A rt: Paths of Women towards Embodying
Themselves
11 T owards a Culture of the Feminine: The Phenomenon of
the Princess-Ballerina in Western Culture 155
Caroline O’Brien
12 F rom Silence to Breath: An Irigarayan Study of the
Representation of Motherhood in Modern Drama 167
Yan Liu
13 B eing Passive/Passive Being: Passivity as Self-Expression in
Gothic Literature 182
Dana Wight
14 F emininity and Subversive Mimicry in Edward Albee’s Plays
and Beyond 195
Mona Hoorvash
Part IV P olitics: Building a New World Instead of Dwelling
on Terrorism
15 T he Mimesis that Was Not One: Femininity as Camouflage
in the Armed Struggle in West Germany 209
Katharina Karcher
16 E mbodying Terror: Reading Terrorism with Luce Irigaray 222
Liz Sage
17 B eing Two in the World: The Bridge Between Sexuate
Difference and Cultural Difference in the Work of Luce
Irigaray 237
Marita Ryan
Part V Contributions of Luce Irigaray
18 Ethical Gestures Towards the Other 253
19 Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us 272
20 Remembering Humanity 284
Afterword – Cultivating Natural Belonging: Luce Irigaray’s
Water Lily
Michael Marder 297
Index 315
Prefaceand Acknowledgements
Since 2003 I have held a one-week seminar with researchers doing
their PhD on my work. This way, they have the opportunity to receive
personal teaching from me and to exchange ideas, methods and
experiences amongst themselves. The seminar has been hosted by the
University of Nottingham during the first three years, and then, in suc-
cessive years, by the University of Liverpool; Queen Mary University of
London; Goodenough College, London; the University of Nottingham;
the University of the West of England/the University of Bristol (as
co-hosts); and the University of Bristol.
The framework of the seminar is as follows: a group of, at most, 15
researchers stay one week on campus. The timetable includes a presen-
tation by each of them on the aspect of their PhD which most focuses
on my work, the discussion of this presentation by the group, my own
comments and answers to the questions asked by each one, and also
sessions devoted to an explanation of some keywords or topics chosen
by the participants. Personal meetings with me are organized on the
last day. The participants pay for their travel, but receive, at least in
part, hospitality from the university. The language of the seminars is
English.
The researchers who participate in the seminar come from various
regions of the world and belong to different cultures, traditions and fields
of research. Apart from the fact that they are all doing their PhDs in
relation to the thought of Luce Irigaray, they mostly gather together by
chance. However, their interests and themes of research have generally
something in common that reflects the current preoccupations of people
around the world. Thus the concerns appearing in the first volume Luce
Irigaray: Teaching (edited by Luce Irigaray with Mary Green, London and
New York: Continuum, 2008), which gathered the contributions of the
researchers in the first three years, are not the same as those that are
manifested in this second volume, in which it is possible to note, beyond
the presence of politics (notably with regard to terrorism), that many
texts focus on constructing interrelations between sexes and genera-
tions, but also between countries, cultures and traditions. If the critical
aspect remains at work in almost all texts, it is more and more accom-
panied with positive proposals at several levels: reading, behaviour,
strategy, education, intercultural solutions, political alternatives, etc.
vii
viii Preface and Acknowledgements
Perhaps we have reached a crucial phase in which young people feel the
need to begin constructing a new world without stopping at criticizing.
They undertake this task with intelligence, heart, open-mindedness
and the desire for collaborating with one another. So much so that a
seminar that assembles each year between ten and fifteen researchers
proves to be a laboratory in which step by step a new world starts to be
elaborated. In such a work, European researchers, but also researchers
coming from China, Japan, Australia, Iran, Pakistan, South Africa and
New Zealand, are involved, beginning with practising a mutual respect
and hospitality during the week of the seminar.
Another approach which is emerging is the significance of a return
to and a cultivation of nature in order to found a new way of thinking.
This requires going back to the beginning of the Western tradition and
discovering how a certain use of language, especially as neutral and
abstractly universal, has cut us off from our living roots and deprived us
of growing with happiness thanks to dialogue and love, something that
needs another ethics taking into account our global beings with their
potential of sensitivity and sensuousness (see the chapter by Lucia Del
Gatto). Human life cannot remain only at a natural level; and the most
crucial gesture in order to pass from nature to humanity can happen
thanks to our sexuate belonging; indeed, if sexuation inscribes forms in
matter itself and is productive of forms, it also engenders an appropriate
place for each, bringing forth relational limits that allow for coexist-
ence between two differently sexuate subjects as the basis of an ethics
concerning a human way to relate to one another while finding, in a
relation that is respectful of difference, a source of becoming for each
and of a fecund sharing (see Emma R. Jones). If that chapter started with
Aristotle again, in order to question Western metaphysics, the next one
approaches the issue of birth and becoming, starting from the work of
Nietzsche, and grants a more crucial part to an artistic creativity than to
a natural sexuate flowering; birth and becoming, then, refer to the con-
quest of oneself as other, especially as a woman, beyond all the captures
and raptures in a world built on sameness by a unique masculine subject,
and to the elaboration of a shareable culture in which truth can no longer
be separated from art and a bodily presence (see Emily Anne Parker). A
return to nature is also a crucial element in order to compare Western
and Eastern traditions. Western cultures generally intend to dominate
nature and submit it to mind and supra-sensitive values, whereas Eastern
cultures are based on respect for nature, and this explains why consid-
eration for parents and ancestry represents the basis and the model
of a virtuous relational life, which does not yet take into account
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
sexuate belonging as a crucial part of natural human identity, as is obvi-
ous in the Confucian conception of ren; hence the interest in collaborat-
ing on the cultivation of an intersubjectivity that cares about sexuate
difference as a cross-cultural task (see Gu Keping). What can be Western
suspicious reaction, notably in academic circles, regarding building
bridges between East and West, this can nevertheless bring to both cul-
tures elements in order to enter another epoch of human evolution; fur-
thermore, these intercultural bridges can serve as a model towards the
recognition of other cultural differences, all the more so since breathing
and sexuate difference provide for a passage between nature and culture
that is universal and can contribute towards the evolution of humanity
at a world level (see Laura Roberts). All of this calls for changes in edu-
cation, and it is not by chance that it is from the East that the proposal
for promoting a return to the self comes, as well as the call for the rec-
ognition of the otherness of the other as the way to develop the global
being of students and make them capable of reaching an autonomy
which does not prevent them from entering into dialogue with various
others towards a continuous becoming; Western experts, for their part,
rather reflect on the modifications of programmes of knowledge with-
out considering sufficiently the p reservation of a particular nature and
inner growing (see Tomoka Toraiwa).
Reading sacred texts and traditions needs a capability to maintain
a respectful distance regarding them in order not to lapse into a mere
destructive criticism. Far from contenting themselves with such a stage,
all the texts that are gathered together in Part II, which is devoted to
a more religious aspect, show a will to open up new spiritual horizons,
especially, but not only, for women. They bear witness to a desire to
assert personal positions without either submission or rejection. Instead,
the matter is of rereading the sacred texts, while paying more careful
attention to the incarnation of the divine with regard to both the divine
figures, especially the feminine ones, and the way in which a woman
can contribute towards her own becoming divine; that is, of interpret-
ing religious history in order to work towards its, and our, evolution
here and now (see Abigail Rine). A text also questions the remnants of
ancient feminine spiritual traditions to recover a path towards a spiritual
sharing between daughter and mother and an interpretation of virginity
that goes beyond its reduction to a mere bodily and natural aspect, and
so makes possible a transcendental relation to the other without falling
back into supra-sensitive ideals or idolatry (see Zeena Elton). Another
way to open up one’s own spiritual path while escaping mere criticism
is to make comparisons between theologians of different churches, what
