What does it mean to be living?

Our Western culture more and more moves away from life. It is so much so that speaking about nature is generally understood as alluding to some or other concept that would be more or less adequate, but not as referring to or questioning about life. This situation is all the stranger since we are facing a real danger regarding the survival of the earth and of all the living beings that populate it. It is as if all the discourses we hear about this problem could remain abstract considerations and academic or scientific evaluations and discussions without practical concern about our own life and our living environment. This probably results from the status of our discourse in general and its current relation to the real. There is no doubt that questions are little by little arising about the present situation of the world, and also that some of the recent philosophers have begun to inquire about the truth and their way of approaching it (as is the case, for example, with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty). But it seems that, although they speak about the necessity of overcoming our past metaphysics, they succeed in doing that with difficulty. Could it be possible that the undertaking would be easier for a woman, because she did not actively contribute to the construction of our past metaphysics, and her identity and subjectivity have remained more in harmony with nature—which she is, furthermore, presumed to represent for the patriarchal tradition? Anyway, it seems that Luce Irigaray—in particular her last two books, Through Vegetal Being (coauthored with Michael Marder, 2016) and To Be Born (2017)—offers elements that correspond to what is at stake in our epoch, both at an empirical and a theoretical level. Hence this conversation about her approach to and treatment of issues crucial today for our life, our world, and all living beings

Listening, thinking, teaching

La tradición occidental se basa en mirar en lugar de escuchar. En nuestra tradición, escuchar está al servicio de mirar, especialmente en lo que respecta a la enseñanza. A partir de un momento determinado de la cultura griega, el maestro ha enseñado a sus discípulos lo que él ya ha percibido; es decir, lo que ya ha visto. El mundo entero se transforma, de alguna manera, en un conjunto de objetos que el maestro tiene que percibir -es decir, ver- de un modo apropiado, y ordenar dentro de un mundo paralelo gracias a su lenguaje, su lógica lingüística, su logos. Las discusiones, los presuntos diálogos, entre maestro y discípulo, están basados en la correcta percepción de las cosas u objetos del mundo y su correcta distribución en un todo. Gracias a su logos, el maestro construye una especie de duplicación, una suerte de duplicación mental, de la realidad externa. Él toma el mundo externo y construye una especie de mundo paralelo que siempre mantiene a mano. Ciertamente, la construcción de este mundo siempre a mano es algo extremadamente difícil: la pregunta es cómo transformar una realidad presente, múltiple y variada, en un único mundo siempre a mano.Conferencia de Luce Irigaray en la Universidad de Nottingham (junio 2006). Publicado en: L. Irigaray y M. Green (eds.) (2008). Teaching. London: Continuum.Facultad de Psicologí

A Glimpse into a True Democracy. An Interview with Luce Irigaray

"A Glimpse into a True Democracy." An Interview with Luce Irigaray

Elementy kultury politycznej dla tego, co kobiece : rozmowa Katarzyny Szopy z Luce Irigaray

Niniejsza rozmowa z Luce Irigaray jest pierwszą zaadresowaną do polskich czytelniczek z okazji stulecia praw wyborczych wywalczonych przez kobiety w Polsce. Autorka Speculum. De l’autre femme (1974) rozpoznawana jest w polskim środowisku jako „feministyczna pisarka”, „psychoanalityczka” czy przedstawicielka „postmodernizmu”, a rzadziej jako filozofka czy aktywistka polityczna. [fragm. tekstu

‘A Chain of Creation, Continuation, Continuity’ : Feminist dramaturgy and the matter of the sea

This article considers what remnants of the imaginary link established between the maternal and the sea might still be useful in feminist performance practice and theory. It does so by discussing a practice-as-research experiment that adapted strategies from Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine–which performs a liquification of ordering structures in prose writing–into a dramaturgical form based on the logic of waves. The article goes on to suggest that such a dramaturgy recasts creation as a fluid state of becoming ex tempore, resisting the masculine-connoted vision of creation as an act of the singular genius ex nihilo. It further argues that drawing on a non-human phenomenon, the sea, to describe and theorise a type of dramaturgical composition might be read as a twofold attempt on the hegemony of patriarchal culture: through its associative link with the maternal body the creative potential of the feminine is revalued while at the same time the generative capacity of the non-human is recognised via Gaston Bachelard’s notion of the material imagination. The article concludes by proposing that the sea, together with its analogic association to the maternal, can be instated as a figure that gives temporary shape to an alternative vision of cultural production

‘Daddy, I'm falling for a monster’: Women, Sex, and Sacrifice in Contemporary Paranormal Romance

This paper examines a key trope within much contemporary paranormal romance: the absence, or ineffectiveness, of the father. The first part of the essay develops an analysis of this aspect of the genre (in the Twilight Saga especially) through the work of René Girard, Luce Irigaray, and Juliet MacCannell. Of particular importance here is the extent to which Twilight and similar narratives stage female self-sacrifice as a pre-condition for the redemption of the hero and the restoration of patriarchal bonds initially compromised by some crisis in the effective functioning of paternal authority. The second section extends this analysis to consider ways in which paranormal romances featuring werewolves and vampires shift away from this conservative and reductivist romance paradigm so as to affirm and contest heteronormative, paternalistic models of masculinity and sexual desire

A cinema of desire: cinesexuality and Guattari's a-signifying cinema

This article will first describe the benefits and risks in challenging projects of signification as they relate to feminism. I will then point out the ways in which the desiring event of cinema – what I have termed ‘cinesexuality’ – can reorient and rupture structures of signification through a focus on expression. The relation of cinesexuality to feminism will then be drawn, using Guattari’s notion of asemiotic bodies: the ‘homosexual’ and ‘woman’. This will be followed by some brief sketches toward thinking cinesexuality as a form of ‘becoming-woman’. The cinesexual emphasises cinematic pleasure as asignified, pleasure beyond signification that then challenges how genders, and indeed individuals as their own collective of disparate modalities, desire cinema

YouTube birth and the primal scene

Motherhood has recently re-emerged as ‘material’ for artistic practice, and as a viable subject of academic research that both recognizes and extends earlier feminist assertions that the maternal is a key site for the anxious psychosocial negotiations of identity, subjectivity, equality, ethics and politics. Additionally, pregnancy and birth have graphically entered the public domain. Hundreds of thousands of short films of live birth, for instance, circulate around the globe on video sharing platforms such as YouTube, some with followings of many million viewers. Yet, how might we understand the desire to perform and spectate birth? ‘YouTube birth’ raises questions about performing and spectating birth in digital culture, and the meaning of watching our own birth with a mass public of millions of viewers. In this paper I explore these questions through revisiting the psychoanalytic notion of the ‘primal scene’. The primal scene is the Freudian articulation of the crucial role of infantile sexual and violent fantasies in structuring psychic life, linked to the loss of, or denial of, the material/maternal body as source or origin. Although within feminist scholarship the primal scene as a theoretical concept is radically out of date, it may be productive to revisit primal fantasies in the digital age, and the ways digital technologies shift our relation to ‘analogue’ notions of place, scene, birth, origin and loss. Exploring the continued place of psychoanalysis in helping to understand issues to do with origin, reproduction and temporality, I ask both what psychoanalysis might have to offer our understanding of performing and watching birth, and how a psychoanalytic configuration of the primal scene may itself need to change in relation to digital primal fantasies and technologies that function through fungibility and loss-less-ness