Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and 'the Greeks' (SUNY series in Gender Theory)
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 1438431007
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A transdisciplinary reader on Luce Irigaray’s reading and rewriting of ancient Greek texts.
In this definitive reader, prominent scholars reflect on how Luce Irigaray reads the classic discourse of Western metaphysics and also how she is read within and against this discourse. Her return to “the Greeks,” through strategies of deconstructing, demythifying, reconstructing, and remythifying, is not a nostalgic return to the ideality of Hellenocentric antiquity, but rather an affirmatively critical revisiting of this ideality. Her persistent return and affective bond to ancient Greek logos, mythos, and tragedy sheds light on some of the most complex epistemological issues in contemporary theory, such as the workings of criticism, the language of politics and the politics of language, the possibility of social and symbolic transformation, the multiple mediations between metropolitan and postcolonial contexts of theory and practice, the question of the other, and the function of the feminine in Western metaphysics. With a foreword by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and a chapter by Irigaray responding to her commentators, this book is an essential text for those in social theory, comparative literature, or classics.
“This is no doubt a state-of-the-art edited collection which will make a major contribution not merely to existing Irigaray scholarship and to the fields of feminism, gender and queer studies but, more widely, in contemporary critical and cultural theory.” — Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
“The real strength, and rare quality, of this book lies in its willingness to engage in a nuanced—at times, even critical—approach to Irigaray’s feminism.” — New Formations
“This singular volume begins to take account of the enormous influence and range of the work of Luce Irigaray. Taking as a point of departure the key critical writings on Greek philosophy that form the basis of Irigaray’s theories of sexual difference, the sexed body, and writing, this anthology brings Irigaray’s Greek legacy into the present to consider feminist philosophy as a critical rereading of philosophy’s foundations. Here we see that the departures from that important tradition are as important as the debts we owe. Once again we see that to read Irigaray means learning to read in both directions at once. As well, we see in vivid terms that Irigaray’s work poses an enormous challenge for rethinking relations of eros and love, recrafting philosophy through new textual and corporeal practices, both embodied and critical. The volume recognizes Irigaray as a feminist philosopher whose work has itself produced an impressive legacy of diverse and vital criticism among major contemporary thinkers. This is an invaluable text for those who wish to understand just how radically feminist thought intervenes in questions of history, love, embodiment, and critical readings in philosophy.” — Judith Butler, author of Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
“This book will captivate feminist scholars and classicists alike, presenting the complex panorama of an interdisciplinary study in which the primacy of the ‘text’ (be it Irigaray’s or that of the ancient tradition) is at the same time confirmed and trespassed.” — Adriana Cavarero, author of Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender
shadows? “What happened in Eleusis was the separation and reunion of the dual goddess Demeter-Kore (Deó), she who sometimes appears as two barely differentiated figures.”62 Kore, the reflected light of Demeter, Demeter who is the life-giving light, the photon whose energy is transmitted in diffracted light rays. Demeter-Kore is the story of the reflected, refracted, and diffracted energy of that light, wandering in the world, transmitting its energy. In this cosmos, Kore returns from darkness to her
stuck on pales. (Eumenides, lines 185–190) In this passage, and indeed, in the whole of the Eumenides, Aeschylus seeks to demonstrate that the ancient custom of talion was brutal, uncivilized, and inhuman, and that the time had come to legislate for the future of Greece. It is not my point to argue that the talion, as practiced by the Erinnyes, could have been worthy of the new order of the polis, where all would be subject to the established rule of law. My point rather is that Apollo’s—and
human action and should be the foundation for an ethics. This is partly because for Irigaray incest, in particular Oedipal incest relative to Jocasta, represents a moment of women’s multiplication into indistinction: mother and wife are indistinguishable in the figure of Jocasta, in relation to one and the same person, Oedipus. So, within the logic of this tale, womankind is stripped of its occasion to be both (1) generationally singular and distinct, on the one hand, and (2) allied amongst
guests (the suitors) create the narrative interest on the home front. Furthermore, the social and moral code of hospitality is the chief means of distinguishing between men in ethical terms. Virtuous and wise men follow the code of hospitality, most particularly as hosts but also as guests, whatever their social status. The issue on which I want to focus is that of hospitality and sexual difference. While some of the key theoretical texts currently influencing the debate on hospitality (notably
encapsulated in his wife Helen. If all hospitality harks back to the fear and desire of our first home, what about the position of real women as hosts? I make a distinction, awkward though it is to the ear, between hostesses and female hosts. If not commercial, the hostess implies hospitality offered by the master of the house, the true host, by means of his woman, the hostess. Her authority is thus only a delegated one, and she is an intermediary, her body (and mental and emotional faculties) a