Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T00:03:43.926Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Coming Together: The Six Modes of Irigarayan Eros

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Christopher Cohoon
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Luce Irigaray's provocative vision of eros is often expressed in what Elizabeth Grosz calls “rambling and apparently disconnected” language, and nowhere in Irigaray's texts is it presented as a coherent account. With the goal of elaborating the significance of Irigaray's vision, I here set out to construct such an account. After first defining the Irigarayan erotic encounter as a paradoxical conjunction of “separation and alliance,” I then aim to show that its structure may be productively interpreted in terms of six co-present modes: (i) wonder, the affective mode; (ii) touch, the sensuous mode; (iii) transgression, the subjective mode; (iv) fluidity, the elemental mode; (v) future, the temporal mode; and (vi) threeness, the numerical mode. From this interpretation, I argue, there emerges a new understanding of the immense power of Irigarayan eros as a “sexual or carnal ethics” and as a constitutive force not only for embodied subjectivity and intersubjectivity but also for sexual difference itself.

Type
Erotic Ethical Encounters
Information
Hypatia , Volume 26 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Ethics of Embodiment , Summer 2011 , pp. 478 - 496
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bostic, Heidi. 2002. Irigaray and love. Cultural Studies 16 (5): 603–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chanter, Tina. 1995. Ethics of eros: Irigaray's rewriting of the philosophers. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cheah, Pheng, and Grosz, Elizabeth. 1998. The future of sexual difference: An interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell. Diacritics 28 (1): 19–42.Google Scholar
Descartes, René. 1649/1931. Passions of the soul in The philosophical works of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. E.S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1989. Sexual subversions: Three French feminists. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1995. Space, time, and perversion. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2008. Plenary Session. Third Annual Conference of the Luce Irigaray Circle. Hofstra University. Hempstead, New York. September 12–13.Google Scholar
Ince, Kate. 1996. Questions to Luce Irigaray. Hypatia 11 (2): 122–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Irigaray, Luce. 1974/1985. Speculum of the other woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Irigaray, Luce. 1977/1985. The sex which is not one. Trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Irigaray, Luce. 1982/1992. Elemental passions. Trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Irigaray, Luce. 1984/1993. An ethics of sexual difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Irigaray, Luce. 1990/1991. Questions to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Margaret Whitford. In The Irigaray reader, ed. Whitford, Margaret. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Irigaray, Luce. 1992/1996. I love to you: Sketch of a possible felicity in history. Trans. Alison Martin. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Irigaray, Luce. 1994/2000. To be two. Trans. Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F. Cocito‐Monoc. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Irigaray, Luce. 2002. The way of love. Trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháček. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Irigaray, Luce. 2004a. Key writings. New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Irigaray, Luce. 2004b. What other are we talking about? Trans. Esther Marion. Yale French Studies 104:67–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joy, Morny. 2000. Love and the labor of the negative: Irigaray and Hegel. In Resistance, flight, creation: Feminist enactments of French philosophy, ed. Olkowski, Dorothea. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
La Caze, Marguerite. 2005. Love, that indispensable supplement: Irigaray and Kant on love and respect. Hypatia 20 (3): 92–114.10.1353/hyp.2005.0100CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1961/1969. Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.Google Scholar
Perpich, Diane. 2003. Subjectivity and sexual difference: New figures of subjectivity in Irigaray and Cavarero. Continental Philosophy Review 36 (4): 391–413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watts, Alan. 1961. Psychotherapy east and west. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
White, Richard. 1999. Elemental passions and the nature of love. Philosophy Today 43 (1): 43–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar