Luce Irigaray – Quotes
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Posted 24 September 2011, by Staff, The European Graduate School, egs.edu
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…more than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. it sets at a distance, maintains the distance. in our culture, the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing, has brought about an improverishment of bodily relations…the moment the look dominates, the body loses its materiality.
Irigaray, Luce.
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“Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our ‘salvation’ if we thought it through.
Irigaray, Luce.
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Between gods and men, territories are set up. At least in the no-man’s land of the heights of heaven, the depths of hell, and inside the boundary traced by the oceans. Dimensions installed by a cosmogonic trilogy that leaves each term in its generic place. There remains the earth ancestress, a fourth term, that was once the most fertile, that has been progressively buried and forgotten beneath the architectonic of patriarchal sovereignty. And this murder erupts in the form of ambivalences that have constantly to be solved and hierarchized, in twinned pairs of more or less good doubles.
Irigaray, Luce and Gillian C. Gill (Translator). Marine Lover: Of Friedrich Nietzsche. Columbia University Press. April 15, 1991. Hardcover 176 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0231070829.
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Is E=Mc² a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged that which goes faster.
Irigaray, Luce. Parler n’est jamais neutre. Éditions de Minuit. 1987. p.110. (Quoted in and translated by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures, London: Profile Books, 1998, p.100.)
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“The ‘feminine’ is always described in terms of deficiency or atrophy, as the other side of the sex that alone holds a monopoly on value: the male sex. Hence the all too well-known ‘penis envy.’ How can we accept the idea that woman’s entire sexual development is governed by her lack of , and thus by her longing for, jealousy of, and demand for, the male organ? Does this mean that woman’s sexual evolution can never be characterized with reference to the female sex itself? All Freud’s statements describing feminine sexuality overlook the fact that the female sex has its own ‘specificity’.
Irigaray, Luce and Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Translator). This Sex Which Is Not One. Cornell Univeristy Press. 1985. Paperback, 223 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0801493315.
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Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a … divine composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick?
Irigaray, Luce. “Body against Body: In relation to the Mother.” in: Fifth Conference on Mental Health entitled ‘Women and Madness”. May 13, 1980.
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Only Ed 