Author(s): Luce Irigaray

Society & Culture

'Irigaray's work is always dazzling, surprising and unexpected. No other thinker of Irigaray's generation has her range, insight and originality. No other thinker has managed to illuminate the challenge and the mystery that the other, the other of sexual difference, brings to all encounters, and to all knowledges. In The Way of Love Irigaray opens up philosophy to the mystery of sexual difference, a mystery inscribed in but covered over in all of Western thought.' Elizabeth Grosz. If Western philosophy has claimed to be a love of wisdom, it has forgotten to become a wisdom of love. We still lack words, gestures, ways of doing or thinking to approach one another as humans, to enter into dialogue, to build a world where we can live together. Globalisation represents an opportunity but also a danger for humanity. Sameness has been the key to the construction of Western cultures and societies. Difference - beginning with sexual difference - can open up for us an era of inter-communication, from our most everyday exchanges to the universal interweaving of a democratic global community. Table of Contents: 1. Introduction 2. The Sharing of the Word 3. Being With the Other 4. Thanks to Difference 5. Rebuilding the World About the Author: Luce Irigaray is Director of Research in Philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. Now acknowledged as one of France's most influential theorists, her work focuses on the culture of two subjects, masculine and feminine, particularly through the liberation of a feminine subjectivity.