File spoon-archives/french-feminism.archive/french-feminism_1996/96-06-15.140, message 219


Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 16:15:42 -0600
From: hammond1-AT-ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (David Hammond)
Subject: Re: prenumeration


>This post does not concern prenumeration, sorry.  I've been lurking,
>waititng to see what we might be discussing, and to my dispair -- nada.
>So, I'll ask a question:  Has anyone read Irigaray's -An Ethics of Sexual
>Difference- and if so, was anyone besides me intrigued by her call for a
>new poetics that woudl fall in line with an ethics of wonder?
>
>There's lots of talk about ethics thesee days, in feminism and out, and
>I'm wondering why it is that Irigary's text -- which pre-dates this
>discussion in America by nearly eight years -- is not actively referred
>to in this discussion.  Just about ever PoMo ethic or feminist ethic I
>see put forward has direct connections to her book, and finds a full
>articulation there.
>
>Any takers?
>M.
>
>Meaghan Roberts                         | ... in our interpreted world...
>Ph.D. Candidate - Ethics and Literature |
>The University of Texas at Dallas       |
>Meaghan-AT-UTDallas.edu                    |


M.
        Here goes. (I've been listening in, following, this list, for too
long.) . . . My considerable but not as yet well-considered 'hunch' is that
Irigaray's more recent studies, which might be best termed, a kind of
lyrical criticism, do not seem terribly useful to those (me, too) who get
swept up by the busyness of certain feminisms, and critical theory
generally. The densities of her thinking, her ethical recollections are not
readily handled or deployed, to 'use' a political commonplace. I speak of
recollection in the Heideggerian sense as preservation, and acceptance, and
re/signation, and distortion. Irigaray thinks Nietzsche, Hegel, Plato,
Heidegger, you might say, magnanimously, by letting-go their words, by
accompanying these so-called 'masters' of air, spirit, sunlight, earth, and
brushing them with 'her/Her' so-called rem(a)inders. Texts such as "Marine
Lover" or "Elemental Passions" are to be lingered with, are not easily
adopted, allegorized by activists who seek equity or academics in quest of
new ways of theorizing. In short, her ethics is essentially (I know, I know
-- He/he is wondering, wandering with her/Irigaray/Her. See "Elemental
Passions" on he/He, she/She) about listening with, touching upon, an
other's saying, about the legein in logos (see "i love to you", especially
the final three essays of love).




   

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