A Conversation between Luce Irigaray and Stephen D. Seely 

about Through Vegetal Being and To Be Born

‘What Does It Mean to Be Living?’

in: philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism, 8.2 Summer 2018, pp. 1-12.

Luce Irigaray and Andrea Wheeler in conversation on “Through Vegetal Being” (Columbia University Press, 2016), “Angelaki” 2017, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 177-181.

In this interview the philosopher Luce Irigaray discusses her book “Through Vegetal Being” co-authored with Michael Marder. In response to questions, she distinguishes the human relationship to the environment and to other human beings. She describes how we must change our manner of relating to nature, beginning with our own: to learning how to coexist as a natural being among others instead of dominating the natural world. We must cultivate our instincts, free ourselves from traditions and elaborate a new education and sociocultural order and it is then that we will perceive that we cannot share with plants and animals all that we can share with another human being.

Exclusive Interview with Luce Irigaray, FWSA newsletter February 2013
Evelien Geerts (Utrecht University) and Maud Perrier (University of Bristol, UK), participants in the 2012 seminar, interview Professor Irigaray for the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association newsletter and discuss the crisis academia faces in the UK and worldwide, women’s role in shaping the academy for future generations and why an ethics of sexuate difference is so vital for changing our world. (Many thanks to the FWSA for allowing us to publish this interview).