Maja Bjelica (Primorska University, Slovenia)

The research presented at the seminar is part of a PhD thesis which explores hospitality in its many forms. In connecting the notions and phenomena of breath, silence and listening with hospitality, be it as its conditions, possibilities and/or intrinsic properties, the thought of Luce Irigaray is crucial, since it provides theoretical grounds for the concepts at stake. Moreover, her account on music as well as religion, can provide a path to explicitly connect these notions to both case studies of the PhD project, namely, the one that deals with hospitality within the Alevi community in Turkey and hospitality in and as “musicking” (musical activity). Read more…

Ruthanne SooHee Crapo (University of Minnesota, US)

In this presentation, I elaborate the relevance of Irigaray’s work for ecological feminism, animal liberation, and a practical expression of religious diversity.  While other works regarding Irigaray have focused on her spiritual theology, this presentation points toward the outcome of this spiritual and sexually differentiated humanism—a refashioning of human morality and ethical relations. I suggest her work in religion has particular importance given the sometimes-perceived cultural clash between secularism and religion. Read more…

Lauren Fournier (York University, Canada)

For the 2016 Luce Irigaray International Seminar, I presented a paper entitled “The Paradox of Narcissism and the Philosopher’s Wife: Towards a Definition of ‘Auto-Theory.’” This constitutes the introduction of the first chapter of my dissertation, which takes up “auto-theory” as a contemporary mode of feminist cultural production across media. In my paper, I read the work of Chris Kraus (I Love Dick, Aliens and Anorexia, Torpor) through Luce Irigaray’s notion of mimesis and her reading of the philosopher’s wife. I began by fleshing out the theoretical implications of the “auto” orientation and narcissism through a feminist lens. Irigaray’s theoretical work becomes a way for me to connect the performances of hysteria, narcissism, exhibitionism, and disclosure that I perceive in contemporary feminist work to the history of philosophy and persisting gender-based issues. Read more…

Joyce (Jiamim Qi) (Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China)

To give voice to the long silenced Black mother, African American female novelist Gloria Naylor’s (1950- ) third novel Mama Day (1988) chants black woman genealogy and magic. Enlightened by Irigaray’s works, this essay argues that it is Mama Day and George’s different ways of communicating with the maternal spaces generate their different results in healing, either healing their own wounded relationships with their mothers or healing the disconnection between man and woman. Read more…

Amy Kings (Keele University, UK)

Irigaray’s work has many direct relations to the environmental (although not always explicit) which have recently been explored in the „Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology” (2015). In relation to my own research it is clear that Irigaray’s discussion of sexual difference, dualism, the sublime and Kant – have direct implications for the relationship between mankind and nature and of course, between Immanuel Kant and both women and the environment. Read more…

Elspeth Mitchell (University of Leeds, UK)

The girl is a critical point for the revolution of culture, according to Luce Irigaray. As such, we can productively trace Irigaray’s engagement with the girl over several decades through her philosophy. This ranges from her important critiques of the Freudian little girl in Speculum of the Other Woman, to later considerations of Antigone, Persephone/Kore and the little girl’s dialogue with the mother. These texts take up and question the discourses of myth, linguistics, psychoanalysis and philosophy with clear attention to the girl but also through an engagement which is framed by her primary philosophical concern — the question of sexuate difference. Read more…

Rucha Newalkar (India, currently the University of Iowa, US)

My Masters of Science in Architecture dissertation focusses on an ecofeminist inquiry for shaping the urban public space. At Luce Irigaray’s 2016 seminar at the University of Bristol, I presented my paper as a part of my research concentrating on sustainability and public urban spaces. The experience was an effort to strengthen the definition of sustainability by investigating Irigaray’s writings concerning feminism, female subjectivity, ecological essentialism and a global culture of co-existence. I tried to maintain two prominent approaches to dealing with the question of feminism, sustainability and the urban public space, one focussing on the practicality of the subject in the narrower sense of immediate effects and the other in the broader sense of possible philosophical implications of this relationship in the long term course of humanity and the environment. Read more…

Rebekah Pryor (University of Melbourne, Australia)

Allegiances to God or gods aside, and inheritances of religious history and ritual suspended momentarily, we return with Irigaray „to the most simple of everyday life”, where simple things are „always relational – whether it is a matter of the relation to nature, to things, to the other” (Luce Irigaray, „Beyond Totem and Idol, the Sexuate Other”, Continental Philosophy Review 40, no. 4 (2007), pp. 356-7). In pursuit of our spiritual becoming, we meet in a common place, a domestic space where our humanity is most unmistakable.

The experience of the Luce Irigaray Seminar was not unlike this. The rhythm of meeting, listening, speaking, keeping silence and sharing hospitality together enabled a kind of learning (of self, other and the work of philosophy) that typical education experiences don’t. Read more…

Phongkon Weerpiput (Mahidol University, Thailand)

Mahavessantara Jataka is the religious literature, aiming to teach about Vessantara’s height of liberality. Vessantara sacrifices his wife and children and properties for becoming the Buddha in the next life. Maddi Sermon is the ninth sermon of 13 sermons. As you can see the name of this sermon, Maddi, a woman may be the main character. The male characters―Vessantara, Indra God, one lion, and two tigers― influence on the idea and the role of the woman. Moreover, the review of this sermon by the Thai literature specialists in the textbook of the Thai subject of the grade 11 focuses on Maddi’s love and concern on Jali and Kanha, her loyalty to Vessantara, and the esthetic language of the context expressing Maddi’s mourning and suffering which are given by Vessantara and the nature. According to the review of the Thai literature specialists, the woman directly and indirectly resides in the masculine power. Read more…