INTRODUCTION TO THE SEMINAR 2021

In 2020, the seminar did not happen because of the covid 19. I attempted to hold it in June 2021 even if the situation was still problematic due to the virus. The seminar took place in France, in the Centre Mione in the great park of the Château de Chamarande. This choice aimed at protecting the health of the participants. Some of them had to undergo a quarantine and almost all tests at their arrival and before their departure. Unfortunately, two of the registered candidates have been prevented from participating at the last moment because of diplomatic decrees of 19 May concerning the entry in France: a woman from Thailand and a man from USA, stopped at the level of the consulate for one and at the check point of the airport for the other.

All that has created a particular ambiance during the seminar. More than ever the group was unite and showed a deep solidarity. The work was also careful fruitful, and even joyful.

Another particularity of the seminar was that Adelphe Adambadji, who arrived only the last day in 2019, due to a problem of visa, was exceptionally allowed to participate in 2021. 

Luce Irigaray

Adelphe T. Adambadji (University of Cotonou, Benin)

The manner of behaving towards women is henceforth subjected to critics, and some authors show their disapproval regarding the way in which women are treated: the reduction of women to their physical aspect; the way according to which the media sexualize the body of women; the passivity always associated with feminine subjectivity etc. All that makes women trapped in images and roles a priori unfavorable and imposes on them stereotypes, notably with regard to desire, which alienate and paralyze their development. Read more…

Beatriz Conde Alonso (Computense University, Madrid)

According to the psychoanalytic theory, sexuation removes the subjects from the fantasy of completeness and supposes a fundamental limit in their psychic structuring. Each subject will face this border establishing a world approach differently: psychosis, perversion and neurosis. According  this model, desire is understood from the lack: sexual difference, as well as language, are limited, which opens up to a search. Read more…

Federica Doria (University Paris 8, Paris)

My presentation for the seminar «Working with Luce Irigaray 2021» is an analysis of three main works written by this author related to the notion of the maternal and to the mother-daughter relationship. In particular, I studied Body against Body: in Relation to the Mother (1981), Je, tu, nous. Toward a Culture of Difference (1990), and To be Two (1992), because these three contributions are linked to the reflection on the feminine writings as my research at the University. In fact, my thesis focusses on three feminine authors: the American poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), the Italian feminist writer Carla Lonzi (1931-1982), and the French feminist writer Hélène Cixous (1937) who attempt to construct their feminine identity through literary writing. Drawing from a feminist approach, my research also explores the role of the mothers of these three authors and their influences on their daughters’ writings. Read more…

Ginger Guin (Fordham University, New York)

My presentation for Irigaray’s 2021 seminar derived from a portion of my current dissertation research. The presentation considered Irigaray’s engagement with the elemental – the four elements air, water, fire, and earth – in both her 1980s elemental series Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, Elemental Passions, and The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger and in her 2013 In the Beginning, She Was. It sought to develop two conversations in the secondary scholarship that offer proposals regarding the operation of the elemental in Irigaray – one early conversation between Elizabeth Grosz, Carolyn Burke, and Margaret Whitford and another recent conversation between Helen Fielding and Alison Stone. Specifically, it sought to consider how the elemental relates to Irigaray’s concept of physis, a term which can be translated by nature and its growth. Read more…

Robin Hillenbrink (Research Student at the Utrecht University, the Netherlands)

In my research I draw a parallel between the work of the Dutch modernist writer and language philosopher Carry van Bruggen (1881-1932) and that of the famous philosopher Luce Irigaray. Through analyzing the similarities and differences in their approaches to language, I examine the different ways in which language can function to distinguish certain groups in society. In this research I focus mainly on the form of language and how a preferred form can exclude a group or another from a valid discourse. This need for a means of exclusion and distinction leads to the acceptance of an illogical make-up of, among others, the French and Dutch language. Read more…

Tal Menahem (Bar Ilan University, Israel)

My research focuses on the concept of desire in Irigaray’s latest work mainly in her last book Sharing the Fire (2019). Desire is a basic source and resource for human life, as it is made more and more explicit and developed in Irigaray’s work. I will argue that the way she teaches us how to live and cultivate desire is really a theoretical and practical effective tool in her ongoing project of cultivating a relational ontology and it can be Implemented in a political and educational context. Read more…

Mélanie Salvi (Postgraduate Researcher at the University of Sussex, UK)

The aim of my PhD project is to explore the ways in which the philosophies of Early Modern thinkers Spinoza and Leibniz can provide useful tools to re-conceptualize the subject and his/her relationship with the world with the intention of contributing to the recent theoretical developments of feminist thought, as defined by the latest works of philosopher Luce Irigaray. My entryway into these three philosophies is Etienne Balibar’s concept of the “trans-individual”. Through this concept I attempt to carry out a connexion between my readings of Spinoza and Leibniz and the recent developments in the philosophy of Luce Irigaray. Read more…