Introduction to the seminar 2023

As usually, the atmosphere of the seminar was truly international with researchers coming from Australia, Brazil, Croatia, Germany, Iran, Taiwan, Thailand, and U.S.A. Nevertheless, something new happened. Unlike past seminars, most of the participants came with a partner, a parent, or a companion and their child. Consequently, they left the group before or after the dinner, which has modified the cohesion and the mood of the group which was less close than other years. The relation to the work was also quite different, at least from a part of the participants. They seemed to be there to affirm a position, sometimes even against my own thinking, without showing a real desire to learn. It was the first time that these two characteristics arose in a seminar, and I wondered about the reason of their appearance. Could they testify to a state of the world which renders people both anxious and clinging on past certainties, instead of daring to open to a future still to come? Fortunately, some good researchers were also present, with whom I committed myself to innovative projects.

Luce Irigaray

Sabine Hattinger-Allende (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

In my thesis I investigate the political participation of children and their primary caregivers in the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (short: PAH), a social movement defending the right to housing during the economic and political crisis in the Spanish state. My hope was to find inspiring forms of children’s political participation in the movement, as their voices in institutional participation structures are constrained by tokenism, discontinuity, and lack of accountability. I soon realized that I needed to go beyond the political theories I had studied up to that point to understand the generational order that prevents children from bringing something new into the world. I already had a deep understanding of the specific status of care in a political economy, but it wasn’t until I encountered the work of Luce Irigaray that I began to understand how the dynamics of a sacrificial economy, arising from an original matricide, hinders the becoming of children and their caregivers. My thesis is guided by one core argument: the political sphere rests on the invisible presence of the feminine-maternal – as a flesh of the flesh – and we could gain new insights into the social and symbolic positioning of the child if we dared to go back to encounter this first other. Read more…

Noor Imran (Stony Brook University, US)

My research addresses the question about how women have been viewed in the workplace, the home, and society through the historical lens of philosophy. I take a very critical stance to consider not only the role of women but even if one can begin to justify the presence of the other in this convoluted, multidimensional, and changing world. In this world, we are invited to share space. We must carry this non-imposed and ethical responsibility to experience the sharing of an identifiable and respectful space. But what does that mean? Are we sharing space or diminishing this space by filling it with our personal insecurities and irrational demands that linger on material satiations? Irigaray and many other thinkers such as Kant, Leibniz, and Newton have attempted to define the cost associated with the ambiguous concept of space and time for those who strive to share space equally and generously. Read more…

Martina Sanković Ivančić (University of Trieste, Italy)

Luce Irigaray makes Nietzsche one of the privileged interlocutors of her philosophy, the milestone that, as should happen for every excellent master, must be overcome – or, at least, acknowledged as different. This is confirmed, both transparently and explicitly, in her writings, above all in Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, and in a much-subdued way, through a network of conceptual references, in her other works. Spurred on by Irigaray’s interpretation, we can state that Nietzsche’s passionate and tenacious clash with Christianity led him to slip into the web from which he tried to extricate himself, assimilating some of the elements that he instead tried to eliminate. To accomplish what Nietzsche started, it was necessary to place oneself outside the paradigm of Western philosophy. Read more…

Paula Gruman Martins (University of Paris, France)

Psychoanalytic theory provides the conditions of intelligibility for analytic listening. Thus, the starting point of this study is the idea that another model of psyche and body, different from that of castration and lack, would lead to a different, possibly less prescriptive, way of listening in psychoanalysis. The purpose of this research is to theorize a new model for the “body-psychism” in psychoanalysis. The thinking of philosopher Luce Irigaray is central to my proposals – especially the inseparability between materiality and signification postulated by this thinker, as well as her approach to sexuation, inherent in all discourse. Stemming from the ethics of sexual difference that Luce Irigaray notably proposed, I advocate an ethics of differences, one that prioritizes intersubjectivity. I reinterpret her concept of the “mucous”, giving it the status of a model. The mucous tissues, thanks to their permeability, allow different elements to coexist without cancelling each other out – including bodily and psychic elements. The mucous membrane is a tissue present in every body. It includes sexuality through the drive and differences through intersubjectivity, but does not essentialize identities. Read more…

Setareh Shohadaei (The New School for Social Research, US)

Irigaray’s reading of Plato’s cave in Speculum patiently unpacks the disavowal of maternal beginnings in the inaugurating scene of Western political philosophy. If the phallic structure of psychic identity formation depends on a radical severance from maternal attachments leading to a masculine appropriation of the feminine and its erasure as such, Irigaray shows that this phallic cut  goes on in all the conceptual work and is of use  for founding truth in Plato’s thinking.  She carefully maps the elements of the cave onto feminine anatomy (mapping the entrance, little wall, and internal space of the cave as vagina, hymen, and uterus), interpreting Plato’s metaphorical conception of Truth as light to be premised upon the displacement of the feminine-maternal. The relation to the maternal beginnings is disavowed and is replaced by another origin story, one that is signified by the space of darkness, illusions, and servitude. In this scenography, the task of birthing, of conception is now originally assumed by the (male) philosopher, who knows himself as the only one able to deliver men (“sex unspecified”) from the chains of falsehood into the world of light and the progressive movement towards the Truth of eternal forms. Read more…

Shan-ni Sunny Tsai (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)

How can the subject amount to a relational practice? Luce Irigaray suggests  that the relation between two naturally different living beings can be a key towards a cultivation of life faithful to our energy, our own nature, our relationship with ourselves, with the other(s), with the world, and towards the elaboration of a civilization corresponding to a flourishing  and not merely surviving humankind. In order to relate to a subject different from ourselves by nature, we need to return to and within ourselves. Such a relationship « requires an ability to dwell with the possibility of opening oneself to the other, of leaving home to meet with the other while remaining able to return home, to oneself, within oneself in order to keep the two, the one and the other » (cf. Luce Irigaray, In the Beginning, She Was, p. 143). Read more…

Kitiya Withayapraphat (Thammasat University, Thailand)

This research aims to discover the meaning of the silence between Me and Mazu, the Chinese sea goddess, through Luce Irigaray’s words about feminine genealogy. My inspiration for this research arose from the documentary film, The Last Breath of Sam Yan, which was produced by a group of students who protested against the removal of the Mazu Shrine, the last building standing within a construction site in the heart of an old Thai-Chinese community. The film compares Mazu with the last breath of the Sam Yan district. As for me, Mazu is the new breath of my 38 years as a Thai-Chinese woman. In my presentation, I related Mazu’s stories to my experiences in making handmade books called “zines,” independent publications that some feminists use for recovering and sharing our lost feminine stories. Read more…