Introduction to the seminar 2022

The 2022 seminar happened very well. I found a place next my home in Paris which offered a room for the seminar with a wonderful garden, a restaurant, and beautiful and quiet bedrooms – all that at a good cost! As usually, the participants went from various countries: Thailand, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Canada, America, England… The work was high on thinking – as can be noted through the summaries – but also on debates. And the atmosphere was really cordial.

Luce Irigaray

Marie-Sophie Banville (University of Victoria, Canada)

Colonialism amounts to a flood, an ever-rising tide that never recedes. The colonial project is enmeshed in a “monosubjective culture” (Irigaray, Sharing the World, p. 2) that casts a shadow of sameness on the entire horizon. Through colonial means, liberal legal traditions fashion worlds where they look for themselves and only see their own reflection – they are water and submerged lands as far as the eyes can look. In a Canadian context, colonialism is expressed in an architecture where one legal world ― Canadian law ― refuses to provide itself with limits and engulfs another world ― Indigenous law. The colonial project is short of shoreline: only water and submerged lands as far as the eye can see. Read more…

Thanai Charoenkul (Thammasat University, Thailand)

This article aims to present the origin of Thai surnames during the reign of King Vajiravudh (1910–1925), which were invented to institute a subjective citizenship. This invention was based on the desire to inaugurate the living together of a group through the establishment of a lineage or bloodline from the family. But it extended its implications to the creation of a modern state. Thai surnames initiated a system of masculine genealogy which had to be the only official lineage and made women legally dependent on the surnames of men. Because of the disappearance of a feminine genealogy, this amounted to the establishment of patriarchy within Thai family, but it also corresponded with the birth of a modern Thai state. Read more…

Chanida Chitbundid (University of Wisconsin–Madison, US)

Social movement scholarship (Sms) downplays grassroots women’s knowledge due to the reference toneuter subjects in neo-liberal politics. In order to highlight Global South women’s knowledge, this paper aims to answer the question: What knowledge has been produced by village women who fight against the state? I engage with the concept of “sexuate difference” of Irigaray to elaborate on how village women create sexuate knowledge in the environmental justice movement by using a case study of Thailand. I argue that the Thai grassroots women who fight for their community resort to specific sexuate knowledge in their commitment to the state resistance movement, which is different from their male partners. Read more…

Ana Laura Funes Maderey (Eastern Connecticut State University, US)

Inspired by her own approach to Eastern philosophies, Luce Irigaray calls for a way of thinking that does not forget to breathe and remembers the air in which, thinking takes breath. Irigaray describes her project as an endeavour to “render possible a philosophy, and more generally a culture, of two subjects” (Luce Irigaray. Key Writings, Preface, p. vii). In her recent book A New Culture of Energy. Beyond East and West (2021), she also suggests that we develop “a new culture of energy”, reminding us of the importance of cultivating the relation between “two sexuate individuals” without allowing energy of this relation to be destroyed by putting into the neuter the individual or the group. Read more…

Imogen Gunner (Newcastle University, UK)

In this paper I aim to explore an Irigarayan analysis of the traditional Irish story and song, “Eoin Búrcach”, collected in 1937 from singer Nellie Nı́ Dhomhnaill (see www.bit.ly/3T4sJ63). This piece, thematically linked to Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353), was passed down orally, from mouth of the performer to ear of the listener in rural Irish contexts, where intimate gatherings of musicians, story tellers and singers formed the basis of social entertainment. The significance of this oral culture is relevant to an Irigarayan exploration, as it existed and survived in parallel with, and outside the established confines of written language and mainstream European cultural outputs, which were often the domain of men. Read more…

Silvia Locatelli (University of Lisbon, Portugal)

What does it mean to create an authentic relationship between two different subjects? And what role does the self-determination of individual subjects play in the creation of such a relationship? These are questions that I believed to be fully solved within the Hegelian system. Indeed, as a student trained in systematic thought, I was convinced that, in a dialectical perspective, the formation of subjectivity and its relation to otherness was definitively solved. Thanks to Irigaray’s writings, however, I have realized that speculative thought is not always neutral, and I began to reflect on how the universal process of the spirit could be critical of the singularities subsumed under its logic. Read more…

Milagros Lores Torres (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain)  

Is the crisis of gender identity—which is experienced by an important part of the West and the globalized world—the symptom of a logic of Sameness and the consequent failing subjectivity in our past culture? Is the proliferation of gender identities the result of a general crisis of Western culture, in which subjectivities are constituted according to an alienating process? If gender is being undone, as Judith Butler sustains (in Undoing Gender), could the conditions for the emergence of a new comprehension of sexuate difference henceforth exist? The thought of Luce Irigaray,  which is mainly concerned with subjectivity, offers an appropriate perspective to address these questions. Read more…                   

Mitchell Damian Murtagh (Emory University, US)

In this paper, using insights derived from Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of sexuate difference – notably her assertion that ‘La nature a un sexe toujours et partout’ (in Sexes and Genealogies, p. 108) – I criticize a major assumption made by some contemporary physicists about the structure of fundamental reality, that this reality  is unifiable, self-contained, and autogenic. Then, I offer an alternative cosmology, which re-figures the relation between the physical and the metaphysical, taking account of sexuation, and the negative that it entails, as a structuring given in the perception of reality. The assumption made by contemporary physicists, I demonstrate, undergirds several scales of recent Western science’s cosmological models. Read more…

Sarah Simms (DePaul University, US)

My research examines Christian apophatic mysticism from the standpoint of an Irigarayan ethics of sexuate difference. The apophatic tradition emerges from negative theology, a body of religious literature that insists that the journey towards union with God requires the surpassing of both the intelligible and sensuous aspects of human existence. Drawing inspiration from Irigaray’s long-standing and rigorous engagement with religious thought and the theological underpinnings of the Western canon, I explore the work of two medieval mystical theologians, Pseudo-Dionysius and Bonaventure, both of whom strive (as the former writes in The Mystical Theology) to follow the via negativa “toward union with him who is beyond all being and knowledge” (The Mystical Theology, 1.1). Read more…