For Luce Irigaray, one of the most original French
feminist theorists, deconstructing the patriarchal tradition is not
enough. She admits that it is not an easy task, but she believes
that it is necessary to also define new values directly or indirectly
suitable to feminine subjectivity and to feminine identity. She begins
this project by analyzing and interpreting the absence of the feminine
subject in the definition of dominant cultural values. She then wonders
how these new values can be constructed without simply reversing
the roles. Far from implying a hierarchy, difference affirms the
coexistence and fruitful encounter of two different identities. These
two heterogeneous identities, masculine and feminine, are not socially
but ontologically constructed and describing the feminine requires
establishing methods other than those already used by the masculine
subject.
Why Different? is a collection of interviews, conducted
in both France and Italy, that deal explicitly with the relationship
between daughter and mother, the sexuation of language, the symbolic
order, and the importance of both history and philosophy for the
liberation of the feminine subject. In Why Different? Irigaray
elaborates on issues brought up in her other ../books/bookCovers, Speaking is Never
Neutral, I Love to You, Thinking the Difference, and To
Be Two and brings them to fruition. |
