Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray

In many of her post-millennium texts, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray evokes the possibility of a living, creative dialogue: a new kind of speaking and listening that would allow people to forge respectful, creative connections with others who are fundamentally different from themselves. In order to most productively receive this ethical vision, I argue, it is helpful to read Irigaray’s work as a whole with a focus on the themes of relation and limit. Doing so will reveal that Irigaray re-works traditional philosophical concepts such as subjectivity and ontology along relational lines. This book will explore these themes through an analysis of Irigaray’s interactions with Lacan, Heidegger, and Aristotle; and it will also situate these readings within some historical and theoretical contexts relevant to feminism in France and the United States.