Irigaray and Lyotard: Birth, Infancy, and Metaphysics

Hypatia 27 (1):139-162 (2012)
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Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which Luce Irigaray and Jean-François Lyotard critique western metaphysics by drawing on notions of birth and infancy. It shows how both thinkers position birth as an event of beginning that can be reaffirmed in every act of initiation and recommencement. Irigaray's reading of Diotima's speech from Plato's Symposium is positioned as a key text for this project alongside a number of essays by Lyotard in which he explores the potency of infancy as the condition of philosophy itself. Despite this potency, however, Lyotard suggests that metaphysics is haunted by a melancholia that is inseparable from the limits of thought. I argue that Irigaray is able both to explain why western metaphysics is constitutively melancholic and to offer a shift in perspective that means we are not inevitably condemned to melancholia. The paper concludes that while Lyotard's account of infancy challenges the terms of western metaphysics from within, Irigaray's reassessment of our beginnings in birth offers the possibility of an alternative metaphysical horizon

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Rachel Jones
George Mason University

Citations of this work

Continental feminism.Jennifer Hansen - 2013 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Continental feminism.Ann J. Cahill - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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References found in this work

Critique of judgment.Immanuel Kant - 1790 - New York: Barnes & Noble. Edited by J. H. Bernard.
Democracy and Education.John Dewey - 1916 - Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications.
Speculum of the Other Woman.Luce Irigaray - 1985 - Cornell University Press.
An Ethics of Sexual Difference.Luce Irigaray - 1984 - Cornell University Press.
The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.Jean-Francois Lyotard - 1985 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 63:520.

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