Abstract

In her latest book, To Be Born, Luce Irigaray pays attention to the question of desire, which becomes one of her key notions in understanding sexuate difference, because desire, according to her, functions as a relational energy which contributes to our individuation and our blossoming, and helps us to enter into relations with the other. In her essay “Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us”, Irigaray explains that in a culture based on pairs of mutually exclusive opposites, our energy remains uneducated and subordinated to normative values which are abstracted from the real, thus it is “not yet prepared for a human sharing”. Consequently, desire, which above all “arises from difference”, is destroyed “by appropriating its energy and reducing it to sameness”, although its destiny is to transcend our being “to a beyond”, to another horizon that firstly is embodied by the other who is naturally and irreducibly different from us.