Best 19 quotes of Luce Irigaray on MyQuotes

Between gods and men, territories are set up. At least in the no-man’s land of the heights of heaven, the depths of hell, and inside the boundary traced by the oceans. Dimensions installed by a cosmogonic trilogy that leaves each term in its generic place. There remains the earth ancestress, a fourth term, that was once the most fertile, that has been progressively buried and forgotten beneath the architectonic of patriarchal sovereignty. And this murder erupts in the form of ambivalences that have constantly to be solved and hierarchized, in twinned pairs of more or less good doubles.

Be what you are becoming without clinging to what you might have been; what you might yet be.

Breathing, according to me, corresponds to taking charge of one's own life.

Death is the real inspiring genius or Musagetes of philosophy, and for this reason Socrates defined philosophy as thanatou mélétè (preparation for death; Plato, Phaedo, 81a). Indeed, without death there would hardly have been any philosophizing.

Every desire has a relation to madness.

Is e=mc2 a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest.

letting be is as important as mastering. Our tradition has encouraged us to be effective, to make or fabricate but not to let be born or let be.

...more than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. it sets at a distance, maintains the distance. in our culture, the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing, has brought about an improverishment of bodily relations...the moment domin ates the look dominates, the body loses its materiality” -luce irigaray

Nature is a universal that is shareable by all, males and females, men and women, and can thus be of use in mediating between all. The same does not apply for already constructed worlds and cultures. They are neither universal nor easily shareable.

Self-affection is the real dwelling to which we must always return with a view to a faithfulness to ourselves and an ability to welcome the other as different.

Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our 'salvation' if we thought it through.

Traditional morality ... does not teach us how to let the other follow his or her own path, meet with whomever he or she desires, go where he or she wants.

Your silence exists as does my self gathering. But so does the almost absolute silence of the world's dawning. In such suspension, before every utterance on earth, there is a cloud, an almost immobile air. The plants already breathe, while we still ask ourselves how to speak to each other, without taking breath away from them.

Our eyes are not capable of seeing, nor even contemplating, intimacy, at least not directly. They can only imagine something about intimacy from the light, the gestures, the words, that it radiates. But intimacy as such will remain invisible, irreducible to appropriation, and thus strange to the logic of Western discourse, to the logos, except in its delusion its lack, its derelictions and artificial ecstasies. Intimacy allows itself neither to be seen nor to be seized. Nevertheless it is probably the core of our being. And any attempts to appropriate it risks annihilating being itself. However, it is not a question of magic, of irrationality, of madness--it is a question of touch.

Our [western] culture cuts us off from our natural roots, instead of contributing toward the cultivation of the natural beings we are. This tradition has, in this way, rendered us extraneous to our environment, extraneous to one another as living beings, en even extraneous to ourselves.

The human in what it is objectively ever since its beginning is two, two who are different. Each part of what constitutes the unity of the human species corresponds to a proper being and a proper Being, to an identity of one's own. In order to carry out the destiny of humanity, the man-human and the woman-human each have to fulfill what they are and at the same time realize the unity that they constitute.

The ultimate reality from which the path of this becoming could start off again will no longer rest on a ground of 'causa sui.' in any case the sense of a God who would alone be capable of giving an account of self. It is rather from the human and from what the human most irreducibly is that it is a question of starting off again. From the human as it objectively is before it starts to construct a language and a thinking which help to distance it from its beginning, from its prematureness without thinking it in the totality of its being.

Why only one song, one speech, one text at a time?" - "When Our Lips Speak Together

Your body expresses yesterday in what it wants today. If you think: yesterday I was, tomorrow I shall be, you are thinking: I have died a little. Be what you are becoming, without clinging to what you might have been, what you might yet be. Never settle. Leave definitiveness to the undecided; we don't need it.