Rewriting Difference

Luce Irigaray and 'the Greeks'

Elena Tzelepis, Athena Athanasiou

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781438431017
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this definitive reader, prominent scholars reflect on how Luce Irigaray reads the classic discourse of Western metaphysics and also how she is read within and against this discourse. Her return to "the Greeks, " through strategies of deconstructing, demythifying, reconstructing, and remythifying, is not a nostalgic return to the ideality of Hellenocentric antiquity, but rather an affirmatively critical revisiting of this ideality. Her persistent return and affective bond to ancient Greek logos, mythos, and tragedy sheds light on some of the most complex epistemological issues in contemporary theory, such as the workings of criticism, the language of politics and the politics of language, the possibility of social and symbolic transformation, the multiple mediations between metropolitan and postcolonial contexts of theory and practice, the question of the other, and the function of the feminine in Western metaphysics. With a foreword by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and a chapter by Irigaray responding to her commentators, this book is an essential text for those in social theory, comparative literature, or classics.

Table of contents

• REWRITING DIFFERENCE
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1. Thinking Difference as Different: Thinking in Luce Irigaray’s Deconstructive Genealogies
• 2. The Question of Reading Irigaray
• 3. Kore: Philosophy, Sensibility, and the Diffraction of Light
• 4. In the Underworld with Irigaray: Kathy Acker’s Eurydice
• 5. Textiles that Matter: Irigaray and Veils
• 6. Mothers, Sisters, and Daughters: Luce Irigaray and the Female Genealogical Line in the Stories of the Greeks
• 7. Antigone and the Ethics of Kinship
• 8. Mourning (as) WomanEvent, Catachresis, and “That Other Face of Discourse”
• 9. Weird Greek Sex: Rethinking Ethics in Irigaray and Foucault
• 10. Autonomy, Self-Alteration, Sexual Difference
• 11. Hospitality and Sexual Difference: Remembering Homer with Luce Irigaray
• 12. “Raising Love up to the Word”: Rewriting God as “Other” through Irigarayan Style
• 13. Dynamic Potentiality: The Body that Stands Alone
• 14. Sameness, Alterity, Flesh: Luce Irigaray and the Place of Sexual Undecidability
• 15. “Women on the Market”: On Sex, Race, and Commodification
• 16. Irigaray’s Challenge to the Fetishistic Hegemony of the Platonic One and Many
• 17. Who Cares about the Greeks?Uses and Misuses of Tradition in the Articulation of Difference and Plurality
• 18. Conditionalities, Exclusions,Occlusions
• 19. The Return
• Contributors
• Index