Between East and West: From Singularity to Community

Incorporating her personal experience with yoga into her provocative philosophical thinking on sexual difference, Irigaray proposes a new way of understanding individuation and community in the contemporary world, and an ethic of sexual difference predicated on a respect for life, nature, and the feminine.

Library Journal

What happens when a distinguished French feminist philosopher and psychoanalyst takes yoga lessons? Irigaray gets some shocks and some good ideas, too. She chafes at the male sexist attitude of some yoga teachers and concludes that "patriarchal censorships and repressions" encroached upon a once healthier aboriginal tradition in India. Irigaray also believes that the differences between men and women can play an important role in the emergence of the love that is our best hope something quite possible within an Eastern tradition that understands its resources (Western misunderstandings, including Schopenhauer's, take a beating here). She comes to believe that breathing is a way of focusing the body and that the idea of shared breath is more fundamental than the idea of exchangeable words. Most readers will not be persuaded that, for instance, there is a difference between male and female breathing, but this is a fresh look at the need for East and West to get together, and Irigaray's notion of a community without gender wars is important. Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Luce Irigaray, a director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, is the leading feminist philosopher in France. She is author of more than twenty books, including Speculum of the Other Woman, This Sex Which Is Not One, The Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (Columbia), and The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger.