Between East and West: From Singularity to Community

With this book we see a philosopher well steeped in the Western tradition thinking through ancient Eastern disciplines, meditating on what it means to learn to breathe, and urging us all at the dawn of a new century to rediscover indigenous Asian cultures. Yogic tradition, according to Irigaray, can provide an invaluable means for restoring the vital link between the present and eternity -- and for re-envisioning the patriarchal traditions of the West.

Western, logocentric rationality tends to abstract the teachings of yoga from its everyday practice -- most importantly, from the cultivation of breath. Lacking actual, personal experience with yoga or other Eastern spiritual practices, the Western philosophers who have tried to address Hindu and Buddhist teachings -- particularly Schopenhauer -- have frequently gone astray. Not so, Luce Irigaray. 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. She looks toward the indigenous, pre-Aryan cultures of India -- which, she argues, have maintained an essentially creative ethic of sexual difference predicated on a respect for life, nature, and the feminine.

Irigaray's focus on breath in this book is a natural outgrowth of the attention that she has given in previous books to the elements -- air, water, and fire. By returning to fundamental human experiences -- breathing and the fact of sexual difference -- she finds a way out of the endless sociologizing abstractions of much contemporary thought to rethink questions of race, ethnicity, and globalization.

Columbia University Press

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.