Rewriting Difference

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.

Acknowledgments

Foreword
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

1. Thinking Difference as Different Thinking in Luce Irigaray’s Deconstructive Genealogies
Athena Athanasiou and Elena Tzelepis

2. The Question of Reading Irigaray
Elizabeth Weed

3. Kore: Philosophy, Sensibility, and the Diffraction of Light
Dorothea Olkowski

4. In the Underworld with Irigaray: Kathy Acker’sEurydice
Dianne Chisholm

5. Textiles that Matter: Irigaray and Veils
Anne-Emmanuelle Berger

6. Mothers, Sisters, and Daughters: Luce Irigaray and the Female Genealogical Line in the Stories of the Greeks
Gail Schwab

7. Antigone and the Ethics of Kinship
Mary Beth Mader

8. Mourning (as) Woman: Event, Catachresis, and “That Other Face of Discourse”
Athena Athanasiou and Elena Tzelepis

9. Weird Greek Sex: Rethinking Ethics in Irigaray and Foucault
Lynne Huffer

10. Autonomy, Self-Alteration, Sexual Difference
Stathis Gourgouris

11. Hospitality and Sexual Difference: Remembering Homer with Luce Irigaray
Judith Still

12. “Raising Love up to the Word”: Rewriting God as “Other” through Irigarayan Style
Laine M. Harrington

13. Dynamic Potentiality: The Body that Stands Alone
Claire Colebrook

14. Sameness, Alterity, Flesh: Luce Irigaray and the Place of Sexual Undecidability
Gayle Salamon

15. “Women on the Market”: On Sex, Race, and Commodification
Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

16. Irigaray’s Challenge to the Fetishistic Hegemony of the Platonic One and Many
Tina Chanter

17. Who Cares about the Greeks? Uses and Misuses of Tradition in the Articulation of Difference and Plurality
Eleni Varikas

18. Conditionalities, Exclusions, Occlusions
Penelope Deutscher

19. The Return
Luce Irigaray

Contributors