"Sorcerer Love" is the name that Luce Irigaray gives to the demonic function of love as presented in Plato's Symposium. She argues that Socrates there attributes two incompatible positions to Diotima, who in any case is not present at the banquet. The first is that love is a mid-point or intermediary between lovers which also teaches immortality. The second is that love is a means to the end and duty of procreation, and thus is a mere means to immortality through (...) which the lovers lose one another. Irigaray argues in favor of the first position, a conception of love as demonic intermediary. E.K. (shrink)

“Sorcerer Love” is the name that Luce Irigaray gives to the demonic function of love as presented in Plato's Symposium. She argues that Socrates there attributes two incompatible positions to Diotima, who in any case is not present at the banquet. The first is that love is a mid-point or intermediary between lovers which also teaches immortality. The second is that love is a means to the end and duty of procreation, and thus is a mere means to immortality through (...) which the lovers lose one another. Irigaray argues in favor of the first position, a conception of love as demonic intermediary. E.K. (shrink)

The premise of this paper is that the language of science, like language in general, is neither asexual nor neutral. The essay demonstrates the various ways in which the non-neutrality of the subject of science is expressed and proposes that there is a need to analyze the laws that determine the acceptability of language and discourse in order to interpret their connection to a sexed logic. C.B.

A critical analysis of Diana Fuss's Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference and Elizabeth Grosz's Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists.

Luce Irigaray's fearlessness towards speaking the body has earned for her work the dismissive label "essentialist." But Irigaray's Speculum de l'autre femme and Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un suggest that essence may not be the unitary, monolithic, in short, essentialist category that anti-essentialists so often presume it to be. Irigaray strategically deploys essentialism for at least two reasons: first, to reverse and to displace Jacques Lacan's phallomorphism; and second, to expose the contradiction at the heart of Aristotelian metaphysics (...) which denies women access to "Essence" while at the same time positing the essence of "Woman" precisely as non-essential (as matter). (shrink)

Luce Irigaray's fearlessness towards speaking the body has earned for her work the dismissive label “essentialist.” But Irigaray's Speculum de l'autre femme and Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un suggest that essence may not be the unitary, monolithic, in short, essentialist category that anti-essentialists so often presume it to be. Irigaray strategically deploys essentialism for at least two reasons: first, to reverse and to displace Jacques Lacan's phallomorphism; and second, to expose the contradiction at the heart of Aristotelian metaphysics (...) which denies women access to “Essence” while at the same time positing the essence of “Woman” precisely as non-essential. (shrink)