Between East and West (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism) - Hardcover

Irigaray, Luce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0231119348 ISBN 13: 9780231119344

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

Between East and West is an attempt to rediscover meaning for Western philosophy and culture by looking outside the Western tradition. Luce Irigaray's passionate intellect is in evidence throughout the book, which she envisions as "a quest for myself, for the world, for the other, beyond illusions, beyond lies." Irigaray, probably the foremost feminist philosopher in France, attempts to "reground" both individuality and community. To do so she examines the experiential aspects of Eastern philosophy, particularly the yogic tradition.

In the original elements of Indian philosophy, Irigaray finds a mythic-philosophic wellspring of ecological and sexual harmony that is predicated on a respect for difference. Ultimately, she wants to show that certain elements of pre-Aryan Indian thought allow us to reconstitute ourselves as individuals and refound our communities. And according to Irigaray, the stakes are high: "Political agendas ... need new formations, perspectives, words and logic," she writes. And if we don't find them, the 21st century "risks being nothing but a pitiful decline of the human species." --Eric de Place

Book Description:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0231119348
• ISBN 13: 9780231119344
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208