An Ethics of Sexual Difference

This volume continues and completes Irigaray's writing on "sexual difference" by addressing the ethical implications of her work. Irigaray speaks out against the egalitarian project of feminism important to the Anglo-American school of women thinkers; instead she pursues questions of sexual difference, arguing that all thought and language is gendered and that there can therefore be no neutral thought - philosophy, science or psychoanalysis. Counterposing classical philosophical texts - including those of Plato, Spinoza and Levinas - with a series of meditations on the female experience, she shows that traditional philosophical concepts are problematic. She advocates new philosophies grounded in women's experience, through which women can develop a distinctly female space and a "love of self". Only then can love become ethical and the basis of a transformed ethics of sexual difference. This volume provides a major contribution to an expanding feminist and philosophical discourse and should be of value to feminists, literary critics and philosophers.