Way of Love (Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers) [Paperback]

Luce Irigaray (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 082647327X | ISBN-13: 978-0826473271 | Publication Date: July 22, 2004

The Way of Love asks the question: How can we love each other? Here Luce Irigaray, one of the world’s foremost philosophers, presents an extraordinary exploration of desire and the human heart. If Western philosophy has claimed to be a love of wisdom, it has forgotten to become a wisdom of love. We still lack words, gestures, ways of doing or thinking to approach one another as humans, to enter into dialogue, to build a world where we can live together.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'Irigaray's work is always dazzling, surprising and unexpected. No other thinker of Irigaray's generation has her range, insight and originality. No other thinker has managed to illuminate the challenge and the mystery that the other, the other of sexual difference, brings to all encounters, and to all knowledges. In The Way of Love Irigaray opens up philosophy to the mystery of sexual difference, a mystery inscribed in but covered over in all of Western thought.' Elizabeth Grosz

About the Author

Luce Irigaray is Director of Research in Philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. A doctor of philosophy, Luce Irigaray is also trained in linguistics, philology, psychology and psychoanalysis. Now acknowledged as a key influential thinker of our times, her work focuses on the culture of two subjects, masculine and feminine - particularly through the liberation of a feminine subjectivity - something she explores in a range of literary forms, from the philosophical to the scientific, the political and the poetic.

Product Details

• Paperback: 198 pages
• Publisher: Continuum (July 22, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 082647327X
• ISBN-13: 978-0826473271
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #442,186 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wisdom of love, February 16, 2008

By 

Martin H. Dickinson "Walker in the woods, dis... (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Way of Love (Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers) (Paperback)

What is love and why is it so important to understand and explore it?

Since Plato's Symposium (and maybe even longer) the meaning of love has been a significant topic of philosophers. Irigaray's exploration and discussion is refreshingly different. She, in a way, takes on the whole prior philosophic tradition.

This is tough but exciting. It requires a bit of patience to stick with Irigaray's argument for this whole book--both because of the denseness of her philosophic language and a difficult transation that she herself (almost apologetically) took a hand in, changing some of the terms used by her translators. But in sticking with her we learn that her "way of love" is a) really quite down to earth; and b) very poetic and all-encompassing. Both of these at the same time!

One of her most enticing notions is "letting be transcendence."

"To experience this co-belonging implies leaving representative thought and letting oneself go in the co-belonging to Being which already inhabits us, constitutes us, surrounds us. It presupposes, in fact, dwelling 'there where we truly already are' . . . In order to have access to it man has to leave his own world, or rather to partly open its limits. It is not in his house, including that of language, that he will find out how to enter a new historical era, a new speech. The feature referring to the specificity of man has to change place--passing from the relation to things to the relation to the other."

I think of "letting be transcendence" as the best possible communication between persons who love one another. It is a way of relating in which one does not define the other but leaves an open space and listens and watches to see how the other defines him or herself. By not defining or pre-categorizing the other, two together achieve something higher--the "letting be transcendence" which opens up a whole world, and a higher order of thinking and existing in the world.

Besides "letting be transcendence" there are numerous concepts and ideas she reveals along the "way of love" that captivate our imagination and make us want to be participants. Love for Irigaray is not some abstract notion or intellectual category--it is real, existing in the here and now.

It is exciting when you, as her reader, are going along with Irigaray on these flights. She makes love--actual physical, emotional love and being together--to be something transforming and visionary.

It is as though Irigary takes the actual physical proximity that we know of as fulfilling love and expands it outward into a view of the cosmos--and in a way that is the reverse of Plato and other philosophers. In the old fashioned way of looking at things philosophically, love seems more an abstract external concept or force that a man (if worthy) might access or partake of. But for Irigaray it is the concrete, immediate presence of love that generates this spiritual force outward.

Very cleverly she begins her treatise by discussing the word "philosophy" itself, asking the question why we have interpreted philosophy to mean "love of wisdom" instead of the "wisdom of love."

It requires concentration and a surrender to her text (almost like the surrender to love itself) to keep up with Irigaray on her remarkable journey, but the experience is well worth it.