Engaging with Irigaray is the first collection of essays that attempts to go beyond the question of essentialism in order to provide a full critical assessment of Irigaray's contribution to a number of fields, notably philosophy. By reconsidering Irigaray's writings in the field of European thought and politics in which she positions herself, the authors of these essays--among them Judith Butler, Elizabeth Weed, and Rosi Braidotti--shed new light on the relationship of Irigaray to many of the philosophers she has "romanced," from Aristotle to Deleuze.

This collection of essays will...

No radical feminist thinker has provoked as much interest and perplexity as Luce Irigaray. Her claim that Western reason is premised on the suppression of sexual difference, her engagement with Lacanian and Derridean theory, and her apparent essentialist conception of the feminine all challenge and disturb in equal measure. Margaret Whitford's study provides an introduction to Irigaray's whole corpus, including previously untranslated French texts. Treating Irigaray as a philosopher of sexual difference, Whitford suggests that her work should be seen as philosophy in the feminine, actively...

The question of difference has always been a controversial issue for feminists. This is certainly true in the case of epistemological questions. What difference does the adoption of a feminist perspective make in relation to traditional knowledge? How are feminist perspectives themselves affected by the difference between women? Both questions require a re-evaluation of issues of objectivity and the justification of knowledge claims in a way that focuses on the subjects who constitute the knowledge producers.

Luce Irigaray is one of the leading French feminist philosophers and psychoanalysts. The Irigaray Reader is a collection of her most important paeprs to date, ranging across feminism, philosophy, psychoanalysis and linguistics. A number of them appear here for the first time in English.