Luce Irigaray is one of the most influential philosophers and theorists in the field of feminist thought, and her work is considered both revolutionary and controversial. This volume offers the first critical assessment of the relation of her early critical and poetic writings to her later political and practical philosophy. Contributors examine how the question of sexual difference has unfolded in a wealth of different directions in Irigaray's later work, focusing on the areas of nature and technology, social and political theory and praxis, ethics, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology. They...

While philosophy and psychoanalysis privilege language and conceptual distinctions and mistrust the image, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva recognizes the power of art and the imagination to unblock important sources of meaning. She also appreciates the process through which creative acts counteract and transform feelings of violence and depression.

Reviewing Kristeva's corpus, Elaine P. Miller considers the intellectual's "aesthetic idea" and "thought specular" in their capacity to reshape depressive thought on both the individual and cultural level. She revisits...