Continental Philosophy

A review of Conversations

This book is a collection of ten interviews with Irigaray by scholars and readers of her work from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Norway. The interviews span the period from 1996 to the present. Some have been published before, but in scattered places, so it is helpful to have them assembled together.

Some interviews address specific topics: architecture, building and dwelling, with Andrea Wheeler; yoga, with Michael Stone; the later Merleau-Ponty, with Helen Fielding; education, with Michael Worton; and Irigaray’s re-interpretation of the Virgin Mary, with Laine Harrington and Margaret Miles. I found this a particularly interesting interview. Irigaray interprets Mary to have been a ‘virgin’ in the sense of having achieved integrity as a woman and autonomy with respect to her mother Anne; thus, she had a kind of spiritual perfection that enabled her to generate a divine child. Irigaray firmly rejects the interviewers’ reference to Mary as a symbol, insisting on the historical reality of her virginity and of the incarnation — although, evidently, her understanding of what these realities consist in departs considerably from theological tradition (pp. 87-88, 102).

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From the Philosophers’ Magazine, an interview with Irigaray.

Edited by Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew, French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception

From the publisher’s site:

French Interpretations of Heidegger undertakes a philosophical engagement with the work of the most significant and creative figures involved in the reception of Heidegger in France. The essays address those thinkers who have been influenced by Heidegger’s thought and have interpreted it in remarkable ways, including Levinas, Beaufret, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Irigaray, Zarader, Greisch, and Dastur. The volume explores the extraordinary impact that Heidegger’s thought has had on contemporary French philosophy, including such movements as existentialism, deconstruction, feminist theory, post-structuralism, and hermeneutics, and illustrates its impact on the American continental scene as well.

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A new book by Dorothea Olkowski: The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible): Beyond Continental Philosophy

From the publisher:

The Universal proposes a radically new philosophical system that moves from ontology to ethics. Drawing on the work of De Beauvoir, Sartre, and Le Doeuff, among others, and addressing a range of topics from the Asian sex trade to late capitalism, quantum gravity, and Merleau-Ponty’s views on cinema, Dorothea Olkowski stretches the mathematical, political, epistemological, and aesthetic limits of continental philosophy and introduces a new perspective on political structures.

Straddling a course between formalism and conventionalism, Olkowski develops the concept of an ontological unconscious that arises from our “sensible” relation to the world-the information we absorb and emit that affects our encounters with the environment and others. In this “realm of the senses,” or the field of vulnerability defined by our experience with pleasure and pain, Olkowski is able to rethink the space-time relations put forth by Irigaray’s notion of the “interval,” Bergson’s “recollection,” Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the “flesh,” and Deleuze’s “plane of immanence.”

This aesthetic sense is shared by all humankind and nonhuman entities in the organic and inorganic world. The sensible universal can be applied to categories of pure and practical reason; experiential binaries of male-female and subject-object; and issues of autonomy, moral laws, and the regulation of perception.

About the Author: Dorothea Olkowski is professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Her publications include Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation and, with Constantin Boundas, Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy. She has also edited books on Merleau-Ponty and on French feminism.

The Irigaray Circle at Stony Brook University, sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and the Program in Women's Studies, will present its second annual conference on September 7-8, 2007. The conference will present work on or inspired by Luce Irigaray. We invite proposals that engage with any aspect of Irigaray's work, such as

• The history of philosophy
• Psychoanalysis
• Medicine, health, and the body
• Language and literature
• Aesthetics and architecture
• Ethics
• Political theory
• Epistemology
• Literature and the Arts
• Multiculturalism

We welcome submissions from all disciplines, and from inside and outside of the academy. Please share this notice with your colleagues and students.

The deadline for proposal submissions is January 6, 2007. Completed proposals should be suitable for blind review and should include your name, professional affiliation, contact information, abstract title, a brief (one paragraph) bio, and, in a separate computer file, an abstract of 350-700 words, with title. The organizers welcome collaborative proposals for panel sessions, as well as individual submissions.

Proposals should be submitted electronically in .rtf format. Please send proposals for review to irigaray06@gmail.com. Please note that the conference organizers are planning an edited volume based on the conference and request the right of first review on all conference papers.

For further information on the conference please contact Mary C. Rawlinson at irigaray06@gmail.com or visit the website of the Luce Irigaray Circle at:www.irigaray.org

(Thanks to Jim Ambury for the tip.) 

An ethics of reading: Adorno, Levinas, and Irigaray — Michelle Boulous Walker
Being and givenness in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship — Travis O’brian
Finding uses for used-up words: thinking weltanschauung “after” Heidegger — J Aaron Simmons
Lyotard and posthuman possibilities — Richard White
Sartre and the communicative paradigm in critical theory — JC Berendzen
Sartre, critical theory, and the paradox of freedom — David Sherman
The complexity of the tragicomic vision ethical implications — Ronald Mckinney
Toward a philosophy of food history — S K Wertz