Ebook: Irigaray and Politics: A Critical Introduction

Positions Luce Irigaray as one of the most important and radical political thinkers alive today

• Provides an overview of Irigaray’s broader psychoanalytic and philosophical contexts that have not as yet been acknowledged, giving important context for engaging with her more recent writings
• Situates Luce Irigaray as a political philosopher, helping us to fully appreciate her political project and her challenge to western modernity and rationality
• Connects the political, ethical and ontological aspects of Irigaray’s, bringing the concrete political features of Irigaray’s philosophy of sexuate difference to the fore
• Engages with the intersections of race, class and coloniality in Irigaray’s work and connects it to decolonial thinkers more broadly

Bringing together Luce Irigaray’s early psychoanalytically orientated writings with her more recent and more explicitly political writings, Irigaray and Politics weaves together the ontological, political and ethical dimensions of Irigaray’s philosophy of sexuate difference in imaginative ways.

Laura Roberts argues that Irigaray’s philosophical–political project must be read as a critique of constructions of western modernity and rationality. When appreciated in this way, it becomes clear how Irigaray’s thought makes profound interventions into contemporary political movements and decolonial thought – themes that have never been covered before in Irigaray scholarship. This enables readers to recognise that the question of sexual difference in Irigaray’s philosophy is concerned not only with refiguring politics and political action, but with the foundational structures that govern existence itself.