The Mother-Daughter relationship and Cultural Transformation: A Multi-Dimensional Reading in the Irigarayan Text
Luce Irigaray – philosopher, psychoanalyst, and one of the main intellectuals of French feminist theory – operates, teaches and writes to this day, in her 90s, from her Paris home. Her extensive writing, spanning five decades, is a sharp critical philosophical project that contests the Western tradition of thought and culture. However, her thought is not only an act of negation: it contains a determined attempt to establish renewed thought about the human subject and its relation to the other and the world.
This preface offers Hebrew readers an introduction to Luce Irigaray’s prolific thought in its latest developments, in honor of the publication of the Hebrew translation of the essay “And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other.” The essay, first published in 1978 and still standing as a foundational text existing independently in the Irigarayan writing corpus, is a poetic text offering an archetypal description of the way the relationship between mothers and daughters exists and is enabled in the framework of patriarchal culture. In this section I wish to place Irigaray’s essay in the context of her broad philosophical project as well as delineating in general lines Irigaray’s cultural criticism and the channels towards overall cultural transformation through discussing the unique characteristics of the mother-daughter relationship.
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