"Approaching the Other as Other" (1999)

Along with Roland Barthes, Luce Irigaray is my current go-to scholar. I read them daily towards an understanding of myself as two (or more).

This Monday I present my thesis research to my CCS 506 class. The essay I have assigned is Irigaray's "Approaching the Other as Other" (1999).

Below is the fourth paragraph from Irigaray's essay:

"We want to have the entire world in our head, sometimes the entire world in our heart. We do not see that this gesture transforms the life of the world into something finished, dead, because the world thus loses its own life, a life foreign to us, exterior to us, other than us."

Un homme, une femme, quelles différences?

Dodie Bellamy's Cunt Norton begins with a quote from Luce Irigaray:

Two lips kiss two lips, and openness is ours again. Our "world." Between us, the movement from inside to outside, from outside to inside, knows no limits.

In the first part of the above video, Irigaray talks about her language experiments with children and teenagers. The operative words here are avec (with) and ensemble (together).