Engaging the World

Offers essays demonstrating the critical relevance of Irigaray's thought of sexual difference for addressing contemporary ethical and social issues.Engaging the World explores Luce Irigaray's writings on sexual difference, deploying the resources of her work to rethink philosophical concepts and commitments and expose new possibilities of vitality in relationship to nature, others, and to one's self. The contributors present a range of perspectives from multiple disciplines such as philosophy, literature, education, evolutionary theory, sound technology, science and technology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. They place Irigaray in conversation with thinkers as diverse as Charles Darwin, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gilles Deleuze, René Decartes, and Avital Ronell. While every essay challenges Irigaray's thought in some way, each one also reveals the transformative effects of her thought across multiple domains of contemporary life.Mary C. Rawlinson is Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Stony Brook University, State University of New York. She is the coeditor (with Ellen K. Feder and Emily Zakin) of Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman and (with Sabrina L. Hom and Serene J. Khader) of Thinking with Irigaray, also published by SUNY Press.