Luce Irigaray b. 1930

Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and linguist, and one of the most influential feminist thinkers of the late twentieth century. Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One mounted a sustained critique of the masculine economy of Western philosophy and psychoanalysis, in which woman appears only as the negative or the mirror of the masculine subject. Her later work, in books such as An Ethics of Sexual Difference and I Love to You, develops a positive ethics of sexual difference, calling for a culture in which two distinct subjects, masculine and feminine, can speak and love without one absorbing the other.

Luce Irigaray was born at Blaton in Belgium in May 1930. She took her master's in philosophy at Louvain in 1955, taught for several years in Brussels, then moved to Paris, where she added a licence in psychology, a diploma in psychopathology, and from 1962 a research position at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique that she retained for the rest of her career. She trained as a psychoanalyst at Jacques Lacan's École Freudienne de Paris and taught at the experimental department of Vincennes.

Her doctoral thesis, published in 1974 as Speculum of the Other Woman, mounted a withering reading of the history of philosophy and of Freud as a single phallogocentric discourse and provoked her expulsion from Lacan's school and from Vincennes. Her later books include This Sex Which Is Not One (1977), Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (1980), Elemental Passions (1982), An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984), Sexes and Genealogies (1987), I Love to You (1992), To Be Two (1994), Between East and West (1999), The Way of Love (2002), and Sharing the World (2008).

Irigaray reads the Western philosophical tradition as a long monologue of the masculine subject for whom the feminine is only the mute matter of its self-production, and proposes against it a 'thinking of sexual difference' in which two irreducible subjects speak from their own bodily and symbolic ground. Her later work has extended this ethics of two into politics, breath-yoga, and a sustained engagement with Indian and Chinese traditions.