The entwinement of affects and the public dimension seems an enigma. We cannot resolve this problem if we continue to refer to the Freudian analysis that deals with the classic dualisms opposing violence to order, love to death, and the body to social order. A feminist analysis, reworking psychoanalytical knowledge, offers another thesis. Taking the concept of `affects' – defined as one's corporeal drives in their sociocultural expression – a different analysis and new political practices emerge. This concerns recognizing a (...) necessary tension between an irreducible singularity and the `being-together' dimension, which is beyond the classic dualism opposing the body to the Law. (shrink)

While Beauvoir admitted that feminists refused to be women-alibi as she had been, Irigaray recognized that she was one of the many who had read The Second sex being reanimated by it. Nevertheless the two authors have been considered the reference of two opposite feminist theoretical and political paradigms, again and again – emancipation vs liberation, constructivism vs essentialism, materialism vs symbolical. Through the rereading of their main issues, a new feminist paradigm can be developed for the contemporary challenges.

Nearly 30 years after the first edition of Speculum, Irigaray's present work can be read from a different position. Accordingly, the main political and civil concerns of the author are examined in their relation to a theory of sexual difference. A new insight can emerge, as women realize that their own position is also made by Irigaray's work. This produces new configurations between politics and theory, embodied experiences and relations and their formalization, in a move that is both a rooting (...) in and a departure from Irigaray's work. (shrink)