allowing women to form meaningful social groups, and reestablishing the existence of a female divine.

Essay 5, “Wonder,” is Irigaray’s reading of René Descartes’s Les Passions de l’âme (1649; The Passions of the Soul, 1950), in which she returns to the idea of wonder as the essential element lacking in people’s modern understanding of the passions. If man and woman were again able to inspire surprise and wonder so that people felt as if they were seeing something eternally new, sexual ethics would be favorably altered. Wonder provides the appetite to appreciate the other without preconceived knowledge, and wonder inspires a sort of reverence. Wonder could provide the essential third element now lacking between men and women in all their relations with each other.

Essay 6, “The Envelope,” is Irigaray’s reading of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethica (1677; Ethics, 1870) in which she examines the concept of God. In her view (and her choice of pronouns), God exists on its own with no outside agency predicating it. Man also has a creator/created relationship with woman because woman as mother is the container from which man arises and woman as lover is the location of the man’s image of himself. Therefore, woman’s effort is exhausted in providing identity for man, first as his mother and then as his lover. By reconsidering the roles of both, Irigaray suggests that men and women could be given wider scope.

Essay 7, “Love of Same, Love of Other,” states that love of self among women, particularly in the feminine, is nearly impossible, except in the childish relationship of daughter and mother. However, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud states that this early attachment must be destroyed by girls in order for them to become attached to men and become objects to attract male attention. This paralyzes the self-love of women as well as love between women, who compete with each other for men. In order to love each other or love the feminine in themselves, women must begin to love their own bodies and love the bodies of others. Women must become both mothers and daughters to each other; they must love with a maternal and a filial love.

Women need a language of their own, outside the supposedly neutral but actually deeply sexed language currently in use. Women must think about this sexism within language and attempt to circumvent it. Irigaray likens this to thinking about the mucous membranes of the body, which connect the body most immediately to the outside world (as language does), but which most people take entirely for granted unless they become irritated. Language has traditionally served men, and Irigaray urges the reader to think about its activities and especially its limits.

Essay 8, “An Ethics of Sexual Difference,” examines the myth of Antigone. Like Antigone, woman has traditionally been walled up in a small space and deprived of a voice to speak because she upsets the male balance of the world, represented by Creon. Irigaray is convinced this is the present-day status of woman because the so-called universal is really the male element, and women have been completely removed. There is not even a neuter space, only the male and the not-male that woman represents. This is also true in science, though science purports to be objective and neutral. Science does not speak to women, Irigaray asserts, because the language of scientific discourse does not allow it to; that language is and always has been male. This language is like air, which is the most essential element of all life but which is constantly completely ignored by most living beings. She indicates that people must again begin to think about air—and about all the unquestioned and unnoticed assumptions of language—more directly in order to arrive at a new sexual ethics that is workable.

Essay 9, “Love of the Other,” attempts to pin down even more directly the hidden effects of sexism in language. Irigaray suggests that people think they control language, but in fact, it controls them by limiting how and what they are able to think, to talk, or to write about. Making reference to her own study of the utterances of mentally disturbed men and women and linguistic studies of students, Irigaray points out that men tend to make remarks that are self-referential, whereas women tend to make remarks entirely referential to the outside world. These two examples show the differences in how men and women view themselves in society. Irigaray assumes that women are trying to gain access to discourse—by use of the women’s movement and other methods—but the dichotomy between thought and the feminine remains constant in Western culture. Removing this distinction would benefit both women and men immensely by opening up alternate realities to them, across which real communication would be possible for the first time.

Essay 10, “The Invisible of the Flesh,” is a reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Le Visible et l’invisible (1964; The Visible and the Invisible, 1968). Irigaray states her agreement with Merleau-Ponty that, in order to come to some meaningful understanding of the world, people must return to a moment of experience that predates language. By doing so, people can get a new understanding of all things because language is the primary method by which people think and understand or believe that they understand. However, language is circular in that it always returns to itself as an ultimate reference. Therefore, some other path to knowledge must be found. According to both Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray, this prediscursive moment would be achieved through touch and also the look, which is a variant of touch. She equates this knowledge acquired by touching with Original Sin because Adam and Eve were warned not only not to eat of the forbidden fruit but also not to touch it as well. She suggests that perhaps the male interpretation of God, which has so often equated touch with evil carnality, is at fault in our lack of attention to this knowing that is acquired by touch. Man has traditionally claimed the privilege of the look in Western culture, but Irigaray suggests that this is illusory and that women have special access to the knowledge of touch by virtue of their status as mothers and lovers.

The eleventh and final essay, “The Fecundity of the Caress,” is a reading of Emmanuel Lévinas’s Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (1961; Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 1969) and a final attempt to discuss ways in which the language of touch might give people access to knowledge that is forbidden in the strictures of language. Irigaray suggests that sensual pleasure can give people passage to parts of the world that are closed off by the confines of a sexed language system. Through a series of almost ecstatic short utterances, Irigaray describes a sensual moment in which men and women might bridge the gap that separates them and gain an understanding of each other and the world that has never before been available. Because women have usually been relegated to the status of mother, infant, or animal, their intimate knowledge of the body and of touch—as opposed to the knowledge that is described in sexed male language—has been ignored and ridiculed. If women were allowed to escape their traditional configurations and became once again figures that inspire wonder and astonishment, a new ethic might be achievable. This new ethic would call for a return to the flesh, a way of ordering the world that predates language and exists in the more nebulous world of the touch, the body’s knowing without speech.

Irigaray’s writing is extremely dense and difficult to follow because she assumes the reader has a wealth of prior knowledge to draw on and is well read in the major philosophical texts of the Western world. Additionally, she attempts to use language in unusual ways, to better make her points about the effects of language on our thought and especially the limits of words in truly expressing certain concepts, particularly feminine ones. However, even though her books are not readily accessible to the novice, her examinations of the interactions between language and culture, and particularly language and psychoanalysis, have been very influential. Feminist critics have been especially interested in her insights on traditional philosophical texts and her examinations of how language deals with the differences between men and women.