Elemental Passions

The prose of Irigaray unsettles the calm assuredness with which the realms of spirituality and the feminine have so often been rendered as subjects without agency, the weaker and subordinate opposite of material,tangible reality. Irigaray demonstrates how to dislodge, disrupt, and destabilize the barriers founded by certain academic standards. She dares to use words to describe the futility of words. "...if your words have such seductive power, such a potent charge of investment, is it not because they come to fill the place of a desire deprived of words? Borrowing their strength from energy free from any declaration. A fundamental misunderstanding lies within your language: what it carries of persuasive power does not belong to speech but to what it covers in silence."(36) Another way Irigaray problematizes the othering of the spirit world is through exploding linear, normative conceptions of time and space in her reconstruction of infinity. She speaks of the current model of time as something which holds power by relying on a timeless void as its opposite. She defies this dualistic construction, describing not an abyss which relies on fullness and definition, but a fullness so vast it has the capacity to lodge emptiness within it. "That invisible presence bearing you, supporting you there where you set up an opposing illusion of indifference as limit to your own desire. As a stasis at each point, guarding against the risk of overflowing which would lead to your downfall. Your vanishing into the immense space where you place that void which maintains your coherence." (Passions, 20) This book is a delightful contrast to the cold, hard and cerebral discourse most noted for contemporary theories of psychology, philosophy, feminism, and politics!