Breathing with Luce Irigaray

(Hardback)

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Contributors to this volume consider the implications of 'the Age of Breath': a spiritual shift in human awareness to the needs of the other figured through breathing. Awareness of the breath allows us to attend to our bodies and the bodies of others, to animals, nature, other cultures, oppressed minorities, and the other of sexual difference. As a way to connect body and spirit, self and other, nature and culture, and East and West, breathing emerges as the significant theological and philosophical gesture of our time. Philosophy has too often cut off metaphysical thought from this living, breathing world with its animal and female bodies, just as religious traditions have repressed the breathing flesh in favour of calcified word. The re-introduction of breath into philosophy and theology draws our awareness back to the body, to respect for the other, and to nature, making awareness of the breath essential for an embodied ethics of difference in our globalized, ecological age. These themes are addressed by an international team of scholars, including Luce Irigaray.

Reviews

An unusually diverse range of international scholars and practitioners in various fields take up Luce Irigarays recent work inspired, in part, by her own yoga practice. Without avoiding the difficult questions of essentialism, Orientalism, and white solipsism, they find within this work breathing room, if you will, for engaging significant issues that arise where theory and practice, body, mind and spirit meet. * Ellen Armour, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair in Feminist Theology, Director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender and Sexuality, Vanderbilt University, USA *
Skof and Holmes have brought together an international group of scholars to think with, to breath with, Irigaray, on what it means to think and act an ethics of breath. These essays are inspirational and moving. They invite us to think while breathing at a different tempo, more mindfully of our shared life. * Eduardo Mendieta, Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, USA *

Author Bio

Lenart kof is Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Primorska, Slovenia. Emily A. Holmes is Associate Professor of Religion, Department of Religion and Philosophy, Christian Brothers University, USA.