Sharing the World

In this important new book, a follow up to The Way of Love, Luce Irigaray, one of France's most influential contemporary theorists, turns once again to the concept of otherness. We are accustomed to considering the other as an individual without paying sufficient attention to the particular world or specific culture to which the other belongs. A phenomenological approach to this question offers some help, notably through Heidegger's analyses of "Dasein", "being-in-the-world" and "being with'. Nevertheless, according to Heidegger, it remains almost impossible to identify an other outside of our own world. "Otherness" is subjected to the same values by which we are ourselves defined and thus we remain in "sameness'. In this age of multiculturalism and in the light of Nietzsche's criticism of our values and Heidegger's deconstruction of our interpretation of truth, Irigaray questions the validity of the "sameness" that sits at the root of Western culture.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Transcendence of the Other 1. The Path Toward the Other 2. At the Crossroads - The Encounter 3. The World of the Beyond 4. Distance in Nearness Afterword

About the Author :
Luce Irigaray is Director of Research in Philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. A doctor of philosophy, Luce Irigaray is also trained in linguistics, philology, psychology and psychoanalysis. Now acknowledged as a key influential thinker of our times, her work focuses on the culture of two subjects, masculine and feminine - particularly through the liberation of a feminine subjectivity - something she explores in a range of literary forms, from the philosophical to the scientific, the political and the poetic.

Review :
Mentioned - The Chronicle Review, August 8, 2008 "Irigaray (philosophy, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) continues her project of describing our relation to "otherness" in these four essays, seeking the reasons why we tend to place the other within our own social and cultural contexts and only then to consider him or her... she writes eloquently of the transcendence of the moments of knowing as well as of the moments of meeting." - Book News, November 2008 Sharing the World is bound to appeal to [Irigaray's] well-established audience in feminist and gender studies. However, her acute exploration of intimacy should appeal to a broader public too, for it contains notable considerations on existential and phenomenological features of human life.