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Marguerite La Caze
Philosophy Department, University of Queensland
'Luce Irigaray's Ethics of Love'
Is love essential to ethics or merely a supplement to it? I argue that in Luce Irigaray's ethics of love there are important challenges to philosophical understandings of friendship and love. Irigaray emphasises the importance of the relationship between love and respect, arguing that love and respect don't conflict because love as a passion must involve respect for the difference of the other. Irigaray also introduces the political to ethics, by arguing that we need to have the right conditions for genuine love and respect to flourish. She writes 'We should not renounce love but educate it so that we can be faithful, even in passion, to our highest ideal' (Democracy Begins Between Two, 2000, 108). By 'our ideal' she means the ideal of recognition of sexual difference in citizenship and the new culture she envisages. For love of self for men and women, love between men and women, and relations between women to be genuine, there must be a profound change in social and political conditions. Love can only take place in a culture where women have specificity and identity. In an ethics of love, love must be cultivatable. I show how Irigaray envisages the possibility of an ethics of love by conceiving it as both passion and responsibility.
Bio: Dr Marguerite La Caze is an Australian Research Fellow in philosophy at the University of Queensland. She has research interests and publications in European philosophy, feminist philosophy, and aesthetics. She has published The Analytic Imaginary (Ithaca: Cornell, 2002) and Integrity and the Fragile Self, co-authored with Damian Cox and Michael Levine (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Recent papers include 'The Encounter between Wonder and Generosity', Hypatia, 2002 Vol.17, No.3, 2002, 1-19 and 'Michèle Le Dœuff and the Work of Philosophy', Australian Journal of French Studies, forthcoming 2003. She is currently working on a major project on 'Wonder and generosity as guides to the ethics and politics of respect for difference' and a project on the recent work of Michèle Le Dœuff.
<m.lacaze@uq.edu.au>