Product Overview
With this book we see a philosopher well steeped in the Western tradition thinking through ancient Eastern disciplines, meditating on what it means to learn to breathe, and urging us all at the dawn of a new century to rediscover indigenous Asian cultures. Yogic tradition, according to Irigaray, can provide an invaluable means for restoring the vital link between the present and eternityand for re-envisioning the patriarchal traditions of the West.
Western, logocentric rationality tends to abstract the teachings of yoga from its everyday practicemost importantly, from the cultivation of breath. Lacking actual, personal experience with yoga or other Eastern spiritual practices, the Western philosophers who have tried to address Hindu and Buddhist teachingsparticularly Schopenhauerhave frequently gone astray. Not so, Luce Irigaray. Incorporating her personal experience with yoga into her provocative philosophical thinking on sexual difference, Irigaray proposes a new way of understanding individuation and community in the contemporary world. She looks toward the indigenous, pre-Aryan cultures of Indiawhich, she argues, have maintained an essentially creative ethic of sexual difference predicated on a respect for life, nature, and the feminine.
Irigaray's focus on breath in this book is a natural outgrowth of the attention that she has given in previous books to the elementsair, water, and fire. By returning to fundamental human experiencesbreathing and the fact of sexual differenceshe finds a way out of the endless sociologizing abstractions of much contemporary thought to rethink questions of race, ethnicity, and globalization.
