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Crossing Lovers: Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions
- Hypatia
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 15, Number 3, Summer 2000
- pp. 92-112
- 10.1353/hyp.2000.0042
- Article
- Additional Information
Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions could be read as a response to Merleau-Ponty's article "The Intertwining--The Chiasm" in The Visible and the Invisible. Like Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray describes corporeal intertwining or vision and touch. Counteracting the narcissistic strain in Merleau-Ponty's chiasm, she assumes that sexual difference must precede the intertwining. The subject is marked by the alterity or the "more than one" and encoded as a historically contingent gendered conflict.