Review by Choice Review
In a work quite remarkable in its scope, comprehensiveness, and precision of articulation, Whitford seeks to offer an overview of Irigaray's work to date and to provide a strong, sympathetic, and detailed account of the originality and power of Irigaray's vision. The text is divided between philosophy and psychoanalysis, following Irigaray's own double commitments, and is careful to show what is borrowed and what is rejected from both fields. Although closest to Lacan and Derrida, Irigaray parts company from them concerning her ultimately feminist commitments. Whitford details both the slippage used by Irigaray and fluid conceptuality, including "the female imaginary," as well as the exactitude of her position by showing how her critics have thus far misrepresented and misunderstood the vision at stake. "Philosophy in the feminine," Whitford argues following Irigaray, means to write, think, articulate, and describe experience as a woman, as women, not to think "like" a woman. To this end her rereadings of Plato's cavern, Hegel's Antigone, and Derridean deconstruction reveal that philosophy has always claimed the place of woman man's version of her/it, as an object, a possession, his property and lost object at the same time. "Philosophy in the feminine," although still to be done, must speak as a female subject, from feminine subjectivity.-I. E. Harvey, Pennsylvania State University, University Park Campus
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
