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Living Politically: An Irigarayan Notion of Agency as a Way of Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Miri Rozmarin
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Abstract

This paper formulates Luce Irigaray's notion of agency as a political way of life. I argue that agency, within an Irigarayan framework, is both the outcome and the condition of a political life, aimed at creating political transformations. As Irigaray hardly addresses the topic of agency per se, I suggest understanding Irigaray's textual style as implying specific “technologies of self” in the Foucauldian sense, that is, as self‐applied social practices that reshape social reality, one's relations to oneself, and enhance one's freedom and pleasures in these relations. This interpretation aims to extract concrete transformative practices, which, by shaping one's sense of self in relation to others, create oneself as a free and active subject.

Type
Found Cluster on Luce Irigaray
Information
Hypatia , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , Summer 2013 , pp. 469 - 482
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Hypatia, Inc.

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