Luce Irigaray

[abu nuwas]

Does the use of the past have a special significance in some circles? Maybe Derrida did that, or Lacan?

And if so? What is your point and how does it relate to my sentence quoted by you?

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I rarely take the time to find out biographical details about any writer, except for the general period in which they were writing -- I am a good student of Barthes, and I don't give much of a damn about the author him/herself. In this I find myself utterly in agreement with Luce -- knowledge of the writer's personal details should not influence the reader's appreciation or understanding of the text as an intellectual creation.

Then you are good a deal more postmodernist than I am. ;-) (they were not the only ones I know.) Sometimes I feel the need to get more info on the background of a text implying the writer. Sometimes not. I am not that much into generalizations anymore. This approach to treat texts as organisms on their own and independent of those who created them e.g. I find too extreme. Why not find a hopefully meaningful balance between the biographical and the postmodernist approach? Why not approach texts (fictional) as art and aproach them each invidually? What method or combination of methods seems to fit best.

We say ''pick and choose''. A simple grammatical error on your part, therefore, or, for what I know,some special way of expressing an obscure concept, of the sort high-lighted by Sokal. I have no means of knowing.

I am glad that you have seen the light over Ms Irigaray. Yet even one of her apologists writes this absurd piece, reluctant to give up to the last.

''I’ve read only a little of the work of the feminist writer, Luce Irigaray, but I was delighted to learn, from the few briskly contemptuous pages devoted to her here, that, in arguing for the masculinist bias of science, she has had the estimable insolence to suggest that the 20th century’s most resonant (and sinister) equation, E = MC2, may be sexist for having ‘privileged the speed of light’ or ‘what goes fastest’ over other velocities, and that if the science of fluid mechanics is under-developed, then that is because it is a quintessentially feminine topic. Irigaray’s invocations of the sciences concerned may be worse than dodgy, but in that libertarian province of the intellectual world in which she functions, far better wild and contentious theses of this sort than the stultifying rigour so inappropriately demanded by Sokal and Bricmont.''

I earlier asked you to express yourself more clearly. Perhaps I should demonstrate with a critique of this: unmitigated balderdash.

As we are a friendly site, I shall save your blushes by refraining from pointing out your spelling errors. But I would say this one thing. I find much talk on poetry sites of physics , M-theory and Prof Hawking's last obscure statement. Now, I have no idea whether they are correct, but I was struck by another professor at Cambridge, also physics, and one of his colleagues, who said he did not really understand it. But the poets did.