Anticipating Sin in Medieval Society
Erin Vanessia Abraham
- Title
- Divine Flesh, Embodied Word
- Subtitle
- Incarnation as a Hermeneutical Key to a Feminist Theologian's Reading of Luce Irigaray's Work
- Author
- Anne-Claire Mulder
- Price
- € 73,95 excl. VAT
- ISBN
- 9789085551010
- Format
- Paperback
- Number of pages
- 412
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 26 - 04 - 2006
- Dimensions
- 17 x 24 cm
- Series
- Vossiuspers UvA
- Category
- Health and Medicine
- Discipline
- Science, Medicine, and Technology
Table of Contents - 7
Acknowledgements - 12
Acknowledgements 2005 - 14
Introduction - 16
I. Incarnation: the Word becomes flesh - 29
1. The order of discourse is built upon matricide - 32
A specific order of the city is established through matricide - 33
The constitution of the masculine subject is founded upon matricide - 42
2. 'And the Word became flesh': salvation or matricide? - 54
The Prologue to the Gospel of John - 56
The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed - 67
The Eucharist: this is my body, this is my blood - 71
3. Becoming woman, becoming 'hysteric': the genesis of female embodied subjectivity - 83
The order of discourse eradicates difference - 84
Becoming woman, becoming hysteric - 93
II. Incarnation: the flesh becomes Word - 109
4. The flesh: maternal, sensible, tangible and libidinal matter - 117
The flesh: blood, flesh, material elements - 119
Being is rooted in the flesh - 134
5. Morphology: corporeal, imaginary, linguistic differences between the sexes - 137
Morphology: the form of the flesh - 139
Morphology: the parameter to the formation of identity - 143
Discovering the morphology of the female sex. - 152
The morphology of language - 164
6. God-She: the horizon or 'objective' of a gender and the object of communication - 171
'God': the emblem of a 'house-of-language' - 173
7. God: mirror of woman - 190
Women need a Speculum Mundi to become - 193
Inventing an identity: giving oneself images - 203
Identity and becoming - 208
III. Incarnation: fruit of the encounter with the other - 218
8. The dialectical structure of the relation to the other - 224
The recognition of the alterity of the other - 225
From God as the transcendent Other to the transcendence of the other: Luce Irigaray's critique of God - 227
The recognition of the other is the labour of the negative - 242
The dialectical movement between self and other, between inner and outer - 251
Incarnation: the fruit of the encounter with the other - 255
9. Incarnation: the fruit of the encounter of female subject with the horizon of her gender - 258
The transcendence of the horizon of the female gender - 259
Luce Irigaray looks at art. - 270
The construction of a horizon: aesthetic practice and theory ánd the recources of this construction - 280
10. Incarnation: the fruit of the encounter of female subject with the other: man or woman - 293
The love of and for the other of different sex - 294
Love of the other, woman - 321
The fecundity of the love of the other - 333
Epilogue - 344
Speaking and thinking 'God': the dialectics between flesh and Word. - 344
The Flesh: living and productive matter - 346
The flesh as living matter - 346
The flesh is productive matter: the significance of a philosophy of sexual difference - 349
A post-theistic understanding of 'God - 358
The function of 'God' in a post-theistic discourse - 361
'God': the symbol of the transcendence of the horizon of a gender - 366
The dialectical relation of flesh and Word - 369
The dialectics between 'God' and the divine and the tension between eros and thanatos - 370
The divine: creative ánd disruptive force - 374
Bibliography - 380
Book and articles by Luce Irigaray, used in this book - 380
Books and articles by other authors - 382
Index - 396
Anne-Claire Mulder
Divine Flesh, Embodied Word
Incarnation as a Hermeneutical Key to a Feminist Theologian's Reading of Luce Irigaray's Work
What has Luce Irigaray’s statement that women need a God to do with her thoughts on the relation between body and mind, or the sensible and the intelligible?
Using the theological notion ‘incarnation’ as a hermeneutical key, Anne-Claire Mulder brings together and illuminates the interrelations between these different themes in Luce Irigaray’s work. Seesawing between Luce Irigaray’s critique of philosophical discourse and her constructive philosophy, Mulder elucidates Irigaray’s thoughts on the relations between ‘becoming woman’ and ‘becoming divine’. She shows that Luce Irigaray’s restaging of the relation between the sensible and the intelligible, between flesh and Word, is key to her reinterpretation of the relation between woman and God. In and through her interpretation of Luce Irigaray’s thoughts on the flesh she argues that the relation between flesh and Word must be seen as a dialectical one, instead of as a dualistic relation. This means that ‘incarnation’ is no longer seen as a one-way process of Word becoming flesh, but as a continuing process of flesh becoming word and word becoming flesh. For all images and thoughts – including those of ‘God’ – are produced by the flesh, divine in its creativity inexhaustibility, in response to the touch of the other. And these images, thoughts, words in turn become embodied, by touching and moving the flesh of the subject.
Using the theological notion ‘incarnation’ as a hermeneutical key, Anne-Claire Mulder brings together and illuminates the interrelations between these different themes in Luce Irigaray’s work. Seesawing between Luce Irigaray’s critique of philosophical discourse and her constructive philosophy, Mulder elucidates Irigaray’s thoughts on the relations between ‘becoming woman’ and ‘becoming divine’. She shows that Luce Irigaray’s restaging of the relation between the sensible and the intelligible, between flesh and Word, is key to her reinterpretation of the relation between woman and God. In and through her interpretation of Luce Irigaray’s thoughts on the flesh she argues that the relation between flesh and Word must be seen as a dialectical one, instead of as a dualistic relation. This means that ‘incarnation’ is no longer seen as a one-way process of Word becoming flesh, but as a continuing process of flesh becoming word and word becoming flesh. For all images and thoughts – including those of ‘God’ – are produced by the flesh, divine in its creativity inexhaustibility, in response to the touch of the other. And these images, thoughts, words in turn become embodied, by touching and moving the flesh of the subject.
Author
Anne-Claire Mulder
Anne-Claire Mulder (theologian) defended this thesis in 2000 at the University of Amsterdam. She has published texts in Paragraph (2002/3) and in Welt gestalten im ausgehenden Patriarchat edited by Maria Moser and Ina Praetorius (2003). She is co-editor – with Kune Biezeveld – of Towards a Different Transcendence. Feminist Findings on Subjectivity, Religion and Values, (Oxford/Bern, 2001). She is currently university teacher for Women’s studies theology at the Theological University of Kampen.
