SOURCE: Irigaray, Luce, Elizabeth Hirsch, and Gary A. Olson. “‘Je—Luce Irigaray’: A Meeting with Luce Irigaray.” Hypatia 10, no. 2 (spring 1995): 93-114.

In the following interview, originally conducted in May 1994, Irigaray discusses the specificity of her own practice as a writer, her relationship with psychoanalytic theory, and her relationship to traditional Western philosophy.

The authors conducted this interview with Luce Irigaray in her home in Paris in May, 1994.

Introduction

Trained in linguistics, literature, and psychoanalysis, Luce Irigaray nonetheless insists that her works must be read, above all, as philosophical texts—that is, as interventions into the specific canon of thought “by means of which values are defined,” in her view.¹ She thus assigns primacy to the philosophical not only as a dimension of her own multifarious writings, but within culture generally: in the historical production of knowledge, meaning, subjectivity, power. In fact, she suggests that it is because of...