Elemental Passions

Dancing Contact Improvisation with Luce Irigaray: Intra‐Action andElemental Passions

“…Nothing determinable. The foundation of all giving” (Irigaray , 89). Her radically open notion of infinity stands in stark contrast to the implied male interlocutor of Elemental Passions , who fills the position of both her lover and the Western discourses of philosophy and psychoanalysis, and who had assumed the right to define the female speaker as the radical and always lacking other.…”

“…Elemental Passions targets “the fixity and lethal inertia of conceptual thinking” (Braidotti , 2); literally and conceptually, Elemental Passions is full of movement, of negotiating passivity, activity, and action, and of finding ways to open up the rigidity of her interlocutor's world, the “closed totality” which for him “contain[s] all possibilities” (Irigaray , 89). I see the woman‐speaker of Elemental Passions dancing and improvising: with her poetic and allusive language, the rhythms and flows that her prose creates, Irigaray's woman‐I swirls and falls, rolls and crawls, glides and slides through her conversation like a dancer moving through a choreographed duet.…”

“…In that exchange of affection the producer and the product become one, the organ and the body can no longer be divided, myself and yourself are no longer embodied as distinct and rival universes. (Irigaray , 58)…”

“…And two. The accounts overflow, calculation is lost” (Irigaray , 58). She understands that difference does not create separation; rather, in continuously affecting each other, the difference between herself and her lover establishes a bond, as feeling herself and feeling her partner—feeling‐with, and sometimes maybe even feeling‐for, her partner—become virtually the same during the multiple encounters of discursive and corporeal exchange.…”

Immigrant Children’s Bodily Engagement in Accessing Their Lived Experiences of Immigration

“…Rather, as a photographer, I believe that that which is evidently "out there," separate from me and unrelated to me or to my approach, is now duplicated by an image, recorded. Each positioning implies a division between the embodied and the known that both Merleau-Ponty (1968) and later Irigaray (1992) contest. As a habituated posture, photographing knows only its own way of living, a particular aestheticizing, passivating, and disengaged from of exteriority.…”