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Books

To Be Born: Genesis of a New Human Being by Luce Irigaray

Dharmender Dhillon muses on Luce Irigaray’s best way to make an individual.

Luce Irigaray is a highly influential French cultural theorist, philosopher, and psychoanalyst. Her latest offering, To Be Born: Genesis of a New Human Being (2017), is a dense but readable defence of individuality amidst a culture that fosters conformity.

Irigaray’s ‘continental’ approach – that is, seeing philosophy as a way of life irreducible to mere formal study – is evident from the outset, in a cryptic prologue. Thankfully, once we get past the initial jargon-laden introduction, the main body reads well, and her conclusion follows from the premises she’s outlined. The writing is emblematic of Irigaray’s trademark, highly creative, ‘Hegelian-Nietzschean phenomenology’.

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