Rorty and Irigaray

on a culture of love and peace

pp. 171-181

in: Lenart Škof, Breath of proximity, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

In this chapter we attempt to rethink the issue of democratic experimentalism from an ethical point of view and look at its potential for the future by way of drawing on two key thinkers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: Richard Rorty and Luce Irigaray. First we explore the experimentalist character in Irigaray's later thought and point to a pragmatist link in her works. We dynamize her original theory of sexual difference by pointing to G. H. Mead's symbolic interactionism. In the second section of this chapter a revolutionary character of Irigaray's thought is defended by focusing on her interventions into the very core of Western philosophy and in particular its Hegelian heritage. In the third section, by introducing Rorty into the debate, we finally pledge for a new democratic culture of love and nonviolence as a 'spiritual" mode of democratic experimentalism needed in our times. Finally, we conclude by showing that both in Irigaray's and Rorty's thought there is an affinity toward intercultural thinking, bearing important consequences for an ethico-spiritual project of democratic experimentalism.