Thinking Politically with Luce Irigaray

As editors of this special issue, we are especially grateful to Luce Irigaray for offering two contributions to this Irigaray and Politics special issue, as well as all the contributors who have written on Irigaray’s political thought ranging from the notion of air democracy and an elemental politics to bringing Irigaray’s work in conversation with Indigenous scholars to figuring a philosophy of the child. The wide-ranging themes included in this special issue are a testament to how important Irigaray’s political thinking continues to be. There is no doubt, in our contemporary age, the multiple global political crises we face are rooted in violent possessive logics, both patriarchal and colonial (see Moreton-Robinson et al., 2007), and we urgently need to consider the work of political philosophers that challenge the structures and logics that enable such crises. As Lenart Škof clearly argues in his article for this issue, we must move away from dominant narratives in political western philosophy based on violent logics. We need new political philosophies that enable us to reimagine a politics attentive to the concrete community of citizens and the passage between singularity and community. We need a politics that nurtures an ethical co-existence based upon non-possessive, non-appropriative logics and respect for difference. These are all themes that are explored in Irigaray’s work and by the commentators on this issue. It is clear to many of us that we urgently need a new frame for politics, and we believe Luce Irigaray’s political philosophy offers a refiguring of democracy that gestures towards a hopeful future in which politics serves all persons in our ethical co-existence with one another and the natural world.