ABSTRACT
At a Hegel conference Luce Irigaray once said: "To keep faith with life the universal must manifest and maintain the becoming of living things as they are: sexed." 1 Even if it is easy to see how universalism and vitalism can entwine, the universal is at first sight at odds with the assertion of sex. But when Irigaray says sexual difference is eternal and everywhere, she simultaneously says it has until now been everywhere stifled. Her thought has a rashly Utopian dimension which makes her uneasy with the term feminism. With statements such as "I love to you" and "democracy begins between two" Irigaray means that grasping the irreducibility of sexual difference is also traversing it with love and respect. 2 Not only women have to learn what Irigaray calls in Daoist vein "the way of love," the virtue and pleasure of relating to another without taking, imprisoning, or commodifying. 3 Such reciprocity established at the level of the amorous relationship will extend to the law, the European Union, religion, and the planet.
