ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a preliminary sketch of Luce Irigaray’s reflections on religion and the notion of divinity. Irigaray’s work seeks to enact a Copernican revolution, whereby the female-feminine ground of western discourse begins to find cultural symbols and images by which to represent itself in positive terms, thus paving the way for an ethics and a spirituality of sexuate difference. Irigaray’s attempts to craft a model of divinity, religion and spirituality that challenges the phallocentric order anchored by western monotheistic traditions have very much been welcome by those feminists unwilling to cast, and consequently dismiss, religion as necessarily patriarchal. One of the signature moves in Irigaray’s authorship, particularly in her early, deconstructive phase, is to expose what she calls the “blind spot” of western discourse: its repression of the female body. Importantly, for Irigaray, fidelity to the reality of sexual difference calls for the affirmation of what she labels a “sensible transcendental.”.
