marine lover

Speaking Volumes: Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche

12 May 1995

Nicola Lacey on Luce Irigaray's Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche .

... Luce Irigaray's Marine Lover. I read it only recently, but it will stay with me for a long time. Irigaray is one of France's best known feminist theorists. She has traced the ways in which woman and the feminine have been silenced, devalued and effaced in human history and in particular within its mythologies and intellectual discourses. She is an exponent of ecriture feminine - poetic and elliptical writing, which is often dialogic in form, evocative rather than analytic in style, and seeks to recover the repressed feminine, the unacknowledged body, and to give them a place within language. Marine Lover, the most poetic of her works, falls into three parts. The first, "Speaking of Immemorial Waters", is an imaginary dialogue with Nietzsche, in which the feminine genre is represented in terms of the metaphor of the sea; the second, "Veiled Lips" is a further engagement with Nietzsche's philosophy, this time in the third person; the third, "When the Gods are Born" is a re-reading of Greek and Christian myths, in which the central elements of Irigaray's critique of Nietzsche are realised in a vivid, concrete yet imaginative way.

... For me, Marine Lover represents the intellectual excitement of this kind of boundary-blurring: it speaks to what I first loved in philosophy - the engagement with the contours and power of ideas - in a way that escapes the pretension to objectivity and (dare I say it) tedium of a relentlessly analytic philosophical mode. This is not to say - and this is a second lesson I have learnt from Marine Lover - that there is no analysis in Irigaray's work: it is to show that intellectually compelling analyses are sometimes expressed elliptically, poetically, and metaphorically. So, thirdly, Irigaray also showed me that philosophy could be beautiful, witty, irreverent, literary, and fun to read. ...


Nicola Lacey is a fellow, New College, Oxford.