Historicism and Lacanian theory

In 1977 Luce Irigaray published a passionately written article in the journal Critique, entitled ‘The Poverty of Psychoanalysis’. The text is a richly woven tapestry of diverse references and poetic resonances, and merits a close reading. However, rather than using Irigaray’s essay as an exercise in textual analysis, I will use it here as a […]

Did Man Make Language?

Did Man Make Language? Alison Assiter Males, as the dominant group, have produced language, thought and reality. This sentence appears on page 143 of Dale Spender’s book Man Made Language. Spender believes that ‘maleness’ pervades language ‘as a whole. Moreover, according to her, the reality most of us inhabit most of the time is a […]

Thinking naturally

36* Tim Hayward, Ecological Thought, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995; Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995.realism of postmodernism and accept the significance of the ways in which the concept of ʻnatureʼ has been used for ideological purpose. Soperʼs own position occupies that political space. Her strategy is to carve […]