Abstract

This chapter presents interpretive synopsis of Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions. Elemental Passions consist of fifteen chapters. It introduces key events in the relationship between you-man and I-woman. You-man has responded to I-woman's invitation to a mutually empowering love rather than a love which controls and consumes. Elemental Passions presents a meditation on the element of fire. It is full of references to flame, the sun, the sky, the clear horizon, flashes of lightning; and their contrasts: night, darkness, shadowy enclosure. In Speculum, Irigaray gives a reading of Plato's myth of the cave which reveals its implicit gender connotations. In language reminiscent of Speculum, Irigaray suggests that even when they come out of the cave, Plato's prisoners have to impose binary categories of thought in order to cope with reality. Elemental Passions offers a meditation on the nature of time, space, infinity and movement.