Flesh Made Word: Theology After Irigaray

Table of Contents
 

      Introduction 1

      1. Summary of argument 10

      Introduction to PART ONE: Metaphysics and Language 18

      1. Sex and gender 20

      2. Word and flesh 23

      Chapter One: An Incarnate Imago Dei 26

      1. Thinking through the incarnation 27

      2. Sexual difference and the imago Dei in the early Church 34

      3. Sexual difference and equality 39

      4. A contemporary feminist reading of Genesis 1-2 44

      Chapter Two: Metaphysics 51

      1. Heidegger: forgetting the air 52

      2. The critique of metaphysics 55

      a. Plato’s dialogues and the end of dialogue 59

      b. The metaphysical principle of totalisation 60

      c. The death of God as the monological subject of metaphysics 63

      d. Metaphysics and language 67

      3. Symbol 71

      Chapter Three: Language 78

      1. Structuralism 79

      a. Bakhtin: monologic and dialogic 80

      b. Jakobson: metaphor and metonymy 82

      2. Irigaray and Language

      a. "Parler-femme" and "la parole" as metonymy 86

      b. The question of linguistic determinism 90

      c. That speaking is never neuter/neutral 92

      d. A social and cultural dialogue 99

      Introduction to PART TWO: The Question of the Other 102

      Chapter Four: Hegel 107

      1. Hegel’s three phases of recognition 109

      2. Feminist engagements with Hegel 111

      3. Irigaray’s engagement with Hegel 113

      4. The dialectic of love 116

      5. The divine dimension of recognition 120

      6. "The universal as mediation" 123

      Chapter Five: Lacan 127

      1. The mirror stage 128

      2. The name of the Father 131

      3. The other and "full speech" 134

      4. Heterology 138

      5. The alterity of woman 142

      6. The relation with the other 146

      Chapter Six: Levinas 148

      1. Levinas on the other 149

      2. Illeity 153

      3. The other of sexual difference 157

      4. Levinas and Irigaray: the space of ethics 165

      5. The feminine divine as a correction of asymmetry 168

      Introduction to PART THREE: Irigaray and Theology 171

      1. Anthropological constants 173

      2. The method of critical correlation 178

      3. The rule of faith 182

      4. Irigaray and "catholic" theology 184

      Chapter Seven: The Feminine Divine 188

      1. Sin, redemption and the feminine divine 192

      2. The gender of God 197

      3. Feuerbach’s mirror 203

      4. Towards a double syntax 210

      Chapter Eight: Sacrifice and Sacramentality 213

      1. The logic of sacrifice 215

      2. Irigaray on sacrifice 220

      1. Conception, immaculate and otherwise 221
      2. The Eucharist as sacrifice 223

      c. The Eucharist as transformative 227

      3. Mary Magdalene as prototype 230

        1. The domestication of Mary Magdalene 232
        2. Women as leaders in the early Church 237

      4. Sacrifice and Christianity 238

      a. The second century 241

      b. The return of sacrifice 243

5. Beyond the logic of sacrifice 244

1. Christian eschatology 253

2. Irigaray and eschatology 255

3. Divine persons 264

4. The "Third" 270

5. Personhood 275

      Conclusion 278

      Works cited 281