...more than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. it sets at a distance, maintains the distance. in our culture, the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing, has brought about an improverishment of bodily relations...the moment domin ates the look dominates, the body loses its materiality” -luce irigaray
Interpretation
This quote explores how visual perception influences our relationships and experiences, leading to a detachment from bodily sensations.
Luce Irigaray's quote highlights the power of the visual sense in shaping our understanding and interaction with the world. She suggests that in a culture where sight predominates over other senses, we risk reducing our physical experiences and bodily relations to mere objects, leading to a loss of materiality and connection with ourselves and others. This domination of the 'look' emphasizes distance and separation rather than intimacy and presence, ultimately impoverishing our sensory experiences.
In practice
During a lecture on sensory perception in psychology, this quote could emphasize the importance of experiencing life through all senses, not just the visual.
Your silence exists as does my self gathering. But so does the almost absolute silence of the world's dawning. In such suspension, before every utterance on earth, there is a cloud, an almost immobile air. The plants already breathe, while we still ask ourselves how to speak to each other, without taking breath away from them.
Each sex has a relation to madness. Every desire has a relation to madness. But it would seem that one desire has been taken as wisdom, moderation, truth, leaving to the other sex the weight of a madness that cannot be acknowledged or accommodated.
Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position, back to center stage.
Study what thou art Whereof thou art a part What thou knowest of this art This is really what thou art. All that is without thee also is within.
There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.
Men cannot expect to do ill and fare well, but to find that done to them which they did to others.
Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.
It's not differences that divide us. It's our judgments about each other that do.
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