In The Way of Love, Luce Irigaray asks what love might mean if it were not possession, fusion, projection, rescue mission, or decorative wound.

For Irigaray, love is not the sweet little bow placed on top of relation after the fact; it is the difficult architecture of relation itself. How do we approach another person without absorbing them? How do we speak without turning the other into material for our own meaning? How do we remain near without making proximity into conquest?

This is Irigaray at her more meditative and philosophical: writing through language, breath, distance, sexual difference, speech, silence, and the ethics of encountering another person as genuinely other. It is a book about intimacy, but not in the flattened lifestyle sense. More like intimacy as a dangerous epistemological event: the point where selfhood has to loosen its grip or become another empire in miniature.

Dense, searching, occasionally misty in that Continental way, but very beautiful when it lands. One for readers interested in feminist philosophy, phenomenology, love, language, and the strange violence of assuming we already know what another person is.

Paperback edition, published by Continuum in 2002. Good used condition with light shelf wear and minor handling; clean internally.