Learning to Love the Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche

Isabelle Adjani: Pull Marine 
(music video dir. Luc Besson, 1984) 

Click here to watch

I think the first work I tried to read by French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray was Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, which was published in English translation (by Gillian C. Gill) in 1991, when I was doing my MA at the University of York and spent a lot of time hanging around with members of the women's studies department, including Liz DeLoughry, who is now a professor at UCLA and who, if I remember correctly, lent me the book.  

Unfortunately, I couldn't make head or tail of it and I found Irigaray's lyrical-poetic style antithetical. It should be noted that this is not offered as a criticism of her thinking or mode of writing, but is more a reflection upon my own limitations as a reader at this time. Indeed, it might partly explain why I'm not a professor at UCLA ...

However, here we are in 2019, almost 30 years later, and I'm strangely tempted to give it another go, having just come across this very beautiful line by Irigaray in another work: The plant nourishes the mind that contemplates the blooming of its flower.   

That's not to say I don't still have limitations as a reader - don't we all? - but I'm hopefully a little less limited than I was in '91 and have, in the years since, often myself adopted a writing style that attempts to dissolve the distinction between theory, fiction, and philosophy. So, fingers crossed I'll get more from my re-encounter with l'amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche ... 

See: Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill, (Columbia University Press, 1991). 

Notes:

Originally published in France in 1980, Marine Lover is the first in a trilogy in which Irigaray interrogates the feminine as conceived within modern philosophy from an elemental perspective; in the case of this book, as the title makes obvious, it's water that is used to cleanse Nietzsche's writings of their phallogocentricity and freshen up his ideas. But Irigaray does so not as an enemy, but as an imaginary lover who engages in an amorous dialogue with the latter. 

And the song? It's an absolutely beautiful track written by Serge Gainsbourg and released as a single from the album Isabelle Adjani (Philips, 1983).