While considering sensitivity lower than thought, our tradition left sensitivity uncultivated and thinking a mental concern, which limited human development. Making flower our whole being requires us to surmount such hierarchy towards a sensitive thinking. This book, inspired by Luce Irigaray’s Sharing the Fire, undertakes to approach this further cultural stage by focusing attention on life and sharing in education but also in relating to our environment, be it natural, sociocultural or technological as well as in our contribution to a sensitive  thinking in art, spirituality, ethics and politics. This can lead on to a culture which gives up past confinements in systematic closures of understanding by favouring difference over sameness, subject-subject logic over subject-object logic, sharing over individual mastery, touch over sight. The teaching of the confinement due to the COVID-19 virus ought to incite us to enter into such a new, universally open, cultural era.

Andrea S Wheeler is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Iowa State University. After completing her PhD on the philosophy of Luce Irigaray and the notion of dwelling, she has worked in the fields of sustainable architectural theory and the philosophy of Luce Irigaray.

Jennifer Carter is a Lecturer of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, New York. She specializes in continental philosophy and phenomenology, particularly the work of Luce Irigaray. Her forthcoming book, On Touch with Luce Irigaray (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), explores Irigaray’s sustained engagement with touch as grounding subjectivity and human life.