The importance of Irigaray's work lies n the fact that feminist and philosophical discourses are brought together in a feminist appropriation of Spinoza. The author draws on both philosophy and psychoanalysis in a rejection of traditional literary modes and thus frees literature from male dominance. "Elemental Passions" was first published in France in 1982. It explores the man/woman relationship in a series of lyrical meditations on the senses and the four elements. Its form resembles a series of love-letters, in which, however, the identity and reality of the addresses are deliberately obscured in order to escape from conventional, male-imposed conceptual patterns.