Abstract. This paper explores the compatibility of Luce Irigaray's recent insistence on the need to revalue nature, and to recognise culture's natural roots, with her earlier advocacy of social transformation towards a culture of sexual difference. Prima facie, there is tension between Irigaray's political imperatives, for if culture really is continuous with nature, this implies that our existing, non-sexuate, culture is naturally grounded and unchallengeable. To dissolve this tension, Irigaray must conceive culture as having self-transformative agency without positioning culture as active vis-à-vis an inert and passive nature. I argue that Irigaray achieves this by conceiving culture to arise from a division internal to nature. She derives this idea from Hölderlin, who claims that nature originally divides itself into subjects and objects, and from Heidegger, who maintains that nature inflicts an originary violence upon itself. Critically reworking Hölderlin and Heidegger, Irigaray argues that male nature tends to turn against itself to generate an anti-natural, ecologically destructive, culture. She argues, however, that this tendency can be redirected and alleviated by the very cultural resources which male nature generates in dividing itself. Irigaray thus develops a unique way to advocate social change while recognising nature's profound impact and influence upon culture.This paper offers an interpretation of Luce Irigaray's later philosophical reflections on the relation between nature and culture.1 Irigaray is now widely recognised as a thinker of change, who seeks social transformation towards a culture of sexual difference, within which 2 femininity and masculinity would share equivalent value and symbolic and civil status. 2 In her recent work, Irigaray also urges cultural change to recognise the value and fundamental importance of nature, and to recognise how profoundly culture is invariably shaped by, and dependent upon, nature. She insists that 'it is from the natural that we should start over in order to refound reason' and that thinking must 'understand its natural roots and resources'.3Yet there appears to be some tension between Irigaray's political imperatives, for if every culture has natural roots, then our current non-sexuate culture must be naturally grounded and therefore, presumably, resistant to change. To understand Irigaray's later thought, and to appreciate the continuities within her political and philosophical thinking as a whole, it is important to explore how her recent attention to humanity's dependence upon nature builds on, rather than compromises, her earlier insistence on the necessity and possibility of cultural change.This question is not narrowly relevant to scholars of Irigaray's thought, but has importance for broader debates in feminist philosophy. Contemporary feminist thinkers generally agree that western culture and society have a pervasive tendency to devalue and denigrate nature relative to culture and to align nature symbolically with femininity, which becomes e...