Irigaray

Rachel Jones

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745651057, 9780745651040
• eBook ISBN: 9780745637815
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

The work of French Philosopher Luce Irigaray has exerted a profound influence on feminist thinking of recent decades and provides a far-reaching challenge to western philosophy's entrenched patriarchal norms.

This book guides the reader through Irigaray's critical and creative transformation of western thought. Through detailed analysis of her most important text, Speculum of the Other Woman, Rachel Jones carefully examines Irigaray's transformative readings of such icons of the western tradition as Plato, Descartes, Kant and Hegel. She shows that these readings underpin Irigaray's claim that western philosophy has been dependent on the forgetting of both sexual difference and of our singular beginnings in birth. In response, Irigaray seeks to recover a positive account of sexual difference which would release woman from her traditional position as the 'other' of the subject and allow her to speak as a subject in her own right.

In a sensitive reading of Irigaray's work, Jones shows why this distinctively feminist project necessarily involves the transformation of the fundamental terms of western metaphysics. By foregrounding Irigaray's approach to questions of otherness and alterity, she concludes that, for Irigaray, cultivating an ethics of sexuate difference is the condition of ethical relations in general. Lucidly and persuasively written, this book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand Irigaray's original contribution to philosophical and feminist thought.

1

Approaching Irigaray: Feminism, Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy

Approaching Irigaray’s texts is a complex matter, not least because of their extraordinary range. However, as this book seeks to engage with Irigaray primarily as a feminist philosopher, this chapter will offer a frame for approaching her work through her contested relations to both feminism and philosophy, drawing attention to the ways in which she seeks to transform both. Irigaray argues that the dominant theoretical and philosophical frameworks of western culture have continually positioned woman as object and other for a male subject. Her project is therefore to transform that theory and culture in ways that make it possible for women to take up a position as subjects in their own right. Negotiating the relations between (objectified, idealized) ‘woman’ and (singular, flesh and blood) ‘women’ is thus an integral part of her task. Irigaray challenges the reductive theoretical construction of woman as ‘other’ because of the ways this erases the sexed specificity of actual women. Instead, she is seeking to parler femme, a phrase that can be translated as both ‘to speak woman’ and ‘speaking (as a) woman’. By way of a pun (par les femmes), the French also suggests that speaking (as a) woman is something that needs to be done ‘by women’, that is, among and between them.¹ Parler femme speaks of a way of articulating the female sex that would allow women to take up the position of speaking subjects themselves, and thereby to relate to one another as women, whose differences and similarities can be registered without mediation through a male voice.

Nonetheless, as she is acutely aware, Irigaray’s own position as a theorist writing about women as a woman is problematic from the start, as the following passage indicates: ‘We can assume that any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the “masculine”. When she submits to (such a) theory, woman fails to realize that she is renouncing the specificity of her own relationship to the imaginary. Subjecting herself to objectivization in discourse – by being “female” ’ (S, 133). How can a woman write about women without re-objectivizing them (or herself)? How might she theorize a female ‘subject’ if being ‘a subject’ means taking up a masculine position? And is it possible for her to theorize as a woman at all? If woman ‘renounces her specificity’ in submitting to theory, one of the challenges Irigaray faces is how to engage in theoretical analysis without subordinating herself to the masculine in the process. Thus, before we can begin to approach what Irigaray has to say, we need to examine how she negotiates the problems involved in producing theory ‘about’ women at all, especially as a woman.

In fact, the ways in which Irigaray negotiates this issue are inseparable from her transformative project. This is exemplified in the text through which we will approach Irigaray in this book. In Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray shows how woman has been excluded, appropriated, objectified, or otherwise devalued in western philosophical thought. To do this, she does not simply take up and work with the conceptual framework this philosophical tradition provides. Nor does she seek to re-accommodate woman within its terms. At the same time, she does not simply turn the tables on the tradition, distancing herself from masculine discourse in order to make it the object of her own analysis: such a reversal would continue to mimic the tradition by keeping the subject/object opposition in place.

Instead, Irigaray takes up key texts and voices from the tradition in ways that subvert their words from within. By asking questions and exposing blindspots, she twists their dense theoretical fabric around until it reveals its dependence on making woman both ‘object’ and ‘other’. Given the oppositional logic on which such thinking relies, pitting subject against object and self against other, Irigaray’s writing seeks to disrupt all such dichotomies:

Nothing is ever to be posited that is not also reversed and caught up again in the supplementarity of this reversal. To put it another way: there would no longer be either a right side or a wrong side of discourse, or even of texts, but each passing from one to the other would make audible and comprehensible even what resists the recto-verso structure that shores up common sense. (TS, 79–80)

Thus a key part of Irigaray’s style lies in her disruption of conceptual oppositions such as form/matter, self/other, and of course, male/female. She achieves this partly by showing how in these conceptual couples, one side excludes and determines the other while nonetheless remaining dependent upon it. This undoes their apparent opposition along with the supposed self-sufficiency of the prioritized term. But it also shows how each term in a binary relation relies on the space between, which makes the distinction of one and another possible while resisting capture by a logic that insists on dividing everything up into ‘one’ (side) or the ‘other’.

To avoid remaining trapped in such a logic herself, in Speculum Irigaray adopts a style in which she refuses to take up one position consistently against another, shifting instead between multiple voices and holding contradictory claims alongside one another. Nonetheless, this project of unsettling opposites is not merely negative. Rather, Irigaray is seeking to cultivate the passages and in-between spaces which resist such oppositional terms and thereby hold open the promise of a different, more fluid logic of relation. It is this positive dimension of Irigaray’s project that distinguishes her from more strictly deconstructive approaches, despite the clearly deconstructive aspects of her work. Thus, Irigaray exploits the often contradictory representations of woman within philosophical texts not only to disrupt their apparent coherence, but at the same time to weave together a different voice, whose complexity slips between the accepted terms of philosophical discourse and can no longer be reduced to the mere opposite or other of a male subject. Such inventiveness results in a style that is at once deliberately disruptive and creatively constructive. It is nicely captured by Irigaray’s own description of the language through which it might be possible to speak (as a) woman:

Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand. … One would have to listen with another ear, as if hearing an ‘other meaning’ always in the process of weaving itself, of embracing itself with words, but also of getting rid of words in order not to become fixed, congealed in them. (TS, 29)

Seeking to write philosophy as a woman is one way of allowing woman to speak. Speculum is above all a performative text: what it says finds its fullest articulation in the way it is written. Thus, we will continue to pay attention to how Irigaray writes as well as to the ideas she seeks to convey.

The Importance of Style

In Speculum, Irigaray does not construct clearly defined arguments, or comment on the philosophical canon with a critically distanced voice. Instead, she weaves her own voice in and out of those of Plato and Freud, Lacan and Kant, quoting long passages verbatim, asking questions, and ironically taking up the language of her philosophical forefathers in a subversive mimicry that draws out its latent tensions and blindspots.

By remaining attentive to the multi-valence of Irigaray’s voice and complexities of her style, this book will try to avoid giving an account of her project that simply reconceptualizes it in traditional philosophical terms. Indeed, one of Irigaray’s most important claims is that forging the terms with which to think woman in her specificity is inseparably bound up with transforming the terms of western metaphysical thought. Hence the difficulty of writing ‘about’ woman: any such project will tend to get trapped back into a model that opposes a theorizing (masculine) subject to a theorized (female) object. To disrupt this framework so as to allow a woman to speak of and for herself (as well as to other women) without simply mapping her onto a male subject position, would mean answering Irigaray’s central question: ‘what if the “object” started to speak?’ (S, 135). Such a possibility confounds the traditional framework by ascribing the activity of speaking to the object, rather than the subject, of discourse. At the same time, it displaces the traditional metaphysical oppositions between mind and body, reason and matter, by refusing to separate woman as a subject from her material, corporeal (‘object-like’) existence.

The double perspective such a project requires is exemplified in an essay from This Sex Which Is Not One, the volume that in many ways can be read as accompanying Speculum. In ‘The Power of Discourse’ Irigaray notes that: ‘the issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which woman would be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself’ (TS, 78). Yet a few pages later, she asks what changes would be required for women to become speaking subjects themselves (TS, 85). On the one hand, this is a good example of the way that Irigaray puts theory into practice by not ‘positing’ something herself without almost immediately reversing it. As she says, when woman speaks, her words seem to overturn themselves in ways that are ‘somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason’. On the other hand, such apparent contradictions are symptomatic of the radicality of the transformation required to speak (as a) woman. Read together, Irigaray’s comments suggest that it would be possible for women to become speaking subjects so long as they were no longer trapped by a framework in which each was either a subject or an object. Such a subject would be more like a ‘speaking object’. But in fact she could no longer be adequately theorized in terms of the subject/object dichotomy that has structured modern western thought.

We will return to Irigaray’s critical analysis of this structure in the chapters that follow. For now it is worth noting that, whereas the masculine subject is reliant on an ‘other’ defined in his own terms, Irigaray often uses the same words to say several different things at once. Thus the difficulty of quoting her work to support a reading or interpretation. In so doing, one always runs the risk of identifying her text with a single meaning where there are several; in turn, this risks pulling her work back into the very conceptual framework she is resisting, where the quest for unity and identity privileges the ‘one’ at the expense of others who are thereby excluded.

This book will take the risk of quoting extensively from Irigaray, and in particular from her most multivalent work, Speculum. However, in working closely with her texts, it will seek to remain attentive to the ways in which several different things are often being said at once, in words that are almost always at least double in meaning. In so doing, I hope to at least mitigate ‘the danger of every statement, every discussion, about Speculum’, statements which, as Irigaray herself notes, run the risk of being just as reductive as ‘every discussion about the question of woman’ (TS, 78). Instead of reducing Speculum to one meaning rather than another, this book will seek to aid the reader in distinguishing some of the many different threads that run through Irigaray’s work so as to be better able to hold them together. It will seek to develop an ear for those other meanings that are always in the process of weaving themselves and through which Irigaray forges a language both for thinking differently and for thinking sexual difference. The analysis will be necessarily incomplete, but in ways that I hope will leave openings for others to find further transformative layers of meaning as they read and re-read Irigaray’s texts for themselves.

Irigaray and Philosophy

In approaching Irigaray as a ‘feminist philosopher’, then, what matters is the transformative effect each of these terms has on the other: both the way Irigaray’s feminist project transforms philosophy, and the way her path through philosophy inflects her feminism. This inflection is not just a result of the conceptual resources that Irigaray manages to steal away from western philosophers to aid her feminist project. It is also a result of the position she forges as a feminist who wants to keep doing philosophy, despite its patriarchal or masculinist history.

In fact, Irigaray’s negotiation of a critical yet non-oppositional relation to philosophy is indicative of the kind of feminism she espouses: one that seeks to make space for (sexual) difference without reinscribing a reductive logic of opposition and negation. Indeed, it is this logic itself that is the problem insofar as it generates dichotomies that are governed by only one of their terms, and thus by what Irigaray calls a ‘logic of the Same’. Accordingly, it is this logic which defines woman in terms of her difference from a male subject, and hence positions her as the other of the Same.² As Irigaray repeatedly insists, merely reversing the hierarchical opposition between the sexes – defining man in terms of his failure to be a woman, for example, or replacing patriarchy with matriarchy – would not be a real solution, but merely a repetition of such oppositional structures of thought.

Irigaray’s position is doubly risky: on the one hand, some feminists will be suspicious of the very act of engaging with the ‘master discourse’ of philosophy in anything but a thoroughly critical way. From this perspective, Irigaray’s desire to ‘have a fling with the philosophers’ looks suspiciously like complicity with her oppressors (TS, 150). On the other hand, Irigaray’s explicitly feminist orientation will tempt some philosophers to claim that her own approach is ‘biased’ in ways that distort the philosophical texts with which she engages. Irigaray thus runs the risk of being the doubly undutiful daughter: mistrusted by the philosophers, yet regarded with suspicion by her feminist sisters because of her passion for philosophy.³

I do not wish to deny that Irigaray’s position is risky – but the stakes, as she would be the first to concede, are high: they concern nothing less than the question of being, and thus, the nature of human being. The question, for Irigaray, is whether we think being in terms of any kind of oneness, unified essence or identity, or whether we allow that being – and thus, human being – is two. Moreover, we should not presume we already know what this ‘being-two’ means, for as I discuss in the Conclusion, Irigaray suggests that it resists normal systems of calculation by being irreducible to ‘two times one’. Instead, the ‘being’ of ‘being-two’ is found in-between.

Rather than deny that Irigaray’s thought is biased by her feminism, we should look more closely at what is at stake in that so-called bias. Irigaray interrogates philosophy from a critical feminist perspective because of a bias that she argues is already built in to the dominant forms philosophy has taken in the western tradition since Plato; thus, her bias is corrective. Moreover, the pre-existing masculinist bias she identifies is grounded on a series of blindspots and denials that protect philosophy’s own self-image: thus it is hardly surprising that some philosophers respond to Irigaray defensively. By accusing her of introducing a biased perspective, they can continue to remain blind to the ways in which philosophy itself has been dependent on the denial of difference, and specifically, the difference that woman embodies.

However, there is another reason why Irigaray poses a genuinely disturbing challenge to the philosophers. Her ‘corrective’ feminist perspective does not aim to cancel out a historically contingent but ‘improper’ masculinism in the name of establishing a ‘proper’ universal, neutral, or objective mode of thought. Were this the case, her position really would be re-absorbed by a model of philosophy that is the product and symptom of the very perspective she critiques. Rather, her aim is to challenge a masculinism that masquerades as universal, and an ideal of universality that masks an inadequate articulation of the nature of (human) being. In response, Irigaray calls into question the very idea that a universal or ‘neutral’ way of thinking could properly do justice to human beings. Instead, what is required...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy
• 1 Approaching Irigaray: Feminism, Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
• 2 Re-Visiting Plato’s Cave: Orientation and Origins
• 3 The Way Out of the Cave: A Likely Story . . .
• 4 Woman as Other: Variations on an Old Theme
• 5 Freud, Lacan, and Speaking (as a) Woman
• 6 The Status of Sexuate Difference
• 7 An Ethics of Sexuate Difference
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index