Irigaray for Architects

Peg Rawes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134084036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Specifically for architects, the third title in the Thinkers for Architects series examines the relevance of Luce Irigaray's work for architecture. Eight thematic chapters explore the bodily, spatio-temporal, political and cultural value of her ideas for making, discussing and experiencing architecture. In particular, each chapter makes accessible Irigaray's ideas about feminine and masculine spaces with reference to her key texts.

Irigaray's theory of 'sexed subjects' is explained in order to show how sexuality informs the different ways in which men and women construct and inhabit architecture. In addition, her ideas about architectural forms of organization between people, exterior and interior spaces, touch and vision, philosophy and psychoanalysis are explored. The book also suggests ways in which these strategies can enable architectural designers and theorists to create ethical architectures for the user and his or her physical and psychological needs.

Concisely written, this book introduces Irigaray's work to practitioners, academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students in architectural design and architectural history and theory, helping them to understand the value of cross- and inter-disciplinary modes of architectural practice.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

This book provides architects with an introduction to the work of French thinker, Luce Irigaray. Referring to a selection of her publications since her first controversial book, Speculum de l’autre femme (1974) and her most recent collection of essays, Key Writings (2004), I explore ways in which her work specifically engages with architectural design, history, theory and criticism.

Irigaray’s writing contains numerous discussions about the importance of space and spatial relationships between women and men in Western culture, which are also central to architectural design, history, theory and criticism. She refers to physical and architectural spaces (e.g. houses, passages, paths, doorways, thresholds, boundaries, copulas, porticos and bridges) and geometric ideas (e.g. circles, diagonals, inside/outside relations or envelopes). She also examines methods and techniques of constructing space that are used in architecture, including: surveying and measuring procedures; mathematics and geometry; topology and topography; and the history of ideas of space, time and matter. In addition, Irigaray examines how visual, material and linguistic systems of representation are ‘architectonic’; for example, in her examination of the textual, discursive, philosophical and technical expressions that constitute the individual subject and space in Western culture.

However, Irigaray’s ideas about space and architecture are not simply neutral and unsexed references to architectural forms of spatial organisation. Instead, her interest in these modes of cultural expression is always informed by her belief that men and women express themselves differently.

Irigaray’s ideas are valuable for architects because she
examines how gender and subjectivity construct our
experiences of Western culture and architecture.

The ‘sexed subject’ is a term that Irigaray uses throughout her career. In her writing up to the mid-1980s it is exclusively concerned with women and their expressions. However, in her later publications, the term is developed so that it also represents men who seek to rethink male subjectivities (i.e. ideas relating to the self), as distinct from traditions that refer to universal ideas of the male subject in Western culture. Therefore, for Irigaray, Western culture is never simply a reflection of a universal idea of the person or subject. Consequently, her ideas may be best understood with reference to specific examples of architectural design, history, theory and criticism that also prioritise the importance of different genders and subjectivities for architecture.

Irigaray’s ideas are valuable for architects because she examines how gender and subjectivity construct our experiences of Western culture and architecture. In particular, her writings explore the ways in which Western culture informs or limits the needs and desires of the individual, especially with respect to women. Irigaray argues that ‘sexed’ expressions of women and space are needed so that we can properly understand Western culture and the experience of being women and men. For Irigaray, the way in which men and women express themselves differently is therefore inherently connected to Western culture’s institutions, languages or systems of knowledge and modes of self-expression. So, an individual’s sexed subjectivity is integral to the production and reception of architecture and the built environment; for example, it informs ideas of matter, space and time; expresses the physical and the psychological experiences of inhabiting architecture in modern Western cultures; constructs the social, intellectual and professional structure of the different branches of the discipline and; informs the way in which architectural design, history, theory and criticism are related to each other. As a result, her work is a valuable source through which to examine the different ways in which architecture and the built environment are sexed cultures.

Irigaray’s publications are prolific, including the original texts in French and Italian, and subsequent translations into Dutch, English, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Hebrew. This book focuses on texts that are available to English-speaking readers. However, the combination of her bilingual skills, the different linguistic origins of vocabulary which are located in the Romance languages and English especially, together with Irigaray’s interest in etymology, produce different interpretations of meaning across the translations. The reader will therefore benefit from being sensitive to the way in which the meaning of words differ between the original French and Italian texts and the English translations; for example, the multiple meanings generated by the feminine and masculine pronouns, ‘elle’ and ‘il’ (and ‘lui’ or ‘la’) in the original texts, versus their translation into ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘the’ and ‘it’, in the English translations.

I refer to five key works by Irigaray:

Speculum of the Other Woman (1974/1985)
This Sex Which Is Not One (1977/1985)
An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984/1993)
The Irigaray Reader (1991)
Key Writings (2004).

In addition, I refer to selected essays in another nine publications:

Marine Lover: Of Friedrich Nietzsche (1980/1991)
The Forgetting of Air: In Martin Heidegger (1983/1999)
To Speak is Never Neutral (1985/2002)
Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution (1989/1993)
Je, Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference (1990/1993)
I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History (1992/1996)
Democracy Begins Between Two (1994/2001)
To Be Two (1994/2001)
The Way of Love (2002).

Also, by highlighting the ideas in Irigaray’s writing that are most relevant for exploring the practical, social, political and cultural processes involved in architecture, I do not therefore devote as much attention to Irigaray’s discussions about linguistics and politics as researchers from literature, women’s and cultural studies. Readers are also advised not take these sources as an all-encompassing blueprint for architectural ideas or the basis of a universal architectural language and method. Rather, the aim of this book is to augment the development of informed sexed historical, critical and creative designing, thinking, writing and speaking in all aspects of architecture.

Below, a short introduction to Irigaray’s biography and intellectual career leads into a contextual outline of her ideas in relation to discussions of subject-theory, gender and feminism that exist in architectural design, history, theory and criticism. Six thematic chapters then explore Irigaray’s ideas about subjectivity, space and time, the body and sensory perception, science and politics. In each chapter, I refer to short extracts of her writing in order to give readers an insight into her different techniques of writing, thinking and speaking. In addition, each chapter briefly refers to examples of buildings, design projects, essays and books by designers, historians, theorists and critics who also explore sexed forms of architecture. Finally, each chapter ends with a series of dialogue questions to further stimulate the reader’s exploration of the relationship between his or her ideas, and the design and interpretation of architecture and the built environment. At the end of the book, an Appendix provides guidance on how to read Irigaray’s texts, together with selected references and a list of additional publications that provide further contexts for developing understandings of her work.

CHAPTER 2
Situating Irigaray

Luce Irigaray was born in 1930 and has French nationality. Growing up in Belgium to parents with Belgian, Italian and French ancestry, Irigaray’s academic training began in Louvain, Belgium, where she studied for a degree and then completed a doctorate in French and Philosophy in 1955. After teaching in secondary education for a number of years she took a second degree in psychology and a Diploma in psychopathology at the Sorbonne in Paris. Also during this period she trained as a psychoanalyst and attended Jacques Lacan’s seminars on psychoanalysis. Then, from 1964, she worked as a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research, later becoming a research director at the Centre in 1986. Between 1970 and 1974 she taught at the University of Vincennes, and was a member of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris. In 1973 she submitted two further doctorates, one on poetics and psychopathologies, and Speculum de l’autre femme, which was rejected by the University and resulted in her leaving her teaching position. However, Speculum was very quickly published, in 1974, and Irigaray’s subsequent career has been significant, including: receiving international visiting professorship appointments; giving international lectures and seminars; and working with feminists, women’s groups and democratic movements, especially in northern Italy (for further discussion of Irigaray’s biography and intellectual career, also see Margaret Whitford’s introduction to The Irigaray Reader [1991b] and Irigaray’s preface and section introductions to Key Writings).

Broadly speaking, three phases of Irigaray’s writing can be observed in her work from 1974 to the current day. Irigaray’s experiences of academic training are most strongly reflected in the first phase of her writings from 1973 to the mid 1980s. First, the rejection of Speculum and her break from Vincennes partly contribute towards her fierce criticism of how modern Western culture constructs social and gender relations; in particular, the control of ideas that academic disciplines, such as philosophy and psychology, exert on their respective members. Second, texts from this period are characterised by her intensive critique (i.e. criticism) of the physical and psychological construction of gendered subjectivity in Western culture, which she calls ‘sexual difference’. Principally, this involves her in analysing philosophical, psychoanalytic and linguistic texts to show how they construct our physical and psychological experiences of being women and men. Irigaray’s essays and books from this period, therefore, focus especially on the structures, languages and expressions that consciously and unconsciously inform cultural ideas about the different ways in which women and men express themselves.

A second mode of writing is also evident in texts written between the early 1980s and the mid 1990s. Here, Irigaray expands her criticism of Western culture into a more explicitly poetic style of writing that explores physical forms of sexual difference (e.g. concerning the body) and psychic forms of sexual difference (e.g. concerning our desires and language). These texts also develop ‘performative’ methods of writing that promote historical and mythological modes of feminine expression, and make links between Irigaray’s ideas and those of other contemporary thinkers working in France at the time, especially, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva.

Irigaray’s work during the 1970s and early 1980s also needs to be considered in relation to a number of different intellectual contexts. First, her work is developed after Simone de Beauvoir’s writing on gender and politics in the 1940s and 1950s (e.g. The Second Sex, 1949). Second, her ideas are informed by ‘post-structuralist’ philosophical debates, and the political and social action in France during the late 1960s. Alongside Cixous and Kristeva, Irigaray shares a criticism of Western culture for failing to properly express the needs and desires of women, yet each also privileges feminine forms of linguistic expression (that some commentators have called ‘écriture féminine’). Cixous, for example, ‘deconstructs’ cultural and aesthetic understandings of woman and femininity (e.g. The Newly Born Woman, 1975), and Kristeva analyses the ambivalent, sometimes ‘abjec...

Table of contents

• Thinkers for Architects
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Illustration Credits
• Acknowledgements
• CHAPTER 1 Introduction
• CHAPTER 2 Situating Irigaray
• CHAPTER 3 Doubles and Multiples
• CHAPTER 4 Passages and Flows
• CHAPTER 5 Touching and Sensing
• CHAPTER 6 Diagonals, Horizontals and Asymmetry
• CHAPTER 7 Bridges, Envelopes and Horizons
• CHAPTER 8 Voices, Politics and Poetics
• Appendix: Guidance for Reading Irigaray
• Bibliography of Works Cited
• Further Reading
• Index