Thinking with Irigaray

Mary C. Rawlinson, Sabrina L. Hom, Serene J. Khader, Mary C. Rawlinson, Sabrina L. Hom, Serene J. Khader

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781438439181
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Critica filosofica

Thinking with Irigaray takes up Irigaray's challenge to think beyond the androcentric, one-subject culture, identifying much that is useful and illuminative in Irigaray's work while also questioning some of her assumptions and claims. Some contributors reject outright her prescriptions for changing our culture, others suggest that her prescriptions are inconsistent with the basic ethical concerns of her project, and still others attempt to identify blind spots in her work. By confronting and challenging the mechanisms of masculine domination Irigaray has identified and applying these insights to a wide range of practical and contemporary concerns, including popular media representations of women's sexuality, feminist practice in the arts, political resistance, and yoga, the contributors demonstrate the unique potential of Irigaray's thought within feminist philosophy and gender studies.

PART ONE

ALTERNATIVES TO MASCULINE GENEALOGIES

ONE

ORESTES WITH OEDIPUS

Psychoanalysis and Matricide

Cheryl Lawler

In memory of Ieva Lapinska, who always held a space for my becoming and who continues to become in me.

The first other in the life of a man, the first human you with whom he communicates, is predominantly a feminine-maternal you. But the reality of this you becomes fused with an undifferentiated nature from which he must emerge and distinguish himself, and that he must deny as a possible partner in any communicative exchange. The you may finally be given back to the father, to God-the-Father, and later to the other masculine subjects situated inside a world constructed in spite of or against the first you.

—Luce Irigaray, Key Writings

INTRODUCTION

Give or take a few additions and retractions, our imaginary still functions in accordance with the schema established through Greek mythologies and tragedies…. And what is now becoming apparent in the most everyday things and in the whole of our society and our culture is that, at a primal level, they function on the basis of a matricide. (Irigaray 1991, 36)

It is my contention that we have reached a developmental impasse in psychoanalysis; our theories remain bound to repetitions within the same Imaginary logic of one, such that, for all of our seeming momentum, we remain steadfastly wed to the existing Symbolic. It is a necrophilic Symbolic founded upon and sustained by sacrifice. If psychoanalysis is to remain relevant and birth a new paradigm, then it must turn its technique upon itself, and through accurate diagnosis and interpretation of the pathology inherent in our theoretical base, create an opening for an elaboration of a logic of “at least two” (Irigaray 1996, 35). My gesturing in this chapter is twofold: (1) To demonstrate through the analysis of theory and clinical material the underlying matricide inherent in Western culture, including various psychoanalytic theories, which results in a monosexual economy of desire; and (2) through interpretation and working through of the matricidal pathology of the parental model, to begin the movement toward a new psychoanalytic theory of sexuate love based on intimacy rather than familiarity.

As Irigaray has argued, matricide is at the root of our one-subject economy of desire and, in fact, forms the unconscious substrate of the oedipal phase theory so central to psychoanalytic discourse (Irigaray 1991). This is why Irigaray (2004) wants to wrest gender relations from genealogy. A shift in the Symbolic is required. Such a shift in the Symbolic would allow for a different economy of desire with “at least two” positions and thus capable of creative exchange, as contrasted with the incessant negotiations characteristic of the one-subject economy. I argue that as long as the mother is subsumed by her “function” (Irigaray 1981; 1991) she cannot accede to subject status and thereby provide a check on the phallic power that continues to both shape culture and recreate the psychic structure of individuals in its image. However, while creating an opening in the Symbolic for the mother-as-subject is a necessary step toward the movement away from a familial economy of desire and the creation of an intimate economy of desire, it is not sufficient.

Psychoanalysis provides a framework through which to understand and shift pathology that has become structured within the psyche. We speak of a positive outcome in treatment as one in which structural change occurred. However, I want to argue that our theories themselves are symptomatic of a deep-seated and unconscious pathology that itself demands treatment. Psychoanalytic theory is complicit in the matricidal pathology as it perpetuates a one-subject economy of desire. When we take a closer look at some of our most revered theories and the authors of such theories, we find that they repeat the matricidal trauma even when this is not their express desire.

In our theories, the mother recedes into the background—the watery depths we refer to as pre-oedipal—as the child is initiated into the Symbolic world of autonomous individuality through the intervention of the father (Freud 1924) or the third term—the phallus (Lacan 1975, 67). The intervention of the father/phallus sets the necessary limit, allowing differentiation and achievement of a more “mature” level of development by the imposition of language—a language arising out of a very particularly structured Symbolic. In this Symbolic, sexual difference is imagined from one point of view that has already been codified in the systems of thought that shape identities. The linchpin that binds our Symbolic is based on a defensive denial of sexual difference (Irigaray 1985a; Chasseguet-Smirgel 1976). In this economy, women can become subjects of desire by abnegating their position as embodied women (Irigaray 1985b); they can “function” (Irigaray 1991; 1981) as maternal vessels, or finally, become commodified as objects of (male) desire (Irigaray 1985b; 1993b). In none of these positions is woman able to set a limit to phallocentric-shaped psychic structure. A third term is required precisely because the mother is not a subject in her own right and therefore cannot initiate the child into culture. Instead she represents the threat to (masculine) subjectivity. The relationship with her must be severed if the child is not to become psychotic. However, this psychic matricide exacts a hefty price both individually and culturally as we will see. It founds the one-sex, one-libidinal economy. We are left without a real limit to solipsistic subjectivity and are stranded in our journey toward genuine exchange with the other.

Without sexual difference as the limiting horizon, we remain culturally and intrapsychically unable to mature beyond a familial or parental economy of desire. With the father as the third term and the masculine as the only subject, the feminine is left unelaborated except as the refuse left over after he has constructed his identity (Irigaray 1985a; 2004) and his sexuality (Irigaray 1985b). Even though women can become subjects in this Symbolic, and even achieve a form of exchange within the parameters of its logic, with the maternal-feminine abandoned, all identificatory positions leading to subjectivity remain captive within a logic of one.¹ This leaves us without a horizon that can lead us toward a world of “at least two” subjects—a world of sexual difference and a true intersubjective exchange. I would argue that until we, as a culture, are capable of acknowledging the subjectivity of the immediate other,² of sexual difference—the other sex—we remain incapable of entertaining the alterity of those other others in our world.³ Another Symbolic register is necessary if we are to move beyond the parental, and into an intimate economy of desire. Intersubjectivity experienced from within this logical register would be unlike what we have been capable of imagining from within the parental model. It would set the stage for a new era with regard to both subjectivity and intimacy as it would be grounded in the reality of the corporeal sexual difference of the immediate other.

The erasure of the feminine is still perpetuated ad infinitum in its various mutations within postmodern discursive regimes, which in their movement toward multiplicity perpetuate the illusion of subversion, but in fact reinscribe ad nauseam the hegemony of the one—the same—and what Irigaray refers to as “the other of the same” (cf. Irigaray, Speculum, 1985). Cheah and Grosz argue that “Irigaray regards multiplicity as complicit with the logic of the one. In her view, the multiple is the one in its self-willed dispersal into unrelated atomistic singularities, many others of the same” (1998, 3).

Psychoanalytic theory, including its postmodern elaborations, has not escaped this flatland in which “difference” is constructed on a denial of sexual difference. In our theories therefore, we remain unable to negotiate our own oedipal stage of development such that we are able to move toward a post-oedipal and non-parental economy of desire. Instead, we remain haunted by the return of the ghost of the (un)dead mother⁴—still alive and quite monstrous in our collective and individual imaginations. The mother-monster is a part of our heritage as Westerners that we continue to recreate, and which insinuates itself into the deepest recesses of our psychic structures. The mother-monster requires extreme measures to keep her at bay. For this we must call upon the father, and even God-the-Father, to protect us from engulfment (or worse) where encounters with her are concerned. As I demonstrate through an examination of myth, psychoanalytic theory, and clinical data from my work with men and women, the mother-monster is alive and well. We ritually murder her again and again in our theories and in our psyches, at the same time that we require her return—the return of the repressed—so that we can assuage our guilty conscience, and also, repeat the cycle of death, rebirth, and death. Why a cycle of death and not birth? As I discuss, it is from the corpse of the dead mother that Western civilization is imagined to have sprung. And, in our theories, it is when her subjectivity begins to emerge, apart from her maternal function,⁵ that she must be destroyed.

AN ANCIENT MODERN-DAY TRAGEDY

Sexuality … gives the appearance … of an instinct, but that is only the precarious result of a historical evolution which at every stage of its development may bifurcate differently, resulting in the strangest aberrations. (Laplanche 1985, 15)

One might, when considering the history and myths subtending our sexuate theories, wonder: haven't we witnessed the “strangest aberrations”? For example, is it not strange that sexual desire has been imagined from only one point of view? Isn't it strange that libido is understood as moving in one direction toward “completion,” rather than as a vital and dynamic movement between lovers?

In discussing Aeschylus's Oresteia, Irigaray describes the cultural results of the murder of the mother (in this case, Clytemnestra) as issuing in the “non-punishment of the son, the burial of the madness of women—and the burial of women in madness—and the advent of the image of the virgin goddess, born of the father and obedient to his law in forsaking the mother” (Irigaray 1991, 37–38). As you may recall, the myth runs as such: Clytemnestra murders her husband Agamemnon when he returns with a mistress from his military campaign to win back the beautiful Helen. As an attempt to expedite a successful campaign, he had sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia. As Irigaray reminds us, Clytemnestra was, among other things, a passionate lover who had taken a lover of her own during her husband's long absence, having thought him dead. So when he returns triumphantly with his new mistress, “she kills him out of jealousy … [and] because he sacrificed their daughter to conflicts between men, a motive which is often forgotten by the tragedians” (1991, 31). Her son, Orestes, is then inspired by Apollo, son of Zeus, to kill his own mother in retaliation for the murder of his father and to insure the structure of the law of God-the-Father, Zeus. This murder drives Orestes mad.

When placed on trial for matricide, it is the motherless daughter of Zeus, Athena, who declares Orestes innocent. However, Athena herself is perhaps mad, although it is a madness she cannot begin to know because its roots run prior to her “birth” from the head of her father, Zeus, and are found in an even prior matricide—that of the mother of Athena, Metis. For, although she does not remember a mother and therefore has no way of symbolizing a relationship to her origin, she was not the motherless daughter that she has come to accept as part of her identity in Greek patriarchal tradition. Catherine Keller (1986) recounts Athena's story as produced in Hesiod.⁶ “Hesiod divulges a fact of critical significance: contrary to Athena's classical self-understanding, she does indeed have a mother” (Keller 1986, 54).

As Hesiod tells the tale, it was after the defeat of the Titans, signifying the defeat of the pre-Indo-European culture, that Olympian Zeus rapes/seduces Metis, the Titan goddess of Wisdom, whose symbol was the serpent. She becomes pregnant and in an act of usurpation, he swallows her whole. According to Keller, here is where we find the locus classicus of the “feminine within.” Athena herself is severed from any connection to her origin and becomes the perfect mouthpiece for the emerging patriarchal order and its figurehead, Zeus, who has appropriated both masculine and feminine intelligence for himself. The serpent breastplate worn by Athena is a telltale sign of her former association with her mother's bloodline—“the pre-Hellenic peoples, of which only distorted vestiges, lame or monstrous, seep through the symbolic overlay of the triumphant, Zeus-worshiping Achaean and Dorian invaders” (Keller 1986, 54).

In these pre-Hellenic cultures, the serpent was seen as a symbol of wisdom.⁷ By the time Perseus offers Medusa's severed head with her hair comprised of writhing serpents to Athena, it has been long forgotten that Medusa was once a beautiful virgin who was raped by the god Poseidon in the temple of Athena. It was Medusa, and not Poseidon, who was punished for his rape of her. For her “crime” Athena turned her beautiful hair into writhing serpents. Medusa's story becomes, according to Keller, the story of the hero, Perseus, who must kill her with Athena's help, as her visage has become literally petrifying. “By the time the tale takes written shape, the monster seems to exist only for the glory of the warrior who slaughters her” (Keller 1986, 51). She is, in fact, his creation, albeit with the help of the dutiful daughter, Athena.

Regarding Athena, Keller says of her that “she doubly displaces her female origins: positively from the mother to the father, and negatively from the female as self to the female as Other” (Keller 1986, 56)—Zeus and Medusa respectively—the memory of her mother's line relegated to the monstrous serpents—Medusa's severed head (her mother as given to her by the hero Perseus, as our mothers are “given” to us in masculine theories of our origin)—represented on her breastplate. Keller notes, “the name Medusa, a feminine form for ruler, stems from ...