Luce Irigaray

12 Key excerpts on "Luce Irigaray"

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  Profiles in Contemporary Social Theory

  • Anthony Elliott, Bryan S Turner, Anthony Elliott, Bryan S Turner(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Recently, feminists engaging with Irigaray's work have shown that it consists of much more than an attempt to `write the body' or merely to inscribe feminine desire onto the discursive body. The implication of this is that Irigaray's insistence upon the need to formulate a means of speaking (as) woman, re¯ects a desire to rework traditional patterns of sexed subjectivity in order to facilitate the production of the feminine in lan-guage and other symbolic systems. Feminists have seized upon this and have sought to demonstrate that Irigaray's thought can be used as a resource in relation to a number of dis-ciplines and arenas including feminist philosophy, textual practice and criticism, psychoanalytic practice, history, law, ethics, gender studies, and sexual politics. Current work on Irigaray's thought sets out to examine the roots of her ideas, tracing her debt to theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, and Heidegger (Burke et al., 1994). This shift in the way that feminists now choose to draw on Irigaray's thought marks the acknowl-edgement of her struggle to highlight `the necessity or inevitability of radical social or symbolic transformation' (Whitford, 1994: 29). Largely, this shift in perspective on Irigaray's work has been facilitated by the widespread availability of her texts in translation, which has enabled feminists to undertake a more detailed reading of Irigaray's in¯uences and origins. The wealth of material being produced in this context indicates a depth of potential in this return to Irigaray's work as text and the scene of writing surrounding her work will inevi-tably shift and evolve. The extent of the debate around Irigaray's thought is yet to be fully realized, yet it is undoubtedly the case that her work will continue to in¯uence the directions forged by feminist interrogations of culture. 191 Luce Irigaray IRIGARAY'S MAJOR WORKS Irigaray, Luce (1985a) Speculum of the Other Woman. (Trans. Gillian C. Gill.) Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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  Rethinking Culture, Organization and Management

  • Robert McMurray, Alison Pullen, Robert McMurray, Alison Pullen(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5   Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of the feminine Exploring a culture of sexual difference in the study of organizations Sheena J. Vachhani

  Since the publication of Speculum of the Other Woman , Luce Irigaray has founded some of what can now be thought of as the central claims of poststructuralist French feminism. Irigaray makes a turn to embodiment where the body is a site for the creative possibilities of the body, and her work initiates visceral and embodied forms of thinking about organizations. Irigaray intervenes in a number of philosophers’ work, from Plato to Nietzsche, as a way of unearthing the silent feminine and making it present. Irigaray’s work has gained prominence in management and organization studies and this chapter outlines the contribution of her work to ideas around: the question of difference and the ethics of sexual difference; the influence of psychoanalysis and the maternal in her work; critiques around biological essentialism; and, processes and strategies of writing that disturb and disinter conventional textual practices.

  Her analysis of Western philosophy centres on the critique of the existence of one subject, the masculine subject conceived through patriarchal order, that is to say the predominance of masculinity for understanding social and symbolic life. In Irigaray’s words, ‘It is not a matter of toppling that order so as to replace it – that amounts to the same thing in the end – but of disrupting, and modifying it, starting from an “outside” that is exempt, in part, from phallocratic law’ (Irigaray, 1985b: 68). Irigaray has been accused of perpetuating essentialist readings of identity and sexed bodies, however, proponents of her work suggest that her writing can be read as a form of strategic or political essentialism (Stone, 2006).

  Irigaray was born in Belgium in 1932 and holds doctoral degrees in Philosophy and Linguistics; she also trained as a psychoanalyst. She has also been active in women’s movements, especially in France and Italy. Irigaray’s work has predominantly attracted a feminist audience although she is also well positioned as a philosopher, especially in her earlier works. She has been critical of being asked biographical and personal questions. As Whitford (1991a) writes, Irigaray saw this as a distraction or disruption for those engaging with her work based on the well-founded understanding that women are neutralised and reduced through their biography. She was an outspoken critic of psychoanalysis, exemplified in Speculum of the Other Woman

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  Religion in French Feminist Thought

  Critical Perspectives

  • Morny Joy, Kathleen O'Grady, Judith L. Poxon(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  On Luce Irigaray Passage contains an image

  Chapter 1

  Marie-Andrée Roy

  Translated by Sharon Gubbay Helfer1

  WOMEN AND SPIRITUALITY IN THE WRITINGS OF Luce Irigaray 2

  A set of Themes having to do with spirituality punctuates Luce Irigaray’s writings and contributes to the originality of her body of work. In what follows I review some of the elements that anchor this set of themes, starting with her major work, Sexes et parentés, published in 1987 (and in English in 1993, as Sexes and Genealogies ), up to her most recent writings, Entre Orient et Occident (in English in 2002, as Between East and West ) and The Age of the Breath, originally published in German and English in 1999.

  The French philosopher and psychoanalyst has charted a singular course in the margins of the academic milieux with which she none the less carries on a lively dialogue internationally, in particular with European and North American intellectuals. This dialogue, in essence, centres on the content of Irigaray’s work, which is discussed and reviewed. The scope of the debate is best appreciated in the context of the aims Irigaray has in view. These include not only to contribute to the development of feminist thought but also to ‘elaborate a culture having two subjects respectful of each other’s differences, a model for coexistence amidst diversity at the universal level’ (Irigaray 1999b: back cover). Irigaray has undertaken to make this cultural model known and understood so as to give it the best possible exposure. In this she is pursuing a goal that is transformative and foundational for society and culture. The model emerges both from her theoretical work and from her lived experience. Her knowledge has its sources in texts and also in a reflexive turn back to the experience from which she draws her critique of contemporary culture and her vision for the future.

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  Sexual Subversions

  • Elizabeth Grosz(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4Luce Irigaray and sexual difference

  O

  NE

  of Kristeva’s most articulate contemporaries is Luce Irigaray, who is also a psychoanalyst, philosopher and feminist theorist. They share a number of striking similarities, which is not altogether surprising given their similar training, background, orientation and interests. But less noted in the secondary literature on French feminisms are the major differences and disagreements that place them on opposing sides in a number of theoretical controversies and political issues. In analysing Irigaray’s contributions to French feminist theory, the similarities— and differences — will need further elaboration. While both rely on a series of shared terms and theoretical frameworks (including the work of Lacan and Derrida), the similarities are largely superficial. Identifying them too closely obscures political and intellectual differences, differences in ‘styles’ of writing, in objects of investigation, in methods of analysis and in overall objectives.

  Irigaray is perhaps best known outside France as the most active and vocal advocate of the concept of sexual difference. Given her training in Lacanian psychoanalysis and her interest in Saussurian, structuralist and poststructuralist linguistics and language1 , her position seems close to and compatible with Kristeva’s understanding of sexual difference. Indeed, both are commonly described as feminists of sexual difference.2 Yet, as outlined in the last two chapters, Kristeva’s understanding of sexual difference entails the dissolution of all sexual identities and converts the feminist aspiration of establishing an identity for women into a dispersed process of sexual differentiation relevant to both sexes. Rather than seek a notion of women’s sexual autonomy and specificity, as Irigaray does, Kristeva aims to uncover women’s (repressed) masculinity and men’s (disavowed) femininity through the acknowledgement of a repressed semiotic, sexual energy or drive facilitation on which both male and female ‘identities’ are based and to which they are vulnerable. Where Kristeva challenges or deconstructs the notion of sexual identity, Irigaray actively affirms a project challenging and deconstructing the cultural representations of femininity so that it may be capable of representation and recognition in its own self-defined terms. She insists on precisely the notion of women’s sexual specificity

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  Unspeakable Things Unspoken

  An Irigarayan Reading of Otherness and Victimization in Judges 19–21

  • Isabelle M. Hamley(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Pickwick Publications

    (Publisher)

  1 . Irigaray: an overview

  The publication of Speculum in 1974 marked the beginning of Irigaray’s main research interest: deconstructing phallocentrism in language and culture and mapping out a different way of being for both genders. Her work divides into roughly three periods. Initially, she concentrated on deconstructing Western philosophical models, a “critique addressed to a monosubjective, monosexual, patriarchal, and phallocratic philosophy and culture.”2 Having made a space for woman to emerge, she then attempted to map out female subjectivity and the conditions necessary for its sustainability. Finally, she addresses the very possibility of intersubjective, inter-gender relationships.

  Irigaray’s initial concern was to expose how the dominance of a universal single principle in Western culture has precluded the emergence of and dialogue with a true Other. She tackled the main figures of classical philosophy, starting with Freud, as he embodies and makes explicit the outcome of centuries of phallocentric culture. She then works her way back to Marx, Nietzsche, Kant, Descartes, Socrates, and Plato. Over her next few books, she explores issues of religion, truth, and appearance in dialogue with Nietzsche.3 There we see the seeds of her dual approach, simultaneously seeking deconstruction and retrieval. She then deepens her focus on language, with its definition of reality and its role in identity construction and relationships.4 Critiquing Heidegger leads her to reflect on mediations, liminality, and the need for in-between spaces to distinguish between the One and the Other and make true communication possible.5

  Irigaray then shifts from deconstruction toward the emergence of a feminine subject. Linguistics becomes more prominent, together with social and political issues. She pays attention to the silences of past cultures so as to hear forgotten voices. An early concern is the retrieval of female genealogies, the mother-daughter relationship, and the necessity of women-to-women relationships to construct a female generic identity.6 Other work in that period focuses on linguistics and empirical study of the sexuation of language.7 Irigaray’s key linguistic principles center careful, precise speech analysis and a challenge to the idea of ‘neutral/neuter’ speech and of scientific methods as objective.8

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  Rewriting Difference

  Luce Irigaray and 'the Greeks'

  • Elena Tzelepis, Athena Athanasiou, Elena Tzelepis, Athena Athanasiou(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  Irigaray is the most radical of feminist theorists and the most difficult to read. For signs of that difficulty, one need only look at the different kinds of reception her work has received over the last three decades. In 1974, at the time of the publication of Speculum, de l’autre femme, her doctoral dissertation in philosophy, Irigaray was a practicing analyst, a member of Lacan’s École freudienne de Paris, and one of the EFP members who offered courses in psychoanalysis at the University of Paris at Vincennes. Several months after the publication of the book, she was suspended from her teaching at Vincennes. Accounts as to why she was given the cold shoulder by the Lacanian establishment indicate that some considered her book excessively philosophical and inappropriately political. 1 A decade later when Speculum was translated into English, along with a collection of essays, This Sex Which Is Not One, the Anglo-American response was of a different sort. Toril Moi found the work to be insuf- ficiently philosophical—that is to say insufficiently deconstructive—in its effort to go beyond the critique of woman as man’s other to the formula- tion of a positive femininity. 2 For Jacqueline Rose, Irigaray’s concern with the specificity of female drives displayed a failure of psychoanalytic rigor. We know from Lacan, Rose writes, that “there is no pre-discursive real- ity. And there is no feminine outside language. First, because the uncon- scious severs the subject from any unmediated relation to the body as such . . . and secondly because the ‘feminine’ is constituted as a division in language, a condition that produces the feminine as its negative term. If the woman is defined as other it is because the definition produces her as other, and not because she has another essence.” 3 The Irigaray who is read as not knowing this truth—the scandalously incorrect Irigaray—came to be the nodal point of subsequent Anglo-American wars about essential- ism.

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  Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray

  Language, Origin, Art, Love

  • Gail M. Schwab(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  The Reenchanted Garden: Participatory Sentience and Becoming-Subject in ‘Third Space,’ ” Cheryl Lynch-Lawler, working with the insights gained in her psychoanalytic practice, seeks sense-based and emotional pathways to the reintegration of the mind, body, and spirit, as she takes up Irigaray’s challenge to the Western logic of solids and urges us to seek in the natural world, as well as within our psyche, a fluidity of thought and a connectedness to our own inner wellspring of creativity, all of which we have come perilously close to losing in our capitalist-consumerist world of overly mediatized digital images and networks—representations of life that are cut off from living, breathing life, as Lynch-Lawler shows. Irigaray writes in “How Could We Achieve Women’s Liberation?” that we have begun to “act, experience, and even feel as an element of a more or less huge machine in which the relations between two elements are regulated by the whole without any freedom, responsibility, or even personal experience” (36), and her call for spiritual and artistic endeavor allowing us to connect to the whole of our being, as well as to others, vibrates here in Lynch-Lawler’s rejection of traditional Western philosophico-scientific logic and her search for the wholeness of human subjective becoming in new ways of “doing” science, in sensory immersion in nature, and in a more holistic relation to self, others, and the world.

  Irigaray has ceaselessly mined the canonical Western tradition, and in particular, the stories, tragedies, and philosophy of the Greeks, and her relationship to the Greek heritage has inspired many thinkers; I note here, in particular, the major collection edited by Elena Tzelepis and Athena Athanasiou, Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and “the Greeks ,” which includes important essays by Dorothea Olkowski, Mary Beth Mader, Lynne Huffer, Judith Still, Tina Chanter, and Luce Irigaray herself (see Tzelepis and Athanasiou 2010). Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray continues to develop this line of thought in the chapters by Rebecca Hill, Fanny Söderbäck, Kristin Sampson, and Alison Stone. Looking back beyond Aristotelian metaphysics, as well as beyond the pre-Socratics, to Homer and to the poets of antiquity she labels the “pre-pre-Socratics,” in “Thinking Life through the Early Greeks

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  An Introduction to Modern Feminist Theory

  • Jennifer Rich(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Humanities E-Books

    (Publisher)

  ( New French Feminisms 100) Irigaray’s stress on the doubleness of women’s sexual nature is a rejection of the mono-sexuality of phallocentrism. It also allows her to reject Freudian arguments that women’s sexuality is defined by a lack or an absence: for Irigaray, it is, on the contrary, always multiple and always independent. Her analysis accomplishes an inversion of needs—it is not woman who requires man (in fact, he does nothing but violate her always present sexuality and self-stimulation) it is he that requires her. Irigaray’s discussion of female sexuality functions as a broader commentary on male patterns of thinking, particularly on Occidental epistemology in which the individual is privileged over the collec-tive. Women’s multiplicity—her doubleness—is a somatic critique of this hegemony of the individual. So far away is the female in Irigaray’s conception from this kind of thinking that she resists any kind of naming or categorization: Whence the mystery that she [woman] represents in a cul -ture that claims to enumerate everything, cipher everything by units, inventory everything by individualities. She is nei-ther one nor two . She cannot, strictly speaking, be determined either as one person or as two. She renders any definition inadequate. Moreover she has no ‘proper’ name. ( New French Feminisms [ NFF ] 101) 44 Jennifer Rich Given that woman cannot ‘fit’ into the cartography of male thought, she can not be expected to communicate in ways that are understandable to those caught within a patriarchal mindset. Thus the typically male disparagement of women’s thinking as confused, irrational or superstitious is simply a lack of imagination: women’s thinking is only irrational if understood within a rigid paradigm of linear (phallocentric) thought. Women, then, can never say what ‘they mean’ because their meaning cannot be understood within a male-defined tradition of thought.

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  Essentially Speaking

  Feminism, Nature and Difference

  • Diana Fuss(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Speculum de l'autre femme in 1974 are inevitably based upon or in some way linked to this fear of essentialism. A summary sample of the most important and oft-cited of these criticisms is enough to demonstrate how impassioned and genuine the resistance to essentialism is for many feminists, and how problematic the reassessment of essential-ism's theoretical or political usefulness is likely to be.

  Irigaray and Her Critics

  In 1981, two critical essays on Luce Irigaray's work were published in the U.S., each in a well-known feminist academic journal: Christine Fauré’s “The Twilight of the Goddesses, or the Intellectual Crisis of French Feminism” appeared in Signs, and Carolyn Burke's “Irigaray Through the Looking Glass” appeared in Feminist Studies. Fauré’s critique, a translation from the French, is unquestionably the more severe. She objects to a general trend in French feminist theory, epitomized by Irigaray's search for a female imaginary, which marks “a retreat into aesthetics where the thrust of feminist struggle is masked by the old naturalistic ideal draped in the trappings of supposedly ‘feminine’ lyricism” (1981, 81).1

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  Conversations

  • Luce Irigaray(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Birgitte H. Midttun : My first and up to now only meeting with Luce Irigaray took place in Paris during the seminar ‘Luce Irigaray and the Future of Sexual Difference’ (directed by the Centre for Women and Gender Studies, University of Bergen, Norway, September 2006). My inner picture of this meeting is very much in the spirit of Irigaray and her lifelong work within philosophical thinking. After the seminar we were many younger female academics queuing up at the front of the seminar room, to get a special greeting and a signature in Irigaray’s books from herself, the main speaker that day. What was significant on this occasion was that the line hardly moved ahead. We waited and waited, and when there where only a few persons before me in the line, I understood why it didn’t move faster. Irigaray showed her awareness towards the participants of the seminar and gave each one of us her attention, and she really used the occasion well, getting to know us all, one at a time, asking about our profession, our language, our country of origin, and our academic subjects. In my forthcoming book – Kvinnereisen – 10 møter med feminismens tenkere ( Woman’s Journeys: Meetings with Feminist Thinkers ) – Luce Irigaray definitely gets the last word, and in a way the chance to summarize feminist thinking and theory from the last 30 or 40 years in Europe and the United States. There is a never-ending story here, Irigaray shows us new ways to go on working, thinking, doing and speaking in the name of the new woman to be , the woman we shall become. Reading Irigaray, we will never lose the sight of our origin as women, and neither will we stop asking ourselves, ‘What is really a woman?’ even Postscript: The Long Path Towards Being a Woman Conversation between Luce Irigaray and Birgitte H. Midttun though a long and difficult journey will be needed in order to know even parts of that answer, even today.

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  Irigaray and Politics

  A Critical Introduction

  • Laura Roberts(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  108 5 Luce Irigaray with Gayatri Spivak This, then, might be the moment to remember that, even when – in class, in a lecture room – the other seems a collection of selves and nothing seems displaced or cracked, what ‘really happens’ remains radically uncertain, the risky detail of our craft . . . Can it be imagined how this mischief conducts traffic between women’s solidarity across two sides of imperialism? (Spivak 1993a: 146) Might it be productive to think through the still harder task of reconnecting Gayatri Spivak with Luce Irigaray, so that the latter’s consistent citation predominantly as object of postcolonial critique becomes more difficult to justify (Spivak, 1987; Irigaray, 1985)? (Hemmings 2005: 131) Luce Irigaray’s thinking through of intersubjectivity in terms of the relations between two sexuate subjects raises the question, as Gail Schwab suggests, of thinking through sexuate difference as a global model for ethics (Schwab 1998). In this chapter, I turn to Gayatri Spivak’s work in order to meditate further on the possibility of thinking through an Irigarayan-inspired ethics of sexuate difference in our con- temporary global contexts. How can we articulate a universal ethics of sexuate difference? What issues does this raise for structuring rela- tions between and among women? How do we communicate cross- culturally between traditions in a way that, as I argue in Chapter 6, Luce Irigaray attempts to do in Between East and West? With these questions in mind, this chapter examines how Spivak mobilises Iriga- ray’s work on sexuate difference to address women’s solidarity and what this suggests about the possibility of cross-cultural communica- tion between and among women. In particular, this chapter considers the way Spivak engages with – and goes beyond – Irigaray’s thinking of sexuate difference in two articles: ‘French Feminism in an Interna- tional Frame’ (1981) and ‘French Feminism Revisited’ (1993b).

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  French Interpretations of Heidegger

  An Exceptional Reception

  • David Pettigrew, François Raffoul, David Pettigrew, François Raffoul(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  Irigaray has been criticized for her prioritizing of sex- ual difference and her neglect of, or worse, distortion of other differences such as race, ethnicity, class, and sexualities other than the heterosexual norm. The purpose of this paper has not been to specifically address these concerns, but rather to explore the philosophical underpinnings of this claim in their indebt- edness to Heidegger’s own thinking, an understanding of which, I would argue, is necessary for adequately considering her claim to the prioritizing of sexual difference. For Irigaray’s concern is that if this first difference that is most prox- imate is not acknowledged, then we will fail to recognize or adequately take into account other “diversities that compose the human species” in accordance with “their subjective differences”; instead we risk reducing them to “secondary elements” or limiting them “to a simple genetic inheritance” (2002a, p.120). Similarly, I have tried to show how it is important to begin with this proximate relation between the two thinkers in order to fully assess Irigaray’s project. Hei- degger’s insights into the end of metaphysics, identity, and difference, as well as Dwelling with Language 227 relations within the same belong, for Irigaray, to a great thinker whose “light” she attempts to gather in, even as she respects the difference between their worlds (2001a, p. 315). Notes 1. Luce Irigaray,“From The Forgetting of Air to To be Two,” trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhácek. In Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger, Nancy J. Holland and Patricia Huntington, eds. (University Park, PA:The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001a), p. 315. 2.Irigaray, L’oubli de l’air chez Martin Heidegger (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983); translated as The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary Beth Mader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999): hereafter the first page number will refer to the Eng- lish edition, the second to the French.

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