Abstract

A practicing psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray is also a linguist and a philosopher. Irigaray's earliest book, Le Language des déments (1973), is a study of language and various forms of mental disturbance. It was out of her experience of psychoanalysis, both as analysand and analyst (see 1977, p. 62), that in 1974 Irigaray came to publish Speculum of the Other Woman, a book which takes as its trajectory, however, the history of Western philosophy from Plato to hegel (see Article 6). In her reinterpretation of the Western philosophical tradition Irigaray identifies and excavates the repressed feminine that she sees as having been systematically sublimated by a logic of representation that functioned according to a monolithic economy geared towards masculinity. Her view is that “all Western discourse presents a certain isomorphism with the masculine sex: the privilege of unity, form of the self, of the visible, of the specularisable, of the erection” which “does not correspond to the female sex: there is not ‘a’ female sex” (1977, p. 64). Hence the title of her 1977 work This Sex Which is Not One, which can be read either as “the (female) sex that does not count as such within the masculine economy of the visible,” or as “the (female) sex that is not singular, but multiple” (see Jardine and Menke, 1991, p. 64).