Luce Irigaray

This paper presents a feminist intervention into debates concerning the relation between human subjects and a divine ideal. I turn to what Irigarayan feminists challenge as a masculine conception of ‘the God’s eye view’ of reality. This ideal functions not only in philosophy of religion, but in ethics, politics, epistemology and philosophy of science: it is given various names from ‘the competent judge’ to the ‘the ideal observer’ (IO) whose view is either from nowhere or everywhere. The question is whether, (...) as Taliaferro contends, my own philosophical argument inevitably appeals to the impartiality and omni-attributes of the IO. This paper was delivered during the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God. (shrink)

I begin with the assumption that a philosophically significant tension exists today in feminist philosophy of religion between those subjects who seek to become divine and those who seek their identity in mutual recognition. My critical engagement with the ambiguous assertions of Luce Irigaray seeks to demonstrate, on the one hand, that a woman needs to recognize her own identity but, on the other hand, that each subject whether male or female must struggle in relation to the other in order (...) to maintain realism about life and death. No one can avoid the recognition that we are each given life but each of us also dies. In addition, I raise a more general, philosophical problem for analytic philosophers who attempt to read Continental philosophy of religion: how should philosophers interpret deliberately ambiguous assertions? For example, what does Irigaray mean in asserting, 'Divinity is what we need to become free, autonomous, sovereign'? To find an answer, I turn to the distinctively French readings of the Hegelian struggle for recognition which have preoccupied Continental philosophers especially since the first half of the last century. I explore the struggle for mutual recognition between women and men who must face the reality of life and death in order to avoid the projection of their fear of mortality onto the other sex. This includes a critical look at Irigaray's account of subjectivity and divinity. I turn to the French philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff in order to shift the focus from divinity to intersubjectivity. I conclude that taking seriously the struggle for mutual recognition between subjects forces contemporary philosophers of religion to be realist in their living and dying. With this in mind, the lesson from the Continent for philosophy of religion is that we must not stop yearning for recognition. Indeed, we must even risk our autonomy/divinity in seeking to recognize intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Julian of Norwich (b. 1342) anticipated the ontological and epistemological work on sexed embodiment pioneered in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the 20th century. Her epistemology of sensual ‘showings’ helped reconfigure women’s embodiment and speech acts (‘bodytalk’): by recognizing cognitive emotions and the knowledge-producing body; and by envisioning the intertwining of human flesh with All That Is. The paper next examines Merleau-Ponty’s somatic discourse on the chiasmic flesh, which leads to a discussion of Irigaray’s work on poetic mimesis.

This article reconsiders the issue of Luce Irigaray's proximity to Jacques Derrida on the question of woman. I use Derrida's reading of Nietzsche in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (1979) and Irigaray's reading of Heidegger in L'Oubli de l'air (1983) to argue that reading them as supplements to one another is more accurate and more productive for feminism than separating one from the other. I conclude by laying out the benefits for feminism that such a reading would offer.

In this essay, I argue for an alliance between deconstruction and feminist theology. I forge this alliance by demonstrating deconstruction's usefulness for helping feminist theology deal more adequately with differences of race between women. I argue that 'deconstruction' can help feminist theology uncover the roots of its hegemony and learn to think 'race' and 'gender' differently. ;According to my reading of deconstruction, Derrida and Irigaray uncover a persistent patterning which structures our institutions, our thinking, our writing, our politics, etc. This (...) is what Derrida means by 'the text of western metaphysics' and what Irigaray calls the west's 'cultural grammar.' Their analyses suggest that this text is not a tool which we can pick up or put down at will. Rather, it inscribes us as much as we inscribe it. ;Feminist theology exhibits inscription by this text. I argue that the central texts of feminist theology are governed by the discursive structure of an essential 'woman' which blinds feminist theology to the difference 'race' makes for 'gender.' Through a reading of Derrida, Irigaray, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on 'race' and 'gender,' I show that feminist theology's separation of an essential 'woman' from 'race' emerges out of a larger text which attempts to keep the differences of 'race' and 'gender' in check. ;Deconstruction also offers strategies for intervening in this text in order to disrupt its mastery of these differences. These interventions open the text up for those whom the text defines as its 'others' allowing us to inhabit the text differently. Following out the problematics of 'race' and 'gender' in deconstruction undercuts the trajectory of their separation in feminist theology . In helping feminist theology unearth the roots of its own hegemony and think race and gender differently, I argue that deconstruction also offers feminist theology resources for carrying its critique and construction to a deeper level. Thus, this essay serves as a prolegomenon to further feminist theological reflection through this alliance. (shrink)

This essay considers the tensions informing Nietzsche's reflection on intertwined issues of nature, art, sexuality, and the feminine. Through the figure of Dionysus, Nietzsche articulates a suggestive understanding of generation as the upsurge of nature in its transformative movement. The juxtaposition of Luce Irigaray's elaboration of the Dionysian calls for an interrogation of Nietzsche's work regarding (1) the sublimation of nature into art and of sexuality or sensuality into artistic drives, (2) the oblivion of sexual difference in the coupling of (...) Apollo and Dionysus, and (3) the disappearance of love from the scene of creativity and procreation and, concomitantly, the emphasis on suffering and dismemberment. (shrink)

No memory can follow the traces of the past. It is an immemorial past—and this also is perhaps eternity, whose signifyingness obstinately throws one back to the past. Eternity is the very irreversibility of time, the source and refuge of the past. (Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” 30)Keeping the senses alert means being attentive in flesh and in spirit. (Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, 148).

Is the memory of touching always disguised by senses that forget where they come from? Creating distancethrough a mastery that constitutes the object as a monument built in place of the subject’s disappearance.The memory of touching? The most insistent and the most difficult to enter into memory. The one that entailsreturning to a commitment whose beginning and end cannot be recovered.Memory of the flesh, where that which has not yet been written is inscribed, laid down? That which has a place,has (...) taken place, but has no language. The felt, which expresses itself for the first time. Declares itself to theother in silence.One must remember this and hope that the other remembers. Lodge it in a memory that serves as its bedand its nest, while waiting for the other to understand. Make a cradle for him inside and out while leaving himfree, and keep oneself in the memory of the strength that revealed itself, that acted. (Irigaray, 215–16). (shrink)

Irigaray’s engagement with Aristotelian physics provides a specific diagnosis of women’s ontological and ethical situation under Western metaphysics: Women provide place and containership to men, but have no place of their own, rendering them uncontained and abyssal. She calls for a reconfiguration of this topological imaginary as a precondition for an ethics of sexual difference. This paper returns to Aristotelian cosmological texts to further investigate the topologies of sexual difference suggested there. In an analysis both psychoanalytic and phenomenological, the paper (...) rigorously traces a teleological and oedipal narrative implicit in the structure of the Aristotelian cosmos, in which desire for the mother is superseded by love for the father. Further, the paper argues that this narrative is complicated by certain other elements in the Aristotelian text—aporias involving the notion of boundary and the relationship between space and time, the fallenness of the feminine, and the ineliminably aleatory qualities of matter. The paper concludes that such elements may provide material for disrupting this teleology of gender, opening onto not merely an ethics of sexual difference, but providing space and place for a proliferation of non-normative, queer, transgender and intersex modes of sexed and gendered subjectivity. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray claims that sexual difference is perhaps the significant issue of our age. I argue that Irigaray's essays on central figures in the history of Western philosophy must be read in terms of the issue of sexual difference. I situate Irigaray within a recent, feminist theoretical focus on the status of "the body" . The body, until recently, like woman herself, has been neglected both by philosophy and by feminism. Rather than being considered a worthy topic of investigation, the (...) body has been conceived as merely neutral and passive. Likewise, sexual difference has been simply assumed. For Irigaray, to think through the issue of sexual difference means to rethink the relation between man and woman--as well as between all traditional categories of opposition. I propose that, by emphasizing a positive sense of ambiguity, Irigaray reworks traditional binaries to establish an "innovative" relation. I conclude that Irigaray's project, interpreted in terms of the issue of sexual difference, has particular significance for recent scholarship in the area of "race." "Racial difference," like "sexual difference," is a concept that relies on hidden assumptions regarding the body. To bring these assumptions to the forefront is, therefore, to rethink the relation between the races. ;I support the thesis of the dissertation by providing readings of Irigaray's readings of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel. Essays central to dissertation chapters are: "Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato, Symposium, 'Diotima's Speech,"' and "Place, Interval: A Reading of Aristotle, Physics IV" in An Ethics of Sexual Difference; and "The Eternal Irony of the Community" in Speculum of the Other Woman. I demonstrate that while "sexual difference" has been thematically neglected by the tradition of Western metaphysics, the issue is nonetheless revealed in the precise texts that avoid or omit it. I argue that Irigaray's claim with respect to sexual difference is, thereby, two-fold: Irigaray maintains that sexual difference has not been thought by the Western philosophical tradition, while she simultaneously locates and discloses a genuine thinking of sexual difference within the tradition she criticizes. Irigaray neither dismisses the tradition nor adopts it in its usual rendering. Likewise, "sexual difference" , although elided by Western philosophy and feminism, resists a complete obliteration. The ability of "sexual difference" to resist erasure, I suggest, parallels the "nature" of bodies to extend the borders of traditional frameworks. This claim regarding bodies is shown to hold not only for the sexually marked body, but also for the racially marked one. (shrink)

Responding to the work of previous critics of psychiatry, who have associated its undue dominance with both a modern scientific paradigm and political factors, I put forward a theoretical challenge based on MacIntyre`s work on Aquinas and Aristotle, but adding the museum and assembly as conceptual thinking tools. -/- MacIntyre`s work on practices, tradition-constituted enquiry, Marxist ideology and Kuhn are all used in putting forward a pre-modern view of knowledge. The feminist philosophy of Luce Irigaray widens the project to include (...) psychotherapy. I put forward a workable and kind version of psychiatric medicine which sets the work of the mental health service user movement in context. (shrink)

Thesis --Macquarie University, Faculty of Arts, Department of Media, Music, and Cultural Studies, 2009.

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This article revisits Irigaray's theory of sexual difference in the light of more contemporary developments in terms of nomadic becomings and non-unitary subjectivity, especially in Deleuze. It defends the notion of embodied materiality on philosophical grounds, by linking it to the issues of power, access, hegemony and exclusion, which are central to post-structuralism. Through a detailed analysis of the sexual politics of difference feminism, the author argues for a non-reactive redefinition of the feminine as a project of becoming, and connects (...) it firmly to feminist discussions about gender and queer theory. (shrink)

: This essay examines Irigaray's analysis of politics and the political implications of her critique of sacrificial orders that repress difference/matter. I suggest that her descriptions of a fluid "feminine" can be read as an alternative symbolic not dependent on repression. This idea is politically promising in opening a possibility for justice and a nonantagonistic intersubjectivity. I conclude by assessing Irigaray's concrete proposals for sexuate rights and a civil identity for women.

This essay examines Irigaray's analysis of politics and the political implications of her critique of sacrificial orders that repress difference/matter. I suggest that her descriptions of a fluid "feminine" can be read as an alternative symbolic not dependent on repression. This idea is politically promising in opening a possibility for justice and a nonantagonistic intersubjectivity. I conclude by assessing Irigaray's concrete proposals for sexuate rights and a civil identity for women.

This dissertation mediates between political theory, feminist critique, and continental ethics by presenting Irigaray's critique of Western philosophy and politics. I argue that Irigaray's work provides an analysis of the conceptual framework structuring and legitimizing the organization of power in modern democracies. Like other continental philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas, Irigaray focuses on the way difference has been excluded from the Western tradition. However, her discussion of sexual difference as a difference between two non-hierarchical terms (...) distinguishes her not only from liberal social contract theory, but from postmodern critiques of liberalism. ;I argue that both liberal theorists such as Hobbes and Rawls, and postmodern thinkers such as Derrida and Levinas, share the common premise that any political order must repress and hierarchize difference in order to found itself. Irigaray's most significant contribution to political philosophy is to place this certainty about foundational violence in question. Her analysis of sexual difference permits her to develop an alternative account of the foundation and aims of political order. In her account, order emerges through and aims at a creative encounter between uniquely embodied individuals. Such a community recognizes the particular needs of its members through the establishment of sexuate rights. This framework more adequately reflects the human experience of plurality than the neutral procedures characteristic of liberalism. In this way, Irigaray's work contributes to current debates on democracy and difference by providing an account of how difference can be recognized within the community without lapsing into incoherence or excessive fragmentation. (shrink)

Many critics view Irigaray's work as an extension or deconstruction of a Lacanian paradigm. Few actually analyse it as a direct challenge to Lacanian concepts of symbolic subjectivity, and the consequent, alternative framework this would envisage. This article discusses a poss ible beyond the phallus, in relation to mediating concepts of the female imaginary and symbolic within her work, and an understanding of the female imaginary and symbolic within different feminist interpretations of the maternal imaginary and symbolic, arguing that the (...) imaginary is crucial in delineating a non-separatist cultural sublimation of female desire. Feminist revisions of the Oedipal by Jessica Benjamin and Kaja Silverman are examined in relation to the question of a maternal imagin ary and symbolic. Irigaray objects to Silverman's privileging of a Lacan ian concept of symbolic castration because it cannot negotiate between the literal relation to the body, and the metaphors and language of our cultural symbolic. Her female imaginary and symbolic provide this mediating link in direct challenge to the overly literal penis of Freud's castration complex and the essentially metaphorical nature of Lacan's phallus. Her mediation is related to the work of diverse psychoanalytic thinkers such as Andrew Samuels, Cornelius Castoriadis and Anthony Elliott. Returning to a feminist reading by Margaret Whitford, this article finally negates a Lacanian understanding of these structures and goes on to explore Irigaray's creative bodily imaginary, within two of her papers on analytic practice. Elaboration of a bodily and creative imaginary within the clinical setting can represent necessary mediation between real and symbolic and between the psyche and culture: this HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 10 No. 2 @ 1997 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) pp. 41-60 [0952-6951(199705)10:2] mediation is personified through the hysteric, not through the Oedipal Law of the Father, which is finally the key question in culturally locat ing female desire, thereby connecting the theory of psychoanalysis with practice and with history. (shrink)

In a reading of René Descartes's The Passions of the Soul, Luce Irigaray explores the possibility that wonder, first of all passions, can provide the basis for an ethics of sexual difference because it is prior to judgment, and thus nonhierarchical. For Descartes, the passion of generosity gives the key to ethics. I argue that wonder should be extended to other differences and should be combined with generosity to form the basis of an ethics.