I have learned to be suspicious of myself, of my motives and my desires, psychoanalysis taught us as much. But now I think we should rather interrogate the desires and motives we do not feel as well. (I know that this leaves little room for just being, which maybe is the point as well…) For example, I spent a decade reading and writing about Luce Irigaray’s work — my dissertation began from her work and extended from it — and yet I have barely written about her in the last ten years, even though I think about her ideas often.
Irigaray’s ideas are kind of kooky. For example, take her declaration at the start of An Ethics of Sexual Difference, that in order to think sexual difference we will have to rethink space and time. What? What do space and time have to do with the woman question, or with gender?
Or take how she seems to have taken seriously Simone de Beauvoir’s quip, in the “Introduction to The Seccond Sex, that perhaps women do not exist, laying the groundwork for an understanding of woman as more of a metaphor than person — a walking living container for man’s reproduction through time, and or course, for his pleasure. Sure, Beauvoir taught us that to be a woman is to live under erasure, but to not exist at all? And yet, there is a lot of evidence for our lack of existence, if Irigaray’s reading of the history of Western thought is on the right track.
I used to say that the only academics I admired are ones who had been kicked out of their institutions, a self-fulfilling prophecy given my own... trajectory? The minute I learned that Irigaray had been kicked out of the Freudian School (L'École Freudien) after the publication of her first book, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), I knew she was a woman after my own heart. Looking for support, she reached out the the most famous feminist in France at that time, Simone de Beauvoir. She sent Beauvoir an autographed copy of Speculum, but then never heard back. Ejected from her academic and professional context, and then also rejected by the prominent feminist, she never forgave Beauvoir, and her relationship to feminism as a political movement continued to be fraught with difficulty.
To be fair, Beauvoir’s ghosting of Irigaray is perfectly understandable, really. Freudian psychoanalysis was discredited especially hard in feminist circles. Penis envy? We think not. Also, Irigaray’s seeming adoration for Emmanuel Levinas flew in the face of Beauvoir’s very long footnote in The Second Sex discounting his take on the feminine Other. It was probably naive of Irigaray to think Beauvoir would come to her defense.
The thing about Irigaray’s work is that it is at once conservative and radical, and in such a way that it is undecidable which she is. Her reception in US American circles served to really confuse matters, because she was being read alongside radical feminist who took (hetero)-sexuality to be the linchpin for patriarchy. Irigaray didn’t much like being bunched up with the dykes, and did not help herself much throughout the years, disavowing the lesbian reading of her early essays (“When Our Lips Speak Together” is philosophical erotica); and then, doubling down on the essentialism explicit in her work from the start, and essentialism we US Americans had defended as “strategic essentialism.” If anything, her writing became more and more essentialist, and heterosexist with time. She did not seem to care much for us US American radical feminists on the other side of the pond, happily misreading her work to our heart’s content. Neither was she friendly with radical marxist and socialist feminist in France, such as Christine Delphy, who has written about the creation of “French Feminism” in anglo-American contexts.
It’s kind of a miracle that Irigaray’s work has even survived, and maybe it should just be allowed to die out. That is how I feel about it on some days, on the days where the conservatism and essentialism grates on me, the way someone grates on you because they remind you of someone you know (yourself).
Ten years is a long time to devote to someone’s work, only to discover that you were just reading yourself into the work. It’s not her fault you didn’t pay closer attention. But is this not what we do with all the authors we love? The history of thought, of philosophy, is driven forward by people’s misreadings, is it not? My Irigaray is mine and my generation of feminist and feminist philosophers who thought sexual difference was a good idea. Why did we think it was a good idea? That is perhaps what is left to be writen about.
Maybe I should not pre-judge the utility of the US American reading of Irigaray, of my generation of sexual difference feminists, even if it is not what the author herself meant us to take away from her work. I found it useful, and maybe you will too, to understand and get our bearings in this world. There are days when I think about what is happening right now with women’s reproductive rights, and I think maybe Irigaray is even more relevant today. In the same way that 1970’s radical feminism has found a new audience, Irigaray could also find a new audience now.
But her work should be handled with some care and a suspicion towards our own attraction to it, to the romance of it. Be careful to stay on this side of the strategic essentialism line, as it were. As with the work of radicals Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, work that plays all too well with some very conservative ideas of gender and sexuality, we can say both that we understand the desire to condemn and censor porn, and agree with much of their analysis, while not giving in to our more regressive desires.
You might have heard Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehogs (thinkers who pursue one big idea) and foxes (thinkers who pursue many ideas), Irigaray’s early work leans into hedgehog. She has one big insight, which I have always understood with respect to Beauvoir. Beauvoir said Woman (we are talking the concept of Woman here, so I will capitalize it) is Other to Man. Man represents the positive and neutral sides of the atom, and woman is the negation of man. Man is rational, woman is emotional. We are all familiar with the dichotomies.
Irigaray takes this one step further, to argue that as such Woman has nothing to do with actual women, with women’s experiences, with our embodied experiences. This Woman who serves as Man’s foil is just that — a version of Man, collective men’s fears and fantasies about their Other. A concept of woman from women’s perspective, does not exist. Woman does not exist, in a surprisingly large number of ways, and it is all the way down to language, elements for meaning making.
Irigaray’s earliest research was on the differential use of language by women versus men. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the symbolic order (language, law, culture) is structured by the phallus as the primary signifier, which means women enter language and social reality only in relation to what they lack, never as subjects in their own right. There isn’t the language to speak of her experiences. Irigaray was not the only one putting this idea forward. Irigray’s parole de femme coexisted with Hélène Cixous' écriture féminine, Kristeva's abject, and a generation of feminist experimental writing that attempted to write from the body. The attempt was being made to bring us into existence, to give us a foothold in the real through language. Language, as Heidegger famously put it, is the house of being, and us not having the symbolic wherewithal was diagnosed as the source of our troubles. Creating the language is seen as the first and most important step for making a claim for our place in this world.
Irigaray is not the only one, in this period, to be making this kind of claim then, but what she alone did so well was to anchor the claim in the history or Western Philosophy. In Irigaray’s hands, Beauvoir’s woman question becomes a question for metaphysics. Underlying the political lies a metaphysics that structures and holds a reality in place. When Irigaray’s writes, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference that we will need to rethink space and time, but especially space, she means that gender goes all the way down to our metaphysics. In the weeks that follow, I will begin to tell you that story.
de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage Books, 2011.
Berlin, Isaiah. The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953.
Cixous, Hélène. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875-893.
Delphy, Christine. “The Invention of French Feminism: An Essential Move.” Yale French Studies, no. 97, 2000, pp. 166-197.
Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Plume, 1989.
Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, Cornell University Press, 1993.
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill, Cornell University Press, 1985.
Irigaray, Luce. “When Our Lips Speak Together.” Signs, vol. 6, no. 1, 1980, pp. 69-79.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Lispector, Clarice. The Hour of the Star. Translated by Benjamin Moser, New Directions, 2011.
MacKinnon, Catharine A. Only Words. Harvard University Press, 1993.
MacKinnon, Catharine A., and Andrea Dworkin, editors. In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings. Harvard University Press, 1997.