Luce Irigaray: Love through Sexual Difference

2006

2007

Luce Irigaray's project elaborates an original concept of sexual difference. While this concept is widely discussed in feminist philosophy, there are multiple readings of sexual difference and some of these are contradictory. This essay surveys the various readings of sexual difference in English. Foci include the debate over the status of essentialism, ontology, and the controversy over the primacy of sexual difference, including discussion of whether her oeuvre marginalizes differences of race and sexuality. I conclude by arguing that her thinking of difference is open to the future and non-totalisable in principle. This means that, difference, the concept at the heart of her thinking of sexual difference, cannot be primarily oriented toward engendering sexual difference because it is necessarily open to engendering relations that cannot be predicted.

This book introduces the philosophy of Luce Irigaray (1930) and sketches her position within the philosophical tradition. Luce Irigaray is a representative of the feminist critique of philosophy from the seventies and eighties. Her attention to the examination of the gender neutrality of philosophy is special for it encompasses critique on a metaphysical level. She not only questions the structures of philosophical discourse, but carefully reconstructs them, thereby developing an alternative, namely a philosophy of sexual difference. In this book I investigate Irigaray's strategy of analyzing the masculine philosophical tradition. The alliance in the eighties between poststructuralism and feminism, along with criticism within feminism of the notion of a female subject, forms the background for interpreting Irigaray's work. Because Irigaray aims at developing possibilities for female subjectivity (the early works) and gendered identity for both sexes (the later works) conflict with the poststructuralist and feminist tradition seems inevitable. The goals of her project raise questions concenring Irigaray's often supposed poststrycturalism and pave the way for my interpretation of her philosophical position. investigates Irigaray's strategy of analyzing the masculine philosophical tradition, namely mimesis, and presents an overview over her entire project. It concentrates on her later works, in which she develops a dialectics of sexual difference.

Luce Irigaray is a prolific, erudite writer who describes her thought as having three main trajectories. Firstly, she is concerned with critiquing the masculinisation of the universal subject, exposing the foundations of the Western traditions and culture as projections from the male imaginary; secondly, she seeks to identify and theorise mediations which allow the realisation and symbolisation of the female imaginary, in which feminine subjectivity can exist autonomously and form part of a female genealogy and culture; thirdly, she explores the possibility and formulation of relations of sexual difference, in which masculine and feminine subjectivities can respectfully co-exist without one being subsumed by the other (Irigaray 2008, p.124).

Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2000

L'Esprit Créateur, 2012

Commemorating Epimetheus, a text by a collective known as Les Amis (which translates as "the friends"), honors Epimetheus, one of Prometheus's lesser known brothers. Similar to the way in which ancient Greek discourse has been critiqued by numerous authors for its oft-embraced polarities, Prometheus and Epimetheus are set up as mythological binary figures-that is, two brothers with names that speak to different callings: respectively, "he who thinks before" and "he who thinks after" (3, 2). This book, then, is a commemoration of the past as much as of Epimetheus, remembered brother who "thinks after" the ways of the Earth, sharing in "the memory of what has been […] so as to care for the present and the future" (2-3). What is particularly compelling about this telling is the language of the text, rendered in English by S. Pluháček and reminiscent of works by Luce Irigaray such as Elemental Passions. The authors have shattered the logos of the early Greeks by preconceiving such poets as Heidegger, Irigaray, and Derrida. Knowing little about the source text has the potential of being a distraction. However, the possibility that the authors "thought before" the likes of the aforementioned philosophers presupposes the problem of chronology. Might we, then, also read this text as a pre-originary story of ancient discourse? That is, in the "thinking before" of he who "thought after"? This, indeed, is the question. Acknowledging the innocent beginnings of agricultural existence (indeed, in Heideggerian terms, the opening of a clearing in which to dwell) and the divinity of everyday love (in Irigarayan terms, the presence of dialogue , indirection, and silence), the authors evoke Epimetheus, hearkening back to the "earlier ways of our being-in-the-world" (14). Such a "time before" implicates space for non-agricultural wanderings. As the authors indicate, our "current lovelessness" suggests there exists at our core a fear of wandering (25). The themes of sharing, caring, meeting, dwelling, and loving are presented to commemorate Epimetheus's wisdom on these matters-and, are carried out beautifully so. But what might all of this mean for a land that has gone a different way, toward a "Promethean desire to no longer be dependent upon the earth" (17)? Indeed, both the timeliness and timelessness of this text offer hope. For, as these authors (and our other pre-originary poets) ask, "Is not the future the coming of the startlingly unexpected, the unknown-indeed, the unknowable and that which cannot be expected?" (77). Herein, the fearless wanderings of Epimetheus "think after" and upon the ways of the Earth, prior to such things as profit, property, boundary, and appropriation. Within his kind of thinkingafter, however, thankfulness and care embed themselves. Certainly, the différance projected herein conveys a sense of care that both "differs" and "defers," suggesting creative play as we come to terms with "(the worlding of) [our] world," our "knot of existence so firmly tied together" (45, 93). Would that we could make such a leap.

Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2003

l'eprit createur, 2012