Abstract
This chapter operates as the book’s interlude and midpoint, intended to imitate and encapsulate the movement of the book as a whole, and do so from a contemporary position. The first section shows how twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosopher Luce Irigaray makes use of elemental images and metaphors as modes of knowing to produce conceptual transformation. Carr then illustrates how Irigaray theorizes intersubjective relations by re-telling “old” stories, such as those of Antigone or Persephone—both of which are stories Christine de Pizan also worked with. Stories such as these illuminate Irigaray’s dystopic conception of what she understands as the wasteland of relations between women and men. The final section of the chapter works with Irigaray’s re-telling of the Annunciation to examine her “world-generative” work: the stories and textual voices she puts forward to describe a possible positive social transformation of intersubjective relations to work towards. Carr notes strengths and weaknesses of Irigaray’s thinking on the topic of sexual difference, and outlines several ethical objections to Irigaray’s formulations of sexual difference while reiterating Irigaray’s importance to a project such as this book.
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Notes
- 1.
This is not to say that all of Irigaray’s work is done through fictionalization: it is not. I feel her fictionalized work is her strongest, however, and it is what I will be dealing with in this book.
- 2.
Giving a complete overview of her work is unfortunately outside the bounds of my project, and there will, therefore, be aspects of her writing that will not receive the attention I would give them if I were properly summarizing Irigaray’s oeuvre. For those who are interested in such a summary or for more information on her theory as a whole, see for example Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Alison Stone, Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Or, for a critical but sympathetic review, see Mary Beth Mader , “All Too Familiar: Luce Irigaray’s Recent Thought on Sexuation and Generation,” Continental Philosophy Review 36 (2003): 367–390.
- 3.
Irigaray herself both acknowledges and qualifies this, writing in her book Democracy Begins Between Two , “Personally speaking, in the name of liberation of woma(e)n, I have avoided any party allegiance but I cannot deny that I have learnt lessons from the Italian Left which I do not wish to forget. This does not mean that I toe the line in every respect, but that I want to engage in a dialogue and come face to face with the people who genuinely respect such a tradition for the value it attributes, for example, to a secularity defined positively rather than simply in opposition to religion.” Luce Irigaray, Democracy Begins Between Two , trans. Kirsteen Anderson (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), 2.
- 4.
She thus builds several of her books and essays as commentary on such thinkers as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas , Derrida, Hegel, and Nietzsche, to name a few, as well as ancient thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle .
- 5.
It is important to note that for Irigaray “people” are always sexed either female or male. I will discuss this and its implications below.
- 6.
One can see this, for instance, in her readings on Plato , Aristotle , Descartes, Spinoza, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas , each of which has its own chapter in An Ethics of Sexual Difference , as well as in books such as Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche and The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger .
- 7.
“La femme devrait se retrouver, entre autres, à travers les images d’elle déjà déposées dans l’histoire, et les conditions de production de l’oeuvre de l’homme et non à partir de son oeuvre, sa généalogie.” Irigaray, Éthique, 17; Ethics, 10.
- 8.
Throughout this chapter, I will be trying to be as faithful as possible to Irigaray’s language and categories, though I will not always agree with them. She often speaks of “man,” “the male,” or “the female” and we should remember that by using such terms she is not necessarily lumping all men into one group, likewise with women. She is not even always necessarily speaking about existing human men or women, but rather about a particular way of perceiving and constructing the world—though she is not always as careful about that as I would like. If I read her correctly, she is also not saying that “the male” is a prescriptive masculine category but is rather currently how things stand. It is a description: things could, and should, be different, and she is working toward such a difference.
- 9.
In this too she may be more Heideggerian than one might initially think, as he ultimately turned to poetic language as well. I discuss the power of poetic language and poetics for transformative philosophy in Chap. 5.
- 10.
Irigaray even acknowledges this playfully but pointedly in her Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger , where she occasionally refers to Heidegger as “the philosopher,” just as Aquinas and other medieval scholars referred to Aristotle as “the Philosopher.” See for example Irigaray, L’oubli de l’air, 24–25; Forgetting of Air, 20.
- 11.
At this point, and especially after the recent publication of Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks,” it must be acknowledged that much of Heidegger’s thought carries some particularly nasty conceptual baggage. Although Being and Time was originally published before Heidegger joined the Nazi party, I think Irigaray is right when she sniffs out something inherently destructive or sick within it. This is not to say that I believe Being and Time should be thrown out of the canon. It is to say, however, that I think Martin Heidegger was an ethically and morally sick individual to his core, and when his work is read, it should always be read and weighed with that understanding; the work itself carries that stench. One’s philosophical thought is never wholly divorced from one’s personal feelings and practices, and is usually much more intertwined with them than people imagine.
- 12.
He writes, “One must proceed with regard to the soil from which the fundamental ontological concepts grew and with reference to the suitable demonstration of the categories and their completeness.” Martin Heidegger , Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York, 1996), 2. I would also like to thank Lambert Zuidervaart for pointing out the unfinished nature of the project in Being and Time.
- 13.
She writes, “To air he owes his life’s beginning, his birth and his death; on air, he nourishes himself; in air he is housed; thanks to air, he can move about, can exercise a faculty for action, can manifest himself, can see and speak. But this aerial matter remains unthought by the philosopher.”; “A l’air, il doit de commencer à vivre, de naître et mourir; de l’air, il se nourrit; dans l’air, il est logé; grâce à l’air, il peut se mouvoir, execer une activité, se manifester, voir et parler. Mais cette matière aérienne reste impensé du philosophe.” Irigaray, L’oubli de l’air, 18; Forgetting of Air, 12.
- 14.
In an essay on The Forgetting of Air, Maria Cimitile makes the interesting point that, though she does not specifically mention it, Irigaray is likely playing on the Freudian/Lacanian conception of language and the Father, and of rejecting the mother in favor of the father in order to gain language. Noting that Irigaray has brought up the concept of horror in connection with language in this book (Forgetting of Air), Cimitile argues, “Recalling both Freud and Lacan’s description (or prescription?) of the pre-Oedipal and Oedipal stages of ego development, we know that the mother acts the role of instigator into social normalcy, the Symbolic for Lacan, where all meaning and language lies. Viewed through the feminist lens of Irigaray, and Kristeva as well, the appropriation of language and meaning comes at the cost of rejecting the mother. In both Freud’s and Lacan’s articulations of the developmental process, the main focus is on overcoming the attachment to the mother and attaching oneself to the Phallus/Father. This is the case regardless of the sex of the child … On the psychoanalytic model, woman/mother lies outside of language and her sex, her materiality, is horrifying, rejected by both girls and boys in order to possess language.” Maria Cimitile, “The Horror of Language: Irigaray and Heidegger,” Philosophy Today 45 (2001): 71. Though I would not limit Irigaray’s work in the Forgetting of Air to a feminist-psychoanalytic critique of Freud, Lacan, and Heidegger insofar as he has elements of the same, it is likely present as one critique among several. Irigaray is very talented at writing on several levels at once.
- 15.
“la ressource, le fond sans fond.” Irigaray, L’oubli de l’air, 12; The Forgetting of Air, 5.
- 16.
“(Ne pensez pas que je m’amuse à faire des jeux de mots. Je n’en suis pas là. Je n’ai pas encore trouvé le lieu d’où []pourrais commencer à dire quoi que ce soit. Ici maintenant. J’essaie plutôt de retraverser tous les lieux où j’ai été exilée-enfermée pour qu’il constitue son là. De lire son texte, pour tenter d’y reprendre ce qu’il m’a pris sans retour. De rouvrir tout ce qu’il a construit en me prenant dedans. En me mettant dehors, disant oui et non, ni oui ni non, me laissant dans un suspens d’attente et d’oubli où je ne puis vivre, bouger, respirer. J’essaie de retrouver la possibilité d’un rapport à l’air. N’en ai-je pas besoin, bien avant de commencer à parler?)” Irigaray, L’oubli de l’air, 31–32; Forgetting of Air, 29. For another example of this parenthetical “I” speaking, see Irigaray, L’oubli de l’air, 34; Forgetting of Air, 32.
- 17.
“Place” is an important concept in Irigaray’s thought, which I will discuss briefly later in this chapter. For a more in-depth exploration, see Irigaray’s own work on the matter in her lecture “Place, Interval: A Reading of Aristotle , Physics IV” in Ethics, 34–55. The “there,” of course, refers to the German “da” in Heidegger’s Da-sein; literally “there-being,” or being there.
- 18.
“Heidegger indeed revisits the whole of metaphysics, heading for that which, at the start, was lost—and kept—within it. But he remains within its architectonics: the logos. Seeking the cause of the loss in the forgetting of this architectonics, though it is the architectonics itself that accounts for the loss.”; “Heidegger retraverse bien la métaphysique vers ce qui, au commencement, s’est perdu et gardé en elle. Mais il demeure dans son architechtonique: le logos. Cherchant dans l’oubli de celle-ci la cause de la perte, alors que c’est elle qui la détermine.” Irigaray, L’oubli de l’air, 81; Forgetting of Air, 87.
- 19.
Irigaray writes, “The dwelling of man is not built without hatred of nature.”; L’habitation de l’homme ne se bâtit pas sans haine de la nature.” Irigaray, L’oubli de l’air, 71; Forgetting of Air, 75.
- 20.
“L’élémentaire de la phusis—l’air, l’eau, la terre, le feu—est toujours déjà néantisé dans et par son élément à lui: le langage.” Irigaray, L’oubli de l’air, 70; Forgetting of Air, 74. One cannot help but notice similarities here between Christine’s recounting of Libera’s plaint regarding her children’s evisceration of her body as the body of France they were trying to parcel off (I discuss this in Chap. 4), and Irigaray’s use of Man dismembering Nature to ground his Language. The image/metaphor of female dismemberment is a horrifying, but powerful, trope.
- 21.
As for example in discussing gender in the French language: see Luce Irigaray, “Les Trois Genres” in Sexes et Parentés, 187; “The Three Genders ” in Sexes and Genealogies, 173.
- 22.
Earth may again be included in these elements because it has not been “abstracted” out of a relation with the other elements into a metaphysical unreality of one-element-over-all. That is, the “earth” Irigaray speaks of here is not Heidegger’s soil.
- 23.
“Après se l’être assimilé dans ce Gestell qu’est son corps vivant, il se l’est encore appropriée pour en faire la demeure de son être. L’éloignant, ainsi, éternellement de lui … Accolé à son abri, comme son support encore matériel-matriciel, ne se distinguant plus de cette maison de langage dans laquelle il demeure, elle est indéfiniment séparé d’elle et de lui par cette assimilation d’elle à lui dans la langue. Ainsi demeure-t-elle dans l’oubli. Le double oubli: de celle qui lui a toujours déjà donné la vie et qui est devenue son corps vivant, de celle qui la lui redonne en l’assistant dans le destin de son être. Mais cet oubli d’elle(s) est recouvert par l’oubli de son propre destin en tant qu’être. L’oubli du caractère sexué de l’être? Tant qu’il demeure dans cet oubli, dans l’abri de cet oubli, il ne peut se souvenir d’elle(s). Elle(s) ne se sépare(nt) par de sa vérité. Vérité dont le dévoilement a de quoi effrayer.” Irigaray, L’oubli de l’air, 85; Forgetting of Air, 91–92. Ellipsis is mine and denotes missing text.
- 24.
Though she writes what follows in Marine Lover, it applies just as well to Forgetting of Air. Using the voice of a female “I” addressed to a male “you” Irigaray states: “Were it not for that invisible breeze that still moves in and around your heavy noon, who would pull you out of your deep, deep dreams? From your well of eternity? Only a breath of wind needs to stir and your perfection is ready to vanish.”; “N’était cette invisible brise qui encore circule, se faufilant dans ton pesant midi, qui te tirerait de la profondeur de ton rêve? De ton puits d’éternité? Un rien de vent qui encore frémit, ta perfection est prés de s’envoler.” Irigaray, Marine Lover, 7; Amante Marine, 13.
- 25.
The significance of this will become clearer when I discuss Irigaray’s notion of world-generation and the need to do it in a sense outside language.
- 26.
“toute une histoire la sépare de l’amour d’elle.” Irigaray, Éthique, 68; Ethics, 65. We must recognize and note here that although both Christine and Irigaray use a term that is translated as “history” today, they mean somewhat different things by it. Christine’s notion of history is a repository of edifying exempla. Irigaray is coming after Hegel, however, and history for her is seen through Hegelian lenses. History is a force itself, moving forward to a goal and inextricably bound up with what Hegel called the master/slave dynamic. Irigaray thus typically situates herself as working within but against history-as-power-structure, while Christine would position herself as working from history-as-exempla-provider.
- 27.
“Universal” is a term of Irigaray which she develops at length in, for instance, I Love to You. There she says, “I belong to the universal in recognizing that I am a woman. This woman’s singularity is in having a particular genealogy and history. But belonging to a gender represents a universal that exists prior to me. I have to accomplish it in relation to my particular destiny.” Luce Irigaray, I Love to You , trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996), 39.
- 28.
Psychoanalysis is particularly adept at reading and telling stories, a trait which can be a strength. However, as we will see, many of the stories psychoanalysis reads can be destructive—a reality Irigaray attempts to counter from within the tradition itself, using its own tools. In any case, one must note that these stories and the theory that comes out of them often appear to be built on the understanding that heterosexual relations are normative. Similar appearances throughout Irigaray’s work have prompted a number of commentators, myself included, to criticize her. I will address this shortly.
- 29.
“La féminité fait système avec l’ordre patriarcal. Dissimulation de la femme dans la pensée du père.” Irigaray, Amante Marine, 102; Marine Lover, 96.
- 30.
Persephone is also called Kore, which means maiden. Irigaray, like Christine, begins with stories from history/myth that have cultural weight. She even picks the Persephone story that Christine also commented on several times, and which, as we will see in Chap. 4, Christine uses as the background from which one of her fictive figures speaks. Irigaray does not provide which version of the story she is working with and also does not use many names in her stories, so it is sometimes difficult to tell about which god she is talking, but in at least some versions of the Greek/Roman pantheon, Zeus , Hades , and Demeter were siblings and Zeus and Demeter were the father and mother of Persephone. In some accounts, Zeus gave Persephone to Hades, though Hades did the actual abducting. It is these relationships from which Irigaray is playing off.
- 31.
“La Korè s’est laissée séduire, entraînée à sa perte par ignorance. Son attrait pour la fleur et le fruit, pour elle encore ‘naturel(s)’, s’est trouvé confondu dans le pouvoir de la ressemblance—la fin de la jeune fille, arrachée à sa mère-nature, emportée dans la mort, par la contemplation de narcisse, et son goût de la graine. Mais sans connaître les propriétés de ces analogies. Ravie par surprise, en secret, par manque de savoir, de technique, du semblant.” Irigaray, Amante Marine, 121; Marine Lover, 113.
- 32.
If it were Christine telling this story, I would say that Persephone (through understandable ignorance, given her youth) made an error in her reading, specifically by reading something simply on the surface that should have been read as an integumentum. It is not Christine telling this story, however, and so I merely point out the similarity between Irigaray’s construction of Persephone’s supposed “mistake” in reading the situation and understanding the analogies, and Christine-the-narrator’s own misreading of a situation at the opening of the City of Ladies that traps her in self-loathing under the crushing misunderstanding of herself as a monster.
- 33.
“Il faut, écrit Freud, qu’elle se détourne de sa mère pour entrer dans le désir de l’homme. Si elle reste en empathie avec sa mère, elle reste dans son lieu.” Irigaray, Éthique, 47; Ethics, 41.
- 34.
This is an alliterative chant Irigaray uses throughout the section of Marine Lover where she details the story of Persephone . Even before she explicitly deals with Persephone’s story, she uses these alternative “three r’s” (in French the alliteration is there as well in three v’s instead) as a way to describe how “relations,” if they can be called that, are set up between men and women in this wasteland: “since, left ‘to themselves,’ within ‘themselves’ women always come close, it is—always—necessary to push them away. Rape. Rob. Robe.”; “Et comme, ‘d’elles-mêmes,’ en ‘elles-même,’ toujours elles se rapprochent, il faut bien—toujours—les écarter. Violer. Voler. Voiler.” Irigaray, Amante Marine, 112; Marine Lover, 104. These words and this theme continues through the winding of her dealings with the Greek myths, even those which do not directly deal with rape. One should also note the association of “voiler” with covering or veiling, terms Irigaray uses typically in a negative sense, whereas Christine uses “veiled language” in a positive sense.
- 35.
“Pour déjouer la menace de ses feintes possibles, enlévement de la fille—encore vierge—dans les propriétés du père, du dieu. L’une, ainsi éloignée ‘d’elle-même’, artificieusement isolée, l’autre toujours la/se recherche pour l/se retoucher.” Irigaray, Amante Marine, 113; Marine Lover, 106.
- 36.
“La fille enlevée à la mère, à elle-même, par le père, le frère, l’autre du père, la prend malgré/sans son consentement. La Koré est donné par le dieu céleste au dieu internal, qui ne s’en saisit qu’en la ravissant. Volée, violée, voilée, une deuxième fois.” Irigaray, Amante Marine, 120; Marine Lover, 112. Although Irigaray’s story is a very powerful way of critiquing the tradition within which she is working, I personally find that having such a story as one’s founding point—even as a critique—leaves little room to go anywhere, and ultimately runs the risk of trapping people in the structures from which Irigaray is trying to escape. We should note that this story is presented in one of her very earliest books, and she moves away from it somewhat as her work develops, but it is my belief that, like Heidegger, she is unable to escape the structure she critiques, precisely because of some of the readings she presents of it. (Other readings are, I believe, more fruitful). I will discuss this further in Chap. 5, since here I am trying to present Irigaray’s work in its best and strongest light, as I believe there is nevertheless much to learn from her.
- 37.
These fruits have, however, been given destructive internal meaning and analogies by the other gods, without the consent of Demeter .
- 38.
“passera deux fois plus de temps dans l’ivresse ‘naturelle.’ Ses printemps et ses étés. Cette nécessité, imposée par le refus de Déméter de produire séparée de sa fille, son autre ‘elle-même,’ ne la laisse que l’hiver avec son époux: la saison froide. Enlevée, éloignée et d’elle-même, abîmée, Perséphone devient l’étant glacé.” Irigaray, Amante Marine, 122; Marine Lover, 114.
- 39.
See for example the retelling writer Starhawk (Miriam Simos) gives of the Demeter /Persephone story: Circle Round: Raising Children in Goddess Traditions (New York: Bantam, 2000), 151–156.
- 40.
Irigaray writes, “in the archaeological gallery of Syracuse in Sicily, there are many statues of the goddess Kore. Of course, I have listened to the guide emphasizing the statues of gods, and presenting all these Kore as ‘simple women,’ perhaps only ‘maid servants.’ He did not know of the existence of the goddess Kore, even though her name was inscribed on the work.” Luce Irigaray, “The Return” in Teaching, ed. Luce Irigaray and Mary Green (London: Continuum, 2008), 227.
- 41.
Irigaray, “The Return,” 227.
- 42.
Copeland, Rhetoric, 207.
- 43.
Although I have already cited the second half of her statement, it is worth repeating it here in its full context: “I search for myself, as if I had been assimilated into maleness. I ought to reconstitute myself on the basis of a disassimilation … Rise again from the traces of a culture, of works already produced by the other. Searching through what is in them—for what is not there. What allowed them to be, for what is not there. Their conditions of possibility, for what is not there. Woman ought to be able to find herself, among other things, through the images of herself already deposited in history and the conditions of production of the work of man, and not on the basis of his work, his genealogy.”; “Je me cherche, tel que qui a été assimilé. Je devrais me reconstituer à partir d’une désassimilation … Renaître à partir de traces de culture, d’oeuvres déjà produites par l’autre. Cherchant ce qui y est—ce conditions de possibilité, ce qui n’y est pas. La femme devrait se retrouver, entre autres, à travers les images d’elle déjà déposées dans l’histoire, et les conditions de production de l’oeuvre de l’homme et non à partir de son oeuvre, sa généalogie.” Irigaray, Éthique, 17; Ethics, 9–10, ellipsis in text.
- 44.
Scholar Alison Martin, who translated I Love to You, comments on this, though not from a medievalist perspective. She writes, “Given the closeness of Irigaray’s thinking to those she is thinking of, particularly in her earlier work, a slight turn in the reading can manifest very different results. It is true that, in common with other recent French thinkers, but again in a distinctive fashion, Irigaray has embraced textual strategies as an integral element to the process of envisaging a culture of difference. Irigaray’s attention to language as the material thread that weaves the cultural fabric is another Nietzschean/Heideggerian inheritance and can be compared to Lacanian and Derridean strategies.” Alison Martin, “Luce Irigaray and the Culture of Difference,” Theory, Culture & Society 20:3 (2003): 4.
- 45.
Christine tells the story quite differently to Irigaray. She has Lady Rectitude relate the tale of Argia , portrayed as the wife of Polynices instead of his sister (as Antigone was). Argia, like Antigone, buries Polynices against Creon ’s edict. The similarities end there, however, for after doing so, Argia attacks the city with an army of women to avenge the death of her husband and the disrespect shown his body, killing Creon and everyone else inside living under Creon’s law. Argia could hardly then be accused of passivity, but it is also likely that Hegel (from whom much of Irigaray’s first reading of Antigone comes) would hardly have approved of her story, had he known it. Hegel’s Antigone was the embodiment of familial duty: Christine’s Argia seems to be rather the embodiment of passionate vengeful action. See de Pizan, City, 125–126.
- 46.
“Je reviens donc au personnage d’Antigone , non pour m’y identifier. L’Antigone, l’anti-femme, est encore une production de la culture écrite par les seuls hommes.” Irigaray, Éthique, 115; Ethics, 118–119.
- 47.
“Pour que ce destin d’Antigone ne se répète pas, il faut que le monde des femmes réalise ensemble un ordre éthique, les conditions de leurs actes.” Irigaray, Éthique, 106; Ethics, 108.
- 48.
“l’immédiatement universel de son devoir familial.” Irigaray, Éthique, 114; Ethics, 117.
- 49.
Speaking of the figure of Antigone , Irigaray writes, “But this figure, who, according to Hegel, stands for ethics, has to be brought out of the night, out of the shadow, out of the rock, out of the total paralysis experienced by a social order that condemns itself even as it condemns her.”; “Mais cette figure de l’éthique, selon Hegel, doit être sortie de la nuit, de l’ombre, de la pierre, de la totale paralysie par un ordre social qui se condamne en la condamnant.” Irigaray, Éthique, 115; Ethics, 119.
- 50.
“Enfermée—paralysée à la périphérie de la cité.” Irigaray, Éthique, 115; Ethics, 119.
- 51.
One cannot help but hear similarities in the use of the concept of “city” between Christine and Irigaray. I hope to pursue writing on these similarities—and the differences as well—at a later date. Scholar Sarah Kay comments on this in her 2001 essay. See Sarah Kay, “The Didactic Space,” 438–466.
- 52.
An Ethics of Sexual Difference was first written in French as Ethique de la difference sexuelle, and was published in 1984. Irigaray wrote To Be Two in Italian and published it as Essere Due in 1994.
- 53.
Luce Irigaray, To Be Two, trans. Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F. Cocito-Monoc (New York: Routledge, 2001), 77, both quotes.
- 54.
Irigaray, To Be Two, 77.
- 55.
Shortly after this section, Irigaray does return to speaking about Hegel and the family; however, she leaves Antigone out of that discussion, at least by name. See Irigaray, To Be Two, 81–84.
- 56.
Irigaray, To Be Two, 78. The fact that Creon is presented as speaking “poor, without poetry,” is no coincidence, I think. Poetry is linked with creative thought and possibility by many philosophers (not least of which is Aristotle himself), as we will see in Chap. 5.
- 57.
See Irigaray, Ethics, 119.
- 58.
“Creon sacrifices those who are closest to him—his family, his people—to an abstract or tyrannical dominion, a dominion founded upon nothing if not the means of legitimating the government of a single man.” Irigaray, To Be Two, 78.
- 59.
Irigaray, To Be Two, 78.
- 60.
Irigaray writes, “His skill and audacity are not based on just any reality: they are a challenge to what is, they establish their power from the simple opposition to what exists.” Irigaray, To Be Two, 79.
- 61.
Irigaray, To Be Two, 79.
- 62.
In what sounds strikingly like an inverted mimicking of her own earlier text where Irigaray says she has been “exiled-enclosed” (Forgetting of Air, 29), Irigaray writes, “Creon represents the passage to what is fabricated: to what distances itself from real existence or being in order to exercise itself as simple human ability. To this extent, he is on the earth and outside of the earth, he is in the city and outside of the city, he is a father but he is estranged from kinship, he is a man but he is estranged from masculine identity, he is the King of Thebes but he is estranged from kingship.” Irigaray, To Be Two, 79.
- 63.
I emphasize the words “there is” to draw out the echoes I believe Irigaray is also drawing out from Heidegger’s text and his use of “es gibt” (there is/it gives) with regards to “being” and “world.” Irigaray does discuss the there is of Heidegger’s text and if I am reading her allusive textual playing right, she is intimating that “man” lost his ability to encounter and discover himself in his world because “there is,” es gibt, literally “it gives” no world generation possible within the confines of man’s language. It is worth noting that the “es” of “es gibt” is the neuter pronoun “it” in German, and Irigaray firmly contends that the neuter is death and lack of generation. Being trained as a linguist as well as a philosopher and psychotherapist, it strikes me that she would not have failed to notice this particular neuter in Heidegger’s thought, the neuter which is, in many senses, much of the ground for his thinking.
- 64.
“A moins qu’un dieu peut-être …” Irigaray, Oubli de l’air, 133; Forgetting of Air, 149. Ellipsis in text.
- 65.
Speaking of women, Irigaray writes, “Language seems to have paralyzed us, frozen even our words … the fact that female intelligence is still silent surely means that there are movements that must still be set free.”; “Le langage semble avoir paralysé nos gestes, aussi verbaux … L’intelligence encore silencieuse du féminin ne signifie-t-elle pas des mouvements à libérer?” Irigaray, “Les Trois Genres” in Sexes et Parentés, 195; “Three Genders” in Sexes and Genealogies, 181. Ellipsis is mine and marks omitted text. Emphasis in text. To understand what she is getting at, one must remember to distinguish here between langage and parole. As speaking subjects, women (and men) both engage in parole. It is langage to which she argues women have no real access, since, by her account, langage is man’s language and his construction.
- 66.
“l’acte sexuel serait ce par quoi l’autre me redonne forme, naissance, incarnation. Au lieu d’entraîner la déchéance du corps, il participe de sa renaissance. Et aucun autre acte ne l’équivaut, en ce sens. Acte le plus divin. L’homme fait ressentir à la femme son corps comme lieu. Non seulement son sexe et sa matrice mais son corps. Il la situe dans son corps et dans un macrocosme, la sortant de son éventuelle adhérence au cosmique par la participation à une microsociété.” Irigaray, Ethique, 55; Ethics, 51. I note here, and I am not the first to do so, that describing this particular act as “the sexual act” and as the process by which a person gains “place” or generates world is problematic not least because what she describes is very specifically heterosexual. This seems to exclude similar possibilities for homosexual relations. I will discuss this below.
- 67.
“Thus man and women, women and man are always meeting as though for the first time because they cannot be substituted one for the other. I will never be in a man’s place, never will be a man be in mine. Whatever identifications are possible, one will never exactly occupy the place of the other—they are irreducible one to the other.”; “Ainsi l’homme et la femme, la femme et l’homme sont toujours une première fois dans la rencontre parce qu’ils sont insubstituables l’un à l’autre. Jamais je ne serai à la place d’un homme, jamais un homme ne sera à ma place. Quelles que soient les identifications possibles, jamais l’un n’occupera exactement le lieu de l’autre—ils sont irréductibles l’un à l’autre.” Irigaray, Ethics, 12–13; Ethique, 19–20.
- 68.
Similar to Christine, Irigaray also uses images as ways of knowing, and they often play a powerful role in her work, both as a site for remembering important ideas (as with Christine), and as a site to develop concepts themselves, as we will see with the statute I am about to discuss.
- 69.
“En mai 1984 aprés une conférence au Centro Donne de Venise-Mestre intitulée ‘Femmes divines’ je suis allée visiter l’île de Torcello. Au musée, se trouve une statue de femme dans l’attitude de Marie, mère de Jésus, assise et présentant l’enfant assis sur ses genoux, face à qui les regarde. J’admirais cette belle sculpture de bois quand je remarquai que ce Jésus était une fille! Cela produisit sur moi en effet perceptif et mental important et juilatoire. Je me sentais libérée d’une tension concernant un impératif culturel de vérité qui s’exerce aussi dans l’art: une femme vierge-mère et son fils y figurent les modèles de notre rédemption auxquels il faut croire. Devant cette statue représentant Marie et sa mère Anne, j’étais remise calmement et joyeusement dans mon corps, mes affects, mon histoire de femme. J’étais face à une figure esthétique et éthique dont j’ai besoin pour vivre sans mépris de mon incarnation, de celle de ma mère et des autres femmes.” Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous, 25–26; Je, Tu, Nous (English), 17–18.
- 70.
As early as 1980, speaking about the incarnation of Christ, she asks in Marine Lover, “despite all the well-known horrors and repressions, how do we account for all the works of art which that prophecy gave rise to? What energy let them root and flourish, through the centuries, as places where the divine lives and breathes? Can the legalism, the sentence, even the ressentiment of Christianity claim and take credit for the enthusiasm and exuberance of that creation? Or does the inspiration blossom despite and in opposition to all moralizing? … Don’t they sing here? Don’t they paint? Sculpt? Speak? In a language that of course goes beyond and stops short of any grammar of reason.”; “Et, malgré tout les horreurs et répressions que l’on sait, d’où viennent ces œuvres d’art qu’elle a produites? Quelle énergie les a épanouies et ménagées, à travers les siécles, comme des lieux où souffle et subsiste le divin? Le légalisme, le jugement, voire le ressentiment chrétiens peuvent-ils rendre compte et revendiquer cet enthousiasme et cette exubérance dans la création? Ou cette inspiration se déploie-t-elle envers et contre toute ‘moraline’? … Ne s’y chantent-ils? Peignent-ils? Sculptent-ils? Disent-ils? En un langage certes en deçà ou au-delà de toute grammaire de la raison.” Irigaray, Amante marine, 191–192; Marine Lover, 179. Ellipsis mine, text omitted.
- 71.
Irigaray, To Be Two, 54.
- 72.
Irigaray, To Be Two , 54. Though I acknowledge the power of the Annunciation ’s story thus retold, I would not claim that it can “become an experience of love for everyone” for the reason that it is (1) specifically heterosexual and (2) specifically Christian—even if Irigaray’s retelling is hardly orthodox. While I think the story she tells has a great deal to recommend it, saying that it can work for everyone is assuming too much. I will say more on this momentarily.
- 73.
“Le verbe fait chair en ‘Marie’ signifierait—peut-être?—l’avènement d’un divin qui ne fait pas irruption blessante, tel le dieu du désir grec … Le dieu n’entre pas brutalement dans un corps pour s’en retirer aussitôt, le laissant à la folie et la mort d’une passion sans mesure.” Irigaray, Amante Marine, 194; Marine Lover, 181. Ellipsis mine, text omitted.
- 74.
Irigaray, I Love to You, 123.
- 75.
Irigaray, I Love to You, 140.
- 76.
This encounter took place in May of 1989, as Irigaray recounts at the opening of the book describing and reflecting on it: “We met in Bologna, on May 30th, 1989, in San Donato, the reddest quarter of a very red city. It was during the election of Renzo Imbeni , the town’s mayor, to the European Parliament. The invitation said the theme of the debate would be ‘New Rights in Europe,’ an appropriate theme given the tradition of the university of Bologna, which is famous for its law school.” Irigaray, I Love to You, 1. In the context of my work, it is worth remembering that Christine’s father, who first gave her the means to explore her love of study, was a professor at the University of Bologna before he moved his family to Paris. (See Willard, Christine de Pizan, 17.) Christine’s work too then, in an odd sense, comes out of Bologna, even out of a connection to the University of Bologna.
- 77.
Irigaray, I Love to You, 9.
- 78.
I believe a similar retelling could be effected with Persephone ’s tale such that the daughter of Greek mythology would not be left abandoned in the underworld with her rapist abductor. Any such telling in an Irigarayan oeuvre would have to begin further back than her abduction, however: just as Irigaray began Mary’s story with Anne’s. In fact, I will perform such a retelling, though I will accomplish it in a different way than Irigaray would: see my epilogue .
- 79.
Irigaray, I Love to You, 141. Given the particular story in question, one could possibly even see this “alliance” as a rewritten covenant: such an understanding would at least not be outside Irigaray’s relational paradigm.
- 80.
Irigaray, To Be Two, 66–67.
- 81.
This has been a concern of other scholars as well: see for instance Mader, “All Too Familiar,” 367–390; and Craig Gingrich-Philbrook’s essay “Love’s Excluded Subjects,” Cultural Studies 15:2 (2001): 222–228. For a defense of Irigaray on this topic, see Heidi Bostic, “Luce Irigaray and Love,” Cultural Studies 16:5 (2002) 603–610. Bostic, for example, asserts, “when Irigaray writes that ‘[l]ove between us, women and men of this world, is what may save us still,’ a private, heterosexual relationship is not necessarily what she has in mind, but rather a relation of love that can serve as a solid foundation for transforming the public sphere we inhabit.” (ibid., 606). Bostic’s point is well taken, but nevertheless Irigaray’s language of the male/female couple redeeming the world makes a heteronormative reading likely, at least in the absence of providing other narratives as well, which Irigaray fails to do.
- 82.
Debra Bergoffen , “Irigaray’s Couple” in Returning to Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy, Politics, and the Question of Unity, ed. Maria C. Cimitile and Elaine P. Miller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 164–165.
- 83.
Bergoffen, “Irigaray’s Couple,” 168. Bergoffen continues her questioning, adding, “must this be an exchange between two? Is the couple as cosmically grounded as Irigaray suggests? The placental economy may support more than one fetus … the mother-daughter dyad may also be a triad or more. The male-female relationship may be enacted in plural rather than coupled ways.” Ibid., 169. All of these she brings up as possible alternatives to go beside the couple model, and she spends some time discussing each. Even so, Bergoffen does not answer her own questions, raising them instead as points for discussion, for she insists, “[i]n the end there is an irreducible undecidability that attaches to the name Irigaray.” Ibid., 171.
- 84.
Irigaray, I Love to You, 47.
- 85.
As Irigaray writes in I Love to You, “I belong to a gender, which means to a sexed universal and to a relation between two universals.” or again, a bit earlier, “I am not the whole: I am man or woman. And I am not simply a subject, I belong to a gender. I am objectively limited by this belonging.” Irigaray, I Love to You, 106.
- 86.
Irigaray, I Love to You, 47.
- 87.
Irigaray writes, for instance, “Gender markers show how one sex, how the world, has been forced to submit to the other. Thus, at least in French, the masculine gender always carries the day syntactically: a crowd of a thousand persons, nine hundred and ninety-nine women and one man will be referred to as a masculine plural; a couple composed of a man and a woman will be referred to in the masculine plural; a woman telling the story of her love affair with a man will have to use the supposedly neutral masculine plural form in her agreement of past participles when she says ‘we fell in love’ … these laws of syntax in French reveal the power wielded by one sex over another.”; “Elle [“la marque du genre”] montre comment un sexe s’est soumis l’autre au le monde. Ainsi, en français, du moins, le genre masculin l’emporte toujours sytaxiquement: unefoule de mille personnes composée de neuf cent quatre-vingt-dix-neuf femmeset un homme se décrira comme ‘ils étaient’; d’un couple, on dira ‘ils s’aiment’ une femme racontant son histoire amoureuse doit employer la forme ‘nous sommes aimés’, etc. Par ailleurs, le neutre s’exprime par le même pronom que le masculin: il tonne, il faut, et non elle tonne, elle faut. Ces lois syntaxiques révèlent l’empire d’un sexe sur l’autre.” Irigaray, “Les Trois Genres” in Sexes et Parentés, 187; “The Three Genders ” in Sexes and Genealogies, 173.
- 88.
Without getting into the surrounding questions of essentialism—a debate that dogs much of Irigaray studies—and without yet touching the issue of how to define the categories “male” and “female” if one does reject essentialism, I concede that there in fact are men and women, girls and boys, and there do seem to be some general differences between them. I disagree that this is a cause for a divide down the lines of two, and only two “universals,” however.
- 89.
As Irigaray says in Je, tu, Nous, “Sexual difference is necessary for the continuation of our species, not only because it constitutes the locus of procreation, but also because it’s here that life is regenerated.”; “La différence sexuelle est nécessaire au maintien de notre espèce, non seulement parce qu’elle est le lieu de la procréation mais aussi celui de la régénération de la vie.” Irigaray, Je, tu, nous, 13; Je, tu, nous (English), 7. Emphasis in text.
- 90.
Mader, “All too familiar,” 384. Mader translated The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger .
- 91.
Rather, Irigaray seems to interpret exceptions to her rule in such a way that they are no longer exceptions—in such a way, to my mind, that they suffer a loss of part of the spark that helps animate their imaginative capacity. Even with the best of intentions toward fecund intersubjective flourishing, constraining a person’s imaginative capacity in so strong a way not only harms that person’s own conceptually generative powers but ultimately robs the community in which they are situated of the full expression of that person’s creativity.
- 92.
As she says, “It is true that, for the work of sexual difference to take place, there must be a revolution of thought and of ethics. Everything is to be reinterpreted concerning the relations between the subject and discourse, the subject and the cosmic, the microcosmic and the macrocosmic.”; “Il est vrai que, pour que l’œvre de la différence sexuelle ait lieu, il faut une révolution de pensée, et d’éthique. Tout est à réinterpréter dans les relations entre le sujet et le discours, le sujet et le monde, le sujet et le cosmique, le micro et le macrocosme.” Irigaray, Éthique, 14; Ethics, 6. Translation modified.
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Carr, A. (2017). This is Not the Same: Irigaray and Difference Through Story. In: Story and Philosophy for Social Change in Medieval and Postmodern Writing. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63745-7_3
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