IRIGARAY AND POLITICS - edinburghuniversitypress.com

IRIGARAY AND POLITICSA CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Laura Roberts

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© Laura Roberts, 2019

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1Notes 7

1 Beyond Freud and Lacan 11The Psychoanalytic Critique of Western Thought 13Freud’s Unconscious Phantasy 14Lacan’s Mirror Stage 16A Culture of Narcissism 20Melanie Klein and Projective Identifi cation 21Béla Grunberger and the Masculine Imaginary 23Psychoanalysing the Psychoanalysts: Irigaray on Freud’s ‘Femininity’ 27The Culture of Narcissism as Social Critique 33Notes 35

2 Feminine Imaginaries 44Philosophical Myths: Refi guring Western Space–Time 48Language and Subjectivity: Labial Logics and Placental Economies 57Notes 66

3 Genealogies and Subjectivity 72Cultural Myth: Mother–Daughter Relations and Woman-to-Woman Sociality 73Religious Myth: A Feminine Divine 76New Politics and Sexuate Rights 80Notes 84

4 Irigaray’s Dialectics 86Tracing the Dialectic – Irigaray with Hegel 87Diotima’s Dialectic – Refi guring Love, within and Between Us 91The Interval of Breath 94I Love to You: The Failure of Hegel’s Labour of Love 97Listening and Wonder 102Notes 105

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5 Luce Irigaray with Gayatri Spivak 108‘French Feminism in an International Frame’ 111French Feminism Revisited 119Levinas and the Fecundity of the Caress 124The Impossible Intimacy of the Ethical 126Notes 129

6 A Politics of Proximity 134Marxist Feminist Critique of the Family 136Refounding the Family 141Intercultural Couples 144Politics of the Common 147Where to Now? International New Municipalism 151Barcelona en Comú and the Feminisation of Politics 154Notes 157

Conclusion 159Note 160

Afterword 161Notes 166

Bibliography 167Index 183

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Introduction

The patriarchal foundation of our social existence is in fact overlooked in contemporary politics, even leftist politics. Up to now even Marxism has paid very little attention to the problems of the specifi c exploitation of women, and women’s struggles most often seem to disturb the Marxists. Even though these struggles could be interpreted with the help of the schemes for the analysis of social exploitation to which Marxist political programs lay specifi c claim. Provided, of course, that these schemas be used differently. But no politics has, up to now, questioned its own relation to phallocractic power . . .

(Irigaray 1985b: 165)

‘Sexual difference’, Luce Irigaray announced almost thirty years ago, ‘is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age’ and ‘is probably the issue in our time which could be our “salvation” if we thought it through’ (Irigaray 1993a: 5). Irigaray insists that the philosophical signifi cance of sexual or, better, sexuate1 difference has been silenced in western culture. She says,

whether I turn to philosophy, to science, or to religion, I fi nd this underlying issue still cries out in vain for our attention . . . Both in theory and in practice everything resists the discovery and affi rmation of such an advent or event. In theory, philosophy wants to be literature or rhetoric, wishing either to break with ontology or to regress to the ontological. Using the same ground and the same framework as ‘fi rst philosophy,’ working toward its disintegration but without proposing any other goals that might assure new foundations and new works. (Irigaray 1993a: 6)

Irigaray’s task, as this book sets out to demonstrate, aims to uncover and acknowledge the philosophical signifi cance of the question of sexual difference in western thought. In doing so, Irigaray begins to crack open spaces where we can begin to articulate new founda-tions and new understandings of subjectivity which, in turn, will enable a refi guring of ethics and politics in the western tradition.2

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We must understand Irigaray’s approach as double pronged: both critical and creative, both intellectual and concrete, both philosoph-ical and political. This is why, for Irigaray, it is important to take seriously the ongoing work, strategies and interventions that need to be carried out in order to bring about the ‘revolution in thought and ethics’ required for ‘the work of sexual difference to take place’ (Irigaray 1993a: 6). This philosophical, ethical and political revolu-tion that Irigaray calls for requires the so-called ‘neutral’ individual subject of western thought to be recast as an embodied relational subject, and as sexed. For Irigaray, this process begins with the culti-vation of autonomous feminine subjectivity and woman-to-woman sociality which will challenge western thinking of the subject as neu-tral and atomistic, and the continued silencing of sexual difference. The question of sexual difference is thus not only concerned with symbolic social and political change, we must also appreciate how it is deeply concerned with reimagining the foundational structures of existence and, of course, in how we fi gure subjectivity. Through a detailed philosophical analysis that reads some of Irigaray’s well-known texts alongside some of her less well-known writings, this book illustrates how, throughout her work, Irigaray connects the emergence of a psychoanalytically inspired autonomous feminine subjectivity with the transformations of ontological structures that ground thought, ethics and politics in the western tradition. It pro-vides a reading of Irigaray’s oeuvre as an ongoing project aimed at redefi ning the traditional western notion of ontology as neutral and transcendent, and in doing so, the very meaning of ethical citizen-ship and political subjectivity.

Irigaray argues that the unfolding of an autonomous feminine subjectivity, would, in turn, create space for the possibility of rec-ognising – philosophically, culturally and politically – non-hierar-chal sexuate difference. The unfolding of a second feminine subject works to enable women (as subjects) to create their own cultural and spiritual representations and subjectivities, narratives and histories, appropriate to their own lived experiences. It enables women to exist as autonomous sexuate subjects, not defi ned in relation to ‘Man’, and allows access to a socio-political realm as self-defi ned women. Moreover, as autonomously defi ned sexuate subjects women can have positive relationships with other women because they are no longer competing with one another for the only role available in the patriarchal symbolic, that of ‘mother’. Irigaray notes:


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Without rites and myths to teach us to love other women [nos semblables], to live with them, mutual destruction is a permanent possibility. We need values we can share if we are to coexist and create together. And it is important for us to exist and love one another as women if we are to love the other – man. Society and morality act as though woman, with-out being a full social or political person in her own right, had to love a social person: man. How is such love humanly possible without subjective status? (Irigaray 1991f: 192)

Furthermore, as we will see, this refi guring of feminine subjectivity (subjectivity as sexuate) thus opens up space for the much needed refi guring of masculine subjectivity which remains largely confl ated with the characteristics of the modern western subject that emerges with the cogito of René Descartes: rational, transcendent, solip-sistic. Theorising subjectivity as sexuate and thus as relational, embodied and limited, has important consequences for thinking through political subjectivity and how we conceive of citizenship. Calling for women to positively symbolise feminine subjectivity, Irigaray is challenging the structure and dominance of the modern individual (wealthy, white, masculine) subject, which is currently the norm against which all other subjects are defi ned. This refi gur-ing of subjectivity thus opens up the way to challenge what Irigaray identifi es as a culture of narcissism undergirded by a logic of ‘One-ness’ and ‘Sameness’. Recognising the philosophical signifi cance of sexuate difference, and the implications this has for our imagining of subjectivity in the western tradition, thus opens up new founda-tions and the possibilities of rethinking politics based on relational sexuate subjects.

Read with little knowledge of the breadth of Irigaray’s writings and contexts, the call to positively symbolise feminine subjectivity and to recognise sexual difference might initially strike readers as conservative rather than radical, and there is little surprise that the reception of Irigaray’s work over the past forty years has been fraught with misunderstandings. Her fi rst two major works, Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a) and This Sex which is Not One (1985b), were met with charges of essentialism.3 These early critics believed Irigaray to be talking about the essence of what ‘Woman’ is, assum-ing that she was reducing the category of ‘Woman’ to biology. On refl ection, it seems that these early criticisms were mostly the result of readers not appreciating Irigaray’s psychoanalytic contexts, her symptomatic reading of western philosophers, and the mimetic style



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with which she wrote in her early works.4 It is important, however, to recognise how these early criticisms of essentialism impede an ade-quate appreciation of Irigaray’s larger philosophical project and her challenge to how we conceive of politics. Ellen Mortensen argues that a direct consequence of the debates around essentialism (between the ‘so called essentialists and the constructionists’ in the US during the 1980s and 1990s) resulted in a general lack of ontological questioning in feminist philosophy, with the exception of thinkers like Luce Iriga-ray, Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz (Mortensen 2002: 71).5 And, while there has been a general increase in scholarship regarding Iriga-ray’s philosophical contexts and interlocutors, Irigaray’s ontological challenge, including her rethinking of the structures of existence and her conceptions of materiality, embodiment and subjectivity, remains largely overlooked.6 Later criticisms of Irigaray’s work stem from, in different ways, this inability to read Irigaray’s work as an ontological challenge to the western tradition. Judith Butler, for example, views Irigaray’s later work, from An Ethics of Sexual Difference onwards, as privileging heterosexuality and, more recently, other critics are concerned that Irigaray does not adequately theorise differences such as race, culture or tradition (Butler in Cheah and Grosz, 1998b: 28, Deutscher 2002, 2003).7 It seems that Deutscher’s particular way of reading Irigaray’s early work, one that focused on the impossibility of sexual difference, the deconstructive strategies of mimesis and the hypothetical ideal of sexual difference, and thus defended Irigaray against early criticisms of essentialism, has led to a misreading of her work as a whole and a failure to understand Irigaray’s more recent writings. These criticisms forget that sexual difference is and has always been, for Irigaray, connected to bodies which exist in the world in multiple incarnations. We must remember that Irigarayan questions of sexual difference are always related to sexed and gen-dered bodies, and that these questions are both phenomenological and ontological, concerned with questions of embodiment, nature and materiality.8

Moreover, little has been said of Irigaray’s broader psychoana-lytic context. Margaret Whitford alerted us to this point in 1991, suggesting that there are infl uences other than Jacques Lacan on Irigaray’s work, including Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, as well Cornelius Castoriadis’ ‘theorization of the imaginary’ (Whitford 1991a: 56; 1991b: 72).9 The larger psychoanalytic con-text is crucial for understanding Irigaray’s work in terms of social critique. I thus suggest that much needed work on the relationship


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between the ontological, the political and the ethical aspects of Irigaray’s thinking is still required and it is this relationship that this book, Irigaray and Politics: A Critical Introduction, intends to unpack further.

We begin in Chapter 1 with an exploration of Irigaray’s rela-tionship with psychoanalysis and the broader psychoanalytic con-texts from which Irigaray writes. It is important that we unpack Irigaray’s relationship with psychoanalysis and appreciate her cri-tique of psychoanalysis and Lacan in particular. This chapter thus illustrates the novel ways in which Irigaray uses psychoanalysis against itself, as well as how she uses psychoanalytic methods in her political–philosophical project, which ultimately, as we will see, is a critique of rationality and the supposedly ‘rational’ and ‘modern’ western subject.

In Chapter 2 we focus on Irigaray’s explicit challenge to the binary logic of western metaphysics and, in doing so, we begin to examine her different interventions into the social imaginary of western culture. We explore Irigaray’s refi guring of space–time–desire and her notions of labial logics and placental economies. This chapter explores new alternative imaginaries based upon the logic of two lips and placental economies and these discussions provide important context for understanding Irigaray’s psychoanalytically inspired conception of feminine subjectivity that we examine in the next chapter.

In Chapter 3, we consider more closely Irigaray’s conception of feminine subjectivity and feminine genealogies. This chapter explores the importance of myth and examines Irigaray’s call for mediations in culture, religion, politics and law. This chapter fl ags the importance of the mother–daughter relationship in Irigaray’s work, as well as the important ways in which she imagines a divine in the feminine. We also explore Irigaray’s call for sexuate rights and women’s politics as important mediations in the social imaginary that opens space for an autonomous feminine subject to emerge.

Chapter 4 engages with Irigaray’s reading of Hegel and thinks through questions of political subjectivity, family and community. This chapter traces the moments in Irigaray’s philosophy where she engages with Hegel’s dialectic, and rethinks this dialectical process via the question of sexual difference and a refiguring of love. I sug-gest that if we do not understand Irigaray’s radical reformulation of love, we will miss her larger political–philosophical project and fail to



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properly appreciate her comments on other types of difference – for example, differences of race, tradition, religion. As we begin to appre-ciate the ways in which Irigaray refigures both love and thought as the intermediary, an intermediary that fundamentally disrupts phallo-centric binary logic, we can begin to imagine how refiguring the most intimate human experience of love can lead us toward the realisa-tion of an ethical political community in which difference in all forms is nourished.

Building on these themes of coexisting in difference, in Chapter 5 we turn to Gayatri Spivak’s work to meditate further on this pos-sibility of thinking through an Irigarayan-inspired ethics of sexuate difference in our contemporary global contexts. This chapter marks an important hinge in the argument of the book as we move to refl ect upon some of the challenges of Irigaray’s work, and we do so focus-ing on Gayatri Spivak’s engagement with Irigaray’s thought. This chapter examines how Spivak mobilises Irigaray’s work on sexu-ate difference to address women’s solidarity and what this suggests about the possibility of cross-cultural communication between and among women. In particular, this chapter considers the way Spivak engages with – and goes beyond – Irigaray’s thinking of sexuate difference. We pay close attention to how Spivak mobilises Irigaray’s work on sexual difference to think through the tensions of a global women’s solidarity.

Chapter 6 considers the ways in which Irigaray’s philosophy of sexuate difference can be read alongside feminist Marxist ideas, especially in relation to women’s reproductive labour. We then move on to explore Irigaray’s thinking on the family as an ‘enclave’ of resistance alongside work by Silvia Federici and bell hooks. In this chapter we also explore how a new form of international municipal politics that emerged in Spain in 2015 seems to actualise Irigaray’s thinking of ‘women’s politics’.

The book concludes by reminding us to read Irigaray’s ongoing ontological challenge to western thought as both a political and a philosophical project, a project which gives rise to a politics of grace and wonder, requiring us to rethink our relations with one another and to constantly push the boundaries, to crack open time and to invent the new.

In the Afterword I consider how my personal experience of coming of age during the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa provided a distinct, perhaps decolonial, lens through which I fi rst encountered Irigaray’s philosophy. In a sense, I journey back


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‘home’ to unpack how those early years of South Africa’s transi-tion to democracy corresponded with my teenage years to produce the lens through which I read Irigaray’s work today. In doing so, I consider the work of social activists in contemporary South Africa and their battles with the ongoing legacies of colonialism as well as the urgency with which they are challenging patriarchal ideologies. I hope this work enables readers to appreciate the links between progressive social movements and Irigaray’s political–philosophi-cal project and, especially, how Irigaray’s call for the recognition of sexuate difference is a contestation of traditional gender roles which uphold colonial and patriarchal legacies

Notes

1. In her more recent writings Irigaray moves more freely between the use of the terms sexuate and sexual. She uses the term sexuate to recognise differences in sex without reducing these differences to restrictive and oppressive traditional western notions of femininity and masculinity, and to demonstrate these differences extend beyond biology. Using the term sexuate allows Irigaray to move away from rigid defi nitions at work in phallocentric binary logic, and to prevent her conception of sexual difference being reduced to biological differ-ence (personal communication with Luce Irigaray, PhD seminar, June 2009). Rachel Jones (2011) suggests that the difference between the use of sexuate and sexual in Irigaray’s writing is linked to the rela-tionship or double bind in her work that occurs, and becomes clear especially when reading her work as a whole, between the critical and the more constructive aspects of her philosophy. Jones suggests sexu-ate as corresponding to the more constructive and positive relation-ship that we (as women and as men) must now take up with regard to sexual difference. Jones notes: ‘Broadly speaking, however, I under-stand sexual difference to be that which western culture has forgotten and which Irigaray seeks to recover, while the sexuate involves taking up a positive relationship to sexual difference by acknowledging it as the irreducible difference which infl ects every aspect of our being’ (Jones 2011: 4). I agree with Jones on this point and will follow Jones and Irigaray by moving between the terms ‘sexuate’ and ‘sexual dif-ference’ in this book.

2. While I am aware that ‘western tradition’ generalises many different strands of thought and experience, I nevertheless follow Irigaray’s use of this term to indicate the philosophy, religion and culture that has emerged from Judeo-Greco-Christian traditions and how the underlying logic and values of these traditions, due to globalisation



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and colonialism, directly infl uence values and thought in contem-porary global contexts. For important critical analysis of these log-ics, from differing perspectives, see Dladla (2017), Dussel (2003), Grosfoguel (2012, 2013), Lugones (2008, 2010), Maldonado-Torres (2007), Mignolo and Tlostanova (2007), Mukandi (2015), Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013), Ramose (2016), Quijano (2000) and others work-ing on questions of coloniality and power. Moreover, for an insightful engagement problematising the notion of ‘Western civilization’, see Federici (1995). I also want to acknowledge the tension that emerges when using this term in light of Edward Said’s (1976) work.

3. Diana Fuss writes: ‘Essentialism is most commonly understood as a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fi xed prop-erties which defi ne the “whatness” of a given entity’ (Fuss 1989: xii). Tina Chanter (1995) provides examples of the criticism of Irigaray’s supposed biological essentialism. Chanter cites an example from Mary Poovey who writes ‘Luce Irigaray . . . authorizes th[e] return to biology and essentialism in her creation of a myth of female desire and in bas-ing “feminine” language on the physical properties of female genitalia’ (Poovey cited in Chanter 1995: 4). Monique Plaza, Lynne Segal and Toril Moi are also cited as vocal critics of Irigaray’s supposed biological essentialism.

4. Some good overviews of the reception of Irigaray’s work can be found in: Schor (1994) and Whitford (1994) both published in Burke et al. (1994). See also: Cheah and Grosz (1998a) and Schwab (2006).

5. I will not recount the details here but some important viewpoints on how these debates hindered the reception and appreciation of Iriga-ray’s thought have been discussed by numerous scholars. Early work by Margaret Whitford (1989) attempts to defend Irigaray against the criticisms of essentialism by pointing out Irigaray’s philosophical proj-ect of ‘attempting to begin to dismantle from within the foundations of western metaphysics’. Naomi Schor (1989) discusses how these early criticisms of essentialism worked to silence Irigaray’s unique thinking on materiality and fl uidity with reference to female embodiment. Ellen Mortensen’s work (2002) points out the links between the debates and the lack of ontological questioning in feminist philosophy. Rosi Braidotti (2011) writes, with reference to Irigaray’s philosophy, on the politics of ontological difference and argues that we must rede-fi ne essentialism positively because, as feminist theorists, we have to talk about embodiment and lived experience. Elizabeth Grosz (2011a) more recently adds to this discussion in a chapter entitled ‘Irigaray and the Ontology of Sexual Difference’.

6. Irigaray herself notes ‘the philosophical dimension of my writings is not suffi ciently taken into account . . . nor is the innovative nature of my thinking widely accepted’. (Irigaray 2000c: 10). While the broader


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philosophical aspects of Irigaray’s work have now been more widely appreciated, the ontological aspects of her philosophical work have not. Notable exceptions include the work of Margaret Whitford, Elizabeth Grosz, Ellen Mortensen (1994a, 1994b, 2002), Alison Stone (2006), Rachel Jones (2011), Emma Jones (2011, 2012) and Anne Van Leeuwen (2010a, 2010b, 2012).

7. For an alternative perspective on the question of heterosexuality in Irigaray’s work see Elizabeth Grosz’s (1994b). See also: Cheah and Grosz (1998b).

8. While Deutscher’s analysis does point out this tension when thinking through the question of race in Irigaray’s later writing, her analysis of Between East and West and her focus on the impossibility and futurity of sexual difference hinders an appreciation of the ontologi-cal questioning and the possibility of conceiving of a new politics in Irigaray’s work. Deutscher’s criticism also hinders the possibilities for new ways of practicing philosophy that Irigaray’s work in Between East and West on embodied breath and listening offers us. As Monica Mookherjee points out, Deutscher’s reading treats ‘sex uniquely as symbolic interpretation’ and thus ‘Deutscher avoids addressing head-on the most controversial implications of Irigaray’s basic philosophi-cal claim’ (Mookherjee 2003: 43). Mookherjee writes that Between East and West respects ‘exactly the kind of minimal conception of “being-two” that Deutscher extrapolated from Irigaray’s corpus ear-lier in her book . . . It is a pity that Deutscher focuses principally on the somewhat circular debates about essentialism’ (Mookherjee 2003: 44). It is also important to question the interest that certain feminist philosophers are now taking in the issue of differences among women. Uma Narayan explores this point in an article on cultural essentialism in which she writes that ‘this feminist injunction to attend to “differences among women” sometimes takes question-able forms’ (Narayan 1998: 87). Narayan argues that such a feminist injunction can ultimately lead to a type of cultural essentialism in which cultural groups become defi ned by strict boundaries, and are reduced to hierarchal binary logic in the same way gender essential-ism works. Non-western cultural groups become reduced to an I/you or us/them binary opposition in which ‘they’ will always remain the ‘other’ of the ‘same’. This echoes Irigaray’s thinking on the topic. For Irigaray, to talk of racial difference as somehow separate to sexual difference is to remain within phallocentric logic and masculine poli-tics. Perhaps more importantly, in framing the discussion in this way, one discounts the experiences of women of colour whose very exis-tence straddles both realms of racialised and gendered experience. Rebecca Hill’s (2016) paper adds an interesting perspective to the point I am making here.



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9. Michelle Boulous Walker (1998) recognises the infl uence of Melanie Klein on Irigaray’s work and provides an informative discussion of the importance of the mother in Klein’s work. Boulous Walker also ques-tions why Irigaray does not seek to enter into dialogue with Klein; she notes ‘Given Irigaray’s own views on the importance of a genealogy of women I fi nd the absence of this dialogue more than a little disap-pointing’ (Boulous Walker 1998: 144).


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