An Examination of Irigaray's Commitment to Transcendental Phenomenology in The Forgetting of Air and The Way of Love

Although sexual difference is widely regarded as the concept that lies at the center of Luce Irigaray's thought, its meaning and significance is highly contested. This dissensus, however, attests to more than merely the existence of a recalcitrant conceptual ambiguity. That is, Irigaray's discussion of sexual difference remains fraught not because she leaves this concept undefined but because the centrality of sexual difference in fact marks a complex and unstable nexus of phenomena that shift throughout her work. Consequently, if Irigaray is indeed the preeminent thinker of sexual difference, this is not in virtue of her recurrent appeal to a monolithic, readily digestible concept but rather somehow despite the absence of precisely this gesture. In this paper, I will attempt to elucidate the peculiar preeminence of sexual difference in Irigaray's work by identifying her persistent, though largely unexamined, commitment to transcendental phenomenology. Indeed, I attempt to show that the complex of phenomena of sexual difference emerges in L'oubli de l'air and The Way of Love as a modulation of Heidegger's own revision of transcendental phenomenology. In this sense, the peculiar preeminence of sexual difference does not mark the centrality of a concept but Irigaray's amplification of this Heideggerian gesture.     

Wittgenstein and Irigaray: Gender and Philosophy in a Language (Game) of Difference

Drawing Wittgenstein's and Irigaray's philosophies into conversation might help resolve certain misunderstandings that have so far hampered both the reception of Irigaray's work and the development of feminist praxis in general. A Wittgensteinian reading of Irigaray can furnish an anti-essentialist conception of “woman” that retains the theoretical and political specificity feminism requires while dispelling charges that Irigaray's attempt to delineate a “feminine” language is either groundlessly Utopian or entails a biological essentialism.     

Of Waters and Women: The Philosophy of Luce Irigaray

This article reviews three recent books that enhance our understanding of the work of French feminist Luce Irigaray: Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche and The Irigaray Reader (both by Irigaray), and Philosophy in the Feminine, a commentary on Irigaray's work by Margaret Whitford. The author emphasizes a dynamic reading of Irigaray's philosophy and integrates theoretical concepts with poetic/utopian passages from the works.     

Questions to Luce Irigaray

This article traces the “dialogue” between the work of the philosophers Luce Irigaray and Emmanuel Levinas. It attempts to construct a more nuanced discussion than has been given to date of Irigaray's critique of Levinas, particularly as formulated in “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas” ( Irigaray 1991 )-It suggests that the concepts of the feminine and of voluptuosity articulated by Levinas have more to contribute to Irigaray's project of an ethics of sexual difference than she herself sometimes appears to think.     

The Other as Another Other

De Beauvoir and Irigaray are archetypes of two opposed feminisms: egalitarian feminism and radical feminism of difference. Yet a filiation exists between de Beauvoir's claim, that women is Other, and Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman. This paper explores the relationship between de Beauvoir's and Irigaray's notion of otherness. It argues that Irigaray deforms de Beauvoir's categories, and that de Beauvoir provides a more coherent prospect for the development of an authentic feminine subjectivity.     

Reclamation from Absence? Luce Irigaray and Women in the History of Philosophy

Luce Irigaray's work does not present an obvious resource for projects seeking to reclaim women in the history of philosophy. Indeed, many authors introduce their reclamation project with an argument against conceptions, attributed to Irigaray or “French feminists” more generally, that the feminine is the excluded other of discourse. These authors claim that if the feminine is the excluded other of discourse, then we must conclude that even if women have written philosophy they have not given voice to feminine subjectivity; therefore, reclamation is a futile project. In this essay, I argue against such conclusions. Rather, I argue, Irigaray's work requires that philosophy be transformed through the reclamation of women's writing. She gives us a method of reclamation for the most difficult cases: those in which we have no record of women's writing. Irigaray offers this method through an engagement with the character of Diotima in Plato's Symposium. The method Irigaray demonstrates is reclamation as love.     

The Unacknowledged Socrates in the Works of Luce Irigaray

In Luce Irigaray's thought, Socrates is a marginal figure compared to Plato or Hegel. However, she does identify the Socratic dialectical position as that of a ‘phallocrat’ and she does conflate Socratic and Platonic philosophy in her psychoanalytic reading of Plato in Speculum of the Other Woman. In this essay, I critically interpret both Irigaray's own texts and the Platonic dialogues in order to argue that: (1) the Socratic dialectical position is not ‘phallocratic’ by Irigaray's own understanding of the term; (2) that Socratic (early Platonic) philosophy should not be conflated with the mature Platonic metaphysics Irigaray criticizes; and (3) that Socratic dialectical method is similar in some respects with the dialectical method of Diotima, Socrates’ instructress in love and the subject of Irigaray's “Sorcerer Love” essay in An Ethics of Sexual Difference.     

Irigaray and Lyotard: Birth,Infancy, and Metaphysics

This paper examines the ways in which Luce Irigaray and Jean‐François Lyotard critique western metaphysics by drawing on notions of birth and infancy. It shows how both thinkers position birth as an event of beginning that can be reaffirmed in every act of initiation and recommencement. Irigaray's reading of Diotima's speech from Plato's Symposium is positioned as a key text for this project alongside a number of essays by Lyotard in which he explores the potency of infancy as the condition of philosophy itself. Despite this potency, however, Lyotard suggests that metaphysics is haunted by a melancholia that is inseparable from the limits of thought. I argue that Irigaray is able both to explain why western metaphysics is constitutively melancholic and to offer a shift in perspective that means we are not inevitably condemned to melancholia. The paper concludes that while Lyotard's account of infancy challenges the terms of western metaphysics from within, Irigaray's reassessment of our beginnings in birth offers the possibility of an alternative metaphysical horizon.     

Antigone's Nature

Antigone fascinates G. W. F. Hegel and Luce Irigaray, both of whom turn to her in their explorations and articulations of ethics. Hegel and Irigaray make these re‐turns to Antigone through the double and related lenses of nature and sexual difference. This essay investigates these figures of Antigone and the accompanying ethical accounts of nature and sexual difference as a way of examining Irigaray's complex relation to and creative uses of Hegel's thought.     

Living Politically: An Irigarayan Notion of Agency as a Way of Life

This paper formulates Luce Irigaray's notion of agency as a political way of life. I argue that agency, within an Irigarayan framework, is both the outcome and the condition of a political life, aimed at creating political transformations. As Irigaray hardly addresses the topic of agency per se, I suggest understanding Irigaray's textual style as implying specific “technologies of self” in the Foucauldian sense, that is, as self‐applied social practices that reshape social reality, one's relations to oneself, and enhance one's freedom and pleasures in these relations. This interpretation aims to extract concrete transformative practices, which, by shaping one's sense of self in relation to others, create oneself as a free and active subject.     

Between Races and Generations: Materializing Race and Kinship in Moraga and Irigaray

Juxtaposing Cherríe Moraga's Loving in the War Years and Luce Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman, I explore the ways that sex and race intersect to complicate an Irigarayan account of the relations between mother and daughter. Irigaray's work is an effective tool for understanding the disruptive and potentially healing desire between mothers and daughters, but her insistence on sex as primary difference must be challenged in order to acknowledge the intersectionality of sex and race. Working from recent work on the psychoanalysis of race, I argue that whiteness functions as a master signifier in its own right, and as a means of differentiation between the light‐skinned Moraga and her brown‐skinned mother. Irigaray's concept of blood deepens Moraga's account of her healing and subversive return to her mother. The juxtaposition of Moraga, Irigaray, and contemporary psychoanalysis of race can allow for a necessary revision of Irigaray's psychoanalysis that acknowledges the ways in which sexual difference is indexed by race and sheds new light on her account of the mother–daughter relation.     

Irigaray and the Sacrifice of the Sacrifice of Woman

One of the problems with a superficial reading of “Belief Itself” and “Women, the Sacred, Money” is that Irigaray is too easily understood as merely saying that woman is the hidden victim of sacrifice and that one is called to reveal this hidden victim. While this is an important aspect of Irigaray's work, a more radical interpretation is opened up when it is read alongside the work of Lacan and ?i?ek. Irigaray's work disturbs the traditional discourses on revelation, sacrifice, and woman on one level while at the same time reinforcing their most extreme ramifications.     

Feminist Philosophy and the Philosophy of Feminism: Irigaray and the History of Western Metaphysics

Irigaray demonstrates that metaphysics depends upon the specific negation and exclusion of the female body. Readings of Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman tend to highlight the status of this excluded materiality: is there an essential female body which precedes negation or is the feminine only an effect of exclusion? I approach Irigaray's work by way of another question: is it possible to move beyond a feminist critique of metaphysics and towards a feminist philosophy?     

Sexual Difference and Decolonization: Oyĕwùmí and Irigaray in Dialogue about Western Culture

In this article we aim to show the potential of cross‐continental dialogues for a decolonizing feminism. We relate the work of one of the major critics of the Western metaphysical patriarchal order, Luce Irigaray, to the critique of the colonial/modern gender system by the Nigerian feminist scholar Oy?rónké Oy?wùmí. Oy?wùmí's work is often rejected based on the argument that it is empirically wrong. We start by problematizing this line of thinking by providing an epistemological interpretation of Oy?wùmí's claims. We then draw Irigaray and Oy?wùmí into conversation, and show how this bolsters and helps to further illuminate and contextualize Oy?wùmí's critique of gender. But the dialogue between these thinkers also reveals significant limitations of Irigaray's philosophy, namely her presumption of the priority of sexual difference, its rigid duality, and her failure to take into account the inextricable intertwinement of gender and race in the Western patriarchal order. Relating Irigaray's critique of Western culture's forgetting of sexual difference to Oy?wùmí's critique hence demonstrates to what extent Irigaray's philosophy remains typically Western and how she therefore fails to escape the paradigm that she is so critical of.     

Crossing Lovers: Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions

Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions could be read as a response to Merleau‐Ponty's article “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible. Like Merleau‐Ponty, Irigaray describes corporeal intertwining or vision and touch. Counteracting the narcissistic strain in Merleau‐Ponty's chiasm, she assumes that sexual difference must precede the intertwining. The subject is marked by the alterity or the “more than one” and encoded as a historically contingent gendered conflict.     

WONDER BETWEEN TWO: AN IRIGARAYAN READING OF GENESIS 2:231

Luce Irigaray, in the course of engagement with René Descartes, argues that we must return wonder to its first locus—that of sexual difference. I suggest that Irigaray's notion of wonder finds resonance in the poetic declaration of the first man in Genesis 2:23. While the creation narratives affirm the equality of woman and man, they also affirm the irreducibility of woman and man to each other. This insistence on wonder has implication for communicative exchange between woman and man. I also argue, however, against Irigaray, that wonder is as appropriate between humans and God as between the sexes.     

Irigaray on the Problem of Subjectivity1

In Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Luce Irigaray argues that “any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the masculine.” This paper offers an analysis of Irigaray's critique of subjectivity and examines the psychological mechanism referred to as “the phallic economy of castration.” A different way of conceiving the relation between subject and object is explored by imagining a new subject of desire.     

Dancing Contact Improvisation with Luce Irigaray: Intra‐Action and Elemental Passions

This article takes as its point of departure Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions, in which a woman‐speaker tries to make her lover and the discipline of philosophy understand that she is not how they have imagined her to be; that she is not at all but that she keeps becoming through perpetual movement. The article investigates Irigaray's investment in a form of materialist difference feminism that offers conceptual links to the posthumanist work of Karen Barad's agential realism, especially her theorization of intra‐action. The link between Irigaray and Barad is established via a diffractive reading that incorporates the dance/movement research practice of Contact Improvisation. Although expressed through written language, Elemental Passions creates the impression of the woman‐speaker dancing, of encountering herself, her environment, and her lover through moved and moving contact, searching for a practice of moving‐together, feeling‐with, and feeling‐between that can be experienced in an improvised dance duet. Exploring how touch and the sharing of weight in Contact Improvisation challenges boundaries and establishes ever‐changing configurations and entanglements between dancers, the article proposes that Irigaray's woman‐speaker envisions herself as a posthuman/ist woman and that improvised dancing offers a practice of intra‐action through which she can encounter the world in her becoming.     

Her Mother Her Self: The Ethics of the Antigone Family Romance

This essay discusses the implications of Irigaray's readings of the Antigone in the construction of a feminist ethics. By focusing on the gaps and intersections between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian phenomenology as formulative of Irigaray's eventual call for an ethics of sexual difference, 1 emphasize the inevitability of rethinking the functions of historicity, femininity, and maternity in the formation of new models of intersubjectivity.     

The Diabolical Strategy of Mimesis: Luce Irigaray's Reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty

In this essay I explore the dynamic between Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as it unfolds in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993). Irigaray's strategy of mimesis is a powerful feminist tool, both philosophically and politically. Regarding textual engagement as analogous for relations between self and other beyond the text, I deliver a cautionary message: mimetic strategy is powerful but runs the risk of silencing the voice of the other.