Luce Irigaray
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Luce Irigaray | |
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Born | French feminism[1] | 3 May 1930
Main interests | Linguistics,
Feminist Philosophy ,
Feminist Theory ,
Philosophy,
Psychology,
Schizophrenia
Gender identity |
Notable ideas | Phallocentrism, "Women on the market"[2] |
Part of a series on |
Feminist philosophy |
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Luce Irigaray (born 3 May 1930) is a
Irigaray employs three different modes[8] in her investigations into the nature of gender, language, and identity: the analytic, the essayistic, and the lyrical poetic.[9] As of October 2021, she is active in the Women's Movements in both France and Italy.[10]
Education
Luce Irigaray received a bachelor's degree from the University of Louvain in 1954, a master's degree from the same university in 1956,[11] and taught at a high school in Brussels from 1956 to 1959.
In 1960, she moved to
She completed a PhD in linguistics in 1968 from the
In the 1960s, Irigaray started attending the psychoanalytic seminars of Jacques Lacan and joined the
She held a research post at the
It has also been noted that in her writings, Irigaray has stated a concern that an interest in her biography would affect the interpretation of her ideas, as the entrance of women into intellectual discussions has often also included the challenging of women's point of view based on biographical material. Her most extensive autobiographical statements thus far are gathered in Through Vegetal Being (co-authored with Michael Marder). Overall, she maintains the belief that biographical details pertaining to her personal life hold the possibility to be used against her within the male dominated educational establishment as a tool to discredit her work.[4] However, at age 91, she published A New Culture of Energy: Beyond East and West (2021) in which she discusses her decades-long practices of yoga asanas (postures) and pranayama (breathing) and maintains that yoga builds a bridge between body and spirit.
Major works
Speculum of the Other Woman (Speculum de l'autre femme)
Her first major book, Speculum of the Other Woman, based on her second dissertation, was published in 1974. In Speculum, Irigaray engages in close analyses of phallocentrism in Western philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, analyzing texts by Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant. The book's most cited essay, "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream," critiques Freud's lecture on femininity.
This Sex Which is Not One (Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un)
In 1977, Irigaray published This Sex Which is Not One (Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un) which was subsequently translated into English with that title and published in 1985, along with Speculum. In addition to more commentary on psychoanalysis, including discussions of Lacan's work, This Sex Which is Not One also comments on political economy, drawing on structuralist writers such as Lévi-Strauss. For example, Irigaray argues that the phallic economy places women alongside signs and currency, since all forms of exchange are conducted exclusively between men.[12]
"Women on the Market" (Chapter Eight of This Sex Which is Not One)
Irigaray draws upon Karl Marx’s theory of capital and commodities to claim that women are exchanged between men in the same way as any other commodity is. She argues that our entire society is predicated on this exchange of women. Her exchange value is determined by society, while her use value is her natural qualities. Thus, a woman’s self is divided between her use and exchange values, and she is only desired for the exchange value. This system creates three types of women: the mother, who is all use value; the virgin, who is all exchange value; and the prostitute, who embodies both use and exchange value.[12]
She further uses additional Marxist foundations to argue that women are in demand due to their perceived shortage and as a result, males seek "to have them all," or seek a surplus like the excess of commodity buying power, capital, that capitalists seek constantly. Irigaray speculates thus that perhaps, "the way women are used matter less than their number." In this further analogy of women "on the market," understood through Marxist terms, Irigaray points out that women, like commodities, are moved between men based on their exchange value rather than just their use value, and the desire will always be surplus – making women almost seem like capital, in this case, to be accumulated. "As commodities, women are thus two things at once: utilitarian objects and bearers of value."[12]
Elemental Passions
Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions (1982) 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.[6]
Themes
Philosophy
Some of Irigaray's books written in her lyrical mode are imaginary dialogues with significant contributors to Western philosophy, such as
Language
She continued to conduct empirical studies about language in a variety of settings, researching the differences between the way men and women speak. This focus on sexual difference is the key characteristic of Irigaray's oeuvre, since she is seeking to provide a site from which a feminine language can eventuate. Through her research, Irigaray discovered a correlation between the suppression of female thought in the Western world and language of men and women. She concluded that there are gendered language patterns that denote dominance in men and subjectivity in women.
Gender identity
Since 1990, Irigaray's work has turned increasingly toward women and men together. In Between East and West, From Singularity to Community (1999) and in The Way of Love (2002), she imagines new forms of love for a global democratic community.[13] In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, she introduces the idea of relationships between men and women centered around a bond other than reproduction. She acknowledges themes including finiteness and intersubjectivity, embodied divinity, and the emotional distinction between the two sexes. She concludes that Western culture is unethical due to gender discrimination.
Politics
Irigaray is active in a feminist movement in Italy, but she refused to belong to any one movement because she does not like the competitive dynamic between the feminist movements.
Criticism
Some feminists criticize Irigaray's perceived
W. A. Borody has criticised Irigaray's phallogocentric argument as misrepresenting the history of philosophies of "indeterminateness" in the West. Irigaray's "black and white" claims that the masculine equates to determinateness and that the feminine equates to indeterminateness which contain a degree of cultural and historical validity, but not when they are deployed to self-replicate a similar form of the gender-othering they originally sought to overcome.[16]
In Fashionable Nonsense, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont criticized Irigaray's use of hard-science terminology in her writings. Among the criticisms, they question the purported interest Einstein had in "accelerations without electromagnetic reequilibrations"; confusing special relativity and general relativity; and her claim[17] that E = mc2 is a "sexed equation" because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us".[18] In reviewing Sokal and Bricmont's book, Richard Dawkins wrote that Irigaray's assertion that fluid mechanics was unfairly neglected in physics due to its association with "feminine" fluids (in contrast to "masculine" solids) was "daffy absurdity".[19][20]
Selected bibliography
Books
- Irigaray, Luce (1974). Speculum of the Other Woman. (Eng. trans. 1985 by ISBN 9780801493300.
- Irigaray, Luce (1977). This Sex Which Is Not One. (Eng. trans. 1985), ISBN 9780801493317.
- Irigaray, Luce (1980). Marine Lover: Of Friedrich Nietzsche. (Eng. trans. 1991 by Gillian C. Gill), ISBN 9780231070829.
- Irigaray, Luce (1982). Elemental Passions. (Eng. trans. 1992), ISBN 9780415906920.
- Irigaray, Luce (1983). The Forgetting of Air: In Martin Heidegger. (Eng. trans. 1999), ISBN 9780292738720.
- Irigaray, Luce (1984). An Ethics of Sexual Difference. (Eng. trans. 1993 by Gillian C. Gill), ISBN 9780801481451.
- Irigaray, Luce (1985). To Speak is Never Neutral. (Eng. trans. 2002), ISBN 9780826459046.
- Irigaray, Luce (1987). Sexes and Genealogies. (Eng. trans. 1993 by Gillian C. Gill), ISBN 9780231070331.
- Irigaray, Luce (1989). Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution. (Eng. trans. 1993), ISBN 9780485114263.
- Irigaray, Luce (1990). Je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference. (Eng. trans. 1993), ISBN 9780415905824.
- Irigaray, Luce (1990). I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History. (Eng. trans. 1993), ISBN 9780415907323.
- Irigaray, Luce (1994). Democracy Begins Between Two. (Eng. trans. 2000), ISBN 9780415918169.
- Irigaray, Luce (1997). To Be Two. (Eng. trans. 2001), ISBN 9780415918145.
- Irigaray, Luce (1999). Between East and West: From Singularity to Community. (Eng. trans. 2001), ISBN 9780231119351.
- Irigaray, Luce (2000). Why Different?, ISBN 9780801493300.
- Irigaray, Luce (2002). The Way of Love.ISBN 9780826473271.
- Irigaray, Luce (2008). Sharing the World. (Eng. trans. 2008), ISBN 9781847060341.
- Irigaray, Luce (2008). Conversations, ISBN 9781847060365.
- Irigaray, Luce (2013). In the Beginning, She Was. ISBN 9781441106377
- Irigaray, Luce; Marder, Michael (2016). Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. ISBN 9780231173865.
- Irigaray, Luce (2017). To Be Born: Genesis of a New Human Being. ISBN 9783319392219.
- Irigaray, Luce (2019). Sharing the Fire: Outline of a Dialectics of Sensitivity. ISBN 9783030283292.
Papers
- Irigaray, Luce (1996), "This sex which is not one", in ISBN 9780231107082.
- Irigaray, Luce (1997), "This sex which is not one", in Nicholson, Linda (ed.), The second wave: a reader in feminist theory, New York: Routledge, pp. 323–329, ISBN 9780415917612.
- Luce Irigaray (1999), "Philosophy in the Feminine", Feminist Review, Volume 42, Issue 1, pp 111–114, ISSN 1466-4380.
- Irigaray, Luce (2005), "In science, is the subject sexed?", in ISBN 9780631236108.
- Irigaray, Luce (1981), "And the One Doesn't Stir Without the Other", Signs, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 60–67.
- Irigaray, Luce (1980), "When Our Lips Speak Together", Signs, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 69–79.
See also
- Antinarcissism
- Feminism and the Oedipus complex
- Hélène Cixous
- Julia Kristeva
- List of deconstructionists
- Strategic essentialism
- Unsaid
- Phallocentrism
References
- ^ Kelly Ives, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism, Crescent Moon Publishing, 2016.
- ^ Luce Irigaray, "Women on the Market", in: This Sex Which Is Not One, Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 170.
- ^ "God's Mother, Eve's Advocate: a Gynocentric Refiguration of Marian Symbolism in Engagement with Luce Irigaray" (PDF). 1998. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 January 2022.
- ^ a b "Luce Irigaray: French linguist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher". Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 2019-10-29.
- ISBN 0-415-30651-5.
- ^ S2CID 143882714.
- ^ Irigaray, Luce (1999). The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger. University of Texas Press.
- ISBN 978-1861715470.
- OCLC 27376081.
- ^ "Luce Irigaray (1932?—)". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- ^ Commire, Anne; Klezmer, Deborah (2007). Dictionary of Women Worldwide: 25,000 Women Through the Ages. Vol. 1. Yorkin Publications.
- ^ ISBN 9780631200291.
- ^ Merriman, John; Winter, Jay (2006). Europe Since 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction. Vol. 3. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons.
- ^ Delphy, Christine (2001), L'Ennemi principal, tome 2: Penser le genre (in French)
- S2CID 170564589.
- ^ Wayne A. Borody (1998), pp. 3, 5 "Figuring the Phallogocentric Argument with Respect to the Classical Greek Philosophical Tradition", Nebula: A Netzine of the Arts and Science, Vol. 13 (pp. 1–27).
- ISBN 9781315084718, retrieved 2021-10-22
- OCLC 39605994.
- S2CID 40887987.
- ^ "Jane Clare Jones on Luce Irigaray: The murder of the mother". New Statesman. 2014-05-14. Retrieved 2021-12-01.
Further reading
- Canters, Hanneke; Jantzen, Grace M. (2005). Forever fluid: A reading of Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions. Manchester University Press. JSTOR j.ctt21216bb.
- Sjöholm, Cecilia. "Crossing Lovers: Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions." Hypatia, 2000
- Robinson, Hilary (2006). Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women. I.B. Tauris.