Irigaray and Politics: A Critical Introduction 9781474422819, 9781474422833, 9781474422826, 9781474422840

Citation preview

Irigaray and Politics

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Thinking Politics Series Editors: Geoff M. Boucher and Matthew Sharpe Politics in the twenty-first century is immensely complex and multi-faceted and alternative theorisations of debates that radically renew older ideas have grown from a trickle to a flood in the past twenty years. The most interesting and relevant contemporary thinkers have responded to new political challenges – such as liberal multiculturalism, new directions in feminist thinking, theories of global empire and biopolitical power, and challenges to secularism – by widening the scope of their intellectual engagements and responding to the new politics. The thinkers selected for inclusion in the series have all responded to the urgency and complexity of thinking about politics today in fresh ways. Books in the series will provide clear and accessible introductions to the major ideas in contemporary thinking about politics, through a focus in each volume on a key political thinker. Rather than a roll-call of the ‘usual suspects’ it will focus on new thinkers who offer provocative new directions and some neglected older thinkers whose relevance is becoming clear as a result of the changing situation. Each book will: • Provide a summary overview of the thinker's contribution • Position the thinker within the contemporary political field and their intellectual contexts • Explain key concepts and events • Balance accessibility with a serious critical treatment of the thinker • Expose the thinker's ideas to robust tests of empirical and conceptual evidence • Focus on ideas and debates in relation to real world politics and contemporary political questions with empirical examples • Include text boxes to highlight key concepts and figures Published titles Agamben and Politics: A Critical Introduction Sergei Prozorov Foucault and Politics: A Critical Introduction Mark G. E. Kelly Taylor and Politics: A Critical Introduction Craig Browne and Andrew P. Lynch Habermas and Politics: A Critical Introduction Matheson Russell Irigaray and Politics: A Critical Introduction Laura Roberts https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-thinking-politics.html

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IRIGARAY AND POLITICS A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Laura Roberts

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Laura Roberts, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 2281 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2283 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2282 6 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2284 0 (epub) The right of Laura Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction Notes

vii 1 7

1 Beyond Freud and Lacan The Psychoanalytic Critique of Western Thought Freud’s Unconscious Phantasy Lacan’s Mirror Stage A Culture of Narcissism Melanie Klein and Projective Identification Béla Grunberger and the Masculine Imaginary Psychoanalysing the Psychoanalysts: Irigaray on Freud’s ‘Femininity’ The Culture of Narcissism as Social Critique Notes

11 13 14 16 20 21 23

2 Feminine Imaginaries Philosophical Myths: Refiguring Western Space–Time Language and Subjectivity: Labial Logics and Placental Economies Notes

44 48

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

27 33 35

57 66 72 73 76 80 84

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

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irigaray and politics 5 Luce Irigaray with Gayatri Spivak ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’ French Feminism Revisited Levinas and the Fecundity of the Caress The Impossible Intimacy of the Ethical Notes

108 111 119 124 126 129

6 A Politics of Proximity Marxist Feminist Critique of the Family Refounding the Family Intercultural Couples Politics of the Common Where to Now? International New Municipalism Barcelona en Comú and the Feminisation of Politics Notes

134 136 141 144 147 151 154 157

Conclusion Note

159 160

Afterword Notes

161 166

Bibliography Index

167 183

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Acknowledgements

This book would not have come to fruition without the support and love of my family and friends spread across the globe. The friendships that have nourished my academic life thus far are many, but I especially want to thank those that have nurtured and pushed my work forward in ways that I could not have imagined without them. Thank you Shannon Brincat, Fabiane Ramos, Federica Caso, Liam Miller, Carlos Rivera, Helen Ngo, Tim Joubert and Anna Anto. Thanks also to Cath Carol, Jacquie Chandler, Renee England, Romain Fathi, Martyn Lloyd, Cristina Miguel, Sameema Zahra, Elese Dowden, Nathan Pickles, Hora Zabarjadisar and Omid Tofighian for their championing and encouragement along the way. A special thank you to my most excellent philosophical interlocutor, Bryan Mukandi, as my work bleeds into yours so yours does into mine. Michelle Boulous Walker, my PhD supervisor and dear friend, you introduced me to Irigaray’s work in those early days and you have been a guiding light through this process from the beginning. Thank you both for your kindness, your friendship and your provocations. I am also immensely grateful to Luce Irigaray for her work and thinking, and the battles she continues to fight. I am especially thankful for the week I spent with Luce as a graduate student in her 2009 seminar as well as our various meetings and mischievous moments that have happened since then. The community of The Irigaray Circle has also provided a constant source of support and friendship over the years. I am especially grateful to Gail Schwab, whose unwavering support of my work over the years has helped me to find my voice. Thank you also to Sabrina Hom, Rachel Jones, Ruthanne Crapo, Athena Coleman, Rebecca Hill, Mary Rawlinson and Wesley Barker, as well as all participants of The Irigaray Circle for their openness and generosity. I realise now just how rare it is to find such a community in the academic world. My thanks also to faculty and postgraduate students at The University of Queensland who have provided support, mentorship and camaraderie along the way. I thank especially: Marguerite La Caze, Carole Ferrier, Lisa Featherstone, Megan Cassidy-Welch, Karin Sellberg, Julie vii

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irigaray and politics Kelso and Elizabeth Stephens. And thank you to all the Philosophy and Gender Studies students at The University of Queensland, who have shuffled into class each week and hopefully left with their hearts full and heads held high. You inspire me and fill me with hope. Thank you to the series editors Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher for their support in getting this project off the ground, as well as for their helpful readings of the final manuscript. Thank you to David Lonergan at Edinburgh University Press, whose patience and heartening emails helped me to navigate the process of publishing my first monograph. Infinite thank yous to my mum and dad, Jane and Alan, for their unconditional love and support that provided the grounding for my philosophical habits to grow, even when at times it lead to much exasperation! Thanks to my sisters Emma and Sarah, my closest confidants, whose love and mischief keep me grounded. Thanks also to their partners, Marcus and Elodie, and of course my nieces, Josephine and Annabelle, who surround us with never ending joy. My maternal grandparents, Jean and Joseph Johnson, both passed away during the last stages of writing this book and I am eternally thankful for the lessons in love and magic that they instilled in me. I miss them. Thank you also to Joau, Jules, Sally and Kieran, my Aunty Wendy, John, Sean, Chris and family. Thank you to all my friends who have kept me sane and warm wherever I have landed; there are too many of you to thank here, but you know who you are. The final stages of this work were made possible by an Individual Diversity Grant from Hypatia: Feminist Journal of Philosophy as well as an Australian Academy of the Humanities Travelling Fellowship. My PhD research upon which this book is based was financially supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award Scholarship. Thanks and acknowledgement to Hypatia and Palgrave Macmillan for permission to reprint revised versions of earlier work. A version of Chapter 4 was previously published as: Roberts, Laura (2017). ‘A Revolution of Love: Thinking through a Dialectic That Is Not “One”’. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 32 (1): 69–85; and a version of Chapter 5 was previously published as: Roberts, Laura (2016). ‘Making Mischief: Thinking through Women’s Solidarity and Sexuate Difference with Luce Irigaray and Gayatri Spivak.’ In Identity and Difference: Contemporary Debates, edited by Rafael Winkler. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 201–31, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

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acknowledgements While the theoretical gurus of what’s left of the Left complain about their political impotence, to cite Alain Badiou (2013), or perfect the histrionic art of de-bunking for its own sake, like Slavoj Žižek, they also accomplish a far more pernicious sleight of hand: they have virtually erased the intellectual and political capital built by feminist theory and practice over the last 30 years – as if we had not developed schemes, methods, practices and tactics that could be of general relevance. The Left has questions to answer about the epistemic violence they have exercised against feminist theory and practice and they should not add insult to injury by first deleting feminist politics and then complaining that there is no alternative politics left on the Left. What’s left of the Left misunderstands the feminist politics of experience; they fail to see the relevance of the politics of desire and the affirmation of alternative ways of becoming subjects. Feminism expresses a radical aspiration to freedom aimed to confront and demolish the established, institutionalised form of gender identities and the power relations they actualize. (Rosi Braidotti 2015)

ix

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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 specific 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 specific 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 significance 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 find this underlying issue still cries out in vain for our attention . . . Both in theory and in practice everything resists the discovery and affirmation 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 ‘first 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 significance 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 foundations and new understandings of subjectivity which, in turn, will enable a refiguring of ethics and politics in the western tradition.2 1

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irigaray and politics We must understand Irigaray’s approach as double pronged: both critical and creative, both intellectual and concrete, both philosophical 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 revolution 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 cultivation of autonomous feminine subjectivity and woman-to-woman sociality which will challenge western thinking of the subject as neutral 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 figure subjectivity. Through a detailed philosophical analysis that reads some of Irigaray’s wellknown 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 provides a reading of Irigaray’s oeuvre as an ongoing project aimed at redefining the traditional western notion of ontology as neutral and transcendent, and in doing so, the very meaning of ethical citizenship and political subjectivity. Irigaray argues that the unfolding of an autonomous feminine subjectivity, would, in turn, create space for the possibility of recognising – philosophically, culturally and politically – non-hierarchal 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 defined in relation to ‘Man’, and allows access to a socio-political realm as self-defined women. Moreover, as autonomously defined 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: 2

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introduction 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, without 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 refiguring of feminine subjectivity (subjectivity as sexuate) thus opens up space for the much needed refiguring of masculine subjectivity which remains largely conflated with the characteristics of the modern western subject that emerges with the cogito of René Descartes: rational, transcendent, solipsistic. 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 defined. This refiguring of subjectivity thus opens up the way to challenge what Irigaray identifies as a culture of narcissism undergirded by a logic of ‘Oneness’ and ‘Sameness’. Recognising the philosophical significance of sexuate difference, and the implications this has for our imagining of subjectivity in the western tradition, thus opens up new foundations 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 first 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, assuming that she was reducing the category of ‘Woman’ to biology. On reflection, 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 3

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irigaray and politics with which she wrote in her early works.4 It is important, however, to recognise how these early criticisms of essentialism impede an adequate 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 Irigaray, Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz (Mortensen 2002: 71).5 And, while there has been a general increase in scholarship regarding Irigaray’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 gendered 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 psychoanalytic context. Margaret Whitford alerted us to this point in 1991, suggesting that there are influences 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 context is crucial for understanding Irigaray’s work in terms of social critique. I thus suggest that much needed work on the relationship 4

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introduction 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 relationship with psychoanalysis and the broader psychoanalytic contexts from which Irigaray writes. It is important that we unpack Irigaray’s relationship with psychoanalysis and appreciate her critique 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 refiguring 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 flags 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 suggest that if we do not understand Irigaray’s radical reformulation of love, we will miss her larger political–philosophical project and fail to 5

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irigaray and politics properly appreciate her comments on other types of difference – for example, differences of race, tradition, religion. As we begin to appreciate the ways in which Irigaray refigures both love and thought as the intermediary, an intermediary that fundamentally disrupts phallocentric binary logic, we can begin to imagine how refiguring the most intimate human experience of love can lead us toward the realisation 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 possibility 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 reflect upon some of the challenges of Irigaray’s work, and we do so focusing on Gayatri Spivak’s engagement with Irigaray’s thought. This chapter examines how Spivak mobilises Irigaray’s work on sexuate 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 first encountered Irigaray’s philosophy. In a sense, I journey back 6

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introduction ‘home’ to unpack how those early years of South Africa’s transition 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–philosophical 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 definitions at work in phallocentric binary logic, and to prevent her conception of sexual difference being reduced to biological difference (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 relationship 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 sexuate as corresponding to the more constructive and positive relationship that we (as women and as men) must now take up with regard to sexual difference. Jones notes: ‘Broadly speaking, however, I understand 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 inflects 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 difference’ 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 7

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irigaray and politics

3.

4.

5.

6.

and colonialism, directly influence values and thought in contemporary global contexts. For important critical analysis of these logics, from differing perspectives, see Dladla (2017), Dussel (2003), Grosfoguel (2012, 2013), Lugones (2008, 2010), Maldonado-Torres (2007), Mignolo and Tlostanova (2007), Mukandi (2015), NdlovuGatsheni (2013), Ramose (2016), Quijano (2000) and others working 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. Diana Fuss writes: ‘Essentialism is most commonly understood as a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define 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 basing “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. 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). I will not recount the details here but some important viewpoints on how these debates hindered the reception and appreciation of Irigaray’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 project 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 fluidity 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 redefine 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’. Irigaray herself notes ‘the philosophical dimension of my writings is not sufficiently taken into account . . . nor is the innovative nature of my thinking widely accepted’. (Irigaray 2000c: 10). While the broader 8

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introduction 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 ontological 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 headon the most controversial implications of Irigaray’s basic philosophical 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 earlier 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 questionable 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 defined by strict boundaries, and are reduced to hierarchal binary logic in the same way gender essentialism 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 politics. Perhaps more importantly, in framing the discussion in this way, one discounts the experiences of women of colour whose very existence straddles both realms of racialised and gendered experience. Rebecca Hill’s (2016) paper adds an interesting perspective to the point I am making here. 9

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irigaray and politics 9. Michelle Boulous Walker (1998) recognises the influence 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 questions 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 find the absence of this dialogue more than a little disappointing’ (Boulous Walker 1998: 144).

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1

Beyond Freud and Lacan

We have not exhausted the list of questions that psychoanalysis could raise as to the ‘destiny,’ in particular the sexual destiny, assigned to woman, a destiny too often ascribed to anatomy and biology – which are supposed to explain, among other things, the very high frequency of female frigidity. But the historical determinants of this destiny need to be investigated. This implies that psychoanalysis needs to reconsider the very limits of its theoretical and practical field, needs to detour through an ‘interpretation’ of the cultural background and the economy, especially the political economy, that have marked it, without its knowledge. And psychoanalysis ought to wonder whether it is even possible to pursue a limited discussion of female sexuality so long as the status of woman in the general economy of the West has never been established. What role has been marked off for her in the organization of property, the philosophical systems, the religious mythologies that have dominated the West for centuries? In this perspective, we might suspect the phallus (Phallus) of being the contemporary figure of a god jealous of his prerogatives; we might suspect it of claiming, on this basis, to be the ultimate meaning of all discourse, the standard of truth and propriety, in particular as regards sex, the signifier and/or the ultimate signified of all desire, in addition to continuing, as emblem and agent of the patriarchal system, to shore up the name of the father (Father). (Irigaray 1985b: 67)

Irigaray’s relationship with psychoanalysis is ambiguous; as a qualified analyst she recognises the importance that this has for her thinking through sexuate subjectivity, while as a philosopher, Irigaray uses the methods of psychoanalysis to provide a comprehensive critique of the unconscious and unexamined phantasies that govern the western philosophical tradition. As Irigaray herself writes: I have trained as an analyst and that is important (even despite existing theories and practices) for thinking a sexual identity. I also belong to a philosophical tradition in which psychoanalysis takes its place as a stage in understanding the self-realization of consciousness, especially in its sexuate determinations. (Irigaray 1991c: 31) 11

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irigaray and politics Irigaray clearly views this relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis as central, and, in a sense, foundational to her philosophy of sexual difference. It is important to recognise the way these traditions weave together in Irigaray’s work, as well as the ways she puts these traditions to work on each other, which then enables Irigaray, as Margaret Whitford suggests, to view the ‘subject of philosophy’ as narcissistic.1 As this book illustrates, diagnosing the ‘subject of philosophy’ as narcissistic is central to understanding Irigaray’s political project.2 We must also appreciate Irigaray’s deliberate choice to focus on the ‘subject of philosophy’ and philosophical discourse, because, as she explains: it is indeed precisely philosophical discourse that we have to challenge, and disrupt, inasmuch as this discourse sets forth the law for all others, inasmuch as it constitutes the discourse on discourse . . . That is why we need to pay attention to the way the unconscious works in each philosophy, and perhaps in philosophy in general. We need to listen (psycho)analytically to its procedures of repression, to the structuration of language that shores up its representations, separating the true from the false, the meaningful from the meaningless, and so forth. (Irigaray 1991d: 122–4)3

We begin then, in this first chapter, to examine two ideas central to Irigaray’s psychoanalytic critique of western thought which diagnoses western culture as a culture of narcissism that nourishes the narcissistic ‘subject of (western) philosophy’. First, we need an understanding of what Irigaray calls a masculine imaginary at work in western thought and culture and, second, we need an understanding of how this masculine imaginary is projected onto culture and (mis)taken for reality.4 To adequately appreciate Irigaray’s notion of the masculine imaginary, however, we require an understanding of Sigmund Freud’s conception of the ego and unconscious phantasy and Jacques Lacan’s notion of the imaginary. I will thus outline Freud’s unconscious phantasy and Lacan’s mirror stage. We then examine Irigaray’s broader psychoanalytic contexts in the post-Freudian theories of narcissism of Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion and Belá Grunberger, in order to understand how this imaginary is conceived of as masculine, as well as how this is projected into culture, thus permitting a narcissistic culture and subject to flourish. The chapter concludes with an exploration of how Irigaray appropriates the tools of psychoanalysis in her symptomatic reading of Freud’s lecture ‘Femininity’ – in other words, how Irigaray psychoanalyses the psychoanalysts.5 12

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beyond freud and lacan

The Psychoanalytic Critique of Western Thought Irigaray’s critique of western thought must be read through a psychoanalytic lens in which western culture is diagnosed as a culture of narcissism, supporting and supported by the universal (masculine) narcissistic subject (Whitford 2003). According to Irigaray, the narcissistic (masculine) subject’s illusory omnipotence is secured via projective identification on a cultural and social scale, and it is in this sense that western culture is dominated by a destructive unconscious (masculine) phantasy.6 On the basis of this diagnosis, Irigaray argues that western thought and culture overlooks and necessarily represses the origins of our humanity in the maternal body and, consequently, continues to repress a culture of non-hierarchical sexual difference in which two autonomous sexuate subjects can coexist.7 In her early work especially Irigaray appropriates certain features and methods from psychoanalytic theory – including a type of symptomatic reading and performance of textual mimesis – to break open the discourses, texts and theories undergirding the culture of western narcissism that support the omnipotence of the universal western masculine ‘subject of philosophy’. She does this in order to make space for a reality that may be imagined and experienced differently, a reality governed by a different imaginary, a placental imaginary of coexistence, and a politics of proximity based on non-appropriative non-hierarchical relations among subjects. It is in her 1991 book Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine that Margaret Whitford begins to draw out the important links between Irigaray’s psychoanalytic critique and social explanation, or what we (mis)take for reality. Whitford points out that Irigaray’s diagnosis of a masculine imaginary is also referred to by Irigaray as an ‘anal imaginary’, borrowing the term from psychoanalysis to suggest that the imaginary of western culture correlates with the characteristics of a child in the anal phase of the Freudian psychosexual stages of development which, as Whitford writes, ‘interprets sexual difference as though there were only one sex, and that sex were male (women are defective men)’ (Whitford 1991a: 69).8 In other words, within a culture governed by a masculine imaginary we cannot recognise non-hierarchical sexual difference, we cannot recognise ‘woman-as-subject’; women are conceived of as defective men. This has disastrous consequences for how we conceive of womanas-subject and especially women’s desire and sexuality. It is here, in these moments, that we see Irigaray’s work begin to straddle the 13

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irigaray and politics domains of theoretical psychoanalysis and social critique (Whitford 1991a: 66). In later work Whitford (2003) argues that we ought to understand Irigaray’s diagnosis of an anal imaginary in relation to post-Freudian theories of narcissism, especially the work of Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion and Béla Grunberger. These theories of narcissism elucidate how and why narcissistic subjects are unable to enter into non-appropriative relations with an ‘other’, and how narcissistic subjects secure their unconscious phantasies of omnipotence via projective identification. Bion’s work especially illustrates how these processes manifest in group behaviour at the social level. The link that Whitford makes between the diagnosis of an anal imaginary and post-Freudian theories of narcissism is helpful in understanding how Irigaray theorises subjectivity, and I unpack this further in a moment. For now, however, this link between psychoanalysis and social critique is crucial for understanding Irigaray’s philosophical as well as political ontology; Irigaray as a political thinker. When Irigaray’s psychoanalytic critique uncovers an anal imaginary/symbolic that is mistaken for a neutral and objective reality we must recognise the critique as ontological (concerned with ‘what’ exists) and political (concerned with how aspects of this ‘whatness’ are perceived and given cultural and institutional value in society). Irigaray’s critical appropriation of the Lacanian imaginary and the way in which she applies it to western culture in general is crucial to properly understanding the radical political challenge Irigaray’s philosophy poses for western thought. Moreover, reading Irigaray’s later writings in the context of Melanie Klein’s work will further highlight how Irigaray’s philosophy can be linked with other theorists who use psychoanalysis to inform their social critiques (Whitford 2003: 28).9 It is important to stress, however, that we must recognise Irigaray’s work as a critique of Lacan as well as ‘a challenge to the western conception of rationality’, both of which, as Whitford notes, ‘have not been taken seriously’ and ‘largely been ignored’ (Whitford 1991a: 57).

Freud’s Unconscious Phantasy The Freudian account of the bodily ego and its relation to intellectual activities, as detailed in Freud’s essay ‘Negation’, is explicitly assumed by Lacan in his account of how the imaginary and the symbolic work within the mirror stage (Whitford 1991a: 64).10 Thus, in order to understand Irigaray’s use of the imaginary in her early 14

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beyond freud and lacan psychoanalytic critique of psychoanalysis, as well as understanding her narcissistic diagnosis, we must begin as she does in Speculum, with Freud.11 Freud breaks with traditional western philosophical ideas that equate consciousness with an individual rational subject and instead he posits that the ego is both conscious and unconscious, and is understood as a bodily ego (Freud 1914: 76–7; Freud 1923: 17).12 The ego develops in relation to the child’s own body, its auto-erotic instinctual desires, as well as in relation with its primary caregivers. Initially, the infant can make no distinction between itself and the external world, and is not aware of its own needs or desires because the primary caregiver(s) constantly satisfies these needs. The infant is thus in a state of hallucinatory omnipotence. Freud understands this stage of development as governed by the pleasure principle (Sharpe and Faulkner 2008: 19). Next, the infant enters the stage ruled by what Freud calls the reality principle. Here, the infant begins to realise there is an external world and simultaneously that it must begin to cope with not having its own needs and desires constantly satisfied (ibid.). During this phase, the ego tries to replace the pleasure principle (which governs the passions and internal unconscious drives) with the reality principle (Freud 1923: 25).13 We can think of Freud’s notion of the bodily ego in relation to the reality principle as it is in the attempts to work out what is real, internally and externally to the infant, that Freud’s ‘bodily ego’ emerges (Freud 1923: 26). He writes: ‘The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego: it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself a projection of a surface’ (Freud 1923: 26). Freud continues: the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body, besides, as we have seen above, representing the superficies of the mental apparatus. (Freud 1923: 26)

This idea of the ego as a mental projection springing from the surface of the body and its role in unconscious phantasy is crucial for understanding the role psychoanalysis plays in revolutionising how we view the formation of subjectivity. In his essay ‘Negation’ Freud details how what we might think of as our conceptual mental thoughts actually emerge on the model of the body. What this means, for Freud, is that to judge something to be true using the model of the 15

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irigaray and politics body, in phantasy, is to incorporate it (introjection), whereas to judge something to be false is to reject it (projection). He says: Expressed in the language of the oldest – the oral – instinctual impulses, the judgement is: ‘I should like to eat this’, or ‘I should like to spit it out’; and, put more generally: ‘I should like to take this into myself and to keep that out.’ That is to say: ‘It shall be inside me’ or ‘it shall be outside me’. As I have shown elsewhere, the original pleasure-ego wants to introject into itself everything that is good and to eject from itself everything that is bad. What is bad, what is alien to the ego and what is external are, to begin with, identical. (Freud 1925: 237)

Freud’s bodily ego gives us an explanation as to how the capacity for judgement is bound up or attached to the ‘unconscious affect or emotion attached to it’ (Whitford 1991a: 64). In other words, we are not simply rational beings; our intellectual judgement is always already bound by unconscious phantasy linked to our bodily ego. Described in this way, we can imagine the infant’s sense of self or the developing ego as the bringing together of a previously disorganised assortment of mental processes (Freud 1923: 27; Grosz 1994a: 32).14 This is why Freud suggests that ‘phantasmatic representations’ of/ in the ego are interpretations of biological or social processes rather than accurate or ‘truthful’ representations of them (Whitford 1991a: 64), meaning that Freud’s ego is formed by social processes as much as it forms social processes through projection of unconscious phantasies. This idea of the bodily ego fundamentally disrupts Cartesian mind/body dualism. Crucially, it is Freud’s conception of the bodily ego that Lacan takes up and which inspires Melanie Klein’s concept of projective identification, both of which enable us to better understand Irigaray’s work as social and political critique.

Lacan’s Mirror Stage In his theory of the mirror stage Lacan expands on and refigures Freud’s notion of the ego and especially Freud’s idea of unconscious phantasy (Lacan 1977). Lacan develops the notions of both the imaginary and the symbolic. The symbolic is intimately connected to the imaginary and can be understood as the junction of the body, psyche and social realm of language and culture (Whitford 1991a: 37). Lacan’s imaginary (in one of its registers, a reworking of Freud’s unconscious phantasy), in Irigaray’s hands, has the power to influence and form symbolic, social and cultural realms because it’s tied to 16

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beyond freud and lacan our own unconscious projections. We might think of Lacan’s mirror stage as a moment in the development of the child’s ego, as a bridge between the imaginary and the symbolic. The imaginary (unconscious phantasy) can be understood as forming during the moment in the mirror stage when the child conceives of and identifies with an ideal unified (reflected) image of itself that it believes to be the whole of itself (Whitford 1991a: 63). Crucially, for Lacan, and Irigaray, it is during the mirror stage where the question of sexual difference first emerges. For Lacan, it is in this moment that the child enters the symbolic order (of language) that sexual difference is produced ‘since it is language that is responsible for placing individuals into particular cultural structures by designating them as “women” or as “men”’ (Cavallaro 2003: 30). Sexual difference, according to Lacan, is irreducible to biology and he conceives of sexual difference as ‘an arbitrary construction built around the phallus’ (ibid.) The phallus is seen as the central signifier in language and ‘operates as a symbol, not a physical organ’ (Cavallaro 2003: 31). Lacan’s belief that the phallus is a neutral symbolic signifier is a problematic point for many feminist readers of Lacan’s work, and, as we will see, a point that Irigaray takes issue with. Moreover, in the context of the western tradition and culture, if we view the phallus as gendered masculine it can also be conceived of as a racialised signifier. Sabrina Hom, using Seshadri-Crooks’ work on psychoanalysis and race, argues that we must view whiteness as functioning ‘as a master signifier in its own right, signifying civilization, dominance, reason, beauty, value, wholeness, and purity’ (Hom 2013: 426). Hom’s detailed analysis argues that if we take whiteness as a master signifier, then ‘this argument demands that psychoanalytic feminists theorize race as well as sex, and that these differences be theorized intersectionally rather than assimilated to a single axis of hierarchy (that is to say, a logic of the same)’ (Hom 2013: 426).15 I will return to this point but for now it is important to keep in mind the ways in which race and sex are intersecting in our reading of the emergence of subjectivity in this specifically western narrative. During the mirror stage, which according to Lacan occurs in the period between six and eighteen months, the subject’s relationship to the phallus (signifying the Law of the Father and power) begins to be worked out (Lacan 1977: 1). In the first few months of a child’s life it remains incapable of controlling its bodily movements and has, therefore, no experience of bodily or psychical unity (Grosz 1994a: 32). As a result of experiencing its own body as fragmented, as Lacan calls it ‘the body-in-bits-and-pieces’, the child 17

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irigaray and politics forms a unity with its mother, and cannot differentiate between its self and its environment (Grosz 1994a: 34).16 At first, the child cannot recognise the lack or absence of the mother, but it is at that point when the child can recognise this lack that the mirror stage occurs. As Grosz notes, [t]he child’s recognition of absence is the pivotal moment around which the mirror stage revolves. The child is propelled into its identificatory relations by this first acknowledgment of lack or loss. Only at this moment does it become capable of distinguishing itself from the ‘outside’ world, and thus of locating itself in the world. (Grosz 1994a: 34–5)

This is why the mirror stage represents the beginning of the unravelling of the imaginary relations with the mother’s body and the construction and recognition of sexual difference. Once the child has recognised the distinction between itself and the mother, it becomes capable of locating itself as an individual being in the world. In doing so, the child develops its ego, or ‘I’, and thus its sense of self. Consequently, almost at the same time as the child is locating itself as an individual ‘I’, by identification with an imaginary unity (the Ideal-I), it also experiences and undergoes the separation from the mother’s body. In trying to secure its omnipotence and deal with this foundational psychic trauma, the child uses what Grosz calls ‘identificatory relations’ in an attempt to overcome this trauma. This process occurs for Lacan in and through language. The child acquires its subjectivity, its sense of self, its identity, in and through its ability to say ‘I’. Lacan explains: This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation of the individual into history. The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject . . . the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development. (Lacan 1977: 6)

In recognising the separation from its mother, the child continually seeks to fill the gap or lack that it becomes aware of (Grosz 1994a: 35). Through identifying with an imaginary unity, or as Freud might have said, an unconscious phantasy, the child develops its ego and thus sense of self. However, because this ego is identified with an 18

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beyond freud and lacan imaginary unity, the subject is necessarily alienated, the child assumes the ‘armour of an alienating identity’ (Lacan 1977: 6). The entrance to the social realm of culture and language is based upon an imaginary unity that the child perceives of itself and projects as itself onto culture in order to compensate for the psychic break with the mother, and consequent alienation that has occurred. The child thus acquires its sense of self in the fracturing of its own hallucinatory omnipotence and the denial of this split from the mother by securing its Ideal-I, or sense of self, via the methods of projective identification. This ‘other’ that the child realises in its genesis of the ego is usually the mother. Patriarchal culture, however, demands that the child must repress this desire to be reunited with the mother in order to enter culture as a subject. We can thus understand the mirror stage as the time during a child’s development when it becomes a subject in culture through the unconscious recognition that, as an individual, it is necessarily separated from – and that it must repress the desire to be reunited with – the mother’s body.17 The child’s entrance into the social realm of culture and language as a subject or ‘I’ (the symbolic) is thus dependent upon an image of unity (Ideal-I) that the child identifies with in anticipation. Cavallaro explains: The Oedipus complex is reassessed in relation to language acquisition: what the child must give up is not a literal, physical mother figure but rather the sense of fullness that characterizes life before the entry into language, namely before culture forces us to adopt signs that can never express properly our emotions and desires. The child is torn away from the early state of fullness by a law that Lacan calls the Name of the Father. The word ‘Name’ indicates the child’s subjection to language and its institutions, while the word ‘Father’ symbolizes the patriarchal structures of Western culture. (Cavallaro 2003: 28)

Because, for Lacan, in the production of subjectivity and sexual difference the infant must necessarily repress the relation with the maternal body, Irigaray argues that western culture is founded upon an initial matricide. Irigaray points out that because subjectivity is formed in relation to the ego, body and culture, repressing the relationship with the mother and maternal body is significantly different for the little girl and the little boy. It is the lack of acknowledgement of the significance of this difference that establishes the masculine imaginary, or anal ontology, undergirding the western culture of sameness. Moreover, if we understand the phallus as racialised, as a white master signifier, then we can see how this emergence of 19

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irigaray and politics subjectivity and sexual difference in the western tradition is never not marked by race. How might we think through the relationship a little girl racialised as ‘non-white’ in this structure might have with the logics produced by Name of the (White) Father, and so too a little boy?

A Culture of Narcissism With these points in mind, we now turn to explore how Irigaray’s appropriation of the Lacanian imaginary can be understood in light of contemporary theories of narcissism and accounts of projective identification.18 How does Irigaray see the masculine imaginary working at the social or cultural level in the west? What are the consequences for the development of subjectivity and a subject’s relationship with culture, if, as Irigaray argues, the cultural imaginary is masculine (and white)?19 Or, to pose this question differently, how are the ontological structures of existence within western thought and culture dominated by this masculine (white) imaginary? How does this unconscious phantasy play out and structure the very terms of our existence? How are all ‘others’ excluded from the realm of western rationality? And, following this line of thought, how might we understand Irigaray’s work in relation to ‘some of the major currents of social and political critique of the post-war period?’ (Whitford 2003: 39). Margaret Whitford makes an important point when she notes that Irigaray’s diagnosis of a masculine imaginary takes into account the unbalanced ‘socio-cultural environment into which we are born’ (Whitford 2003: 30). Whitford writes: According to her cultural (rather than individual) analysis, we have a scenario in which the man, via representations of the masculine imaginary, projects the wound on to the woman in order to deny need and dependence, protecting – more or less successfully – his own narcissism, but leaving women without the representational wherewithal to protect theirs. Irigaray’s ‘culture of narcissism’ is a description of an imbalance in which the sociocultural environment into which women are born has long been inimical to women’s positive narcissism – or ‘narcissism of life’ to use Green’s phrase (see Irigaray, 1991: 105–17). (Whitford 2003: 30)

In order to think through the questions I pose above, as well as unpack Whitford’s claims regarding Irigaray’s diagnosis of a ‘culture of narcissism’, we shall explore Melanie Klein’s theory of projective identification and its later iterations, as well as unpack some aspects 20

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beyond freud and lacan of Béla Grunberger’s theory of narcissism.20 My reason for doing this is to elucidate Irigaray’s argument that this masculine (white) imaginary works to exclude the possibility of a second feminine subject emerging in western culture and thought. This will help to draw out the way in which Irigaray’s critical appropriation of the Lacanian imaginary works at the level of social reality and, ultimately, leads us toward a better appreciation of the politics embedded in Irigaray’s philosophy of sexuate difference.

Melanie Klein and Projective Identification In Melanie Klein’s work on the ego we find a challenge to the importance of Freud’s Oedipus complex (and Lacan’s mirror stage) as the pivotal event in the development of the ego. Klein conceives of internalised images (along the line of Freud’s unconscious phantasy and Lacan’s Ideal-I) as internal objects and argues that infants are objectseeking in relation to the mother from the start (Klein 1988: 53 cited in Whitford 2003: 29; Sharpe and Faulkner 2008: 85). For Klein, object-relations are a kind of mental or psychic relation the child has with its mother; the child sees the mother as object (or part objects ‘such as the breast, face or voice of the mother’) as it is unable to perceive or understand the mother as a distinct being or distinct from itself (Sharpe and Faulkner 2008: 85). Klein’s insistence that objectrelations are central to emotional life can be contextualised by the way she understands the ego in terms of two positions: the paranoidschizoid position and the depressive position (Whitford 2003: 35). The paranoid-schizoid is the more primitive position of the two and in order to try and make some sense of its own reality and internal and external sources, the infant divides the experiences into good and bad (Whitford 2003: 35). As Sharpe and Faulkner note: The child introjects the nourishing (‘good’) breast, with which it forms a positive identification. Klein contends that the ‘good breast’ object comes to form the primary core of the child’s ego. On the other side of the coin, the child identifies feelings of discomfort such as indigestion or hunger with the ‘bad breast’. These bad internal feelings are projected outwards in the child’s fantasy on to this ‘bad’ ‘part object’ which becomes for it the source of absolute danger: ‘an uncontrollable overpowering object’. (Klein 1987: 179 cited in Sharpe and Faulkner 2008: 85)

In this sense the paranoid-schizoid position can be read in relation to Freud’s essay ‘Negation’ discussed earlier. Remember for Freud that 21

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irigaray and politics the ego is a bodily ego because of the way our intellectual judgement is always already bound by unconscious phantasy linked to the model of the body. What is important is that this paranoid-schizoid position becomes complicated when the bad experiences that the child has projected outward into its environment return, ‘since the “me” is now surrounded by a bad environment’ (Whitford 2003: 35). At this stage it is crucial for healthy ego development of the infant that the mother provides a safe healthy environment in which the early projections are contained (Whitford 2003: 35). Whitford notes that this basic splitting between the good and bad is fundamental in psychic life, and while Klein suggests that it may be modified, it is never left completely behind or overcome. The depressive position occurs when the child realises that both the good and the bad experiences are coming from the same source or person. The child also recognises that some of the bad experiences that it has projected out are actually ‘its own aggression, rage and envy’ (Whitford 2003: 35). It is much easier for the child to project the bad experiences and introject the good experiences as it does in the more primitive paranoid-schizoid position, and thus, this depressive position is a position of ambivalence and is seen as more psychically difficult as the child has to link together the good and bad, and live with both (Whitford 2003: 35). Sometimes, however, this coexistence and ambivalence of the depressive position becomes too much for the infant and the destructive fantasies triumph over the good feelings (Whitford 2003: 35). And, behind these destructive fantasies, Klein argues, lies the primitive envy that we found in the paranoid-schizoid position. This primitive envy and aggressive rage of the child, which was originally projected outward as bad unwanted experiences, now returns and resurfaces and overwhelms the good feelings. This idea of the resurfacing of primitive envy is important in terms of understanding theories of narcissism, because, ‘envy disturbs the fantasy of omnipotence’ (Whitford 2003: 36). The fantasy of omnipotence is central to theories of narcissism as the narcissistic subject must maintain his omnipotence and is thus unable to recognise any other subject, or dependence on any other. In order for the narcissistic subject to secure his omnipotence he must project the primitive envy outwards into his environment and does so via the method of projective identification.21 Melanie Klein understood projective identification as a way in which the child could distinguish between ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ (Sandler 1987: 34). Klein as describes projective identification (in 1946) in the following way: 22

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beyond freud and lacan Much of the hatred against parts of the self is now directed towards the mother. This leads to a particular form of identification which establishes the prototype of an aggressive object-relation. I suggest for these processes the term ‘projection identification’. When projection is mainly derived from the infant’s impulse to harm or to control the mother, he feels her to be a persecutor. In psychotic disorders this identification of an object with the hated parts of the self contributes to the intensity of the hatred directed against other people. (Klein cited in Sandler 1987: 35–6)

Klein, however, is referring to unconscious phantasy and shifts within the infant’s representational world and it is only in Wilfred Bion’s later development of the concept of projective identification that we find an externalisation of the projected elements of the self (Sandler 1987: 38). In other words, for Klein the processes of projective identification remain phantasy: ‘the parts of the self put into the object are put into the phantasy object, the “internal” object, not the external object’ (Sandler 1987: 37). It is in Bion’s work, however, that we begin to see the broader social relevance of Klein’s ‘account of the ambivalent psyche’ and the processes of projective identification (McIvor 2016: 252). David McIvor explains that Bion’s work demonstrates how ‘paranoid-schizoid anxieties and defenses’ manifest in social spheres and group behaviour (McIvor 2016: 252). It is this idea, that projective identification might be put to use in understanding group behaviour, and especially ‘the types of social oppression in which a whole group is targeted’, that Whitford finds useful for her engagement with Irigaray (Whitford 2003: 34). Moreover, in Bion’s account he develops the concept of the maternal-container, ‘a concept of the mother-analyst as a container of the child’s-analysand’s unthinkable thoughts’ (Whitford 2003: 37). Bion makes clear that this process involves ‘the use of another person who needs to be literally affected by the projections in order to contain and process them’ (Whitford 2003: 37). This process of evacuating and evoking the feelings in someone else can be done forcefully, and projective identification, on Bion’s model, works to ‘affect the mind as well as the actions of others’ (Whitford 2003: 37). ‘Bion’s model of the mothercontainer is’, writes Whitford, ‘indispensable for understanding Irigaray’ (Whitford 2003: 37).

Béla Grunberger and the Masculine Imaginary Before moving on it is important to remember, as I mention at the start of this chapter and as we have seen in her engagement with 23

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irigaray and politics Freud and Lacan, that Irigaray’s relationship with psychoanalysis is complex. She uses the tools and methods of psychoanalysis to unpack and explore unconscious and unexamined phantasies that govern it. In Whitford’s 2003 work she reminds us that ‘Irigaray’s diagnosis of narcissism is a phenomenological one’ rather than a ‘particular metapsychological formation’ (Whitford 2003: 30). Irigaray is interested in the ‘theory’s “imaginary”’, the ‘unconscious fantasy informing the theory’ and this leads Irigaray ‘to take a distance from psychoanalytic theory, even while she makes use of psychoanalytic theory’s resources and techniques to uncover the operation of the masculine imaginary in the various psychoanalytic theories’ (Whitford 2003: 30). And, as Whitford notes, ‘on this account, the theory of primary narcissism would itself be a masculine fantasy’ (Whitford 2003: 30). If we follow this line of thought, that is, if we view primary narcissism as a masculine fantasy, Whitford suggests we can see clear and direct links between Irigaray’s philosophy (emerging from her particular method of psychoanalytic reading) and Béla Grunberger’s Narcissism: Psychoanalytic Essays (1979).22 Whitford explains that in Grunberger’s clinical work we can find all the elements of Irigaray’s description of the masculine (anal) imaginary that she argues is governing western culture (Whitford 2003: 30). Reading Grunberger’s account of narcissism through Irigaray’s psychoanalytic lens we find ‘the fantasies of merger and fusion and the nostalgia for the intrauterine state; the relation between narcissism and anality; the attempt to control the mother-container; the projection of the ideal on to the divine’ (Whitford 2003: 30). 23 For example, Grunberger describes the psychic process of narcissism as the realisation of the loss of ‘self-sufficient narcissism’ in the intrauterine state, which in turn leads to a striving for the omnipotence of the intrauterine state and the projection of the ‘lost omnipotence’ onto the analyst (Grunberger 2012: 219).24 Additionally, in talking about the situation of an infant, Grunberger notes that while the primary caregivers surrounding the child tend to try to reconstitute this lost state in which the child’s needs are continually met, it is in fact impossible for the child to continue to live like this (Grunberger 2012: 220). Grunberger notes: [t]he young human is plunged into a state of abandonment linked to his actual fundamental powerlessness, his distress resulting from having been born in an unfinished state (this helplessness, as Freud puts it). The human child is a fallen god who has to confront a narcissistic 24

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beyond freud and lacan trauma inherent in the human condition just at the moment when the vicarious means of continuing in the prenatal state fail. (Grunberger 2012: 220)

While Irigaray is critical of the masculine (anal) imaginary underlying Grunberger’s analysis, the important point that Whitford makes here is that if, for both Grunberger and Irigaray, this ‘narcissistic trauma’ is ‘inevitable and essential’ to the human condition then ‘when does it become pathological?’ (Whitford 2003: 30). For Irigaray, it is pathological in western culture because the masculine (anal) imaginary, which is taken as neutral, governs the development of the supposedly neutral, rational (masculine) subject. In accordance with this idea of narcissism just described, the case, for Irigaray, is that ‘Man’ (the narcissistic subject) projects his unwanted, destructive fantasies onto ‘Woman’ (and associated femininity). This relieves him of his need for, and secures his fantasy of, omnipotence. This leaves women (and feminised others) with no representational system in which to secure their own narcissism, and thus their own autonomous sexuate subjectivity. In other words, girls and women born into this unbalanced socio-cultural environment governed by this anal imaginary have no appropriate cultural system to secure their narcissism, and within this logic, they thus remain defective, castrated men. As we have seen, this ‘is precisely the aspect which Irigaray foregrounds’ (Whitford 2003: 31).25 Irigaray finds within psychoanalytic theories of primary narcissism, a theory governed by an anal imaginary and ontology, which conceives of women as defective men rather than ‘woman-as-subject’. Recognising non-hierarchical sexuate difference becomes impossible because we are governed by this masculine (anal) imaginary, this cultural unconscious, through which our subjectivities are formed, that views women as castrated men. However, if we pay attention to Irigaray’s very careful symptomatic reading we begin to see how through her performative writing and her textual mimesis she challenges and resists this anal imaginary. Irigaray’s double-pronged approach makes space to imagine Being-otherwise. Irigaray’s reading and writing ruptures the perceived authority of both psychoanalysis and philosophy by exposing the problematic ways in which each theory is governed by an (anal) imaginary that is projected onto culture. If we look closely at some of Irigaray’s works, including Sexes and Genealogies, An Ethics of Sexual Difference and Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a culture of difference, we recognise diagnoses of western 25

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irigaray and politics philosophers’ ‘narcissistic self-sufficiency’ and ‘nostalgia for the intra-uterine state’, the hostility to anything new and the inability to acknowledge the ‘debt to the mother-woman’ (Whitford 2003: 32–3). This denial and refusal to acknowledge any debt conceals a destructive envy. This envy will cause the narcissistic subject to destroy that which he cannot possess. This problem, however, is by no means exclusively masculine as Irigaray is describing ‘an entire culture in which the maternal imago is deficient’ (Whitford 2003: 33).26 This idea of the omnipotence of the self-sufficient narcissistic subject, and the inability for this subject to acknowledge its debt to the maternal body, is, crucially, secured in phantasy via projective identification (Whitford 2003: 34).27 It is in ‘The Limits of Transference’ (Irigaray 1991e) we can see explicit evidence of what Whitford is describing above. Irigaray notes that without an imaginary and symbolic that recognise both sexuate subjects, that is, without both a feminine and a masculine imaginary and symbolic, women remain unable to resolve their own positive narcissism, they remain reduced to the ‘tactile infinite/unfinished’, they remain unsymbolised in culture and without subjectivity.28 For Irigaray, without her own imaginary the woman–mother remains the support for the projections of the masculine subject supported by a masculine imaginary and symbolic. Irigaray uses here the image of a cinema to describe the way in which the masculine imaginary, and the development of the boy child’s ego, is played out on the maternal body: Within this nourishing home screenplays, oral, anal, phallic are run . . . This fiction exacts a high price from the one from whom this excess is borrowed, as the first house is used, used up without any debt, any payment, without any record made of it. (Irigaray 1991e: 112)

Irigaray is making the point, quite clearly, that she considers the maternal feminine body to be the support and container for the development of the boy child’s ego and its journey toward narcissistic self-sufficient subjectivity. This is why it is crucial that we refigure feminine subjectivity as something other than this container, something other than this ‘nourishing home’ upon which projections are run. Moreover, without an imaginary and symbolic that women can use to work through their positive narcissism in order to emerge as autonomous sexuate subjects, women will continue to fight amongst themselves for the inadequate negative representation they currently 26

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beyond freud and lacan have in patriarchal phallic culture. Women are unable to love one another as subjects. Irigaray writes: The absence of an ideal maternal and female figure for women results in the fact that mimicry between women becomes the flaying of one woman by the other . . . In the absence of that support [relais], they enclose the infinite in an endless freeplay or collapse it into formlessness, into the archaism of a primitive chaos. That which constitutes a temporality, an inhabitable space-time has no place or is accomplished blindly, in a night in which the other has no face. (Irigaray 1991e: 111)

Refiguring feminine subjectivity is thus seen as a fundamental challenge to the western culture of narcissism because without this container for the projections the masculine narcissistic subject will no longer be able to secure his phantasies of omnipotence and project his envy and rage onto the feminine. With the advent of an autonomous feminine subjectivity the narcissistic subject will have to acknowledge his own narcissism and, hopefully, move through it to positively recognise the sexuate other and coexist in difference.

Psychoanalysing the Psychoanalysts: Irigaray on Freud’s ‘Femininity’ Now armed with some understanding of Irigaray’s broader psychoanalytic contexts we can begin to appreciate the way Irigaray ‘psychoanalyses the psychoanalysts, analysing their imaginary, the unconscious phantasies underlying the Freudian or Lacanian explanatory systems’ (Whitford 1991a: 65). In ‘Psychoanalytic Theory: Another Look’ Irigaray (1985b) explicitly points out that she views Lacan’s work to be an elaboration of Freud’s basic premises on female sexuality and highlights how both Freud and Lacan define female sexuality as lacking.29 For Freud, the little girl physically lacks the penis, and for Lacan, in his analysis of the mirror stage, a little girl cannot positively identify with the phallus (the powerful master signifier) in the way that a little boy can. Irigaray’s critique of Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage demonstrates how in the emergence of the subject into language – the formation of subjectivity – there is a fundamental difference between how little (white) boys and (all) little girls become (or do not become) subjects. The mirror reflects her lack, her hole. Moreover, it is through Hom’s (2013) reading, which in many ways pushes us beyond Irigaray, that 27

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irigaray and politics we can additionally think through the ways in which sexual difference is indexed by race. In Lacan’s mirror stage, which describes the emergence of subjectivity, this (sexual) difference is produced as a hierarchical difference because the little (white) boy is able to identify with the master signifier (the phallus and whiteness) in ways that little (white) girls cannot and in ways that are complicated and problematic for all children racialised as ‘other’ in this narrative. Because (all) little girls and (some) little boys have no Ideal-I reflection with which to identify in these western structures of patriarchal coloniality they cannot, in this logic, emerge as autonomous (rational) subjects in this tradition. We can see then how little boys racialised as ‘other’ are similarly, although not in the same way, unable to be appropriately reflected in Lacan’s mirror. The purpose of Irigaray’s engagement with Lacan’s mirror stage, however, is to illustrate how (all) little girls, and potential feminine subjects, are defined by a lack (albeit in varying ways depending on sociocultural locations). In order to refigure the feminine as something other the lack, something other than ‘tactile in-finite’ container, we require, like the title of Irigaray’s work attests, a different kind of mirror, a speculum.30 Thus, for Irigaray, it is only through uncovering this Lacanian formulation of (hierarchal) sexual difference, in which the emergence of (white masculine) subjectivity is dependent on the little girl not reaching her autonomous (feminine) subjectivity as well as the ‘other’ little boy not reaching his (masculine) subjectivity, that we can begin to challenge structures of oppression, that we can begin to rethink the emergence of sexual difference and the emergence of sexuate subjectivity as an ontological challenge to the logic of the same undergirding western culture. Irigaray’s reading of Freud’s lecture ‘Femininity’ in Speculum, entitled ‘The Blind Spot of An Old Dream of Symmetry’, refers to the logic of sameness or symmetry which, according to Irigaray’s analysis, structures Freud’s discourse. While Irigaray immediately launches into a critical (psycho)analysis of Freud’s words she does acknowledge, however, that for all the problems she outlines with Freud’s reading he nevertheless strikes ‘at least two blows at the scene of representation’ (Irigaray 1985a: 28). She suggests that the very fact that he chooses to speak on femininity is symptomatic of an underlying neurosis in need of psychoanalytic interpretation (and healing). Not only does Irigaray interpret this symptom, but she uses this as a starting point from which to refigure this logic of sameness in western culture. Irigaray writes: 28

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beyond freud and lacan The other blow, blind and less direct, occurs when – himself a prisoner of a certain economy of the logos, of a certain logic, notably of ‘desire,’ whose link to classical philosophy he fails to see – he defines sexual differences as a function of the a priori of the same, having recourse, to support this demonstration, to the age-old processes: analogy, comparison, symmetry, dichotomic oppositions, and so on. When, as cardcarrying member of an ‘ideology’ that he never questions, he insists that the sexual pleasure known as masculine is the paradigm for all sexual pleasure, to which all representations of pleasure can but defer in reference, support, and submission. In order to remain effective, all this certainly needed at the very least to remain hidden! By exhibiting this ‘symptom,’ this crisis point in metaphysics where we find exposed that sexual ‘indifference’ that had assured metaphysical coherence and ‘closure,’ Freud offers it up for our analysis. With his text offering itself to be understood, to be read, as doubtless the most relevant re-mark of an ancient dream of self . . . one that has never been interpreted. (Irigaray 1985a: 28)

We can read ‘The Blind Spot of An Old Dream of Symmetry’ as an example of Irigaray’s psychoanalytic symptomatic reading uncovering how feminine sexuality is defined using a masculine imaginary framework, or anal ontology. The first words of Speculum are Freud’s which Irigaray quotes from his introduction to ‘Femininity’. Freud notes: Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity – . . . Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem – those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply – you are yourselves the problem. (Freud, cited in Irigaray 1985a: 13)

What Irigaray wants to make clear is how Freud sets up the riddle of the nature of femininity in a discussion and discourse that objectifies and excludes woman-as-subject from the conversation. Irigaray responds to Freud: So it would be a case of you men speaking among yourselves about woman, who cannot be involved in hearing or producing a discourse that concerns the riddle, the logogriph she represents for you. The enigma that is woman will therefore constitute the target, the object, the stake, of a masculine discourse, of a debate among men, which would not consult her, would not concern her. Which, ultimately, she is not supposed to know anything about. (Irigaray 1985a: 13) 29

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irigaray and politics Irigaray meticulously reads Freud’s ‘Femininity’ in this way, carefully undoing his words, looking for the repressions in his language and pointing out the ways in which the words and logic underlying his discourse necessarily exclude woman-as-subject. Throughout this chapter Irigaray demonstrates through complex analysis and playful mimicry the way in which this phallocentric logic represses nonappropriative sexual difference and necessarily situates ‘Woman’ as object. It is here, in her reading of Freud’s ‘Femininity’, that Irigaray spells out the problematic consequences of Freud’s analysis for conceiving of woman-as-subject. We also begin to see the links between narcissism and anality that Whitford (2003) alerts us to. Irigaray observes that for Freud, in order for the ‘little girl, the woman’ to ‘become “fully” a woman, the desire for a child must replace the wish to have a penis’ (Irigaray 1985a: 73). On Irigaray’s reading of Freud, any hope of an autonomous feminine subjectivity (and sexuality) ‘is absorbed into maternity’ and the desire for the boy–child ‘appears as a penis-substitute’ (ibid.). Irigaray illustrates that in Freud’s analysis any contribution by the mother–woman to pregnancy is erased: she notes, ‘the contribution of women’s germ cells, the part played by her sex organs, her body, in the formation of the child, are, in this explanation of the sexual evolution of “femininity,” totally ignored’ (Irigaray 1985a: 74). The boy–child thus guarantees, according to Irigaray’s analysis of Freud, ‘the father’s power to reproduce and represent himself, to perpetuate his gender and his species’ (ibid.). Erasing any active role of women’s desire, sexuality and body, Irigaray argues that this story establishes the primacy of anal eroticism over genital sexuality (ibid.). She writes, citing Freud: The vagina – and even the womb? of which, paradoxically, no mention is made in this context – functions like the anus, rectum, and intestines. In fact ‘interest in the vagina, which awakens later, is also essentially of anal-erotic origin. This is not to be wondered at, for the vagina itself, to borrow an apt phrase from Lou Andreas Salome (1916) is “taken on lease” from the rectum.’ (Irigaray 1985a: 74)

Irigaray continues: In this economy, woman’s job is to tend the seed man ‘gives’ her, to watch over the interests of this ‘gift’ deposited with her and to return it to its owner in due course. The penis (stool), the sperm (seed-gift), the child (gift), all make up an anal symbolic from which there is no escape. (Irigaray 1985a: 75) 30

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beyond freud and lacan Within this anal symbolic/imaginary Irigaray demonstrates that woman-as-subject is excluded from any ‘auto-erotic satisfaction, any narcissism’ (ibid.). Somewhat sarcastically, and again quoting Freud, Irigaray writes: Everything is for the best: woman enters into the (re)production line with not the slightest desire to retain any auto-erotic satisfaction, any narcissism, any affirmation of her own will, any wish to capitalize upon her products. The work of gestation, of childbirth, of breast-feeding, of mothering, will be carried out with ‘not directly sexual trends’ but with ‘aim-inhibited trends of an affectionate kind.’ Her only payment will be the, unconscious, satisfaction of finally possessing (?) a penis-equivalent. (Irigaray 1985a: 75)31

Irigaray’s symptomatic reading of Freud’s ‘Femininity’ illustrates how she identifies a masculine imaginary at a social level, that supports and produces and is produced by a single (masculine) subject, that projects its own Ideal-I (ego) and sees this reflection everywhere (Whitford 1991a: 34). This projection of the masculine (anal) imaginary is the underlying feature of a western culture of narcissism and this is why Irigaray psychoanalyses psychoanalysis and interprets Lacan’s use of the mirror. According to Irigaray, within the masculine (anal) imaginary women in western culture become the tain of the mirror; they support the masculine imaginary but are not themselves reflected, they have no access to imaginary structures which might process their own narcissism and are thus not represented within the symbolic (Whitford 1991a: 34). Whitford explains: Her interpretation is that Freud’s account of sexuality is anal, and that in the Freudian phantasy, the stage in which children are believed to be born through the anus (SE IX:205–26) continues to underlie his theorization. Freud’s model of sexuality is male, according to Irigaray. And since his phantasy is anal, a phantasy in which the role of women in childbirth is not recognized, women inevitably appear in this scenario as defective males. (Whitford 1991a: 65)

Irigaray’s appropriation of the Lacanian notion of the imaginary in her analysis brings to light the fact that women are unable to enter into the symbolic realm of western culture because they are reduced to the body, the material, the tain, of the symbolic, 31

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irigaray and politics supporting the symbolic, rather than engaging within it as subjects. Irigaray writes: Really successful femininity cannot lay claim to being ideal or confer an ideal upon itself. It lacks a mirror appropriate for doing so. The narcissistic ideal for a woman will have been and theoretically still is the man she desired to become. Narcissism and her pact with the ideal would derive from phallic domination. Which woman has the task of supporting. (Irigaray 1985a: 105) 32

In her (psycho)analysis of psychoanalysis and western thought Irigaray identifies that the repression of woman is linked to the reduction of the maternal body to the tain of the mirror, and to nature. The role of the maternal body in this culture of sameness is to support and maintain the becoming of ‘Man’ to the detriment of the little girl’s own becoming woman-as-subject. It is important that we appreciate the structure of Irigaray’s psychoanalytic critique because it uncovers and challenges the ontological structures that define female/feminine/ transgender/racialised as ‘other’, bodies as lacking in relation to the gendered (and racialised) phallus. Crucially, Irigaray finds that it is not a natural or biological difference that represses woman (and all ‘others’) in western culture, rather it is what we might call a colonial specular economy, which classifies and defines ‘Woman’ (and ‘others’) as lacking in relation to this ‘ideal’ masculine subject. This phallocentric racist ‘logic of the same’ can and must be refigured. It is from this perspective, or starting point, that Irigaray seeks to challenge the logic of Sameness, a culture of narcissism, or what we might refer to as a ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’.33 Irigaray imagines changes in the imaginary and symbolic which literally ‘rewrite’ the cultural meanings and significances of female bodies – meanings that would encode ‘Woman’ as something other than lack. Radically, as we will discover in the following chapter, Irigaray calls for an imaginary that is governed by placental relations in which the relation between two is recognised as reciprocal rather than the sacrifice of one for the other. This diagnosis of the anal imaginary/symbolic is crucial to understand Irigaray’s project and we see it return at different moments throughout her work. In the section in Speculum entitled ‘The Dream Interpreters Themselves’, Irigaray points out how the methods and structures of psychoanalysis are caught up in this logic of sameness, the male imaginary. The title suggests it is not only the dream of symmetry or sameness that we must be aware of, but also how the 32

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beyond freud and lacan psychoanalysts, the ‘Dream Interpreters’, are caught within this logic of sameness, this foundational, structural ontology that does not recognise difference. These ‘Dream Interpreters’ are themselves the ‘most inventive dreamers’ (Irigaray 1985a: 27). In other words, they too are caught within this anal ontology or ‘love of sameness’. Irigaray writes: The interpreters of dreams themselves had no desire but to rediscover the same. Everywhere. And, indeed, it was not hard to find. But was not interpretation itself, by that fact, caught up in the dream of identity, equivalence, analogy, of homology, symmetry, comparison, imitation, was it also not more or less adequate, that is to say more or less good? Since, after all, the most able of the interpreters were also the most gifted, the most inventive dreamers, those most inspired by what was liable to perpetuate, even to reactivate the desire of the same? (Irigaray 1985a: 27)

Irigaray suggests that this is why these (male) psychoanalysts feel so strongly and work so hard to project their unconscious phantasies of omnipotence and, in doing so, repress woman-as-subject in their discourse. Irigaray argues that the male psychoanalyst (Freud or Lacan) cannot recognise that ‘Woman’ is reduced to object in ‘His’ discourse, that non-hierarchal sexual difference is necessarily covered over, because to recognise woman-as-subject means to uncover ‘His’ omnipotence is an illusion. The logic of the same, the dream of symmetry, can only maintain itself through the fundamental exclusion of non-hierarchical sexual difference and woman-as-subject. Consequently, Irigaray stresses that we must create mediations necessary (ontologically, culturally, politically) for an autonomous feminine subjectivity to come about that is not defined (as lack, as non-being) according to this logic of sameness.

The Culture of Narcissism as Social Critique Recalling that for Irigaray projection and attempts at securing the omnipotence of the narcissistic subject is occurring on a cultural and subjective level, for the two are intimately intertwined, Whitford (2003: 34) points to work by M. Fakhry Davids in which he suggests ‘that in racism, as described by Fanon, projective identification is the mental equivalent of colonial occupation (Davids 1996: 216)’. Whitford notes that it was this account that persuaded her to think of Irigaray’s work in terms of projective identification (Whitford 2003: 34). 33

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irigaray and politics This reading of Irigaray’s philosophy marks an important moment in thinking about how we frame Irigaray’s thought. If we read Irigaray’s psychoanalytically inspired diagnosis of western culture as a culture of narcissism, it allows us to make important links with decolonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon, who take psychoanalytic frameworks seriously. Sabrina Hom’s work also helps us to recognise the complicated entanglements of sex and race in the way Irigaray refigures Lacan’s mirror stage. Reading Irigaray’s work in this way opens up an entirely new perspective on what Irigaray’s philosophy of sexuate difference offers us. Inspired by Whitford and Hom, I suggest that if we recognise Irigaray’s psychoanalytic and ontological critique of western thought and culture as a culture of narcissism in terms of projective identification we can think through how the philosophy of sexuate difference might contribute to a rethinking of the ways in which different systems of oppression intersect. It is, similarly, my aim in reading moments from Between East and West to use this broader psychoanalytic context to enrich our reading of Irigaray’s work and place it, favourably, in contemporary debates on coloniality, race, culture and sex/gender. Irigaray’s creative appropriation of the Lacanian notions of the imaginary and symbolic, and the work of Klein and other post-Freudian theories of narcissism, enable her to suggest that we can create an imaginary and symbolic that positively recognises difference, an imaginary/symbolic which nourishes relational sexuate subjectivities. This includes an imaginary/symbolic appropriate to feminine subjectivity, not to replace the masculine, but rather to bring about a double imaginary/symbolic. If, inspired by Irigaray, we view the current western social imaginary and symbolic, which are taken for reality and thus as structuring our existence and ontology, as narcissistic and masculine (and white), then we understand that this culture is unable to positively recognise any positive relations with any ‘other’ subject. The narcissistic (rational: masculine, white, wealthy, hetero, colonial) subject cannot recognise its relations with any other because it projects (and in doing so defends) its illusionary omnipotence onto western culture, while at the same time repressing any relations with the maternal body by reducing any notions of the feminine to nature. This narcissistic subject, as Irigaray suggests, is the modern rational subject that founds western metaphysics. Thus, it is not only women who are ‘othered’, but any person who is considered different to this narcissistic subject, including, but not exclusively, people of different genders, sexuality, ethnicity or tradition. Irigaray’s work thus 34

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beyond freud and lacan challenges this colonial specular logic that works to silence all ‘others’ that are in some way different to this western masculine imaginary and symbolic. Recognising and articulating the way Irigaray formulates the western culture of narcissism, as I have done in this chapter, opens up important spaces, I suggest, for the future work of exploring connections with some of the main concerns of decolonial philosophy including the conception of the rational modern subject. Contemporary decolonial philosophers, in various ways, illustrate the connections between world historical, socio-political events and how these continue to enable epistemic privileging of the phallocentric logic of western metaphysics which nurtures this narcissistic subject that founds western metaphysics.34 This book follows Whitford’s suggestions and hopes to open up Irigaray’s thought to new contexts and conversations. Whitford writes: To suppose that her work concerns (white Western) women only would be to miss in a quite significant way the implications of her oeuvre, which – on my reading – is far from being a marginal analysis. On the contrary, it is structurally similar to some of the major currents of social and political critique of the post-war period. (Whitford 2003: 39)

Notes 1. Margaret Whitford (1991a) argues that we cannot adequately engage with Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference without ‘taking into account the insights that psychoanalysis has enabled her to formulate’ (Whitford 1991a: 33). Whitford explains: ‘Her project is to use the methods of the psychoanalyst as a heuristic and epistemological instrument in an attempt to dismantle the defences of the western cultural unconscious, to undo the work of repression, splitting, and disavowal, to restore links and connection and to put the “subject of philosophy” in touch with the unacknowledged mother. The “subject of philosophy” is narcissistic, closed to the encounter with the other, while the Other (woman) has not yet acceded to subjectivity’ (Whitford 1991a: 33). 2. This narcissistic subject, as we will see, undergirds the conception of the modern liberal subject and liberal multiculturalism in western political democracies. 3. If we read Irigaray’s comments here alongside critiques certain decolonial thinkers make regarding conceptions of ‘modernity’ and the modern subject, we begin to better appreciate the larger contexts in which Irigaray’s work might be read. Scholars such as Ramón Grosfoguel, Enrique Dussel and Nelson Maldonado-Torres pay close attention to 35

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irigaray and politics

4.

5.

6.

7.

the tradition of modern western philosophy in their work, and in differing ways, they all draw out links between the logic of the cogito and the ways in which these logics undergird the physical and epistemic violence of colonialism. Attention is paid to the ways in which constructions of modernity and rationality converge and are epitomised by the white masculine body. If we read Irigaray’s work as a critique of the ways in which this modern rational subject is nurtured by western culture, the links become clearer. As Grosfoguel writes: ‘When in the 17th century Descartes wrote “I think, therefore I am” from Amsterdam, in the “common sense” of the times, this “I” could not be an African, an indigenous person, a Muslim, a Jew nor a woman (Western or nonWestern). All of these subjects were already considered “inferior” along the global racial/patriarchal power structure and their knowledge was considered inferior as a result of the four genocides/epistemics of the 16th century. The only one left as epistemically superior was the Western man’ (Grosfoguel 2013: 86). At times in the English translations of Irigaray’s writing this is referred to as a ‘male imaginary’ but I think it’s important to refer to this as a ‘masculine’ rather than a male because, as I go on to explain in more detail in Chapter 1, the imaginary/symbolic cannot be understood as reducible to biology. In Whitford’s more recent work she too uses ‘masculine’ rather than ‘male’ to describe Irigaray’s imaginary; I presume this is for a similar reason. Irigaray’s strategy of symptomatic reading can also be understood as a strategy of textual mimesis. We unpack an example of Irigaray’s textual mimesis in detail in the last section of this chapter in her reading of Freud’s femininity and this strategy is explored again in detail in Chapter 5 in our discussion of Gayatri Spivak’s work. Irigaray’s use of mimesis is well documented in secondary literature. For more on Irigaray’s use of mimesis as a reading strategy, see Grosz (1989), Jones (2011) and Whitford (1991a). As we see in a moment, using Sabrina Hom’s analysis, we must also think of this narcissistic masculine subject as racialised as white and, while Irigaray does not specifically argue this in her early writings, I suggest, using Hom’s work, we can read the unconscious masculine phantasy and masculine imaginary as also a white imaginary (Hom 2013). Read alongside the thinkers mentioned in the note above, we might go as far as to argue that this western masculine white imaginary is the dominant imaginary of coloniality haunting our contemporary times. See also: Arturo Escobar (2008: 364) This is what Irigaray is referring to when she writes: ‘what is now becoming apparent in the most everyday things and in the whole of our society and our culture is that, at a primal level, they function on the basis of a matricide’ (Irigaray 1991c: 36). 36

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beyond freud and lacan 8. While I focus on the Lacanian psychoanalytic use of the ‘imaginary’ in this chapter Whitford details a number of different sources of the concept for Irigaray. One source is phenomenology, especially in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Whitford 1991a: 54). However, unlike Sartre’s use, Whitford suggests that Irigaray’s use of the term imaginary conflates a ‘phenomenological definition (the conscious, imagining, and imaging, mind) with the psychoanalytic definition (the unconscious, phantasying mind)’ (ibid.). Another source of the term is in the work of Bachelard who, similarly to Sartre, views the imaginary as a function of the imagination (Whitford 1991a: 55). A third source of the term ‘imaginary’, and one that Whitford considers to be the closest to Irigaray’s use of the term, and which is important to consider given the focus of this book on Irigaray’s politics, ‘is the confluence of political and psychoanalytic discourses in the work of Althusser and Castoriadis’ (Whitford 1991a: 56). Critical of Lacan’s formulation of the imaginary, Castoriadis proposes ‘that there is an imaginary more primordial than that conceptualized by Lacan’ and he deploys the concept ‘to understand the persistence of social formations and the possibility of changing them’ (Whitford 1991a: 56). Most importantly, we must read Irigaray’s refiguring of the Lacanian imaginary as a critique of Lacan’s work (Whitford 1991a: 57). 9. Whitford explicitly refers to Albert Memmi’s work on colonialism as an example of this, but as she suggests, there are links to be made between Irigaray’s philosophy and other writers who use psychoanalytic narratives to support their work, including and perhaps especially, Frantz Fanon. Fanon explicitly writes on narcissism in his Black Skin, White Masks. He notes: ‘In the course of this essay we shall observe the development of an effort to understand the black-white relation. The white man is sealed in his whiteness. The black man in his blackness. We shall seek to ascertain the directions of this dual narcissism and the motivations that inspire it. At the beginning of my speculations it seems inappropriate to elaborate the conclusions that the reader will find. Concern with the elimination of a vicious circle has been the only guide-line for my efforts. There is a fact: White men consider themselves superior to black men. There is another fact: Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect. How do we extricate ourselves? A moment ago I spoke of narcissism. Indeed, I believe that only a psychoanalytical interpretation of the black problem can lay bare the anomalies of affect that are responsible for the structure of the complex. I shall attempt a complete lysis of this morbid body’ (Fanon 2008: 3). Sabrina Hom’s thought provoking 2013 article ‘Between Races and Generations: Materializing Race and Kinship in Moraga and Irigaray’, makes important links between Irigarayan psychoanalysis and Kalpana 37

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

Seshadri-Crooks’ work on the psychoanalysis of race that certainly adds much to this important conversation. Freud’s essay ‘On Negation’ and the mechanisms of ‘introjection’ and ‘projection’ are also important for our engagement with Melanie Klein’s work on projective identification In an interview in This Sex which is Not One Irigaray is asked why she begins Speculum with a critique of Freud. She replies: ‘Strictly speaking, Speculum has no beginning or end. The architectonics of the text, or texts, confounds the linearity of an outline, the teleology of discourse, within which there is no possible place for the “feminine,” except the traditional place of the repressed, the censured. Furthermore, by “beginning” with Freud and “ending” with Plato we are already going at history “backwards”. But it is a reversal “within” which the question of woman still cannot be articulated, so this reversal alone does not suffice’ (Irigaray 1985b: 68). See the introduction to Elizabeth Grosz’s (1994a) book for an excellent overview of the challenge psychoanalysis and Freud’s notions of the ego poses to Cartesian dualism. Margaret Whitford (1991a) also provides an excellent introduction to how Irigaray takes up these particular notions of Freud’s thought. Whitford explains the importance of understanding Freud’s ego as something that is both conscious and unconscious, and as dynamic and continually developing, which means, crucially for Irigaray’s project, that the ego is capable of change and transformation. In his work ‘The Ego and the Id’ Freud notes ‘the ego seeks to bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavours to substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle which reigns unrestrictedly in the id’ (Freud 1923: 25). Freud writes, ‘[w]e have formed the idea that in each individual there is a coherent organization of mental processes; and we call this his ego. It is to this ego that consciousness is attached’ (Freud 1923: 17). This point is, I think, somewhat similar to the point I go on to make later in the book that to compare racial and sexual difference as Deutscher does is to remain with the phallocentric either/or logic of the same. Or, to put this slightly differently, to compare racial difference with sexual difference assumes these axes of difference can be separated, and in doing so, this logic silences the experiences and knowledges of women of colour. In her paper Sabrina Hom suggests that we can ‘allow a necessary revision of Irigaray’s psychoanalysis that acknowledges the ways in which sexual difference is indexed by race’ (Hom 2013: 419). Hom continues: ‘Clearly the addition of an other so-called phallus to the hierarchy of sexual difference is transformative to the work of postLacanian theorists like Irigaray; as with the recognition of other axes of difference, the hierarchy and array of subject positions produced therein are greatly multiplied and complicated’ (Hom 2013: 426). 38

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beyond freud and lacan 16. Again, in this sense, it is similar to how Freud describes the pleasure principle when the infant is in a hallucinatory omnipotent state. This point becomes important when we begin our analysis of projective identification. 17. See Hom’s 2013 article which problematises the assumption that the mother and daughter are of the same race in Irigaray’s philosophy. 18. Whitford notes: ‘As far as I know, there is no other attempt to explore Irigaray’s psychoanalytic context – apart from the Lacan connection – although as a psychoanalytic trainee in France she would obviously have read widely in the available psychoanalytic literature. My argument is that Irigaray has been concerned from the outset with the problem of cultural narcissism’ (Whitford 2003: 28). 19. In addition to using Sabrina Hom’s (2013) work to develop Irigaray’s thinking in on race we must also recall Frantz Fanon’s work on how we can understand Irigaray’s notion of the masculine imaginary as white. In Black Skin, White Masks he describes the way in which the imaginary myth making discourses are white and masculine, made by white men to serve ‘little white men’. He writes: ‘If we want to answer correctly, we have to fall back on the idea of collective catharsis. In every society, in every collectivity, exists – must exist – a channel, an outlet through which the forces accumulated in the form of aggression can be released. This is the purpose of games in children’s institutions, of psychodramas in group therapy, and, in a more general way, of illustrated magazines for children – each type of society, of course, requiring its own very specific kind of catharsis. The Tarzan stories, the sagas of twelve-year-old explorers, the adventures of Mickey Mouse, and all those “comic books” serve actually as a release for collective aggression. The magazines are put together by white men for little white men. This is the heart of the problem’ (Fanon 2008: 112–13). 20. Both Margaret Whitford and Michelle Boulous Walker suggest a link between Irigaray and the work of Melanie Klein. Boulous Walker suggests that Irigaray’s work ‘entails a careful choreography between the kind of gesture Klein makes and the more linguistic preoccupations of French psychoanalysis’ (Boulous Walker 1998: 144). As Whitford more recently notes: ‘Seeing Irigaray primarily as a dissident Lacanian, who was responding to the gaps in Lacan’s theory where “woman” or “women” ought to have been, made for a rather restricted account. I want to propose that we look at Irigaray in the light of psychoanalytic theories of narcissism in general, and the work of Melanie Klein and the post-Kleinians in particular’ (Whitford 2003: 27). 21. Whitford notes: ‘Projective identification is defined as one of the mechanisms in which omnipotence is secured in fantasy. It is easier to use projective identification – in which the unwanted feelings are projected permanently into someone else who is then felt to carry the feelings – than to suffer the pain of the depressive position’ (Whitford 2003: 36). 39

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irigaray and politics 22. It’s important to note that this work was ‘written over the period of 1957–67’ (Whitford 2003: 28). 23. Whitford continues: ‘There are several points, however, where it might have helped to refer to Grunberger’s account. For example, his reflection that “the equation of woman with castrated man seems to me to belong to the anal phase” (1979, 209) is precisely the aspect which Irigaray foregrounds. Grunberger’s treatment of phallic omnipotence also seems relevant. Phantasies of omnipotence are associated with the memory or fantasy of the pre-natal state. The phallus for Grunberger is a symbol of omnipotence (1979, 212). In Grunberger’s view, the phallus stands for wholeness and integrity in the unconscious, and is a narcissistic indicator par excellence (that is, not an instinctual one), regardless of sex . . . Grunberger further writes that: “We know that the child manages to preserve his narcissistic omnipotence by projecting it on to his deified parents and deifications in general” (1979, 212). This is how Irigaray describes the relationship with God in Western culture’ (Whitford 2003: 31–2). 24. Grunberger writes: ‘Now during intrauterine life (subjective) selfsufficiency is satisfied. As a result, the self is omnipotent, in a state where time and space do not exist, since these result from the gap between the appearance of a need and its satisfaction. The memory of this state exists in us in the form of unconscious traces that reappear in the idea of God (God is the omnipotent fetus before becoming the Father [or mother]) in the various mystical systems, in the “oceanic feeling,” in the elation afforded by the contemplation of works of art or immersion in the world of music, in the belief in a Paradise Lost, a Golden Age, and so on. Now the projection onto the analyst of the lost omnipotence tends to re-create the fetal state in which the fetus was, thanks to its host – the mother – absolutely content, without needs and without “problems”’ (Grunberger 2012: 219). 25. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993a) Irigaray writes: ‘Love of sameness is transformed, transmuted into an architecture of world or worlds, into a system of symbolic and mercantile exchanges. It becomes fabrication and creation of tools and productions. Instead of germination, birth, and growth in accordance with natural economy, man substitutes the instrument and the product. Harvests become a mere outcome of agriculture, as products do of industry. Man cultivates nature and manages its conservation, but often at the price of birth and growth. The cultivation of nature becomes exploitation, which risks destroying the vitality of the soil and the fertility of the great cosmic rhythms. This is the danger we incur when we forget what we have received from the body, our debt toward that which gives and renews life. When we forget our gratitude toward the living being that man is at every instant. The love of sameness among men often means a love within sameness, 40

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26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

which cannot posit itself as such without the maternal-natural-material. It represents the love of a production by assimilation and mediation of the female or females. It often constitutes a kind of ontology of the anal or else a triumph of the absorption of the other into the self in the intestine’ (Irigaray 1993a: 100–1; my emphasis). ‘If the masculine self protects its narcissism through projection, the feminine self suffers from the effects of a narcissistic wound, that is, from the destructive (oral) rage’ (Whitford 2003: 33). In Whitford’s earlier writings she uses the term ‘phantasy’ and in her later article (2003) she uses ‘fantasy’. Both terms are referring to the same concept and my usage here follows Whitford’s in order to avoid confusion. Irigaray notes: ‘The absence of any imaginary and symbolic ground [sol] accorded or recognized “on the side of women” means that all this takes place in a potentially deadly immediacy preceding any masterslave dialectic. A chiasmus takes place in the immediate, with no mirror’ (Irigaray 1991e: 108). Irigaray writes: ‘This formulation of a dialectic of relations that are sexualized by the phallic function does not in any way contradict Lacan’s maintenance of the girl’s castration complex as defined by Freud (that is, her lack or nonpossession does not in any way contradict Lacan’s maintenance of the girl’s castration complex of a phallus) and her subsequent entry into the Oedipus complex – or her desire to obtain the phallus from the one who is supposed to have it, the father. Likewise, the importance of “penis envy” in the woman is not called into question but is further elaborated in its structural dimension’ (Irigaray 1985b: 62). It is in thinking through this notion of feminine excess that Hom also illustrates the difference between the way in which constructions of sex and race are played out in terms of specular logic. Hom writes: ‘Femininity represents lack because to specular logic women have nothing to see; the enigma of the female sex, however, which would be better said to exceed the gaze, can of course be reappropriated as a threat to phallic specularity. The rhetoric of race as visibility, however, promises an unambiguous visual signifier of the inferiority in the other; the inadequacy of the non-white subject is to be immediately and fully disclosed to the eye’ (Hom 2013: 426). Clearly, this system becomes ‘doubly’ complicated and problematic for little girls racialised as ‘other’. Achille Mbembe makes an interesting connection between Fanon’s writing on decolonisation and the mirror or speculum, evoking what we might call a colonial specular economy. According to Irigaray, a specular economy privileges the visual which defines ‘Woman’ as lack and the privileging one form of subject at the expense of the other, which as we will see through this analysis, she is attempting to challenge and 41

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irigaray and politics dismantle. In a colonial specular economy we might recognise the ways in which masculinity coupled with whiteness leads to the perpetuation of a racist and sexist (anal) imaginary. While not at all the same project, it is important to acknowledge the links here and perhaps flag this point for important future research. Achille Mbembe, writing on Fanon, notes: ‘Decolonization’, he says, ‘is always a “violent phenomenon” whose goal is “the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men”’ (Fanon cited in Mbembe 2015: 35). The Latin term ‘species derives from a root signifying “to look”, “to see”. It means “appearance”, or “vision”. It can also mean “aspect”. The same root is found in the term “speculum”, which means “mirror”; or “spectrum”, which means “image”; in “specimen” which means “sign”, and “spectaculum” which refers to “spectacle”. When Fanon uses the term “a new species of men”, what does he have in mind? A new species of men is a new category of “men” who are no longer limited or predetermined by their appearance, and whose essence coincides with their image – their image not as something separate from them; not as something that does not belong to them; but insofar as there is no gap between this image and the recognition of oneself, the property of oneself. A new species of men is also a category of men who can create new forms of life, free from the shock realization that the image through which they have emerged into visibility (race) is not their essence. Decolonization is the elimination of this gap between image and essence. It is about the “restitution” of the essence to the image so that that which exists can exist in itself and not in something other than itself, something distorted, clumsy, debased and unworthy’ (Mbembe 2015: 14; my emphasis). 31. While I am focusing on Irigaray’s use of psychoanalytic methods in this chapter, this reading is also a good example of the clear and often underappreciated links with Irigaray’s work and feminist Marxist critique. We explore these connections in more detail in Chapter 6. 32. Many other subjects would not be adequately reflected in this flat mirror, for example transgender subjects. This raises an interesting point about how Irigaray’s work can contribute to thinking about the reflection and construction of transgender bodies in western culture. Additionally, if, as Sabrina Hom (2013) argues, the master signifier is masculine and racialised as white, we must consider, as Achille Mbembe does, how are ‘other’ male bodies reflected or distorted (2015)? 33. I am using a term coined by bell hooks. hooks says: ‘I began to use the phrase in my work “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” because I wanted to have some language that would actually remind us continually of the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality and not to just have one thing be like, you know, gender is the important issue, race is the important issue, but for me the use of 42

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beyond freud and lacan that particular jargonistic phrase was a way, a sort of short cut way of saying all of these things actually are functioning simultaneously at all times in our lives and that if I really want to understand what’s happening to me, right now at this moment in my life, as a black female of a certain age group, I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking through the lens of race. I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking through the lens of gender. I won’t be able to understand it if I’m only looking at how white people see me. To me an important breakthrough, I felt, in my work and that of others was the call to use the term white supremacy, over racism because racism in and of itself did not really allow for a discourse of colonization and decolonization, the recognition of the internalized racism within people of color and it was always in a sense keeping things at the level at which whiteness and white people remained at the center of the discussion. In my classroom I might say to students that you know that when we use the term white supremacy it doesn’t just evoke white people, it evokes a political world that we can all frame ourselves in relationship to . . .’ (hooks interviewed in Jhally et al. 1997). 34. See: Aníbal Quijano (2000) on ‘coloniality of power’; Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007) on ‘coloniality of being’; Ramón Grosfoguel (2013) on four epistemicides; Enrique Dussel (2003); Achille Mbembe (2013, 2015) and Maria Lugones (2007, 2008, 2010) working on similar questions (albeit from differing perspectives).

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2

Feminine Imaginaries

Isn’t laughter the first form of liberation from a secular oppression? Isn’t the phallic tantamount to the seriousness of meaning? Perhaps women, and the sexual relation, transcend it ‘first’ in laughter? Besides, women among themselves begin by laughing. To escape from a pure and simple reversal of the masculine position means in any case not to forget to laugh. (Irigaray 1985b: 163)

Now that we have some understanding of the broader psychoanalytic contexts that inform the way Irigaray views the relationships between the psyche, sexed embodiment and culture in the formation of subjectivity, we can better understand the significance of Irigaray’s call for the necessary mediations that would enable an autonomous feminine subjectivity (or woman-as-subject) to emerge and blossom in western culture. Recall that within this culture of narcissism, the narcissistic masculine subject cannot acknowledge his origins in the maternal body and is unable to positively acknowledge his relationship to the natural realm. During the process of securing his ego via projective identification, the masculine subject represses his dependence on the maternal body and, somewhat paradoxically, this prohibits a feminine subjectivity being recognised as anything other than mother or maternal body. As the maternal–feminine is reduced to inert matter and static conceptions of nature, woman-as-subject is thus prevented from acceding to a subject position in culture appropriate to her sexuate body and psyche. Because there are no possibilities for a second feminine subject to become anything other than a maternal body used as reproductive vessel and the screen for the narcissistic projections of the masculine subject, Irigaray believes that non-hierarchal sexuate difference remains unrecognised. In other words, women have no access to a different (feminine) imaginary or symbolic with which to sublimate or process their own narcissism, subjectivity, becomings. With only a single (masculine and white) 44

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feminine imaginaries cultural imaginary women, and all subjectivities excluded from this social imaginary, are left without politics, words, language, divine, culture or history appropriate to their own becomings. Consequently, throughout her work Irigaray explores various ways in which we can bring about the recognition of a positive non-hierarchal sexual difference to challenge this culture of narcissism. How can feminine subjectivity be represented and recognised as something more than the maternal–feminine/mother-container (or tain of the mirror) for the projections of the masculine subject? If western culture is a culture of narcissism, a tradition that privileges sameness, and if it is governed by a single masculine white imaginary in which the masculine subject is formed at the same time as it represses its relationship with the maternal body, then how are we to imagine an autonomous feminine subjectivity? Throughout her work Irigaray calls for different ways in which we can intervene in various cultural spaces that will permit an autonomous feminine subjectivity to emerge. These interventions and mediations seek to undermine the culture of narcissism and are both philosophical and political; they are concrete practical strategies that must be understood as part of her larger political–philosophical project which challenges the structures that uphold the western tradition of sameness. In the French edition published in 1977, in This Sex which is Not One, Irigaray explains: I am trying, as I have already indicated, to go back through the masculine imaginary, to interpret the way it has reduced us to silence, to muteness or mimicry, and I am attempting, from that starting-point and at the same time, to (re)discover a possible space for the feminine imaginary. (Irigaray 1985b: 164)

Forty years later Irigaray is still working toward and developing this project of (re)discovering a second feminine imaginary and, in doing so, refiguring our understanding of subjectivity as sexuate, as relational, moving between two. In Conversations (2008) Irigaray reinforces these earlier claims writing that her aim is to ‘indicate mediations which permit a feminine subjectivity to emerge from the unique and so-called neutral Western culture, and to affirm herself as autonomous and capable of a cultivation and a culture of her own’ (Irigaray 2008: 124). Elizabeth Grosz elaborates this point and notes that Irigaray’s call for the refiguring of autonomous feminine subjectivity is not about restoring an antiquated idea of the feminine to its position alongside ‘man the subject’. It is a broad transformative 45

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irigaray and politics project aiming for concrete political and ontological philosophical change. Grosz notes: Hers is not simply the project of restoring the female subjectivity of femininity to where it should belong, in the position of an adequate and respected partner of man the subject. Rather, her project is much broader, for it aims at destabilizing the ways in which we understand the world, and a reformulation of the real that brings with it a transformation of the ways in which we understand epistemology, ethics, and politics. (Grosz 2011b: 100)1

These mediations which Irigaray calls for, necessarily interrupt different cultural spheres of the social imaginary including philosophy, language, religion, politics and art, which (re)produce the dominant myths of western culture.2 In doing so, Irigaray attempts to create new myths as well as calling on women themselves to participate in this task. For example, in her rereading of Plato’s Symposium Irigaray refigures love and female desire alongside western philosophical ideas (myths?) of logic and space–time (Irigaray 1993a).3 Irigaray also challenges the phallocentrism of language and discourse by turning to a placental economy and, in her writing, mimicking a labial logic based upon the (open and yet always touching) vaginal lips. She challenges western religious myths in her call for us to imagine an autonomous feminine divine that enables new becomings and overcomes the body/ spirit divide underpinning Christianity and, more recently, engages with the cultivation of yogic practice and breathing. Irigaray’s work also engages directly with Ancient Greek myths that she rereads and rewrites as well as calling for new myths and stories to be told that represent positive representations of mother–daughter relations and positive maternal genealogies. Positive symbolic representations in various spheres of culture, telling new stories and reimagining myths that include many differing subjectivities which enrich dominant western social imaginaries, are necessary to provide the positive symbolic and cultural structures that are required in the creation of feminine subjectivity.4 This is to ensure that all women and girls are able to sublimate positive aspects of an autonomous feminine subjectivity and thus are able to create their own ideal feminine subjectivities appropriate to their situations and lives. Irigaray is aware that this project is ‘obviously not simply an “individual” task’ and she writes that it is thus important for women to ‘be able to join together “among themselves”” (Irigaray 1985b: 164). 46

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feminine imaginaries Women must do this, Irigaray suggests, ‘in order to discover a form of “social existence” other than the one that has always been imposed upon them’ (Irigaray 1985b: 164). In this process of coming together as women we are becoming politicised and yet Irigaray goes on to claim no women’s politics exists. When Irigaray makes claims such as these they must be understood in the context of her double-pronged project in which she is, on the one hand, going through the masculine imaginary, trying to ‘interpret the way it has reduced us to silence’, while at the same time using this as a starting point for something new: in this case, it is how we conceive of women’s (or feminist) politics (Irigaray 1985b: 164). Irigaray writes: The first issue facing liberation movements is that of making each woman ‘conscious’ of the fact that what she has felt in her personal experience is a condition shared by all women, thus allowing that experience to be politicized. But what does ‘political’ mean, here? No ‘women’s politics’ exists, not yet, at least not in the broad sense. And, if such a politics comes into existence one of these days, it will be very different from the politics instituted by men. For the questions raised by the exploitation of women’s bodies exceed the stakes, the schemas, and of course the ‘parties’ of the politics known and practiced up to now. (Irigaray 1985b: 165)

She continues: When women want to escape from exploitation, they do not merely destroy a few ‘prejudices,’ they disrupt the entire order of dominant values, economic, social, moral, and sexual. They call into question all existing theory, all thought, all language, inasmuch as these are monopolized by men and men alone. They challenge the very foundation of our social and cultural order, whose organization has been prescribed by the patriarchal system. (Irigaray 1985b: 165)5

The processes, methods and interventions that Irigaray herself practices and calls for others to undertake are an ongoing attempt to reclaim and refigure women-as-subject. These mediations attempt to articulate how we can conceive of women becoming politicised subjects and the possibilities of a new (women’s and feminist) politics, and are thus intimately connected to philosophical questions of feminine subjectivity in Irigaray’s work. In order to properly appreciate the various interventions Irigaray calls for we must unpack further Irigaray’s explicit challenge to the tradition of western philosophy and the phallocentric logic that underlies this tradition. 47

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irigaray and politics For this reason, in this chapter we explore Irigaray’s refiguring of western conceptions of space–time as space–time–desire and her articulation of labial logics and placental economies. We then move, in the following chapter, to explore in more detail Irigaray’s call for mediations in culture, religion and politics.

Philosophical Myths: Refiguring Western Space–Time Recall in An Ethics of Sexual Difference Irigaray argues ‘everything resists the discovery and affirmation’ of sexual difference (Irigaray 1993a: 6). She suggests that ‘philosophy wants to be literature or rhetoric’, wishing to break with ontology (ibid.). Irigaray believes this is problematic because it means ‘philosophy’ does not propose any new ontological foundations. It is in these moments that Irigaray’s launches some of her most interesting philosophical interventions to western ontological notions of time and space which, for reasons discussed in the Introduction, have largely been overlooked. Following Irigaray (1993a) and Mortensen (2002), we must recognise that while this desire to break away from old patriarchal traditions is fundamental to feminist thought, if we do not, at the same time, articulate new ontological foundations (that enable new imaginaries, new symbolics, new politics) we simply return to the old patriarchal and colonial structures that govern meaning and value (and reality and politics). For Irigaray, it is these ontological structures and binary logic that support ideas of nature as static and neutral, and that privilege the realm of culture over nature, silencing and repressing the passage between the two. This has devastating consequences especially for how we conceive of woman-as-subject, motherhood and the maternal body in western culture. If nature is conceived of as split from culture, the maternal body becomes reduced to a singular biological reproductive capacity with no acknowledgement of the spiritual and cultural work of the mother–woman. We need new foundations that value, for example, the spiritual and cultural work of the embodied woman–mother–subject as well as the woman–subject.6 Irigaray suggests that if we do not challenge ontological structures, women’s subjectivity remains silenced in the circularity and binary logic of a rigid patriarchal discourse (1985b). She writes: How can we speak so as to escape from their compartments, their schemas, their distinctions and oppositions: virginal/deflowered, pure/ impure, innocent/experienced . . . How can we shake off the chain of 48

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feminine imaginaries these terms, free ourselves from their categories, rid ourselves of their names? Disengage ourselves, alive, from their concepts? . . . You know that we are never completed, but that we only embrace ourselves whole. That one after another, parts – of the body, of space, of time – interrupt the flow of our blood. Paralyze, petrify, immobilize us. Make us pale. Almost frigid. (Irigaray 1985b: 212)

Women are paralysed by the patriarchal masculine world and this occurs, not only at the level of politics and everyday life, but crucially, in the very core of our existential ontological Being. This is why it is vital that we engage philosophically and ontologically to refigure how we conceive of the structures of existence, ‘of the body, of time, of space’ that enables us ‘to free ourselves from their categories, to rid ourselves of their names’ (Irigaray 1985b: 212). For Irigaray, this is why we need ‘a revolution in thought and ethics . . . if the work of sexual difference is to take place’ (Irigaray 1993a: 6). The revolution Irigaray calls for is ontological, although not in the traditional sense. She calls for the recognition of an ethics and politics of sexuate difference undergirded by an ontology that is not founded upon sameness; to recognise that ontology is sexuate. To conceive of ontology as sexuate is revolutionary because, as Irigaray has shown us, western culture is narcissistic and undergirded by an anal ontology of sameness that supports the individual atomistic (masculine narcissistic) subject. The work of sexuate difference thus requires new (ontological) understandings of space and time because we cannot recognise the radicality of sexuate difference and autonomous feminine subjectivity from within phallocentric logic. Moreover, within phallocentric logic we cannot recognise the (ontological) entanglement of our sexuate being with, for example, other differences such as race. The entanglement of these differences that most of us live within and between are thus theorised within a liberal multiculturalism undergirded by phallocentrism, as separate forms of oppression, and ultimately become pitted against one another.7 Within the logic of western metaphysics and its accompanying liberal political systems, it thus becomes impossible for the positive recognition of difference(s), and all ‘others’ are, as Irigaray writes, only recognised as imperfect ‘copies’ of a very narrow ‘idea of man’ (Irigaray 2000a: 122). We thus urgently require new ontological foundations, new conceptions of time and space, in order to appreciate the work (and politics) of sexuate difference. The work of sexuate difference opens up spaces in which 49

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irigaray and politics we can appreciate the rhythmic becomings of sexuate subjectivities entangled with differences such as race, and the temporalities of genealogies, including their non-appropriative vertical and horizontal horizons. Irigaray notes: We need to reinterpret everything concerning the relations between the subject and discourse, the subject and the world, the subject and the cosmic, the microcosmic and the macrocosmic. Everything, beginning with the way in which the subject has always been written in the masculine form, as man, even when it claimed to be universal or neutral. (Irigaray 1993a: 6)

While Irigaray acknowledges that there may have been some proposals of change made in the political world towards the status of women, these ‘overtures remain partial and local’ and ‘no new values have been established’ (Irigaray 1993a: 6). As I note earlier, for Irigaray, there is not yet a ‘women’s politics’ that challenges the underlying patriarchal structures of political systems. Irigaray thus turns to philosophy as one site from which we can do the revolutionary work needed to create new values, new foundations, and new ontological structures that may bring about a socio-political world in which a women’s politics can be articulated; a culture that nurtures and nourishes sexuate difference. And, ‘in order to make it possible to think through, and live, this difference, we must reconsider the whole problematic of space and time’ (Irigaray 1993a: 6).8 In the chapter ‘Sexual Difference’ from An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray offers an alternative interpretation of the conceptions of space and time, the relation between these concepts and how they come about in the western tradition (1993a). In doing so, she illustrates how she believes these concepts are intimately related to notions of masculine and feminine in the western tradition. Irigaray traces the genealogy of western metaphysics and its concepts of space and time back to Ancient Greek and Christian religions. She writes: In the beginning there was space and the creation of space, as is said in all theogonies. The gods, God, first creates space. And time is there, more or less in the service of space. On the first day, the first days, the gods, God, make a world by separating the elements. The world is then peopled, and a rhythm is established among its inhabitants. God would be time itself, lavishing or exteriorizing itself in its action in space, in places. (Irigaray 1993a: 7)9 50

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feminine imaginaries Irigaray argues that western metaphysics transforms these religious creation myths into a universal (metaphysical) system of ‘truth’ in the western tradition. She continues: Philosophy then confirms the genealogy of the task of the gods or God. Time becomes the interiority of the subject itself, and space, its exteriority (this problematic is developed by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason). The subject, the master of time, becomes the axis of the world’s ordering, with its something beyond the moment and eternity: God. He effects the passage between time and space. (Irigaray 1993a: 7)

In other words, Irigaray claims that western philosophy confirms the religious creation myth(s) of its own traditions. She points out that the notions of space and time in the western metaphysical tradition are intimately connected with religious myth – although this relationship is necessarily unacknowledged, since as ‘time’ and ‘space’ are understood to be a priori, ahistorical and universal. Irigaray suggests that the notion of time comes to be understood as something that occurs within the (masculine) subject; ‘the interiority of the subject’ (ibid.). Whereas space comes to be conceived of as occurring outside the (masculine) subject. In thinking of time and space (or place) in this way, these notions become split as they are hierarchised in the phallocentric binary ‘either/or’ logic that Irigaray argues underlies the western tradition.10 In the ‘evolution’ of (masculine narcissistic) ‘rational’ subjectivity (as confirmed by western metaphysics), notions of time and space, the interior and exterior of subjectivity, and the micro- and the macro-cosmic are no longer understood as intimately connected (as they once were, in pre-Socratic times), and this, Irigaray argues, has fundamental implications for sexuate subjectivity. Relations and connections between these ‘categories’ are unable to be recognised. According to Irigaray, this is also related to the way in which (masculine, white, narcissistic) subjectivity is intimately intertwined with conceptions of a universal transcendent God. Recall from the earlier discussion of Irigaray’s psychoanalytic contexts, the role that Irigaray argues the Ideal-I plays in the formation and validation of subjectivity. This is the context in which we must understand Irigaray when she writes that God is the ‘beyond’; in other words ‘He’ is the projection of the Ideal-I of (masculine narcissistic) subjectivity with which the (masculine narcissistic) subject seeks to identify.11 This is why the system of western metaphysics, and along with it the single (masculine white) subjectivity in the 51

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irigaray and politics image of the transcendent disembodied God that it produces, cannot acknowledge the origins and relations with the maternal body that Irigaray ultimately goes on to argue is the unacknowledged container for this (masculine narcissistic) subjectivity. Because this (masculine narcissistic) subject must reinforce his illusionary omnipotence at all costs, his relationship with ‘space’ and place, ‘exteriority’, the exterior structure, the mother’s womb as the original container, cannot be acknowledged. In this reading, Irigaray shows how western metaphysics is not based on a universal abstract ahistorical truth cut off from an inert matter and nature; it has a history itself. However, if this metaphysics were to recognise its relation with its origins, it would fundamentally undermine the logic of the system, and this is why it must be repressed. Consequently, Irigaray demonstrates that within this metaphysics, in which the (masculine, white, narcissistic) subject is positioned as the ‘master of time’ and as such must also repress his relation to his origins with the maternal body, there is no way in which this relationship between time and space and place as becoming, process, flux and generation, rather than a split, can be theorised. For Irigaray, the structuring of (masculine) subjectivity is intimately tied to the creation of western conceptions of space and time. Not only is the masculine liberal subject constructed as the transcendent disembodied ‘master of time’, he also requires the feminine to be reduced to the static place or space of the maternal–feminine body (or tain of the mirror) that allows for the masculine subject to emerge. In ‘Sexual Difference’, Irigaray unpacks how, in the creation of the concepts of space and time within the western tradition of metaphysics, the silencing of temporal processes like generation, growth and flux has occurred. She thus argues for the recognition of the (non-traditional) ontological status of sexuate difference, because to do so would be to completely refigure the ontological foundations upon which dominant western thought and philosophy stands. Irigaray writes: The transition to a new age requires a change in our perception and conception of space-time, the inhabiting of spaces, and of containers, or envelopes of identity. It assumes and entails an evolution of a transformation of forms, of the relations of matter and form and of the interval between: the trilogy of the constitution of place. Each age inscribes a limit to this trinitary configuration: matter, form, interval, or power [puissance], act, intermediary-interval. (Irigaray 1993a: 7–8) 52

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feminine imaginaries She continues: Desire occupies or designates the place of the interval. Giving it a permanent definition would amount to suppressing it as desire. . . . The transition to a new age comes at the same time as a change in the economy of desire. (Irigaray 1993a: 8)

For Irigaray, not only must we change the metaphysical structures that construct the feminine as reducible to the static fixed container/ place/space for the masculine subject’s projections, we must, crucially, at the same time recognise that this entails a new articulation of the dynamic relationship between refigured conceptions of space and time, and consequently, between masculine and feminine. Rebecca Hill writes: The inaugural act of differentiation enabling metaphysics to separate itself from the maternal-feminine is unthought within metaphysics. In other words, in the philosophical tradition, both the maternal-feminine and the interval flounder together in obscurity (1991, 169). The interval, then, is fundamental to Irigaray’s project. In non-hierarchical sexual difference, the interval is posited explicitly as the opening of thinking and life, while in the monosexual economy of metaphysics, the interval is the secret lever of differentiation that buries the material-feminine and elevates philosophy as phallocentrism. It must be emphasized that the differentiating movement of the interval is always understood by Irigaray as both spatial and temporal. (Hill 2008: 120)

In order to properly appreciate Irigaray’s rethinking of the so-called ‘trinitary configuration’ of desire, matter and form, she suggests we must return to Freud and rethink the notion of sublimation. If we understand Freudian sublimation as the socially acceptable projection of erotic energy into creative achievements, we can begin to appreciate why Irigaray argues that Freud does not explore the sublimation of positive aspects of the feminine and instead he speaks of their repression. She writes: ‘In order to imagine such an economy of desire, one must reinterpret what Freud implies by sublimation and observe that he does not speak of the sublimation of genitality (except in reproduction?)’ (Irigaray 1993a: 8). In other words, to acknowledge the possibility that the feminine might have an excess of erotic energy irreducible to her object status as maternal body is dangerous, because it undermines the object status she is assigned within western thought.12 In doing so, it might produce new values 53

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irigaray and politics that enable woman-as-subject to emerge in the world. Irigaray suggests that Freud does not speak of: the sublimation of the partial drives in relation to the feminine but rather of their repression (little girls speak earlier and more skilfully than little boys; they have a better relationship to the social; and so on – qualities or aptitudes that disappear without leaving any creative achievements that capitalize on their energy, except for the task of becoming a woman: an object of attraction?) (Irigaray 1993a: 9)

This is why Irigaray notes that woman within this culture of narcissism or sameness undergoes what Irigaray calls ‘nonsublimation of herself’ (ibid.). Irigaray writes ‘in this possible nonsublimation of herself, and by herself, woman always tend toward without any return to herself as the place where something positive can be elaborated’ (Irigaray 1993a: 9). In other words, because the maternal–feminine is the place for the masculine subject, woman cannot ‘return to herself as the place’. Moreover, if women cannot sublimate their desire, they cannot become subjects with their own appropriate becomings, goals, desires, and thus they remain within this non-represented ‘déréliction’ (Whitford 1991a: 77). Due to this ‘nonsublimation’ or lack of positive symbolic autonomous recognition for/of feminine subjectivity within these western structures of existence (in other words with no access to the structuring of time or place appropriate to autonomous feminine subjectivity), the feminine subject is in exile from this tradition, she becomes reduced to object. The maternal–feminine has no time or space and place of her own within and from which woman-as-subject can emerge. We thus need new understandings of space–time to challenge and rethink this problem. Without new understandings, without a revolution in thought and ethics, the maternal–feminine remains the tain of the mirror with no access to a subjectivity of her own.13 In the western tradition, the potential for an autonomous feminine subjectivity to emerge is necessarily excluded in the genesis of our understanding of desire, space and time. In other words, because feminine subjectivity is reduced to the space or place for the masculine (the maternal body as container), the feminine subject has no ability to articulate a rhythmic and open becoming that is appropriate to her sexuate nature. Irigaray’s account demonstrates how western metaphysics and Christianity both work to reduce the excess of 54

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feminine imaginaries feminine erotic energy to the maternal body. Nevertheless, Irigaray anticipates an alternative. She continues: If after all this, she is still alive, she continuously undoes his work – distinguishing herself from both the envelope and the thing, ceaselessly creating there some interval, play, something in motion and un-limited which disturbs his perspective, his world, his/its limits. But, because he fails to leave her a subjective life, and to be on occasion her place and her thing in an intersubjective dynamic, man remains within a masterslave dialectic. The slave, ultimately, of a God on whom he bestows the characteristics of an absolute master. Secretly or obscurely, a slave to the power of the maternal-feminine which he diminishes or destroys. The maternal-feminine remains the place separated from ‘its’ own place, deprived of ‘its’ place. She is or ceaselessly becomes the place of the other who cannot separate himself from it. Without her knowing or willing it, she is then threatening because of what she lacks: a ‘proper’ place. She would have to re-envelope herself with herself, and do so at least twice: as a woman and as a mother. Which would presuppose a change in the whole economy of space-time. (Irigaray 1993a: 10–11)

While Irigaray demonstrates how within this metaphysical system the masculine (narcissistic) subject is unable to recognise its origins with (and dependence on) the maternal body, Irigaray is also suggesting here that the maternal–feminine escapes his limits and perspective; the feminine is always undoing the limits of patriarchal logic. Irigaray argues that in order to maintain the illusion of an omnipotent masculine narcissistic subjectivity it is crucial in this western metaphysical system – in which the masculine subject is positioned as the ‘master of time’ – that he repress his relation (of his desire to return?) to his origins in the maternal body. Perhaps this is why there is no way in which space–time as becoming, process, flux and generation can be theorised in western metaphysics. Consequently, the growing maternal body and the excess and fluidity of the feminine cannot be theorised within this logic. Feminine subjectivity, womanas-subject, does not emerge within this western metaphysics. Irigaray argues we must refigure place (and the feminine) in such a way that does not require an annihilation of the subject’s relationship with the maternal body (and as I show in the following chapter, a potential feminine divine). Irigaray asks: How can we work out a problematic of place that would involve not cutting or annihilation but a rhythmic becoming in relation to 55

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irigaray and politics place? Return to the self so as to move again toward the other? Selfabsorption in order to regain the tensing toward, the explanation . . . (Irigaray 1993a: 42)

Irigaray is asking how we can refigure place so that its temporal dimension is recognised, and how can we refigure time so that its spatial dimension is appreciated. Can we conceive of feminine subjectivity as a rhythmic becoming rather than a static object out of time and place? How can we articulate a refigured metaphysics (a sexuate ontology) that will recognise this refiguring of space as temporal (a rhythmic becoming), and consequently completely refigure the notions of time and space in the western tradition? This is why it is not only the change in our conception of space–time that is required for a transition to a new age, to a new politics, but also, importantly, a change of our conception of the relation or interval between space and time, especially as they are associated with the feminine and the masculine. We must rethink desire, space and time so that these notions are not reducible to binary either/or hierarchical logic. Feminine subjectivity, in Irigaray’s reworking of desire, time and space, becomes reconnected with her own space–time–desire that significantly revolutionises these categories, as well as the notion of the passage between. Irigaray recognises that a positive autonomous feminine subjectivity is potentially the envelope/container for the foetus, or penis, but is not reducible to either of these, and in thinking through the uncontainable female jouissance, is also so much more. Irigaray writes that it is from the recognition of the excess of female desire or jouissance (that is the irreducible interval between time and space) that we can begin to create change to our problematic western metaphysical system and perhaps allow a women’s politics to emerge.14 As she writes: This place, the production of intimacy, is in some manner a transmutation of earth into heaven, here and now. Providing she remembers? An alchemist of the sexual and one who tries to keep the sexual away from repetition, degradation. Attempts to keep it and sublimate it. Between. In the interval of time, of times. Weaving the veil of time, the fabric of time, time with space, time in space. Between past and future, future and past, place in place. Invisible. Its vessel? Its container? The soul of the soul? A second container, imperceptible and yet there, offered up to man in the sexual relation. How fitting if the container were offered back to her in a sort of irradiation outside of her ‘grace’ from within. She would be re-contained with place in place. Thanks to her partner . . . 56

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feminine imaginaries She would be re-contained by that weaving of space-time that she has secretly conceived. Nothing more spiritual, in this regard, than female sexuality. Always working to produce a place of transcendence for the sensible, which can become a destructive net, or else find itself, remain, in endless becoming. Accompany cosmic time. Between man’s time and the time of the universe. Still faithful to the one and seeking to find a rhythm in the other, perhaps? Unfortunately, the two are often cut apart. Those two rhythms are not only no longer harmonious but are cut off from one another. Does this produce false gods and false hells? To avoid this, an alchemy of female desire is needed. (Irigaray 1993a: 53)

For Irigaray, this refigured relationship of female desire is foundational to the new age and culture of sexuate difference, and crucially, it is bound up with the reworking of subjectivity, temporality, and the traditional ontological structures of matter and form. It is thus central to this revolution in thought and ethics that we rework an ‘economy of desire’ in which ‘desire ought to be thought of as a changing dynamic whose outlines can be described in the past, sometimes in the present, but never definitively predicted’ (Irigaray 1993a: 8). Irigaray’s refigured notion of desire can never be authoritatively known or reduced, and it is temporal as well as spatial. It is an alwaysevolving dynamic temporal relation, and importantly, it is situated within and between embodied sexuate subjects. Irigaray argues that if love or desire continues to be understood as it is currently, as a linear journey, from point A to B, as ‘the teleological quest for what is deemed a higher reality and often situated in a transcendence inaccessible to our mortal condition’, then our age will fail to realise the radical and revolutionary passage that a rethinking of the structure of desire holds (Irigaray 1993a: 29). This radical rethinking of desire is a fundamental challenge to binary phallocentric logic.15 Desire has a temporal character here, moving between past and present, what is known and what is not; it is described in the same way as Irigaray articulates Diotima’s dialectic, which I will explore in more detail in Chapter 4. In this sense, we can think of it as a trilogy of place, as Irigaray suggests.16

Language and Subjectivity: Labial Logics and Placental Economies Recall that for Lacan, subjectivity comes about through language and the enunciation of ‘I’ via the identification with, or differentiation from, the unitary (white), obviously masculine Phallic signifier 57

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irigaray and politics in culture. Bringing the image of the two lips, alluding to a female sexuate body, and her poetic, fluid language into this phallocentric discourse, Irigaray undermines Lacan’s theory of the supposedly neutral relation between the body, psyche and language. While Irigaray accepts the psychoanalytic ideas that subjectivity and language structure the symbolic, if the symbolic is, as Irigaray demonstrates, masculine and narcissistic and erected upon the necessary repression of the maternal body and woman-as-subject, then one way in which we can challenge the phallocentric logic of the symbolic is by pointing out that humanity is comprised of many different bodies, different figurations of subjectivity, thus rethinking this relation between the supposedly neutral body, psyche and language. Irigaray’s argument highlights that at present the western symbolic only recognises and supports a masculine language and phallocentric logic, based on the projections of a unified, narcissistic, selfsufficient (masculine) subject related to a very particular version of a white male body. Irigaray disrupts dominant discourse and plays with language and writing in a way that mimics a female body in order to undermine the supposed neutrality of language. This style highlights how language and subjectivity emerges in relation to the phallus, and thus how language is phallocentric. Rachel Jones notes that one of the key figures Irigaray ‘employs to reimagine woman as a subject’ is the ‘image of two lips’ (Jones 2011: 160). Jones suggests that in Irigaray’s appeals to the female body she is attempting to fundamentally rethink the structures that govern the problematic relations in western philosophy between body and language. Michelle Boulous Walker points out that this labial logic is crucial in Irigaray’s work because it uncovers and ‘deconstructs the oppositional nature of the self-other relation’ (Boulous Walker 1998: 157). Boulous Walker writes: It is deconstructive because it shifts ‘language’ away from an oppositional logic of reference versus metaphor toward something much closer to the play of différance . . . The singularity of the labia is always double, never one. This labial logic confounds oppositional thinking. It displaces oppositions such as inside and outside, self and other, reference and metaphor. (Boulous Walker 1998: 157)17

I agree with both Jones and Boulous Walker that Irigaray’s explorations of the image of the two lips and the placental relation are crucial for how we can reimagine feminine subjectivity.18 58

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feminine imaginaries We find a good example of Irigaray’s use of the figure of the two lips and the dialogic, poetic style of feminine language in the chapter ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’, in This Sex which is Not One (1985b). In this text Irigaray explicitly notes that the feminine subject does not yet have a language, and this claim ought to be read in the same sense as the statement that there is not yet a women’s politics. According to Irigaray, the ‘as yet unrecognised’ autonomous feminine subject has no access to an alternative and appropriate symbolic that would enable a positive reflection and projection of her ideal sexuate self via the mirror stage. Because of this, the feminine subject cannot enter culture as ‘subject’, as the ‘I’ of discourse; as a consequence she is always other to the ‘I’ (One). The feminine subject thus has no place of enunciation, no place from which she can speak. The style of ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’ aims to challenge this situation and is written from the spaces and mediations that Irigaray is making to enable a feminine subjectivity to emerge. Irigaray is speaking as a woman–subject and is speaking with and addressing another woman–subject. This sets up a unique position, a space of enunciation, a place of dialogue, from which women as subjects can speak to one another and begin to undermine sexual indifference in western discourse. We are asked to imagine two feminine subjects, women amongst themselves, situated within a masculine symbolic that is coded by phallocentric language that does not sufficiently express difference.19 A feminine narrator is positioned as the subject in this text, ‘She’ is the feminine subject, speaking. Boulous Walker suggests that Irigaray is explicit in her ‘concern to theorise the movement from the mother’s body to language’ (Boulous Walker 1998: 157). This movement is the emergence of a feminine subjectivity that becomes subject while forming a non-appropriative relation to the mother’s body. The autonomous feminine subjectivity does not deny her relation to the mother’s body; a labial logic enables this relation to remain alive and non-appropriative within its double – always open, always touching – logic. It completely refigures the problematic Freudian mother–daughter relation, demonstrating new ways of actualising this relationship, in all its complexity. On this point, Boulous Walker elaborates: Positioning herself as daughter she [Irigaray] self-consciously moves from the topos of masculine phantasy – the breast – around the mother’s body, a metonymic movement from the breasts to the lips. In doing so Irigaray displaces the traditional metaphor of mother as nourishment 59

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irigaray and politics with the disruptive figure of an ambiguous labial sexuality that speaks the complex relationality of mother and girl-child. (Boulous Walker 1998: 157)

I think we see this in Irigaray’s ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’ (1985b). Irigaray writes: And the strange way they divide up their couples, with the other as the image of the one. Only an image. So any move toward the other means turning back to the attraction of one’s own mirage. A (scarcely) living mirror, she/it is frozen, mute. More lifelike. The ebb and flow of our lives spent in the exhausting labor of copying, miming. Dedicated to reproducing – that sameness in which we have remained for centuries, as the other. (Irigaray 1985b: 207)

Here, Irigaray points out how ‘they’, the (masculine) subjects of phallocentric discourse, divide up ‘their’ world, based on a phallocentric logic in which there is only One, and all others are imperfect copies. When the (masculine) subject tries to approach the other, he can only see his image in the mirror. In this logic, the feminine is the tain of the mirror; mother and daughter are fused, neither has an image of her own, instead they are reduced to a homogeneous static maternal–feminine dedicated to reflecting the sameness of the narcissistic subject. Irigaray is bringing to light the way in which the illusion of the self-unity of the One is privileged in this phallocentric logic, and requires the maternal–feminine to support it. The way out of this fusion of mother and daughter, Irigaray suggests, is for the feminine subjects to find a language of their own, a feminine language that will fundamentally disturb this phallocentric order and allow both mother and daughter to move out of the tain of the mirror in order to find a mirror that reflects their own images. Irigaray, speaking with the other feminine subject here, warns of the potential rupture when she says: ‘Indifferent one, keep still. When you stir, you disturb their order. You upset everything. You break the circle of their habits, the circularity of their exchanges, their knowledge, their desire. Their world’ (Irigaray 1985b: 207). Irigaray playfully and explicitly evokes the image of two lips, writing through a labial logic mimicking the female body that positively represents contradiction, openness and fluidity. The poetic style suggests that within this feminine language there is no fixed meaning or truth. In this language we are always moving, limitless, between the passages within and between us. It 60

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feminine imaginaries breaks open a world founded on binary categories and hierarchical order. This language subverts phallocentric academic discourse. Irigaray writes: Kiss me. Two lips kissing two lips: openness is ours again. Our ‘world’. And the passage from the inside out, from the outside in, the passage between us, is limitless. Without end. No knot or loop, no mouth ever stops our exchanges. Between us the house has no wall, the clearing no enclosure, language no circularity. When you kiss me, the world grows so large that the horizon itself disappears. Are we unsatisfied? Yes, if that means we are never finished. If our pleasure consists in moving, being moved, endlessly. Always in motion: openness is never spent nor sated. We haven’t been taught, nor allowed, to express multiplicity. To do that is to speak improperly. (Irigaray 1985b: 210)

A feminine language that mimics the two lips of a female sexuate body expressing female desire can never be circular because of the recognition of two that cannot ever be reduced to one. The two are not separate and neither are they fused, they are always in relation. Moreover, this language disturbs patriarchal conceptions of knowledge, in which ‘to know’ something means to define, control, limit and repress. Irigaray continues: If we don’t invent a language, if we don’t find our body’s language, it will have too few gestures to accompany our story. We shall tire of the same ones, and leave our desires unexpressed, unrealized. Asleep again, unsatisfied, we shall fall back upon the words of men – who, for their part, have ‘known’ for a long time. But not our body. (Irigaray 1985b: 214)

For Irigaray, without a feminine language, ‘our body’s language’, there will be no language to tell our stories, no language with which to create alternative myths, different imaginaries, new politics. We need a logic and language to tell our stories of feminine genealogies, our histories, and to positively represent the mother–daughter relation. Within phallocentrism, in Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage in which we become subjects with language in relation to the Phallic signifier, these relations are reduced to binary either/or logic, leaving only one space for woman, who is either mother or daughter. There is no place for both. There is no space for women-as-subjects amongst themselves and thus no place for woman’s politics that adequately challenges the patriarchal order. Consequently, Irigaray 61

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irigaray and politics argues that we need a language that evokes the contradictions of rhythmic becoming of sexuate subjectivity, and she performs this writing/language in particular texts. For example, Irigaray writes: The lips never opened or closed on a truth. Light, for us, is not violent. Not deadly. For us the sun does not simply rise or set. Day and night are mingled in our gazes. Our gestures. Our bodies. Strictly speaking, we cast no shadow. There is no danger that one or the other may be a darker double. I want to remain nocturnal, and find my nights softly luminous, in you. (Irigaray 1985b: 217)

This writing and language evokes openness and fluidity which embraces and breaks down opposites. Contradiction is not problematic in this logic; it is valued. It breaks down the illusion of a single universal truth and privileges non-sacrificial relations between two. As Jones suggests, Irigaray’s image of the two lips ‘helps us imagine a female subject whose constitution does not depend on the unity of self-identity . . .’ (Jones 2011: 164).20 It helps us to imagine woman-as-subject as located in the interval between, as the sensible transcendental. Jones points out that the lips are not only used by Irigaray to invert the privilege or norm of the male body. The lips are used to call forth the non-sacrificial economy of the feminine. (As we will see, Irigaray also does this with her conception of a placental economy.) These gestures are important, as they remind us of the way in which subjectivity and language fundamentally structure our existence. Jones writes: Thus, the lips are not simply deployed to refigure female sexuality in ways that no longer take the male body as paradigmatic. As ‘strangers to dichotomy and oppositions’, the lips offer an alternative model to that in which identity is secured via opposition to or a constitutive cut from an other (ESD, 18) . . . The lips through which a woman touches herself as they touch on each other are neither one nor two, nor do they relate as (active) subject to (passive) object . . . Each moves and is moved by another such that they mutually define each other without need for division or rupture. Instead, they are held together by a spacing that allows each to touch on the other while remaining distinct. In the movements that flow between them, they remain in contact without being the same, shape one another while taking on their own form. The male order of the subject covers over this fluid economy because its oppositional logic ‘freezes the mobility of relations between. It produces discontinuity. Peaks, pikes, fissures’ (EP, 90). (Jones 2011: 165) 62

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feminine imaginaries Jones’ attentive reading of Irigaray’s figure of the two lips suggests that while this labial logic works to deconstruct the oppositions of self and other, it also requires we pay attention to the interval between the lips. We can think of this in relation to Irigaray’s refiguring of the traditional western ontological categories of space– time–desire in ‘Sexual Difference’ (Irigaray 1993a). Not only do we require a revolution in the binary categories that reduce feminine to the masculine, we urgently require a revolution of the ontological relations between these, which is what I suggest Irigaray does in her refiguring of space–time–desire and love. In a moment, we will see how Irigaray’s work on the breath, which aims toward cultivating spaces of silence that enable non-appropriative relationships between subjects, is evoked here in her image of the two lips. For now, however, it is important to appreciate that as Jones and Boulous Walker claim, in contrast to the phallocentric ‘male order’ that covers over this fluid economy, the lips ‘belong to a different logic’ and ‘figure a self-shaping female corporeality whose fluid movements bring woman into definition without needing to exclude otherness and thus without needing to mirror the (phallic) unity of the male form’ (Jones 2011: 165).21 Irigaray also mobilises the figure of the placental relation within the pregnant body to undermine the supposed neutrality of the masculine symbolic, suggesting the relation between the foetus and mother might be a possible model that can show us how to structure ethical relations between two. In Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference (1993b), Irigaray interviews Hélène Rouch, a biologist who specialises in the relationship between mother and child in utero. This is not the first time Irigaray explores the placental relation in her work. Gail Schwab (1994) suggests we can find evidence of Irigaray theorising the placental relation as early as 1980 and that Irigaray uses Hélène Rouch’s 1987 study ‘Le placenta comme tiers’ published in a special issue of Langages (edited by Irigaray) ‘as empirical evidence in dealing with problems she had already begun to theorize herself’ several years earlier (Schwab 1994: 364). In this article Schwab looks specifically at the image of the angel in Irigaray’s work and draws out the links between Irigaray’s writing on love, the placenta and mucous. Schwab notes that Irigaray: consistently discovers mediatory structures in relationships previously conceived as strictly binary: the angels are messengers between god and man, the placenta regulates the flow between mother and baby in the 63

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irigaray and politics womb, love itself exists as a space or even as an entity between lovers, the mucous establishes a less than zero degree interval between two different bodies in the sexual act. (Schwab 1994: 371)

With this in mind, I will explore the most recent Rouch and Irigaray interview taken from Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference (Irigaray 1993b) as I think it nicely combines Irigaray’s thinking through of both the empirical and the philosophical issues concerning her work on the placental relation.22 Irigaray suggests, in this interview with Hélène Rouch, that thinking through the logic of a placental relation represents a disruption to the rigid structures of phallocentrism. Irigaray notes that the ‘placental relation represents one of those openings with regard to determinism, to vital or cultural closure, an opening which stems from female corporeal identity’ (Irigaray 1993b: 38). Again, evoking the feminine sexuate body in culture and language, Irigaray seeks to bring about changes in the logic of the dominant masculine symbolic order. Rouch explains the mediating role the placenta plays during inter-uterine life. She notes: there’s a commonly held view that the placenta is a mixed formation, half-maternal, half-fetal. However, although the placenta is a formation of the embryo, it behaves like an organ that is practically independent of it. It plays a mediating role on two levels. On the one hand, it’s the mediating space between mother and fetus, which means there’s never a fusion of maternal and embryonic tissues. On the other hand, it constitutes a system regulating exchanges between the two organisms . . . (Irigaray 1993b: 38)23

Similar to the way in which Irigaray describes the two lips as always open and always touching, we can understand that the role of the placenta within the mother’s body is to make sure that the mother and foetus are always in relation, but are not fused. The placenta regulates exchanges between the mother and foetus without privileging one or the other. Rouch goes on to explain the process of recognition and the process of coming into relation that occurs between the mother’s body and the embryo in terms of ‘self’ and ‘other’. She says: It’s a sort of negotiation between the mother’s self and the other that is the embryo . . . there has to be a recognition of the other, of the non-self, by the mother, and therefore an initial reaction from her, in 64

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feminine imaginaries order for the placental factors to be produced. The difference between the ‘self’ and other is, so to speak, continuously negotiated. (Irigaray 1993b: 41)

For Irigaray, the placental relation offers an alternative way of conceiving of logic or economy in which the other is recognised, yet not assimilated or sacrificed in order that the self may live. The other within the placental economy is recognised, though not reduced to the self. The self and other constantly negotiate their differences. They are neither in a state of fusion, nor are they understood to be completely separate. Instead, both self and other are mediated by a third; they are mediated by the placenta, which regulates exchanges between them while at the same time providing a limit to each. If we compare the labial logic of the placental economy to the phallocentric logic that Irigaray has exposed in western philosophy and culture, we can begin to understand the radicality of calling for the recognition of a feminine subjectivity that recognises and cultivates the relation between her sexuate body and subjectivity. Jones sums up the importance of these images for Irigaray in the creation of a feminine subject. Jones writes: The figures of the placental economy and the lips offer an alternative to the oppositional model in which a subject is constituted via a split from the m/Other. Instead, self and other take shape together in ways that would allow a woman – and more specifically, a daughter – to remain in touch with her mother. By relating to her own sex in the body of the mother, the daughter would be able to enter a horizon of sexuate belonging and relate to herself as a woman without being defined against a male subject. At the same time, the language of the placental economy allows the daughter’s debt to birth to be acknowledged in terms of a dynamic relational bond that prevents the mother from disappearing into a fantasy of amorphous plenitude. (Jones 2011: 166)

Irigaray uses the image of the two lips and the fluidity of the female body to reimagine a feminine subjectivity that challenges the ontological foundations that support the ‘unity of self identity’ within the culture of narcissism and the narcissistic masculine subject. The images that these figures evoke are relational, fluid and open-ended and they must be read as structuring part of the dialectical process appropriate to the feminine subjectivity that Irigaray first called for in Speculum. 65

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irigaray and politics

Notes 1. As I have suggested earlier in the book, we might read Irigaray’s project as an attempt to change the way we experience and understand the world alongside Fanon’s claim in Black Skin, White Masks (2008) that we need a restructuring of the world to overcome the structures that enable racism. In this work he writes: ‘We shall see that another solution is possible. It implies a restructuring of the world’ (2008: 60). I think there is a complicated entanglement of race and gender present in Fanon’s work and this has not yet been sufficiently unpacked. An interesting project might be to place Hom’s (2013) analysis of how race indexes sexual difference in Irigaray’s writing alongside Fanon. For now, however, the connection I want to make is that both Fanon and Irigaray understand the entanglement of oppressive patriarchal and colonial systems as structural and phenomenological, as these structures and the myths they perpetuate form our understanding of ourselves, our being in the world, and what we (mis)take for reality. 2. Both Beauvoir and Fanon highlight the work that myth-making discourses do to create women and racialised subjects as ‘other’ in western culture. Beauvoir takes us on a journey in The Second Sex highlighting the way different discourses do this and in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks he notes, with particular reference to comic books in France, the way in which French culture and myth reduces and stereotypes the black man. We can also turn to Althusser and Stuart Hall’s reading of Althusser’s work here for more on the relation between ideology and interpellation of subjectivity as well as to contemporary thinkers like bell hooks and her important work in unpacking problematic racist, sexist and classist myths in popular culture in the USA. I think we must read Irigaray as part of this conversation and her call to create the mediations required for a feminine subjectivity to emerge ought to be read in these contexts. Keeping these contexts in mind we can better engage with Irigaray’s call for an autonomous feminine subjectivity and her political–philosophical project to imagine and ‘restructure’ a better world in which multiple subjects can coexist in difference. 3. I discuss how Irigaray’s refiguring of space and time in her reading of Plato’s Symposium is intimately related to her engagement with yoga in a forthcoming article in the journal Australian Feminist Studies (2019). 4. For some excellent work on Irigaray and film see Bolton (2011) and Bainbridge (2008). We can also look to film-makers like African American director Ava DuVernay, French filmmaker Céline Sciamma and Indigenous Australian artist Tracey Mofatt for examples of alternative stories and representations of differing feminine subjectivities that might be read as the type of examples that Irigaray is calling for here. 66

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feminine imaginaries All three of these artists especially take the entanglement of race, sexuality and class seriously in their work. 5. This Sex which is Not One, the text from where this quote is taken, was first published in French in 1977 and I think Irigaray’s claim certainly still holds today in terms of nation state and international politics. There is, however, something interesting happening in terms of how I think Irigaray would conceive of new (women’s) politics in Barcelona, Spain, and I discuss this further in the final chapter. Two other recent examples that come to mind of how we can imagine women becoming politicised but without access to a women’s politics (including rights protected by law), in the sense that Irigaray is arguing for, are the 2017 global Women’s March and the #metoo campaign that erupted on social media in late 2017. In an excellent analysis of the global Women’s March (in January 2017 in response to Donald Trump’s inauguration in the United States), Angela Davis and others coin the phrase ‘Feminism for the 99%’(echoing the ‘we are the 99%’ slogans of the Occupy movement) as a way in which to think about gender justice and women’s rights globally while recognising women’s struggles in their differences. I think perhaps the #metoo campaign on social media in late 2017 is another way in which we can see women becoming politicised in different ways to earlier women’s liberation movements. While not without criticism these contemporary movements are more nuanced in their articulation of the entanglement of race, class, sexuality and gender, and yet are still fundamentally connected to the oppression of women and the oppression of their bodies, their desires and sexualities in ways that we have not yet seen in the history of women’s social movements. 6. This point can and should be read alongside the feminist Marxist critiques of reproductive labour and social reproduction – see Angela Davis (2001) and Silvia Federici (2004) as well as Ariel Salleh’s work Ecofeminism as Politics (2017). See also Irigaray’s chapter ‘Women, the Sacred, Money’ in Sexes and Genealogies (1993c) and ‘Women on the Market’ in This Sex which is Not One (1985b). 7. We might read the argument I am making here about Irigaray’s philosophy alongside Audre Lorde’s work and in particular her essay ‘There is no Hierarchy of Oppressions’ from I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde (2009). Lorde makes the point that as a ‘Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, poet, mother of two . . .’ she ‘cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only’ (2009). Lorde’s work explicitly reminds us that oppression is lived in many forms and these forms are intimately entangled, thus our resistance to oppression(s) must take special notice of the ways in which they intersect. Lorde writes: ‘And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, 67

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irigaray and politics

8.

9.

10.

11.

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wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you’ (2009). Frantz Fanon has some interesting things to say about racialised subjectivities being ‘out of time’ in ways that we might read alongside Irigaray’s argument about feminist subjectivity here. See Alia Al-Saji (2013) and Helen Ngo (2017) for a reading of Fanon’s work on ‘racialised time’. Also see J. Halberstam (2005) for a reading of queer time. I think there is potential to read these works alongside Irigaray’s work on time to produce some interesting ways to theorise the entanglement of race, gender and sexuality in the becoming of subjectivity. I should point out that Irigaray acknowledges she is making this criticism from within the western tradition (although this criticism does go on to destabilise this east/west divide). Irigaray writes on the page prior to the above quote: ‘Man has been the subject of discourse, whether in theory, morality, or politics. And the gender of God, the guardian of every subject and every discourse, is always masculine and paternal, in the West’ (Irigaray 1993a: 6–7). Again, we can make connections between Irigaray’s point here and the work of decolonial scholar Rámon Grosfoguel (2013), that is, we can see the connections with colonialism, Christianity and the ‘ideal’ masculine rational subject of western discourse. We can keep in mind Whitford’s suggestion that ‘it is the Kantian conditions of experience, the categories of space and time, that are reexamined. In each case, Irigaray is tackling, not the explicit arguments of the philosopher, but the sexual subtext, the fantasmatic organization underlying the surface rationality’ (Whitford 1991b: 8). This is connected to, as I will demonstrate in a moment, Freudian notions of sublimation. This point will also become clearer in the next chapter when I discuss Irigaray’s work ‘Divine Women’ (in Irigaray 1993c) that explores the specific role religious discourses play in the articulation of subjectivity and becoming. This is a point that Gayatri Spivak takes up in her heterogeneous sexanalysis (1981: 183) calling it an excess of the clitoris. I explore these links in detail in Chapter 5. Irigaray continues on this point in An Ethics of Sexual Difference in her reading on Aristotle entitled ‘Place, Interval’. Crucially the way in which Irigaray is refiguring the relation between woman as mother and place for man or child, and the relation between woman for herself (and auto-affection, or feminine pleasure), can be linked to my upcoming discussion on Gayatri Spivak’s work later in this book. Irigaray notes: ‘If woman could be inside herself, she would have at least two things in her: herself and that for which she is a container – man and at times the child. It seems that she can be a container only for one thing, if that is her function. She is supposed only to be a container for the 68

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14.

15.

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child, according to one moral position. She may be a container for the man. But not for herself. . . . It is necessary, Freud writes, for woman to turn away from her mother in order to enter into desire of and for man. If she remains in empathy with her mother, she remains in her place. So her mother remains a mold for her? Back into herself she turns her mother (and) herself. She interiorizes her container-mother in herselfas-container. Between the two, she exists’ (Irigaray 1993a: 41–2; my emphasis). Recall Irigaray writes in ‘Sexual Difference’: ‘Has something been held in reserve within the silence of a history in the feminine: an energy, a morphology, a growth and flourishing still to come from the female realm? An overture to a future that is still and always open?’ (Irigaray 1993a: 19). Irigaray notes: ‘Our age will have failed to realize the full dynamic reserve signified by desire if it is referred back to the economy of the interval, if it is situated in the attractions, tensions, and actions occurring between form and matter, but also in the remainder that subsists after each creation of work, between what has already been identified and what has still to be identified, and so on’ (Irigaray 1993a: 8). As I argue elsewhere (see Roberts 2019) Irigaray’s conception of sexuate feminine subjectivity as rhythmic becoming is anchored between the binaries created by western metaphysics and can be read alongside Rosi Braidotti’s notion of subjectivity as cartographies that take into account both space and time. Braidotti refers to alternative cartographies of subjectivity as ‘feminist figurations’ in which she argues ‘the definition of his/her identity takes place in between nature/technology; male/female; black/white; in the spaces the flow and connect such seeming binaries’ (Braidotti 2009: 5). Similarly, Jones notes: ‘While recognizing that there are risks involved in Irigaray’s appeals to the female body, I argue that her aim is not simply to find alternative ways of representing the female sex. Rather, she is seeking to refigure the very relation between the body and language by escaping the hylomorphic model in which symbolic forms are imposed on inert and essentially form-less matter. Irigaray’s claim is neither that our existence as women is determined by our anatomical sex, nor that we think differently because we have female bodies. Instead, she is arguing that we need to rethink the relation between our being and our bodies, as well as between form and matter, self and other, if we are to be able to think of woman as a sexuate subject. Irigaray’s explorations of female self-relation are designed to engender figures for a female autonomy that would permit us to affirm being (as) two’ (Jones 2011: 160). As I suggested earlier, many of the early criticisms that labelled Irigaray’s work as essentialist failed to understand Irigaray’s appeals to the 69

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irigaray and politics female body as a mimetic strategy aimed at subverting the dominant phallocentric symbolic. Interestingly, an early interview in Hecate in 1983 Irigaray’s comments on how in Tantric traditions the lips of the women’s genitals are not covered over. The interviewer, Aafke, asks: ‘You say that female sexuality is polymorphous, constantly moving, not goal-directed. But then I wonder, is sexuality really so different for men?’ Luce Irigaray replies: ‘The man’s genitals consists of an organ which stands up, which is visible. It changes in form and you can see it change. With the female genitals the lips are, it’s true, somewhat visible, but not the interior, unless you use a mirror. When you make love, the female sex also changes form, but you can’t see it, you can only feel it. In a culture which has always favoured the visible, the woman isn’t in a favourable position because she feels something which isn’t visible. Her sex is above all tangible, tactile. Perhaps the fact that women do things like make themselves up and dress up is a way of compensating for the fact that their genitals are invisible. While you do see images in Greek sculpture of men with an erect penis, the lips of women’s bodies are never represented. You see a small curve, but no open lips. In my book Amante Marine I wanted to include an image of the female sex which shows itself, but that image doesn’t exist. You’ll find them in the East, in Tantric culture, but not in Greek and Judeo-Christian culture’ (Irigaray cited in Amsberg and Steenhuis 1983). 19. As Rachel Jones points out: ‘In these texts [‘When Our Lips Speak Together’, Speculum (Volume Fluidity) and Elemental Passions], the image of the lips is offered as a way of figuring a female morphology according to which – contra Freud and Lacan – woman is defined not as the lack or absence of the phallus, but in relation to herself. Irigaray works to recover the possibilities both for self-relation and for pleasure afforded by the ‘nonsuture of her lips’, possibilities that are sacrificed when woman is reduced to the closed volume of a reproductive container (TS, 30). By invoking both the labia and the mouth, the image of the lips playfully suggests that by re-figuring the female sex, woman might begin to speak in a sexuate voice’ (Jones 2011: 164). 20. Jones notes Irigaray thus turns the female body ‘into a positive resource for re-figuring female auto-affection . . . (S, 230)’. Jones continues: ‘For Irigaray, the question of sexuality is inseparable from the question of how a subject is formed. Male sexuality has typically been organized around the idealization of a single, visible sex organ, in ways that reflect and reinforce the model of self-identical unity. Irigaray contrasts this with the multiple sites of woman’s sexual pleasure – “breasts, pubis, clitoris, labia, vulva, vagina, neck of the uterus, womb . . .” (S, 233) – which are suggestive of the way the female body does not conform to the bounds of male identity. . . . Irigaray’s task is to show how this does not mean “that she has no sex” (S, 233)’ (Jones 2011: 163). 70

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feminine imaginaries 21. Recall my earlier discussion of Naomi Schor’s claim that we must pay attention to the work on Irigaray’s materialism and the linking together of the fluid and the feminine (Schor 1989: 49–50). Elizabeth Stephens (2014) also writes on Irigaray’s fluidity. 22. Irigaray’s use of the placental relation receives less attention in the secondary literature. For a clear exposition, see Jones 2011; Irigaray 1993b; Schwab 1994. 23. Some interesting work is emerging on placental relations between foetus and mother, for example Fannin and Coll (2013) explore Irigaray’s account of the placental relation in the context of geographies of bodies. Kara et al.’s (2012) scientific research demonstrates how the mother can physically benefit from the child in utero.

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3

Genealogies and Subjectivity

Substituting the two for the one in sexual difference corresponds, then, to a decisive philosophical and political gesture, one which renounces being one or many in favour of being-two as the necessary foundation of a new ontology, a new ethics and a new politics in which the other recognized as other and not as the same: greater, smaller, at best equal to me. (Irigaray 2000a: 141)

The ways in which the figure of the two lips, placental economies and space–time–desire work within Irigaray’s philosophy are crucial to understanding her call for appropriate interventions in culture which would enable an autonomous feminine subjectivity to emerge. In this chapter, we explore some of the mediations Irigaray calls for including: 1. the symbolic articulation of positive mother–daughter relations; 2. the creation of a feminine divine; 3. the articulation of sexuate rights. While seemingly quite different, these aspects of Irigaray’s work can be seen as strategies for bringing about a culture of difference, one that nourishes sexuate difference. For Irigaray, the strategies listed above are concrete and practical examples of the way in which symbolic representation and expression of a second feminine imaginary/ symbolic/subjectivity can work to change our unique and personal subject formation, as well as to change culture and politics. If, as I have shown in Chapter 1, our subjectivity is formed via a complex matrix of primitive intellectual judgements that are intimately linked to the body and processes of projective identification that secure the infant’s fantasy of omnipotence and subjectivity, then we can see how subject formation has the potential to affect culture and the symbolic and vice versa. Thus, for Irigaray, the body marks culture at the same time as culture marks the body. In this way, as we will see, sexuate subjectivity comes to be articulated as a site of the passage between, a constant movement back and forth, and it is this (re)articulation or 72

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genealogies and subjectivity (re)figuring of the relationship between nature and culture (the sexed body and language) that makes Irigaray’s work unique. It is not a nature versus culture argument; it is not a sex versus gender argument. The argument for western culture to recognise non-hierarchal non-binary sexuate difference is not a return to a binary logic of body versus culture, nor is it an attempt to invert the logic to make the body more valuable than culture, and neither – again – is it a fusing of the two. Rather, it is a rethinking of the relationship between, and the very meaning of, the two, in which both are rethought and refigured. Nature and the sexuate body are rethought and (re)valued, as is the idea of culture and mind. This, I believe, is Irigaray’s understanding of the sensible transcendental. In refiguring the passage and interval between the sensible and transcendental, she is (re)thinking our very understanding of what subjectivity is. Moreover, as we see in more detail in Chapter 4, this refigured relationship between nature and culture within sexuate subjectivity (the vertical horizon) also structures dialectical relations among and between sexuate subjects (the horizontal horizon).

Cultural Myth: Mother–Daughter Relations and Woman-to-Woman Sociality Refiguring and (re)symbolising the relationship between mother and daughter is a theme that runs through Irigaray’s oeuvre and her work on language and the figure of the two lips, and the placental economy highlights the need to refigure this relationship in terms of language and subjectivity. Additionally, her engagement with Ancient Greek, Christian and philosophical myths attempt to (re)articulate how mother–daughter relationships are symbolised in various mythmaking discourses. Irigaray points to the story of Antigone throughout her work as a ‘tragic episode’ ‘between the genders’ in western culture and that this story ‘represents the passage into patriarchy’ due to Antigone being forbidden to ‘respect the blood bonds with her mother’ (Irigaray 1993c: 2). Irigaray explains that under ‘patriarchy the girl is separated from her mother and from her family in general; she must live with him, carry his name, bear his children’ (Irigaray 1993c: 2). Irigaray makes the links between our contemporary contexts and these ancient myths. She writes: Our code of morality today is still derived from those very ancient events. This means that the love between mother and daughter, which 73

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irigaray and politics the patriarchal regime has made impossible (as Freud in fact reinforces for our benefit), has been transformed into the woman’s obligation to devote herself to the cult of the children of her legal husband and to the husband himself as a male child. In fact, despite the incest taboo, there seems little indication that man has sublimated the natural immediacy of his relationship to the mother. Rather, man has transferred that relationship to his wife as mother substitute. In this way the man-woman couple is always out of phases by a generation, since male and female genealogies are collapsed into a single genealogy: that of the husband. (Irigaray 1993c: 2)

Producing new and refiguring old cultural myths to include positive representations of the mother–daughter relationship in the symbolic would disturb this reduction to a single genealogy, a single story. New and alternative readings of old myths that disturb sexist, racist, classist and homophobic stereotypes would also allow alternative representations with which diverse women and girls can identify and work out their own narcissism fundamental to healthy subject formation. Additionally, the positive representation of these relations would also enable women-as-subjects to emerge in which mother and daughter are neither fused nor placed in deathly competition. Irigaray thus argues that the positive symbolisation of the mother– daughter relationship is: an indispensable precondition for our emancipation from the authority of fathers. In our societies, the mother/daughter, daughter/mother relationship constitutes a highly explosive nucleus. Thinking it, and changing it, is equivalent to shaking the foundations of the patriarchal order. (Irigaray 1991b: 50)

This relationship, for Irigaray, provides women with the opportunity to have an identity that is separate from the maternal function (Irigaray 1991b: 50). If women are able to envision an identity that is in excess of the maternal function, through a symbolisation of the mother–daughter relationship (and the creation of a feminine divine), then they will be able to enter the symbolic realm on their own terms, as autonomous subjects. The mother–daughter relationship allows women to articulate their own relation to their origins and belonging, and thus not remain in the state of ‘déréliction’ that Irigaray believes women are in at present (Whitford 1991a: 77). The state of ‘déréliction’, for Irigaray, refers to the absence of adequate symbolisation and ‘connotes for example the state of being abandoned 74

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genealogies and subjectivity by God or, in mythology, the state of an Ariadne, abandoned on Naxos, left without hope, without help, without refuge’ (Whitford 1991a: 77–8). According to Irigaray, women are abandoned outside the symbolic order in this state of ‘déréliction’ and lacking symbolisation which is needed for the operations of sublimation (Whitford 1991a: 78). It is for this reason that the symbolisation of the mother– daughter relationship is vital for Irigaray: For once again, woman as such has no means of participating in socalled ‘spiritual’ life (?), since she takes no part in working it out, in its ‘symbolization,’ its exchanges. This accounts for her grievance at being excluded as ‘subject’ from a phallocentric scene upon which she can appear only if she accepts derision, guilt, and the loss of what they call, or he calls, her ‘femininity.’ (Irigaray 1985a: 57)1

For Irigaray, one of the effects of this state of ‘déréliction’ or ‘nonsymbolization’ is pathology between women. This is because women have no symbolic representation (language, religion, politics) and cannot speak to one another as women subjects. This pathology between women occurs because of the continual competition for the only place in which women are represented (if only inadequately) – that of the mother (Whitford 1991a: 88). Therefore, if the specific relationship between a mother and a daughter can be symbolised as something exceeding the maternal then this shall provide the foundation for a female symbolic and thus a woman-to-woman sociality (and politics) in which women can speak to one another as woman– subject. This idea of symbolising the specific relation between mother and daughter is linked to Irigaray’s continual project of not defining woman but rather asking women, in their own specificity, to define themselves. Irigaray uses the mother–daughter relationship as a way to encourage all women to tell their own stories and histories, thus allowing women to speak as women and among women. In order to enter the symbolic realm as (speaking) subjects who will exceed this maternal function, Irigaray suggests the urgent need of various forms of cultural production by women, a sort of rewriting of history and future concepts of the divine to include positive symbolisations of women. Irigaray thus calls for women to write into the symbolic our own female genealogies and futures. As Athena Athanasiou and Elena Tzelepis write in 2010: In Irigaray’s hands, myth is motivated, and proposed to us, as a route for refiguring sexual difference. In her later work, a more constructive 75

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irigaray and politics and positive use of myths emerges in the context of her affirmative, recreative articulation of female genealogies deriving from a pre-Hellenic matrix. From the authorial and authoritative logos of male philosophers Plato and Aristotle, Irigaray shifts to female figures emerging from the more polylogic horizon of mythology: Demeter and Persephone, Eurydice. (Athanasiou and Tzelepis 2010: 5–6)

As such we must read these calls for new figurations of the mother– daughter relationship alongside Rachel Jones’ point that in using the image of two lips and the placental economy Irigaray is trying to put the mother and daughter into non-appropriative relation enabling the daughter ‘to enter a horizon of sexuate belonging and relate to herself as a woman without being defined against a male subject’ (Jones 2011: 166).

Religious Myth: A Feminine Divine Closely intertwined with these previously discussed mediations is Irigaray’s intervention into religious myths and the project of imagining and thus constructing a positive autonomous feminine divine. In the introduction to Sexes and Genealogies, the book in which the chapter ‘Divine Women’ is reprinted, Irigaray notes: Respect for God is possible as long as no one realizes that he is a mask concealing the fact that men have taken sole possession of the divine, of identity, of kinship. Once we give this whole issue the attention and serious consideration it deserves, however, it becomes obvious that God is being used by men to oppress women and that, therefore, God must be questioned and not simply neutered in the current pseudoliberal way. Religion as a social phenomenon cannot be ignored. (Irigaray 1993c: v)

In proposing the refiguring of feminine divinity and spirituality, Irigaray is arguing for the entry of women (as autonomous subjects) into one of the most important symbolic discourses that construct meaning in our lives. Irigaray notes that patriarchal religious discourse is pervasive and, rather than attempting to ignore or exclude it, she confronts the issue challenging it via psychoanalytic, phenomenological and ontological questions. This rethinking of the role of religion and the divine is especially important for Irigaray, because it is another way in which we can challenge the dominance of the male imaginary in the west. Irigaray notes: 76

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genealogies and subjectivity It seems we are unable to eliminate or suppress the phenomenon of religion. It reemerges in different forms, some of them perverse: sectarianism, theoretical or political dogmatism, religiosity. . . . Therefore, it is crucial that we rethink religion, and especially religious structures, categories, initiations, rules, and utopias, all of which have been masculine for centuries. Keeping in mind that today these religious structures often appear under the name of science and technology. (Irigaray 1993c: 75)

Alison Martin notes that for Irigaray, the feminine divine is intimately connected to reimagining feminine subjectivity and transforming the ways in which we understand the world in western culture (2000). Martin notes that Irigaray’s divine is not ‘God as the Being who sets standards of behaviour for other beings’ but rather the divine, for Irigaray, ‘is more a question, through feeling, of structuring and placing the self in a process of becoming relative to one’s own gender and to the other gender’ (Martin 2000: 118–19).2 In ‘Divine Women’ Irigaray writes: ‘Divinity is what we need to become free, autonomous, sovereign. No human subjectivity, no human society has ever been established without the help of the divine’ (Irigaray 1993c: 62). Irigaray argues that it is the idea of God that enables Man to exist because God ‘helps him orient his finiteness by references to infinity’ (Irigaray 1993c: 61). Referencing Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity Irigaray proposes that ‘to posit a gender, a God is necessary: guaranteeing the infinite’ (Irigaray 1993c: 61). She notes that science is unable to do this, to posit the ‘infinite of the finite’ like a God or divine can, and that instead science ‘limits by closing things off. Thereby banning becoming?’ (Irigaray 1993c: 61). However, in order to live, for human life, Irigaray argues that the most valuable goal ‘is to go on becoming, infinitely’ (Irigaray 1993c: 61). Irigaray proposes that we refigure divinity, we need to refigure gender as divine, to enable woman and men to reconceptualise gender as a horizon that posits the ‘infinite of the finite’. If we ‘posit a gender’ as a horizon and adequately recognise sexuate difference, this enables the ‘infinite of the finite’, an infinite becoming that recognises the threshold of gender differences (Irigaray 1993c: 61). If we do not do this, our becoming ‘remains partial and subject to the subject’ and we are left without a future ‘leaving it up to the other, of the Other of the other, to put us together’ (Irigaray 1993c: 61). Irigaray notes: To become means fulfilling the wholeness of what we are capable of being. Obviously, this road never ends. Are we more perfect than the 77

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irigaray and politics past? This is not certain. Could this be because woman has no gender through which she can become? And man, clearly, is able to complete his essence only if he claims to be separate as a gender. If he has no existence in his gender, he lacks his relation to the infinite, and, in fact, to finiteness. To avoid that finiteness, man has sought out a unique male God. (Irigaray 1993c: 61)

‘Divine Women’ (Irigaray 1993c) is what we might call an Irigarayan rereading of Feuerbach’s ideas on God. Feuerbach’s view is that God enables man’s existence, and in Irigaray’s reading she highlights how women too need a feminine divine in order to differentiate and define their own feminine subjectivity. Irigaray outlines the importance of the role of God and religion in psychoanalytic, phenomenological and ontological terms; she stresses the importance of the way in which religion structures our lived existence and sexuate subjectivities. Martin notes: For Irigaray, then, that women were halted in their divine becoming is not simply a question of the fact that masculine figures came to represent the divine; the issue is rather that the structure and mode of the divine was thus changed and in the place of a divine becoming a divine Being was established, and this set up a different logical order such that the economies of law and language were likewise transformed at the expense of women (1990a, 19). (Martin 2000: 115)

In other words, Irigaray’s argument in ‘Divine Women’ illustrates how the necessity of an appropriate ideal object in subject formation affects the lived experiences of women, including the relations among women as well as their socio-economic situations. In ‘Divine Women’ Irigaray demonstrates how these aspects of existence are inseparable. This, suggests Martin (and I agree), is the basic argument in Irigaray’s reading of Feuerbach in her chapter ‘Divine Women’. Martin notes: This was no radical feminist exaltation of female goddesses, but more a phenomenological and psychoanalytic argument regarding the necessity of an object in identity formation. For all the importance of localized and specific strategies by women to improve relations among themselves, and to improve their socio-economic situation, Irigaray argued that without a symbolic object in the feminine they cannot come-to-be as women. (Martin 2003: 6)

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genealogies and subjectivity Importantly, as Martin notes, Irigaray reworks Feuerbach’s argument into ‘a claim for the gendered nature of any object ideal – a gender that is created not from an essence but from its relation to the other gender’ (Martin 2003: 6). The dialectical relationship between each genre or gender that Irigaray imagines, can be understood in the phenomenological sense of two worlds that ‘are absolutely other to each other’ (Martin 2003: 7). In other words, it is only through the recognition of each sexuate subjectivity’s own limits, the processing of their own narcissism or the ability for each sexuate subjectivity to realise they are not omnipotent, and thus recognising (but not assimilating) the sexuate other, that sexuate difference can come about. This is why the idea of two different yet interweaving worlds for each sexuate subject is crucial, and on this point Irigaray notes: Sexuate difference means that man and woman do not belong to one and the same subjectivity, that subjectivity itself is neither neutral nor universal. From such a reality, it results that man and woman cannot meet together in a same world, unless one of them renounces their own subjectivity. The encounter between them requires the existence of two different worlds in which they could enter into relation or into communication after recognising they are irreducible the one to the other. (Irigaray 2004: xii)3

Irigaray is concerned with creating a positive feminine symbolic and a feminine divine in order to bring about a feminine subjectivity that allows for a woman-to-woman sociality in which women, as autonomous sexuate subjects, can relate to and love one another as sexuate subjects. On this point, Irigaray notes that: If women have no God, they are unable to either communicate or commune with one another. They need, we need, an infinite if they are to share a little. Otherwise sharing implies fusion-confusion, division, and dislocation within themselves, among themselves. If I am unable to form a relationship with some horizon of accomplishment for my gender, I am unable to share while protecting my becoming. Our theological tradition presents some difficultly as far as God in the feminine gender is concerned. There is no woman God, no female trinity: mother, daughter, spirit. This paralyzes the infinite of becoming a woman since she is fixed in the role of mother through whom the son of God is made flesh. (Irigaray 1993c: 62)4 79

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irigaray and politics The connection between divinity and women-as-political-subjects is important to acknowledge. In a recent article Peta Hinton makes these links clear, Hinton writes: Irigaray finds in the concept of divinity, in a rethinking of its transcendent status, the possibility of a political community for and among women that can be figured through a sexual difference that does not defend itself against a monolithic, phallocentric, and universal outside to the specificity of women’s lived experience. (Hinton 2013: 438)

The idea of a feminine divine helping to bring about a woman-towoman sociality is heavily linked with the importance of the mother– daughter relationship as well as Irigaray’s notion of sexuate rights that I will discuss in what comes next.

New Politics and Sexuate Rights In order to continue think through the implications of Irigaray’s call for the recognition of an autonomous feminine subjectivity and the practical strategies that Irigaray advocates, let us return to what Irigaray wrote in 1989 in the preface to a collection of lectures entitled Thinking the Difference (published in 1994). The lectures explore different aspects of Irigaray’s arguments for the creation of a feminine subjectivity and of corresponding sexuate rights. We might understand Irigarayan sexuate rights as rights that she envisages are appropriate to and that protect each sexuate subject (masculine and feminine) in the positive recognition of their difference. Irigaray’s reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – that she clearly views as a problematic symptom of a culture of narcissism and the western liberal political tradition – demonstrates how the illusion of equality that underlies the definition of ‘Human’ is an example of the way in which feminine subjectivities are not autonomously and adequately recognised. Irigaray’s reading (and questioning) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights highlight the way in which certain rights that are supposedly protecting our humanity are not appropriate for feminine subjects. Perhaps we can think of Irigaray’s reading here as providing reasons why we need institutional legislation to protect autonomous feminine subjectivity? Or, as demonstrating how the culture of narcissism has detrimental political effects on the daily reality of women? Ultimately, for Irigaray, 80

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genealogies and subjectivity these human rights do not adequately address women’s experiences, they do not address the specific ways in which women’s bodies and desire are exploited, thus resulting in the silencing of one half of humanity. Irigaray notes: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights [La Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme, that is, Declaration of the Rights of Man] may be a moving document, but from the very first article, I, a woman, no longer feel ‘human’ [feel I am a ‘man’]. For I am not ‘born free and equal in dignity and rights’ [to other men]. I have female identity problems that current law does not resolve. I cannot feel that this ‘universal’ charter includes me unless I renounce my sex and its properties, and also agree to forget all the women who do not enjoy the minimal civil liberties that I do. (Irigaray 1994: ix)

Irigaray points to specific passages in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and highlights how these supposedly neutral rights are in fact gendered; they are masculine and do not account for or protect a differently sexuate subject, a feminine subjectivity. These rights are not appropriate to women and girls, and they are not appropriate protection from the variety of ways women and girls across the world can be violated. Moreover, Irigaray is not blind to the fact that she, as a Belgian-born white women, is privileged in comparison to the situations of many other women who do not enjoy ‘the minimal civil liberties’ that she does (Irigaray 1994: ix). Irigaray’s continual questioning of the declaration breaks open the silences; it brings our attention to the way in which these human rights are not applicable to the different ways in which women are oppressed when compared to men. Irigaray states: ‘Let us go back to Article 17: “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.” Fine. But what is rape then?’ She continues: Just what exactly is my ‘recognition . . . as a person before the law’ (Article 6)? How can it be defended against ‘cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment’ (Article 5), whether corporeal or spiritual? And if I do not say the same things as humans [‘men’], and, as a result, am subjected to various kinds of cruel treatment in my work, where do I turn? Must I go into exile? Change nationality? Or keep silent? (Irigaray 1994: x)

In Irigaray’s questioning of the declaration, we are reminded that Irigaray’s concern with women’s politics is not a recent turn in her 81

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irigaray and politics work, as we saw in her discussion in This Sex which is Not One, when she writes: whatever inequalities may exist among women, they all undergo, even without clearly realizing it, the same oppression, the same exploitation of their body, the same denial of their desire. This is why it is very important for women to be able to join together, and to join together ‘among themselves’. (Irigaray 1985b: 164)

It is clear that Irigaray sees common threads in the oppression of women and girls across the globe in our so-called post- and decolonial globalised contexts, and this oppression is undoubtedly tied to the exploitation of women’s bodies and women’s desire. However, just because Irigaray argues for the recognition of women’s oppression globally, this does not mean that she discounts differences between women, for this would suggest that Irigaray views sexist oppression as split from racism. This is not the case. Irigaray explicitly recognises the inequalities and differences that exist among women across the globe while at the same time calling for women to: expose the exploitation common to all women and to find the struggles that are appropriate for each woman, right where she is, depending upon her nationality, her job, her social class, her sexual experience, that is upon the form of oppression that is for her the most immediately unbearable. (Irigaray 1985b: 166–7)5

Consequently, we can begin to understand the wider contexts of why Irigaray foregrounds the creation of an autonomous feminine subjectivity that may serve as a horizon of difference for masculine subjectivity. Irigaray asks what must she do, as a woman, in order to be recognised as a woman, a sexed subject or ‘person’, before the law? What is she supposed to do? Irigaray’s questions highlight that it is because of her inability to be recognised as a sexuate and feminine subjectivity that this type of silencing occurs. Instead, Irigaray gives some examples of what she means by women’s rights. She argues for: 1. The right to human dignity, which means: a. Stopping the commercial use of their bodies and images; b. Valid representations of themselves in actions, words, and images in all public places; c. Stopping the exploitation of motherhood, a functional part of women, by civil and religious powers. (Irigaray 1993b: 80) 82

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genealogies and subjectivity Irigaray lists what she thinks are the most important sexuate rights for women. She notes that women’s rights must include the ‘legal encodification of virginity (or physical and moral integrity)’; the right to motherhood ‘as a component (not a priority) of female identity’; that woman have a right ‘to defend their own and their children’s lives, their living space, their traditions, and their religion against all unilateral decisions emanating from male law (including in this respect armaments and pollution)’ (Irigaray 1993b: 81–2). Irigaray argues that linguistic exchange needs to be revised under law to ‘guarantee a right to equivalent exchange for men and women’ and ‘women shall be represented in equal numbers in all civil and religious decision-making bodies, given that religion also represents civil authority’ (Irigaray 1993b: 83). An interesting point, and one that ties in with the point I am making throughout this chapter regarding myth-making discourses and the power these have over our subject formation, is that Irigaray argues ‘media broadcasts, such as television, for which women pay the same taxes as men, shall be half of the time targeted towards women’ (Irigaray 1993b: 82). If we think through the way Irigaray is formulating subjectivity as I have outlined it in this chapter, it is important we take her work on sexuate rights seriously. Irigaray is well aware of the lived differences between women, and her argument for sexuate rights is not an attempt to cover over differences, or ignore differences between women. Rather we must read this as part of the mediations necessary for feminine subjectivity, woman-as-subject, in all her different ways of being, to emerge. We require new myths, new ontological structures, new religions, new politics, and we require new laws. Patriarchal (western) law does not protect women: we only have to look at the epidemic of domestic violence in countries like Australia and the UK where many women enjoy ‘minimal liberties’, to see the horrifying statistics of two women a week killed by a partner or former partner. Thus, not only do we need myth-making discourses, philosophical, political and cultural change – we also require legislative and legal change to protect women and to help us refigure subjectivity. As Irigaray explains: The objection, in this instance, that the sexes are treated differently in different traditions does not hold up. It is precisely coexistence between traditions that civil codes must guarantee, leaving each man and woman free to make the more ideological choices. (Irigaray 2000a: 10) 83

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irigaray and politics She continues: Sexual difference is perhaps the hardest way, but it is also the key, to achieving civil coexistence between other forms of difference. An apprenticeship in respect for the other at the most instinctive, emotional level, leads to peaceful coexistence with all forms of otherness. (Irigaray: 2000a: 12)

Notes 1. And further: ‘The nonsymbolization of her desire for origin, of her relationship to her mother, and of the libido acts as a constant appeal to polymorphic regressions (be they melancholic, maniacal, schizophrenic, paranoiac . . .). She functions as a hole – that is where we could place it at its point of greatest efficiency, even in its implications of phobia, for man too – in the elaboration of imaginary and symbolic processes. But this fault, this deficiency, this “hole,” inevitably affords woman too few figurations, images, or representations by which to represent herself. It is not that she lacks some “master signifier” or that none is imposed upon her, but rather that access to a signifying economy, to the coining of signifiers, is difficult or even impossible for her because she remains an outsider, herself (a) subject to their norms. She borrows signifiers but cannot make her mark, or re-mark upon them. Which all surely keeps her deficient, empty, lacking, in a way that could be labelled “psychotic”: a latent but not actual psychosis, for want of a practical signifying system’ (Irigaray 1985a: 71). 2. Martin continues on this point, explicitly linking Irigaray’s call for a feminine divine as a form of questioning that will challenge current ontological assumptions as I argue at the beginning of this chapter. Martin notes: ‘In one sense, fundamental change is necessarily an ontological question and emerges from the different interpretations different eras give to the meaning of Being. Therefore, for sexed being to be recognized all the parameters of being will need to be reinterpreted in accordance with possibilities that are always determined ontologically’ (Martin 2000: 120). 3. On this point Martin notes: ‘Irigaray is attracted to Feuerbach’s argument because she accepts not only that ideal objects are necessary for the process of subject and community formation but also that they are necessarily divine. The ideals are not the products of individual choice or will as such, rather they bespeak a form of transcendence in the process of the subject’s interpretative self-projection in them; gender transcends the individual’ (Martin 2000: 108). 4. Grosz suggests that Irigaray’s notion of the divine attempts to replace: ‘a masculinist onto-theology, in which man defines, and is not in turn 84

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genealogies and subjectivity defined by, God, with the idea of sexual (and presumably cultural) specificity. Not a single, paternal God, whose unity and universality sweeps away a polytheistic pantheon, but sexually specific gods, gods who represent the extension and perfection, the infinite becoming, of sexually specific subjects’ (Grosz 1989: 155). 5. Irigaray’s comments on nationality and exile suggest to me an acute awareness of the ways these differences are at always at work on and within sexuate subjects. In her seemingly flippant remark about changing nationality or going into exile I think Irigaray is demonstrating the tension that western liberalism does not recognise: globally women’s oppression is tied to the exploitation of their bodies and this is a common thread; however, this is not to say that all women experience the same oppression and as such the lived differences of nationality (or lack of in the case of asylum seekers and refugees) for example is, for some, an added burden or axis of oppression and for others a privilege. These differences between women do not discount the ways in which women in various situations are oppressed; it is not a zero sum game, it is not a binary either/or logic. Irigaray’s work problematises identity politics with its focus on the between, the borderlands and I think there is a connection and overlap with the work of Gloria Anzalduá here that could be explored further.

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4

Irigaray’s Dialectics

whoever exists, is a unique being with an unrepeatable life story . . . he or she is simply someone that always has a face and a name. It is someone who consists of his/her life and his/her story. He or she is an unrepeatable existing being whose identity coincides perfectly with that lived life that is his/her story . . . The only question we can coherently pose to a unique being: who are you? (Cavarero 2002: 101) Who are you who will never be me or mine? (Irigaray 1996a: 19)

We are now familiar with Luce Irigaray’s argument, unpacked in previous chapters, that the emergence of an autonomous feminine subjectivity supported by an appropriate feminine imaginary and symbolic would enable us to establish a culture of sexuate difference and a ‘new era of History’ (Irigaray 1996a: 64). For this to happen, we must, as sexuate subjects, pass through our own narcissism and recognise that we are always in relation with the other. In doing so, we call into question the omnipotence of the (masculine) individual subject in a culture of narcissism that, according to Irigaray, founds and structures the western tradition. Irigaray recognises that the structures of the imaginary and symbolic are crucial for subject formation, but she reimagines autonomous feminine subjectivity according to a different symbolic/imaginary economy, in which the feminine subject would enter culture without sacrificing the relation with her sexuate body. The imaginary/symbolic economy of the feminine would recognise and value a fluid, open and non-sacrificial relation between body and culture. Language plays a fundamental part in actualising this new economy ‘because language and its values reflect the social order and vice versa’ (Irigaray 1996a: 66). This is why, throughout her writings, Irigaray plays with and evokes symbolic images tied to the female sexuate body. Writing in this way Irigaray seeks to undermine the phallocentric logic that privileges the phallic One and requires the single masculine and narcissistic subject to repress his relation with 86

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irigaray’s dialectics the maternal body. Irigaray argues that we must rethink the fundamental structures of existence that continue to perpetuate this split between body and culture and, moreover, refigure our relations with the maternal body as the origin of life. We must learn to appreciate the relation between body and culture and revalue our relations between the two in terms that are non-sacrificial. Because for Irigaray language structures culture, she seeks a new language that is appropriate to the female sexuate body. Irigaray thus uses the image of the two lips and the placental relation between mother and foetus in her writings to demonstrate the links between body and culture, and between body and language. She also highlights what a logic, culture and language might look like if they were to be structured as an open two-way passage between two in which neither of the two is sacrificed. Irigaray’s poetic and dialogic writing style mimics the qualities of fluidity and openness she sees connected to the feminine body. In her earlier work, Irigaray uses the strategies of mimesis in her images of the two lips that are themselves always touching and always open in a way that disrupts a phallocentric binary logic since they cannot be reduced to an either/or (nature/culture) dichotomy. This chapter builds on our reading of Irigaray undertaken in the previous chapters and suggests that we must read this refiguring of the nature/culture relationship alongside Irigaray’s reworking of the dialectical process that she first hints at as a redoubling of the Hegelian dialectic in Speculum.1 In Speculum, Irigaray contends that a dialectical struggle for self-consciousness occurs only for the masculine subject. We must recognise, however, that a dialectical process needs to occur in the creation of autonomous feminine subjectivity, and due to the openness and fluidity of her sexuate body, this dialectic must be refigured in terms that are non-sacrificial and that fundamentally disrupt phallocentric logic.

Tracing the Dialectic – Irigaray with Hegel I will thus trace three moments in Irigaray’s philosophy where she engages with Hegel’s dialectical thinking in Speculum, An Ethics of Sexual Difference and I Love to You.2 In the first moment, in Speculum Irigaray uncovers how the feminine is necessarily reduced to the unconscious and to inert nature in the Hegelian dialectical narrative of the (masculine) subject’s journey toward self-consciousness (Irigaray 1985a). Consequently, Irigaray calls for the recognition of a double dialectic appropriate to both a masculine and a feminine 87

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irigaray and politics subjectivity. The second moment occurs in An Ethics of Sexual Difference when Irigaray begins to focus on (re)thinking the interval between the binary terms nature and culture, masculine and feminine (Irigaray 1993a). Irigaray reimagines this dialectical process via the question of sexual difference and a refiguring of love as intermediary. The third moment in the development of Irigaray’s work is when she returns to Hegel in I Love to You (Irigaray 1996a). Irigaray describes how, in returning to Hegel, she actually uses his work as a point of departure to develop what she ‘wanted to say about a double and even triple dialectic: one in the masculine, one in the feminine and one between the two’ (Irigaray 2004: 3). She notes, ‘I depart from Hegel but use the dialectical process in a different manner: now it is in the service of intersubjectivity’ (Irigaray 2004: 3). In ‘The Eternal Irony of the Community,’ a chapter from Speculum, we can see the initial challenge Irigaray makes to Hegel’s dialectic and the call for a redoubling and reworking of the dialectic. In this chapter Irigaray points out, via a rereading of Hegel’s reading of Antigone, that the impoverished relations between men and women can be read in terms of a Hegelian master/slave dialectic. Irigaray argues that this notion of the Hegelian ‘Self’ and the process by which self-consciousness is reached is tied up in this oppressive relation between the sexes. In Irigaray’s reading of the dialectic, the male subject becomes the One, ‘the Master’, and his dialectical struggle for self-consciousness is founded upon the obliteration of the feminine other. In this structure the feminine remains unconscious and has no access or passage to subjectivity. Irigaray ironically explains: What an amazing vicious circle in a single syllogistic system. Whereby the unconscious, while remaining unconscious, is yet supposed to know the laws of a consciousness – which is permitted to remain ignorant of it – and will become even more repressed as a result of failing to respect those laws. But the stratification, on top/underneath, of the two ethical laws, of the two beings-there of sexual difference . . . comes from Self, of itself. The movement by which the mind ceaselessly sublates necessity, climbing to the top of its pyramid more easily if the other is thrust deeper down the well. Thus the male one copulates the other so as to draw new strength from her, a new form, whereas the other sinks further and further into a ground that harbors a substance which expends itself without the mark of any individualism. (Irigaray 1985a: 223)

Within this binary logic (that Irigaray describes here as ‘on top/ underneath’), in the struggle for self-consciousness, the feminine, as 88

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irigaray’s dialectics the unconscious substance from which the male ‘Self’ (or subject) emerges, remains ‘underneath’ and moves ‘further and further’ away from any form of subjectivity. Irigaray refers to this repression of the feminine as a rape that goes unrecognised, and argues that if the single-dialectical relationship remains the sole way of expressing or structuring the relations between men and women, non-hierarchical sexuate difference will never be recognised in this culture. Sexual indifference – the silencing of sexuate difference – is exemplified here by the rape of the feminine that goes unrecognised. This is why Irigaray’s critique is swiftly followed by calls for change. Irigaray notes that change can come about only if we rethink subjectivity in terms of a double dialectic. She writes, ‘the crime [of rape] can easily occur unnoticed and that the operation may never be translated into a fact. Unless each of these/its terms is doubled so radically that a single dialectic is no longer sufficient to articulate their copulation’ (Irigaray 1985a: 223). Irigaray understands this problem of sexual indifference and rape as the result of a masculine subject having the resources that enable him to dialecticise to some extent, whereas the feminine does not. Irigaray thus calls for a double dialectic in which the masculine and the feminine can articulate their own differing struggle toward selfconsciousness, toward recognising two sexuate subjects in culture. Calling for a double dialectic, Irigaray is challenging the universal (masculine) subject of Hegel’s philosophy to acknowledge his sexuate body, his sexuate self. Irigaray’s demand for a double dialectic thus makes it possible for the feminine subject to begin to move from a place of repressed material substance toward a sexuate subjectivity. Irigaray notes: masculinity – in man and possibly in woman – will to some extent be able to dialecticize its relationships and identificatory allegiance to the maternal, including a negativization of female singularity, but this would not be true for femininity, which is aware of no difference between itself and the maternal, or even the masculine, except one that is mediated by the abstract immediacy of the being (as) or by the rejection of one (as) being. The female lacks the operation of affirming its singular and universalizable link to one as self. (Irigaray 1985a: 224)

In Hegel’s narrative, the feminine has no dialectical process that enables her to affirm her subjectivity in culture and to recognise the passage between her sexuate body (singular) and her symbolic (universal). The feminine thus has no identity separate from the maternal 89

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irigaray and politics (hence the importance of the representation of mother–daughter relations), and also no awareness of her positive difference from the masculine. Neutrality and universality conceived of as sexual indifference reign supreme within the Hegelian dialectic, and Irigaray seeks to create a new culture in which the dialectic can be doubled and worked out within each sexuate subjectivity. In I Love to You, the development of Irigaray’s engagement with Hegel’s thought deepens (Irigaray 1996a). Here we see Irigaray working out the concept of sexuate difference that she refers to as ‘the labor of the negative’ and it is this intersubjective relationship that is articulated in detail in I Love to You. For Irigaray, an autonomous feminine subjectivity would be able to articulate her own dialectical struggle for self-consciousness, between a feminine ‘I’ and a feminine ‘you’. Intimately connected to the creation of feminine subjectivity and her own sexuate dialectic is the intersubjective, non-sacrificial, dialectical relation that this feminine subjectivity has with masculine subjectivity. It is in I Love to You that Irigaray articulates in detail how the double dialectic and intersubjective dialectical relations work together, and I believe this is why she refers to it as a decisive moment in her work (Irigaray 2004: 3). The emergence of an autonomous feminine subjectivity requires establishing and acknowledging a limit for both masculine and feminine subjects. This process of acknowledging the limits to subjectivity in the emergence of sexuate subjectivity is what Irigaray refers to as ‘the labor of the negative’. It is this idea of the limits to sexuate subjectivity that is connected with the recognition and relation to the sexuate other, and articulations of the sexuate divine. The realisation that subjectivity is sexuate plays a part in realising ‘I/you’ are not the whole of the world; the masculine subject is no longer omnipotent. And in this sense, the refigured relation of love between the masculine and feminine is a third kind of intersubjective dialectical process. This third dialectic is thus part of the realisation of a double dialectic in which the sexuate subjectivities come into Being-Two. The decisive moment seems to be the unfolding of the process and becoming-two of sexuate difference. And, although Irigaray suggests that it is in I Love to You that a decisive unfolding occurs in the articulation of the intersubjective dialectical process between sexuate subjects, I believe we can see her beginning to sketch the relation between the double and intersubjective dialectical process – or the non-traditional ontology of sexuate difference – in An Ethics of Sexual Difference and, in particular, Irigaray’s reading of Diotima. In Irigaray’s engagement with Diotima, 90

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irigaray’s dialectics we see how the relation between feminine and masculine subjectivity is reimagined as a non-sacrificial relation of love and as a radical challenge to the Hegelian master/slave relationship that she outlines in Speculum.

Diotima’s Dialectic – Refiguring Love, within and Between Us Diotima’s Speech Diotima of Mantineia was Socrates’ teacher in the art of love and her teachings are recounted by Socrates in part five of Plato’s Symposium, a philosophical discussion on the nature of love. Diotima’s speech describes love as a process that begins with physical attraction of a single body and moves toward the abstract appreciation of the form of Beauty. There is a movement up the ladder of love that moves from the experience of lusting over a particular body toward a universal ideal of beauty, which also carries with it moral virtues of the good.

The dialectical process that Irigaray articulates in her reading of Diotima’s speech in ‘Sorcerer Love’ from An Ethics of Sexual Difference explores the intersubjective dialectical relationship between the sexuate subjects. Irigaray suggests that Diotima’s teaching presents a challenge to a traditional Hegelian master/slave dialectic because she introduces a dialectical process in which a radical notion of love as an intermediary relation between the two is the goal. This notion of love as an intermediary between two is preferable to a master/slave struggle that ends in sacrifice of one of the terms (Irigaray 1993a: 20). When Irigaray turns to Diotima’s dialectic, she introduces her refigured dialectical relation of love as intermediary between two terms – for example, matter–form, nature–culture, sensible–transcendental, wealth–poverty or ignorance–knowledge – that, unlike Hegel’s dialectic, does not end in a synthesis of two terms into a complete whole or ‘Absolute’. Rather, for Irigaray, love remains the passage between the two terms. One term does not pass into or assimilate with the other, and struggle does not have to end in the death of the other. Irigaray suggests that from the very outset, Diotima ‘establishes an intermediary that will never be abandoned as a mere means, way or path’ 91

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irigaray and politics (Irigaray 1993a: 20). Diotima’s dialectic unveils the necessity of love as the intermediary that permits progression between the two terms without sacrificing either. Moreover, on Irigaray’s reading of Diotima, love does not have to be sacrificed in order for the philosopher to gain knowledge, or for the subject to become self-conscious. Irigaray notes: ‘It is love that leads to knowledge . . . It is love that both leads the way and is the path. A mediator par excellence’ (Irigaray 1993a: 21). This reimagined dialectical relation of love as intermediary between, for example, ignorance and knowledge, provides the context for a critical engagement with what it means to think, to be a philosopher and to do philosophy in the western tradition. Irigaray’s engagement with Diotima challenges us to consider how we conceive of philosophy in the western tradition. Her reading of Diotima enables us to ask what the implications might be for teaching and learning in this tradition if one can only ever be either ignorant or wise. Furthermore, the concept love as intermediary enables Irigaray to imagine each sexuate subject as having a refigured, non-hierarchical, and non-sacrificial nature–culture relation and thus to refigure subjectivity as sexuate.3 To give this notion of love as intermediary more context, consider, for example, the chapter ‘Sexual Difference’ in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, which is situated prior to the unfolding of Diotima’s dialectic. In this chapter Irigaray writes that we do not yet have an ethics of sexual difference and, as such, (ethical) love between the sexes is ‘yet to come about’; importantly, this love must come ‘from the most intimate to the most political’ (Irigaray 1993a: 17). Thus, for ethical relations of love to emerge between and among the genders we require a notion of love that embraces the two – sexuate subjects as well as the passage between the most intimate and the most political – without the sacrifice of either term. We require a conceptualisation of love as intermediary in order to bring together binary terms and disrupt the logic of phallocentrism. Irigaray suggests that Diotima demonstrates that love is neither beautiful nor ugly. It preserves the third term that allows the passage or progression – between nature and culture, between body and mind, between ignorance and knowledge, or between the sensible and transcendental.4 It is the intermediary of love, the space that this love makes between two, that allows the two terms to exist without sacrificing one for the other. Irigaray contends: Therefore, between knowledge and reality, there is an intermediary that allows for the encounter between the two. Diotima’s dialectic is in at 92

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irigaray’s dialectics least four terms: the here, the poles of the encounter, and the beyond – but a beyond that never abolishes the here. And so on, indefinitely. (Irigaray 1993a: 21)

The point Irigaray is making here is important. These four terms of Diotima’s dialectic fundamentally rework the Hegelian master/slave dialectic into a dialectical relation that values a non-sacrificial love relationship between two terms that are not understood as opposites struggling against each other. This refigured dialectical relation is redoubled, as Irigaray argues in Speculum, and a dialectic with four terms is created. Alongside this feminine subjectivity, with her own dialectical struggle toward self-consciousness, is the dialectical relation that this refigured feminine subjectivity has with a refigured masculine subject. The four terms can be understood as follows: ‘the here’ might be thought of as the singular particular feminine (or masculine) subject, ‘the beyond’ might be thought of as the universal or symbolic representation (the divine?) of the feminine or masculine subjectivity. Thus ‘the here’ and ‘the beyond’ can be understood as constituting the dialectical nature–culture relation of feminine (or masculine) subjectivity, and in this sense can be understood as a vertical dialectical relationship. The ‘poles of the encounter’, I believe, refer to the relation between these two sexuate subjects (although these relations are always constituted by the vertical dialectical relations specific to each sexuate genre as we see in her refiguring of the sexuate divine), and in this sense it is also a horizontal intersubjective relationship between the masculine and feminine. Thus, if we recognise that sexuate difference is the intersection of these four terms of Diotima’s dialectic, we can begin properly to understand the radicality of Irigaray’s philosophy. We must understand Irigaray’s radical reworking of the dialectic as the redoubling and crossing over of the vertical and horizontal in order to fully appreciate her remarks on love between sexuate subjects. The fluid and evolving relationship between the vertical and horizontal is central to the work of sexuate difference.5 Because the refiguring of feminine subjectivity, and accordingly sexuate subjectivity, means that each masculine and feminine subject has renewed links with nature and culture appropriate to his or her own gender, the link that reunites the masculine and feminine is both horizontal and vertical – it is both natural and cultural. This means that woman cannot be reduced to object or to nature because there is a non-sacrificial relation between nature and culture for both feminine and masculine subjectivity. The link 93

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irigaray and politics reuniting the two operates on both a horizontal intersubjective plane and a vertical intrasubjective plane; these two aspects are intimately connected to each other in the working out of sexuate difference. Irigaray notes: The link uniting or reuniting masculine and feminine must be horizontal and vertical, terrestrial and heavenly . . . it must forge an alliance between the divine and the mortal, such that the sexual encounter would be a festive celebration and not a disguised or polemical form of the master–slave relationship. (Irigaray 1993a: 17)

It must be noted, however, that this linking together of the ‘terrestrial and heavenly’ or ‘horizontal and vertical’ is not a synthesis or fusion of the two terms or subjects. Irigaray suggests that we ought to understand this relation as mediated by breath and thus learning to breathe for oneself in order to recognise this ethical relation with an other is offered as a way in which to imagine this relationship.

The Interval of Breath We can think of autonomous breathing as part of the rhythmic becoming of relational feminine subjectivity, a sensible transcendental, and thus intimately connected to Irigaray’s refigured relations of desire and love as intermediary. The interval of breath (and breathing) makes possible the relation of the sensible transcendental, as breathing becomes the intermediary in a non-hierarchal and non-appropriative relation between body and spirit, as well as between subjects, that links the two without fusing into the One. In order to demonstrate the significance of the work of the breath in rethinking subjectivity in Irigaray’s writing, I pause for a moment to return to a passage from an early work, ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other’ (1981). In this passage we see an example of how the work of the breath is foundational to refiguring the passage between body and spirit toward an autonomous feminine subjectivity. Irigaray does this within the context of the positive representation of a mother–daughter relationship. Irigaray writes: With your milk, Mother, I swallowed ice. And here I am now, my insides frozen . . . A little light enters me. Something inside me begins to stir. Barely. Something new has moved me. As though I’d taken a first step inside myself. As if a breath of air had penetrated a completely petrified 94

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irigaray’s dialectics being, unsticking its mass. Waking me from a long sleep. From an ancient dream. A dream which must not have been my own, but in which I was captive. Was I a participant, or was I the dream itself – another’s dream, a dream about another? I start to breathe, or rather I start to breathe again. It’s strange. I stay very still, and I feel this something moving inside me. It enters me, leaves me, comes back, leaves again. I make this movement all by myself. No one assists. I have a home inside me, another outside, and I take myself from one to the other, from the one into the other. And I no longer need your belly, your arms, or your words to return or to leave. I am still so close to you, and already so far away. It’s morning, my first morning. Hello. You’re there. I’m here. Between us so much air, light, space to share with each other. I no longer kick impatiently, for I’ve got time now. (Irigaray 1981: 60–1)

We read here how the breath works to unstick the mass of the petrified or solidified (frozen) object that the daughter feels she is. The daughter is initially frozen and objectified with no access to her own subjectivity within the phallocentric logic of patriarchal western culture that only allows for the representation of woman as mother. Irigaray calls attention to this problem of representation of women and demonstrates the way in which the individual act of conscious breathing allows the daughter to become self-consciously autonomous and yet remain in relation with her mother. We start to see the beginnings of autonomous feminine subjectivity and woman-to-woman sociality emerge through the act of breathing. The daughter does not need to fuse with her mother, nor silence or repress her relation to her mother, because she is learning to breathe for herself. Conscious and autonomous breathing enables the daughter to move from an objectified state toward an ethical relation with the mother in which they are both able to share their breath with each other as autonomous feminine subjects. The daughter is able to do this, beginning with her own breath. The moment in which the daughter awakens to the new dawn of subjectivity is signified here by her first morning. We might also recognise that she is mourning. This ‘mourning’ is the recognition of the loss of the relationship with the mother in the creation of the ‘self’ or subject in psychoanalytic theory, particularly Lacan’s mirror stage. However, because the daughter can breathe for herself, recognise herself and her mother as autonomous subjects, they are able to coexist without either appropriating the other. Two woman–subjects are in non-hierarchal, non-appropriative relation. This is why the daughter awakens to a new dawn, a new horizon that recognises autonomous feminine subjectivity and non-hierarchical 95

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irigaray and politics sexuate difference. Similarly, when the daughter notes at the end of this passage that she has time now, I think this points toward Irigaray’s refiguration of space–time needed for the work of sexual difference to be recognised in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. The daughter is no longer silenced within phallocentric notions of time and space and it is her breath and refigured subjectivity as rhythmic becoming that has reimagined the relation between time and space. The feminine subjectivity that emerges in this passage evokes (and is evoked by) the sensible transcendental that Irigaray speaks of in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. It’s important to appreciate how Irigaray’s focus on the breath more recently in Between East and West is thus not new, rather it is central to rearticulating the passage between nature and culture, as well as refiguring the very notions of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, that is crucial for an autonomous feminine subjectivity and sexuate difference to emerge. We can imagine how the breath holds together the ‘terrestrial and heavenly’ or ‘horizontal and vertical’ while not fusing the two terms or subjects. Rather, there is a non-sacrificial dialectic at play here (a placental economy), and Irigaray suggests that in order to prevent the reduction of the two (or four terms) to the One or Absolute, we require ‘a limit that the other may or may not penetrate’ (Irigaray 1993a: 17). Irigaray writes that: in order for an ethics of sexual difference to come into being, we must constitute a possible place for each sex, body, and flesh to inhabit. Which presupposes a memory of the past, a hope for the future, memory bridging the present and disconcerting the mirror symmetry that annihilates the difference of identity. (Irigaray 1993a: 18; my emphasis)

Thus, in thinking through the ethical relations of sexuate difference, an ontological questioning and rethinking of place and temporality occurs. As we see in the analysis of the interval of the breath above, as well as in Chapter 3 of this book, Irigaray argues that as the mother–woman is reduced to an inert nature, she remains the place, the home, for man and she has no place or home of her own. Woman–subject is in exile in the western tradition. Thus, the refiguring of feminine subjectivity reimagines the relationship that both men and women have with their own bodies, their own place(s), their own home(s). Consequently, in her questioning of the relation between place and temporality, Irigaray’s conception of subjectivity becomes a ‘rhythmic becoming’ (Irigaray 1993a: 42). 96

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irigaray’s dialectics In this questioning, along with the interval of breathing, Irigaray uses the image of the two lips of the female sex as a threshold and as a way in which to conceive an alternative logic that would allow a flourishing of the non-sacrificial, non-hierarchical sexuate difference described above. She suggests that perhaps we are passing through an era when time must redeploy space? . . . A remaking of immanence and transcendence, notably through this threshold which has never been examined as such: the female sex. The threshold that gives us access to the mucous. Beyond oppositions of love and hate, liquid and ice – a threshold that is always half-open. The threshold of the lips, which are strangers to dichotomy and oppositions. (Irigaray 1993a: 18)6

Irigaray’s use of the imagery of the female sex, in its confounding of binary oppositions, thus propels us toward a new labial logic.

I Love to You: The Failure of Hegel’s Labour of Love In I Love to You Irigaray engages with Hegel’s writings on the relationship between the sexes, noting that he is ‘the only Western philosopher to approach the question of love as labor’ (Irigaray 1996a: 19). Irigaray thus suggests that an engagement with Hegel’s work might explain the reasons for what she understands as the current lack of ‘ethical relations between the sexes’ (Irigaray 1996a: 20). However, in her return to Hegel, Irigaray finds that he defines the relationship between the sexes as it is traditionally defined in the western tradition, and that his thought thus remains governed by the masculine imaginary at work within the culture of narcissism. Hegel’s thought on the love relationship between woman and man is framed and situated within the traditional heterosexual family relationship, in which woman’s role is reduced to wife and mother. As a result, woman has no passage to her own sexuate self-consciousness, and she is barred from realising an autonomous feminine subjectivity in culture. Irigaray points out that beyond the realm of the family, Hegel shows little concern for granting each gender its own identity, particularly a legal one, even though he states that the status of the human person depends upon his or her recognition by civil law. From his perspective, then, sexed law should pertain only to the family. There would be no sexed identity for the citizen. (Irigaray 1996a: 22) 97

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irigaray and politics Irigaray emphasises how Hegel is interested in the ‘labor of love’ between the sexes only within the context of family relations. She notes that within Hegel’s system, ‘woman is wife or mother’ and the only access she has to culture is via this abstract duty that, as it is always defined in relation to a man, allows no access to an autonomous feminine subjectivity that is appropriate to her singular sexuate experience (Irigaray 1996a: 22). Woman remains within the familial realm and has no access to citizenship. There is no possibility of an autonomous feminine subjectivity that has access to a culture, language, politics, law or divine appropriate to her as a woman.7 Importantly, Irigaray suggests, in Hegel’s system woman is always situated within the horizon that is defined by man, and as such, as wife or mother, is always in the service of the masculine universal. As a consequence, woman does not, on Irigaray’s reading, have access to the dialectical struggle for self-consciousness that ends in (neutral) civil identity for the masculine citizen. Irigaray stresses that for woman the universal comes down to practical labor within the horizon of the universal delimited by man. Deprived of a relationship to the singularity of love, woman is also deprived of the possibility of a universal for herself. Love, for her, amounts to a duty – not a right – establishing her role within humankind where she appears as man’s servant. (Irigaray 1996a: 22)

Alison Stone notes that for Hegel the family is a ‘natural ethical community . . . based first and foremost, on the natural sexual relationship between husband and wife’ and that ‘only men progress out of the family into political life’ (Stone 2006: 166–7). Thus, the wife remains within the ‘natural’ sexual relationship and the husband progresses out toward culture. Importantly, as Stone points out, for Hegel, this brings the two spheres of nature/culture (or family/politics) into conflict: women cannot identify with the political community and consequently can see no validity in actions which promote its good, while conversely men can see no validity in actions promoting the good of families. Hegel finds in Sophocles’ Antigone, to which he alludes, the perfect illustration of the problem. (Stone 2006: 167)

Stone notes that the polis, on Irigaray’s reading of Hegel, ‘emerges from men’s deliberate break with the family’ (Stone 2006: 171).8 Irigaray’s critique of western culture demonstrates how in a culture of narcissism the young boy must repress his desire to remain in a sensual relationship with his mother in order to enter culture as a masculine subject. This narcissistic masculine subject is supported 98

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irigaray’s dialectics by his projections of omnipotence that protect (and cover over) his unconscious repressed desire (or need) for his mother. Stone suggests that Irigaray presents Oedipus as Hegel’s exemplary political agent: an agent cut off from all family ties (including the maternal body) and bound by his civic duty (Stone 2006: 172). Furthermore, there is also no opportunity for an ethical relation of love, or shared breath, to occur between mother and daughter, or between and among women.9 Without a passage between the singular and the universal dimensions of feminine subjectivity, the love between mother and daughter cannot be articulated. Mother and daughter can never be in relation as autonomous feminine subjects; the daughter can only take her mother’s place in patriarchal culture. Irigaray argues that it is due to the repression of the maternal body by the masculine subject that the relationship between the sexes, even in Hegel’s labour of love, is reduced to the master/slave relationship. Alluding to the point that the (masculine) ‘Spirit’ is unable to remain in relation with matter or the maternal, Irigaray suggests this type of (masculine and single) struggle toward Spirit/Self has only death as its horizon. On this point Irigaray notes: The capitalization of life in the hands of a few who demand this sacrifice of the majority. More especially, the capitalization of the living by a male culture which, in giving itself death as its sole horizon, oppresses the female. Thus, the master–slave dialectic occurs between the sexes, forcing woman to engender life to comply with the exigencies of a universal linked to death. (Irigaray 1996a: 25)

Irigaray asks again, as she did in Speculum and in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, how can we escape this situation? How can women and men escape this master–slave dialectic that structures their (non)existence (and silencing)? That reduces woman to nature and man to culture? How to escape this relationship between opposites that only ends in death? Can we rethink this as a relation in which life rather than death would flourish? Irigaray thinks that we can and proposes an ethical relation of love between two as preferable to the master–slave dialectic ‘with death as its master’ (Irigaray 1996a: 26). Irigaray asks: So how can we get away from such an abstract duty, from the sacrifice of sexed identity to a universal defined by man with death as its master, for want of having known how to let life flourish as the universal? How can we discover for ourselves, between ourselves, the singularity and universality of love as the natural and spiritual realization of human identity? (Irigaray 1996a: 26) 99

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irigaray and politics In I Love to You Irigaray asks how we can rediscover love as sexuate difference in the four terms articulated in her early reading of Diotima in ‘Sorcerer Love’. How can we discover a love that is both natural and spiritual, that is both sensible and transcendent, that is non-sacrificial and ethical, that recognises love as the intermediary? And how can we discover the relation of love that is ‘for ourselves’ as sexuate subjectivities, and ‘between ourselves’ as sexuate subjectivities? As Irigaray suggests, love understood as the fluid, open and complex dialectic of four terms is the ‘realization of human identity’ (Irigaray 1996a: 26). Nature and culture must be in relation within each sexuate subject and between sexuate subjects. Irigaray argues we must recognise that the dialectical, non-sacrificial process occurs on the vertical level, and between and among sexuate subjects on a horizontal plane. This is why a revolution in loving is central to Irigaray’s project, and this love cannot be reduced to a heterosexual relationship within the traditional western nuclear family that is played out in a traditional master–slave dialectic that ends in the death/repression of the consciousness of the other, the mother–woman. At the end of the chapter, ‘He I Sought but Did Not Find’ in I Love to You, Irigaray suggests that a refiguring of the process of Hegelian recognition is needed to bring men and women face to face in order to bring about ethical relations between them. Irigaray begins the next chapter asking, ‘How are we to outline the process of recognition?’ (Irigaray 1996a: 103). She answers: I recognize you, thus you are not the whole: otherwise you would be too great and I would be engulfed by your greatness. You are not the whole and I am not the whole . . . I recognize you means that I cannot know you in thought or in flesh. The power of a negative remains between us. (Irigaray 1996a: 103)

Irigaray notes that within the Hegelian system it is through a process of recognition that the master–slave dialectic is overcome. For Irigaray, however, we must practice a ‘sort of recognition different from the one marked by hierarchy, and thus also genealogy’ (Irigaray 1996a: 105). Irigaray notes: Only the recognition of the other as sexuate offers this possibility. Between woman and man, man and woman, recognition requires the labor of the negative. Mastery of, substitution for, thereby become impossible processes given the respect for what is, for what exists. (Irigaray 1996a: 105–6) 100

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irigaray’s dialectics Using a reworked notion of recognition and placing the labour of the negative between the two sexuate subjects, Irigaray outlines an ethical intersubjective relation between the two. Using a refigured Hegelian negative as a way to conceive of this relation of recognition, Irigaray envisions a framework that challenges the master–slave dialectic and the narcissism of the masculine (liberal) subject because He no longer has an object upon which to project his phantasies of omnipotence. In other words, this traditional masculine subject is refigured when recognising the limits to his own subjectivity. Gail Schwab emphasises the importance of the labour of the negative in Irigaray’s later work and notes that ‘despite myriad misconceptions’, sexual difference ‘is not about predetermined, stereotypical (“fossilized,” as Irigaray writes) identities for heterosexual couples, but rather about coming to the other through the recognition of the negative in the self ’ (Schwab 1998: 81–2; my emphasis). Moreover, Schwab writes, ‘in sexual difference, the experience of the negative leads to a joyous access to the other, to noninstinctive, nondrive-based relations: to true intersubjectivity’ (Schwab 1998: 82). The negative thus enables a way to conceive of the limit to sexuate subjectivity, a boundary that allows a return to self (a return to a possible place, a return home?) that is necessary for feminine subjectivity and the creation of ethical loving relations between and among women. Moreover, the labour of the negative and mediation between the two in sexuate difference allows the two to be, and to become, in non-sacrificial relation. The motif that Schwab describes above as a ‘joyous access to the other’ is taken up in a recent discussion between Catherine Malabou and Ewa Ziarek. Their article explores Irigaray’s reformulation of the dialectic in I Love to You. Malabou and Ziarek contrast the sacrificial logic of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic with Irigaray’s refiguring of the dialectic that proposes ‘the possibility of happiness as the horizon of interpersonal and cultural ethics’ (Malabou and Ziarek 2012: 14). They demonstrate how Irigaray’s use of the negative in reformulating the process of recognising the other, that ‘I am not all’, initiates felicity, joy and happiness. Malabou and Ziarek suggest that it is thus not lack that undergirds desire or drives intersubjective relations but rather joy. Thus they argue that the process of recognition and the work of the negative in sexuate difference are reframed in Irigaray’s philosophy as felicity rather than death. Moreover, Malabou and Ziarek support my 101

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irigaray and politics reading of Irigaray’s diagnosis of a narcissistic masculine subject when they suggest that Irigaray’s recognition of limit in the emergence of sexuate subjectivity, that ‘I am not all’, is a positive, joyous revelation that ‘negates the aggressive projections of the other’ and ‘prevents the reification of existing gender and racial stereotypes’ (Malabou and Ziarek 2012: 15–16). Furthermore, Malabou and Ziarek’s article suggests that the reworking of the labour of the negative in Irigaray’s work requires a reworking of the nature– culture dialectic, which is what I have demonstrated in my reading of Diotima. Thus my analysis of Irigaray’s Diotima might be read fruitfully alongside the claims they make regarding Irigaray’s refiguring of the Hegelian negative in I Love to You. Recall the four terms of Diotima’s dialectic: ‘Diotima’s dialectic is in at least four terms: the here, the poles of the encounter, and the beyond – but a beyond that never abolishes the here. And so on, indefinitely’ (Irigaray 1993a: 21). Sexuate difference is situated in ‘the here’, the present, what actually exists in this moment: two sexuate bodies with their own relations to genealogy and the beyond, which cannot be substituted for each other. They are irreducible and transcendent to each other in this relation that is vertical and horizontal. In this way, sexuate difference fundamentally rethinks the relation between universal and particular and, consequently, may provide a foundation for a global model of ethics that challenges existing gender and racial stereotypes, as we see Schwab and Malabou and Ziarek suggest.

Listening and Wonder Descartes’ Passions of the Soul In the Passions of the Soul, the last work published by Rene Descartes in 1649, he is still concerned with the problem of the mind/body split. In this work he explores different passions, what we would now refer to as emotions, and argues that wonder is one of the primary emotions, the ‘first of the all passions’. Wonder is considered a primary passion because it occurs as a surprise of the soul and it happens before judgement. The point that Irigaray takes up in her work is that for Descartes, this passion has no opposite.

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irigaray’s dialectics Although this notion of the limit in the emergence of subjectivity is crucial in order to appreciate the radicality of Irigaray’s work, another aspect of this rethinking of recognition and ethical communication between the two is the motif of attentive listening. Although Irigaray argues that you can never ‘know me’ – because to know me means to appropriate me – you can, however, still ‘perceive the directions and dimensions of my intentionality. Importantly, you can help me become while remaining myself’ (Irigaray 1996a: 112). In order to perceive my intentionality ethically, Irigaray suggests we need to cultivate silence and learn to listen attentively (Irigaray 1996a: 116). Irigaray writes: ‘I am listening to you: I perceive what you are saying, I am attentive to it, I am attempting to understand and hear your intention. Which does not mean: I comprehend you, I know you’ (Irigaray 1996a: 116). Accordingly, we begin to appreciate how a radically refigured notion of love as the passage between, for example, ignorance and wisdom occupies the space of silence required for attentive listening and ethical communication between the two. This point also illustrates the importance of the passion of wonder in Irigaray’s work. Irigaray suggests that in our encounter with an other we ought to always try to remain in the state of wonder and surprise in relation with the other. Breathing for oneself enables one to remain in a state of wonder or grace which will maintain the relation of indirection between the two and will enable the other to always remain partially unknowable to me. I will continue to be surprised by the other. Irigaray reworks Descartes’ thinking on the passion of wonder in order to articulate the unknowable excess that is required between two subjects for a non-appropriative communal relation to emerge. Irigaray writes: To arrive at the constitution of an ethics of sexual difference, we must at least return to what is for Descartes the first passion: wonder. This passion has no opposite or contradiction and exists always as though for the first time. Thus man and woman, woman 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 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. (Irigaray 1993a: 12–13)

This notion of wonder, like the intermediary and mystery of love, is necessary for an ethics and politics of non-hierarchal sexual difference. 103

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irigaray and politics Irigaray imagines this passion of wonder as a state of conscious silence in relation to an other that challenges phallocentric logic. It is this relation of wondrous silence that Irigaray believes to be an irreducible sign of what it means to be human. She argues that it is not only the capacity to use language but, crucially, also the ability to listen and to be silent that makes us human. Active listening and cultivated silence are necessary for the passion of wonder. Irigaray writes: Neither language as a tool of appropriation and information nor the capacity to control what is and efficiency in the intervention upon the real are specific to the human being. But the negative, the step back, listening and silence, the necessary alternation of doing and letting be, toward self and other, in relation to a different subject are perhaps its irreducible sign. (Irigaray 2002a: xi)

We should note here that the emphasis on the ‘necessary alternation of doing and letting be’ evokes the movement and rhythmic becoming of breath and of sexuate subjectivity that Irigaray explores in her work on space–time–desire (Irigaray 2002a: xi). It is the cultivation of autonomous breathing that enables us, as sexuate subjects, to speak, to be silent and to listen. To be silent and to consciously listen evoke the work of the negative dialectic Irigaray explores in I Love to You. Keeping in mind this notion of attentive listening and wonder, I return for a moment to Diotima. At the end of ‘Sorcerer Love’ Irigaray wonders whether it could be beauty itself that Diotima proposes contemplating, and if this is the case, ‘one would have to go back over everything again to discover it in its enchantment’ (Irigaray 1993a: 33). Michelle Boulous Walker suggests that Irigaray’s reading of Diotima provides us with an example of an open reading, a reading ‘that refuses to totalise its encounter with the other’ (Boulous Walker 2006: 231). Boulous Walker writes: ‘Irigaray’s reading remains – up until the very last sentence – a readiness to re-read’ (Boulous Walker 2006: 231). This readiness to reread enacts a mode of attentive listening and the ‘always evolving’ nature of Irigaray’s thinking that I am trying to, somewhat paradoxically, capture here.10 Moreover, the way in which Irigaray performs the ethical engagement with Diotima in this chapter is an example of the actualisation of Irigaray’s writing and philosophy as an intermediary between ignorance and wisdom. This is an important point to consider when reading Irigaray’s work. What does the performance of Irigaray’s philosophical 104

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irigaray’s dialectics writings evoke when one considers what she is suggesting about love in her reading of Diotima? This readiness to reread suggests an openness – an attentive and ethical listening – that defies the either/or, us/ them, true/false logic that undergirds western thought. In connecting the reconceptualisation of love between and among men and women with philosophy, wisdom and thinking, Irigaray’s refiguring of love challenges the very way we think and the way in which we read, practice and perform philosophy; it challenges us to think, to be and to become differently. The project of uncovering the repressed feminine and the creation of an autonomous feminine subjectivity that Irigaray began in Speculum continues to be a central part of her philosophical and political project. What I hope to have highlighted here is the way in which the refigured, dialectical, non-sacrificial relation of love between two autonomous sexuate subjects is the founding of sexuate difference. This dialectical relation is structured in the terms Irigaray explores in Diotima’s dialectic and An Ethics of Sexual Difference and articulated in much more detail in I Love to You ‘as the coming to the other through the recognition’ of the sexuate dialectical struggle within feminine subjectivity (Schwab 1998: 82). We must therefore take Irigaray seriously when she announces the importance of love in the final chapter to I Love to You. Irigaray writes: At this time – of the globalization and universalization of culture – but when this globality and universality are now ungovernable and beyond our control, making us divided and torn between differing certainties, opinions, dreams or experiences, it seems appropriate to return to what is governable by us here and now: love. (Irigaray 1996a: 129)

Notes 1. As we will see later in this chapter, my claim here is supported by Catherine Malabou and Ewa Ziarek. They write that in Irigaray’s work the ‘non-sacrificial negative requires a redefinition of the nature/culture dialectic in the context of the negativity of sexual difference’ (Malabou and Ziarek 2012: 17). 2. Adrian Switzer notes that generally the secondary literature on Irigaray and Hegel frames ‘Irigaray’s engagement of Hegelian thought through the particulars of his treatment of Antigone in the Phenomenology’ (Switzer 2008). Although I begin with Irigaray and Hegel in Speculum, my focus is not Irigaray’s engagement with Hegel’s treatment of 105

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irigaray and politics

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

Antigone. Rather, my aim in this section of the article is to trace the development of Irigaray’s engagement with Hegel’s dialectic and explore how this relationship has evolved in her work. Switzer (2008) lists the following works as examples of secondary literature on Irigaray and Hegel’s Antigone: Butler (2002); Chanter (2002); Jenkins (2002); Miller (2004); Stone (2002). Donna Haraway’s cyborg, for instance, inhabits and reworks the relation between nature and culture that we might liken to the nonsacrificial nature–culture relation that Irigaray evokes here (Haraway 2000: 292–3). See Toye (2012) for an illuminating discussion of how we might productively read Haraway and Irigaray alongside each other, especially, as Toye notes, ‘in terms of conceiving “the cyborg” as an ethical figure in terms of Irigaray’s ethical concept of the “interval between”’ (Toye 2012: 185). Irigaray’s sensible–transcendental is a central term in An Ethics of Sexual Difference that brings the traditionally dichotomous pair of body and spirit together in a non-sacrificial way (Whitford 1991a: 48). The notion receives renewed attention in Between East and West when Irigaray advocates the practice of yoga as a way of becoming an embodied, sexuate divine (Irigaray 2002a). See Byrne (2008: 22); Jones 2011: 126–9; Roberts (2015, 2019). See Deutscher (1994) and Schwab (2011) for more on the link between the vertical and horizontal in relation to the theme of divinity in Irigaray’s work. Simone Roberts (2004) provides an illuminating analysis of how we ought to read Diotima’s dialectic and Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference in relation to Tantra. As Michelle Boulous Walker points out, and we explored in Chapter 3, this labial logic is crucial in Irigaray’s work because it ‘confounds oppositional thinking’ (Boulous Walker 1998: 157). Linnell Secomb’s work also explores Irigaray’s use of the two lips. Secomb suggests that Irigaray’s ‘strategy involves rather a movement back and forth, between, or simultaneous insistence on, proximity and difference: the two lips are, for example, both a sign of sexual difference and an image of proximity’ (Secomb 2007: 103). This is one of the reasons behind Irigaray’s call for sexuate rights as discussed in Chapter 3. See Irigaray (2000a). This wish to break with the family is given some psychoanalytic context by Stone, and we can read this in light of the diagnosis of a culture of narcissism in the West. Stone writes: ‘in Sexes and Genealogies . . . [Irigaray] clarifies that this wish stems from their infantile difficulties in separating from their mothers, given the reality of sexual difference (SG, 136/150). These difficulties . . . lead boys to disavow their early intertwinement with their mothers and, at the same time, their corporeality’ (Stone 2006: 171). 106

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irigaray’s dialectics 9. Irigaray notes: ‘Even the love between mother and daughter is forbidden in the sense that it reminds the daughter, the woman, of the singularity of the female gender she has to renounce, except as an abstract duty imposed upon her by a culture that is not hers and inappropriate for her. The girl’s only reason for being is to become a wife and mother’ (Irigaray 1996a: 26). 10. I discuss Irigaray’s notion of active listening in more detail in Chapter 6. For more on Irigaray’s attentive listening and reading, see Boulous Walker (2017).

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5

Luce Irigaray with Gayatri Spivak

This, then, might be the moment to remember that, even when – in class, in a lecture room – the other seems a collection of selves and nothing seems displaced or cracked, what ‘really happens’ remains radically uncertain, the risky detail of our craft . . . Can it be imagined how this mischief conducts traffic between women’s solidarity across two sides of imperialism? (Spivak 1993a: 146) Might it be productive to think through the still harder task of reconnecting Gayatri Spivak with Luce Irigaray, so that the latter’s consistent citation predominantly as object of postcolonial critique becomes more difficult to justify (Spivak, 1987; Irigaray, 1985)? (Hemmings 2005: 131)

Luce Irigaray’s thinking through of intersubjectivity in terms of the relations between two sexuate subjects raises the question, as Gail Schwab suggests, of thinking through sexuate difference as a global model for ethics (Schwab 1998). In this chapter, I turn to Gayatri Spivak’s work in order to meditate further on the possibility of thinking through an Irigarayan-inspired ethics of sexuate difference in our contemporary global contexts. How can we articulate a universal ethics of sexuate difference? What issues does this raise for structuring relations between and among women? How do we communicate crossculturally between traditions in a way that, as I argue in Chapter 6, Luce Irigaray attempts to do in Between East and West? With these questions in mind, this chapter examines how Spivak mobilises Irigaray’s work on sexuate 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 in two articles: ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’ (1981) and ‘French Feminism Revisited’ (1993b). In Spivak’s 1981 article ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’, she uncovers the way mainstream US feminist discourse (in the late 1970s) failed to recognise the problematic way in which 108

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luce irigaray with gayatri spivak it structured relations between women, including (and especially) women in what Spivak loosely terms the Third World.1 Spivak recognises the value of Irigaray’s ‘productively conflictual’ symptomatic reading and suggests that Irigaray’s writing simultaneously works ‘against sexism and for feminism, with the lines forever shifting’ (Spivak 1981: 180). Spivak demonstrates how Irigaray’s call for positive and autonomous representations of femininity is intimately connected to Irigaray’s refiguration of feminine desire. Interestingly, Spivak argues that ‘paradoxically enough’ she finds in this ‘seemingly esoteric area of concern’ (of female desire in Irigaray’s reimagining of feminine subjectivity) ‘a way of reaffirming the historically discontinuous yet common “object”-ification of the sexed subject as woman’ (Spivak 1981: 180). In other words, on my reading, Spivak finds in Irigaray’s positive articulation of feminine desire as double – that refuses phallocentric logic and the categorising of woman as sex or reproductive object – ways in which we can connect women across the globe. I turn to Spivak’s work because she argues that some of the most valuable lessons we can learn from Irigaray’s philosophy are how to negotiate the structures of violence that effect women’s situations on both sides of imperialism. Spivak’s work in these papers explores non-appropriative structures for imagining relations between and among women in a global context that demonstrate an alternative to the western liberal notion of ‘multiculturalism’ that I will argue is founded upon phallocentric logic. She suggests that the first step towards organising women’s solidarity consists in acknowledging the contradictions and paradoxes that structure relations between and among women. In doing so, Spivak’s work undermines the phallocentric logic that is founded upon the principles of non-contradiction. In Spivak’s 1981 paper, she founds the non-appropriative structures of women’s global solidarity on a refiguring of female desire. Intimately linked to this line of thought, she goes on to suggest in her 1993 paper, ‘French Feminism Revisited’, that we can structure relations between postcolonial and metropolitan feminists using the model of a radically uncertain relation. I suggest that both these aspects of Spivak’s work, the focus on refiguring female pleasure and notions of radical uncertainty, resonate with Irigaray’s understanding of feminine subjectivity, womento-women sociality and mother–daughter relationships. As I go on to illustrate, we can see the way in which Spivak’s reworking of female pleasure is inspired by Irigaray’s work, and at the same time, how it takes Irigaray’s work forward in different directions. Spivak’s notion 109

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irigaray and politics of radical uncertainty links to Irigaray’s writings on knowledge and the questions of what it means ‘to know’ that Irigaray explores in her reading of Diotima and throughout An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Interestingly, these notions also link to more recent writings of Irigaray’s on listening and teacher–student relationships (Irigaray and Green 2008: 231). For Irigaray, ‘to know’ an other is to silence and appropriate the other. It is through the work of the negative in the relation of sexuate difference that sexuate subjectivity comes to recognise the limits to subjectivity. As a result, for Irigaray, sexuate subjects come into Being-Two through the realisation that they can never completely know the other; the sexuate other is the limit to subjectivity. Consequently, in this relation of sexuate difference and the founding of sexuate subjectivity, there will always be an excess; whether we call this excess desire or love, this third space is the uncontainable place that allows the two sexuate subjectivities to be in relation, with neither appropriating the other. Spivak’s writings highlight how in Irigaray’s work the two sexuate subjectivities of sexuate difference not only focus on maintaining the limit, and space, between each other, they also refigure the relations within feminine subjectivity and within masculine subjectivity. In other words, we must imagine the two sexuate subjectivities of sexuate difference as providing two spaces, a framework or matrix, within which singular subjects can learn to differentiate from one another using their relation to the double dialectic, or what we might call a double sexuate universal. In doing so, we can learn to become human in a radically different way. Each sexuate subject will realise subjectivity through a relation with a double sexuate universal that is both at once similar and different, self and other, to themselves. We must also remember that the relations between the double sexuate universal are fluid; the relations within the framework and matrix continually move and are ultimately unstable. This fluidity or rhythmic becoming located at the foundation of subjectivity and ontology completely undermines phallocentric logic. If we read Spivak’s articulation of the radically uncertain relationship that she argues can refigure women’s solidarity alongside Irigaray’s work, it enables us to appreciate how Irigaray’s project refounds ontology using the universal non-appropriative relation between two sexuate irreducible subjectivities.2 Spivak’s work brings to light the way in which, within this refigured sexuate ontology, our lived differences are not measured hierarchically against a single universal that will always inevitably define any difference as an ‘imperfect copy’. Instead, within 110

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luce irigaray with gayatri spivak the non-hierarchical and relational logic of sexuate difference, these differences are positively realised in the universal relation of sexuate difference.

‘French Feminism in an International Frame’ Spivak begins the 1981 paper with reference to a Sudanese colleague who has written ‘a structural functionalist dissertation on female circumcision in the Sudan’ and frames her reaction using a playful mimicry that evokes the ambiguity of Spivak’s own position as a postcolonial Indian academic feminist recently situated in the USA (Spivak 1981: 154). Throughout this paper, Spivak performs an astute awareness of the ambiguity of her own subjectivity. This performance is crucial to Spivak’s argument in the essay. The mimicry (and ambiguity) is subtle; Spivak moves seamlessly between the silent voice(s) of an ‘other’ (postcolonial? Indian? Third World?) woman that underlies mainstream US feminist discourse (of the late 1970s), and, in the same breath, inhabits her speaking subject position as a critical academic feminist in the US academic system (Spivak 1981: 154). Spivak writes: I was ready to forgive the sexist term ‘female circumcision’. We have learned to say ‘clitoridectomy’ because others more acute than we have pointed out our mistake. But Structural Functionalism? Where ‘integration’ is ‘social control [which] defines and enforces . . . a degree of solidarity’? (Spivak 1981: 154)

Using mimicry, Spivak elucidates the ambiguity (and awareness of the conflict) of her own position(s) and immediately unsettles the belief that there can be a single ‘all-encompassing’ feminist voice. While Spivak is initially troubled at her colleague’s use of Structural Functionalism, she notes that in her colleague’s research she finds an allegory of what she calls her ‘own ideological victimage’.3 This notion of ideological victimage evokes, I think, an awareness that the ability to articulate the relation between her own fractured subjectivity and her own research has been necessarily silenced by the mainstream US feminist discourse with which Spivak attempts to engage. Writing in 1981, Spivak notes that as her career in the USA progressed she discovered an area of feminist scholarship called ‘International Feminism: the arena usually defined as feminism in England, France, West Germany, Italy, and that part of the Third 111

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irigaray and politics World most easily accessible to American interests: Latin America’ (Spivak 1981: 155). However, when Spivak attempts to engage with this field and tries to think of ‘so-called Third World women in a broader scope’ she finds that she too is ‘caught and held by Structural Functionalism, in a web of information retrieval inspired’ by the following statement: ‘what can I do for them?’ (Spivak 1981: 155). Realising that the very framing of this question ‘what can I do for them?’ is ‘part of the problem’, Spivak sets about to refigure this problematic (Spivak 1981: 155). She notes: ‘I sensed obscurely that this articulation [what can I do for them?] was part of the problem. I re-articulated the question: What is the constituency of an international feminism? The following fragmentary and anecdotal pages approach the question’ (Spivak 1981: 155). Proceeding in this way, Spivak brings to light the silencing of her own fractured subjectivity, an embodied subjectivity that inhabits a space somewhere between the binary categories of ‘East’ and ‘West’, alongside ‘First’ and ‘Third’ World(s). Spivak finds her destabilising subjectivity has no place in the dominant discourse; it is unacknowledged, silenced and ultimately objectified. Is Spivak (and ‘others’ that do not fit the stereotypes) the symbolic ‘scapegoat’ that takes on the unwanted ideological projections of mainstream US feminist discourse (of the late 1970s)? In other words, in seeking to create an alternative discourse to the one she encounters, Spivak recognises that her fractured subject position, her ‘inbetweeness’, has been silenced and objectified in the unwanted projections from a well-meaning feminist discourse. It is these dangers of well-meaning feminist discourse(s) that Spivak wishes to highlight in this paper. In doing so, she uses Irigaray’s work to deconstruct the meaning of the (narcissistic and masculine) subject that governs western discourse(s), as well as this notion of a generalised ‘other’ that covers over the unacknowledged heterogeneity of women’s perspectives around the globe. Near the start of the chapter, Spivak recalls a childhood memory of walking alone on her grandfather’s estate in India and overhearing the conversation of two washerwomen talking on the banks of a river. She does this, I think, in order to demonstrate the multiple locations of subjectivity that are involved in thinking through our negotiations with the binary categories of self/other. Spivak acknowledges the divide between her situation and that of the washerwomen – which would not have been seen from the perspective of the mainstream US discourse.4 Inspired by this memory, and not forgetting her (somewhat privileged) location within it, Spivak asks: 112

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luce irigaray with gayatri spivak How, then, can one learn from and speak to the millions of illiterate rural and urban Indian women who live ‘in the pores of’ capitalism, inaccessible to the capitalist dynamics that allow us our shared channels of communication, the definition of common enemies? (Spivak 1981: 156)5

Aware of how this claim is often taken up by patriarchal nationalists in recently decolonised countries, Spivak explains how her point differs. She continues: This is not the tired nationalist claim that only a native can know the scene. The point I am trying to make is that, in order to learn enough about Third World women and to develop a different readership, the immense heterogeneity of the field must be appreciated, and the First World Feminist must learn to stop feeling privileged as a woman. (Spivak 1981: 156–7)

The ‘First World Feminist’ must recognise the almost unlimited varying perspectives of women who have no access to ‘speak’ within the ‘channels of communication’ that a global capitalism allows. In order to recognise these silent others, the ‘First World Feminist’ must stop asking what she can do for the other as this question remains in the hierarchal binary self/other logic. This is why Spivak says the ‘First World Feminist’ must stop feeling privileged as a woman. This is an important claim and I believe it is linked to a more sophisticated critique of the underlying patriarchal phallocentric logic at work in the discourse Spivak is criticising. In asking what she ‘can do for the other’, there is no possibility of a non-hierarchal recognition between and among the women, and thus no possibility of any ethical dialogue between them. In light of her critical analysis, Spivak argues that Luce Irigaray’s and Sarah Kofman’s work gives us ‘politicized and critical examples of “Symptomatic reading”’ that do not always follow ‘the reversaldisplacement technique of a deconstructive reading’ (Spivak 1981: 177). ‘Symptomatic reading’, according to Spivak, thus becomes ‘productively conflictual when used to expose the ruling discourse’ (Spivak 1981: 177). For Spivak, Irigaray’s and Kofman’s work, rather than simply deconstructing, produces something new and is thus useful when trying to refigure fragmented post/decolonial subjectivity from a feminist perspective. It is this, I think, that Spivak learns from Irigaray.6 113

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irigaray and politics While Spivak acknowledges the positive and productive aspects of Irigaray’s and Kofman’s work, she is, nevertheless, acutely aware of the dangers of this type of ‘academic feminism’ (Spivak 1981: 179).7 Because of this, Spivak suggests that we must always recognise the discontinuity between women living in different situations around the world. We can work at this discontinuity using the structures that she finds in the productively conflictual readings of Irigaray and Kofman. In doing so, we begin to refigure the relations between women across the globe. Spivak writes: However unfeasible and inefficient it may sound, I see no way to avoid insisting that there has to be a simultaneous other focus: not merely who am I? but who is the other woman? How am I naming her? How does she name me? Is this part of the problematic I discuss? Indeed, it is the absence of such unfeasible but crucial questions that makes the ‘colonized woman’ as ‘subject’ see the investigators as sweet and sympathetic creatures from another planet who are free to come and go . . . My point has been that there is something . . . wrong in our most sophisticated research, our most benevolent impulses. (Spivak 1981: 179)

I think we can heed Spivak’s lesson here. It is crucial to remind ourselves that if we are thinking through sexual difference as a universal feminist ethics, and even if we refigure intersubjectivity in terms of two sexuate subjects, we must also always recognise the destabilising relations at work between and among women (within feminine subjectivity). We must always ask the questions Spivak asks. To do so, she situates the ‘First World Feminist’ in relation to other women’s perspectives. Asking these questions fundamentally destabilises the self/other relation of phallocentric logic that always situates self as the single universal. In drawing our attention, yet again, to this constant need for a ‘simultaneous other focus’ Spivak suggests that she finds that the focus on women’s pleasure in the French feminists’ texts might provide some sort of way to theorise the common yet history-specific solidarity between women across the globe (Spivak 1981: 180). It is here, in the descriptions of women’s pleasure, that Spivak identifies what she calls the best of French feminism. She says, ‘the best of French feminism encourages us to think of a double effect (against sexism and for feminism, with the lines forever shifting . . .)’ (Spivak 1981: 180). Spivak quotes Irigaray: In order for woman to arrive at the point where she can enjoy her pleasure as a woman, a long detour by the analysis of the various systems of oppression which affect her is certainly necessary. By claiming to resort 114

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luce irigaray with gayatri spivak to pleasure alone as the solution to her problem, she runs the risk of missing the reconsideration of a social practice upon which her pleasure depends. (Irigaray cited in Spivak 1981: 182)

She suggests this common thread might be found in recognising the disruptive excess of women’s pleasure. Spivak notes that in the objectification of woman, it is the clitoris as the signifier of the sexed subject that is effaced. All historical and theoretical investigation into the definition of woman as legal object – in or out of marriage; or as politico-economic passageway for property and legitimacy would fall within the investigation of the varieties of the effacement of the clitoris. (Spivak 1981: 180)

Most helpful, however, is the double vision Spivak finds in Irigaray’s work: working against sexism (e.g. identifying the silencing of the feminine within the western culture of narcissism) and for feminism (creatively imagining a potentially autonomous feminine subjectivity), while at the same time continuously blurring the lines between these important themes. And, it is here, in Spivak’s work (following Irigaray), that we find the beginnings of an alternative discourse (Spivak 1981: 177).8 Spivak suggests that we must recognise the irreducible relationship between the excess of woman’s pleasure (via the clitoris) and what she refers to as the ‘reproductive definition’ (Spivak 1981: 183). Thinking through this irreducible relationship becomes an alternative way in which to positively symbolise autonomous feminine subjectivity. It is this connection between refiguring woman’s pleasure and autonomous feminine subjectivity that I think Spivak finds in Irigaray’s work.9 Irigaray points out how the silencing of sexual difference, and consequently the silencing of an autonomous feminine imaginary, works to repress the positive symbolisations of the plurality of woman’s pleasure. For Irigaray, to rethink woman’s pleasure as autonomous and plural also works to undermine this phallocentric logic that only ever defines woman’s pleasure (and subjectivity) as dependent on the man’s penis (phallus). I think these aspects of Irigaray’s work on feminine desire inspire Spivak’s argument and provide important context to the links that Spivak makes between the objectification of women around the globe and the effacement of the ‘clitoris as signifier of the sexed subject’ (Spivak 1981: 181). Spivak writes: The double vision is not merely to work against sexism and for feminism. It is also to recognize that, even as we reclaim the excess of the clitoris, we cannot fully escape the symmetry of the reproductive definition. One 115

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irigaray and politics cannot write off what may be called a uterine social organization (the arrangement of the world in terms of the reproduction of future generations, where the uterus is the chief agent and means of production) in favour of a clitoral. The uterine social organization should, rather, be ‘situated’ through the understanding that it has so far been established by excluding a clitoral social organization. (Spivak 1981: 183)

In other words, we must not remain within the binary phallocentric logic of western metaphysics that makes us choose between pleasure and reproduction. Spivak is clearly inspired by Irigaray’s work when Irigaray acknowledges that, for Freud, ‘female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters’ (Irigaray 1985b: 23). Within phallocentric logic, the plurality of woman’s pleasure is silenced by reducing women’s bodies to the reproductive function. The only way a little girl can emerge as a subject in phallocentric culture is as mother. In response to this problem, Irigaray (and Spivak) point out that there is an irreducible relation that occurs within feminine pleasure and desire that cannot be reduced to the single reproductive function. Rather, we can imagine woman’s pleasure as double, as plural, as multiple, as fluid, based on the labial logic that disturbs the phallocentric logic of sameness which requires any difference to be subsumed and appropriated into the whole, the phallocentric ‘One’. Again, on this point, I turn to Irigaray to contextualise. She writes: ‘Woman’s desire would not be expected to speak the same language as man’s: woman’s desire has doubtless been submerged by the logic that has dominated the West since the times of the Greeks’ (Irigaray 1985b: 25). Irigaray notes that this masculine logic privileges the visual and as a result woman’s sexuality and pleasure is represented as a lack, literally ‘as a hole’. She notes: This organ which has nothing to show for itself also lacks a form of its own. And if woman takes pleasure precisely from this incompleteness of form which allows her organ to touch itself over and over again, indefinitely, by itself, that pleasure is denied by a civilization that privileges phallomorphism. The value granted to the only definable form excludes the one that is in play in female autoeroticism. The one of form, of the individual, of the (male) sexual organ, of the proper name, of the proper meaning . . . supplants, while separating and dividing, that contact of at least two (lips) which keeps woman in touch with herself, but without any possibility of distinguishing what is touching and what is touched. Whence the mystery that woman represents in a culture claiming to count everything, to number everything by units, to inventory 116

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luce irigaray with gayatri spivak everything as individualities. She is neither one nor two . . . She resists all adequate definition. Further, she has no ‘proper’ name. And her sexual organ, which is not one organ, is counted as none. The negative, the underside, the reverse of the only visible and morphological designatable organ (even if the passage from erection to detumescence does pose some problems): the penis. (Irigaray 1985b: 26)

Within this refiguration of woman’s pleasure as founded upon an irreducible relation between the reproductive function and the clitoral social organisation, Spivak suggests that this reimagining of women’s pleasure as double enables the links between women to emerge. We can think of this in relation to Irigaray’s notions of feminine subjectivity and the image of the ‘two lips’, women-to-woman sociality and the positive representations of mother–daughter relations in which neither feminine subject is reduced to a reproductive function. Spivak suggests that within this doubly dynamic discontinuous discourse that moves between pleasure and reproductive function we can find a common thread at work that links young girls facing the real threat of clitoridectomy, wealthy women in advanced capitalist countries and those women living ‘in the pores’ of the global capitalist system (Spivak 1981: 156). Spivak notes that we find here the link between women’s objectivity (whether as sexual or as reproductive object) and the repression of women’s pleasure. She writes: At the moment, the fact that the entire complex network of advanced capitalist economy hinges on home-buying, and the philosophy of home-ownership is intimately linked to the sanctity of the nuclear family, shows how encompassingly the uterine norm of womanhood supports the phallic norm of capitalism. At the other end of the spectrum, it is this ideological-material repression of the clitoris as the signifier of the sexed subject that operates the specific oppression of women, as the lowest level of the cheap labor that the multi-national corporations employ by remote control in the extraction of absolute surplus-value in the less developed countries. . . . whether the family is a place of the production of socialization or the constitution of the subject of ideology; what such a heterogeneous sex-analysis would disclose is that the repression of the clitoris in the general or the narrow sense (the difference cannot be absolute) is presupposed by both patriarchy and family. (Spivak 1981: 183–4)

It seems clear to me that Spivak’s analysis intends to recognise and explore the connections between women that in no way covers over 117

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irigaray and politics the differences between them. Rather, in constantly calling attention to her own politics of location and her own place of enunciation, Spivak makes it clear that she is not speaking for all women. In so doing, she constantly works to create dialogue, while simultaneously recognising that this is not always possible. Spivak shows us that despite the problems we must nonetheless try, and I think this is the crucial lesson. In our efforts to communicate, we can work towards alternative ways that do not silence the other. Spivak writes: I emphasize discontinuity, heterogeneity, and typology as I speak of such a sex-analysis, because this work cannot by itself obliterate the problems of race and class. It will not necessarily escape the inbuilt colonialism of First World feminism toward the Third. It might, one hopes, promote a sense of our common yet history-specific lot. It ties together the terrified child held down by her grandmother as the blood runs down her groin and the ‘liberated’ heterosexual woman who, in spite of Mary Jane Sherfey and the famous page 53 of Our Bodies, Ourselves, in bed with a casual lover – engaged, in other words, in the ‘freest’ of ‘free’ activities – confronts, at worst, the ‘shame’ of admitting to the ‘abnormality’ of her orgasm; at best, the acceptance of such a ‘special’ need; and the radical feminist who, setting herself apart from the circle of reproduction, systematically discloses the beauty of the lesbian body; the dowried bride – a body for burning – and the female wage-slave – a body for maximum exploitation. There can be other lists; and each one will straddle and undo the ideological-material opposition. For me it is the best gift of French feminism, that it cannot itself fully acknowledge, and that we must work at . . . (Spivak 1981: 184; my emphasis)

Spivak’s constant attention to the discontinuity between the situation(s) of women via the self-reflective attention she draws from her own lived experiences enables her to perform a critical analysis of the phallocentric logic that silences any recognition of sexual difference, and consequently any non-hierarchical non-sacrificial relations between and among women. Using Irigaray’s work along with her own astute analysis, Spivak not only displaces the phallocentric logic that underlies the ideological–material opposition she seeks to disrupt, but begins to make space for alternative imaginings of autonomous feminine subjectivity. Spivak has successfully demonstrated the ambiguity of a potential universal (and yet heterogeneous) feminine subjectivity that both straddles and displaces the phallocentric split between female pleasure and the uterine female 118

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luce irigaray with gayatri spivak reproductive function, as well as the phallocentric split between the situations of oppression of women in rural Third World situations and their counterparts in the ‘First World’.

French Feminism Revisited In 1993, Spivak published ‘French Feminism Revisited’ in which she returns to the themes I have just explored. In particular, she notes that this new essay feels like ‘a second take on “International Frame”’ (Spivak 1993a: 144). Spivak reflects on the development of her work and teases out some insightful perspectives on relations between ‘French feminist’ thought and so called postcolonial ‘Other(s)’. In this essay, Spivak positions texts by Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray alongside a text by the Algerian writer MarieAimée Hélie-Lucas. She writes: My question has sharpened: How does the postcolonial feminist negotiate with the metropolitan feminist? I have placed three classic texts of French feminism before an activist text of Algerian feminism that speaks of negotiation. I imagine a sympathy with Marie-Aimée HélieLucas’s subject-position because hers too is perhaps fractured and I help to crack it further, for use. She too is revising an earlier position. As she does so, she speaks of solidarity with Islamic women around the world. She speaks to a British interviewer. And I, a non-Islamic Indian postcolonial, use her to revise my reading of French feminism. (Spivak 1993a: 145)10

Spivak reflects on the development of her research since writing the 1981 article ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’. She notes: ‘my original argument, that the face of “global” feminism is turned outward and must be welcomed and respected as such, rather than fetishized as the figure of the Other, gains confirmation from my first research visit to [postcolonial] Algeria’ (Spivak 1993a: 141). Spivak continues: Further research will, I hope, flesh out the domestic space in such a way that this postcolonial feminist will no longer need to revisit French feminism as a way in . . . The way in through French feminism defines the third world as Other. Not to need that way in is, paradoxically, to recognize that indigenous global feminism must still reckon with the bitter legacy of imperialism transformed in decolonization. (Spivak 1993a: 141; my emphasis)

119

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irigaray and politics What I think Spivak is demonstrating here, as she did in 1981, is the recognition that we cannot simply split the west from all that is ‘notthe-west’. She suggests that, on the one hand, if you use French feminism as a frame (as a way in) you inevitably ‘define the Third World as Other’, while, on the other hand, to not need this frame renders indigenous global feminism unintelligible (to academic discourse). To unpack this worrying paradox, we must, according to Spivak, recognise that feminist thinkers on both sides of imperialism need to grapple with its bitter legacy (Spivak 1993a: 141). In response to this problem, Spivak refers to Chafika Marouf’s suggestion that contemporary feminist research in Algeria and the Maghreb ought to be evaluated with a ‘retrospective view’ that recognises the ‘paradigms of academic intelligibility of feminism in Algeria and in the Maghreb have been, for the large part, modulated in the intellectual configurations of Western thought’ (Spivak 1993a: 142).11 In doing so, Spivak provides an alternative lens with which to view the problem of framing that she reveals to us in her 1993 work. With reference to Marouf’s point, Spivak writes: ‘this intelligent passage defines my charge: to see that the view is retrospective, and that the requirements are of academic intelligibility’ (Spivak 1993a: 142). For Spivak, there is always going to be a ‘framing’ of the postcolonial situation, and if we do not acknowledge that this ‘frame’ is itself contested and constructed by the colonial and postcolonial situation(s), then we have not escaped the patriarchal phallocentric logic that underlies imperialism. This situation can be likened to the manner in which Spivak articulates the ‘what can I do for you?’ logic in her earlier work. If there is no attempt to locate the need for both a retrospective view and the frame of ‘French feminism’, then the latter will become the central (unacknowledged) signifier against which ‘others’ are judged (always as ‘imperfect copies’) with no acknowledgement of its own location in the hierarchies of power. This silencing covers over any potential space for possible non-hierarchal dialogue between differing perspectives and welcoming of the multiple ‘faces’ of global feminisms. For Spivak, this sets up a contradiction; it is paradoxical because to fail to acknowledge Spivak’s necessary way in (using her own engagement with French feminism) would be to submit herself to the binary categorical logic that underlies cultural imperialism. However, because Spivak acknowledges ‘her way in’ through French feminism, this does not silence the ‘other’; instead, we might say that Spivak uses this 1993 chapter ‘French Feminism Revisited’ as a way to retrospectively reflect on her earlier writings. In this sense then, 120

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luce irigaray with gayatri spivak I suggest that Spivak’s ‘way in’ works and performs, it destabilises, it reverses and reinforces the asymmetrical bridges between her own fluid, fractured, sexuate, postcolonial subjectivity and her European philosophical genealogy. Spivak’s writing performs contradiction(s); it is neither one thing nor the other. We are not submitted to the phallocentric logic of imperialism here. This is why we must always acknowledge this relationship between postcolonial and metropolitan thought when engaging with what we might call ‘global’ feminism(s), no matter how problematic this may be. To fail to acknowledge this relationship would be to assume that it does not exist, and this would allow phallocentric logic to continue to repress the other(s). Recall that within phallocentric logic there is one universal, there is one singular narcissistic (masculine) subject, against which all others are compared. Thus, if we attempt to speak of differences between women without destabilising this underlying logical structure, it will continue to repress any possibility of non-appropriative or non-hierarchal communication between two. This silencing of the other through the structure of the underlying phallocentric logic is what I think Spivak means when she refers to the ‘structures of violence’ that Irigaray’s work helps us to negotiate. Acknowledging the paradoxical relationship between postcolonial and metropolitan feminist thought is crucial because if it is not acknowledged and continually negotiated by both perspectives then there will be no possibility for a non-hierarchical dialogue between them. To acknowledge this relationship makes it available to problematise, destabilise and refigure. Spivak’s emphasis on the importance of acknowledging the dynamic and contradictory relationship between postcolonial and metropolitan feminist thought can be understood in relation to questions of knowledge. What is it to know? What does it mean to know the other? Can we ever know the other? Spivak illustrates the links between her thoughts on the relations between women and her ideas on the relationships that occur between teacher and student. She imagines these ideally non-appropriative relationships to be structured in similar ways. Spivak suggests that we can understand the relationships between teacher and student as a kind of radically uncertain relation that she proposes we may imagine to be underlying women’s solidarity. This relationship of radical uncertainty, which Spivak suggests occurs in a teaching environment, is reimagined as a mischievous relationship between women, which occurs on both sides of imperialism. Evoking mischief to describe the relations between and among 121

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irigaray and politics women on both sides of imperialism refers back to Spivak’s earlier work on women’s solidarity. Acknowledging that relations between/ among women are radical and uncertain emphasises two main points in Spivak’s analysis. The term ‘mischief’ highlights the way in which these relations are heterogeneous and discontinuous and, secondly, it calls attention to the importance that Spivak places on these relations to trouble and disturb the violent logic of imperialism. In suggesting that relations between women are mischievous, Spivak gestures towards a unique way of challenging and displacing the violence of imperialism rather than attempting to ‘simply’ reverse it. Spivak explains that in the position of teacher one never actually ‘knows’ what occurs in the attempt at the transmission of ‘knowledge’ to the student(s), and because of this she suggests this relationship between teacher and student is dynamic, unstable and risky. This risky relationship is founded upon the recognition of the limits to what we can know about an other and it demonstrates the ways in which Spivak begins to imagine how we might structure relations between women. She writes: This, then, might be the moment to remember that, even when – in class, in a lecture room – the other seems a collection of selves and nothing seems displaced or cracked, what ‘really happens’ remains radically uncertain, the risky detail of our craft . . . Can it be imagined how this mischief conducts traffic between women’s solidarity across two sides of imperialism? (Spivak 1993a: 146; my emphasis)12

This idea links to the refigured relation between what we might call a metropolitan feminist and a postcolonial feminist. They are both, in different ways, situated as silenced ‘other’ to the masculine subject of either colonial or postcolonial discourse. I think that Spivak’s remarks point to a creative imagining of conversations that can take place when we acknowledge these space(s) of radical uncertainty. The ‘other’ is always inaccessible to us and yet in the double moment of recognising our embodied (fractured) self and an (embodied) other in this relationship of radical uncertainty, the moment we let go of ‘knowing’ or ‘appropriating’ the ‘other’, it is there that we may find a potential common ground, a common mischief.13 Keeping in mind Spivak’s overarching question of how to structure relations between women, I turn to the end of Spivak’s paper where she focuses on Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Spivak points out that what Irigaray means by an ethics of sexual difference is not 122

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luce irigaray with gayatri spivak an argument reducible to biology (or traditional western ontology). Spivak also recognises that what Irigaray has to say cannot be reduced to a claim concerning a normative heterosexuality. It is clear from the following passage that Spivak appreciates Irigaray’s metaphysical challenge to the single universal of phallocentric logic, the risk that she takes in positing two universals, and, consequently, the potential restructuring of subjectivity as sexuate. Spivak writes: This is no separatist politics, but a full-blown plan for an ethics where sexual difference, far from being located in a decisive biological fact, is posited as the undecidable in the face of which the now displaced ‘normal’ must risk ethicopolitical decisions. An ethical position must entail universalization of the singular. One can wish not to be excluded from the universal. But if there is one universal, it cannot be inclusive of difference. We must therefore take the risk of positing two universals, one radically other to the other in one crucial respect and keep the ‘real universal’ on the other side of différance. If Derrida had dared to think of minimal idealization, Irigaray dares minimal alterity. Each is a samesexed ethical universal, operating in a social cooperation that must conventionally assume others to be collectives of othered selves. This is to provide the (im)possible ethical base for rewriting gendering in the social sphere. (Spivak 1993a: 163)

Reading Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference alongside Derrida’s notion of différance, Spivak opens up an interesting moment between these two philosophers.14 If we think of the play of Derrida’s différance as resonating with an Irigarayan labial logic, we can see why Spivak might bring différance into dialogue with Irigaray’s project of sexual difference. Both Irigaray and Derrida seek to challenge the traditional either/or logic of western metaphysics, and the writings of both these two philosophers ought to be appreciated with this challenge in mind. Consequently, when Spivak writes that we must risk positing two universals and we ought to keep the ‘“real universal” on the other side of différance’, she is suggesting that Irigaray’s double sexuate universal ought to be appreciated within the labial logic and play of différance that cannot be reduced to the binary either/or logic of western metaphysics. In suggesting the double sexuate universals’ move to the side of différance, Spivak is reminding us of the excess between the two, the interval that Irigaray suggests we need in order for the two universals to exist (and meet in difference). We can think of this as the refigured dialectical relation of desire or the intermediary of love between two. It is the excess, it is the sensible 123

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irigaray and politics transcendental, and it is in this way that we can understand sexuate difference as universal. I believe that Spivak’s understanding of sexual difference as a double universal allows her to productively read Irigaray’s work as she goes on to focus on the last chapter of An Ethics of Sexual Difference: ‘The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, “Phenomenology of Eros”’. In what follows, I turn to Spivak’s engagement with Irigaray’s reading of Levinas in depth in order to consider this double sexuate universal, radical alterity and the caress, and bring these notions into dialogue with Spivak’s motif of radical uncertainty. As we will see, Spivak writes that the double sexuate universal provides ‘the impossible differed/ deferred grounding of the ethics of sexual difference in the fecund caress . . .’ (Spivak 1993a: 170–1). I thus suggest that Spivak’s reading of Irigaray’s appropriation of the (fecund) caress and the notion of a double sexuate universal enables Spivak to explore notions of radical alterity between and among women in novel ways.

Levinas and the Fecundity of the Caress Spivak notes that the ‘empirical scene of sexual congress behind Levinas’s “Phenomenology of Eros” is almost comically patriarchal, so generally so that the bourgeois male colonial subject from various parts of the world can be fitted into the slot of “the lover”’ (Spivak 1993a: 166). Spivak suggests that she finds ‘it difficult to take this prurient heterosexist, male-identified ethics seriously’, but Irigaray, on the other hand, ‘is more generous’ (Spivak 1993a: 167). Tina Chanter writes that ‘no matter how problematic Levinas’ depiction of the feminine is in other respects, it challenges the logic of metaphysics with a radicality hitherto unprecedented’ (Chanter 1995: 209). Levinas describes the face-to-face relation as one in which beings face one another and yet are asymmetrical with regard to one another. He notes, ‘[T]he being that presents himself in the face comes from a dimension of height, a dimension of transcendence whereby he can present himself as a stranger without opposing me as obstacle or enemy’ (Levinas 1991: 215). Instead of positing the subject as a rational and individual subject, Levinas thinks of the subject as always in this face-to-face relation. The subject in the face to face differs from the rational and individual subject because it is always in relation to another subject; it is never, even primordially, an isolated individual. 124

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luce irigaray with gayatri spivak Spivak (1993) suggests that because Irigaray degenders the ‘active– passive’ division and identifies both the ‘lover’ and ‘beloved’ as both feminine and masculine, this is not a reduction to some heteronormative sexual ethics. She writes, ‘The most noticeable thing about Irigaray’s “Fecundity of the Caress” is the practical crispness of its tone. It is obviously a text that assumes that both partners do things, and are not inevitably heterosexual’ (Spivak 1993a: 167). As Spivak suggests, this is a ‘full-blown plan for ethics’ with the refiguring of a double sexuate universal (Spivak 1993a: 165). Importantly, it is within this degendering of the active–passive division that we can begin to see the emergence of two autonomous sexuate subjectivities that are always in relation, and not necessarily heterosexual. This is what I think Irigaray means when she writes that in the fecundity of the caress ‘the abyss is circumscribed by the unavoidable alterity of the other. Its absolute singularity’ (Irigaray 1993a: 204). Recall that recognising the limit to sexuate subjectivity is crucial for bringing about the recognition of a non-hierarchal and non-binary ontology of sexuate difference because it means that the narcissistic masculine subject cannot silence the maternal body (and the sexuate other) via projections of illusionary omnipotence.15 This is arguably a staging of the sensible transcendental in the sense that the scene of sexuality brings together in a fecund caress a spiritual excess that is beyond the reproductive function or outcome in a child, and at the same time is situated in the present of the touching and caressing of livedin-bodies.16 Spivak points out that for Irigaray it is through the loving and fecund caress that a refigured feminine subjectivity emerges. Irigaray writes: Bringing me back to life more intimately than any regenerative nourishment, the other’s hands, these palms with which he approaches without going through me, give me back the borders of my body and call me to the remembrance of the most profound intimacy. As he caresses me, he bids me neither to disappear nor to forget but rather to remember the place where, for me, the most intimate life is held in reserve. Searching for what has not yet come into being for himself, he invites me to become what I have not yet become. To realize a birth that is still in the future. Plunging me back into the maternal womb and beyond that conception, awakening me to another birth – as a loving woman. (Irigaray 1993a: 187)17

Irigaray continues here, suggesting that this birth as a loving, desiring woman (as a refigured autonomous feminine subjectivity) has not 125

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irigaray and politics yet occurred. She argues that we will never move out of the current epoch if we fail to recognise sexuate difference as well as the work of the negative in the emergence of the two sexuate subjects. We need new ontological structures in order for sexuate difference to come about; we have to construct and refigure love (and space and time and desire). Irigaray’s thinking through of the fecund caress, radical alterity and the emergence of autonomous feminine subjectivity links, I suggest, to Spivak’s explorations of radical uncertainty and women’s solidarity. Irigaray continues: A birth that has never taken place, unless one remains at the stage of substitution for the father and the mother, which gestures toward an act that is radically unethical. Lacking respect for the one who gave me my body and enthusiasm for the one who gives it back to me in his amorous awakening. When the lovers, male or female, substitute for, occupy, or possess the site of those who conceived them, they founder in the unethical, in profanation. They neither construct nor inhabit their love. Remaining in the no longer or the not yet. Sacrilegious sleepers, murderous dreamers – of the one and of the other in an unconscious state that might be the site of sensual pleasure? Sterile, if it were not for the child. (Irigaray 1993a: 187)

The impossible threshold of ethics is thus evoked in the refigured fecundity of the caress of the two sexuate subjects (intimately linked to the two universals of sexuate difference) as an impossible memory that shapes each one of us, as mother’s sons and as mother’s daughters, in relation to the intimate relation to the maternal body.

The Impossible Intimacy of the Ethical So what is it, Spivak asks, that is ‘born in the sexual embrace?’ She responds: ‘The possibility of two spaces, un-universalizable with each other’ (Spivak 1993a: 168). As Spivak suggests, the two universals are not reducible to one another and neither can appropriate the other. Rather, it is the universal relation of the two sexuate subjectivities (and the fecund relation of the two involved in the caress) themselves that becomes the universal. In this sense, again, can we imagine an ontology of sexuate difference? (Spivak 1993a: 167). Thinking through this ethical universal relation of sexual difference, Spivak writes: 126

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luce irigaray with gayatri spivak The ethics of sexual difference are persistent and to come. In all patriarchal cultures, all classes, it is an immense move for the wife to become the fecund agent of the caress . . . How much more immense to inscribe the agency of the fecund caress in ‘woman’ collectively, rather than in site and situation-specific exceptions. In fact, it is not excessive to say that this ethical charge illuminates every immediate practical undertaking for women’s liberation . . . (Spivak 1993a: 169–70; my emphasis)

Spivak is suggesting here that perhaps the lesson we must learn from ‘learning the agency of the caress’ is that to be human is to recognise the unknowable sexuate other. That the recognition of the two universals of an ontology of sexuate difference will allow us to appreciate the space(s) required for the openness, fluidity and radical uncertainty that is our humanity; ‘the unavoidable alterity of the other’ (Irigaray 1993a: 204). Spivak acknowledges that this is the most important lesson we learn from Irigaray when trying to think through difference in our postcolonial/neo-colonial globalised environment. She writes: The discourse of the clitoris in the mucous of the lips still remains important in Irigaray’s work. Trying to think the international from within a metropolized ethnic minority, I had given this discourse a general structural value a decade ago. Much talk, flying, and falling, from known and unknown women, has shown me that that evaluation runs no more than the usual risks of intelligibility. It is just that the generalization of a bicameral, or even two universals, to provide the impossible differed/ deferred grounding of the ethics of sexual difference in the fecund caress seems to respond to the call of the larger critique of humanism with which postcoloniality must negotiate, even as it negotiates daily with the political and cultural legacy of the European Enlightenment. (Spivak 1993a: 170–1)

What is Spivak suggesting here? She notes that the themes of the clitoris, lips and mucous that she explored in 1981 remain important in Irigaray’s work, for all the criticisms it may have endured. Accordingly, Spivak admits that her own evaluation is not without its risks and, as I have demonstrated, she recognises this may be true of all of her work. However, it is in the moments of (productively conflictual) radical uncertainty that Spivak evokes in her writing that we can begin to think through a global women’s solidarity that is universal and historically specific. Recall, it is in this risk of radical uncertainty that we begin to learn, that we glimpse another way of 127

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irigaray and politics being. It is here, in recognising the radical uncertainty of the two universals of an ethics of sexual difference, that we can imagine ‘how this mischief conducts traffic between women’s solidarity across two sides of imperialism’ (Spivak 1993a: 146; my emphasis). Spivak’s analysis demonstrates, and goes beyond, the valuable lessons that Irigaray’s work teaches us. Not only must we, as women, challenge western metaphysics, but also the phallocentric logic underlying the masters of the crises of metaphysics, for example Heidegger, Levinas and Fanon. Continually moving between these two patriarchal structures, Spivak and Irigaray bring about a heterogeneous sex-analysis that is radically confronting. Spivak continues and returns to her original question. She asks again, ‘How does the postcolonial feminist negotiate with the metropolitan feminist?’ (Spivak 1993a: 145). Must we assume that the postcolonial feminist has no use for the metropolitan feminist? The answer is not straightforward. Spivak writes: ‘What of the Irigaray who rereads Plato and Levinas? Can Hélie-Lucas have no use for her? On the contrary. Here again we revert to the task of decolonizing the mind through negotiating with the structures of violence’ (Spivak 1993a: 170–1). Spivak continues and suggests that Irigaray’s work may have relevance to a feminist citizen of a recently decolonised nation. She notes: there will be someone who is in that particular subject position – a feminist citizen of a recently decolonized nation concerned with its domestic/international political claims, not merely its ethnocultural agenda. To such a person I would say – whenever the teleological talk turns into unacknowledged, often travestied, articulations of the Plato of the Republic or Laws; or, indeed to the rights of the self-consolidating other, Irigaray’s readings must be recalled in detail. If such a person – I must assume her without alterity – holds a reproduction of this page, she will know, alas that such occasions will not be infrequent. But how can I be certain? And what is it to know, or be sure that a knowing has been learned? To theorize the political, to politicize the theoretical, are such vast aggregative asymmetrical undertakings; the hardest lesson is the impossible intimacy of the ethical. (Spivak 1993a: 171; my emphasis)

Again, Spivak refers to the radical uncertainty, what is it to know? To know the other, as Spivak and as Irigaray teach us, is to silence, to appropriate. However, to speak ‘for’ the other is also to silence the other. The only way out is to refigure the relationship between binary oppositions of ignorance and knowledge, as Irigaray does in Diotima’s dialectic, that is, to refigure love. To acknowledge that there is 128

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luce irigaray with gayatri spivak always a ‘contested’ frame, and that there is always an ‘other’ voice, a different narrative. This happens in Irigaray’s refiguring of the two sexuate subjects. Here, Spivak writes, lies the ‘impossible intimacy of the ethical’. The hardest lesson is to recognise the limit of the other, the recognition that there is a limit to our knowledge of the other. We cannot appropriate the other by knowing her or him, and within the intimacy of the fecund caress that brings together the carnal and spiritual – in that realm of refigured desire – is the universal ethics of sexual difference. What I hope to have demonstrated in this chapter is that in thinking through a universal ethics of sexual difference we must take seriously Spivak’s notions of women’s solidarity using the motifs of radical uncertainty, the double sexuate universal and the fecund caress, and recall how this enables us, as women, to joyfully participate in the making of mischief on both sides of imperialism. Women’s solidarity, conceived in this way, as an Irigarayan-inspired Spivakian heterogeneous sex-analysis, offers feminist citizens around the globe alternative ways to fight, together, the increasingly insidious structures of violence that neo-colonialism brings.

Notes 1. Spivak goes on in later work to critique and problematise the use of this phrase. In her 1993 book Outside in the Teaching Machine, Spivak analyses the many layers of what she calls ‘cultural identity’ and how the fluidity of this notion is continuously played out differently with different meanings in different cultural contexts. She uses her experience of giving a talk at Birkbeck College, London, UK, to frame the discussion. One example she gives (in relation to trying to describe her own ‘cultural identity’) is that ‘Asian’ refers to different ideas in the UK and US. In relation to this point (and calling into question the use of ‘Third World’ as a descriptor), Spivak suggests: ‘The name “Third World” is useful because, for any metropolitan audience, it can cover over much unease. For these listeners, the speaker’s identity might well have been “Third World”. (In the United States this would undoubtedly have been the case. It nicely marks the difference between Britain as the central colonial, and the United States as a central neocolonial power.) . . . What need does it satisfy? It gives a proper name to a generalized margin. A word to name the margin. Perhaps that is what the audience wanted to hear: a voice from the margin. . . . It should then be pointed out that what is being negotiated here is not even a “race or a social type” . . . but an economic principle of identification through separation’ (Spivak 1993a: 55). In other words, what is being negotiated is not a specific ‘cultural identity’; rather it is the 129

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objectified, collective marginalised ‘Other(s)’. In bringing this problem to light Spivak does not suggest a solution, but rather that we must continually draw attention to this problem of naming. I think we can read Spivak’s analysis alongside ideas of the ‘politics of location’ that Adrienne Rich articulated and Rosi Braidotti subsequently explores in her work Nomadic Subjects (2011) and ‘Embodiment, Sexual Difference, and the Nomadic Subject’ (1993). While Irigaray’s work has been criticised for privileging sexuate over other differences, this chapter highlights how Spivak’s reading that links women together via a complex matrix of radical uncertainty demonstrates how an Irigarayan conception of sexuate difference can be mobilised in ways that do not hierarchise differences of skin colour, class, religion, age, disability, sexuality. Spivak explains that her concern with Structural Functionalism is that it ‘takes a “disinterested” stance on society as functioning structure. Its implicit interest is to applaud a system – in this case sexual – because it functions’ (Spivak 1981: 154). Understood within phallocentric logic, these three Indian women would have been constructed as an all-encompassing single ‘other’ when in fact there are multiple sites of difference between them, including, for example, class, religion and caste. In terms of these ‘shared channels of communication’, we might argue that much has changed since 1981 in terms of Internet access across the globe. Indeed, many contemporary social movements and feminist movements are commonly linked to global Internet activism and consciousness-raising. However, for those in the ‘pores of capitalism’ how much has actually changed? People living in the ‘pores’ do not have access to clean drinking water and food, never mind the Internet. Spivak goes on, in future work, to argue that it is not enough (or that simple) to reverse power relations between colonial/postcolonial. Rather, we must recognise these binary relations cannot ‘simply’ be reversed because there are not two separate ‘pure’ ‘cultures’ or ‘subjects’. Spivak argues we must destabilise these problematic relationships of colonial power in order to demonstrate how imperialism constructs the idea of a ‘pure native’ or ‘native hegemony’ and vice versa, how this (false) idea of ‘native hegemony’ constructs the ‘colonial subject’. I believe Spivak takes this central point in her philosophy from her early engagements with Irigaray (and Kofman) in these works that I explore here. See Gedalof (1999) for an interesting perspective on constructions of purity, colonial subjectivity and ‘French Feminist’ thought. Spivak writes: ‘As soon as one steps out of the classroom, if indeed a “teacher” ever fully can, the dangers rather than the benefits of academic feminism, French or otherwise, become more insistent. Institutional changes against sexism here or in France may mean nothing or 130

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luce irigaray with gayatri spivak

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indirectly, further harm for women in the Third World. This discontinuity ought to be recognized and worked at. Otherwise, the focus remains defined by the investigator as subject’ (Spivak 1981: 179; my emphasis). Spivak notes that in Irigaray’s Speculum we find: ‘the analysis brilliantly deploys the deconstructive themes of indeterminacy, critique of identity, and the absence of a totalizable analytic foothold, from a feminist point of view’ (Spivak 1981: 177). See, for example, Irigaray’s This Sex which is Not One, where she writes: ‘Perhaps it is time to return to that repressed entity, the female imaginary. So woman does not have a sex organ? She has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as ones. Indeed, she has many more. Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural. Is this the way culture is seeking to characterize itself now? Is this the way texts write themselves/are written now? Without quite knowing what censorship they are evading? Indeed, woman’s pleasure does not have to choose between clitoral activity and vaginal passivity, for example. The pleasure of the vaginal caress does not have to be substituted for that of the clitoral caress. They each contribute, irreplaceably, to woman’s pleasure. Among other caresses . . . Fondling the breasts, touching the vulva, spreading the lips, stroking the posterior wall of the vagina, brushing against the mouth of the uterus, and so on. To evoke only a few of the most specifically female pleasures. Pleasures which are somewhat misunderstood in sexual difference as it is imagined – or not imagined, the other sex being only the indispensable complement to the only sex’ (Irigaray 1985b: 28). While I have no desire to reduce either description of a metropolitan feminist or postcolonial feminist to a static definition, for the purposes of the problematic Spivak is attempting to unravel, I point to very general meanings of these terms: postcolonial as ‘occurring or existing after the end of colonial rule’ and metropolitan as ‘belonging to, forming or forming part of, a mother country as distinct from its colonies etc. (metropolitan France)’ (The Australian Oxford Dictionary, 4th edn). This suggests to me that Spivak is specifically acknowledging that this particular essay is working within this French postcolonial setting. Moreover, this paragraph illustrates that relations between a metropolitan and a postcolonial feminist are not reducible to the (patriarchal) coloniser/colonised relationship that the canonical texts of Postcolonial Theory have attempted to unravel. In order to make her point, Spivak quotes a passage from Chafika Marouf (1988) and I cite this here in order to provide context for Spivak’s further comments: ‘Current research on the family in Algeria and in the Maghreb cannot be evaluated without a retrospective view, however brief, of the movement of ideas that have emerged in Europe, 131

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irigaray and politics and in Anglo-Saxon and transatlantic countries . . . The paradigms of academic intelligibility of feminism in Algeria and the Maghreb have been, for the large part, modulated in the intellectual configurations of Western thought: They have offered the frame and the genesis . . .’ (Marouf cited in Spivak 1993a: 142). 12. This refers back to a point Spivak made earlier where she notes: ‘Assuming that classes and audiences are collections of selves ignores the details of their intimate and inaccessible alterity’ (Spivak 1993a: 142). 13. Recall, again, how the labial logic of the two lips is ‘always touching, always open’, confusing the binary of self/other logic? This notion of mischief can also be thought of in relation to what Michelle Boulous Walker calls labial logic. Boulous Walker (1998) links Irigarayan labial logic with Derrida’s play of différance, noting that: ‘It is deconstructive because it shifts “language” away from an oppositional logic of reference versus metaphor toward something much closer to the play of difference . . . The singularity of the labia is always double, never one. This labial logic confounds oppositional thinking. It displaces oppositions such as inside and outside, self and other, reference and metaphor’ (Boulous Walker 1998: 157). Consequently, we might think of this ‘common mischief’ in terms of Derrida’s notion of différance and play as disruptive to binary logic that he explores in his 1968 lecture ‘Differance’ (Derrida 2004: 282). Furthermore, Irigaray’s early remarks on women laughing in This Sex which Is Not One evoke this notion of playful mischievousness to challenge the notion that sexual difference is a simple reversal of binary positions. Irigaray writes: ‘Isn’t laughter the first form of liberation from a secular oppression? Isn’t the phallic tantamount to the seriousness of meaning? Perhaps women, and the sexual relation, transcend it “first” in laughter? Besides, women among themselves begin by laughing. To escape from a pure and simple reversal of the masculine position means in any case not to forget to laugh’ (Irigaray 1985b:163). 14. Derrida writes: ‘Différance is not simply active (any more than it is a subjective accomplishment); it rather indicates the middle voice, it precedes and sets up the opposition between passivity and activity. With its a, différance more properly refers to what in classical language would be called the origin or production of difference and the differences between differences, the play [jue] of differences. Différance is neither a word nor a concept. In it, however, we shall see the juncture – rather than the summation – of what has been most decisively inscribed in the thought of what is conveniently called our ‘epoch’: the difference of forces in Nietzsche, Saussure’s principle of semiological difference, differing as the possibility of [neurone] facilitation, impression and delayed effect in Freud, difference as the irreducibility of the trace of the other in Levinas, and the ontic-ontological difference in 132

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luce irigaray with gayatri spivak Heidegger’ (Derrida 2004: 279). I think we can add Luce Irigaray’s ontology of sexuate difference to the ‘juncture’ of our ‘epoch’ that Derrida describes earlier. 15. To bring both the maternal and erotic into relation is to go beyond Levinas. As Tina Chanter writes: ‘Plenty could be said about the stereotypical restrictions on sex roles in play in Levinas’ texts. Levinas limits the appearance of the feminine figure either to the realm of the erotic (where, in one respect, it turns out to be a poor imitation of the ethical), or to the elevated heights of maternity. It is not, perhaps, too extreme to accuse Levinas of expressing the traditional denigration and deification of the feminine in the restricted possibilities he extends to the feminine . . . However far it might be from his intentions, it is hard not to find in Levinas’ work the opposition between good wife and mother and wayward sex symbol’ (Chanter 1995: 199). 16. This is why the two subjects are not necessarily heterosexual. The difference is created within the relation to the maternal and to the other. There is no normative sexual function whereby the couple reproduce a child; the relation is in excess of this. It is within this difference that we become sexuate subjects, that we are born as a ‘loving woman’ that is beyond the reproductive function. 17. Spivak then quotes Irigaray from a 1986 translation of the text. I quote the 1993 An Ethics of Sexual Difference translation as I think it evokes the point being made here more clearly than the earlier translation (Irigaray 1993a: 187).

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6

A Politics of Proximity

We have seen that capitalism treats differently the one who possesses and the one who works, but we have not perceived clearly enough that its products alienate all of us, male and female, turning each and everyone of us into interchangeable numbers in a dehumanized world. How then can we unite politics and happiness? In my view, by refusing to accept that politics should be reduced to managing a world that is now dehumanized and dehumanizing; by refusing to accept that the world should remain as it is, criticizing only other people, as bad, within such a world. Nor is it enough to turn our attention to the distant horizon, to those worse off than ourselves, while continuing to obey the dictates of this world. All this leads to very little except accelerating the destruction of the human species and its culture . . . there will not be a future unless we make the salvation of the earth itself our immediate concern. Rescuing the planet Earth means, too, being concerned about happiness, as much for ourselves as for others. Happiness of this kind does not cost much, has nothing to do with economic calculations – or, at least, should not have – but is, perhaps, the highest form of happiness if we learn how to perceive it, to contemplate and to praise it. (Irigaray 2000a: 169)

Irigaray’s demand for the recognition of sexuate difference, as I have illustrated throughout this book, begins in Speculum and continues throughout her writings. Following Whitford, I suggest that Irigaray’s journey toward a culture of sexuate difference is simultaneously structured by and critical of psychoanalysis. I also propose that in order to appreciate the political–philosophical argument at work in Irigaray’s philosophy we must recognise how her work is formed via critical and productive engagements with certain philosophers in what we conceive of as the western tradition, notably Plato, Freud, Lacan, Hegel, Heidegger and Levinas. Crucially, as we learned in Chapters 2 and 3, it is the emergence of an autonomous feminine subjectivity that is fundamental to Irigaray’s account. Without refigured notions of sexuate subjectivity we cannot imagine new futures, new familial and political communities, and particularly ‘women’s politics’, which will, according to Irigaray, 134

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a politics of proximity call into question all existing theory, all thought, all language, in as much as these are monopolized by men and men alone. They challenge the very foundation of our social and cultural order, whose organization has been prescribed by the patriarchal system. (Irigaray 1985b: 165)

Following Irigaray, I argue that this autonomous feminine subjectivity cannot be understood or properly appreciated without new ontological foundations. Hence the importance of taking Irigaray’s philosophical encounters and her philosophical perspective seriously. As we saw in Chapter 2 Irigaray argues for a reworking of the traditional western (colonial and patriarchal) notions of space–time in An Ethics of Sexual Difference that uncovers and challenges the unacknowledged links between theology and philosophy. This refiguration of space–time–desire is foundational to her notion of the sensible transcendental and sexuate subjectivity; however, as I point out in the Introduction, reading Irigaray’s work as an important contribution to, and critique of, ontological thought in western traditions is largely overlooked by readers and critics. We need to acknowledge and unpack these productively conflictual engagements in order to appreciate how radically Irigaray refigures (and redoubles) aspects of the Hegelian dialectic as discussed in Chapter 4. Irigaray’s reimagining of dialectical thought opens up new ways of theorising political subjects as embodied, and as gendered and as raced, and when we read Irigaray’s claims alongside Spivak’s work in Chapter 5, it enables new ways to articulate positive relations among women and women’s (albeit paradoxical) global solidarity. In this chapter, we look closely at Irigaray’s refigurations of community and family to imagine new future becomings, a new politics that challenges the foundations of our patriarchal and colonial ‘social and cultural order’ (Irigaray 1985b: 165). A major thread of Irigaray’s critique and analysis of the traditional western form of nuclear family underpinning western culture can be read, in some senses, in line with a feminist Marxist critique of the family which acknowledges the problematic hierarchal binary separation of the public from the private realm, and the reduction of woman to mother within this private sphere. While contemporary feminist Marxist critique of capitalist systems most certainly considers the ways in which race and gender intersect with class in nuanced and helpful ways, Irigaray’s project, as we will see, focuses on the entanglement of differences within the family as sites of potential resistance and change. The ways in which 135

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irigaray and politics Irigaray challenges conservative western conceptions of love and desire in her argument for ‘refounding the family’, I suggest, can be read alongside bell hooks’ work in ‘Homeplace: A Site of Resistance’ (1990), Patricia Hill Collins’ comments in ‘The New Politics of Community’ (2010), and Ofelia Schutte’s work ‘Cultural Alterity: Cross-Cultural Communication and Feminist Theory in North-South Contexts’ (1998). All three of these feminist scholars, writing from different perspectives and intellectual contexts, agree that we need to view the home and family, as ‘a site of resistance’ (hooks), ‘as a site of political contestation’ (Hill Collins) and a site of potential change (Schutte). Reading Irigaray’s work alongside these different perspectives enables us, I think, to imagine, along with Irigaray, the possibilities and potentialities of new political communities, ranging from the intimacy of a family couple to the local to the global.

Marxist Feminist Critique of the Family Recall that for Hegel the family is located within the private realm which is split from the cultural and political realm to which the (masculine colonial) subject accedes, and women, within this binary split, remain located within the family and women’s role is reduced to wife and mother. In this structure, women have no access to civil citizenship or identity as political subjects. For Irigaray, without civil identity, women have no political subjectivity and thus have limited access to create institutional change, and they are unable to adequately and ethically love one another, or an other. There cannot be a reciprocal ethical love between two subjects within this structure as only the One subject is recognised as such. The public and political realm is conceived of as masculine, whereas the private familial realm is feminine and there is no crossover or passage between the two. Irigaray’s response to this, as we saw in Chapter 4, is to refound love as an intermediary, a passage between these binaries, a dialectical relation and process of recognition that does not appropriate and dehumanise the other, and in coming to recognise each other as subjects in this process, we recognise the limits to our subjectivity. Through and within this dialectical becoming of love, sexuate subjectivity is continually worked out. In doing so, we begin to imagine what an ethical relational subjectivity, and an ethical relation of love between subjects, might look like. With this in mind, and as a starting point for our discussions in this chapter, I turn to Irigaray’s 136

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a politics of proximity reference to Marx which precedes her critique of Hegel’s ‘labor of love’ in I Love to You. She writes: ‘Marx defined the origin of man’s exploitation of man as man’s exploitation of woman and asserted that the most basic human exploitation lies in the division of labor between man and woman’ (Irigaray 1996a: 19). Irigaray then asks: ‘Why didn’t he devote his life to solving the problem of this exploitation?’ (Irigaray 1996a: 19). She suggests that perhaps the reason is due to Hegel’s conception of love as labour which then allows Marx to consider the labour undertaken within the familial realm as private and split from the (masculine) sphere of production (paid work) (Irigaray 1996a: 19). From her earliest writing, Irigaray has engaged with Marx’s work and her chapter ‘Woman on the Market’ (first published in French in 1978) is a clear example of this (Irigaray 1985b). While Irigaray is critical of Marx for forgetting the question of sexual difference (in other words, the forgetting of the labour of love) in his critique of capitalism, she clearly takes up and agrees with major aspects of his thought. Irigaray begins ‘Woman on the Market’ claiming that the ‘society we know, our own culture, is based upon the exchange of women’ and that ‘the passage into the social order . . . is assured by the fact that men, or groups of men, circulate women among themselves, according to a rule known as the incest taboo’ (Irigaray 1985b: 170). Irigaray uses Marx’s work to argue that women are the commodities of exchange between men in patriarchal (colonial) societies. Irigaray suggests that aspects of Marx’s analysis of value seem ‘to describe the social status of women’ (Irigaray 1985b: 174). She makes particular reference to the difference between the roles of mother, virgin and prostitute in this social order. Irigaray writes: ‘mothers are essential to its (re)production (particularly inasmuch as they are [re]productive of children of the labor force: through maternity, child-rearing, and domestic maintenance in general. Their responsibility is to maintain the social order . . .’ (Irigaray 1985b: 184). The mother, according to Irigaray’s analysis, is private property and remains a ‘reproductive instrument marked with the name of the father and enclosed in his house . . . excluded from exchange’ (Irigaray 1985b: 185). On the other hand, ‘The virginal woman’, writes Irigaray, ‘is pure exchange value’ (Irigaray 1985b: 186). The prostitute within this social order is ‘implicitly tolerated’ and understood as ‘usage that is exchange’ (Irigaray 1985b: 186). It is the role of the mother, as unacknowledged reproducer of the labour force and of the social order, that I am most interested in here as it is 137

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irigaray and politics this analysis that is very much in line with what feminist Marxist scholar and activist Tithi Bhattacharya refers to as ‘social reproduction theory’ (Bhattacharya 2013). Bhattacharya notes that for Marx in Capital Volume 1 (the same volume Irigaray is reading in ‘Woman on the Market’) capitalism requires ‘our capacity to labor’ and it is the accumulation and appropriation of this labour power that is the source of value for capitalists and capitalism. Echoing Irigaray’s point, Battacharya notes: Marx is frustratingly silent on the rest of the story. If labor power produces value, how is labor power itself produced? Surely workers do not spring from the ground to arrive at the market place fresh and ready to sell their labor power to the capitalists? (Bhattacharya 2013)

Bhattachraya tells us, summarising the work of feminist Marxists scholars like Lise Vogel, that the key to the capitalist system is that labour power ‘is actually produced and reproduced outside of capitalist production, in a “kin-based” site called the family’ (Bhattacharya 2013). Bhattachraya notes: Labor power, in the main, is reproduced by three interconnected processes: 1. By activities that regenerate the worker outside the production process and allow her to return to it. These include, among a host of others, food, a bed to sleep in, but also care in psychical ways that keep a person whole. 2. By activities that maintain and regenerate non-workers outside the production process – i.e. those who are future or past workers, such as children, adults out of the workforce for whatever reason, be it old age, disability or unemployment. 3. By reproducing fresh workers, meaning childbirth. These activities, which form the very basis of capitalism in that they reproduce the worker, are done completely free of charge for the system by women and men within the household and the community. (Bhattacharya 2013)

The important insight that this analysis provides is that capitalism is a system, and that changes in one sphere, for example the family, will accordingly create change in another. It also helps us to understand that any gains for gender rights in the ‘formal economy or outside of it’ are temporary because ‘the material basis of women’s oppression is tied to the system as a whole’ (Bhattacharya 2013). Bhattacharya claims that a feminist Marxist account that takes this 138

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a politics of proximity notion of unacknowledged reproductive work and social reproduction seriously enables us to understand the ‘significance of political struggles in either sphere’ (Bhattacharya 2013). These points are clearly consistent with Irigaray’s claim that woman is reduced to the maternal, the silencing of mother–daughter genealogies and her claims that autonomous feminine subjectivity and thus ‘woman’s politics’ does not yet exist; all of which undergird Irigaray’s calls for ‘a revolution of thought, of ethics, of politics’ (Irigaray 2002a: 127). It is clear that we can read Irigaray’s broader political–philosophical project as in line with this Marxist analysis, but, as I have also demonstrated, Irigaray’s project goes further. Irigaray’s feminist Marxist critique of capitalism is inseparable from her psychoanalytically inspired critique of the phallocentrism of undergirding western culture. Irigaray’s main focus is to change the entire system, an ontological, cultural and political revolution, including the imaginary and symbolic cultural order, which would thus enable new subjectivities, new politics and new economies to emerge that are radically different from the current model founded upon the reduction of women, people of colour, the working class and the poor to commodities. Given Irigaray’s engagement with Marx and the resonances between a feminist Marxist critique of the family and Irigaray’s thought, we must read Irigaray’s idea of the family as ‘an enclave’ that might resist this patriarchal capitalist white supremacist system with these resonances in mind (Irigaray 2002a: 14). Irigaray’s thinking of the family as ‘an enclave’ of resistance resonates with bell hook’s chapter ‘Homeplace: A Site of Resistance’ (1990). In hooks’ chapter she too views family and home as an important political space and especially for ‘black women in white supremacist societies’ (hooks 1990: 78). bell hooks outlines the effects of the combination of oppressive systems of capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy on the daily lives of black women ‘who worked outside the home’ and then ‘returned to their homes to make life happen there’ (hooks 1990: 77). The chapter makes clear the multiple layers of labour which many working black women experience – both in and outside the home. hooks points out that the division of labour between men and women required for capitalism to continue occurred too in black homes.1 However, hooks notes that even though sexism assigns women the task of ‘sustaining a home environment’, in doing so the construction of home becomes a ‘space of care and nurturance in the face of the brutal harsh reality of racist oppression, of sexist domination (hooks 1990: 77–8). hooks explains 139

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irigaray and politics how the homeplace, particularly for African American people, had a ‘radical political dimension’ (hooks 1990: 78). She writes: This task of making homeplace was not simply a matter of black women providing service; it was about the construction of a safe place where black people could affirm one another and by so doing heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination. (hooks 1990: 78)

In an especially poignant section, bell hooks tells us of her childhood, living in segregated areas, and of her mother who went to work as maid in the ‘homes of white folks’ (hooks 1990: 83). hooks writes: I think of the effort it must have taken for her to transcend her own tiredness (and who knows what assaults or wounds to her spirit had to be put aside so she could give something to her own) . . . Politically, our young mother, Rosa Bell, did not allow the white supremacist culture of domination to completely shape and control her psyche and her familial relationships. Working to create a homeplace that affirmed our beings, our blackness, our love for one another was necessary resistance. Our lives were not without contradictions, so it is not my intent to create a romanticized portrait. Yet any attempts to critically assess the role of black women in liberation struggle must examine the way political concern about the impact of racism shaped black women’s thinking, their sense of home, and their modes of parenting. (hooks 1990: 84)

In hooks’ account the private sphere of the home is very clearly a radical political space. She goes on to argue, however, that when black people begin to consider the home as a politically neutral space ‘mirroring white bourgeois norms’ (and we could say in Irigaray’s terms the western traditional nuclear family) a shift in perspective occurred and the importance of ‘black female labor in teaching critical consciousness in domestic’ space begins to be overlooked (hooks 1990: 85). hooks very clearly articulates the ways in which her experience of familial communities in African American contexts provided an ‘enclave’ and site of resistance in relation to the broader white supremacist patriarchal capitalist culture in which they were living. Patricia Hill Collins reiterates Bhattacharya’s and Irigaray’s interest in the family and community as a site of political resistance. Hill Collins writes: historically the construct of family was theorized in apolitical terms, safely tucked away in the private sphere of household and neighbourhood. This 140

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a politics of proximity view advanced an uncritical binary idea of society, dividing social relations into the non-political private sphere of family (where love and loved ones naturally reside) and the public sphere of work and civil society. (Hill Collins 2010: 9)

Hill Collins notes that feminist theory has challenged this view, by pointing out how the construct of the family ‘is not only the building block of patriarchy but also helps structure social inequalities of sexuality, class, race, and age’ (Hill Collins 2010: 9). For these reasons the construct of the family is a crucial site of political contestation and, according to Hill Collins, so too is the construct of community. Hill Collins argues that because community has been associated with minority groups, it is not recognised as a ‘core construct of political analysis for understanding the workings of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and ethnicity as systems of power’ (Hill Collins 2010: 11). Hill Collins suggests that rather than a ‘natural, apolitical space . . . the construct of community may lie at the heart of politics itself’ (Hill Collins 2010: 11).

Refounding the Family Thus, when reading Irigaray’s claims in Between East and West that our notions of family and community are dysfunctional, and when weighing statements such as ‘the common is defined by property and not proximity’, we must read them in terms of her earlier engagement with Marx as well as with hooks and Hill Collins’ work (Irigaray 2002a: 14). She expands on these concerns in the introduction to Between East and West. Irigaray writes: ‘Community is no longer constituted starting from intimate relations of kinship, from closeness with others, but from the outside, starting from rules, from goods, from borders that are more or less foreign to the subject(s)’ (Irigaray 2002a: 14). And: ‘The family, like woman, moreover, is simultaneously overvalorized and devalorized, colonized. It is subjected to values that are foreign to it and that, little by little, destroy it’ (Irigaray 2002a: 15). It is important that we read Irigaray’s political–philosophical challenge to ‘refound the family’ and community as a challenge to the ‘neo-colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’, to use bell hooks’ now famous phrase, which upholds western liberal multiculturalism. Moreover, it is through reading Irigaray’s work, both as a whole, and as an important part of a larger conversation in 141

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irigaray and politics feminist theory and feminist Marxist politics, that we can begin to see the links between her early diagnosis of a culture of narcissism – a culture that upholds the One (masculine colonial) subject as the ideal subject and does not positively recognise and appreciate difference – with liberal feminism and liberal multiculturalism. Liberal feminism and liberal multiculturalism do not in any way attempt to recognise, challenge and change the patriarchal, classist, imperialist and racist structures of oppression that all persons who are dehumanised and negatively ‘othered’ in relation to this One (masculine colonial) subject remain caught within. Aware of the limitations of liberal feminism and liberal multiculturalism which work to appropriate difference and reduce the ‘other to an object of study’ rather than appreciate positive difference, Irigaray writes: never without doubt has an age spoken so much of the other as ours does, globalization and migrations requiring it. But, too often, this other is reduced to an object of study, to what is at stake in diverse sociopolitical strategies aiming in some manner to integrate the other into us, into our world. (Irigaray 2002a: 124–5)

Irigaray suggests that a culture of narcissism and the structures of neo-liberalism make it very difficult for a genuine non-hierarchal meeting of two autonomous subjects; there are limited meetings with the other in positive difference, and thus there is very little room for familial and political communities to coexist in difference. In her exploration of the traditional western nuclear family, Irigaray notices, however, that the traditional notion of ‘family’ in the western tradition is undergoing profound change, and is being challenged via the most intimate levels of our humanity, the desire and love between human subjects.2 Across the globe, our experiences of everyday life are redefining notions of love, notions of desire, and ideas of what constitutes a family. The fact that families are now made up of people from different traditions, ethnicities, languages, classes and geographic locations, including same-sex families, is a daily reality in many parts of the globe. Crucially, as Irigaray argues, these new familial communities emerging in western culture (and elsewhere) challenge western neo-liberalism’s and colonialism’s categorising of differences of religion, ethnicity, race, class and sexuality. In thinking about the relations between subjects within these radically changing, intimate communal spaces and the continual work within these spaces and relations to structure relationships that 142

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a politics of proximity do not appropriate and objectify one another, Irigaray revisits her notions of wonder, the breath and the role of active listening. She writes: We sometimes, at least partially, find this state again, I would say this state of grace, in which the spring puts us, when we are immersed in a new landscape, in an extraordinary cosmic manifestation, when we bathe in an environment that is simultaneously perceptible and imperceptible, knowable and unknowable, visible and invisible to us. We are then situated in a milieu, in an event that escape[s] our control, our know-how, our inventiveness, our imagination. And our response to this ‘mystery’ is or could be astonishment, wonder, praise, sometimes questioning, but not reproduction, repetition, control, appropriation. (Irigaray 2002a: 122)

Irigaray continues: ‘The state that springtime, certain landscapes, and certain cosmic phenomena provoke in us, sometimes takes place at the beginning of an encounter with the other’ (Irigaray 2002a: 123). It is in this sense that Irigaray evokes the ability to be present and to recognise the other, without losing oneself or appropriating, consuming or silencing the other. This work is foundational to sexuate difference. If an autonomous sexuate subject learns to breathe consciously and thus to become in wonder in relation to an other, then this rhythmic becoming of autonomous feminine subjectivity between listening and speaking can be understood in relation to Irigaray’s reworked notion of desire. It opens up and rediscovers spaces of cultivated silence. However, Irigaray is clear that she thinks we still need to learn these lessons. She writes: On this way, we have not advanced very far. It holds for us sources of energy, of speech and wisdom that we still do not know. It represents without any doubt a place starting from which to resume and to pursue human becoming. Not as the act and according to the will of one subject alone, but beginning from the horizon opened by the recognition of the existence of two different subjects who work toward the construction of bridges between them while safeguarding their own singularity. (Irigaray 2002a: xi)

Irigaray understands the process of learning to breathe consciously as a personal and political practice that is intimately connected to possibilities of socio-cultural and symbolic change.3 In this way, it connects the macro and the microcosmic. Learning to breathe 143

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irigaray and politics consciously at the personal level can, for Irigaray, challenge the culture of narcissism because Irigaray understands subjectivity as intimately connected to symbolic representations in the cultural realm. It is vital that we appreciate this conception of the breath and how it is linked to Irigaray’s suggestion that in order to move forward in the becoming of humanity we must reground identity and reground community (Irigaray 2002a: 3).4

Intercultural Couples In an interesting moment in Between East and West and, I think, in response to this problem of appropriation, assimilation and integration of the other by liberal multiculturalism, Irigaray writes that given the increased ‘generalized diversity of our age’ there is a need to ‘push for the creation of links between nature and culture that a simple sexual difference did not seem to require’ (Irigaray 2002a: 144). And it is within a refounding of the family that Irigaray argues we can find new ways of actualising a more nuanced sexuate difference. Irigaray sees the familial community as a space and place of resistance, and a community from which western culture, politics and theory can learn difference. She notes: ‘In my opinion, a family is born when two persons, most generally a man and a woman, decide to live together on a long-term basis, to “set up a home,” to recover an old expression that, deep down, is beautiful’ (Irigaray 2002a: 105).5 She goes on to suggest that a couple formed by a man and woman who are racially different and of different religions and cultures might become an ‘extraordinary seed for growth for our civilizations . . .’ and that these families may ‘represent a key place for the construction of our future societies’ (Irigaray 2002a: 144). Irigaray imagines new communities in which ‘the community will be composed of relations between and not of one + one + . . .’ indicating the need for non-hierarchal and non-appropriative relations between and among subjects (Irigaray 2002a: 17). Irigaray imagines new communities made up of relational sexuate subjects rather than the atomistic liberal (narcissistic) subject, and thus ‘a consciousness of the self as limited, from an individual or collective responsibility that does not efface the singularity of each person’ (Irigaray 2002a: 102). This reimagining of community is important, as it is not a community based on sameness, with all belonging to the same religious tradition, for example. Moreover, the community is composed 144

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a politics of proximity of conscious subjects founded on collective responsibility in which difference is not superseded or erased by a majority; instead, positive relational difference among subjects founds the community. In the political–philosophical project of reimagining subjectivity Irigaray suggests that families are like miniature laboratories in which the ‘historical becoming of humanity is worked out’ (Irigaray 2002a: 134).6 Irigaray writes: Cultural elements that children would have learned with difficultly all year long at school are offered to them at home, or with friends, as bits of daily life. If, from the youngest age, diversity is admitted and respected, the child will learn a second language, will familiarize himself or herself with more than one tradition, will be brought up with tolerance toward the stranger. While public authorities will look into the difficult problem of integration, new families will have initiated the young generations into a cohabitation that is multiracial, multicultural, etc. . . . Has it [the family] not already chosen difference as a springboard for survival? (Irigaray 2002a: 134)

If we read these points with Fanon’s analysis of how the family resembles the nation state it provides an interesting perspective. Irigaray continues: From this point of view, mixed families represent a key place for the construction of our future societies. They will then either testify to a decline of human consciousness, to an economic fate that leaves us in a cultural ill-being and impotence, or they will participate in a more or less tranquil world revolution. (Irigaray 2002a: 144)

Ofelia Schutte’s 1998 article that explore notions of cross-cultural communication and cultural alterity in feminist theory is helpful here. She investigates the tensions in cross-cultural communication among women engaged in feminist theory and ultimately argues for a universal feminist ethics. Schutte notes that her work is inspired by certain works of Levinas, Kristeva and Irigaray. She suggests that their work on alterity revolutionises concepts of the self in terms of interpersonal relations. Schutte writes: In this tradition, the breakthrough in constructing the concept of the other occurs when one combines the notion of the other as different from the self with the acknowledgement of the self’s decentering that results from the experiences of such differences. Moreover, the breakthrough 145

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irigaray and politics involves acknowledging the positive, potentially ethical dimensions of such a decentering of interpersonal relations (as in Levinas 1979, Irigaray 1993, and Kristeva 1991), in contrast to simply taking the decentering one might experience in the light of the other’s differences as a deficit in the individual’s control over the environment. According to this understanding, interpersonal and social interactions marked by cultural (as well as sexual, racial, and other kinds of difference) allow us to reach new ethical, aesthetic, and political ground. (Schutte 1998: 54)

Schutte’s analysis is thoughtful and enlightening. She goes on to suggest that a universal feminist ethics must always be ‘negotiated cross-culturally’ and on a ‘case-by-case basis by individuals, or collectively by groups’ (Schutte 1998: 68). Schutte’s work explores the importance of rethinking notions of the family and, particularly, the role of intercultural families in our understanding of cross-cultural communication. Schutte notes: The presence of so many mixed unions among people of different cultures offers some hope that effective cross-cultural communication in matters that pertain to intimate details of peoples’ lives is not some sort of utopian fantasy. But people in mixed unions that are based on parity, as compared to the practices of dominant cultures with regard to subaltern cultures, are very strongly motivated to understand each other, as well as to communicate with each other so as to deepen and strengthen their understanding. Such individuals commit themselves to lifestyles in which giving of one’s time to reach out to the other, as well as making space for the other’s differences, are part of the very fabric of daily existence, neither a forced nor an occasional happening. People in mixed unions have also presumably experienced the positive benefits of their association to the extent that they would rather affirm what remains incommensurable in their distinct cultural horizons than shut the other out of their intimate life and feelings. No doubt, individuals who either work or live successfully with culturally differentiated others are highly skilled communicators, making optimum use of opportunities for crosscultural, interactive engagements. The postcolonial feminist perspective highlights these interactive realities, deconstructing the traditional binarism of self-other paradigms, in which each side lays claim to either mutually exclusive or equal but separate realities. (Schutte 1998: 68)

I think Schutte’s analysis can be read alongside Irigaray’s work on refounding the family to open up Irigaray’s points to a larger political context. Regardless, however, of whether or not one agrees with Irigaray’s thoughts on refounding the family, I do think her turn to 146

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a politics of proximity rethinking the family and community is important and interesting, especially in thinking through the possibilities of women’s politics. As I suggest, we must read these comments as part of the larger feminist critique of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy founded upon the public/private split, and the reduction of the family, wife and mother to the private supposedly apolitical realm. However, as hooks, Hill Collins and Irigaray highlight, the private realm of family and home is, at times, a political site of resistance and contestation. For Irigaray, it is within the realm of a refigured family structure that we become relational ethical subjects and learn non-appropriative and non-hierarchical ways of relating and being while at the same time acting and being in the wider community as political subjects. If we read this argument alongside hook’s articulation of the importance of the work of African American women in nourishing positive black subjectivity in the private realm of the family within a white supremacist culture, I think we can begin to imagine the concrete manifestations and possibilities that Irigaray seeks. This refigured family becomes, in a sense, a conduit between the private and public realm and thus an important challenge to the capitalist patriarchy. Irigaray writes: Community is then composed of autonomous individuals in conscious relation to one another. It does not come down to an undifferentiated whole of citizens organized by an instinct, a will, an idea, or a leader, whether it be the leader of a horde, of a tribe, of Church or of State. In fact, such a leader resembles the patriarch who assures the unity of a family founded on an already artificial naturalness. In this family unit, each member, the man, the woman, or the children, alienates his or her own singularity in order to form a whole of which the side called natural will remain ‘private,’ subtracted from the civil community, and the side called ‘cultural’ or conceptual will become public, visible, and will be governed by a male citizen or, in the best of cases, a so-called neuter citizen. (Irigaray 2002a: 102–3)

Politics of the Common Silvia Federici offers an interesting perspective on rethinking notions of communal life and community from a feminist perspective and argues that we must place notions of ‘the home, territory, and the family’ at the centre of the politics of the common (Federici 2015). Federici’s concerns can be read alongside Irigaray’s critique and especially her thinking on communal life and comments that community 147

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irigaray and politics is no longer defined by proximity and instead is defined by property (Irigaray 2002a: 14). In a 2015 interview Federici explains that this movement to politicise the commons is a relatively new political consciousness, and that the ‘concept “common” did not exist’ in the ‘discourse of the ’60s and ’70s’ (Federici 2015). The concept, Federici notes, is ‘tied to the idea of our common life’ and aims to challenge the increasing privatization of communal life, including physical resources such as land and water and has now extended to thinking of the Internet as a common, as well as ways of organising or running community services, such as schools (Federici 2015). She suggests that ‘the notion is a result of the privatizations, of the attempt to appropriate and marketize the entire body, knowledge, land, air and water’ (Federici 2015). This new political consciousness has ‘provoked reflection about the communitarian dimension of our lives’ (Federici 2015). And thus, as Federici explains, there is ‘a very strong relation or correspondence between expropriation, production of the common, and the importance of the common as a concept of life, of social relations’ (Federici 2015). However, Federici points out it is crucial to formulate ‘the common from a feminist point of view’, because it is women ‘historically, and in our time’ who are ‘most invested in the defense of common resources and the construction of broader forms of social cooperation’ (Federici 2015). She writes: Around the world, women are the agricultural producers of subsistence, they are the ones who pay the greatest cost when land is privatized; in Africa, for example, 80 percent of subsistence agriculture is produced by women, and, therefore, the existence of communal ownership of land and water is fundamental for them. Finally, the feminist point of view is concerned with the organization of the community and the household. Because something that surprises me is that in all of the discussions of the common, there is talk about land and the internet, but the home is not mentioned! The feminist movement in which I started always spoke about sexuality, children, and the home. And later, I was very interested in the entire feminist, utopian socialist and anarchist tradition for how it approaches these topics. We need to create a discourse about the home, territory, and the family, and to place it at the centre of the politics of the common. Today we see the need for practices that create new communitarian models. (Federici 2015)

In ‘Feminism and the Politics of the Commons’ Federici points to various examples of women’s grassroots communalism across the 148

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a politics of proximity globe, arguing that this form of communalism leads to the ‘production of a new reality, it shapes a collective identity, it constitutes a counter power in the home and community and opens a process of self-valorisation and self-determination from which there is much that we can learn’ (2011). Federici argues that the first lesson we ought to learn is that ‘the “commoning” of the material means of reproduction’ that is, the labour which is usually reduced, in western culture, to the familial or private realm such as cooking, cleaning and childcare, for example, ‘is the primary mechanism by which a collective interest and mutual bonds are created’ (2011). In other words, the recognition of these resources as common and the pooling of these material means have the potential to reconnect people and communities and ‘thus counteract the tendency toward alienation under capitalism’ (Hormel 2016). Federici points out that while the models she describes from different communities across the globe cannot be simply transplanted into an urban North American city (where she is located) there are ways in which ‘the reclamation and commoning of the means of reproduction’ can work in North American contexts. She writes: by pooling our resources and re-appropriating the wealth that we have produced, we can begin to de-link our reproduction from the commodity flows that, through the world market, are responsible for the dispossession of millions across the world. We can begin to disentangle our livelihood not only from the world market but also from the war machine and prison system on which the US economy now depends. Not least we can move beyond the abstract solidarity that so often characterizes relations in the movement, which limits our commitment, our capacity to endure, and the risks we are willing to take. (Federici 2011)

While Federici’s argument that this has potential to change North American contexts might sound unrealistic and utopian, in my following discussion on the new international municipalist movement we see glimpses of this political philosophy being actualised in institutional municipal politics in major cities and urban centres across the globe. Thinking through Federici’s analysis of women’s grassroots communalism and women’s political activism around the world, and the importance of placing the family and the home at the centre of rethinking communal relations, as sites of political resistance and contestation, are important perspectives from which we can read Irigaray’s political–philosophical project. In other words, to read Irigaray as a political thinker. Moreover, in light of the discussions in 149

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irigaray and politics this chapter, I think that we can see Irigaray’s conception of women’s politics emerging in this new municipalist movement. Recall, for Irigaray, a women’s politics, undergirded by a philosophy of sexuate difference, consists of a community made up of autonomous relational sexuate subjects, in non-appropriative and non-hierarchal relations with each other, and can be read alongside Federici’s arguments as well as the points made by bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins. These communities would, as Federici’s work attests, challenge the social and cultural order in ways perhaps Irigaray’s early work could not yet imagine, and perhaps this is the point. Recall in Chapter 2, I noted that for Irigaray women must join together ‘among themselves’, and that women must do this ‘in order to discover a form of “social existence” other than the one that has always been imposed upon them’ (Irigaray 1985b: 164). This sounds very similar to Federici’s description of the emergence of women’s grassroots communalism across the globe in her 2011 article ‘‘Feminism and the Politics of the Commons’ that I have outlined above. Irigaray explains her notion of women’s politics. It is very clearly a call for a change of political and economic model, based on refigured subjects, and I repeat the quote here. Irigaray writes: But what does ‘political’ mean, here? No ‘women’s politics’ exists, not yet, at least not in the broad sense. And, if such a politics comes into existence one of these days, it will be very different from the politics instituted by men. For the questions raised by the exploitation of women’s bodies exceed the stakes, the schemas, and of course the ‘parties’ of the politics known and practiced up to now. (Irigaray 1985b: 165)

She continues: When women want to escape from exploitation, they do not merely destroy a few ‘prejudices,’ they disrupt the entire order of dominant values, economic, social, moral, and sexual. They call into question all existing theory, all thought, all language, inasmuch as these are monopolized by men and men alone. They challenge the very foundation of our social and cultural order, whose organization has been prescribed by the patriarchal system. (Irigaray 1985b: 165)

Moreover, in the epigraph to this chapter, taken from Irigaray’s more recent book Democracy Begins between Two, we see her take up the themes of happiness and politics in response to the alienation and dehumanisation that capitalism and neo-liberal economics brings. 150

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a politics of proximity She argues that we must refuse ‘to accept that politics should be reduced to managing a world that is now dehumanized and dehumanizing’, and that ‘there will not be a future unless we make the salvation of the earth itself our immediate concern’ (Irigaray 2000a: 160). Irigaray notes that we must be concerned with happiness, and argues that we must bring politics and happiness together, in response to the dehumanising practices of current neo-liberal patriarchal politics. This call to unite happiness and politics sounds very much like a way in which we might rethink communal life and the commons from a feminist viewpoint, enabling a different way of relating to one another, new economies, a different way of doing politics and, in turn, producing new alternative (and happier) realities to the one capitalism would currently have us believing in. Reading Irigaray’s work alongside Federici’s work on the politics of the commons thus enables us to unpack these aspects of Irigaray’s political–philosophical project. Furthermore, in thinking about a feminist viewpoint of the commons, and how this might challenge the traditionally masculine realm of institutional politics, I turn to a discussion of a new political movement with its roots in grassroots communalism that has erupted in urban centres across the globe: new municipalism. Two especially important themes that are found within some of the successful new municipalist citizen platforms are what is called ‘the feminisation of politics’ and a rethinking of ‘the commons’ which, on my reading, sounds very similar to Federici’s call for a feminist point of view on the commons.

Where to Now? International New Municipalism International new municipalism emerged out of the wake of the global uprisings of 2010–11 and is concerned with ‘how to harness the demands and practices that emerged from these movements, and those that followed in their wake, to create new ways of doing electoral politics’ (Shea Baird 2016). This new type of municipal local politics, with strong roots in Indignados [15-M] and Occupy movements, aims to do politics differently and, in doing so, it provides a challenge to the current capitalist political and economic models and thus, in various ways, challenges notions of liberal feminism and liberal multiculturalism. Luca Calafati writes: From Barcelona to Cleveland, from Paris to Belo Horizonte, cities are increasingly questioning the growth machine urbanism of the past 151

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irigaray and politics 30 years. This new municipalist movement is not about adding social and environmental concerns to a traditional urban agenda; this is a political and economic change of model. A model that seeks to redress the failings of liberal economics, by building a more economically and socially just alternative. (Calafati 2017)

One can certainly read this description alongside Irigaray’s call for a new politics that disrupts the current social and cultural order. New municipalism’s ‘political and economic change of model’, as described by Calafati, is indeed in line with Irigaray’s and Federici’s critique of liberal economics and the privatisation of the common, and so too do we find similarities in their analysis of the potential of refounding the importance of relations and communal life. While there is no clear-cut historical trajectory of the new municipalist movement, Vincente Rubio-Pueyo writes that Murray Bookchin’s ‘Libertarian Municipalism’, Henry Lefebvre’s Right to the City and David Harvey’s Rebel Cities are ‘frequently invoked’ when describing municipalism’s theoretical framework. However, as Rubio-Pueyo suggests, many in this movement realise the tension between theory and concrete practical change. He notes that many agree that theories ‘cannot be applied mechanically but need to be adapted to specific political situations and collective visions’ (RubioPueyo 2018).7 Moreover, as Vincente Rubio-Pueyo further explains, and as Carlos Delclós also notes, radical municipal politics is not ‘an altogether new concept, especially not in Spain’ (Delclós 2015). Delclós notes that even the the so-called father of libertarian municipalism, social ecologist Murray Bookchin, was strongly inspired by the Spanish municipal politics of the 19th and early twentieth century as well as the Swiss Grey Leagues and the New England townships, when he wrote his influential ‘New Municipal Agenda’. (Delclós 2015)

Most analyses of the emergence of these new municipalist centres or confluences (as Rubio-Pueyo names them) highlight the importance of the integration of theory with proposals and concrete strategies. As Kate Shea Baird explains, one of the most important things we can learn from municipalist movements like Cuidad Futura (Future City) in Rosario, Argentina, is the importance of pragmatism (Shea Baird 2016). She writes ‘rather than getting bogged down in the abstract, theoretical debates that so often paralyze the left, the organization pours its energies into meeting people’s immediate needs in 152

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a politics of proximity the neighbourhoods of Rosario’ (Shea Baird 2016). This practical and pragmatic commitment to grassroots radical democracy and the needs of the local communities and neighbourhoods is crucial and it underpins new municipalism and, I think, its success. Common life and community is refigured in new municipalism. Kate Shea Baird explains further: Municipalism works at the local scale. In an age of xenophobic discourses that exclude people based on national or ethnic criteria, municipalism constructs alternative forms of collective identity and citizenship based on residence and participation. Municipalism is pragmatic and goal-based: in a neoliberal system that tells us ‘there is no alternative’, municipalism proves that things can be done differently through small, but concrete, victories, like remuncipalizing basic services or providing local ID schemes for undocumented immigrants. Municipalism allows us to reclaim individual and collective autonomy; in response to citizen demands for real democracy, municipalism opens up forms of participation that go beyond voting once every few years. (Shea Baird 2017)

Again, one can read these alternative forms of community emerging as ‘collective identity and citizenship based on residence and participation’ in line with Irigaray’s and Federici’s thinking on community as emerging from ‘commoning’ and from ‘proximity not property’. Municipalism is understood as a form of politics that enables individuals and communities to regain and reclaim collective and individual autonomy, much like Irigaray’s visions of the movement between singularity and community in the making of a new subjectivities and new politics. Moreover, new municipalist politics is not some far-fetched utopian ideal. Municipalist movements composed of local engaged citizens have been winning back cities from the patriarchal neoliberal elites all over Spain as well as in Italy (Naples, Bologna, Pisa) (Shea Baird 2017). Further afield in the USA there are municipalist platforms winning seats in electoral politics in Richmond, California, and Jackson, Mississippi, as well as in Hong Kong and cities in Poland, Brazil and Argentina (Shea Baird 2017). Rojava, in the Kurdish region of Northern Syria, is probably one of the more wellknown municipalist communities (Shea Baird 2017). The success of Barcelona en Comú is an especially important example and reference point for the new municipalist movement as ‘the 2015 Barcelona City Council election is one of the first cases in which one of these movements has got to ‘occupy’ the public institutions by building 153

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irigaray and politics Barcelona en Comú, a political party that won the elections’ (Aragón et al. 2015). Barcelona en Comú are also aware that their experience has ‘become a model of political transformation’ (Shea Baird et al. 2016). With this in mind, they argue that faced with ‘adversaries who cross borders, our response must also be transnational’ and ‘the way forward is to work as part of a global municipalist network’ (Shea Baird et al. 2016). For example, ‘our ability to restrain the excesses of gigantic multinationals like Airbnb in Barcelona will depend on the success of struggles for the right to housing in San Francisco, Amsterdam, New York and Berlin’ (Shea Baird et al. 2016). A global municipalist network ‘is a way of working’ rather than a ‘formal structure’; it is a ‘political space made up of movements and organizations that may be in government, opposition or not participate in electoral politics at all’ (Shea Baird et al. 2016). The reach of this global network and a new international political space was actualised in June 2017, when Barcelona en Comú hosted representatives from municipalist platforms around the globe for the Fearless Cities International Municipalist Summit. The Summit attracted over 600 mayors, local councillors, activists and academics from over forty countries and brought together ‘for the first time, a network of municipalist platforms that has been expanding around the world’ (Shea Baird 2017). What was most evident to me at this gathering, and what I want to focus on next, was Barcelona en Comú’s commitment to ‘feminising politics’.

Barcelona en Comú and the Feminisation of Politics Kate Shea Baird and Laura Roth argue that feminising politics ‘means three things’ (Shea Baird and Roth 2017). They write: First, gender equality in institutional representation and public participation. Second, a commitment to public policies that challenge gender roles and seek to break down patriarchy. Third, a different way of doing politics, based on values and practices that put an emphasis on everyday life, relationships, the role of community and the common good. (Shea Baird and Roth 2017a)

They continue in a follow-up article: We don’t make this argument from an essentialist perspective. Gender roles are, of course, the product of patriarchy itself. Rather, we see a need for ‘feminine’ values and practices because the predominance 154

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a politics of proximity of ‘masculine’ styles pushes women, who have not been socialized into using them, out of the center of the political arena. Such a shift in the way politics is done implies attacking patriarchy at its root: through the practices where gender roles themselves are reproduced. What is more, if our goal is to deepen democracy and empower people, promoting ‘feminine’ ways of doing – collaboration, dialogue, horizontality – will help to include all sorts of disadvantaged groups and should be a priority independent of the question of gender. (Shea Baird and Roth 2017b: 103)

And, indeed, Barcelona en Comú, ‘is showing how urban politics can be feminized from the bottom up’ (Shea Baird 2015a). Shea Baird writes: The platform’s roots in the city’s neighbourhood associations and social movements, in which women have historically played a leading role, are allowing Ada Colau and the women working alongside her to shape the initiative in their own image, rather than playing by the rules of the male establishment. They are developing new forms of horizontal, networked leadership that stand in stark contrast to the hierarchal models of traditional politics. (Shea Baird 2015a)

Shea Baird tells us that ‘just over half of platform’s candidates are women’ and in 2015 many stepped ‘into electoral politics for the first time’ (Shea Baird 2015a). These women are ‘combining precarious labor, study, and childcare with their activism, and bringing these experiences to bear in the constructions of the project’ (Shea Baird 2015a).8 The increased involvement of women in these new forms of horizontal networked leadership are changing the rules of the game and developing and valuing different forms of politics, and political subjectivity. Importantly, as noted above, this feminisation of politics, writes Rubio-Pueyo, ‘goes far beyond the election of individual female leaders’ (Rubio-Pueyo 2018: 13). Feminising politics means valuing ‘ideas of dialogue, tolerance, empathy, and capacity for listening’ and ‘presents a type of leadership that is collectively built, far away from the culture too often built by macho political figures’ (Rubio-Pueyo 2018: 13). These new ways of imagining and doing politics which at their very foundation challenge patriarchal hierarchal politics seems to actualise Irigaray’s imagining of ‘women’s politics’. Since winning back the city in 2015, Barcelona en Comú takes issues of, for example, city pollution, tourism and gentrification, city mobility and big data to the city council. They are committed to 155

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irigaray and politics renewable energy and increase in social housing. Barcelona en Comú has increased social housing and buys old and derelict buildings to use for community needs rather than selling these off to private interests. In an effort to curb gentrification, banks are fined 30,000 euros if they leave apartment blocks empty and Airbnb are fined 60,000 euros for illegal apartments. City council are voting on implementing a new tram line on 23 March 2018 to help curb pollution and increase access to public transport for all. Barcelona en Comú also argue for technological sovereignty against multinational corporations’ access to personal data. They argue that the data of the city is a common good and are moving to recover these from multinationals. They have also implemented open source software and Linux over Microsoft. There have been many radical changes in the feminising of politics at the municipal level that echo Irigaray’s thought. However, the daily struggle against the institutions ‘prescribed by the patriarchal system’ is real. In the 2016 documentary Alcadessa, Ada Colau, the mayoress of Barcelona, speaks frankly and emotionally of the daily struggle to change patriarchal political institutions while trying to embody a feminist or women’s politics. In the short video, Dos Años Despues (Two Years Later), that the platform released in 2017, we hear some of the women councillors of Barcelona en Comú, Eulàlia Corbella, Gemma Tarafa, Laura Pérez, Gala Pin, Janet Sanz, talk about their experiences entering into these patriarchal institutions. While they talk about their individual struggles and experiences of, for example, being called ‘honey’ or ‘sweetheart’ in the middle of a meeting, what is quite clear is the woman-to-woman sociality that exists among these women. Again, I hear the echoes of Irigaray’s early writings and I repeat Irigaray’s words on ‘women’s politics’. Recall she notes that women’s politics will be very different because when women want to escape from exploitation, they do not merely destroy a few ‘prejudices,’ they disrupt the entire order of dominant values, economic, social, moral, and sexual. They call into question all existing theory, all thought, all language, inasmuch as these are monopolized by men and men alone. They challenge the very foundation of our social and cultural order, whose organization has been prescribed by the patriarchal system. (Irigaray 1985b: 165)

And, as Shea Baird notes, this ‘isn’t just about feminizing politics – it’s about feminist politics. The platform and its candidates, both women and men, agree that if their “democratic revolution” isn’t 156

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a politics of proximity feminist, it won’t be deserving of the name’ (Shea Baird 2015a). The road toward a feminization of politics, a ‘women’s politics’ in Irigarayan terms, is not easy but it has, it seems, started.

Notes 1. hooks writes: ‘The tensions between service outside one’s home, family, and kin network, service provided to white folks which took time and energy, and the effort of black women to conserve enough of themselves to provide service (care and nurturance) within their own families and communities is one of the many factors that has historically distinguished the lot of black women in patriarchal white supremacist society from that of black men’ (hooks 1990: 77). 2. Irigaray writes: ‘Two events of our time compel us to rethink our relation to the other as other: 1. the blending of races and ethnicities that is now a part of our daily landscape, 2. the recognition of the importance of gender from a culture point of view’ (Irigaray 2002a: 126). 3. See Elisha Foust (2013) for an interesting perspective on this. 4. ‘Two gestures appear necessary: to reground identity and to reground community constitutions’ (Irigaray 2002a: 3). 5. She continues: ‘Love takes place in the opening to self that is the place of welcoming the transcendence of the other. . . . It alone seems to be able to refound the family in the direction of a historical progress that manifests itself . . . as a more real democracy at the political level . . .’ (Irigaray 2002a: 115–16) 6. This is a point that echoes and I think responds to an argument that Fanon makes in Black Skin, White Masks. He writes: ‘The white family is the agent of a certain system. The society is indeed the sum of all the families in it. The family is an institution that prefigures a broader institution: the social or the national group. Both turn on the same axes. The white family is the workshop in which one is trained and shaped for life in society . . . The family structure is internalized in the super ego . . . and projected into [though I would say social] political behaviour. As long as he remains among his own people, the little black follows very nearly the same course as the little white. But if he goes to Europe, he will have to reappraise his lot’ (Fanon 2008: 115). 7. Rubio-Pueyo writes: ‘Rebel Cities, the Right to the City, the Commons, the rejection of neoliberal policies toward urban growth – all these, as well as many other ideas and practices, were important ingredients in the formation of the municipalist method. Based on these frameworks, a number of research initiatives – such as the Observatorio DESC (Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Observatory) or activist research collectives like the Observatorio Metropolitano, but also alternative publishing houses such as Tracantes de Sueños or self-education 157

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irigaray and politics programs like Nociones Comunes – were key to processing and elaborating these theoretical references. Integrating them with more immediate concerns on the ground and translating them into political proposals and strategies, these and similar initiatives have provided much of the critical analysis and technical knowledge later incorporated into the Municipalist Confluences’ (Rubio-Pueyo 2018: 6). 8. As Kate Shea Baird notes: ‘One of the first steps taken after renting the BEC [Barcelona en Comú] headquarters was to set up a play corner where parents . . . could leave their kids while they worked’ (Shea Baird 2015a).

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Conclusion

I hope, in conclusion, that Irigaray’s comments on women’s politics can be understood alongside her notions of love and desire that are refigured as non-appropriative intermediaries between sexuate subjects. These relations must be understood within the context of her argument for new subjectivities. Irigaray’s work is both philosophical and political. It is a political–philosophical project, a politics that is founded upon the recognition of the sexuate other in the emergence of subjectivity, and gives rise to a politics of grace and wonder, and requires the courage to step into the unknown, to push the boundaries, to crack open time and to invent the new.1 Irigaray starts with refiguring subjectivity via the most intimate and personal level of breath, love and desire as the beginning of a new epoch, a new reality, for it is within these most intimate relations that our lives begin and our reality is constructed in the first place. It within these contexts that we read Irigaray’s political philosophy as challenge to liberal multiculturalism and western liberal feminism. Irigaray’s thinking of a ‘women’s politics’ that challenges the ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ must be read in the context of her overall political–philosophical project I have outlined in this book. Irigaray concludes Between East and West echoing the call she announced in ‘Sexual Difference’ almost thirty years before. At that time Irigaray wrote: Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age . . . each age has one issue to think through, and one only. Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our “salvation” if we thought it through. (Irigaray 1993a: 5)

And, while Irigaray’s thought has unfolded in various ways since her initial writings in Speculum, what I hope to have demonstrated here is that the guiding light of her overall political–philosophical project has not changed. Consequently, Irigaray ends Between East and West echoing these early claims, writing: ‘Some ages demand the change of the horizon itself. This is true of our age’ (Irigaray 2002a: 145). 159

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irigaray and politics

Note 1. Recall Grosz’s words. She writes: ‘The task is not so much to plan for the future . . . It is to make the future, to invent it. And this space, and time, for invention, for the creation of the new, can come about only through the dislocation of and dissociation with the present rather than simply its critique. Only if the present presents itself as fractured, cracked by the interventions of the past and the promises of the future, can the new be invented, welcomed, and affirmed’ (Grosz 2004: 261).

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Afterword

The kind of feminism we seek is already emerging internationally, in struggles across the globe: . . . Together, they herald a new international feminist movement with an expanded agenda – at once anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-heterosexist, and anti-neoliberal. (Angela Davis et al. 2017) The wait for our people has been too long. A new wave of youth has emerged that is certainly a product of their time. As the Rhodes Must Fall Movement eloquently asserts, ‘Dear History‚ this revolution has women‚ gays‚ queers and trans. Remember that. #RhodesMustFall’. We have emerged in a time where there are contested notions of the roles of gender and tradition within contemporary South Africa and abroad, where the centre of power is no longer solely defined by masculinity; and where the faces of colonial ideology in our landscape is questioned. We are the millennial generation that choose to define and represent our own narratives. (Sethembile Msezane 2015)

On 11 February 1990 the world watched as Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela walked free from jail with Winnie Madikizela-Mandela by his side. I was ten years old. I came of age during the dismantling of apartheid and entered my first year of high school the year the country began creating a new multi-racial government. By the time the first democratic elections happened on 27 April 1994 I was fifteen years old. I was in my last year of school the year the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up, which included public hearings broadcast on national television and radio, documenting and bearing witness to the horrors of apartheid; it continued until 1998. Reflecting on these years now I understand my high school education took place during the massive curriculum reforms aimed at dismantling institutionalised racism in South Africa. As teenagers embedded in this historical moment of change and the transition to a free democracy, we certainly had some sense of the gravity of our changing curriculum which gave us some insight into the history of the place we called home. We read stories that were previously banned under the apartheid government and in class we explored through 161

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irigaray and politics literature and plays, with the help of brilliant and fearless teachers, nuanced understandings of the ways in which race, class and gender are always entangled. These stories helped us to understand one another better, as well as the new world unfolding around us. I did not recognise the enormity of the decolonial moment that enveloped my high school years in South Africa until many years later. In 1997, when I entered the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, I was part of the first generation of South Africans to enter university after apartheid had officially ended. During my first years there I thus encountered anti-racist and feminist theory from within a country grieving the murderous years of apartheid, dismantling institutionalised racism and literally rewriting its history. The learning that happened during this time came from lecturers as well as from my diverse cohort of fellow students and friends. We were a mixed bunch, full of youthful enthusiasm brought together for the first time by the promises of university education. While many students were overcoming significant social and economic barriers, and some were returning to South Africa from exile, it seemed that, regardless of our backgrounds, most of us were hopeful and invested in our futures as well as the future of the newly named ‘Rainbow Nation’. While not without its disruptions and problems, indeed the South African Police Force armoured vehicles (Casspirs) were an occasional presence on campus, new ways of being in the world were made tangible in our everyday experiences, and the imaginings of better futures sustained us like the heavy humid air we breathed in sub-tropical Durban. These were exciting times to be a young woman reflecting on who I was and my place in the world. Our daily realities, our lived experiences, our bodies, our histories were all so different from one another that even to think that we were all in the same position was impossible. However, within these differences we were able to find a certain shared experience between us as human beings and, at times, as women. As a young woman forming my own identity within this shifting socio-political context, I learned that religious, political and historical ideas of ‘truth’ must constantly be questioned, and these are, crucially, not fixed. The symbolic landscape of South African culture(s) was changing in ways that were impossible to foresee. Our new president, Nelson Mandela, had only been released from prison on charges of terrorism four years prior to winning the first democratic election and leading the country. We understood contradiction; we lived it. Truth was certainly not fixed, and I understood that those in power wrote the history books. I did not learn this from history 162

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afterword books or philosophy lectures; I lived and participated in this truth. During this time, I became aware, probably because I was involved in theatre making, of the way in which our bodies signified personal and social locations, geographically and socio-historically. I am referring here to the idea that our bodies not only signify and are given meaning by culture but also have the potential to inform and create culture. The symbolised meanings of, for example, sex or race, are not fixed, and neither are they simply reducible to a natural (in the sense of biological) difference, nor to a social or cultural difference. Our conceptions of race and sex and gender sit in relation to one another within a complicated matrix. Irigaray refers to this idea in Between East and West as the ‘diverse symbolic constructions’ of age, sex and race that vary greatly from culture to culture (Irigaray 2002a: 140). Perhaps as a consequence of my ‘politics of location’, my ‘embedded and embodied social position’, when I first engaged with Irigaray’s early work in a philosophy seminar in Australia in 2004 I could not really comprehend the criticisms of her work, in particular the criticism that she does not adequately theorise race.1 Given my background, I had not experienced, theorised or imagined ‘race’ as somehow split or separate from gender, and while I now appreciate how white feminism in its various manifestations does this, it was through my own intersectional and perhaps what we might now call decolonial lens that I encountered Irigaray’s work for the first time. I had an intuition that there was something more to Irigaray’s philosophy than the criticisms suggested, and it is this intuition that grounded my PhD research which developed into this book. In my early reading of her work, I recognised Irigaray employing tactics such as mimicry in ways similar to those that were used in the theatre and literature I had encountered during my studies in South Africa. Using patriarchal stereotypes, images and so called ‘scientific facts’ about women, Irigaray self-consciously assumes a feminine position in her writing in order to highlight the insanity and contradictions that western patriarchy assumes and defines women to be. In South Africa we used this tactic repeatedly in performances, showing through performance the explicit racial and gendered stereotypes that the patriarchal apartheid state was based upon. Assuming the feminine deliberately, for Irigaray, highlights the impossibility of all women being able to speak as autonomously defined subjects within western patriarchal culture. However, assuming the feminine in a deliberate and intentional manner also enables the possibility for change. Rather than arguing for gender neutrality or that we 163

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irigaray and politics ought to go beyond culture and nature, beyond our symbolic and our gendered bodies, Irigaray seeks to demonstrate how nature and culture, body and spirit, are intricately connected, that we can in no sense escape either.2 Myth-making and stories are important for Irigaray and I think this is one reason why she uses mimicry as a strategic tool, especially in her early work. The reasons that she does so are perhaps similar to those that motivated many storytellers to use mimicry as a tool to challenge the stereotypes that the apartheid state relied upon. This strategy, often used with humour, worked to break open stereotypes, uncover unheard voices, stories that had been silenced. Mimicry allows the contradictions of lived experience to be presented, to be heard, to become legitimised. It authorises new understandings of truth and new histories to be told.3 Little did I realise that the stories I was engaging with on a daily basis during my teenage years, the multiple different stories of South Africans young and old, men and women, of different cultures and races, had a name that I did not learn until I was sitting in a drama class at university in Australia. Apparently, this was Postcolonial Theory. My daily reality had become a discipline and subject of study in the west. But something troubling had occurred in the translation from my lived experience to the texts and to the theories we were studying: as an English/South African/White woman, my life experience did not fit neatly into the coloniser/colonised binary. Our studies explored notions of the oppressed other and we deconstructed power at work in various different political environments, and yet, I felt as if I, along with my alumni, had been submitted to the ‘ready-made grids’ of phallocentrism, fossilised, with no regard to my own unique experiences as a woman, our own figurations and cartographies.4 The nuances of the intersections of race, class and gender were, in order to be understood in the western academy, lost in this translation. Unfortunately, it seems it is not only Australian universities that have this problem. The decolonial moment and promise of transformation that enveloped my teenage years has since worn thin and in 2015, as South Africa was celebrating two decades of democracy, students at the University of Cape Town began calling attention to the lack of any real transformation in the university. As Kealeboga Ramaru writes: Black students spoke of the systematic exclusion that manifested itself through a Eurocentric curriculum, minimal staff transformation – where the majority of academics in senior positions and management were 164

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afterword white – and, more shocking, that the University of Cape Town did not have a Black Womxn professor in 2015. Students also spoke about the physical and existential exclusion that manifested itself through the culture of the University, which creates comfort for white, middle-class, heterosexual students, and causes great discomfort for students who do not fit the mould. The names of buildings and symbols were also an aspect of exclusion. The statue of Cecil John Rhodes which occupied the centre of the campus was a representation of all of these things to the students and its removal became an important start to the decolonial project. (Ramaru 2017: 90)

Ramaru describes the beginnings of the Rhodes Must Fall movement and it is important to document that this movement was brought to life by ‘Black feminists, Black queer people, and Black womxn’ (Ramaru 2017: 92). Ramaru notes ‘We started the movement and, for that reason, the politics that dictated our lives and radicalised our existence had to be part of the conversation’ (Ramaru 2017: 92). The Rhodes Must Fall movement was an intersectional queer Black feminist movement that won an enormous symbolic battle: the university removed the statue on 9 April 2015. This was a huge moment, especially for these organisers, but also for us further away. The call for decolonisation of universities and curricula continues, in South Africa and further afield. What struck me, however, when reading Ramaru’s reflections on the Rhodes Must Fall movement was the particular and ongoing gendered violence that continues today, even within progressive social movements. It is a reminder that this violence happens around the world, in every space where there are men and women. It thus seems an urgent and much needed task to make links between the work of different activists and thinkers, including and especially those working and writing on gender, race, class and disability. We urgently need to better understand the entanglement of these axes of oppression in order to imagine more ethical futures. We require new ways of approaching one another that recognise and positively nourish the intersection of differences at play in the emergence of subjectivity. While not without its own limitations and challenges, I have found, in Irigaray’s philosophy, a sustained commitment to uncovering the contradictions of lived experiences of women. Irigaray’s work seeks to challenge the neutrality of the conception of the rational modern subject in western thought, and if we understand this as her central challenge, we will begin to open spaces to make connections with decolonial themes and thinkers. I believe that thinking through 165

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irigaray and politics aspects of Gayatri Spivak’s work, as well as other important scholars, like Irene Watson, Gloria Anzaldúa, Angela Davis, Nkiru Nzegwu and Maria Lugones, alongside Irigaray’s philosophy of sexuate difference, can provide us with novel ways of negotiating these ‘always evolving’ relations between us and, ultimately, new understandings of the political.

Notes 1. For more on the notion of a politics of location see Rosi Braidotti (2011: 3) and for the criticism of Irigaray that I refer to here see Penelope Deutscher (2002). 2. As we see in the book, there are connections with Donna Haraway’s important work on nature–culture relation. For more on this see Haraway (2000: 292–3) and Margaret Toye (2012: 185). 3. Only some twenty years later and during the final stages of my PhD research did I begin to have an appreciation of just how revolutionary the ideas and texts we, as young women, were engaging with. I am eternally grateful to the risks taken by my schoolteachers, university lecturers (see Loots 1996, 1997) and fellow friends and students in South Africa who all, in one way or another, brought these stories to life. As young women, in the newly democratic South Africa, these stories were multiple, complex and ours; stories of our friends, our sisters, our mothers, our aunties, our grandmothers. These stories positively symbolised the complex relations between women in ways that had previously been silenced. A few stand out examples are: Gcina Mhlophe’s short story “The Toilet” (1987) and her play Have You Seen Zandile? (1988), Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions (1988), Susan Pam-Grant’s play “Curl Up and Dye” (1993), the protest theatre play You Strike the Woman You Strike the Rock (Kani 1994) workshopped primarily by Black South African women (see Loots 1997). See also: Athol Fugard et al. (1986). 4. See Braidotti’s use of these terms in her philosophy of nomadic subjects (Braidotti 2011).

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irigaray and politics Whitford, Margaret (1989). ‘Rereading Irigaray.’ In Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, edited by Teresa Brennan. London and New York: Routledge. Whitford, Margaret (1991a). Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. London and New York: Routledge. Whitford, Margaret, ed. (1991b). The Irigaray Reader: Luce Irigaray. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Whitford, Margaret (1991c). ‘Irigaray’s Body Symbolic.’ Hypatia 6 (3): 97–110. Whitford, Margaret (1991d). ‘Irigaray, Utopia and the Death Drive.’ In Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought, edited by C. Burke, N. Schor and M. Whitford. New York: Columbia University Press. Whitford, Margaret (1994). ‘Reading Irigaray in the Nineties.’ In Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought, edited by C. Burke, N. Schor and M. Whitford. New York: Columbia University Press. Whitford, Margaret (2003). ‘Irigaray and the Culture of Narcissism.’ Theory, Culture & Society 20 (3): 27–41. Zechner, Manuela (2015). ‘Barcelona en Comú: The City as Horizon for Radical Democracy.’ ROAR Magazine, 4 March. Ziarek, Krzysztof (2000). ‘Proximities: Irigaray and Heidegger on Difference.’ Continental Philosophy Review 33 (2): 133–58.

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Index

Braidotti, R., 4, 8n, 69n, 130n, 166n Butler, J., 4, 106n

Algeria, 119–20, 131–2n alterity, 123–8, 132n, 136, 145 Antigone, 73, 88, 98, 105–6n autonomy, 69n, 153

capitalism, 113, 117, 130n, 134, 137, 138, 139, 149–51 capitalist, 32, 42n, 113, 117, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141, 147, 151, 159 Castoriadis, C., 4, 37n Chanter, T., 8n, 106n, 124, 133n Colau, A., 155, 156 coloniality, 8n, 28, 34, 36n, 43n; see also decolonial; postcolonial community, 5, 6, 80, 84n, 88, 98, 135–6, 138, 140–1, 144–5, 147–50, 153–4, 156, 157n

Barcelona en Comú, 153– 6, 158n Beauvoir, S de., 66n, 119 being being-otherwise, 25, 83 being-Two, 9n, 72, 88–9, 90, 110 coloniality of being, 43n ontological, 33, 49, 69, 66n, 68n, 84n, 95 biology, 3, 7n, 8n, 11, 16, 17, 32, 36n, 48, 123, 163; see also nature Bion, W., 12, 14, 23 body body and psychoanalysis, 15, 16, 17, 20, 31, 58, 72 body and spirit, 46 maternal, 13, 19, 26, 32, 34, 40, 44–5, 48, 52, 53, 54–5, 58, 86–7, 99, 125–6 sexuate, 49, 65, 69, 72, 73 Boulous Walker, M., 10n, 39n, 58, 59–60, 63, 104, 106n, 107n, 132n

decolonial, 6, 34, 35, 68n, 82, 113, 162, 163–5 see also coloniality; postcolonial democracy, 7, 153, 155, 157n, 161, 164; see also Irigaray, Luce: Democracy Begins Between Two Derrida, J., 123, 132n, 133n; see also différance Descartes, R., 3, 36n, 102, 103

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irigaray and politics family, 5, 6, 73, 97–100, 106n, 117, 131n, 135–42, 144–9, 157 Fanon, F., 33–4, 37n, 39n, 41n, 42n, 66n, 68n, 123, 145, 157n Federici, S., 6, 8n, 67n, 147, 148–51, 152, 153 feminine, 8n, 21, 34, 38, 41n, 52–6, 60, 62, 63, 69n, 71n, 87–90, 94, 105, 115, 124, 125, 133n, 136, 154, 155, 163 body, 26, 32, 52, 64, 87 imaginary, 26, 44–5, 72, 86, 115 language, 59–61 sexuality, 29, 55, 68n, 109, 115, 116 subjectivity, 26, 27, 28, 30, 33, 34, 44–7, 49–50, 54–6, 58–60, 65, 66n, 69n, 72, 77, 78–83, 84n, 86–7, 90–1, 93, 95–9, 101, 105, 109, 110, 114, 115, 117–18, 125–6, 134–5, 139, 143; see also rhythmic becoming, 56 symbolic, 79 femininity, 7n, 25, 27–30, 31, 36, 41n, 46, 75, 89, 109; see also Freud: ‘Femininity’ Feuerbach, L., 77–9, 84n Freud, S., 12, 21, 24, 38n, 39n, 41n, 59, 69n, 70n, 74, 116, 132n, 134 Bodily-ego, 12–16, 18, 38n ‘Femininity’, 12, 27–31, 36n ‘Negation’, 21, 38n sublimation, 53–4, 68n, 75

desire, 11, 15, 19, 29, 30, 33, 94, 98, 101, 110, 123, 136, 142, 143, 159; see also jouissance female desire, 8n, 46, 57, 61, 109; see also sexuality: female repressed desire, 98–9 space–time–desire, 5, 48, 53, 56, 63, 72, 104, 126, 129, 135; see also interval women’s desire, 13, 31, 32, 41n, 54, 60, 67n, 69n, 81–2, 84n, 115, 116; see also sexuality: female Deutscher, P., 4, 9n, 38n, 106n, 166n dialectics, 5, 18, 41n, 55, 57, 65, 73, 79, 87–93, 96, 98–102, 104, 105, 106n, 110, 123, 128, 135, 136; see also Diotima: Diotima’s dialectic, 57, 91–3, 106n, 128 différance, 123, 132n; see also Derrida, J. Diotima, 90, 91, 100, 102, 104–5, 110 Diotima’s dialectic, 57, 91–2, 102, 105, 106n, 128; see also dialectics divine, 24, 45, 93, 94 feminine divine, 5, 46, 55, 72, 74, 75–80, 84n, 98 sexuate divine, 90, 93, 106n see also Irigaray, Luce: ‘Divine Women’; horizons; sensible transcendental; yoga essentialism, 3–4, 8n, 9n, 69n, 154

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index genealogies, 50 female, 74–5 feminine, 61, 72 maternal, 46 mother–daughter, 139 genealogy, 10n, 50–1, 74, 100, 102, 121; see also genealogies globalisation, 7n God, 11, 24, 40n, 50–2, 55, 57, 63, 68n, 75–9, 85n; see also divine grace, 6, 56, 103, 143, 159 Grosz, E., 4, 8n, 9n, 16n, 17–18, 36n, 38n, 45–6, 84–5n, 160n Grunberger, B., 12, 14, 21, 23–5, 40n

see also feminine: imaginary; masculine: imaginary intermediary, 6, 52, 88, 91–2, 94, 100, 103–4, 123, 136; see also interval interval, 52–3, 55–6, 62–4, 68n, 69n, 73, 88, 94, 96–7, 106n, 123; see also desire: space–time–desire Irigaray, Luce An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 1–2, 4, 25, 40n, 41n, 48, 49–57, 63, 68n, 69n, 87–94, 96, 97, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106n, 110, 122, 124 –7, 133n, 135 Between East and West, 9n, 34, 96, 104, 106n, 108, 139, 141–5, 147–8, 157n, 159, 163 Democracy Begins between Two, 49, 83–4, 150 Divine Women, 68n, 76–8 I Love to You, 86–90, 97–107, 137 Speculum, 3, 15, 28–33, 38n, 65, 70n, 75, 84n, 87–9, 91, 93, 99, 105, 131n, 134, 159 This Sex Which is Not One, 3, 27, 38n, 41n, 45, 46–7, 48–9, 59–62, 59, 67n, 82, 116, 117, 131n, 132n , 135, 137, 150, 156

Haraway, D., 106n, 166n Hegel, G., 5, 87–91, 93, 97–102, 105n, 106n, 134, 135, 136, 137 Hill Collins, P., 136, 140–1, 147, 150 Hom, S., 17, 27, 34, 36n, 38n, 39n, 41n, 66n hooks, b., 6, 42n, 43n, 66n, 136, 139–41, 147, 150, 157n horizons, 50, 61, 65, 73, 76, 77, 79, 82, 93–6, 98–100, 101–2, 106, 134, 143, 146, 155, 159 imaginary anal, 13–14, 24–5, 31–2, 42n feminine, 44–5, 72, 86, 115 masculine, 12, 13, 19, 20, 23–4, 26, 29, 31, 35, 36n, 39n, 45, 47, 97

Jones, R., 7n, 9n, 36n, 58, 62–3, 65, 69n, 70n, 71n, 76, 106n

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irigaray and politics Mbembe, A., 41n, 42n, 43n mimesis, 4, 13, 25, 36n, 87 Mortenson, E., 4, 8n, 9n, 48 mother–daughter relationship, 5, 46, 59, 61, 72, 73–6, 80, 90, 94, 109, 117, 139 municipalism, 151–3 myth, 3, 5, 8n, 11, 39n, 46, 47, 51, 61, 66n, 73–6, 83, 164 déréliction, 54, 74–5

jouissance, 56; see also desire Klein, M., 12, 14, 21–3 labial logics, 5, 44, 46, 48, 57–60, 63, 65, 97, 106n, 116, 123, 132n; see also two lips Lacan, J., 4, 5, 12, 14, 16–21, 24, 27–8, 31, 33–4, 37n, 38n, 39n, 41n, 57–8, 61, 70n, 95, 134 Levinas, E., 124, 128, 132n, 133n, 134, 145–6 listening, 9n, 102–5, 107, 110, 143, 155 love, 3, 5, 6, 27, 46, 57, 63, 64, 70, 73, 79, 87–8, 90–1, 99–100, 118, 124–6, 128, 136, 140–2, 157, 159 Hegel, 97–9, 137 love as intermediary, 88, 91–4, 97, 100–5, 107, 123 love of sameness, 33, 40n, 41n,

narcissism, 3, 12–4, 20–2, 24–7, 30–5, 37n, 39n, 41n, 44–5, 54, 65, 74, 79, 80, 86, 97, 98, 101, 106n, 115, 142, 144 nature, 4, 40n, 69 inert, 48 reduction of feminine to nature, 32, 34, 44, 99 relationship with culture, 73, 87, 92, 93, 96, 98, 100, 102, 105n, 106n, 144, 164, 166n sexuate nature, 54 see also biology

Martin, A., 77–9, 84n Marx, K., 141 feminist Marxism, 6, 42n, 67n, 135–9, 142 masculine imaginary, 12, 13, 19, 20, 23–4, 26, 29, 31, 35, 36n, 39n, 45, 47, 97 subjectivity, 3, 13, 25, 26, 28, 31–2, 36n, 44–5, 51–6, 58, 60, 65, 82, 87, 89–91, 93, 98, 99, 101–2, 110, 112, 121, 122, 125 symbolic, 59, 63, 64

phallocentrism, 46, 49, 53, 61, 64, 92, 139, 164 placental economies, 5, 46, 48, 57, 62, 65, 72, 73, 76, 96 politics feminising, feminisation, 154–5 international new municipalism, 151 women’s, 5, 6, 47, 50, 56, 59, 67n, 81, 134, 147, 150, 155, 156–7, 159

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index sexuate difference, 2, 3, 6, 7, 21, 25, 34, 44, 49, 50, 52, 57, 72–3, 77, 79, 86, 89–90, 93–4, 96–7, 100–2, 105, 108, 110–11, 124–7, 130n, 133n, 134, 143, 144, 150, 166 rights, 5, 72, 80, 83, 106n Spivak, G., 6, 36n, 68n, 108–33, 135, 166 Stone, A., 9n, 98–9, 106n subject; see also feminine: subjectivity; masculine: subjectivity symbolic feminine, 79 masculine, 59, 63, 64

postcolonial, 82, 108, 109, 111, 113, 119–22, 127–8, 130n, 131n, 146, 164; see also coloniality; decolonial psychoanalysis see Freud; Lacan race, 4, 6, 9n, 17, 20, 28, 34, 37n, 38n, 39n, 41n, 42n, 43n, 49, 50, 66n, 67n, 68n, 118, 129n, 135, 141–2, 157n, 162–5 racial difference, 9, 38n racism, 33, 43n, 66n, 82, 140, 161, 162 white supremacy, 43n, 139 rape, 81, 89 rhythmic becoming, 44, 50, 55–6, 62, 69n, 94, 96, 104, 110, 143; see also subject: subjectivity

Tantra, 106n two lips, 5, 58–65, 72, 73, 76, 87, 97, 106n, 117, 132n; see also labial logics

Schwab, G., 8n, 63–4, 71n, 101–2, 105, 106n, 108 sensible transcendental, 62, 73, 91, 94, 96, 106n, 125, 135 sexuality, 34, 67n, 68n, 130n, 141, 142 female sexuality, 11, 13, 27, 29–31, 57, 60, 62, 70n, 116, 125, 131n, 148 heterosexuality, 4, 9n, 123

Whitford, M., 4, 8n, 9n, 12–27, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36n, 37n, 38n, 39n, 40n, 41n, 54, 68n, 74, 75, 106, 134 Winnicott, D., 4, woman–to–woman sociality, 2, 73, 75, 79, 95, 156 wonder, 6, 102–4, 143, 159 yoga, 66n, 106n

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