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Luce Irigaray
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 This
Sex Which Is Not One by
Luce Irigaray, Catherine Porter (Translator), Carolyn
Burke (Translator)
In This Sex Which Is
Not One, Luce Irigaray elaborates on some of the major themes of
Speculum of the Other Woman, her landmark work on the status of
women in Western philosophical discourse and in psychoanalytic
theory. In eleven acute and widely ranging essays, Irigaray
reconsiders the question of female sexuality in a variety of
contexts that are relevant to current discussion of feminist
theory and practice. Among the topics she treats are the
implications of the thought of Freud and Lacan for understanding
womanhood and articulating a feminine discourse; classic views on
the significance of the difference between male and female sex
organs; and the experience of erotic pleasure in men and in
women. She also takes up explicitly the question of economic
exploitation of women; in an astute reading of Marx she shows that
the subjection of woman has been institutionalized by her
reduction to an object of economic exchange. Throughout
Irigaray seeks to dispute and displace male-centered structures of
language and thought through a challenging writing practice that
takes a first step toward a woman's discourse, a discourse that
would put an end to Western culture's enduring phallocentrism. Making
more direct and accessible the subversive challenge of Speculum of
the Other Woman, this volume -- skillfully translated by Catherine
Porter with Carolyn Burke -- will be essential reading for anyone
seriously concerned with contemporary feminist issues. About
the Author Luce Irigaray, a trained
psychoanalyst, holds two doctorates, one in linguistics and one in
philosophy. The publication of Speculum of the Other Woman
in 1974 provoked the wrath of the Lacanian faction, leading to her
expulsion from the Freudian School and from her teaching position
at Vincennes.
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By Sean McDaniel. In his book
"Capital" Marx attempts to explain the hidden
underpinnings of the capitalist economic system, and to reveal the
rather illusionary nature of the relationship between the
materiality or utility of a thing, and its perceived
"value" in a capitalist society. In her book "The
Sex Which is not One," Luce Irigaray argues that there is
another similar system that pre-dates and is probably a
requirement for capitalism, and yet remains independent of
capitalism, that being the subjugation of women as a commodity to
men. While for Marx capitalism is a only a stage in the larger
process of the evolution of economic systems, for Irigaray
"from the very origin of private property
and the patriarchal family, social exploitation occurred [. . .]
[A]ll the social regimes of "History" are based upon
the exploitation of one "class" of producers, namely
women" (173).
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Excerpt:
The first time we discussed Luce Irigaray in class,
there seemed to be quite a bit of hostility or discomfort about
the author, her philosophical and rhetorical styles, and (our
perceptions of) French feminisms.
I am hoping that as we have passed through some
of the major influences on continental intellectual life of the
twentieth century, we might better understand or perhaps even
appreciate Irigaray's programme, methods and ideologies. Since we
will not be spending time on Irigaray in class, I thought that I
would use this paper to reconsider some of our concerns from
September along with a little commentary on the short article we
are reading for this week. I am certainly not an Irigaray expert,
so I would appreciate any corrections or criticism you may send to
the listserve.
"What is she trying to do?"
Irigaray's theoretical vocabulary seems a little
more familiar now that we have read psychoanalytic and Marxist
critics. "Radical analysis" looks a lot like the
superstructure-base diagram we discussed in class for several
weeks; a vector of causality connects a society's economic reality
to its ideological construct, or vice versa depending upon the
critic. Althusser, Gramsci, and even Bourdieu demonstrated that
ideology plays a central role in the formation of social reality.
Like Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous, the other two major figures
of 1970s French feminism, Irigaray passed briefly through a
controversial intellectual circle called "Psychanalyse et
Politique." Thus, as a radical *psychoanalytic* intellectual,
Irigaray mixes radical analysis with Lacanian and Freudian theory
in order to deconstruct patriarchal hegemony in the connected
real, symbolic and imaginary orders. Hence her unorthodox prose --
a reaction against and within a symbolic order complicit in
domination.
The title of Irigaray's book, "This sex
which is not one," makes use of the polyvalence of the French
word, "sexe." As in English, in French "sexe"
denotes both sexual category and the sexual activity. Irigaray
plays on yet a third French meaning for the word -- the sexual
organ, usually the penis. By a strange coincidence, the noun with
its definite article, "le sexe" may be used to designate
either "the fair sex" or "the penis." With
such a title, Irigaray is pointing to the slippage between the
real, the imaginary, and the symbolic which she plays off of in
her resistant re-reading of Freud and the construction of the
feminine...
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