Today, I'm sharing a few key ideas from Luce Irigaray's book
An Ethics of Sexual Difference.
In this book, Irigaray posits that sexual difference might be the issue of our time.
And she's interested in general in accounting for fundamental difference
in a way that's not reducing difference to categories of sameness.
And so she thinks that sexual difference in particular has
something to teach us here.
And I'll say more later about what I think she means by that, and
how it's not just as simple as like men and women are different.
That is not what she means.
In any case, let's go with this for a moment and then I'll come back to that.
So she thinks that The other is essentially a mystery and we need to
experience awe in the face of the other.
Desire is a fundamental directedness toward the other
that doesn't seek to reduce or grasp the otherness of the other.
She's inspired by Descartes' idea that the only passion that
doesn't have an opposite is wonder.
She believes that we need to rediscover wonder in the face of the other in
order to properly ground philosophy.
And so she's in line with Levinas in thinking that ethics should be first
philosophy rather than ontology or traditionally understood metaphysics.
And she thinks that we can think about difference
without hierarchy.
And so it's an ethics of difference, an ethics of sexual difference,
that is removed from a sense of hierarchy or calculation.
Ethics doesn't relate to prescribing rules, maxims or norms, but is
instead about responsiveness and orientation towards the other.
So in that sense, pretty similar to Levinas, whom
I've also done a video about.
And it's also partly why Irigaray is often known as a difference feminist,
because her particular orientation towards feminist theory is not wanting to
abolish difference, um, through say like equal treatment or something like that,
but instead to preserve and respect it.
She thinks that oftentimes feminist efforts to attain the equality of the
sexes or genders ends up re inscribing
masculine values and that we actually need to reevaluate our values altogether
and to draw attention to the values that have traditionally been undervalued.
Um, values like wonder, for instance.
So wanna just read a quick passage from her on this.
She says, or she asks, Has a worldwide erosion of the gains won in women
struggles occurred because of the failure to lay foundations different from those
on which the world of men is constructed.
And she says a little bit further down, that a revolution in thought
and ethics is needed if the work of sexual difference is to take place.
We need to reinterpret everything concerning the relations between
the subject and discourse, the subject in the world, the subject
and the cosmic, the microcosmic, and the mascul, and the macrocosmic.
Everything was getting ahead of myself there, everything beginning
with the way in which the subjects has always been written in the
masculine form as man, even when it claimed to be universal or neutral.
So for her, it's not enough to reevaluate the concept of
subjectivity and extend it to women, a category that has traditionally
been denied this, uh, subjectivity.
Instead, we need to fundamentally rethink the very categories of philosophy
because they might implicitly have masculinist, values inscribed in them.
And so, for instance, she thinks that the notion of subjectivity implies a
sort of unity and a desire to grasp what is outside of itself that is phallic.
And so I wanna say here, Irigaray is deeply influenced by psychoanalysis
and specifically the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, although they had
a lot of issues with each other, that's a fascinating story too.
Um, I don't think she's a big fan there, but nonetheless, she's influenced
by Lacan on one main point, which is this idea of the symbolic order.
So for Irigaray , when we talk about the phallic, we aren't
talking about a body part, right?
, we're not talking about a penis.
We're talking about a symbolic way of understanding a, a
category or, um, maybe concept.
We could say that that organizes our world in ways that we don't even recognize it.
And in contrast with this fall conception of the subject as unitary.
Irigaray wants to draw attention to the figure of the lips.
And so she's kind of playing on this, uh, anatomical difference
between phallus and vulva.
But as I said, this is really happening on a symbolic level,
and so it's not for her.=,
A matter of just like.
The essences of different sexes and genders.
Um, Irigaray has sometimes been understood as a gender essentialist,
but because of the way that she's using psychoanalytic theory and specifically
the concept of the symbolic order, that is not quite what's going on.
There are a lot of great scholars who have written about this.
So the idea of the lips for Irigaray helps figure a doubling.
And that doubling is a way of revaluing the traditional notion of selfhood that
is not rooted in singular subjectivity.
The lips are two, but they're not dichotomous.
And I wanna read another quote from her here.
She says.
The threshold of the lips are strangers to dichotomy and oppositions gathered
one against the other, but without any possible suture, at least of a real kind.
They do not absorb the world into or through themselves, provided they
are not misused and reduced to a means of consumption or consummation.
The offers shape of welcome, but do not assimilate, reduce, or
swallow up a sort of doorway to voluptuous this and so on and so on.
So, She thinks that this figure of the lips can help us understand and embrace
that does not reduce two things to one.
It's against a notion of fusion, and this is this image of the between that she
later develops in terms of the interval.
An interval, which she says is the space that is, is occupied by desire,
indicates that there's always a remainder in our experience of the other.
There's always a gap between self and other.
And to really think through this involves actually rethinking space and time.
So she notes that historically in the very sexist tradition, the history of
philosophy, women have been associated with space and men with time.
But even with respect to space, women have been associated with the abyss and
night, well, God, of course, masculine, um, has been associated with time.
And so she says that women have been seen as place, which
means being seen as a thing.
Women have been seen as a place for man, but not having places of their own.
And so one thing she counsels is a new kind of inhabiting, a critique of
linear time in mathematical space, um, which you find already in a number of
other philosophers, such as Heidegger.
But she thinks Heidegger doesn't go far enough because he forgot
the air that surrounds our habitation and tried to densify.
Irigaray, in encouraging us to think about the interval, the between
and the lips is trying to move away from that densifying movement and
envision a union that preserves difference and that upholds wonder.
So one thing I mentioned that Irigaray has sometimes been thought
of as an essentialist because of the way that she's using the figure of
the lips which are associated with the vulva and that of the phallus,
which is associated with the penis.
And I've also said that her retort to this is gonna be that she's
using these in a symbolic sense.
Um, but I think that that's true of an ethics of sexual difference.
But in some of her later work, Irigaray ends up going in some
pretty essentialist directions.
And so a lot of feminists have moved away from this notion of difference, feminism.
Um, especially because even if you just think about it as symbolic,
it can be seen as still preserving the idea of a binary, right?
A symbolic binary is still a binary, and I think a lot of contemporary feminists
and queer theorists are invested in sort of destroying a binary from within
and without, and I think that's valid.
I also think Irigaray may, at least in works like this, offer us some ways of
thinking about that because she ultimately wants to destroy the traditional history
of philosophy that has denigrated, um, anybody who's not a man as well.
Right.
And so there's a sense in which her notion of the interval and wonder,
I think can really open us up, a lot of feminists have argued this, to
ways of thinking beyond binaries.
Uh, because for Irigaray, the notion of the two, the notion of lips for
instance, it's always already more than two because it draws our attention
to the interval between things.
But you can see for yourself if you haven't checked the book out yet,
and then you can come to your own conclusions about whether or not
you think this, um, has potential for contemporary feminist thought.