Irigaray E-Book

Rachel Jones

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 567

Beschreibung

The work of French Philosopher Luce Irigaray has exerted a profound influence on feminist thinking of recent decades and provides a far-reaching challenge to western philosophy's entrenched patriarchal norms. This book guides the reader through Irigaray's critical and creative transformation of western thought. Through detailed analysis of her most important text, Speculum of the Other Woman, Rachel Jones carefully examines Irigaray's transformative readings of such icons of the western tradition as Plato, Descartes, Kant and Hegel. She shows that these readings underpin Irigaray's claim that western philosophy has been dependent on the forgetting of both sexual difference and of our singular beginnings in birth. In response, Irigaray seeks to recover a positive account of sexual difference which would release woman from her traditional position as the 'other' of the subject and allow her to speak as a subject in her own right. In a sensitive reading of Irigaray's work, Jones shows why this distinctively feminist project necessarily involves the transformation of the fundamental terms of western metaphysics. By foregrounding Irigaray's approach to questions of otherness and alterity, she concludes that, for Irigaray, cultivating an ethics of sexuate difference is the condition of ethical relations in general. Lucidly and persuasively written, this book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand Irigaray's original contribution to philosophical and feminist thought.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Key Contemporary Thinkers

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy

1 Approaching Irigaray: Feminism, Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy

The Importance of Style

Irigaray and Philosophy

Transforming Philosophy as a Feminist Project

Irigaray and Feminist Philosophies: Equality and Difference

Irigaray and the History of Philosophy

Thinking Other-Wise

2 Re-Visiting Plato’s Cave: Orientation and Origins

Speculum

Returning to Plato’s Cave

A Cave like a Womb

Forgetting We Have Forgotten

Back to Front and Upside-Down

Origin and Offspring: A Disorienting Mimicry

The Wall Face that ‘Works All Too Well’

The Artistry of Mirrors

3 The Way Out of the Cave: A Likely Story . . .

The Prisoner and his Shadow

More Mirrors

The Maternal–Material: Blindspot of Metaphysics

Metaphysical/Metaphorical Resources

The Forgotten Passage

Contact and Contiguity

Reclaiming Diotima: The Wisdom of Love

4 Woman as Other: Variations on an Old Theme

Irigaray on Aristotle: Woman as a ‘Mutilated Male’

Plotinus: Freezing over the Mother-Matter

Irigaray Reading Descartes

The Self-Sufficient Meditator

The Need For An Other: God

Nature without Gaps

Thus Was I Reborn in Wonder

Kantian Reversals

Earthquakes and the Anxiety of Inversion

An Unanalysed Remainder

Re-Framing the World

5 Freud, Lacan, and Speaking (as a) Woman

Freud on Femininity

Mirroring Plato

The Mute and the Melancholic

Mothers and Others: Lacan and the Non-Existence of ‘Woman’

The Other of the Other

Speaking in the Feminine/Speaking (as) Woman

6 The Status of Sexuate Difference

When Our Lips Speak Together

Appealing to the Body: The Risk of Essentialism

From Strategic Essentialism to Symbolic Transformation

Refiguring the Female Body and the Form/Matter Distinction

Ethics and/as Poetics: Recalling Being (as) Two

The Sexuate, the Sexual, and the Heterosexist

Gender/Genre and the Ontological Status of Sexuate Difference

Displacing (Hetero)Sexism through the Sexuate

7 An Ethics of Sexuate Difference

Irigaray and Antigone: Disrupting a Hegelian Dream

Hegel versus Lacan: Doubling Dialectics for a Female Subject

Antigone’s Call

Cultivating Alterity

Refounding Ethics on Sexuate Difference

Irigaray, Cultural Difference, and Race

Conclusion

The Incalculable Being of Being Between

Bibliography

Index

Key Contemporary Thinkers

Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau

Michael Caesar, Umberto Eco

M. J. Cain, Fodor

Rosemary Cowan, Cornel West

George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin

Maximilian de Gaynesford, John McDowell

Oliver Davis, Rancière

Reidar Andreas Due, Deleuze

Chris Fleming, Rene Girard

Andrew Gamble, Hayek

Neil Gascoigne, Richard Rorty

Nigel Gibson, Fanon

Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin

Karen Green, Dummett

Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell

Christina Howells, Derrida

Fred Inglis, Clifford Geertz

Simon Jarvis, Adorno

Sarah Kay, Žižek

Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said

Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler

James McGilvray, Chomsky

Lois McNay, Foucault

Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl

Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak

Harold W. Noonan, Frege

James O’Shea, Wilfrid Sellars

William Outhwaite, Habermas, 2nd Edition

Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner

John Preston, Feyerabend

Chris Rojek, Stuart Hall

William Scheuerman, Morgenthau

Severin Schroeder, Wittgenstein

Susan Sellers, Helene Cixous

Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn

David Silverman, Harvey Sacks

Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman

James Smith, Terry Eagleton

Felix Stalder Manuel Castells

Geoffrey Stokes, Popper

Georgia Warnke, Gadamer

James Williams, Lyotard

Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick

Ed Pluth, Badiou

Stacy K. Keltner, Kristeva

Copyright © Rachel Jones 2011

The right of Rachel Jones to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2011 by Polity Press

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5104-0 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5105-7 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3782-2 (Single-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3781-5 (Multi-user ebook)

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues in Philosophy and the ‘Women, Culture and Society’ Programme at Dundee; the students from those programmes who took the time to read and discuss Irigaray with me; and Nicholas Davey and Stephen Houlgate, who provided valuable encouragement and perspective at key stages of the project.

The feedback from the anonymous readers was invaluable in the development of this book; I would like to thank them for their comments and hope I have responded adequately to their thoughtful suggestions here. My thanks also to Oneworld for the impetus that led to this publication and to Mike Harpley in particular for his generous advice. My editor at Polity, Emma Hutchinson, provided excellent and timely guidance, particularly during the final stages of writing. David Winter’s patient editorial assistance and support was greatly appreciated.

Special thanks to Christine Battersby, who first introduced me to Irigaray’s work and who has taught me so much about reading (and writing about) philosophical texts; and to my friends – who were often my readers – for their philosophical insight and generosity with their time and support, especially Tina Chanter, Catherine Constable, Beth Lord, Aislinn O’Donnell, Johanna Oksala, Andrea Rehberg, Fanny Söderbäck, and Alison Stone.

With thanks to my mother, June, and my sisters, Beki and Naomi, for their constant love and support; and to Kurt, for reading and commenting on multiple drafts, for thinking with me, and for helping me to think further.

The publishers wish to acknowledge permission to reprint the following copyright material:

Material reprinted from Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, translated by Gillian C. Gill. Translation copyright © 1985 by Cornell University Press. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.

Material reprinted from Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter & Carolyn Burke. Translation copyright © 1985 by Cornell University Press. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.

List of Abbreviations

BEW

Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, trans. S. Pluháek (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). First published as Entre Orient et Occident: De la singularité à la communauté (Paris: Grasset, 1999).

DBT

Democracy Begins Between Two, trans. K. Anderson (London: Athlone, 2000).

EP

Elemental Passions, trans. J. Collie and J. Still (London: Athlone, 1992). First published as Passions élémentaires (Paris: Minuit, 1982).

ESD

An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G. C. Gill (London: Athlone, 1993). First published as Éthique de la différence sexuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1984).

ILTY

I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History, trans. A. Martin (London: Routledge, 1996). First published as J’aime à toi: Esquisse d’une félicité dans l’histoire (Paris: Grasset, 1992).

S

Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). First published as Speculum de l’autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974).

Sf

Speculum de l’autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974).

TS

This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. C. Porter with C. Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). First published as Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977).

Introduction: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy

This book seeks to guide the reader through Luce Irigaray’s transformation of western thought, showing how her project – at once critical and creative – generates the terms for a sexuate philosophy. The approach taken thus involves positioning Irigaray primarily as a feminist philosopher.1 This immediately raises numerous questions: what kind of feminist is Irigaray? What makes her work specifically philosophical? Why does it matter to position her as a philosopher? Indeed, given the patriarchal bias that her own work locates at the very heart of western philosophical thought, why should feminists have anything to do with philosophy? Conversely, why should philosophers not particularly concerned with feminism have anything to do with Irigaray?

In response, one of the aims of this book is to show that Irigaray’s sustained, if profoundly critical, engagement with western thought has much to contribute to key philosophical debates concerning metaphysics and ontology (questions about reality and being) as well as epistemology and ethics (questions about knowledge and value) – not least because she challenges the very terms in which these debates are traditionally framed. At the same time, the book aims to provide an in-depth guide to the philosophical grounding of Irigaray’s project for those drawing on her work to address specifically feminist concerns or issues of sex and gender. Such readers may approach Irigaray from a range of diverse fields including gender and women’s studies, queer theory, social and political thought, geography, history, film, art, literature, or architecture, as well as philosophy. The book seeks to offer an opening onto aspects of Irigaray’s work that may be less readily accessible for those without a prior training in the history of western philosophical thought. But perhaps more importantly, it hopes to show why it is worth undertaking the intensive philosophical work Irigaray demands of us, if our aim is to challenge and transform the inequitable gendered structures – as well as the gender blindness – that inform western thought and culture.

The reason for foregrounding Irigaray’s work as a philosopher is not because feminist philosophy has priority over other areas of feminist thought and praxis. Irigaray herself has conducted her theoretical work alongside her ongoing practice as a psychoanalyst and teacher, as well as her involvement in the realm of practical politics. Nor should the importance of other discourses to Irigaray’s own work be underestimated, most notably those of psychoanalysis and linguistics. Rather than a question of priority, the issue is one of specificity: this book aims to introduce readers to the specifically philosophical dimensions of Irigaray’s feminist project along with the ways in which she transforms the terms of both traditional and contemporary philosophical debate.

In keeping with this aim, the book’s guiding thread is Irigaray’s groundbreaking analysis of the history of western thought, Speculum of the Other Woman. In many ways, Speculum is feminist philosophy’s first critique. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously displaces sceptical doubts about whether our knowledge conforms to the reality of objects by showing how objects necessarily conform to our cognitive faculties.2 He thereby revolutionizes thought by grounding knowledge in the human subject rather than the objects known. In Speculum, Irigaray sceptically re-examines the philosophical subject’s dependence on the object and introduces new doubts about the supposed self-sufficiency and universality of that subject. She does so by showing how the subject’s identity is typically secured against a material, sensible realm aligned with the figure of woman. The supposedly ‘universal’ rational subject thus turns out to be implicitly male, while woman is mapped onto the position of object and ‘other’. This pattern of oppositional thinking means that woman is defined against a male subject, rather than in terms of her sexed specificity or as a subject in her own right. Despite his revolutionary approach, Kant is seen as repeating and reinforcing this pattern, together with the forgetting of sexual difference it implies. Indeed, according to Irigaray, western philosophy since Plato has failed to think sexual difference, in that it has failed to think this difference . Instead, it has reduced the difference between men and women to a specular structure in which woman is always the ‘other’ or mirror-image of the self-same (male) subject. By reminding philosophy that each human being is born from a mother who is also a woman, Irigaray asks us to remember that a human being is two: western thought must therefore make space for (different) subjects by attending to the irreducible sexual difference between them. She thereby seeks a revolution in thought no less significant or transformative than Kant’s.