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Luce Irigaray is without question one of the most important thinkers to emerge from the French feminist tradition — particularly in the post-May ’68 generation. Although Irigaray was in her forties before she began to publish, her 1974 debut Speculum of the Other Woman quickly established her within academic circles. Her second book,This Sex Which Is Not One (1977) followed soon afterwards, cementing her reputation as a leading feminist philosopher. The book takes the form of a collection of eleven separate texts, mostly essays and interview fragments. The style of Irigaray’s writing is close to stream-of-consciousness at times, using obtuse, elusive and philosophical language to probe questions of sexual difference with both patience and perspicuity. Surprisingly readable for such a dense text, it examines without preaching and illuminates without delineating.
Irigaray’s engagement with feminism stems from her involvement in the Lacanian school of psychoanalysis during the 1960’s; an involvement that lingers as a prevailing mode of speech Irigaray aims to disrupt in both Speculum and This Sex. Although Irigaray was once a regular attendee of Lacan’s seminars, she was exiled from Lacan’s inner circle after the publication of Speculum. Conceptually, the antagonism between Irigaray and Lacan can be traced back to Seminar XX “Encore”, where Lacan first makes the claim “woman does not exist” (i.e. as a generalization — La femme n’existe pas) and that “there is no such thing as Woman” (il n’y a pas La femme).
A significant portion of the texts in This Sex can be read as a direct response to Freud, Lacan and the psychoanalytic tradition. “Psychoanalytic Theory: Another Look” appropriates analysts such as Karen Horney, Melanie Klein and Ernest Jones, as explorers venturing into the “dark continent” of female sexuality — left undiscovered by Freud and Lacan. Similarly, texts like “The Power of Discourse” and “Questions” take the form of Q&A segments, wherein many of Irigaray’s interlocutors explicitly question her critique of Freud (in Speculum) and her reading of the history of philosophy.
There is no doubt that Irigaray has an unique philosophical perspective, couched in the structuralist canon of Lacan, but also in the more radical work of thinkers like Deleuze & Guattari. Deleuze & Guattari’s 1972 text Anti-Oedipus — also an attack on Freud and Lacan — leaves its mark on Irigaray’s work in a number of ways, but curiously this influence is mostly felt in Irigaray’s visceral writing style. The essays and aphoristic passages in This Sex demand your attention with their intensity, similar to Deleuze & Guattari’s jarring language in Anti-Oedipus. Nevertheless, Irigaray’s polemic against psychoanalysis is quite conceptually distinct from Deleuze & Guattari, insofar as its aim.
Luce Irigaray
A couple of the texts in This Sex stand out: (1) “Così Fan Tutti” (or, The School For Lovers) draws on Lacan’s analysis of courtly love to demonstrate how “there is no such thing as a sexual relation” (99). Instead, love takes the place of sexual relations. The ritual courtship between man and woman displaces their relationship entirely into language. Irigaray sees this problematic tendency as continuing even in the present day. (2) “Women on the Market” uses Lévi-Strauss’ analysis of kinship to introduce three figures of women within the male economy: mother (as use value), virgin (as exchange value), or prostitute (as both). And finally, (3) “Frenchwomen, Stop Trying” incites women to search for sexual pleasure outside of male representation (e.g. pornography). Each text can be read as a fresh attempt to escape the framing of a masculine logos that structures all modes of discourse, all systems of representation, all power relations.
In many ways, this is the central problematic of This Sex. The eponymous text establishes Irigaray’s point in evocative fashion: the impossibility of experiencing anything like female sexuality. Later sections like “The Mechanics of Fluids” and “When Our Lips Speak Together” deepen Irigaray’s project , imagining the experience of sexual difference in terms of basic anatomy — an effort to re-appropriate the Freudian proclamation: “Anatomy is destiny”. This use of the body as a point of departure led later critics, particularly North American feminists, to accuse Irigaray of essentialism — a claim she denies, asserting that her use of the female body is mimetic. And overall, this mimetic quality is what sets Irigaray’s account apart from many of her contemporaries: This Sex displays an imagination and vitality that takes nothing away from its philosophical rigour. It remains an incredibly important work on feminism, almost 40 years after its publication.
