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Luce Irigaray (born 3 May 1930) is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural theorist. She is best known for her works Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) and This Sex Which Is Not One (1977).

Biography

Irigaray received a Master's Degree in Philosophy and Arts from the University of Louvain (Leuven) in 1955. She taught in a Brussels school from 1956 to 1959, then moved to France in the early 1960s. In 1961 she received a Master's Degree in psychology from the University of Paris. In 1962 she received a Diploma in Psychopathology. From 1962 to 1964 she worked for the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) in Belgium. She then began work as a research assistant at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris.

In the 1960s Irigaray participated in Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic seminars. She trained as and became an analyst. In 1968 she received a Doctorate in Linguistics. In 1969 she analyzed Antoinette Fouque, a leader of the French women's movement. From 1970 to 1974 she taught at the University of Vincennes. At this time Irigaray belonged to the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), a school directed by Lacan.

Irigaray's second doctoral thesis was "Speculum, de l'autre femme."

In the second semester of 1982, Irigaray held the chair in Philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Her research here resulted in the publication of An Ethics of Sexual Difference.

Irigaray has conducted research since the 1980s at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in Paris on the differences between the language of women and the language of men. In 1986 she transferred from the Psychology Commission to the Philosophy Commission as the latter is her preferred discipline.

In December 2003 the University of London conferred on Luce Irigaray the degree of Doctor of Literature honoris causa. From 2004 to 2006 Irigaray held a position as a visiting professor in the department of Modern Languages at the University of Nottingham. As of 2007 she will be affiliated with the University of Liverpool.

In 2008, Luce Irigaray was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by University College, London.

Contributions to philosophy

In an interview conducted in 1995 Luce Irigaray defined the three phases of her work:

1. the critique of the masculine subject (as in Speculum, This Sex Which Is Not One, and to some extent An Ethics of Sexual Difference)
2. the creation of a feminine subject
3. the exploration of intersubjectivity (in "J'aime à toi" and in "Essere due")

Of the first she said, "It was the phase in which I showed how a single subject, traditionally the masculine subject, had constructed the world according to a single perspective." In the second phase she defined "those mediations that could permit the existence of a feminine subjectivity — that is to say, another subject". And the third she sees as "trying to define a new model of possible relations between man and woman, without submission of either one to the other". In this interview she also discusses the problems of translation of her texts, most notably in reference to the title and subtitle of Speculum.

Luce Irigaray wishes to create two equally positive and autonomous terms, and to acknowledge two (at least, she sometimes adds) sexes, not one. Following this line of thought, with the theories of Lacan (mirror stage, forms of "sexuation") and of Derrida (logocentrism) in the background, Luce Irigaray also criticises the favouring of unitary truth within patriarchal society. In her theory for creating a new disruptive form of feminine writing (écriture féminine), she focuses on the child’s pre-Oedipal phase when experience and knowledge depends on bodily contact, primarily with the mother. Here lies one major interest of Luce Irigaray's: the mother-daughter relationship, which she considers devalued in patriarchal society.

Women, she writes, must recast discourse in a form that does not preserve an implied masculine subject, harmonizing the machine of language in order to rethink the relations that make possible meaning, knowledge and presence. Accordingly, Luce Irigaray's oeuvre challenges phallogocentrism. She notes that society's two gender categories (genre), man and woman, are in fact only one, man, as he is made the universal referent. She works towards a theory of difference, that involves the creation of an other, woman, who is a feminine subject equal to the masculine subject in worth and dignity, yet radically different.

Women on the market

In 1985 Irigaray wrote the book This Sex Which is Not One. Within this book, Irigaray formed a thesis within the essay "Women on the Market" that argues women are treated as commodities. Irigaray utilizes Karl Marx’s theory of capital and commodities to show how women are exchanged between men in the same way as any other commodity is. She argues that our entire society is predicated on this exchange of women. The exchange of women is primarily used to allow men to have homosocial relations with each other, since it is always men negotiating the exchange between one another. A woman fits in with Marx’s definition of commodity because she is reduced to her exchange value and her physical “use value” disappears. Her exchange value is determined by society, while her use value is her natural qualities. This divide creates a schism between nature and society, with society ultimately subordinating nature to a non-value. Thus, a woman’s self is divided between her use and exchange values, and she is only desired for the exchange value. This system creates three types of women: the mother, who is all use value; the virgin, who is all exchange value; and the prostitute, who embodies both use and exchange value.

Within the same essay, “Women on the Market,” Irigaray uses additional Marxist foundations to argue that women are in demand due to their perceived shortage and as a result, males seek “to have them all," or seek a surplus like the excess of commodity buying power, capital, that capitalists seek constantly. Irigaray speculates thus that perhaps, “the way women are used matter less than their number." In this further analogy of women “on the market,” understood through Marxist terms, Irigaray points out that women, like commodities, are moved between men based on their exchange value rather than just their use value, and the desire will always be surplus – making women almost seem like capital in this case, to be accumulated. “As commodities, women are thus two things at once: utilitarian objects and bearers of value."

Criticism

Many feminists criticize the essentialist position of Luce Irigaray.

W. A. Borody has criticised Luce Irigaray's phallogocentric argument as misrepresenting the history of philosophies of "indeterminateness" in the West. Luce Irigaray's "black and white" claims that the masculine=determinateness and that the feminine=indeterminateness contain a degree of cultural and historical validity, but not when it is deployed to self-replicate a similar form of the gender-othering it originally sought to overcome.

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, in their book critiquing postmodern thought (Fashionable Nonsense, 1997), criticize Luce Irigaray on several grounds. In their view, she wrongly regards E=mc as a "sexed equation" because she argues that "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us". They also take issue with the assertion that fluid mechanics is unfairly neglected because it deals with "feminine" fluids in contrast to "masculine" rigid mechanics; in a review of Sokal and Bricmont's book, Richard Dawkins dryly points out that

You don't have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity of this kind of argument (...), but it helps to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell us the real reason why turbulent flow is a hard problem (the Navier–Stokes equations are difficult to solve)

Selected bibliography

Books

• Speculum of the Other Woman, 1974 (Eng. trans. 1985 by Gillian C. Gill)
• This Sex Which Is Not One, 1977 (Eng. trans. 1985)
• When Our Lips Speak Together, 1977
• And the One Doesn't Stir without the Other, 1979 (Eng. trans. 1981)
• Marine Lover: Of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1980 (Eng. trans. 1991 by Gillian C. Gill)
• Elemental Passions, 1982 (Eng. trans. 1992)
• Belief Itself, 1983
• The Forgetting of Air: In Martin Heidegger, 1983 (Eng. trans. 1999)
• An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 1984 (Eng. trans. 1993 by Gillian C. Gill)
• To Speak is Never Neutral, 1985 (Eng. trans. 2002)
• Sexes and Genealogies, 1987 (Eng. trans. 1993 by Gillian C. Gill)
• Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution, 1989 (Eng. trans. 1993)
• Je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference, 1990 (Eng. trans. 1993)
• I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History, 1990 (Eng. trans. 1993)
• Democracy Begins Between Two, 1994 (Eng. trans. 2000)
• To Be Two, 1997 (Eng. trans. 2001)
• Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, 1999 (Eng. trans. 2001)
• The Way of Love, 2002
• Sharing the World (Eng. trans. 2008)

Articles

• Irigaray, L. (2008), "In Science, is the Subject Sexed?", in Continental Philosophy of Science (ed. G. Gutting), Blackwell Publishing Ltd

See also

• Feminism and the Oedipus complex
• Hélène Cixous
• Julia Kristeva
• List of deconstructionists
• Strategic essentialism

Notes

1. Hirsch, Elizabeth (Spring). ""Je-Luce Irigaray": A Meeting with Luce Irigaray". Hypatia. 10 (2): 93–114. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Check date values in: |accessdate=, |date=, and |year= / |date= mismatch (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
2. Irigaray, Luce. "Women on the Market." 1985. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2nd ed. N.p.: Blackwell, 2004. 799–811.
3. Irigaray, Luce. "Women on the Market." 1985. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2nd ed. N.p.: Blackwell, 2004. 799–811.
4. Christine Delphy, L'Ennemi principal, tome 2 : Penser le genre (2001)
5. Wayne A. Borody (1998) pp. 3, 5 Figuring the Phallogocentric Argument with Respect to the Classical Greek Philosophical Tradition Nebula: A Netzine of the Arts and Science, Vol. 13 (pp. 1–27) (http://kenstange.com/nebula/feat013/feat013.html).
6. Dawkins, Richard (9 July 1998). "Postmodernism disrobed". Nature, vol. 394. pp. 141–143. Retrieved March 18, 2008. {{cite web}}: More than one of |author= and |last= specified (help)

External links

• "Luce Irigaray": entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Template:Persondata

• 1930 births
• Living people
• Academics of the University of Nottingham
• Continental philosophers
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• Women philosophers
• Feminist philosophers
• Feminist studies scholars
• Feminist theory
• French feminists
• Linguists from France
• 20th-century French philosophers
• Catholic University of Leuven alumni (pre-1968)
• Philosophy of sexuality
• University of Paris alumni
• Postmodern feminists
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• Psychoanalytic theory
• Women and psychology