Luce Irigaray - Contributions To Philosophy

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 a 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.