SOURCE: Burke, Carolyn. “Irigaray through the Looking Glass.” Feminist Studies 7, no. 2 (summer 1981): 288-306.

[In the following essay, Burke discusses Irigaray's early works in the context of Lacanian and Derridean thought, examining how Irigaray's writing functions and whether it meets its own criteria.]

It is no longer possible to go looking for woman, or for woman's feminity or for female sexuality. At least, they can not be found by means of any familiar mode of thought or knowledge—even if it is impossible to stop looking for them.

Jacques Derrida, Spurs/Eperons

Luce Irigaray is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and essayist whose work explores the possibility and impossibility of understanding “woman.” She has been active in the MLF (Mouvement de libération des femmes) in Paris since its early stages.¹ With the publication of Speculum de l'autre femme in 1974, her critiques of psychoanalytic and philosophical discourses began to be known by a limited audience outside of France.² Her work has been inaccessible to English-speaking feminists partly because there have been so few translations, but more importantly, because of the conceptual and stylistic difficulties that her writing presents, even for those who are fluent in French. This situation is further complicated by the fact that her writing has been discussed, to some extent, out of context in a series of critiques of what is taken to be her position. Because Irigaray is concerned with the possibility of an analogy—a seductive one at that—between female sexuality and a parler femme or women's language, it is important to examine her writing in context, to see how it functions and whether it lives up to its own expectations.

For some time, Irigaray has been working on the premise that “language and the systems of representation cannot ‘translate’” woman's desire.³ Her first book, Le langage des déments (1973), studies the statements of schizophrenics of both sexes.⁴ As a result of this research, Irigaray concludes that “sexual differences become embedded in language,” that “there is a dynamics of statements which is different according to sex.”⁵ Although, in her view, male patients retained the ability to perform syntactic modifications and the use of metalanguage, women tended to articulate their condition physically, to “suffer it directly in their body.”⁶ Generally speaking, she asserts, women lack access to language appropriate to the expression of their desire. Consequently, in Speculum de l'autre femme, she set out to understand why female sexuality could not be articulated within Western theoretical discourse. Taking examples from Plato to Hegel, Irigaray sees in this idealist tradition, which emphasizes the principles of identity, sameness, and visibility as conditions for representation in language, the philosophical assumptions underlying psychoanalytic discourse. Within this psychophilosophical system, the female is defined “as nothing other than the complement, the other side, or the negative side, of the masculine.”⁷ Thus, the female subject is either assimilated to the male, as in Freud's account of infantile psychic development, or simply left out of theory, which assumes that it cannot be conceptualized. Because the female sex offers nothing to see, female sexuality becomes the “hole” in psychoanalytic theory. This lack scandalizes the philosopher in Freud, who suspects that it is indeed impossible to say what woman really wants.

Speculum de l'autre femme calls for a patient but radical “disconcerting” of language and logic, which is then enacted in Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (1977).⁸ The sex that is not one is, of course, the female sex. In Irigaray's view, the male sex has taken unto itself the privileged status of “oneness”: that is, a unitary representation of identity in analogy with the male sexual organ. She asserts that “all Western discourse presents a certain isomorphism with the masculine sex: the privilege of unity, form of the self, of the visible, of the specularisable, of the erection.”⁹ Such a logic cannot allow for the expression of the female sexual organs, which can not be described, let alone represented in unitary terms. Just as the female genitals are “plural” or multiple—the vulval lips “are always at least two … joined in an embrace”¹⁰—so women's language will be plural, autoerotic, diffuse, and undefinable within the familiar rules of (masculine) logic. Because Irigaray believes that female sexuality cannot be articulated within Aristotelian logic, her prose abandons the coherence and forcefulness of analytic argument. The result, in Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, is a more fluid and sinuous style or styles, which seek to keep “in touch” with a different style of sexuality.

A woman's language might articulate experiences that are devalued or not permitted by the dominant discourse: the most important, in Irigaray's view, are the sensual/emotional relationships of women with their mothers and with other women, which have been censured in psychoanalytic theory. Her next work, written in 1979, was a brief poetic text entitled Et l'une ne bouge pas sans l'autre which takes as its theme the difficult relationship between a mother and daughter.¹¹ Painfully, Irigaray's prose embodies their knotted relations and the guilt-ridden structures of their mutual desire. Returning in a different vein to the body language of women, she explores corporeal paralysis as a metaphor for lack of connection to the maternal. Written in 1980, Irigaray's most recent work, Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche, conducts a subtle critique of the philosopher's theory, taken as a type of masculine thought.¹² However, its lyrical, incantatory voice refuses to argue a thesis according to the traditional requirements for such language. It is as if she were speaking from another territory: the ocean, or the other side of the looking glass, where the familiar rules of logic have been reversed, deconstructed, and subjected to a sea change. To follow her trajectory, this essay adopts the strategy of first locating her starting points and defining their intellectual ambience, then, imitating her progress in search of an ideological space for the parler femme, female writing.

Irigaray might be described as a dissident Lacanian psychoanalyst whose feminist revision of psychoanalytic theory and “female style” may be situated in relation to Derridean deconstruction. However, such a description raises more questions than it answers for an American audience. Jaques Lacan and Jacques Derrida do not figure in her writing as straightforward “influences”: indeed, Speculum de l'autre femme mentions neither, and in Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, Irigaray hesitates to invoke the authority, indeed the name, of Lacan. These two prominent intellectual forces are, to borrow a concept from deconstruction, present “intertextually”; they are interwoven into the web of her own text's unfolding. However, to locate the echoes of their writing in Irigaray's work, to describe their effects upon it, is a risky business, for any selection or summary is necessarily a distortion when one is dealing with such maddeningly abstruse thinkers. Risky, but unavoidable, if one wishes eventually to read with Irigaray, rather than read about her.

Irigaray was a member of the Freudian School of Paris, the psychoanalytic institute founded by Jacques Lacan in 1964 when he and his followers broke from the more conservative French Psychoanalytic Society.¹³ Members of the Freudian School also taught at Vincennes, the experimental, “left-wing” campus of the University of Paris established in the wake of the 1968 political disturbances. From its inception, the Vincennes Department of Psychoanalysis, the only one of its kind, was staffed by some of Lacan's close associates, including Irigaray. However, after the publication of Speculum de l'autre femme, when she proposed to examine some of its themes in her seminar, Irigaray learned that her seminar had been canceled by the new board of directors of the department: it did not appear to fit into their program for the development of a psychoanalytic “science.”¹⁴ When no explanation for her sudden dismissal was offered, many people felt that the publication of her book was the real reason, and furthermore, that Lacan had used the reorganization of the department to express his personal displeasure at this feminist critique. Thus, to call Irigaray a “dissident Lacanian” raises the complicated history of her theoretical and personal relations to the controversial psychoanalyst. It calls for a discussion of her efforts to deal with the presence of “le Maître,” or, the position of Lacan as “Master” of the house of psychoanalysis.

The question of the disciples' relationship to Freud has played an enormously complicated role in the creation of a psychoanalytic establishment. Critical of American interpretations of Freud, Lacan claims to return psychoanalysis to the spirit of the Master and accuses its American advocates of reducing Freud's subtle science to normative ego-psychology. As faithful disciple, Lacan defends and reinterprets his Master's word, but as new Master, Lacan occupies the central position in his own branch of the psychoanalytic establishment. Although in their writings, both Freud and Lacan undermine the traditional foundations of authority per se, their own magisterial positions within psychoanalytic practice pose serious problems as a contradiction of their theory. Sherry Turkle, a sociologist of “psychoanalytic politics,” has asked whether the master-disciple relationship built into psychoanalysis by means of the training analysis does not work, in the long run, to subvert what is most subversive about its own practices. She observes that Lacan's followers have been taxed with an allegiance to Lacan that overshadows any psychoanalyst's allegiance to Freud, and that not surprisingly, the problem of “le Maître” has occupied a central place in their discussions.¹⁵ One might expect, then, that questions of “mastery” and “the Master” would engage French feminists' attention: these concepts are loaded, or overdetermined, in their particular cultural context, and for that reason, call out for a feminist demystification.

In Irigaray's view, the general problem is further exacerbated when male masters speak as authorities on the subject of female sexuality. The first section of Speculum de l'autre femme analyzes Freud's (fictive) lecture, “On Femininity,” as the discourse of a master who cloaks his desire to dominate his female subject(s) with the seductive formulations of phallocentric theory.¹⁶ In 1972-73, Lacan took as the theme for his famous public seminar, Freud's question Was will das Weib [What does Woman want?]. Lacan concluded that “there is a pleasure [jouissance] beyond the phallus,”¹⁷ but insisted that women, even women analysts, would not or could not make clear to him what this pleasure might be. Furthermore, to add insult to injury, he added: “They don't know what they are saying, and that's the whole difference between them and me.”¹⁸ Lacan, by contrast, is the one who can “explain what it's all about.”¹⁹ But, Irigaray “replied,” in two essays published in 1975 and 1977, there is no place for the female subject within Lacan's theoretical models. Although he had already expelled her from the ranks of the faithful, she had by no means gotten him out of her system. If “a Maitre can play a dominant role as much by his absence as by his presence,”²⁰ Irigaray's texts may be haunted by Lacan. His unspoken name paradoxically embodies the paternal authority of psychoanalytic “law.”

Lacan is like the patėr familias of the psychoanalytic family who refuses to acknowledge the independent wisdom of his daughters. The daughter, in turn, seeks a way out of her overdetermined transference to this rejecting father-lover by turning upon the terms of her allegiance. Lacan's absent presence in Irigaray's writing resembles the “Name-of-the-Father,” his own concept of social identity as inscribed in the subject, male or female, through the assumption of the patronym within a patriarchal order.²¹ Her work, then, becomes, in part, an attempt to rename herself. She must divest herself of the patronym “Lacanian” to reclaim an ideological space from which to “speak female.” Furthermore, this self-renaming would refuse the Name-of-the-Father's prohibition against prolonged contact with the maternal, which the congruence of “name” and “negative” [nom et non] implies in the original French. Ridding language of this embodiment of the paternal law may free one to explore the “geography of female pleasure”²² and its ties to the preoedipal phase, when the child enjoys a sensual relationship to the mother's body. Irigaray suspects that it is with other women that a woman may find the “means for overcoming that loss of the first relationship with the mother's body,”²³ and that this recovery can happen only in an ideological and textual space apart from the prohibitions represented by the Name-of-the-Father. This position leads to a kind of separatism which is nevertheless troubled by the seductive appeal of the paternal metaphor from which it is breaking away.

Irigaray derives considerable support in this undertaking from a male philosopher who asserts that only “the ‘man’ … believes in the truth of woman, in woman-as-truth.” This provocative statement appears in Jacques Derrida's essay, “La question du style.”²⁴ This text hovers, unmentioned, in the background of both Speculum de l'autre femme and Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, which amplify the charge that Lacanian discourse is phallocentric. Derrida's essay weaves its way around its subject, the relations of “woman” and “truth” as a question of style in Friedrich Nietzsche. It suggests that the apparently misogynistic Nietzsche may have sought, in spite of himself, to “describe a femininity that is not defined by a male desire to supply a lack.”²⁵ Whether or not this was Nietzsche's project, it becomes Irigaray's. But to come to it, she operates through the detour of deconstructive philosophy, which provides her with the methods to elaborate upon Derrida's charge against Lacan.

Derrida's vocabulary, in “La question du style,” undergoes a slight but significant modification for Irigaray's purposes when he asserts that Lacanian theory places woman “back in the old [conceptual] machinery, in phallogocentrism.”²⁶ His word weds “phallogocentrism” to “logocentrism”: it implies that psychoanalytic discourse is guilty of identifying the phallus²⁷ with the Logos as transcendent, and therefore, unexamined (and unexaminable) grounds of signification, of assigning meaning. One may attempt to unpack his neologism. In Derrida's writing, “logocentrism” designates the tendency in Western philosophy to interpret the Word [Logos] in its full theological sense (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God”). Logocentrism also implies an attitude of nostalgia for a lost presence, or a longing for some first cause of being and meaning. More recently, with the general diminution of religious belief, logocentric thinking has assigned this lost value to the activities of full self-consciousness (“thought thinking itself”). Logocentrism results from the human desire to posit a central presence as a locus of coherence and authenticity—whether in the form of God's statement “I am that I am” or the Cartesian “cogito ergo sum.” Derrida's coined word taxes Freudo-Lacanism with a double centrism when it puts the phallus in the central position as a kind of Logos, as the “signifier of all signifiers.”

Expanding Derrida's critique, one could argue that because the phallus guarantees the possibility of the representation of both sexual difference and desire, it is the master term of psychoanalysis, or “God” within its own conceptual system. Derrida's phallogocentrism, then, “declares the inextricable collusion of phallocentrism with logocentrism … and unites feminism and deconstructive, grammatological philosophy in their opposition to a common enemy.”²⁸ In psychoanalytic theory's longing for an authorizing principle resides its capacity for blindness about its own presuppositions. In a general way, Derrida's meditation on the relations of “truth” and “woman” suggests ways out of the old conceptual machinery.

But what is deconstruction, let alone a feminist version of that enigmatic procedure? The deconstructor begins by finding “the point where the text covers up,”²⁹ or “the moment that is undecidable in terms of the text's apparent system of meanings.”³⁰ Then, “the task is to dismantle [déconstruire] the metaphysical and rhetorical structures at work in (the text), not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe them in another way.”³¹ The structures in question are usually binary opposites such as “same/other,” “subject/other,” “identity/difference,” “male/female.” The aim is not to neutralize the oppositional structure, but rather, to demonstrate the inequality of the terms locked into opposition. In such a structure, according to Derrida, “one of the two terms controls the other, … holds the superior position. To deconstruct the opposition is first … to overthrow [renverser] the hierarchy.”³² However, the task is not yet complete: “in the next phase of deconstruction, this reversal must be displaced,” and the “winning” term used without giving it the privileged status that its opposite once possessed. The critic must be prepared to accept “the irruptive emergence of a new ‘concept,’ a concept which no longer allows itself to be understood in terms of the previous regime.”³³ In Speculum de l'autre femme, this strategy of reversal and displacement operates upon the conceptual hierarchies “identity/difference,” “subject/object,” “male/female.” It also produces the fable of female sexuality and writing enacted in Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un in which the “inferior” terms of these structural pairs are reinscribed, but with a different status, and presumably, without placing the formerly devalued term in the position of its “oppressor.”

The problematic status of this displacement, the way in which the new concept means what it says once the operation of deconstruction is complete, is beyond the scope of this essay which returns now to the subject of Irigaray, Irigaray as subject. At this point, however, one may offer a final description of Derrida's strategy: “His text … is the unmaking of a construct. However negative it may sound, deconstruction implies the possibility of rebuilding.”³⁴ Both Derrida and Irigaray create new sexual fables of the process of signification. Derrida proposes an account that replaces phallogocentrism with a “hymeneal” fable: one that involves both sexes and sexual difference in its metaphorical representation of the creation of meaning. Irigaray, by contrast, omits the male sex and valorizes female sexual sufficiency, in a fable that can be described as “vulval” or “vaginal.”³⁵ Her account emphasizes the multiple or plural styles of female sexuality and expression, in the figure of the sexual lips which are constantly “in touch” with the diffuse sensuality of the female body. Although it would be interesting to compare Derrida's “hymeneal” fable with Irigaray's “vaginal” one, it suffices to observe that in both cases, a fable is offered in opposition to Lacan's figure of the phallus. Again, in both cases, it is important to note that terms like “hymeneal” and “vaginal” are being used with an awareness of their limitations as analogies, or as emerging “concepts” resisting the possibility that they will be taken as new master terms. To put it differently, the reader of such texts must be willing not to “believe” in their fables, to let go of them once they have become too useful.³⁶

Is it possible or even desirable to adopt a frame of mind that does not require a text to confer a final, reliable authority? Deconstructive writers assert, and intend their readers to understand, that they are creating limited analogies without an absolute claim for their ontological status. Certainly, this peculiar use of language creates a strain. Words are being used without their authors' subscribing to the premise that the models to which they refer might actually exist. The referential status of language is put into question, and, furthermore, each deconstruction can, in turn, be deconstructed. In such a view, “language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique.”³⁷ One may observe, at this point, that deconstruction's basic stance is antiauthoritarian: it is suspicious of master concepts and explanations that assert their own finality. Indeed, if one adopts the strategies of deconstruction, then no single text, including this one, can pretend to have made a definitive statement. With this predicament in mind, the critic is tempted to imitate Irigaray's move from the “hard” language of theoretical discourse to the more “fluid” languages of poetry and fable in her recent writing. This transformation—but the word is too dramatic to describe the gradual shift that occurs in Irigaray's prose—can be observed as it happens in her work. At this point in my own text, therefore, I follow on her path, while keeping my distance, to speak of Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un in its own language(s).

Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un is a chorus of voices, in which Freud, Lacan, Derrida, various unnamed speakers, and unexpectedly, Lewis Carroll, reverberate and are transposed into a different mode. As readers, we are invited not to begin objectively, outside the text, but rather, to start inside and work our way out into its complex web of textual relations. We recognize our own textuality while adjusting to the quality of intertextuality that inhabits Irigaray's writing. To become the reader of Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un is to recognize that we are all implicated in this discourse. This realization may then generate a new critical attitude: one that rejects the lonely fiction of superiority over a text.

If we can abandon the illusion that it is possible to speak from a position of mastery, we may be tempted by the subversive notion of an “other” view—an underview. We may follow Irigaray when, in the preface, she goes underground with Lewis Carroll's Alice, seeking a place from which she may (re)learn to speak. It is found after the book's prolonged journey through the looking glass to what she imagines as the “other side,” a conceptual realm beyond the law of the Logos. Woman's place, she tells the men, is not where you think it is: we are beyond the mirror of your languages in a new psychic space. Her “other” view is, then, something like the dizzying perspective of an adult Alice, and her “other side,” an ideological space beyond the psychic economy of patriarchy. Irigaray is trying to imagine a realm—at once emotional and intellectual—in which woman is no longer defined in relation to man as his negative, other, or as lack.

However, in the country of Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, the rules of logic are not simply inverted as in Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. Rather, Irigaray questions the structures of logic in which the female as concept has been suppressed, then displaces the whole system. Deconstructing structural polarities that assign priority to the first term and devalue the second, she attempts to leave behind the conceptual universe of the Logos and its symbolic policeman, the phallus. This new ideological place of Irigaray's writing could be described as preoedipal or postpatriarchal, or, as the place of a desire. It is a site where women's relations to each other might acquire appropriate expression.

Some of the difficulties confronting one who would discuss Irigaray on her own terms may be apparent by now. In a sense, there is a lack of “content.” Unlike Hélène Cixous or Monique Wittig, Irigaray does not invent (or reinvent) for us female characters, heroines, or myths in opposition to patriarchal culture. Her deconstructive procedure is puzzling, because she is chiefly concerned with questioning familiar modes of thought, and interrogating the concepts of logic and the rules of discourse. Once we realize that this procedure is, in part, her content, we are on the right track. At the same time, her attempt to rethink woman without resorting to limiting or essentialist [intrinsic] definitions puts a strain on our reading habits, as when Irigaray suggests, but does not make absolute claims for, a relation between the geography of female sexuality and the shape of her own writing. As my discussion interweaves with her texts, I trust that this performance will convey something of their procedures and strategies, while sketching the shape of her “female writing.”

On the unexpected order of Speculum de l'autre femme, which begins with Freud and ends with Plato, Irigaray commented,

the architectonics of the text, of the texts, disconcerts that linearity of a project, that teleology of discourse, in which there is no room for the “feminine,” unless it is that traditional one, that which is repressed or censured.³⁸

In that work, her desire was to disturb the “phallogocentric” order of argumentation, in which the end is clearly predetermined by the beginning. It is not surprising, then, that the form of Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un is difficult to describe. Like Speculum de l'autre femme, it begins in an unexpected manner: its preface is a film review entitled “Le miroir, de l'autre côté” [“The Mirror, from the Other Side”]. This preface is doubly reminiscent, for it reviews a recent Swiss film, Les Arpenteurs [The Surveyors], whose heroine is named Alice in a subtle parallel with the Alice of Wonderland. The film's “Alice” seems to have elected a dwelling-place somewhere on the “other side,” in Irigaray's new geography of female desire. Her activities, and the opposition which they soon encounter, provide the rich thematic material that Irigaray teases out in the rest of the book. After this curious preface, she traces “Alice's” journey backwards, via “a long detour through the analysis of the different systems of oppression that work upon her,” so that she may once again “arrive there where she knows pleasure as a woman.”³⁹ This detour includes the title essay on female sexuality,⁴⁰ an evaluation of psychoanalytic theory, and an essay on the power of language and the subordination of the female as a concept. After a series of dialogues with various interlocutors, Irigaray pursues her analyses with an essay on “the traffic in women” (which suggests that female homosexuality must be rethought outside the psychosexual economy of patriarchy)⁴¹ and a discussion of pornography. Her book concludes, although it does not seem to end, with a poetic prose essay evoking a love relationship between women, “When Our Lips Speak Together.”⁴²

If Speculum challenged Freud by deconstructing his theory of female sexuality, Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un adopts Lacan's own tactics to question the discourse of the Master: it contains two remarkably subtle replies to Lacan. Interestingly, however, Irigaray rarely mentions him by name in these two essays. She prefers to bring his system into question by exposing the ways in which it gives him the magisterial role. The first essay, “Così fan tutti,” does Lacan the curious honor of quoting him against himself, to demonstrate his incapacity to hear what women say. Irigaray again insists that in his psychoanalysis, “there is no place for the female except within a system of models and laws decreed by masculine subjects.”⁴³ Although she cites Lacan throughout the text, his name—the symbol of his authority—is relegated to the bottom of the page, where he appears in a footnote.

The second essay, “La mécanique des fluides,” indicts the Master and his system for their lack of interest in the geography of female pleasure. However, Irigaray does this in an insidiously indirect manner, again weaving her way around Lacan while citing him in the footnotes only. Ostensibly, she discusses the physics of fluids, which have not been explained by the language suited to the discussion of solids. Here, of course, “fluids” is partly an analogy with female expression, and “solids” with the dry self-consistency of male logic, including the logic of psychoanalysis. In an artfully flowing style, she unravels the “long-standing complicity” between rationality and “solids,” which has resulted in a privileging of that which is firm, quantifiable, and measurable. In this system of physics (and metaphysics), “the whole psychic economy is organized in terms of the phallus (or Phallus).”⁴⁴ It is not surprising, then, that the fluidity of the female is deemed unworthy of attention. Because female language flows beyond the boundaries of logical discourse, it is seen as unstable, in excess of solidifiable sense, and therefore outside the discourse of the Master. Because “woman” speaks “fluid,”⁴⁵ her meanings can not be frozen into static images or metaphors. With tremendous stylistic fluidity, Irigaray slips away from Lacan's fiefdom while paying an ironic “hommage” to the Master, in woman's language.⁴⁶

Because her writing seeks to stir up this fluid current within language and open up the closure of its logical and syntactic systems, it is useful to focus upon her strategies of beginning and ending, or, “preface” and “conclusion.” Both “Le miroir, de l'autre côté” and Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un begin with an epigraph from Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass (chapter 3):

She stood silent for a minute, thinking, then she suddenly began again. “Then it really has happened, after all! And now, who am I? I will remember, if I can! I'm determined to do it.” But being determined didn't help her much, and all she could say, after a great deal of puzzling, was “L, I know it begins with L.”

The original Alice finds herself alone in the wood where things have no name. The rules of logic do not yet prevail, for no name-bestowing Adam is present. This is Alice's question about her identity, and her observation that “it begins with L.” There is no answer, other than her self-renaming. “L” is, of course, multiple in Irigaray's reading: Alice, “Alice,” Luce, and for a French speaker, elle/elles—the third person feminine, both singular and plural. To begin with elle(s) means to learn that the female self is multiple, that we are all written into the text. Once through the looking glass, the unified self is seen as an illusion. In the shifting tones and styles of Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, “je” is trying to speak as “elle(s),” to establish through language the communication that she desires among “nous: toute(s)”—the final words of the book.

Irigaray suggests that our naming system has always hindered this communion. Names appropriate identity and cloister us within the networks of family relations. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, the film's “Alice” does not use a family name, for she seeks to live beyond the Name-of-the Father. She hopes to live apart from the categories of the “proper,” “property,” and “propriety.” Irigaray examines the logical requirements of this cluster of concepts and demystifies its effects upon the status of women within the economy of language.⁴⁷ It follows that elle must demystify her proper name, the one that she was “given” within the system that saw her as a form of property. Since her father's death, “Alice” has situated herself in relation to her mother, who is her closest neighbor and “the only one who seems to know what Alice is.”⁴⁸ This special knowledge suggests an identity shared with, or derived from, the mother. Soon, another woman appears in “Alice's” house and becomes first her double, then her accomplice. The two women refuse the surveyors' “patriarchal” attempts to separate them or demarcate their sphere as private property. Through their deliberate rejection of such values, they establish a fragile community among themselves. However, the old laws concerning identity, property, and what is proper soon reassert themselves, when the surveyors threaten to destroy their privileged territory.

This new geography of female relations reappears only in the final essay, which has a therapeutic aim. Irigaray wants to make room for a language of love among women, of sexual pleasure that is truly beyond the law of the phallus. These relations partake of the preoedipal relations between mother and daughter, without, however, recreating their roles. Resurrected in the present, this lost paradise of mutual affection does not resemble the psycho-analysts' description of preoedipal crises over the need for individuation. There is no need to seal off the self from the other. For the space of an essay, mutuality once again exists among women, for each woman is herself multiple and speaks a variety of tongues. “Elle” speaks to her lover in a mode that reinvents the female subject as “tu/je,”’ “you/I.” Here, language is trying to unlearn its requirements for a unified subject and to set aside the subject-object paradigm as a model of human relations. “Tu” is the equal of “je”; their mutuality is signaled in writing by their double inscription as subject(s). Untrammeled by the delimiting function of proper names, the lovers reject the demands of appropriation as literally inappropriate to their relations. “When Our Lips Speak Together” may be described as a love poem in prose and a fable of female relations in the optative mood: it is written “as if” we could forget the logical and emotional requirements of the phallic economy. Irigaray wagers that once language has been taught to lower its resistance, it may then learn to generate another mode of signification.

Allow me to open a parenthesis within this opening. In her dream of an “other side,” Irigaray's writing again shows affinities with that of Derrida. Like Derrida, Irigaray returns to the current in Freud that could enable us to decode the neurosis-producing structures of the oedipal family, the guilty relations of this central Western fable. However, if one abandons the oedipal model, what remains as a figure of truth? Is there a “feminist” fable through which we can work out the relations of woman and truth, woman's truth? In their similar/dissimilar approaches, Irigaray and Derrida have both taken up Antigone, that difficult daughter of Oedipus who defied the laws of the city. In their different interpretations, the Antigone myth describes a break with the teleology of Oedipus within his own family.⁴⁹ In Speculum de l'autre femme, Irigaray reads Antigone's defiance of the law—the edicts of Creon—as the assertion of her maternal lineage. In her view, Antigone buries Polyneices, not because he is her brother, but because he is her mother's son. She wishes to honor their shared connection to the mother, in opposition to the surrogate father, Creon. She analyzes the Sophoclean drama as testimony of the transition from matriarchal to patriarchal values. Then, in the startling analogies of Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, Irigaray's “Alice” shows affinities with Antigone, the antagonist whose going underground subverts the laws of the fathers. Describing the project that preceded her dismissal from Vincennes, Irigaray explains that she intended to examine the myth of Antigone in the work of Sophocles, Hoederlin, Hegel, and Brecht. Her seminar would have analyzed what this heroine's opposition to the law brings into focus, “that other ‘face’ of discourse which provokes a crisis when it meets the light of day.”⁵⁰ In this reading, Antigone's example prompts us to rethink the reasons behind her sentence: the law's requirement that she be silenced to save the constituent necessities of rationality.

Both Irigaray and Derrida, however, bring into question these logical necessities in their attempts to counter the closed circle of theoretical discourse. Rejecting teleological closure, both create unfamiliar sequences of argument and demonstration. Although at this point, I close my parenthesis concerning Derrida in Irigaray's text, I reopen the question of its opening. Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un begins with a preface that is not a preface: a review which repeats or rehearses the rest of the book in another key. In the sequence that follows, “Alice” is transformed into “elle(s),” the antagonist of closed structures of meaning. For Irigaray, the metamorphoses of the female self can occur only in an open structure, one in which neither beginning nor end is quite what we expect. Once the rhetorical and metaphysical structures requiring closure have been deconstructed, the critic can reinscribe her meaning in a new way. Irigaray's book ends without closing, as befits the image of “ce sexe”: the female one whose lips are both closed and open. Through them flows the current of what “woman” is saying. “Yet one must know how to listen otherwise than in good form(s) to hear what she is saying.”⁵¹

Irigaray's texts know how to listen, for “Alice” is also “an/alyste” and her work, “an/alyse.” Her writing is an extension of the performance of psychotherapy, for female self and other. As such, it accepts the hesitations and silences of unfamiliar meanings. “Questions,” for example, transcribes a number of interviews or exchanges in a mode that is between speech and writing, as befits her subject(s). Questions echo throughout her writing, but when they go unanswered, silence is not oppressive. It waits for an opening, as in the indecisions, pauses, and blank spaces of “When Our Lips Speak Together.” Reserving a space for the reader, her concluding essay offers “the site of a listening attention,”⁵² or what the analyst provides for the analysand. In a more general way, Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un as a whole opens itself to the reader, that other self. The book calls for a complicity between reader and writer not unlike that which may occur in the analytic situation, between a nonsubordinate analysand and a nonauthoritarian analyst. Reading Irigaray is like taking part in a process in which neither participant is certain of the outcome. Because “termination” suggests (fore)closure, this analysis may well be interminable, but my own is now coming to an end.

But how, the nagging voice persists, do we learn to play with language in this fashion? And how shall we rescue our own writing from the mark of Oedipus, from the guilt and neurosis of “absence” and “lack”? Can we rid ourselves of the yoke of “authority” and desubjugate the female self simply by altering the languages in which we have learned to express our understanding? Is there anything here that translates into our contexts? One may observe that Irigaray's writing is not immediately “useful” or prescriptive, and that in its very nondirectiveness lies its importance. We can not extract from her work an all-encompassing feminist theory, although we can learn that “trick of rereading,”⁵³ the habit of mind that is called deconstructive. Furthermore, we may conclude that deconstruction, “which teaches one to question all transcendent idealisms,” is a critical approach eminently suitable to feminists: surely, we have less to lose and more to jettison in the traditions of critical distance, authority, and mastery.⁵⁴ And finally, it may come as a relief to find that one may use the available languages without fully subscribing to their premises, that one may question the metaphysics of their questions.

However, an important problem for readers of Irigaray remains: does her writing manage to avoid the construction of another idealism to replace the “phallogocentric” systems that she dismantles? Do her representations of a parler femme, in analogy with female sexuality, avoid the centralizing idealism with which she taxes Western conceptual systems? Although feminists criticism of her work has come, generally speaking, from quarters not in sympathy with the deconstructive strategies she employs, their different readings are, in their own ways, instructive. In one such reading, Irigaray is charged with an essentialist celebration of the female body, differing little from the patriarchal definitions which she proposes to dismantle: “To found a field of study on this belief in the inevitability of natural sex differences can only compound patriarchal logic and not subvert it.”⁵⁵ However, as another critic asserts, to dismiss Irigaray's arguments in this reductive fashion “is to fail to register their full impact and the range of devices at their disposal.”⁵⁶ One might respond to the first criticism by commenting that it reduces the subtlety of Irigaray's thought to a simple argument “from the body,” in order to then point out that such arguments are, indeed, essentialist. This strategy ignores Irigaray's suggestion that female writing may be produced in analogy with the body and her awareness that it does not simply flow from it. Furthermore, in thus reducing her arguments, it disregards their manner, even though questions of style and strategy go to the heart of their matter.

A more useful critique argues that “to invoke the rhythms of the body is only to extend the sphere of existent speech, not invent a new one.”⁵⁷ In this view, the parler femme simply extends the terrain of what can be expressed, and the dream of an “other side” of language is unrealizable. Although this observation is probably correct, it too focuses upon the problematic figure of the body in Irigaray's writing at the expense of other features: its mode of address, its stylistic fluidity, its deconstructive tactics. In her use of conscious or deliberate analogies, Irigaray intends to avoid the reification of which such critiques would convict her: she stresses “not so much the anatomy but … the morphology of the female sex.”⁵⁸ The lips of “When Our Lips Speak Together,” for example, should not be reduced to a literally anatomical specification, for the figure suggests another mode, rather than another model. It implies plurality, multiplicity, and a mode of being “in touch” that differs from the phallic mode of discourse. Similarly, her “vaginal” fable does not simply replace the “phallic” one, and one should recall that both are probably simulacra, or representations of ideas in the mind. Important questions that have not been raised by Irigaray's critics concern the nature and use of her figurative language: whether it is mimetic or referential, whether it hovers or shifts back and forth between these two types of signification, and whether it is used consistently. Only once these questions have been fully discussed can we begin to understand the problematic intersection of sexuality and representation. On the subject of philosophy's “proud, delusive knowledge” (the assumptions which allow us to ask such questions), Nietzsche wondered whether all philosophy “has not been merely an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body.”⁵⁹ To reverse Nietzsche, one might ask whether the representation of the body does not depend upon the undecidability of these philosophical questions. At this point, once again, the language of theory cedes tactfully to the language of fable.

Such fables can only be read: they do not provide a basis for action. However, although we can not “apply” Irigaray's writing in any direct fashion, we may find that we emerge from this difficult reading process with our minds, literally, changed. We may become interested in a kind of writing that encourages us “to question privileged explanations even as explanations are generated.”⁶⁰ Furthermore, such writing is itself generative in its power to set language in motion. It is liberating to find that one may transgress the demands of univocal signification by letting in the linguistic “accidents” that don't fit into logical discourse—the puns, conjunctions of opposites, and coinages that open up the realm of meaning. At the same time, we may learn to participate in the play of self-unfolding within writing, for once the requirement of objectivity is demystified, we come to the salutary admission of the autobiographical necessities of our own work. The transformations of “L”/Alice/“Alice”/Luce/“analyste” perform an instructive mimesis of self-discovery: Irigaray's insertion of this multiple signature runs counter to the “Name-of-the-Father” and goes beyond the enclosures of patriarchal naming. Through such play with language, the conceptual systems that have determined the representation of the female may be deconstructed as the machinery of masters reluctant to recognize their actual lack of mastery. Let us dream, with Irigaray, that the story of O may yet be erased by the story of elle(s).

Notes

1. On this context and her relation to other French feminist writers, see the following in Signs 3, no. 4 (Summer 1978): Elaine Marks, “Women and Literature in France,” pp. 832-42; and Carolyn Burke, “Report from Paris: Women's Writing and the Women's Movement,” pp. 843-55.

2. Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l'autre femme (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974).

3. Irigaray, “Women's Exile,” Ideology & Consciousness 1 (1977): 71.

4. Irigaray, Le langage des déments (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1973).

5. Irigaray, “Women's Exile,” p. 74.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., p. 63.

8. Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977).

9. Irigaray, “Women's Exile,” p. 64. “Specularisable”: that which can be represented, as in a mirror or reflection.

10. Ibid., p. 65.

11. Irigaray, Et l'une ne bouge pas sans l'autre (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979).

12. Irigaray, Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980).

13. Jacques Lacan's selected essays are available in translation: Ecrits (New York: Norton, 1977). On his work, see Yale French Studies 48 (1972); Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Pantheon, 1974); Jane Gallop, “The Ghost of Lacan, the Trace of Language,” Diacritics 5, no. 4 (Winter 1975); Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1977); Martha Noel Evans, “Introduction to Jacques Lacan's Lecture: the Neurotic's Individual Myth,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 48 (1979), among others. My account is indebted to Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud's French Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1978).

14. See Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics, pp. 164-88, passim, on Lacan's attempt to base psychoanalytic “science” on the use of mathematical formulas, or mathemes.

15. See Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics, especially p. 120 ff.

16. Irigaray, Speculum de l'autre femme, pp. 41-42. See also Jane Gallop, “The Ladies' Man,” Diacritics 6, no. 4 (Winter 1976); and her forthcoming Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter's Seduction, to be published by Macmillan.

17. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire XX: Encore (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), p. 69. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.)

18. Irigaray cites Lacan's provocative judgment as the epigraph for “Così fan tutti,” in Ce sexe, pp. 85-101, in which she implies that Lacan does not know how to listen.

19. Lacan, Le Séminaire, p. 54.

20. Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics, p. 130.

21. For a full account of the Name-of-the-Father in relation to the Oedipus complex, see Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, pp. 78-92; and Evans, “Introduction,” pp. 386-404 (n. 12).

22. Irigaray, Ce sexe, p. 88.

23. Irigaray, “Women's Exile,” p. 76.

24. Derrida's essay, “La question du style,” first appeared in Nietzsche aujourd'hui? I: Intensités (Paris: Collection 10/18, 1973). Slightly revised, it is available in a bilingual edition: Spurs/Eperons (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978). The citation from Derrida appears on p. 249, “La question du style,” and pp. 62-65, Spurs/Eperons.

25. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Translator's Preface to her translation of Derrida's Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. xxxvii. I am greatly indebted to her account of his thought.

26. Derrida, “Question du style,” pp. 247-48; Spurs/Eperons, p. 61, where “phallogocentrism” is, unfortunately, translated as “phallocentrism.”

27. Lacan's exegetes point out that the phallus is not simply the penis, that it is, rather, a simulacrum or mental image which functions in the psycholinguistic representation of sexual desire. Moreover, it is not so much a symbol as it is a mode of meaning, for the phallus expresses the realization of lack as a structural factor in the understanding of sexual difference. Freud's infamous “penis envy” might, then, more properly be called “phallus envy,” and it might apply equally but differently in the psychic development of males and females. The phallus is “the signifier of all signifiers,” or “the signifier of desire,” that is, of the instauration of the need to express desire for what is lacking through and by means of language. On this difficult concept, see Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” Ecrits; and Irigaray, Ce sexe, pp. 57-59, 63, 108-109.

28. Gallop, “The Ladies' Man,” p. 30.

29. Spivak, Translator's Preface, p. lxxiii.

30. Ibid., p. xlix.

31. Derrida, cited in Spivak, Translator's Preface, p. lxxv.

32. Ibid., p. lxxvii.

33. Ibid. See also Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” Glyph 1 (1977): 195.

34. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 140; cited in Spivak, Translator's Preface, p. xlix.

35. Here again, according to Spivak, in Translator's Preface, pp. xxi-xxvii, Derrida's practice is Nietzschean when he adapts the concept of the philosopher-artist. Nietzsche observed that philosophical discourse is rhetorical or figurative language that has forgotten its own metaphorical status. Thus, he argued, its “truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions.” Philosophical fables such as those imagined by the philosopher-artists Derrida and Irigaray might function, then, as illusions which have a certain truth value as long as one remembers that they are illusions. Of his coined word, “hymeneal,” for example, Derrida writes, quoted in Of Grammatology, p. lxxi, “This word … is not indispensable.”

36. See Spivak, Translator's Preface, pp. xiv-xx, on Derrida's practice of writing sous rature (under erasure). This strategy allows one to use terms while putting into question their premises.

37. Derrida, cited in Spivak, Translator's Preface, p. xviii. Deconstructive philosophy puts one in the awkward/exhilarating critical position of the mise en abîme (placing/being placed in the abyss or infinite regress of meaning), in which no final account is possible even though one must offer her provisional account—such as this one—as if she “believes” in it. (See Spivak, Translator's Preface, pp. lxxvii-lxxviii on this intellectual “double bind.”)

38. Irigaray, Ce sexe, p. 67.

39. Ibid., p. 30.

40. Translated by Claudia Reeder as “This Sex Which Is Not One,” in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), pp. 99-106.

41. Translated by Claudia Reeder as “When the Goods Get Together,” in New French Feminisms, pp. 107-110.

42. Translated by Carolyn Burke, with Introduction, in Signs 6, no. 1 (Autumn, 1980): 66-79.

43. Irigaray, Ce sexe, p. 85.

44. Ibid., p. 108.

45. Ibid., p. 109.

46. Ibid., p. 114. On this question, see Jane Gallop, “Impertinent Questions: Irigaray, Sade, Lacan,” Sub-Stance 26 (1980): 57-67.

47. Cf. Spivak's discussion in Translator's Preface, p. lxxiii, of Derrida's somewhat different problematization of “proper” and “proper name.”

48. Irigaray, Ce sexe, p. 10.

49. Derrida and Irigaray both reread Hegel on Antigone (The Phenomenology of Mind). See Derrida, Glas (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1974); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Glas-Piece: a Compte Rendu,” Diacritics 7, no. 3 (Autumn 1977): 22-43; and Josette Féral, “Antigone or the Irony of the Tribe,” Diacritics 8, no. 3 (Autumn 1978): 2-14.

50. Irigaray, Ce sexe, p. 162.

51. Ibid., p. 109. The rhetorical status of the parler femme and Irigaray's sexual metaphors is not easily defined, partly because of her deliberate decision to elude the rigidity of definitions. The problem is discussed at the conclusion of this essay.

52. The phrase is used to describe Lacanian psychoanalysis by Stephen Heath, whose analysis of sexual difference and representation is influenced by Irigaray. See his “Difference,” Screen 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1978): 52.

53. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Explanation and Culture: Marginalia,” Humanities in Society 2, no. 3 (Summer 1979): 204.

54. Ibid., p. 202. The forthcoming publication of Spivak's Deconstruction, Feminism and Marxism: Theory and Practice in the Humanities is announced in the Contributors section of this issue of Humanities in Society.

55. Monique Plaza, “‘Phallomorphic power’ and the psychology of ‘woman,’” Ideology & Consciousness 4 (1978): 8. This essay was first published in Questions féministes 1 (1978).

56. Beverley Brown and Parveen Adams, “The Feminine Body and Feminist Politics,” m/f 3 (1979): 36.

57. Irigaray, “Women's Exile,” p. 64.

58. Cited in Spivak, Translator's Preface, p. xxv.

59. Spivak, “Explanation-and-Culture,” p. 218.