SOURCE: Holmlund, Christine. “The Lesbian, the Mother, the Heterosexual Lover: Irigaray's Recodings of Difference.” Feminist Studies 17, no. 2 (summer 1991): 283-308.

[In the following essay, Holmlund surveys Irigaray's oeuvre and its critical reception, identifying three central tropes that inform her criticism and the political/literary implications of these devices in the evolution of her thought.]

To North American feminists encountering Luce Irigaray for the first time, several of the themes underlying her wide-ranging theoretical and empirical investigations will seem familiar: (1) her overt, uncompromising challenge to male systems of thought; (2) her continual recognition that theoretical choices carry with them practical implications; and (3) her ongoing insistence that language usage both constitutes and perpetuates sexual inequality. Other stances may well seem alien: (1) her immersion in European philosophical debates; (2) her strategic invocations of essentialism; and (3) her apparent failure to examine concrete aspects of women's lives.

Unlike most North American feminists, Irigaray rereads and rewrites male, not female, theorists. And she urges that the roles biological factors play in the constitution of subjectivity be explored; whereas most North American feminists would prefer to emphasize social factors. Irigaray consciously places herself on the margins of, even outside, the French intellectual establishment and defines her work in feminist terms. In line with many male structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers, she frequently argues that “Woman” is the silent condition of representation. Consequently, she holds up male avant-garde literature and poetry, not writing by women, as the prime loci of subversion. Although Irigaray prefers dialogue with male philosophers, she does occasionally refer to the work of other women, and she always finds the idea that “Woman” is the condition of representation intolerable and unacceptable.

In this essay I review Irigaray's work, survey its critical reception, and suggest some directions for future research. For those interested in but unfamiliar with Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One is no doubt the best point of entry to her complex theoretical/political project. Two other collections of essays and lectures, L'Ethique de la différence sexuelle and Sexes et parentés, also merit attention, but they are more demanding, and only portions are available in English.¹ The clearest and most comprehensive critical study of Irigaray to date is Elisabeth Grosz's Sexual Subversions. Other suggestions for secondary reading may be found in the notes.

Ever since the publication of Speculum de l'autre femme in 1974, Luce Irigaray has analyzed and reanalyzed, worked and reworked, the meanings accorded identity, equality, sameness, and difference within patriarchal discourses and within the alternative theoretical framework she proposes. Echoes, shifts, and contradictions in definitions and usage abound, from work to work, even within the same work. In Speculum de l'autre femme, Irigaray formulates what is no doubt her most fundamental argument regarding “sameness” and “difference.” Here, as throughout her work, she maintains that Western philosophers, linguists, and psychoanalysts describe women and femininity according to a male model which ignores the difference between the sexes and thereby reduces women to being the same as men.² Elsewhere in Speculum de l'autre femme, however, Irigaray insists that women today are not the same as men but that they have much to gain, politically, from demanding social justice and risking sameness. Sameness, in other words, may be a necessary first stage before differences can be perceived and appreciated:

It is still a matter, ultimately, of demanding the same prerogatives [as men have]. … [W]omen have to advance to those same privileges (and to sameness, perhaps) before any consideration can be given to the differences that they might give rise to.³

Three years later, in Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, Irigaray recasts this political paradox she sees feminism facing as “equality” rather than “sameness.” In an essay entitled “Questions,” she asks, for example, “how can the double bind—for both equality and difference—be articulated?”⁴ In another essay in this volume, “The Power of Discourse,” she argues against equality alone, because “women merely ‘equal’ to men would be ‘like them,’ therefore not women. Once more, the difference between the sexes would be in that way cancelled out, ignored, papered over” (Ce sexe, p. 166).

Irigaray uses “identity” in similarly multivalent ways. In Passions élémentaires (1982), as earlier in “Le Langage de l'homme” (1978), reprinted in Parler n'est jamais neutre (1985), identity is defined as a male concept used to make sense of men's necessary separation from their mothers. For women, who have a different, much closer relation to their mothers, according to Irigaray, identity is meaningless: no separation or delimitation of boundaries occurs between mother and daughter.⁵ Within a male framework, the possibility of a female identity is, therefore, unrecognized, unknown, unthought, as are reciprocity, fluidity, exchange, and permeability. Difference is quantitative (women are less than men), not qualitative (women are other than men).⁶

Despite her earlier condemnation of identity, in Sexes et parentés (1987), Irigaray insists that women need an identity of their own, not an identification with men.⁷ Returning to the political/philosophical questions she broached thirteen years earlier in Speculum de l'autre femme, she argues that because the rhetoric of equality is too easily absorbed within the state, which uses it to neutralize and contain women, feminist demands for “salaries and social recognition” should be made

in the name of identity and not equality. Without women, no more society. They should make this heard and demand, for themselves, a justice appropriate to their identity and not a few temporary rights annexed to the justice of men. Sexual difference is one of our hopes for the future.⁸

What are U.S. feminists, who have fought long and hard for equality with differences, to make of Irigaray's frequent preference for a distinctive female identity over equality? How to interpret the seeming contradictions within her work? Does Irigaray opt for a single difference between women and men over multiple differences among women and also among men? What of history and change?

In the past, Irigaray's vehement polemics have often led to a hasty dismissal of her theories as utopian and/or essentialist. With some exceptions, neither the nuances of her arguments nor the differences between U.S. and French intellectual and political contexts have been sufficiently taken into account.⁹ True, the fragmentary nature of much of Irigaray's work (several books are collections of essays, interviews, lectures and similar pieces), its unavailability in English, and the widely different textual strategies she has adopted over the years have exacerbated critical confusion. For the casual reader not versed in the rhetoric of European cultural debates especially, Irigaray's multiple styles are disconcerting, even intimidating. The range of her intellectual engagement—from psychoanalysis to linguistics to philosophy—is unquestionably daunting.¹⁰ And, last but not least, Irigaray's use of metaphor to express her vision of sexual difference makes it virtually impossible to say definitively what she means. As she herself points out, metaphor is, by definition, elusive. To interpret a metaphor is to close off the play of meaning it sets in motion.¹¹

How, then, given the complexity of Irigaray's project, are we as U.S. feminists working in the 1990s, to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses? How are we to assess the promises and problems her writings pose in light of our own political and theoretical needs? Are her formulations of an alternative sexual difference purely theoretical and utopian, or are they also grounded in history and praxis?

In order to approach these questions from a fresh perspective, I argue that Irigaray consciously and unconsciously structures her critiques and creations around three central female figures. I maintain, further, that the fulcrum of Irigaray's analyses has changed over the years, moving from the lesbian to the mother and the daughter to the female lover in a heterosexual couple. This progression corresponds roughly to the three phases of stylistic experimentation identified by Carolyn Burke. The first phase includes the early, densely written, deconstructions of male philosophers (Speculum and Ce sexe). The second phase includes the transitional, erotically charged, poetic inscriptions of feminine desire of the late 1970s and early 1980s—the last essay of Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, entitled “Quand nos lèvres se parlent,” Et l'une ne bouge pas sans l'autre (1979), and Le Corps-à-corps avec la mère (1981). And the third, most recent phase includes the more collaborative engagement with Nietzsche, Levinas, Heidegger, Hegel, Derrida, and others—Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche (1980), Passions élémentaires (1982), L'Oubli de l'air (1983), La Croyance même (1983), L'Ethique de la différence sexuelle (1984), Parler n'est jamais neutre (1985), and Sexes et parentés (1987).¹²

In what follows, I examine each of Irigaray's central female figures in turn, associating each with a particular period and style of writing and placing each within the broader context of her work as a whole. In conclusion, I return to my initial questions regarding Irigaray's de- and re-codings of identity, equality, sameness, and difference, rephrasing them in light of Irigaray's successive emphasis on these central female figures. Because Irigaray's most recent concern has been the relation between woman and man, has a different relation between woman and woman, as lesbians or as mothers and daughters, disappeared? If so, what might this mean for Irigaray's political philosophy? Where and how should our own critical rereadings of Irigaray come into play? Crucial questions, indeed, for as Irigaray herself would be the first to admit, the choice of organizing figures and tropes has political as well as poetic consequences.

THE LESBIAN

Although like Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva and unlike Simone de Beauvoir, Irigaray has always emphasized the need to define femininity in relation to maternity,¹³ initially, the lesbian, not the mother, served as the linchpin for Irigaray's deconstructions of and dialogue with male philosophers, particularly Sigmund Freud. In Speculum de l'autre femme and Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, only the lesbian and lesbian relationships provide Irigaray with an alternative to the hegemonic phallocentric model she so harshly condemns. With analyses of the lesbian, Irigaray thus begins a double theoretical move of critique and reconstruction which will characterize all her future work.¹⁴

For Irigaray, the lesbian's reduction by Freud to a man—she looks and acts like a man; she desires another woman like a man—stands as “the extreme consequence” (Ce sexe, p. 43) of what Irigaray labels the “hom/m/osexuality” of psychoanalysis, by which she means its inability to conceptualize women except as the “same” as men.¹⁵ All exchange, Irigaray insists, takes place among men, and male homosexuals are ostracized only because they too openly enact this basic principle.¹⁶ Lesbianism, in contrast, is overlooked by psychoanalysis because “the phenomenon of female homosexuality appears so foreign to [Freud's] ‘theory,’ to his (cultural) imaginary, that it cannot help but be ‘neglected by psychoanalytic research’” (Ce sexe, p. 195).¹⁷

That a woman might desire a woman ‘like’ herself … that she might also have auto- and homosexual appetites is simply incomprehensible to Freud, and indeed inadmissible. So there will be no female homosexuality, just a homosexuality in which woman will be … begged to maintain the desire for the same that man has. …

(Speculum, pp. 101, 103)¹⁸

Irigaray shows Freud's vision of the lesbian as always, inevitably “masculine” to be riddled with contradictions, the result of his own desires and denials. Whereas, Irigaray charges, Freud could have pointed out that “miming—acting, pretending—is capable of affording an increase in pleasure over simple discharges of instincts” (Speculum, p. 100), he instead passes over lesbian pleasure and by extension, female pleasure. In the framework of sameness he constructs, women in general, and lesbians in particular, are granted no separate identity. Equality, as a result, can quite literally not be thought.

Nevertheless, by her presence, the lesbian shows up the conflation within psychoanalysis and philosophy of femininity and maternity as ideologically motivated. She exposes “mature femininity” (Speculum, p. 112, citing Freud) as, in effect, mere masquerade, imposed on women by men.¹⁹ By desiring another woman “like a man,” the lesbian mimics and plays with the masculinity and femininity of psychoanalytic discourse, thereby making both “visible” as constructions and performances.²⁰ At the same time she discovers, creates, “what an exhilarating pleasure it is to be partnered with someone like herself” (Speculum, p. 103). For Irigaray, then, the lesbian demonstrates that women “are not simply resorbed” by a male-defined femininity: “They also remain elsewhere …” (Ce sexe, p. 76).

Crucially, lesbian relationships thus figure not only the possibility but also the actual existence of another kind of exchange, another kind of desire, “without identifiable terms, without accounts, without end” (Ce sexe, p. 197). The last essays of Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un in particular draw on lesbian relationships and sexuality to initiate a “speaking among women” (Ce sexe, pp. 119, 135). In the final essay of Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, “Quand nos lèvres se parlent,” the central metaphor of the first period, women's two lips, is explicitly associated with lesbian sexuality. As the title suggests, kissing and talking are linked: for Irigaray, the two lips evoke both a nonreproductive female sexuality and a new female language.²¹

Despite her lyrical evocation of lesbian love as a space where “there are no proprietors, no purchasers, no determinable objects, no prices” (Ce sexe, p. 213), however, Irigaray is not uncritical of lesbianism as a feminist strategy. Elsewhere in Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, she warns against adopting separatism as a goal or lesbianism as the life-style for women. Posing such either/or choices, she says, will lock women into being “among themselves” once again, with the result that “history would repeat itself in the long run, would revert to sameness: to phallocratism” (Ce sexe, p. 33).²² In her later works she is even more reluctant to promote lesbianism as an end in and of itself. In L'Ethique de la différence sexuelle (p. 66), for example, she argues that “one of the dangers of love between women is the confusion of identity between them, the nonrespect and non-perception of differences.” For Irigaray, self-love, love for other women, and lesbianism, like “forg[ing] … a social status that compels recognition” and “earning [a] living,” are “indispensable stages” needed for “women's sexuality … women's imaginary [and] women's language to take place” (Ce sexe, p. 33). Later, in L'Ethique de la différence sexuelle (p. 69), ideal love seems more heterosexual than homosexual: “The discovery would be to be two in order to be able to be one in this third which is love.”²³ Nevertheless, she does acknowledge at various points that both female homosexuality and a heterosexuality based on the difference between women and men must be explored.

Two qualitative differences remain to be discovered, to be placed in relation to each other—that which arises from sexual difference and that which can be lived in a sympathy between women. They are no doubt not separate but they do not correspond to the same feeling. To fold them in on each other or to efface one within the other would be to reduce both to something quantitative.

(Parler, p. 294)

Irigaray's own interest in analyzing the figure of the lesbian and lesbian relationships wanes, however, after Speculum de l'autre femme and Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un. Instead, in the next phase of her writing, her attention shifts to the mother and the relationship between mother and daughter. While the lips continue to be a central metaphor, evocative of openness, fluidity, and the importance of touch as opposed to sight, their connection with lesbian sexuality and relationships among women is attenuated by the increasing prominence of the placenta, the nourishing envelope for both sexes. How the lesbian functions as metaphorical or historical figure, and what she may offer Irigaray's, and our own, understanding of identity, equality, sameness, and difference, cannot be fully assessed, therefore, until her work with the mother and the heterosexual female lover is also examined.

THE MOTHER

Although the mother figures prominently in Irigaray's early books and again in her most recent work, Et l'une ne bouge pas sans l'autre (1979) and Le Corps-à-corps avec la mère (1981) stand out for three main reasons: (1) in them, Irigaray focuses exclusively on mother/daughter relationships; (2) in them, she applies and adapts the double move of criticism and creation begun around the lesbian to the mother; and (3) in these works, as opposed to those that follow, Irigaray's attitude toward the mother is ambivalent, haunted by the image of the male-defined phallic mother she described in Speculum de l'autre femme and Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un. In her studies after 1981, in contrast, Irigaray's redefinitions of the mother and maternal metaphors are far more positive.

From Speculum de l'autre femme on, Irigaray views the reclamation of the mother and motherhood for women as a more urgent task than the reappraisal of the lesbian. Time and again, she notes that phallocentric discourse equates female identity with motherhood: “‘Femininity’ fades away before maternity, is absorbed into maternity”; “the mother once again … mask[s] the woman” (Speculum, pp. 74, 117).²⁴ For Irigaray, as Elisabeth Grosz points out, “maternity has functioned to elide the specificity of women's identities and social positions by equating femininity always and only with reproduction and nurturance.”²⁵ A corollary proposition also holds: because phallocentric discourse emphasizes motherhood and reproduction, the mother is deprived of her identity as a woman and as a lover.²⁶ Hence the dual importance, politically and personally, of “recognizing your mother as a woman … [of] distancing yourself from motherly omnipotence. You recognize her as a finite person with limits. …”²⁷

Irigaray analyzes at length men's conscious and unconscious reasons for reducing women, including mothers, to reproductive vessels. The mother, she says, “at least—is not nothing. She is not this vacuum (of) woman” men find so threatening (Speculum, p. 228). Although sons may feel nostalgic for an archaic mother, usually they fear her. Daughters, however, are not permitted any active relationship or identification with their mothers.²⁸ So complete is the erasure of mother and daughter within male representation, Irigaray charges, that mother/daughter relationships can be termed the “dark continent of the dark continent” (Corps, p. 61), and Western culture can be said to be founded on the death of the mother.²⁹

To counter and rewrite this suppression of what she refers to in L'Ethique de la différence sexuelle as the “vertical dimension” of feminine ethics,³⁰ Irigaray takes mother/daughter relationships as the subject of Et l'une ne bouge pas sans l'autre and Le Corps-à-corps avec la mère. In both books, exchange between mothers and daughters is accorded the seductive and productive characteristics earlier attributed to lesbian exchange. Written from the point of view of a baby girl and reminiscent of the lyrical exchanges between the lesbian “tu/je” in “Quand nos lèvres se parlent,” Et l'une ne bouge pas sans l'autre is a lament for the lack of love between mother and daughter. In the absence of genuine dialogue between them, love borders on hate, an idea Irigaray occasionally returns to in her later work as well. In L'Ethique de la différence sexuelle (p. 100), for example, she asks:

Love for the mother, for women, perhaps must only or could only exist in the form of a substitution? Of a taking her place? Which is unconsciously suffused with hate?

Ambivalence, however, is the central emotion in Et l'une ne bouge pas sans l'autre. Only at the end of the essay does the daughter, overwhelmed, suffocated by the mother, try to persuade her that they do not need to obliterate each other, that “in giving me life, you still remain alive.”³¹

More polemical in style and more positive in tone, Le Corps-à-corps avec la mère overtly reformulates mother/daughter relationships in terms of lesbian relationships:

Given that the first body with which [women] are involved, the first love with which they have to do, is a maternal love, is a female body, women are always—unless they renounce their desire—in a certain archaic and primary relationship to what is called homosexuality.

(Corps, p. 30)³²

The maternal is thereby redefined in nonbiological terms, no longer restricted to reproduction. As a result, Irigaray can say at the end of Le Corps-à-corps avec la mère and in an accompanying interview that “we are always mothers as soon as we are women,” and “every woman is potentially a mother” (pp. 27, 63). What Irigaray calls the “motherly dimension” is separated from “material reproduction”: “You can also ‘give birth’ in your work or in your relations with others. You can mother your friends.”³³ Irigaray's belief in the existence of a redefined motherhood is implicit here, although elsewhere it becomes visionary as motherhood encompasses all creation: “of love, of desire, of language, of art, of the social, of the political, of the religious, etc.” (Corps, pp. 27-28).

Gone is the ambivalence which permeated Et l'une ne bouge pas sans l'autre: from Le Corps-à-corps avec la mère on, the mother in Irigaray's model becomes largely a positive figure. The placenta—first home of both women and men, symbol of flux, permeability, nourishment, and a mother who is forever elusive, lost—becomes as frequent and important a metaphor as the lips. Irigaray thereby moves, in Teresa Brennan's words, “to symbolize women's relation to their maternal origin.”³⁴ Indeed, were it not for the appearance of a third female figure, the heterosexual female lover, one might well agree with Domna C. Stanton that “the vehicle for [Irigaray's] exploration of difference is essentially maternal.”³⁵ But because in Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche, Passions élémentaires, L'Ethique de la différence sexuelle, L'Oubli de l'air, and Sexes et parentés Irigaray's identification with the heterosexual female lover is far more profound than her identification with either the mother or the lesbian, this final figure must also be considered before Irigaray's redefinitions of identity, equality, sameness, and difference can be fairly evaluated.

THE HETEROSEXUAL FEMALE LOVER

The seeds for Irigaray's dialogue with male philosophers from the point of view of the heterosexual female lover, like her initial treatment of the mother and the daughter, are already to be found in Speculum de l'autre femme and Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un. In the latter, she describes the strategy of destruction through seduction which will dominate her later work, saying of her engagement in Speculum de l'autre femme with Freud, Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel and in Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un with Lacan, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and Freud: “It was necessary to destroy … with nuptial tools. … The option left to me was to have a fling with the philosophers …” (Ce sexe, p. 150).

But although the practice of amorous dialogue is already present in the early work, the figure of the heterosexual female lover does not fully emerge until Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche (1980). Despite Irigaray's brief return in 1981 in Le Corps-à-corps avec la mère and again in a few later essays to the mother/daughter relationships, after Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche her attention shifts from female relationships, whether lesbian or mother/daughter, to heterosexual relationships. The couple is now characterized as “the basic unit of all society” and the “intermediary space between individuals, peoples, States” (Sexes et parentés, pp. 167, 17). Irigaray's dream of a new age encompasses everyone and everything, including, even foregrounding, men: “A new epoch signifies a different relation between man and god/s, man and man, man and world, and man and woman” (L'Ethique, pp. 15-16).³⁶ Marriage is no longer simply conceptualized as the male exchange of women, to be countered by exchange among women. Rather, like Irigaray's reformulation of lesbian relationships and her metaphoric reexamination of the mother, marriage is now thought of as openness and fluidity, characterized by a respect for the boundaries of an other without fixed identity.³⁷ In order to celebrate marriage, Irigaray notes, “a harmonious passage from the exterior to the interior, from the interior to the exterior of bodies … is needed. That the two be here and there at the same time, which is not to say that they merge” (Amante marine, pp. 124-25). In a sense, the heterosexual love relationship even replaces procreation and motherhood. Irigaray argues that “lovers would confer life on themselves/each other, in the assumption and absolution of a definitive conception” (L'Ethique, p. 177). As was the case with her redefinition of the mother, Irigaray insists that the heterosexual love relationship be considered outside the demands of reproduction: “By forcing couples to reproduce they are prevented from being creations of the world.”³⁸

The double move of critique and re-creation begun with the lesbian is thus multiply present in Irigaray's discussion of heterosexual love and lovers. Once again, Irigaray chastises post-Socratic philosophy for straitjacketing women and men as the same and proposes an alternative wherein love and eroticism are combined. “In order to love, it is necessary to be two,” she says repeatedly (L'Ethique, p. 69). Passions élémentaires sings the rediscovery of love, the elements, and the world by female and male subjects who encounter and embrace without fusing with or annihilating each other. Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche (p. 43), in contrast, warns that “If the one and the other don't marry each other in the difference of their movements, they risk the abyss in each other, perceiving nothing any longer of themselves or of the other.”

To date, Irigaray argues, phallocentric conceptions of love have been predicated on hierarchy and exclusion, not reciprocity and acceptance. Love has meant appropriating and consuming the other, not letting her or him grow.³⁹ In much the same way that she scolded Freud for defining the little girl and the lesbian as men, Irigaray takes Nietzsche to task: The woman “takes part in your marriage, but in your marriage with yourself. … That she is destroyed in the process is of little concern to you” (Amante marine, p. 38). Within phallocentric discourse, neither female self-love nor an active female desire of the other can be envisaged. The female lover is positioned as object, as the beloved, in French, “l'aimée.” The consequences of such a restriction, Irigaray charges, are disastrous for women: “To define the couple in love as lover and beloved signifies, already, an assignation to a polarity which deprives the female lover of her love” (L'Ethique, p. 189).⁴⁰

Irigaray rewrites this scenario as she did with the lesbian and the mother. Now, however, her intentions are clearer, for instead of redefining the original term “lesbian” or “mother” within a different context, here she counters “l'aimée” with “l'amante,” the female lover, an actively desiring female subject. Again, as with the redefined lesbian and mother, the question implicitly arises as to whether this active female lover already exists or whether she is purely a utopian construct. The answers Irigaray gives are contradictory. Her sadness at the impossibility of a relationship with Nietzsche as an equal is obvious. At the beginning of Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche (p. 9), she sighs: “How I would love you, if I had the possibility of speaking to you.” And, in Sexes et parentés (pp. 193-94), she maintains that the heterosexual female lover does not yet exist: “Where the woman is concerned, her gestures as lover seem still to be invented. She has lost herself in the mother. … She expresses perhaps her need-desire to be loved, but not her own love.”

But Irigaray's own practice systematically undercuts such pessimism. Her writing style—the multiplication of questions and quotations, the proliferation of sentences without subjects, the fondness for conditional verbs—refuses certitude, presence, and Truth. All are predicated on love relationships which are, for the most part, heterosexual. With the exception of “Quand nos lèvres se parlent,” Et l'une ne bouge pas sans l'autre and, arguably, Le Corps-à-corps avec la mère, Irigaray speaks to, of, and with men as their lover, in “a double style: a style of amorous relationships, a style of thought, of exposition, of writing” (Sexes et parentés, p. 191).

Despite her harsh and sustained criticisms of male philosophers, the extent and continuity of her involvement with them is obvious. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more apparent than in Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche. As she says in an interview in Le Corps-à-corps avec la mère (p. 44), “Amante marine … is not a book on Nietzsche but with Nietzsche who for me is a partner in a love relationship.” Carolyn Burke explains that Nietzsche's attractiveness for Irigaray is based on a shared critique of metaphysics as a misunderstanding of the body.⁴¹ The very title of Irigaray's book acknowledges her debt to and active participation with Nietzsche: the preposition “de” in Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche is willfully ambiguous. The use of the informal “tu” throughout further indicates the closeness of the bond she feels with Nietzsche.⁴²

In many ways, then, and on many levels, the status accorded the female heterosexual lover within Irigaray's work differs markedly from the status accorded either the lesbian or the mother. Although Irigaray makes clear her opposition to rigid dichotomies and forced alternatives, promoting relationships between women and relationships between women and men, there can be no doubt that for her, the heterosexual couple is more important, more intriguing than either the lesbian couple or the mother and daughter. As she says in an interview, “man and woman is the most mysterious and creative [couple].” Jokingly she adds, “it is deeper with a man.”⁴³

Jokes aside, Irigaray's recent emphasis on heterosexual relationships and comparative neglect of lesbian relationships necessarily affects how critics and activists read and use her deconstructions and redefinitions of identity, equality, sameness, and difference. Having sketched the political and philosophical concerns which motivate Irigaray's mobilization of these three main female figures, therefore, I will now weigh each against the others, first with respect to metaphor, then with respect to history, in order to assess the strategic value implicit in each, and in all.

CONCLUSION: ON METAPHOR AND HISTORY

Feminist critics in general find Irigaray's critique of phallocentric “identity” powerful and frequently persuasive. When woman is reduced to the same as or less than man, equality is clearly impossible. Debate as to the value of Irigaray's analyses of identity, equality, sameness, and difference centers for the most part on her visionary re-creations of an undefinable, nonunitary female identity based on difference. Does Irigaray's version of difference become yet another model predicated on sameness, as Linda Godard charges?⁴⁴ Does her new model of female identity duplicate without transforming phallocentric representations of “Woman”? Does she ignore differences among women, as Domna C. Stanton maintains?⁴⁵ Are Elizabeth Berg and Debra Terzian right to say that Irigaray speaks not as a woman but as a phallic mother or a man?⁴⁶ Or is Irigaray successful in thinking difference “differently,” as Carolyn Burke argues?⁴⁷ Is she able to deal with difference without constituting an opposition?⁴⁸ Does she express something amorphously in-between, multiple, and fluid, which she calls the “interval”?⁴⁹ Can a final judgment of her even be rendered, or does she manage to “proceed in such a way that linear reading is no longer possible” (Ce sexe, p. 80)?

For me, the debate over how to read and use Irigaray's recreations hinges on two related questions: the one concerns the role of metaphor, language, and experience in her work, the other the role of history, ideology, and politics. For some feminists, the question of the status of metaphor in Irigaray's writing has been particularly divisive. Most appreciate Irigaray's dissection of the tropes of phallocentric discourse and especially her critiques of the privileging and conflation of the penis/phallus in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Although Jacqueline Rose may be right to argue that Irigaray does not recognize that, for Lacan, the phallus is a symbol of lack for men as well as women, she is not simply anti-Lacan or anti-Freud, or even antiphallus.⁵⁰ Rather, as Margaret Whitford points out, her goal is to expose the ideological dimensions of psychoanalysis and Western metaphysics which mask an imaginary grounded on the male body as neutrality, objectivity, reality, and truth.⁵¹ She is concerned with questions of representation, not with the drives or the pre-Oedipal per se. And here there is of course no getting around the fact that the phallus is propped on the penis, a male sex organ.

Irigaray's countering of phallic metaphors with her own metaphoric network knotted around the lips and the placenta is harder for many feminists to accept. Many castigate Irigaray for lapsing into essentialism and repeating phallomorphic categories, and/or for failing to question her own metaphors.⁵² Others, however, appreciate Irigaray's metaphors, reading them as efforts to reembody the disembodied Cartesian subject, and/or to anchor “femininity” in a female body. For these critics, Irigaray's confusion of social and anatomical categories is a necessary political strategy, productive, not reductive. As Dianna Fuss puts it, because “Irigaray both is and is not an essentialist,” she circumvents an either/or opposition between discourse on the one hand and matter on the other.⁵³

Irigaray describes her rewriting of, with, and through the body as metaphor, that is, as a way of “translat[ing], by an obligatory detour, the aporia of speech as to the inarticulable functioning … of the copula, of sex. …”; a way of expressing “the games of like or, better yet, as if … the games between.” Metaphors proliferate throughout Irigaray's texts because, she says, only an “abuse of metaphors” or what “is abusively designated as metaphors” can in any way convey the ineffable (Parler, pp. 174-75). For Irigaray, the choice of both the lips and the placenta is thus motivated by a desire to go beyond “the phallocentric equat[ion of] women's sexuality with her reproductive organs” to inscribe an erotic female sexuality built around openings and permeable membranes which are neither unitary nor immediately visible (Speculum, p. 146).

The lips, in particular, are associated with female autoeroticism and “a symbolism … created among women … who can speak with each other” (L'Ethique, p. 103). In Jane Gallop's view, Irigaray's selection of the lips bypasses the either/or phallocentric opposition of vagina and clitoris and plays back and forth between sexuality (the lips below) and language (the lips above). But because Gallop does not discuss Irigaray's overt association of the lips with lesbian sexuality in “Quand nos lèvres se parlent,” she argues that Irigaray “produces an in-itself of female experience that is not rooted in anything recognized as female experience.”⁵⁴ Although I am sympathetic to Gallop's desire to defend Irigaray against charges of reductive anatomical referentiality, and although I agree that Irigaray's emphasis is on representation, I would like to move feminist rereadings of Irigaray in another direction. For me, Irigaray's association of lips with a lesbian sexuality is richly evocative. Imagine, lips on lips, above and below. No longer is genital sex in the service of reproduction the only option for women. Finally attention is paid to the multiplicity of female erogenous zones, with time for talk and laughter, too. I find it useful and necessary to insist on Irigaray's references to sexual practices among women, as compensation for Irigaray's own recent neglect of the lesbian and as counterbalance to the many readings of Irigaray that remain docilely within heterosexual parameters.

Yet I do not want to suggest that the lips are to be read as only referring to or reflecting sociological experience: this would be to ignore the emphasis Irigaray constantly places on representation. Nor do I want to imply that the lips are only aligned with the lesbian in Irigaray's discussions: all women have lips, above and below. Because Irigaray goes on to describe mother/daughter relationships in terms of lesbian relationships, she provides, as Stanton acknowledges, “an important vehicle for speaking the Lesbian relation in an enduringly homophobic hegemony,”⁵⁵ and, I would add, suggests a way out of what is often the impasse of heterosexuality.

The placenta functions differently. Although Irigaray describes it as the first home for both women and men and links it to a prediscursive experience shared by both sexes, as a metaphor it is obviously associated with the mother's body alone. Irigaray may expand the constellation of meanings associated with the placenta and the mother to the bursting point, but unlike the lips, the placenta cannot be stretched to encompass different sexual practices or female sexuality and eroticism in general. Stanton argues as a result that “the maternal metaphor does not produce revelations so much as revalorizations or relodgings of topoi, images, and myths embedded in binary phallologic.” Because the maternal is so overdetermined in today's society, she says, “it militates against our overcoming the conceptual impasse it represents.”⁵⁶

In her critique, however, Stanton tips the scale toward the mother, without taking the lesbian or the heterosexual female lover adequately into account, and without giving sufficient weight to Irigaray's interweaving throughout her later work of metaphors of the lips with metaphors of the placenta. When Irigaray's work is reviewed as a whole, it is clear she is more aware of differences among women than Stanton will admit. Certainly, the danger that a phallocentric binary logic will be reduplicated exists, both because Irigaray counters male metaphors with female ones and because she reinscribes traditional conceptions of femininity as fluidity, openness, materiality, and so on. But the risk of sameness must be taken: feminism will always find itself in a double bind vis-à-vis the body, because patriarchal ideology has no outside.

Where Irigaray's metaphors of the body are concerned, then, it seems to me we need to insist on, even highlight, the early association of the lips with lesbianism, despite Irigaray's current preference for the heterosexual female lover, and not focus exclusively on the maternal and the placenta. Perhaps we should even hope for still further thickenings of this metaphorical soup, for reconfigurations of male as well as female sexuality. What about the balls, for example, as Jane Gallop asks?⁵⁷ After all, phallocentric discourses form male as well as female sexuality: the penis and the phallus are not the same. How might we expand on Irigaray's analyses of male hom/m/osexual exchange and formulate male homosexuality apart from male heterosexuality? Meanwhile it is crucial that we recognize the political impetus behind Irigaray's abuse of metaphors. The title “Le Sexe fait comme signe” in Parler n'est jamais neutre nicely expresses the complexity of Irigaray's practice of metaphorization: the sex is already made, constructed, in discourse, like a sign; but it also gestures, actively, like a sign to this discourse, in what Irigaray terms its “semaphoric function” (Parler, p. 181). By gesturing outward, toward the act of enunciation, metaphors and plays on words may thus serve as prompts for investigations of history, politics, and ideology.⁵⁸

Here, too, however, Irigaray's interventions in the name of difference and female identity are hotly debated. At issue, as I have indicated earlier, is the extent to which Irigaray's re-creations are solely theoretical and utopian or whether they are also historical and material. Is the feminine, and/or women, completely silenced, repressed throughout history? Or can female alternatives be extrapolated from a range of “contextual, sociohistorical discourses”?⁵⁹ Similarly, does Irigaray always position herself in opposition to phallocentric philosophy, repetitively offering the same monolithic, ahistorical critique of male philosophers? Are such either/or assessments of her work fair? Or do they instead reflect a North American discomfort with Continental philosophy? Where does it make sense, politically speaking, to insist in our rereadings of Irigaray on an imbrication of experience and representation in her work? Should we read her as solely concerned with representation?

At many points in her texts, Irigaray indicates her sensitivity to the need to look at sexual difference and sameness from a contextual and sociohistorical perspective. For example, she describes sexual difference as “one of the questions or the question which must be thought” in today's society (L'Ethique, p. 13) and calls for an analysis of “the historical determinants that prescribe the ‘development of a woman’ as psychoanalysis conceives of it” (Ce sexe, p. 63). She speaks of “Woman” as “differently veiled according to the epochs of history” (Amante marine, p. 126) and says that sexual difference “is not situated in reproduction (natural or artificial) but in the access of the sexes to culture” (Sexe et parentés, p. 8).

Yet although she argues against “making woman the subject or the object of a theory” and against “subsuming the feminine under some generic term such as ‘woman,’” and although she urges that women's liberation movements should be recognized as many, not one, saying “there are multiple groups and tendencies in women's struggles today” (Ce sexe, pp. 156, 164), only rarely does Irigaray herself refer to or enter into dialogue with other women.⁶⁰ Her collusion in the silencing of women's voices is a conscious choice, resulting from her desire to clear a space for “le féminin,” a female symbolic, a new form of knowledge, by tackling and engaging with patriarchal discourses. As Grosz points out, Irigaray is well aware that

the project of (re-)creating a lost past does not simply consist in excavating those women “forgotten” in history. … To be able to trace a female genealogy of descent entails new kinds of language, new systems of nomenclature, new relations of social and economic exchange—in other words, a complete reorganization of the social order.⁶¹

But this choice carries with it risks and limits. As a strategy, it unwittingly exonerates female writers and philosophers from the crimes of Western science, technology, and metaphysics. It also paradoxically leaves Irigaray vulnerable to charges that she is a “phallic mother” who positions herself as the authority on female language, experience, and politics.⁶² Finally, because Irigaray converses with white European men and focuses on gender and sexuality, class and race do not often surface as issues in her work. As a result, for all her insistence that she speaks as a woman, not for women, and for all her emphasis on the need for a genealogy and a history of women, she may be in danger of “ignoring who the other woman is.”⁶³ The question of Irigaray's relation to women and history thus proves as thorny, yet as necessary, as the status of metaphor in her work.

Irigaray's readings of male philosophers similarly shy away from concrete historical analyses, although they are by no means either completely one-sided or entirely ahistorical. She repeatedly emphasizes, for example, the contributions as well as the limitations of psychoanalysis: “Freud is in fact indicating a way off the historico-transcendental stage, at the very moment when his theory and practice are perpetuating … that very same stage.” She also insists on the need to interpret “the historical determinants of the constitution of the ‘subject’ as same” (Speculum, pp. 139-40). Frequently, she acknowledges her debts to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan, Levinas, Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and others. Yet the fact that she makes virtually the same criticisms of each can be seen as problematic, unless we agree with Margaret Homans that Irigaray's intent in so doing is to explore “not only the powers but also the limits of feminist revisionism.”⁶⁴ I believe, however, that because of the complexity of Irigaray's political/philosophical project, we will only really be able to appreciate whether and why Irigaray analyzes shifts in female and male representations when her later texts have been examined more thoroughly, within and against the contexts of male philosophers.

In the meantime, I will argue once again that precisely because history, politics, and ideology are granted such important, but vague, roles in Irigaray's work, the figure of the lesbian is crucial to our reviewings of her reconstitutions of identity, equality, sameness, and difference. For in her analyses of the lesbian, Irigaray draws on and refers to a desire and exchange among women which already exists, and which, moreover, offers an alternative to, although not necessarily a replacement of, phallic sexuality. As feminist critics and activists, we cannot afford to forget that “there are at least two modes of jouissance for women” (Le Corps, p. 31).

To argue in favor of retaining and foregrounding the lesbian in Irigaray's work is not, however, to argue that the lesbian alone holds the key to another, better, world. One of Irigaray's primary strengths, as I see it, is that in her texts, unlike those of most male theorists, it is impossible to view the metaphor of woman as single. The lesbian, the mother, the daughter, the heterosexual female lover all function as nodal points for the subversion of patriarchal discourses and the creation of feminist alternatives. For U.S. feminists especially, Irigaray's deconstructions and reconstructions of the mother as always, also, a woman, hence not solely defined in terms of reproduction, are vital interventions, because motherhood and choice have become such volatile political issues. Irigaray's recent concentration on and reconceptualization of the heterosexual female lover is innovative as well, for it runs counter to and complements the tendency within feminist theory to promote a politics of identity based on female autonomy. For all her interest in feminine identity and difference, Irigaray argues that the heterosexual female lover must be thought together with the man, and vice versa. I read Irigaray on the heterosexual female lover, therefore, as not just obsessed with a difference from men but as engaged in reformulating a difference with men.

For both sexes, a new status for “Woman,” whether as lesbian, mother or heterosexual lover, necessarily entails a certain danger: “The difference between the sexes—when it happens—brings with it a risk, each time not easily foreseeable, of an increase or a diminution of jouissance if not of desire. For the woman as well as for the man” (Parler, p. 273).⁶⁵ Feminists have always taken this risk, have always found it necessary to posit difference in order to ask questions. This is not the same as positing difference in order to give answers. What female identity/identities or a female imaginary/imaginaries may be, may become, is not clear. But explorations like Irigaray's, which walk the tightrope between metaphor and history, philosophy and politics, can help create “the conditions in which change can take place.”⁶⁶

Admittedly, shifting gears between biology, psyche, and society as Irigaray does is inevitably awkward, invariably unsatisfying. Future studies of Irigaray need to engage with at least three as yet ill-explored areas of her work: (1) the tropes and figures which uphold her formulations of identity and difference; (2) her relationships to and departures from male philosophical traditions; and (3) her explorations of female and male language use. In the first of these areas, we will certainly want to look at a fourth, far more androgynous figure, who increasingly haunts Irigaray's writings: the angel. For Irigaray, the angel, as intermediary between heaven and earth, heralds the importance of defining a sexually based ethics. But the angel's relation to female and male figures can only be assessed through investigation of the second area, Irigaray's interactions with male philosophers. To date, most work has been done on her rereadings and subversions of Freud, Lacan, and Derrida. Yet Irigaray's work is not just deconstructionist or poststructuralist in its suspicion of identity. A strong totalizing urge marks it as well. Not enough attention has been paid to Irigaray's concern with ethics and metaphysics: it may well make sense to read her now in conjunction with the various strands of the nouvelle philosophie that are similarly characterized by a renewed interest in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and political philosophy.

Finally, Irigaray's ongoing examinations of language use must be studied with respect to her psychoanalytic, philosophical, and poetic interventions. Despite the fact that empirical studies have been an integral part of her political/theoretical project from the start, the task of evaluating what they may mean has only begun.⁶⁷ It is quite possible, for example, that the connections Irigaray makes between experience and ideology, metaphor and history will surface more concretely here. The studies she is currently conducting, together with women in France, the United States, Italy, Canada, and Germany, may well yield data on cross-cultural differences as well as on gender differences.⁶⁸

There are no easy bridges between theory and practice or French and American intellectual and political contexts. Nevertheless, I strongly believe we cannot afford to dismiss the questions Irigaray raises out of hand, for they are vital to the theoretical and practical dilemmas that confront us today. In right-wing America, where AIDS is viewed as proof of gay men's damnable difference, and where women's right to choose is placed on a par with a fetus's right to life, we can certainly agree with Irigaray that the meanings accorded identity and equality, sameness and difference, are not just academic exercises. As we know all too well, merely to fight for difference or merely to fight for equality would be naive. For U.S. feminists who want to adapt Irigaray's provocative “detour[s] into strategy, tactics and practice” to our own present political and theoretical needs, the best solution is to engage in dialogue with her,⁶⁹ taking the time to consider the implications her thought has for ethics and metaphysics, rather than invoking her texts in support of an ahistorical methodology of reading.⁷⁰ It is, after all, unfair and unwise to expect Irigaray, or anyone, to have all the answers.

Within the larger projects of reading and dialogue I have signaled above, the task of “pierc[ing] the metaphors” (Speculum, p. 136) she herself has constructed stands out as crucial, as Grosz notes, “not only because [metaphors] occup[y] a central place in her writings, but also because [they] constitut[e] the most densely inverted and heatedly contested area of her work.”⁷¹ Irigaray's current preference for the heterosexual female lover and corresponding neglect of the lesbian, for example, does not mean she has repudiated the one for the other. But given the force of heterosexual assumptions and privileges in today's world, we may well need to insist that the lesbian is not a stage to be outgrown en route to mature heterosexuality. From my dialogues with and readings of Irigaray, I would urge that we—like Irigaray, with Irigaray, even, if necessary, against Irigaray—explore differences within women, among women, and between women and men. Rather than reformulate “Woman” as lesbian, as mother, or as heterosexual lover, let us follow Irigaray's lead and use these figures to question and extend each other.

Notes

1. Besides Speculum de l'autre femme and Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, only a few of Luce Irigaray's essays have been translated into English: Et l'une ne bouge pas sans l'autre as “The One Doesn't Stir without the Other,” trans. Helene Wenzel, Signs 7 (Autumn 1981): 60-67; part of Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche as “Veiled Lips,” trans. Sara Seidel, Mississippi Review 11 (1983): 98-119; an essay from Parler n'est jamais neutre, “Is the Subject of Science Sexed?” in Cultural Critique 1 (Fall 1984): 73-88; an essay from Sexes et parentés, “Woman, the Sacred, and Money,” trans. Diana Knight and Margaret Whitford, Paragraph 8 (October 1986); the first chapter of L'Ethique de la différence sexuelle, “La Différence sexuelle,” as “Sexual Difference,” trans. Sean Hand, in French Feminist Thought, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); the last chapter of L'Ethique de la différence sexuelle, “Fécondité de la caresse,” as “The Fecundity of the Caress,” trans. Carolyn Burke, in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard S. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987); and another essay from Sexes et parentés, “The Gesture in Psychoanalysis,” trans. Elizabeth Guild, in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brennan (New York: Routledge, 1989), 127-38.

2. Irigaray's later work continues to charge that men prefer sameness to difference: she therefore refers to the male body as women's prison. See, for example, Irigaray, Passions élémentaires (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1982), 16-17: “You have trapped me in yourself … we will die together unless you let me go outside your same.” See also p. 91: “You erase … the difference between us.” The translations are mine, as are all subsequent translations except those from Speculum de l'autre femme and Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un.

3. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 119. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in parentheses in the text. Gill's translation at times alters Irigaray's text and interrupts the flow through the addition of title subdivisions; however, I have chosen to refer to it in what follows because it is so readily available.

4. Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 81. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in parentheses in the text.

5. See, for example, Irigaray, “Le Language de l'homme,” Revue philosophique 4 (Fall 1987), reprinted in Parler n'est jamais neutre (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985), 284, 287. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in parentheses in the text. See also Irigaray, Passions élémentaires, 109.

6. On this subject see, for example, Irigaray, “Le Sujet de la science est-il sexué?” in Parler n'est jamais neutre, 313. See also Irigaray, L'Ethique de la différence sexuelle (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984), 78, 178 (a passage that connects a qualitative, not a quantitative, difference with the possibility of a nonoppressive heterosexual love). Subsequent references to this edition are cited in parentheses in the text.

7. On the distinction between identity and identification, see Irigaray, “Une Chance de vivre,” in Sexes et parentés (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1987), 210-11:

   The neuter is often situated … in the confusion between identity and identification. The lure of being … able to be men … exiles women from themselves and makes of them agents of individual and social destruction.

   See also “Femmes divines,” in Sexes et parentés, 85:

   Feminine identity is always brought back to empirical parameters which prevent a woman, and the world of women, from resembling themselves as unity. … “Are you a virgin?” “Are you married?” … “Do you have children?” these … do not situate [a woman] except from the outside and in relation to a social function and not [in relation to] a feminine identity and autonomy.

8. Irigaray, Sexes et parentés, 8. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in parentheses in the text. See also pp. 126, 130.

9. For discussion of the differences between U.S. and French contexts see, for example, Teresa Brennan, “Introduction,” in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, 1-24; Claire Duchen, Feminism in France (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986); Josette Féral, “The Powers of Difference,” in The Future of Difference, ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 88-94; Jane Gallop and Carolyn G. Burke, “Psychoanalysis and Feminism in France,” in Future of Difference, 106-22; Dorothy Kaufmann, “Simone de Beauvoir: Questions of Difference and Generation,” Yale French Studies 72 (1986): 121-32; Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 3-38; Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Christiane Makward, “To Be or Not to Be … A Feminist Speaker,” in Future of Difference, 95-105; Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Methuen, 1985); Domna C. Stanton, “Language and Revolution: The Franco-American Dis-Connection,” in Future of Difference, 73-87; and Danièle Stewart, “The Women's Movement in France,” Signs 6 (Winter 1980): 350-54.

10. Most assessments of Irigaray, as Margaret Whitford and Ellen Mortensen point out, deal with her work solely in relation to psychoanalysis. Only recently have critics begun to examine and discuss her work in philosophy and linguistics. See, for example, Elisabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 100-83; Ellen Mortensen, “Woman's (Un)truth and the Dionysian Woman: Reading Luce Irigaray with Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger,” forthcoming; Naomi Schor, “This Essentialism Which Is Not One: Coming to Grips with Irigaray,” Differences 1, no. 2 (1989): 38-58; and Margaret Whitford, “Rereading Irigaray,” in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, 106-26.

11. See Irigaray, Parler n'est jamais neutre, 177. In Sexes et parentés, 191, Irigaray characterizes her style in L'Ethique as “double.”

12. See Carolyn Burke, “Romancing the Philosophers: Luce Irigaray,” Minnesota Review 29 (Fall 1987): 103-14.

13. For comparisons of Irigaray's work on the mother with that of Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Simone de Beauvoir see, for example, Kaufmann. See also Arleen Dallery, “Sexual Embodiment: Beauvoir and French Feminism,” Women's Studies International Forum 8, no. 3 (1985): 197-202; and Domna Stanton, “Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva,” in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 157-82.

14. In an earlier article, I describe the lesbian in Irigaray as a kind of “double other”: “As a woman, she is the other to man's subjectivity and economy; as a homosexual, she is the other to heterosexual relations formulated around reproduction.” Irigaray also, however, defines the lesbian as “otherness”: through their sexual practices, lesbians “call attention to the characteristics of female sexuality Freud neglected or redefined in terms of a masculine model.” See Christine Holmlund, “I Love Luce: The Lesbian, Mimesis, and Masquerade in Irigaray, Freud, and Mainstream Film,” New Formations 9 (Winter 1989): 108.

15. See also Irigaray, Ce sexe, 65.

16. See Irigaray, Speculum, 99-104, and Ce sexe, 192-93.

17. The internal quotes in this passage are from Sigmund Freud, “Femininity,” New Introductory Analyses on Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1965), 133.

18. See also Irigaray, Ce sexe, 194.

19. For a comparison of Irigaray's and Joan Rivière's discussions of femininity and masquerade, see Holmlund, 105-10. See also Mary Ann Doane, “Masquerade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator,” Discourse 11 (Fall-Winter 1988-89): 42-54.

20. Nowhere does Irigaray discuss butch/femme lesbian roleplaying.

21. See also Irigaray, “Nietzsche, Freud, et les femmes,” in Le Corps-à-corps avec la mère (Montréal: Editions de la pleine lune, 1981), 49 (subsequent references to this edition are cited in parentheses in the text); and Carolyn Burke, “Introduction to Luce Irigaray's ‘When Our Lips Speak Together,’” Signs 6 (Autumn 1980): 67-68.

22. See also Irigaray, Ce sexe, 160-62.

23. See also Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 73-74: “Of course, the ‘answer’ is not to set up another homosexual economy, but that may be necessary as one step to some hetero-sexuality.”

24. See also Irigaray, Speculum, 234.

25. Grosz, 119.

26. See, for example, Irigaray, Speculum, 146, and Ce sexe, 64, 102.

27. Kiki Amsberg and Aafke Steenhuis, “An Interview with Luce Irigaray,” trans. Robert van Krieken, Hecate 9 (1983): 198, 195.

28. Psychoanalysis, Irigaray charges, most often equates the daughter with the son, although a girl's relationship to her mother is framed not in terms of mastery but of self-engenderment. See, for example, Irigaray, Speculum, 77; La Croyance même (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1983), 19-30; and “Le Geste en psychanalyse,” Sexes et parentés, 109-18.

29. L'Oubli de l'air is based on this premise. See also Irigaray, Le Corps, 81.

30. For Irigaray, the horizontal dimension consists of relationships between women or between “sisters.” See L'Ethique, 103.

31. Irigaray, “The One Doesn't Stir without the Other,” 67.

32. Irigaray distinguishes lesbian relationships from mother/daughter relationships as a “secondary” rather than a “primary” homosexuality.

33. Amsberg and Steenhuis, 199.

34. Brennan, 16 (emphasis added).

35. Stanton, “Difference on Trial,” 159.

36. Irigaray, Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980). Subsequent references to this edition are cited in parentheses in the text. See Moi, ed., French Feminist Thought, 120, for a slightly different translation of this quote.

37. See, for example, Irigaray, L'Ethique, 174. See also Burke, “Romancing the Philosophers,” 108.

38. Amsberg and Steenhuis, 199.

39. See Irigaray, Passions élémentaires, 32.

40. Ibid., 56-58, 62.

41. See Burke, “Romancing the Philosophers,” 107.

42. Nietzsche is the only male philosopher Irigaray addresses informally; elsewhere, she uses the formal “vous.” For other discussions of the use of direct address in Irigaray's texts, see, for example, Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction; and Susan Suleiman, “(Re)writing the Body,” in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 15.

43. Amsberg and Steenhuis, 200.

44. Linda Godard, “Pour une nouvelle lecture de la question de la ‘femme’: Essai à partir de la pensée de Jacques Derrida,” Philosophiques 12 (Spring 1985): 161-64.

45. Stanton, “Difference on Trial,” 175.

46. Elizabeth Berg, “The Third Woman,” Diacritics 12 (Summer 1982): 15; and Debra Terzian, “Luce Irigaray: Discours de l'homme ou de la femme?” Constructions (1985): 125.

47. Carolyn Burke, “Rethinking the Maternal,” in Future of Difference, 107.

48. See Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction, 93.

49. On the subject of the “interval,” see, for example, Irigaray's L'Ethique, 15-21, 41-59, and Sexes et parentés, 33.

50. See Jacqueline Rose, “Femininity and Its Discontents,” in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), 83-103. In “I Love Luce” I argue, in contrast, that Irigaray has considered critiques like Rose's and does “retain the unconscious for feminism.” Holmlund, 117. See also Whitford, “Rereading Irigaray,” 106-26.

51. Margaret Whitford, “Luce Irigaray's Critique of Rationality,” in Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy, ed. Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret Whitford (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 109-30.

52. See, for example, Stanton, “Difference on Trial,” 162-63.

53. Dianna Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 70. For similar arguments, see also Brennan; Grosz; Schor; Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); and Whitford, “Rereading Irigaray.”

54. Jane Gallop, “Quand nos lèvres s'écrivent: Irigaray's Body Politic,” Romantic Review 74 (January 1983): 82. See also Whitford, “Rereading Irigaray,” 149; and Grosz, 114-16.

55. Stanton, “Difference on Trial,” 177. Unlike many of Irigaray's critics, Stanton bases her critique on well-considered and nuanced engagement with Irigaray's texts.

56. Ibid., 171.

57. Gallop points out that Irigaray sees the male genitals “according to phallomorphic parameters” which demand that male sexuality be perceived as unitary, “Quand nos lévres s'écrivent,” 78.

58. Grosz (110-11) claims Irigaray uses metaphor “to devise a strategic and combative [sic] understanding, one whose function is to make explicit what has been excluded or left out of phallocentric images.”

59. Stanton, “Difference on Trial,” 176.

60. See, for example, Irigaray, “Psychoanalytic Theory: Another Look,” This Sex Which Is Not One, 49-60, and “Misère de la psychanalyse,” Parler n'est jamais neutre, 253-80.

61. Grosz, 123. Also see Elizabeth Gross, “Philosophy, Subjectivity, and the Body,” in Feminist Challenges, ed. Carole Pateman and Elizabeth Gross (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), 142.

62. Berg, 15.

63. Gayatri Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame,” Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 179. Irigaray on the whole fails to raise questions about differences among women even where Western women are concerned. Naomi Schor (56 n. 5) also comments that “Irigaray has, like other bourgeois white feminists, only managed to relocate universality, to institute a new hegemony.”

64. Margaret Homans, “The Woman in the Cave: Recent Feminist Fictions and the Classical Underworld,” Contemporary Literature 29 (Fall 1988): 371.

65. See also Irigaray, Passions élémentaires, 33: “What risk is contained in attraction through difference?”

66. Whitford, “Luce Irigaray's Critique of Rationality,” 110.

67. As Katherine Stephenson says, “if there is one thread uniting all [Irigaray's] works, it is her critical focus on the representation of subjectivity in language, and the lack of representation of female subjectivity.” See her “Luce Irigaray: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to the Representation of Subjectivity and Sexual Difference in Language Use,” in Semiotics 1988, ed. Terry Prewitt, John Deeley, and Karen Hayworth (Lanham: University Press of America, 1989), 417.

68. See, for example, Katherine Stephenson, “Luce Irigaray's ‘L'Ordre sexuel du discours': A Comparative English Study on Sexual Differentiation in Language Use,” in Semiotics 1987, ed. John Deeley (Lanham: University Press of America, 1987), 257-66. Although Irigaray's “Love Survey” does not look at race, it does request information on the participant's education level, native language, age, and occupation.

69. Margaret Whitford says

    Irigaray's work requires an interlocutor more than most, since ‘speaking as a woman’ … necessitates a dialogue: the meaning of what women are saying only becomes accessible in an active exchange between speaker and hearer.

    See her “Luce Irigaray and the Female Imaginary: Speaking As a Woman,” Radical Philosophy 43 (Summer 1986): 3.

70. See Mortensen, 43 n. 7.

71. Grosz, 113.