SOURCE: Haas, Lynda. “Of Waters and Women: The Philosophy of Luce Irigaray.” Hypatia 8, no. 4 (fall 1993): 150-59.

[In the following review, Haas examines Irigaray's thought in Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche and The Irigaray Reader, focusing on her contributions to philosophy.]

“Let [people] take what they will out of my books. I don't think that my work can be better understood because I've done this or that” (Irigaray 1991, 1). Even though feminist scholars from many perspectives have discussed her work, the writing of Luce Irigaray remains somewhat elusive. Of course, in English we lack the benefit of Irigaray's full career, since the larger part of her texts are still untranslated; perhaps this is why we are, as Margaret Whitford states, just now beginning to come to grips with Irigaray. Her texts have certainly been hotly debated on many levels; she has been both respected and dismissed by feminists in many places. In Philosophy in the Feminine, Whitford writes, “the scholar or student seeking to find out more about the debates kindled by Irigaray's work has their work cut out simply trying to locate the most important articles” (Whitford 1991, 2). In her edited collection of Irigaray's work, The Irigaray Reader, Whitford includes not only important pieces from This Sex Which Is Not One and Speculum of the Other Woman but a number of essays not previously published in English. For those interested in learning more about Irigaray and her critics, these essays and Whitford's clear-eyed commentary are most helpful. These texts together present an Irigaray competent in philosophy, linguistics and psychoanalysis; here I will concentrate on those pieces that advance an understanding of Irigaray as philosopher. As she opens Philosophy in the Feminine, Whitford asks, “How many people recognize Irigaray as a philosopher?” (Whitford 1991, 1). Whitford's two books, Irigaray's recently translated Amante marine (Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche), and the commentaries of other feminist philosophers (see, e.g., Schutte 1991 and Fuss 1989) provide avenues by which to assess and measure Irigaray's place in philosophy.

Critical to Irigaray's philosophical position is her stress on sexual difference (not on destroying it, but on emphasizing it)—a stress Whitford sees as a strategic and theoretical parallel to radical feminism:

Certain tendencies of the day, certain contemporary feminists, are noisily demanding the neutralization of sex [sexe]. That neutralization, if it were possible, would correspond to the end of the human race. What is indispensable is elaborating a culture of the sexual which does not yet exist, whilst respecting both genres. … [Sexual difference] is probably that issue in our own age which could be our salvation on an intellectual level. But wherever I turn, whether to philosophy, science or religion, I find that this underlying and increasing insistent question remains silent.

(Irigaray 1991a, 32, 165)

What I see, however, in this recent scholarship is more reason to assert that Irigaray crosses feminist boundaries while resisting definition. Whitford suggests that Irigaray's theories on the dissent and tension within the women's movement can be read as a therapeutic move toward helping us to understand further the tension between theory and action, between unthought and unsymbolized drives (Whitford 1991, 15). As Irigaray manages to keep the tensions of feminisms in productive crisis, she offers a multiplicitous intercourse in which both theory and practice find voice.

Irigaray, writes Whitford, is engaged in the “most philosophical of enterprises: philosophy examining its own foundations and its own presuppositions” (Whitford 1991, 2). At the same time, like two lips always touching each other, Irigaray questions the social and ethical concerns embedded in the master texts of philosophy, suggesting means to reconstruct feminine identity. For those who have dismissed Irigaray as essentialist, Whitford's Philosophy in the Feminine is a good companion piece to the work of Diana Fuss in arguing that we do Irigaray a disservice by missing the ways that her theory uses and goes beyond essentialism. Whitford addresses the critiques that say Irigaray, like other poststructuralists, is apolitical: “The tension between feminist theory and political action is a real one, and most feminists find themselves at one time or another attempting to negotiate it at a personal or collective level” (Whitford 1991, 5).

Philosophy in the Feminine is a monograph that attempts to unravel many questions connected to the name Luce Irigaray, while The Irigaray Reader is a collection of essays by Irigaray accompanied by Whitford's commentary. I think these two books are most usefully read as companion pieces, thereby gaining not only Irigaray's voice, but also Whitford's observations; thus, as I outline the issues Whitford undertakes in Philosophy in the Feminine, I add excerpts from essays in the Reader.

The first four chapters of Philosophy in the Feminine review necessary groundwork for reading Irigaray's philosophy and, although they will seem repetitive to some who are already acquainted with Irigaray, Whitford admirably lays these foundations in a succinct and understandable fashion. There is something to be gained by reading a discursive treatment of Irigaray alongside Irigaray's unique variety of écriture feminine. Irigaray's texts are, admittedly, difficult—“there has always been a visionary aspect to Irigaray's work, a utopian element that many have felt uneasy with” (Whitford 1991, 13). Chapter One of Philosophy in the Feminine concentrates on two different ways Irigaray has been read by feminists and how a difference in reading dictates either an immobilizing or an energizing outcome; these ways of reading are connected to two types of utopian writing—static and dynamic. Whitford argues for a dynamic interpretation of Irigaray—one that does not attempt to fix a specific historical context or meaning at any specific point in the text—and argues that Irigaray's utopian writing is valuable to feminists, if for no other reason that it can engage us to go beyond her. In the Reader, Whitford argues that in writing, Irigaray attempts to produce a living fluidity that cannot be reduced to narrative or commentary—a text that casts the reader as interlocutor (Irigaray 1991a, 14). In Ethique de la différence sexuelle, Irigaray writes,

The only replay that can be given to the question of the meaning of the text is: read, perceive, feel. … Who are you? would be a more pertinent question, provided that it does not collapse into a demand for an identity card or an autobiographical anecdote. The answer would be: and who are you? Can we meet? Talk? Love? Create something together?

(Irigaray 1991a, 14)

In Chapter Two of Philosophy in the Feminine, Whitford takes up Irigaray's method of “psychoanalyzing the philosophers,” and discusses how Irigaray dynamically engages the master texts of philosophy. Because it is unaware of its own historical determinants, Irigaray reasons that philosophy is governed by unconscious male fantasies, reflecting a solely patriarchal social order. Irigaray writes,

[Men's] discourses, their values, their dreams and their desires have the force of law, everywhere and in all things. Everywhere and in all things, they define women's function and social role, and the sexual identity they are, or are not, to have. They know, they have access to the truth; we do not. Often we scarcely have access to fiction.

(Irigaray 1991a, 35)

Irigaray also argues that philosophy does not acknowledge its debt to women's role, particularly that of mother—this is explained in “Women-Mothers: The Silent Substratum of the Social Order” (Irigaray 1991a, 47-52) and also in “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother” (43-46), where Irigaray performs a rereading of Greek myth, focusing on Clytemnestra (instead of the male heros reread by traditional philosophy) and argues that Western culture (for both men and women) is founded on a sinister acceptance of matricide:

As for us, it is a matter of urgency not to submit to a subjectivized social role, that of the other, governed by an order subordinated to a division of labour—man produces/woman reproduces—which confines us to a mere function. Have fathers ever been asked to renounce being men? Citizens? We do not have to renounce being women in order to be mothers.

(Irigaray 1991a, 42-43)

Irigaray maintains that a woman-to-woman relationship which liberates both daughters and mothers from their societally constructed identities is “an indispensable precondition for our emancipation from the authority of fathers” (Irigaray 1991a, 50).

Irigaray's counter-strategy to the dominance of philosophy's masculine fantasies, as outlined in This Sex Which Is Not One (Irigaray 1985) and explicated in Marine Lover (Irigaray 1991b), involves assuming the feminine role deliberately (mimesis). Irigarayan mimesis is an attempt to avoid adopting and adoption by the male system; by avoiding recapture, woman refuses to perpetuate both male fantasies and the dominant social order.

Chapter Two addresses the concept of “speaking (as) woman” (parler femme) and follows Irigaray's changing emphasis within this term from woman enunciating to woman-as-subject. Whitford suggests that as part of her change of emphasis, Irigaray now more often uses a different term: “the sexuation of discourse” (see Irigaray 1991a, 78). Whitford remarks on the difference between speaking “as” a woman and speaking “like” a woman and the tendency in recent writing to suggest that the feminine position can be adopted by either sex. For instance, Nietzsche, Hegel, Levinas, and Derrida have all shown interest in “feminine identity and in their identity as feminine or women” (Whitford, 50). Irigaray uses a comment by Derrida (“I would like to write, too, like a woman. I try to. …”) to point out that while men may be able to identify with woman's position (speaking like a woman), they cannot take woman's identity (speaking as a woman), and that if speaking (as) woman is their goal, it is highly questionable:

Turning back towards the moment at which they seized socio-cultural power(s), are men seeking a way to divest themselves of these powers? I hope so. Such a desire would imply that they are inviting women to share in the definition of truth and the exercising of it with them.

(Whitford, 50)

However, the feminized writing of philosophers like Derrida (writing without mastery) has obviously done nothing so far to include women as participants in the making of culture (women-as-subjects); in fact, what these writers do, in practice, is “colonize the space that might become women's. Their ‘feminine’ is, in Irigaray's terms, ‘the other of the same,’ not the ‘other of the other’” (Whitford 1991, 50). Therefore, Whitford suggests, Irigaray's concept of speaking (as) woman has evolved into two moments: first, the unheard feminine in patriarchy; second, the demands of women claiming their right to be epistemological subjects too.

The next two chapters of Philosophy in the Feminine discuss the “imaginary” and the problems caused by Irigaray's insistence on a feminine imaginary, particularly her symbolic articulation of this concept. Whitford explains Irigaray's claim that women (the maternal-feminine) provide the unsymbolized basis of masculine theoretical construction; Whitford then undertakes an historical description of how Irigaray reconstitutes the imaginary. Irigaray's emphasis on the imaginary is the basis for her critique of rationality and her call for a restructuring of the construction of the rational subject. Whitford presents the term “imaginary” within its rich context in European philosophy, explaining how it changes meaning when used by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, or Althusser; she suggests that when Anglo-American feminists have discussed Irigaray's use of “imaginary,” they have missed the other implications, seeing only an extension of Lacan—and that this narrow interpretation of Irigaray's imaginary has likely caused the labels like “biological essentialist.” Whitford reads the Irigarayan imaginary dynamically, and concludes that when Irigaray applies the genres of male and female to the imaginary, they become active reconceptualizations that “might help us change and transform our society in a direction which is less inimical to women” (Whitford 1991, 57).

In the last four chapters of Philosophy in the Feminine, Whitford connects the marginalization of women in the symbolic and social order, the complicity of philosophy in this marginalization, and the conditions for inclusion. Chapter Five outlines Irigaray's argument that a single move by traditional philosophy results in women's double exclusion from both philosophy and the social order and traces Irigaray's interpretation of philosophical fantasies that keep this exclusion in place. In the present system, argues Irigaray, the only place allowed women is that of “defective” or “castrated” men; women are not symbolically self-defined.

Then Whitford takes up Irigaray's interpretation of women's identity, showing how traditional philosophical conceptualizations of identity do not provide women with an imaginary and symbolic world; here Whitford extends the discussion begun in Chapters Three and Four, making suggestions on how Irigaray conceptualizes and symbolizes a female imaginary. Chapter Eight makes connections between the body, the imaginary, and the social order, showing how Irigaray's writing and speaking (as) woman could shift women's position as subjects of enunciation. In the Reader, Whitford explains that

The vision of women's language that seemed so revolutionary and iconoclastic in This Sex Which Is Not One turns out not to be a question of a totally different language, but more to do with socially-determined linguistic practices, sexual differences in the generation of messages, and self-positioning in language vis-à-vis the other, all of which are possible sites for transformation, opening up the possibility of women's distinct cultural identity.

(Irigaray 1991a, 5)

Underlying all, Whitford argues that Irigaray redefines the terrain of philosophy by investigating and re-exploring what philosophy, until now, has barred from its lofty heights.

Irigaray's project, for the most part, is to reclaim philosophy in a way that it can be of immediate relevance to the lives of women and to the women's movement. For Irigaray, it is crucial that women find new ways of speaking about relationships between women if we are ever to create a new identity for ourselves within the symbolic order. In Marine Lover, Irigaray not only addresses Nietzsche's philosophy and his symbolic allusions, looking at how woman has been defined by/for men, she offers a symbolic representation for women, who, she argues, as yet remain unidentified and unsymbolized. However, embedded in her metaphor of the sea is a fluidity and depth that resists identification. In “Volume without Contours” (an extract from Speculum in Irigaray 1991a, 53-67), Irigaray writes, “(The/A) woman gestures towards what cannot be defined, enumerated, formulated, formalized” (56); the “feminine feminine” is represented in this piece as a fluid that resists containers. Man's fear, a fear initiated by his need for mastery, is of the thing he cannot enclose, possess, or capture in his nets. “Or his fear is of the fluid, that which flows, is mobile, which is not a solid ground/earth or mirror for the subject” (Irigaray 1991a, 28). In the first section of Marine Lover, “Speaking of Immemorial Waters,” Irigaray extends this metaphor of a volume without contours, and describes a feminine imaginary that is like the vast ocean:

And the sea can shed shimmering scales indefinitely. … And each one is the equal of the other as it catches a reflection and lets it go. As it preserves and blurs. As it captures the glinting play of light. As it sustains mirages. Multiple and still far too numerous for the pleasure of the eye, which is lost in that host of sparkling surfaces. And with no end in sight.

(Irigaray 1991b, 46)

In contrast to the depths of the sea, Irigaray uses Nietzsche's own metaphoric language (from Thus Spoke Zarathustra) to describe aspects of him (and patriarchal philosophy): “Are you fish or eagle, swimmer or dancer, when you announce the decline of man? Do you seek to sink or climb? … And in your entire will for the sea are you so very afraid that you must always stay up so high?” (Irigaray 1991b, 13). She also uses the tightrope walker (literally translated “dancer”), a character in the Prologue to Zarathustra, to depict Nietzsche on a rope strung out over the abyss (which she often connects to the sea, or woman): “Perched on any mountain peak, hermit, tightrope walker or bird, you never dwell in the great depths. … Are you truly afraid of falling back into man? Or into the sea?” (13). And picking up on Nietzsche's sailor imagery (Zarathustra is sometimes called a sailor), Irigaray speaks of man's invention of ships in order to pass over the waves. But the feminine sea will not be mastered: the gaze from high can not penetrate, the rope (or bridge) is unsure, and the ship cannot negotiate:

The loftiest gaze does not penetrate thus far into her depths and is still unable to unfold all the membranes she offers to bathe his contemplations … she undoes all perspective. … Anything that has not yet seen daylight hurtles into the abyss. Anything that remains unilluminated is taken by the eye to be a chasm drawing a man to his destruction. And since he does not want to fall, he comes back at break of dawn to get a good look at things and thereby ensure himself a firm footing as he goes off again on his high-seas exploration.

(Irigaray 1991b, 47)

The only way to capture the sea is to take a cup and fill it with her fluid; but this does not really contain her—the separated water, contained by a master, loses its characteristics, like removing a brilliantly red piece of coral from underwater only to find that in the sunlight it is colorless. This, too, is how I feel about Irigaray as I attempt to take her words from the poetic context of her book.

Irigaray has entitled this work Marine “Lover,” and throughout, it is evident that Irigaray appreciates Nietzsche, that she reads him sympathetically although resistantly. However, stitched into her dialogue with Nietzsche are strong critiques: for example, she often questions his western rationality through a feminine imaginary based on the body. She writes,

If to be body whole and entire and nothing else means also taking the other's body, then keep your soul, old man! Go on playing with your reason, your mind, your beliefs. There is relative peace on earth when you keep busy with things other than bodies.

(Irigaray 1991b, 18)

Irigaray does not accept when Nietzsche's attitude is one of “ressentiment” (sometimes translated “rancor”); she would rather speak of mimesis than nihilism, of life masks than death masks. She recognizes the distance Nietzsche places between men and women, between himself and her, a distance necessary to keep the feminine in its marginalized place within the master texts of philosophy:

So get away from the sea. She is far too disturbing. … Too restless to be a true mirror. At a distance: that is where to keep her so as to bind her to his rhythm and to the measure of his will, without his coming back too near to test the reliability of such footbridges.

(Irigaray 1991b, 52)

In “Veiled Lips,” Irigaray focuses on Nietzsche's The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil (she also briefly refers to The Twilight of Idols and Daybreak) to discuss not only this binding distance, but also to offer her strategy for “subsisting,” existing beneath the bind. “Veiled Lips” refers, in part, to Irigaray's “mimicry,” a concept treated more fully here, perhaps, than in any other Irigarayan text. She begins by disagreeing with a quotation from Beyond Good and Evil: “From the very first nothing is more foreign … to woman than truth … her great art is falsehood, her chief concern is appearance and beauty” (in Irigaray 1991b, 77). Falsehood, appearance, and beauty, says Irigaray, are not foreign to truth, but rather, “They are proper to it, if not its accessories and its underside. And the opposite remains caught up in the same. … With a flip of the coin, it forms the basis for its representations” (77).

With her reference to a “flip of the coin,” Irigaray introduces the game imagery that prevails in this section, and which, interchanged with images of a “veil” and a “skin,” connect her discussion of the performance of gender. Other thoughts, both Nietzschean and Irigarayan, continually contextualize this discussion: the discourse of mastery, distance and the “foreign,” doubleness and duality, myth, the body, “the other of the same” and “the other of the other,” the will, the economy of truth, the abyss, and death. Irigaray articulates what is implied in feminine posing, which she refers to throughout as elle se donne pour:¹

This may be read as: she gives herself out to be: what she is not. This operation would be implied in the game of the other. Of the same. Interpreted in this way, she stakes him in a new game without his needing to borrow from the kitty. And therefore go into debt, risk losing. Mastery. Which the other (of the same) threatens his with. From afar, given the way he is placed at a distance by the economy of truth. How to defend oneself from an adversary who is so subtly absent? The danger is dizzying in its deceit.

(Irigaray 1991b, 79)

When using the “skin” image, Irigaray switches the discussion to castration: “Wasn't that, precisely, the gesture of repetition which gave the key to the whole stage set by the same? And therefore gave it some play, gave the game the possibility: to be played” (Irigaray 1991b, 80). She then moves this idea into acting; woman is “nothing in this theatre but a nothing that resists representation. … Because she is castrated, she is the threat of castration.” She stays outside in the wings, prompting; “Thus: she is disguised for the performance of representation … where she doubles up her own role as other, as well as same—beyond all that is taking place” (Irigaray 1991b, 83)

When Irigaray shifts her images of mimicry to the “veil,” she evokes the Greek myths and philosophers, weaving them into her story. She speaks of Socrates who dreams, but who “doesn't know he does, doesn't want to know” (Irigaray 1991b, 99). “Philosophy teaches the eyelids to close tighter and tighter to bar anything still presented by the senses, teaches the gaze to turn inward to the soul. … The horror of nature is magicked away” (99). She speaks allegorically of Apollo and his patriarchal right/blood ties; of Orestes, who “slits his mother's throat [and] takes refuge in the temple of the god who is subject to the wishes of Zeus alone. The women who cry out for revenge are thrown out” (100). And of Athena: “The chorus of women/Athena. The mother/Athena. The woman/Athena. All the women all together—I-we, thou-you—wounded, humiliated, bloody, suppliant, breathless, exhausted from their pursuit” (101). With her “horror concealed, wound masked, the difference in values covered over,” she is the “Pretense of the God of gods—standing in the long white robe that veils even her feet” (101). She subverts the Law of the Father by giving herself out to be what she is not, and by demanding of Zeus a “clear explanation.”

I've chosen to stay outside in the wings of Irigaray's writing, presenting her themes in as close a context as possible to her own (albeit translated) language. Appreciating her poetic analysis, I find it difficult to sever words from her organic narrative; and so, I close by encouraging those interested in Irigaray to pick up Marine Lover. When I read it, I heard familiar but more complete lyrics, echoing the Irigaray I experienced in shorter pieces. The book is as deep, as beautiful, and as reflective as the sea itself. I close with a note of hope and a call from Irigaray:

We have a lot of things to do. But it is better to have the future before us than behind us. Let us not wait for the Phallus god to grant us his grace. Yes, the Phallus god, because whilst many repeat that “God is dead,” they rarely question the fact that the Phallus is alive and well.

(Irigaray 1991a, 45)

Note

1. This is Irigaray's translation of Nietzsche's statement “Dass sie ‘sich geben,’ selbst noch, wenn sie—sich geben” (Nietzsche 1974). Walter Kaufmann literally translates this as “They give themselves (that is, act, play a part, pose as …) even when they give themselves” (Translator's note, Irigaray 1991b, 82).

References

Fuss, Diana. 1989. “‘Essentially Speaking’: Luce Irigaray's Language of Essence.” Hypatia 3(3): 62-80.

———. 1990. Essentially Speaking. New York and London: Routledge.

Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

———. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

———. 1991a. The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

———. 1991b. Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. [1882] 1974. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.

Schutte, Ofelia. 1984. Beyond Nihilism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 1991. “Irigaray on Subjectivity.” Hypatia 6(2): 64-76.

Whitford, Margaret. 1991. Philosophy in the Feminine. New York: Routledge.