[In the following essay, Berg proposes an ironic reading of “When Our Lips Speak Together,” situating Irigaray's “lips” metaphor as a counterpart to Lacan's “phallus” metaphor.]

The work of Luce Irigaray is regarded by many feminists as riven with contradictions: she is a poststructuralist and a Lacanian insofar as she believes that the subject is a discursive construct, making identity unstable; but, in order to rescue women from what she sees as the repressive effects of phallocentrism, she apparently proposes an alternative feminine discourse modeled on the female genitals.¹ Irigaray's “lips” have become the basis of debate: those critics (including Plaza, Jones, Moi, Burke) who regard her work as naive (it suggests the possibility of a prediscursive sexual identity) and dangerously essentialist (it posits an eternal essential femininity) have occasioned widespread feminist suspicion of poststructuralism as ultimately leading to a reactionary essentialism.²

Irigaray's defenders, on the other hand, regard her “lips” as having a “strategic” function: she posits a feminine essence not in order to trap women in deterministic definitions but to enable them to escape cultural definitions defined by men.³ The only critic who has recently attempted to argue against the seemingly overwhelming consensus that Irigaray is essentialist is Jane Gallop, who claims that we should read Irigaray's work not as a politics but as a poetics of the body: “not predestined by anatomy but … already a symbolic interpretation of that anatomy.”⁴ The debate, as Diana Fuss says, “comes down to this question of whether the body stands in a literal or a figurative relation to language and discourse: are the two lips a metaphor or not?”⁵ Formulating the problem of Irigaray's work in terms of an opposition is, however, symptomatic of a misconstruction of Irigaray's explicit disavowal of binaries that not even Gallop, despite her own poststructuralist style, avoids.

I suggest an alternative reading of Irigaray's lips. It is surely an example of old sexist double standards that Jacques Lacan is taken at his word when he insists that the phallus is not the organ to which the word phallus refers, whereas Irigaray's lips provoke accusations of naive essentialism. It may be true that both signifiers are equivocal (as Emile Benveniste said in a different context: “Here … is the thing, expressly excluded at first from the definition of the sign, now creeping into it by a detour, and permanently installing a contradiction there”),⁶ but only Lacan is given the benefit of the doubt. While Lacan is appropriated to the feminist cause by critics such as Jacqueline Rose who insist that his remarks about there being no such thing as a woman are ironic exposures of the social representation of femininity, Irigaray's irony (which is more obvious than Lacan's) is almost wholly overlooked.⁷ Yet Lacan reminds us that “desire must be taken literally,” that is, he wants to be taken at his word.⁸ To redress the Irigaray-Lacan critical imbalance, I propose reading Irigaray's lips as a counterpart to Lacan's phallus, but without ignoring their irony, because I think the apparent contradictions in Irigaray's work are resolved by recognizing her ironic critique of Lacan.

FEMINISTS ON IRIGARAY

Open your lips; don't open them simply. I don't open them simply. We—you/I—are neither open nor closed. We never separate simply: a single word cannot be pronounced, produced, uttered by our mouths. Between our lips, yours and mine, several voices, several ways of speaking resound endlessly, back and forth.⁹

Understandably, perhaps, the immediate reactions to Irigaray were suspicious, not to say hostile. Monique Plaza, writing in an early issue of Questions feministes, countered: “All that ‘is’ woman comes to her in the last instance from her anatomical sex, which touches itself all the time. Poor woman.”¹⁰ Irigaray perpetrates, says Plaza, the “Eternal Feminine,” who is moreover (by virtue of avoiding masculine, i.e., coherent, discourse) the “eternal idiot”: “illogical, mad, prattling, fanciful.”¹¹ Plaza is “astonished” at Irigaray's “cheerfully prescribing woman's social and intellectual existence from her ‘morphology,’ … when we remember that [she] criticized Freud's prescription of the psychical by the anatomical.” Plaza concludes that Irigaray's “positivism” is “matched by a flagrant empiricism.”¹²

Perhaps the best known of the “Anglo-American” interpretations of what has come to be known as “new” French feminist writing is Ann Rosalind Jones's article “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l'ecriture feminine.” The article, which echoes Plaza's objections to Irigaray, was first published in 1981 when very little of Irigaray's work had been translated into English.¹³ No doubt because of its pathbreaking role but also possibly because it reads the French authors within a materialist feminist framework congenial to a British and North American audience, Jones's criticism remained influential among Western scholars. Her article was republished in three anthologies with very different critical orientations in 1985 when two of Irigaray's major books became available in English.¹⁴ When Jones castigates the French for claiming “that female subjectivity is derived from women's physiology and bodily instincts as they affect sexual experience and the unconscious,”¹⁵ she effectively inverts the French concept of the subject as discursive; it is Jones who creates an essentialist position by defining the unconscious as the innate, a priori, origin of subjective experience. What Jones misses is that Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva hold the Lacanian view of the unconscious as the product of the subject's insertion into the symbolic; it is not the cause but the consequence of women's social experience. Irigaray does not offer “as the starting point for a female self-consciousness the facts of women's bodies and women's sexual pleasure,” as Jones maintains;¹⁶ on the contrary, Irigaray attempts, through discourse, to reconstruct women's bodies and their sexual pleasure. Her essay on Freud in Speculum of the Other Woman exposes the role of language in the construction of female sexuality and the body, just as her essay “When Our Lips Speak Together” alters them discursively.¹⁷

Kaja Silverman more recently (1988) has also been troubled by Irigaray's lips; her reading of Irigaray is perhaps surprising in view of her earlier critique of Lacan in The Subject of Semiotics, in which she held that “it is preposterous to assume … that woman remains outside of signification,” since both the female and the male subject's “linguistic inauguration” cuts them off from immediate “being.”¹⁸ Although this echoes aspects of Irigaray's rejection of Lacan, Silverman nevertheless catches Irigaray committing an error similar to Lacan's in suggesting that feminine sexuality lies outside of (phallocentric) signification. Silverman explains in The Acoustic Mirror that Irigaray “dreams of forging an existential or indexical relation between words and the female body,” which she “celebrates, as though it were an accomplished fact.”¹⁹ In doing so, says Silverman, Irigaray simply repeats an approach that she otherwise denounces as phallocentric: “All Western discourse,” Irigaray explains in Women's Exile, “presents a certain isomorphism with the masculine sex … the privilege of unity, form of the self, of the visible, of the specularisable, of erection.”²⁰ Irigaray's suggestion of a discourse modeled on the labia to replace one modeled on the phallus is, according to Silverman, phallocentric and essentialist. There seems sufficient evidence for Silverman's view that Irigaray considers women to have an extradiscursive sexuality: “We are women from the start,” says Irigaray in “When Our Lips Speak Together”; “we don't have to be turned into women by them, labeled by them” (referring to men).²¹ She also writes: “Long before your birth, you touched yourself, innocently.”²²

It is important, however, to distinguish an indexical relation of language to the body, which Irigaray does not claim, from a morphological one. An indexical sign, as Silverman explains, is understood to be existentially connected to its referent, whereas a morphological or iconic sign merely draws attention to formal resemblances.²³ If Irigaray criticizes the phallomorphism of discourse, she does not make any claims about which comes first, the penis or the phallus; in fact, she suggests that the focus on the penis in the construction of male sexuality is a consequence of values inscribed in discourse, especially that which Lacan describes as a “fantasy of oneness” (i.e., the dream of singularity, unity, coherence).²⁴ Similarly, with respect to the morphological relation that Irigaray establishes between language and the female body, the lips do not refer to the labia (although they aim to alter the way in which we perceive the female genitals); I will return to this in the last section of this article.

Silverman objects that rather than attempting to liberate “a prediscursive sexuality” (which does not exist), we should be transforming “the discursive conditions under which women live their corporeality.”²⁵ This is certainly a reasonable response, but, strangely, Silverman is echoing Irigaray's own sentiment in the essay “This Sex Which Is Not One”: “In order for a woman to reach the place where she takes pleasure as a woman, a long detour by way of the analysis of the various systems of oppression brought to bear upon her is assuredly necessary.”²⁶ In other words, a woman experiences her body and its pleasures only within the repressive “discursive conditions under which” it is lived. Irigaray emphasizes that because female sexuality is defined by “the imaginary and symbolic processes that regulate the workings of a society and a culture,”²⁷ it is impossible to disengage “woman” from the current symbolic system: Irigaray agrees with Silverman, then, that it is impossible to liberate “a prediscursive sexuality.” The conditions that determine women's sexuality are, in Irigaray's view, ultimately discursive. Irigaray maintains that a politics of women that ignores discourse “would leave room neither for women's sexuality, nor for women's imaginary, nor for women's language to take (their) place.”²⁸ For Irigaray, women's sexuality is, as Silverman suggests, entirely discursive, so that altering the conditions under which it is lived entails altering language itself.

So what are we to make of the female lips? Margaret Whitford argues that Irigaray

is speaking not of biology but of the imaginary”: “A distinction needs to be made between (a) women as biological and social entities and (b) the “female,” “feminine” or “other,” where female stands metaphorically for the genuinely other in a relation of difference (as in the system consciousness/unconscious) rather than opposition.”²⁹

If Irigaray is referring not to empirical women but to a metaphorical “Other” in relation to a masculine subject, her work would have no bearing on feminist thought and would merely be a repetition of a phallocentric gesture: if the feminine is simply “Other,” the masculine remains the normative subject. While agreeing with an interviewer who complained that “I simply fail to understand the masculine-feminine oppositions,” Irigaray observed that “the problem is that of a possible alterity in masculine discourse” (emphasis mine).³⁰ Whitford fears “that a provisional identification between female and ‘female’ may entrap the user.”³¹ Far from being a trap, however, some sort of identification between “woman” as a discursive construct and woman as a “biological and social” entity is absolutely necessary and is central to Irigaray's work. Had Whitford recognized that masculine and feminine are in a relation of “differance” rather than “difference” in Irigaray's work, she would not, I maintain, also have made the misleading split between empirical and textual women.³²

Jane Gallop's recent reevaluation of Irigaray in Thinking through the Body (in The Daughter's Seduction, Gallop seemed to subscribe to the view that Irigaray is essentialist) is the most sympathetic reading so far.³³ Gallop sees Irigaray creating a tension between the politics of the body (which Gallop equates with the referential use of language) and a poetics (which “reconstructs anatomy in its own image”)³⁴ in order to expose and problematize our tendency to read the textual body as though it were the anatomical one. While I could not agree more with Gallop's warning against talking “as if there were such a thing as a ‘body itself,’ unmediated by textuality,”³⁵ the distinction between a politics and a poetics of the body—however provisional, and however Irigaray complicates it—is misleading. Irigaray's discursive construction of the body inevitably has a political effect: as Gallop points out, our perception of the body is already always mediated, so that the textual body, its “ideology,” is the body as far as we know. The problem with Gallop's emphasis on Irigaray's poetics is that it confirms the erroneous assumption that poststructuralism is apolitical, by maintaining a traditional distinction—which Irigaray denies—between the metaphoric and the referential (political) use of language. Gallop's term for Irigaray's discourse, “vulvomorphic,” is strangely biological in view of her claim that Irigaray's textual body is not to be simplistically linked to anatomy. Nowhere does Irigaray propose “vulvomorphism”: “les lèvres [qui] se parlent” or “the lips that speak to themselves”³⁶ are carefully chosen for their ambiguity, referring simultaneously to the production or construction of textuality (the lips that speak) and sexuality (the genitals); the point is that the two cannot and should not be separated, because one always implies the other.

Irigaray's essay “When Our Lips Speak Together,” which is central to the debate about the status of Irigaray's female body, attempts neither to forge an existential relation between language and the female body (Silverman) nor to offer a poetics of the body distinct from a politics (Gallop). Irigaray's lips are, as Gallop suggests, a discursive phenomenon, but irony is crucial: while the lips bear a similar relation to the labia as Lacan's phallus does to the penis, they are offered playfully or ironically in order to avoid the phallocentric gesture of displacing the phallus with an alternative hierarchy. “When Our Lips Speak Together,” which has caused so much unease among feminists, is as much a critique of Lacan as the essay “Così fan tutti,” which explicitly interrogates him, but the former is much more successful at unveiling the phallus.³⁷ (The phallus can function as a signifier, says Lacan, only as veiled, i.e., when it is not recognized as the penis.) Irigaray's lips, significantly, self-consciously oscillate between signifier and signified to reveal the impossibility of Lacan's claim that the penis is not the organ to which phallus refers. Lacan's logic, says Irigaray, is one that is “unaware of itself,” that is, is unaware of its own ideology.³⁸ Irigaray mimics Lacan's phallus in order to expose it; elsewhere she explains that ironic imitation is a strategy for uncovering the repression of women:

To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself … to … ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make “visible,” by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible.³⁹

Irigaray's lips are a “playful repetition” of Lacan, exposing Lacan's failure to sustain his premise that gender, constructed entirely within discourse, is unstable, arbitrary, and therefore open to choice. Despite his claims that the speaking being can line up on whichever side of the phallus she chooses,⁴⁰ Lacan renders it impossible for one born without a penis to be on the side of the phallus: gender, within the determinism of his discursive system, is ultimately linked to anatomy.

LACAN ON WOMEN

The value of psychoanalysis for feminism, says Rose, is its challenge to any prediscursive and therefore determining sexual identity:⁴¹ Lacan shows us that “men and women are only ever in language.”⁴² This may be true, and it is certainly what appeals to feminists about Lacan, but insofar as women can also be mothers, they cannot, in Lacan's terms, be “on the side of the man.”⁴³ How we acquire gendered identity depends upon our relation to the “real” of biological reproduction, according to Lacan, just as the phallus, which Lacan claims to distinguish from the penis, is nevertheless “what stands out as most easily seized upon in the real of sexual copulation.”⁴⁴ While insisting that the body is constructed in discourse, Lacan makes the position of the speaker in discourse inextricably tied to his/her anatomy. Women, as Irigaray shows, are placed by Lacan's discourse in an impossible double bind: excluded from a system from which nothing escapes.

Like Freud, Lacan makes the oedipal complex central to a theory of the subject, with the difference, says Judith Butler, that “the oedipal complex does not designate an event or primary scene that could be empirically verified, but indicates instead a set of linguistic laws that are foundational to gender and individuation.”⁴⁵ For Lacan, Butler explains, the linguistic structures—the “elementary structures of reference and differentiation”—are effected in the child as a result of the incest taboo, which in turn is known through the “primary forms of differentiation that separate the child from the mother, and that locate the child within a network of kinship relations.”⁴⁶ In other words, the awareness of gender takes place cumulatively within the symbolic. But so long as the incest taboo is central to a theory of how we acquire a cultural identity, the mother's body will be identified with a precultural state. True, it is not the “real” body that is the issue, but in Lacan's view the subject can only “mean” (i.e., represent himself/herself in the symbolic) by barring (or repressing) “being,” which is the stage of unmediated identification with the mother.⁴⁷ The child accedes to language in the “Name-of-the-Father”—by acknowledging paternity, which depends on signification—and by transcending or barring the imaginary unity with the mother's body.⁴⁸ Lacan thus relegates the maternal woman's body to the “real” of biological reproduction that lies outside of culture or the symbolic.

Once the subject enters the symbolic, the mother becomes the focus of a nostalgic desire for lost unity, for the state of non-meaning, prior to subjecthood; this means, of course, that she also serves as a cautionary reminder “against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance” and losing individual identity.⁴⁹ The attempt of the “I” who speaks to reunite with the I who is speaking produces “non-meaning”: “If we choose being, the subject disappears, it eludes us, it falls into non-meaning.”⁵⁰ If the mother represents our nostalgia for “being,” she also represents the danger of dissolution of the self; she is consequently the focus of our ambiguous feelings about the symbolic realm, which both enables identity and entails a loss of immediacy. Lacan says that insofar as we acknowledge the “Name-of-the-Father,” we take our place in the symbolic by submitting to a purely metaphorical relationship; but insofar as we identify with the mother, we sacrifice the exigencies of symbolization and retreat from the symbolic.

Lacan claims the phallus is the signifier of both desire—“the phallus is … veiled as the ratio of the Other's desire”⁵¹—and the recognition of the impossibility of satisfaction—the “lack inscribed in the signifying chain through which the Other, as the only possible site of truth, reveals that it holds no guarantee.”⁵² If the phallus represents both the promise and the impossibility of unity, both sexes would have an identical relation to the phallus; why, then, does Lacan also say that men have the phallus and women attempt to be it? And how can Lacan say that the castration complex is the recognition that the mother does not have the “real” phallus? If the phallus is a pure signifier and the “real” cannot be known, what would it mean to be without a phallus? It seems that within the symbolic it is only the woman who is a poor shadow of her imaginary self (the man does not arouse the same “intimations of immortality”),⁵³ so that she bears the burden of loss and the man the promise (which may equally be a burden) of fulfillment. The penis, says Lacan, makes connections: by virtue of its turgidity it is “the image of the vital flow as it is transmitted in generation”⁵⁴ (an echo of Aristotle?),⁵⁵ whereas the clitoris, by contrast, is “autistic”⁵⁶ (i.e., it cannot make discursive or sexual connections).

Lacan's key statements on women, which are said to have been taken up by Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigaray, are: “There is no such thing as The woman” and “There is woman only as excluded by the nature of things which is the nature of words.”⁵⁷ Jacqueline Rose defends Lacan from what she calls a “misreading” that interprets him as excluding women from language:

Woman is excluded by the nature of words, meaning that the definition poses her as exclusion. Note that this is not the same thing as saying that woman is excluded from the nature of words, a misreading which leads to the recasting of the whole problem in terms of woman's place outside language, the idea that women might have of themselves an entirely different speech.⁵⁸

If Lacan's statements about women mean simply that the definition of something objectifies it (which is rather trite), one wonders why he formulates the problem in terms of “woman.” Why not man “is excluded by the nature of words”? Rose defends Lacan's statement, “The woman does not exist,” as Lacan's exposure of sexual fantasy: “The woman … is not, because she is defined purely against the man (she is the negative of that definition—‘man is not woman’), and because this very definition is designated a fantasy.”⁵⁹ To the extent that the woman constitutes man's fantasy, says Rose, she can be said not to exist. But this still does not explain why Lacan does not say, “Man does not exist,” which would be equally true. Lacan insists:

When any speaking being whatever lines up under the banner of women it is by being constituted as not all that they are placed within the phallic function. It is this that defines the … the what?—the woman precisely, except that The woman can only be written with the The crossed through. There is no such thing as The woman, where the definite article stands for the universal. There is no such thing as The woman since of her essence … she is not all.⁶⁰

What Lacan means is that only the presymbolic mother is “all,” and since she can never be retrieved, women as we know them are essentially not all. “Woman” as a universal—in terms of what Lacan suggests is the only defining characteristic, motherhood—does not exist. She “exists” only in imaginary oneness with the subject, which is to say that she does not exist as such within signification. Lacan reminds us in “God and the jouissance of The Woman”⁶¹ that the sexualization of woman takes place in discourse and so is subject to a logical requirement in speech that the woman as “not all” is substituted for the “all.” In other words, entry into language requires that the presymbolic mother be replaced by the woman who reminds the subject of the loss of immediate “being,” that is, of what the subject lacks.

Lacan sees desire as metaphorical: desire in the symbolic is always a substitution for the impossible desire for the immediacy of “being” in the imaginary unity with the mother: “The subject designates his being,” Lacan says, “only by crossing through everything which it signifies.”⁶² As Anika Lemaire explains, the subject must formulate metaphors for his/her true desire because of the existence of the father: “The desire for union with the mother, is repressed and replaced by a substitute which names it and at the same time transforms it: the symbol.”⁶³ If desire for the mother is the original signifier, it is “barred” or transformed into the signified, replaced by a new signifier. Lacan always represents the relation between signifier and signified hierarchically:

S/s.⁶⁴

The bar represents the ineluctable separation of the two. Lacan's algorithms are complex and obscure, but their pretensions to objectivity mask an ideological and imaginary construction. His algorithm for the signifying substitution in which the “Name-of-the-Father” stands “in the place … of the absence of the mother” is represented thus:

Name-of-the-Father

Desire of the Mother

Desire of the Mother

Signified to the subject

Name-of-the-Father (O/Phallus).⁶⁵

What matters in this otherwise incomprehensible diagram is that the mother occupies the place of the signified, beneath the bar.⁶⁶ Lacan says that each unit of any signifying chain has “a whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended ‘vertically,’ as it were, from that point.”⁶⁷ As Derrida says of Lacan, you should not satisfy the longing for transcendence by giving primacy to the signifier, especially, Irigaray would add, if the mother is always that which is beneath the bar, repressed and consigned to the realm of potential signification.⁶⁸ Lacan's conception of desire is phallocentric in Irigaray's view because his conception of meaning is phallomorphic: the relation between signifier and signified is explicitly hierarchical. Using the example of a tree, Lacan shows how it “can … call up” various associations, but all are nevertheless “suspended ‘vertically’” (my emphasis) from the signifier.⁶⁹ “Why not rather,” asks Irigaray, “have recalled those ‘pictures’ made for children, pictographs in which the hunter and hunted, and their dramatic relationships, are to be discovered between the branches, made out from between the trees. From the … Spaces that organize the scene, blanks that subtend the scene's structuration.”⁷⁰ Rather than interpreting the dream (expression of desire) in terms of a “teleologically horizontal or vertical displacement,” Irigaray recognizes that the gaps between the trees are as important as the trees; rather than conceiving of desire as substitution, Irigaray wishes to emphasize its metonymic nature: the woman as “all” is never entirely displaced by the woman as “not all.”

In Lacan's theory, as Judith Butler points out, desire is coordinated not with the object that would satisfy it but with an originally lost object, the mother, or woman as “all.”⁷¹ Irigaray puts it even more bluntly: “‘She’ [is] the projection onto that infant ‘being’ … of his relation to nihilism.”⁷² “The woman,” insofar as Lacan identifies her with the mother, represents man's relation to nonexistence in the imaginary—hence Lacan's controversial statements that “the woman” does not exist.

Despite his claim that human identity and gender are constructed only in discourse, Lacan's theory implicitly supports the notion of transcending a biological origin: the mother is identified with a natural state that must be overcome for the subject to take up its place in the cultural realm. The distinction between paternity and maternity in Lacan's system is that paternity depends on signification; maternity, apparently, does not: “There is no need of a signifier to be a father, any more than to be dead, but without a signifier no one would ever know anything about either state of being.”⁷³ What we have is a prediscursive state construed within discourse as identification with the mother; a nature-culture opposition is created in a system that purports to deny it. The problem, as Irigaray points out in “Così fan tutti,” is that although “anatomy is no longer available to serve … as proof-alibi for the real difference between the sexes,” Lacan now makes women's exclusion “internal to an order from which nothing escapes.”⁷⁴

MORE OF IRIGARAY ON LACAN

Irigaray does not (as is frequently assumed) accept women's exclusion from the Symbolic, but from Lacan's system of the Symbolic. In response to Lacan's “Woman does not exist,” Irigaray counters, “Fortunately there are women” (my emphasis).⁷⁵ This does not mean, however, that she begins at the other end (so to speak) and creates the textual “woman” out of the empirical bodies of “women.”⁷⁶ Irigaray's position resembles Kristeva's, if we correctly read the following: “A woman cannot ‘be’; it is something which does not belong in the order of being. It follows that a feminist practice can only be negative, at odds with what already exists.”⁷⁷ Kristeva here juxtaposes a feminist practice with a reconceptualized identity. The claim that “a woman cannot ‘be’” is not an affirmation of Lacan's woman as “not all,” but is rather a deliberate avoidance of what Gayatri Spivak calls the “sovereign subject” of phallocentrism: Kristeva is effecting “the deconstruction-of [sic] man's insistence upon his own identity.”⁷⁸ An identity that is constantly in flux is not contained by the regime of “being,” and can only be “at odds with what already exists,” because it will continually extend and shift its boundaries. Irigaray's practice is similarly “at odds with what already exists” because of her poststructuralist conception of the subject. It is not the woman's body as such that is at issue in her quarrel with Lacan but what that body is “made to uphold of the operation of a language that is unaware of itself.”⁷⁹ Because Lacan's system is “unaware of itself” as a constructed system, it lacks recognition of what is repressed for the sake of coherence. “Woman comes into play” in this system “only as mother”;⁸⁰ Irigaray says this is inscribed in the entire “philosophical corpus,”⁸¹ in which woman is designated as “the unconscious womb of man's language,”⁸² the “Other” who “serves as matrix/womb for the subject's signifiers.”⁸³

Because Lacan claims that the subject enters language only by repressing desire for the mother, Irigaray aims to show “what the unconscious” of his text “has borrowed from the feminine.”⁸⁴ As Barbara Johnson reminds us, a deconstructive reading “does not ask ‘what does this statement mean?’ but ‘where is it being made from?’” or what are the “grounds” of its “possibility”? Such a critique “reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal, in order to show that these things have their history, their reasons for being the way they are, their effects on what follows from them, and that the starting point is not a (natural) given but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself.”⁸⁵ According to Irigaray, the fundamental “condition” of Lacan's systematicity is the “woman,” especially the “earth-mother-nature” that “nourishes” his speculating subject: she is the very condition presupposing subjectivity.⁸⁶ Asks Irigaray:

Once imagine that woman imagines [that is, becomes a subject as opposed to an object], there is no more “earth” to press down/repress, to work to represent, but also and always to desire … no opaque matter which in theory does not know herself, then what pedestal remains for the existence of the “subject”?⁸⁷

Irigaray's deconstructive strategy of filling in the gaps seems less successful in her reading of Lacan (in “Così fan tutti”) than in her readings of Freud and Plato. Perhaps this is because of the peculiarity of Lacan's text: although the discourse he articulates is continually destabilized by the unconscious, it seems in effect to tie us strongly to rationality as we attempt to make sense of it. Irigaray's ironic interlocutions only exacerbate the problem. Lacan may be—to paraphrase Irigaray—speaking to himself about love in order to speak love to himself,⁸⁸ but Irigaray's intervention in the narcissistic circle is not entirely successful.

We turn with relief to “When Our Lips Speak Together,” which discards Lacan's text while keeping Lacan firmly in view. This essay more effectively unveils and disables the phallus. Irigaray's relation to Lacan here is much less equivocal, perhaps because she achieves her aim of a “double syntax (masculine-feminine).”⁸⁹ To use Gallop's terms, “When Our Lips Speak Together” is more political because it is more poetic: it enacts Irigaray's evolving subject constituted as “difference” within (endlessly oscillating between) the mediated “I” of the Symbolic (in the “Name-of-the-Father”) and the immediate “I” experienced as fusion with the “Other” (in the name of the mother, we could say).

Carolyn Burke, the first translator of “When Our Lips Speak Together,” presented it as an imagined “dialogue for female lovers” or between “two aspects of the self,” but she makes only a passing reference to Lacan.⁹⁰ Irigaray's essay, however, could well have been written as an ironic rebuttal to Lacan's theory of the phallus, or to his declaration that the clitoris is “autistic” (i.e., it cannot communicate: it is impotent in the Symbolic).⁹¹ Irigaray replies that “woman has sex organs more or less everywhere” and thus forges multifarious connections.⁹²

With the two (or more) lips, Irigaray subverts the reproductive determinism of Lacan's theory: her emphasis on women's multifaceted sexuality exposes Lacan's theory as an example of what Gayatri Spivak calls the effacement of the clitoris: “Defining woman as object of exchange, passage, or possession in terms of reproduction, it is not only the womb that is literally ‘appropriated’; it is the clitoris as the signifier of the sexed subject that is effaced.”⁹³ In Lacan's theory, as Irigaray shows, woman (at least as “all”) is the womb: “matrix/womb for the subject's signifiers.”⁹⁴ Unlike Lacan, Irigaray refuses to appeal to biological origin for her conception of the subject; she shifts the emphasis away from the subject's relation to the mother in order to focus on the (mature) subject within the symbolic: “Forgive me, mother, I prefer a woman.”⁹⁵ Irigaray's work conspicuously lacks a theory of the subject, or of identity, in terms of development from any fixed origin. Her aim is to retrieve the woman not from discourse, as Rose and others have maintained, but from determinism.

Whereas Lacan reneges on his premise that the subject is overdetermined—“events mesh with one another and are continually transformed through their exchange of meaning”⁹⁶—Irigaray wants to sustain its continual transformation. Lacan himself acknowledges—but ignores—the dynamic nature of the subject: “What is realised in my history … is the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.”⁹⁷ Irigaray suggests, playfully, that we conceive of the subject altogether differently—“lipeccentrically,” if you will, rather than phallocentrically.⁹⁸ This reconceptualization has many implications: it challenges Lacan's centered subject (defined teleologically with reference to its origin in the mother); it defines woman without reference to reproduction—in Spivak's words, as “clitorally ex-centric from the reproductive orbit”; and it constitutes the subject in flux, with reference to a continually deferred future rather than to a repressed past.

Kiss me. Two lips kissing two lips: openness is ours again. … the passage between us, is limitless. Without end. … When you kiss me … the horizon itself disappears. Are we unsatisfied? Yes, if that means we are never finished. If our pleasure consists in moving, being moved, endlessly. Always in motion: openness is never spent or sated.⁹⁹

Irigaray claims that the subject's horizons are limitless. The traditional Freudian conception of the psyche, within which Lacan formulated his theory, is based on the notion that the organism needs equilibrium: this means that any “investment” of psychic energy requires a “return.”¹⁰⁰ Irigaray replaces this “libidinal economy”—which, using Marx, she links with capitalism—with the conception of an unlimited “spending” of inexhaustible energy. “When Our Lips Speak Together” demonstrates the “difference” it makes when we take the lips rather than the phallus as the model for textual/sexual subjectivity.

Neither one nor two. I've never known how to count. Up to you. In their calculations, we make two. Really, two? Doesn't that make you laugh? … Let's leave one to them: their oneness, with its prerogatives, its domination, its solipsism. … And the strange way they divide up their couples, with the other as the image of the one.¹⁰¹

Irigaray's emphasis on two or more lips and on the speaker's inability to count refers to Lacan's attempt to demonstrate in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis that “the subject has to recognize himself … as he who counts.”¹⁰² The importance of the child's counting is synonymous with the mirror stage which is the decisive event in the constitution of Lacan's subject. The mirror stage, in which the child (mis)recognizes its mirror image as a more coherent (and illusory) representation of the self, inaugurates entry into the symbolic realm, where language similarly presents a deceptively unified self.¹⁰³ The subject, as we have seen, is split between the immediacy of being (which cannot be represented in the symbolic) and the being that is conferred by language; but it is only the symbolic subject which “counts.” “I have three brothers,” says the child, “Paul, Earnest and me.”¹⁰⁴ Once the boy in the example recognizes that it is he who counts, that is, that the represented self is and is not the speaking self, he assumes his split subjectivity; his representations, in the mirror and in language, become his own.¹⁰⁵ In Lacan's account, maturity requires repressing the (unmediated) one who is counting (i.e., the one identified with the mother) in favor of the only one that “counts” or matters (identified with the “Name-of-the-Father”); Lacan also implies that language is a flat plane, a mirror that represents an even or coherent image (however illusory) of the self. Irigaray sees language as a “speculum,” giving back an uneven, multiple, shifting self. The denial of the ability to count in “When Our Lips Speak Together” is a rejection of Lacan's conception of desire as metaphorical: in Lacan's account, the child replaces the mother—the “woman as all”—with the woman as “not all,” because language is metaphorical. For Irigaray, language—and therefore desire—does not facilitate such a singular displacement, since metonymy occurs as frequently as metaphor. The essay emphasizes desire for that which is proximate and close (the self or female lover) rather than desire for the lost and displaced mother. Irigaray's evocation of indistinguishable yet multiple identities means that there can be no simple substitution for the desire for the mother: Lacan's claim that language performs the inevitable exclusion of the woman is thereby shown to be false.

As a dialogue between women, Irigaray's essay serves as a critique of the role Lacan—borrowing from Levi-Strauss—assigns to women. When Lacan reflects in Ecrits that “the law of man has been the law of language since the first words of recognition presided over the first gifts,” he affirms Levi-Strauss's myth of the origins of society in which women function as signs of cooperation between groups of men: “The emergence of symbolic thought must have required women to be things (reciprocally) exchanged like spoken words.”¹⁰⁶ Lacan thus refers to empirical women rather than textual “woman.” In “Women on the Market,” Irigaray transposes Lacan's and Levi-Strauss's notion of women as objects of exchange into Marx's theory of commodities. The exchange value of women reduces them, Irigaray says, to “a common feature”: “their current price in gold or phalluses. … each one looks exactly like every other. They all have the same phantom-like reality.”¹⁰⁷ Her claim that women's bodies have a phallus-value is derived from Marx's insight that the exchange value of a commodity is the projection of desire, a manifestation of (male) relations of production.¹⁰⁸ “When Our Lips Speak Together” opposes the fetishization of women whose exchange manifests the power of the phallus, by reestablishing the links between women alienated from one another by a competitive market:

Come back. … We don't owe each other anything. … What would I do with you, with myself, wrapped up like a gift? … bargains like these have no business between us. Unless we restage their commerce, and remain within their order.¹⁰⁹

The dialogue represents a refusal to allow the bodily form of one woman-commodity to mirror the exchange value of the other—“It would be frivolous of us, exchanged by them, to be so changeable”¹¹⁰—thereby rendering women inaccessible to a heterosexual economy: “Between us, one is not the ‘real’ and the other her imitation; one is not the original and the other her copy. Although we can dissimulate perfectly within their economy, we relate to one another without simulacrum.”¹¹¹ “When Our Lips Speak Together” offers an alternative to the masculine “libidinal economy” of parsimonious desire.

We must not forget the lips: “Without lips, there is no more ‘us.’ The unity, the truth, the propriety of words comes from their lack of lips, their forgetting of lips.”¹¹² Lacan's discourse, with its emphasis on the signifier as a unit—its phallomorphism—closes the gap in the play of “difference” between opposites: the result is that Otherness always collapses into Sameness and the feminine Other is always the negative of the masculine Self. Irigaray's lips, by contrast, emphasize continuity, circularity, supplementarity: “Our two lips cannot separate to let just one word pass. … Closed and open, neither ever excluding the other. … Together. To produce a single precise word, they would have to stay apart. Definitely parted. Kept at a distance, separated by one word.”¹¹³ The lips signify what Derrida calls the “open and productive displacement of the textual chain.”¹¹⁴ Irigaray wonders whether “the motifs of ‘self-touching’ of ‘proximity’ … might not imply a mode of exchange irreducible to any centering, any centrism.”¹¹⁵ The interrogative is important: Irigaray eschews dogmatic statement, or “univocity,”¹¹⁶ because she does not wish to displace Lacan's phallus with the lips, which would be a phallocentric strategy.

To avoid what she calls reproducing sameness by installing another hierarchy, Irigaray offers the lips playfully: “To escape from a pure and simple reversal of the masculine position,” she says, we must not forget “to laugh.” Laughter reminds us that “desire” and “pleasure” are “unrepresentable … in the ‘seriousness’—the adequacy, the univocity, the truth … of a discourse that claims to state its meaning.”¹¹⁷ If Irigaray's lips speaking to themselves provoke a smile in the reader, so much the better: that response draws attention to the absurdity and pretentiousness of the phallus as a transcendental signifier. The irony with which the lips are offered is crucial; without it, Irigaray would be guilty of the phallocentric strategy of reversal. The lips are also ironic because they have a dual and contradictory signification: they both do and do not refer to the labia. Far from forging an existential relation between language and the body, as Silverman suggests, Irigaray's lips textually reconstitute the anatomical labia, in a discursive context that enables them far to exceed anatomy. Equally misleading is Gallop's alternative to Silverman's explanation—that Irigaray is articulating a “poetics” of the body—because no distinction can be made between the “poetic” and the “political” articulation of the lips: they are always and only mediated through discourse.

Irigaray's “lipeccentrism” attempts to articulate a sexual identity that is not founded on a gesture of repression and denial, especially of the woman. Irigaray reminds us of what Lacan forgets: that gender is never fixed but is continually transformed as we live it; as Judith Butler says in a different context:

The origin of gender is not temporally discrete precisely because gender is not suddenly originated at some point in time after which it is fixed in form. In an important sense, gender is not traceable to a definable origin because it itself is an originating activity incessantly taking place.¹¹⁸

Lacan's reaffirmation of the oedipal complex—in Irigaray's view a “categorical and factitious law”—makes us wonder to what extent, to quote Butler, “the reification of the prohibitive law is an ideological means of confirming that law's hegemony.”¹¹⁹ “When Our Lips Speak Together” attempts—to borrow from Michel Foucault in another context—to “develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.”¹²⁰ “When Our Lips Speak Together” demonstrates the vital link between a knowledge of difference within the self and the ability to acknowledge the differences among selves subjected to what Irigaray calls “the various systems of oppression.”¹²¹ Furthermore, if the “horizon” of identity continually disappears, this does not mean—contrary to Daryl McGowan Tress's claims of the poststructuralist subject—that “there is no one to emancipate”;¹²² rather, it means that the subject is oriented by desire toward half-glimpsed alternatives.¹²³ By emphasizing the “lipeccentric” (as opposed to “vulvomorphic”) logic of Irigaray's text, we perform the double maneuver of which Irigaray is so fond: we do not immediately regard the body as though it were a given, thus essentializing it, but neither do we divest the textual body of its political effect. Irigaray's lips remind us that, to use Cixous's words, no political reflection can dispense with reflection on language.¹²⁴ Irigaray reclaims the body, because it is on this basis that women have been oppressed, but she has no wish to identify it outside of discourse (even if that were possible), because this would return women to where Lacan had placed them. Irigaray's irony has many dimensions: while it emphatically distinguishes the lips from the labia, it at the same time reveals how impossible it is to cut the signifier (lips) free of its habitual referent (labia) as Lacan claims to do with the phallus. Irigaray's text makes the signified (what goes on in our heads when we read the lips) so rich in connotation that it actually transforms the anatomical referent.

To assert woman's difference, as some critics claim Irigaray does, would simply make the lips the new phallus. Irigaray's aim is not to displace the phallus but, rather, to uncover “phalluses” as they function historically in various discourses, to “unveil” the assumptions on which systematicity depends.¹²⁵ In Lacan's case, ironically, the phallus turns out to be the “empty” womb: the contentless origin or matrix of the Symbolic. Irigaray's lips are an alternative to Lacan's phallus, but Irigaray does not constitute them as either “univocal” or privileged in the order of “being”; she does not pretend the lips are the “privileged signifier” of our culture.¹²⁶

Notes

1. It is interesting that the critics who translated and introduced Irigaray's essay for Signs criticize the French project in Feminist Studies; see Carolyn Burke, “Introduction to Luce Irigaray's ‘When Our Lips Speak Together,’” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 66-68, and “Irigaray through the Looking-Glass,” Feminist Studies 7, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 288-306; Helene Vivienne Wenzel, “Introduction to Luce Irigaray's ‘And the One Doesn't Stir without the Other,’” Signs 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1981): 56-59, and “The Text as Body/Politics: An Appreciation of Monique Wittig's Writings in Context,” Feminist Studies 7, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 264-87. See also Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, New Accents Series (London and New York: Methuen, 1985); Beverly Brown and Parveen Adams, “The Feminine Body and Feminist Politics,” M/F 3 (1979): 35-50; Rachel Bowlby, “The Feminine Female,” Social Text 7 (Spring and Summer 1983): 54-68.

2. See Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” in Reconstructing the Academy: Women's Education and Women's Studies, ed. Elizabeth Minnich, Jean O'Barr, and Rachel Rosenfeld (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 257-88 (first published in Signs 13, no. 3 [Spring 1988]: 405-33); Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory,” Signs 12, no. 4 (Summer 1987): 621-43; Daryl McGowan Tress, “Comment on Flax's ‘Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory’”; and Jane Flax, “Reply to Tress,” Signs 14, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 196-200, 201-3; Ann Rosalind Jones, “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l'ecriture feminine,” Feminist Studies 7, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 247-63.

3. Diana Fuss, “‘Essentially Speaking’: Luce Irigaray's Language of Essence,” Hypatia 3, no. 3 (Winter 1989): 63; Margaret Whitford, “Luce Irigaray and the Female Imaginary: Speaking as a Woman,” Radical Philosophy 43 (Summer 1986): 3-8.

4. Jane Gallop, Thinking through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 94. For another argument that Irigaray is not essentialist, see my “Escaping the Cave: Luce Irigaray and Her Feminist Critics,” in Literature and Ethics: Essays Presented to A. E. Malloch, ed. Gary Wihl and David Williams (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988), 62-76.

5. Fuss, 68.

6. Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary E. Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971), 44.

7. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York and London: Norton, 1982), 50-51.

8. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: Norton, 1977), 256.

9. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 209.

10. Monique Plaza, “‘Phallomorphic Power’ and the Psychology of ‘Woman’: A Patriarchal Chain,” trans. M. David and J. Hodges, in Human Sexual Relations: A Reader, ed. Mike Brake (London and New York: Penguin, 1982), 353 (first published in Questions feministes 1 [November 1978]: 91-111).

11. Ibid., 352, 353.

12. Ibid., 352.

13. Jones, “Writing the Body” (n. 2 above). When Jones's article was first published, only Irigaray's essays “When Our Lips Speak Together” and “And the One Doesn't Stir without the Other” had been translated into English: the former in Signs 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 66-79, and the latter in Signs 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1981): 56-67.

14. Jones, “Writing the Body,” republished in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 361-77, and in Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture, ed. Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt (New York: Methuen, 1985), 86-101; see also a similar article by Ann Rosalind Jones, “Inscribing Femininity: French Theories of the Feminine,” in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Green and Coppelia Kahn (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 80-112.

15. Jones, “Writing the Body,” in Showalter, ed., 362.

16. Ibid., 364.

17. For Irigaray's essay on Freud, see Luce Irigaray, “The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry,” in Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 13-129.

18. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1983), 189. I am indebted to Mary Carpenter for pointing this out to me.

19. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 145.

20. Irigaray, quoted by Silverman in ibid., 145, from “Women's Exile: Interview with Luce Irigaray,” trans. Couze Venn, Ideology and Consciousness, no. 1 (1977), 65.

21. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (n. 9 above), 212.

22. Ibid., 211.

23. Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, 19.

24. Mitchell and Rose, eds. (n. 7 above), 137.

25. Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, 146.

26. Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, 31.

27. Ibid., 69.

28. Ibid., 33.

29. Whitford (n. 3 above), 7.

30. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 140.

31. Whitford, 7.

32. “Differance” combines “to differ” and “to defer,” in order to remind us that difference is not a consequence of identity but, rather, makes identity possible. For a full exposition of differance, see Jacques Derrida, “Semiology and Grammatology: Interview with Julia Kristeva,” in Derrida's Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 15-36.

33. See Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), in which Irigaray seems to be “seduced” by both Freud and Lacan: “She joins Lacan the ladies' man, even Lacan the prick” (41).

34. Gallop, Thinking through the Body (n. 4 above), 94.

35. Ibid., 93.

36. Taken from the French title of the original essay, in Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977), 203.

37. Luce Irigaray, “Così fan tutti,” in Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 86-105.

38. Ibid., 93.

39. Ibid., 76.

40. Mitchell and Rose, eds. (n. 7 above), 143.

41. Ibid., 45.

42. Ibid., 49.

43. Ibid., 143.

44. Ibid., 82.

45. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 201.

46. Ibid.

47. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: Norton, 1981), 211.

48. For the function of “Name-of-the-Father,” or the paternal metaphor, see Lacan, Ecrits (n. 8 above), 197-200.

49. Ibid., 322.

50. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 211.

51. Mitchell and Rose, eds., 83.

52. Ibid., 117.

53. Taken from the title of a poem by William Wordsworth; see Jack Stillinger, ed., Selected Poems and Prefaces by William Wordsworth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 186.

54. Mitchell and Rose, eds., 82.

55. See “On the Generation of Animals,” in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 677-78.

56. Mitchell and Rose, eds., 91.

57. Ibid., 144.

58. Ibid., 49.

59. Ibid., 48-49.

60. Ibid., 144.

61. Jacques Lacan, “God and the jouissance of The Woman,” quoted in Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (n. 9 above), 89; for an excerpt from this seminar, see Mitchell and Rose, eds., 137-48.

62. Mitchell and Rose, eds., 82.

63. Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 87.

64. See, e.g., Lacan, Ecrits (n. 8 above), 200.

65. Ibid.

66. Elizabeth A. Grosz says (Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction [London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1990], 101) that Lacan's “formulae are fundamentally incoherent as mathematical or logical hypotheses. They are irresolvably obscure if taken seriously as formulae.” Jane Gallop says (Reading Lacan [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985], 119) that “these algorithms are absurd.”

67. Lacan, Ecrits, 154.

68. For Derrida, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator's Preface,” in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), lxiv; for Irigaray, see Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 89. For a different interpretation of Irigaray's attitude to the maternal, see 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. I cannot agree with Stanton's inclusion of Irigaray among those who “reproduce the dichotomy between male rationality and female materiality, corporeality and sexuality” (170) by celebrating the pre-oedipal relationship between mother and child.

69. Lacan, Ecrits, 154.

70. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (n. 17 above), 137-38.

71. Butler, Subjects of Desire (n. 45 above), 193.

72. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 95.

73. Lacan, Ecrits, 199.

74. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 87-88.

75. Ibid., 90.

76. Jacqueline Rose, e.g., in Mitchell and Rose, eds. (n. 7 above), says that “femininity is assigned to a point of origin prior to the mark of symbolic difference and the law”; this, which is clearly impossible, turns the French feminists' position into one that is untenable (54).

77. Julia Kristeva, in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 137.

78. Gayatri Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame,” Yale French Studies 62, no. 2 (1981): 171.

79. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 93.

80. Ibid., 102.

81. Ibid., 86.

82. Ibid., 94.

83. Ibid., 101.

84. Ibid., 123.

85. Barbara Johnson, introduction to Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), xv.

86. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 102.

87. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (n. 17 above), 133.

88. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 103.

89. Ibid., 132.

90. Burke, “Introduction to Luce Irigaray's ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’” (n. 1 above).

91. Mitchell and Rose, eds. (n. 7 above).

92. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 28.

93. Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame” (n. 78 above), 181.

94. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 101.

95. Ibid., 209.

96. Antoine Vergote, “From Freud's ‘Other Scene’ to Lacan's ‘Other,’” in Interpreting Lacan: Psychiatry and the Humanities, ed. J. Smith and W. Kerrigan (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 6: 207.

97. Lacan, Ecrits (n. 8 above), 86.

98. “Lipeccentric” is my term, intended to convey the ex-centric and eccentric trajectory of subjectivity.

99. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 210.

100. See J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth, 1982), 127-30.

101. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 207.

102. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (n. 47 above), 20.

103. For the “mirror stage,” see Lacan, Ecrits, 1-7.

104. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 20.

105. Ibid., 81.

106. Lacan, Ecrits, 61; Claude Levi-Strauss, “Les structures elemantaires de la parente,” quoted in Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis: Jacques Lacan, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 254.

107. Irigaray, “Women on the Market,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, 175.

108. Ibid., 183: “Hence women's role as fetish-objects, inasmuch as, in exchanges, they are the manifestation and the circulation of a power of the Phallus, establishing relationships of men with each other?”

109. Ibid., 206.

110. Ibid., 205.

111. Ibid., 216.

112. Ibid., 208.

113. Ibid.

114. Derrida, Positions (n. 32 above), 45.

115. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 79.

116. Ibid., 163.

117. Ibid.

118. Judith Butler, “Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault,” in Feminism as Critique, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Druscilla Cornell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 131.

119. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 27; Butler, Subjects of Desire (n. 45 above), 204.

120. Michel Foucault, preface to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977), xiii.

121. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 31.

122. Tress (n. 1 above), 197.

123. See my “Humanism vs. Post-Structuralism: The Debate in Feminist Theory,” Journal of the Canadian Humanities Association (in press).

124. Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” Signs 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1981): 45.

125. Mary Carpenter, “The Phallus as Hysterical/Historical Subject” (paper presented at Modern Language Association conference, Washington, December 30, 1989).

126. Mitchell and Rose, eds. (n. 7 above), 82.