SOURCE: Schutte, Ofelia. “Irigaray on the Problem of Subjectivity.¹” Hypatia 6, no. 2 (summer 1991): 64-76.

[In the following essay, Schutte analyzes the critique of female identity formation in Speculum of the Other Woman, examining Irigaray's claims of phallocentric biases in psychoanalysis.]

“My sex is removed, at least as the property of a subject, from the predicative mechanism that assures discursive coherence,” states Luce Irigaray in defense of her unconventional critique of the logic of identity and the subject undertaken in her study Speculum of the Other Woman.² Her defiance of the “master discourse” of philosophy and the attempt at subverting the logical order of coherence upon which such a discourse is grounded place the activity of feminist philosophizing in a difficult predicament with respect to the interpretation of this work. Insofar as philosophy relies on a notion of coherence rejected as phallocratic by Irigaray, it would seem that, if she is right, feminist principles would bar one from trying to explain her thought in a manner consistent with currently accepted tools of philosophical analysis. Yet refraining from explaining Irigaray's position as clearly and coherently as possible would only lead to the exclusion of her thoughts from philosophical attention, a circumstance that would deprive us of the opportunity to understand one of this century's leading feminist authors. Indeed, the power of her critique of “the subject” is enriching and stimulating not only to literary theory, linguistics, and psychoanalysis but to philosophy as well. I take it, therefore, that a philosophical reading of Irigaray is not a contradiction in terms, and in fact, much can be learned from approaching her intentionally obscure work, Speculum, in a clear and coherent manner.

In Speculum Irigaray uses a postmodern perspective to challenge the hegemony of phallocentrism in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. I will focus here on an examination of her thesis (given as a chapter title) that “Any Theory of the ‘Subject’ Has Always Been Appropriated by the ‘Masculine’” (Irigaray 1985a, 133-46). At stake in her argument is the claim that the notion of subjectivity is subordinate to a psychological structure of gender dominance. Irigaray's critique has important implications for the construction of a feminist philosophical conception of subjectivity. We depend generally on the notion of the subject to construct our theories of knowledge, value, personal identity, and sociopolitical rights. If our conception of the subject is askew, so will be the values we try to defend and pursue in our civilization. Irigaray's analysis may help to shed some light on this particular dilemma.

PARADIGMS UNDER ATTACK

Irigaray questions the validity of a cluster of dominant paradigms in epistemology, metaphysics, and psychology, all of which she takes to be interrelated. In epistemology, she puts in question theories resting on an essential split between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge. The classical paradigm for this type of subjectivity, as elaborated by Kant, is one in which a transcendental subject of knowledge coordinates and controls the multiplicity of sensations and impressions received from sense experience, thus forming a unified field of experience.³ Irigaray claims, however, that the transcendental subject designated by this paradigm has, by assuming a position of distance from and superiority over the object, cut himself off “from his empirical relationship with the matrix that he claims to survey” (Irigaray 1985a, 134). Several chapters of Speculum are devoted to the critique of philosophers—including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel—as she explores paradigms in which the formal conditions of knowledge privilege male subjectivity as foundational to the epistemic enterprise. In this sense the category “subject” eludes the feminine because linguistic practice has inscribed masculine experience within it, in a binary system of oppositions such that the very condition for the possibility of (masculine) theorizing is feminine silence: “Subjectivity denied to woman: indisputably this provides the financial backing for every irreducible constitution as an object: of representation, of discourse, of desire” (Irigaray 1985a, 33).

The epistemological paradigm under attack by Irigaray rest on a basic division between subject and object of knowledge. She understands a division of this nature as the splitting of a larger whole into two parts, conceived here as “sides.” Although she believes that the positions of subject and object are pregiven in language and are thus, in a sense, preconstructed for any speaker, as a writer she takes advantage of the distinction (as a split) to bolster her view of the excluded feminine. In her writing, through the use of analogy as well as literary devices such as metaphor and metonymy, a number of other referents are explicitly placed on the “side” of the subject, while their counterparts are positioned to appear on the “side” of the subject. Accordingly, the subject of knowledge acquires two other characteristics: a masculine gender identity (the properties of the masculine pronoun he) and the role of the subject of speech, the “I speak” of discourse. Through the blending of these three categories—subject of knowledge, masculinity, and speaking subject—the subject of knowledge is explicitly positioned in the role of male speaker, so that “male speaker” and “subject of knowledge” become interchangeable descriptions. (This implies that any woman philosopher adopting the position of the transcendental subject is speaking with a male voice and articulating a masculine vision of the universe.) Correspondingly, the object of knowledge, precisely because it is object for a subject and lacks a subjectivity of its own, is a being that does not speak. For Irigaray, the object is the denied feminine, or fetishized woman. She uses the feminine pronoun she to refer to the object of knowledge, a reminder of the status of fetishized femininity as constructed by the masculine gaze.

Under Irigaray's scrutiny, epistemology is quickly converted into sexual politics. The subject of knowledge, which secures a position of distance from and control over the object of knowledge comes to stand for the woman whose actual or potential speech is silenced by his discourse. If this is the case, then the human process of becoming conscious of oneself as subject is strongly or entirely dominated by a masculine notion of subjectivity. The paradigm of self-consciousness, used pervasively in historical struggles for equality, freedom, justice, and self-determination, appear tainted by a male bias. If Irigaray were right in her analysis, the emergence of self-consciousness would be mediated exclusively or predominantly by a masculine paradigm of the subject as self, leaving what subjectivity might mean to a feminine subject or partially or wholly out of the picture.

Does the situation improve if the notion of subjectivity is projected onto the unconscious? If one could speak of a subject of the unconscious, would it make sense to refer to this subject as feminine, in contrast to the masculine subject of consciousness? Clearly Irigaray is inclined to move in this direction. But here too she encounters some major obstacles. While she believes that there is a potential reservoir of feminine energy, yet to be tapped, in the unconscious, she argues that the study of the unconscious is still dominated by the masculine-oriented idea of knowledge outlined above. Here too Irigaray finds that any theory of the “subject” has so far been appropriated by the “masculine.” She attacks vigorously what she takes to be the male-oriented bias in the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan (which have otherwise influenced her work significantly). She notes that these theories are an extension of the drive to knowledge of the previously defined transcendental subject. “He” had expressed his dominance over the object by attributing to himself, to his capacity for knowledge, the qualities of elevation (height) and clarity. Eventually, “he” is going to be attracted to the study of the unconscious, with its opposing and therefore challenging attributes of “darkness” and “depth.”

This imagery carries Irigaray over to the Freudian psychological paradigm she is intent on subverting. Psychoanalysis, she claims, is an extension of the paradigm of the transcendental subject. Not content with surveying reality from the heights, man wants to penetrate into its depths. Past mastery had been tied to “clarity,” says Irigaray; how now will he master these “dark continents”?⁴ Among other things, she claims, man will turn the unconscious into a “property of his language” (1985a, 137). This conclusion follows from the importance given to language in Lacanian theory, including the well-known observation of Jacques Lacan that “the unconscious is structured like a language” (Lacan 1977 and 1978, 149 and 203). Irigaray is not saying merely that a male psychoanalyst treating a female client will induce her to give meaning to her experience according to the linguistic and theoretical categories which make his experience meaningful. Her interest goes much further than this problem in doctor/patient ethics. She is concerned with the manipulation of the unconscious through language that, as she notes in her critique of the epistemological subject, is tied to a psychological law giving dominance to the position of the male speaker over that of his female counterpart.⁵ She characterizes the psychoanalyst as being caught up in the following ritual:

Session after session, in a procedure that is now regulated by visual—rememorative—laws, he [the analyst] repeats the same gesture reestablishing the bar, the barred. While all the while permissive, listening with benevolent neutrality, collecting, on a carefully circumscribed little stage, the inter-dict. The lines between the lines of discourse. But he restricts himself to reframing, re-marking, or “analyzing” its contours … so that order, good “conscious” order, may prevail. Elsewhere.

(Irigaray 1985a, 138)

In this sense, the analyst, caught in his own discursive role, is blocked from the possibility of understanding or appropriately interpreting the heterogeneous experiences of women. He is also kept from engaging in a feminist questioning of current psychoanalytic theory, such as the one that ultimately led Irigaray to break from the theoretical perspectives of Freud and Lacan.

For Irigaray, then, to say that the field of the unconscious contains something that is undefinable is to position the unconscious on the same side as the woman whose otherness lies beyond representation before the phallic law. In other words, if the transcendental subject has been linked to a male speaking subject and he makes the unconscious a property of his language, the unconscious (as other to the appropriating act) will come to stand for woman. Speaking of woman, Irigaray states:

Unconsciousness she is, but not for herself, not with a subjectivity that might take cognizance of it, recognize it as her own. Close to herself, admittedly, but in a total ignorance (of self) …, she is the matter used for the imprint of forms.

(Irigaray 1985a, 141)

To the previous divisions—subject/object, he/she, light/dark, speaking subject/silent object—Irigaray adds conscious/unconscious and form/matter, with woman appearing, again, on the side of the repressed. Woman's unconscious, she argues, does not have access to the means for its self-expression, since it is given form by a discourse springing from the interests of male subjectivity. In this way man's consciousness triumphs over woman's unconscious; he succeeds in mastering her even in her own realm of impenetrability and darkness. Her unconscious is prostituted “to the ever-present projects and projections of masculine consciousness” (Irigaray 1985a, 141). With this type of schema Irigaray puts into question the legitimacy of Freudian as well as Lacanian psychology, insofar as both theories are guided by a concept of gender identity extraneous to women's desires and interests.

Having criticized the notion of the subject in epistemology and psychoanalysis, Irigaray turns to a critique of the position of the subject in metaphysics. Her criticisms are directed to the concern with sameness and the control of ultimate meaning characterizing a metaphysics of the subject. Borrowing freely from Heidegger's critique of a metaphysics of “the same,” Irigaray argues that the subject functions as “the same,” an attribute that guarantees his continuity, permanence, and stability. The subject also functions as a point of reference, a designator, the foundation of the world he observes and lives in. Prior to the advent of a secular, scientific age, this subject, the selfsame he, speculated on the ultimate meaning of life by relating the origin of his being to some divinity. Now, Irigaray suggests, the “ultimate meaning will perhaps be uncovered by tracking down what there is to be seen of female sexuality” (Irigaray 1985a, 145).

The control over the meaning of life shifts from a metaphysical to a sexual, biological, or psychoanalytical sphere. The medical procedure known as a hysteroscopy reminds Irigaray of the ancient quest for the ultimate meaning of life in metaphysics. Playing upon the word speculum, which appears in her title, she considers man's “speculum” to be an expression of the drive to measure, survey, or give definition to what is other to himself. Such definitions are aimed at controlling the other and reducing the other's meaning to that projected on it by the subject. Thus the world of objects becomes the double of the subject, bouncing back like a mirror whatever meaning/image is projected upon it. In particular, woman as the double of man is woman as object of appropriation for the phallogocentric order—silent before the law, always readily available for penetration or the imprint of form. But, like a mirror, the world also contains a side that cannot be penetrated by the subject (of reflection) and his ubiquitous, persistent gaze. For Irigaray, this other side is woman as undefinable to phallogocentric discourse and its correspondingly fetishistic gaze. In this aspect woman stands for the theory-resistant field of the unconscious. Metaphorically speaking, she is the dark continent that the white man does not cease to try to penetrate and manipulate, whether sexually or through his thoughts, ideology, and language.

In metaphysics, Irigaray's view of woman undermines the traditional notions of substance and accident, identity and difference, as elaborated by mainstream Western philosophy. Her perspective shows the metaphysical privileging of masculine subjectivity insofar as man is placed on the side of the same, and woman on the side of the (appropriated) other. She also notes that the political economy of the division between identity and difference in metaphysics is such that the other is always reducible to the same. For example, she calls attention to “the movement to speak of the ‘other’ in a language already systematized by/for the same” (Irigaray 1985a, 139). “Other” in this context is a word lacking specificity due to the fact that any specificity in language or logic is drawn according to the categories imposed by the economy of the “same.” If the “other” had any real meaning, then, it would mean the boundless, the undefinable, the unknown. Yet, as this reasoning would conclude, if woman is on the side of the boundless and the undefinable, does this not mean that she will always defy man's control? Only if definition ceases to be the highest instrument of control over the other. The strategic feminist struggle for Irigaray thus becomes the subversion of the power of efficacy and predictability of definition. Her counterproposal to the male speculative drive is the projection of a “concave speculum,” a uniquely feminine mirror, one that is found pirouetting ceaselessly upon itself (Irigaray 1985a, 134). This mirror will absorb the light of the transcendent subject until it disintegrates him. The issue is to fight the adversary not through arguments, whose rules of the game he controls, but through images of the unconscious that will unleash an avalanche of discursive displacements. The task is to “make it impossible for a while to predict whence, whither, when, how, and why” (Irigaray 1985a, 142). As she suggests: “Overthrow syntax by suspending its eternally teleological order, by snipping the wires, cutting the current, breaking the circuits, switching the connections, by modifying continuity, alternation, frequency, intensity” (Irigaray 1985a, 142). The intention is to break the nature of causal explanation, break the subject's assurance of linguistic control over reality, let the unconscious explode. In short, the task is to break the hegemony of the masculine narrative, in terms not only of its content, but also in terms of its form (self-reflection, control over the unknown other).

THE PHALLIC ECONOMY OF CASTRATION

So far I have focused on the structure of Irigaray's argument insofar as she places man on the side of the subject of knowledge and woman on the side of the object. It remains to be seen how Irigaray interprets the nature and manner of the appropriation process through which the subject takes over the object and/or reduces her to silence. To understand the mechanism or structure that generates this kind of appropriation, let us now turn to what she calls “the phallic economy of castration.” We are aided in this analysis if we switch attention from Irigaray's appropriation of Marxist discourse by means of the recurring image of women as “commodities” and note instead the less explicit use of the Marxian category of surplus labor, which seems to accompany her post-Freudian treatment of masculinity.⁶

Borrowing freely from Marx's analysis of a “political economy” in which the fruits of the worker's labor are unjustly appropriated through the economic system of wage labor that generates surplus value, Irigaray speaks of a “phallic economy” that she sees at the root of gender oppression. Her description of this economy is drawn from Freud's model of a libidinal economy, since she refers to a “phallic economy of castration [emphasis added]” (Irigaray 1985a, 141). Yet Irigaray reverses the axis upon which Freud's model turns. One way to understand her analysis is to view the phallic economy as ruled by an operational displacement of the following type: where the gender division occurs in the unconscious between “he” and “she,” the value that falls on the side of the masculine is surplus value extracted/displaced from the side of the feminine. Irigaray's attention focuses to a great extent on the economy of discourse, where, she acutely observes, the silence of one guarantees the autonomy of the other (Irigaray 1985a, 140-44). Henceforth the paradigm of surplus value is not exclusively limited to the specificity of the capitalist/worker relationship. Every time the slash [/] representing the mark of difference occurs between masculine and feminine, we must ask ourselves the question, where does the value, in particular the excessive value, attributed to the masculine term come from? Is it the case that it attains its superiority or predominance precisely because it extracts its value from what originally belongs to the other, the residue indicated after the mark of difference? Or, in Irigaray's words, if the (phallic) economy of discourse is one in which the subject (he) speaks and the object (she) is silent, what would happen if the other began to speak? Can we imagine her discourse?

Before expanding on this question, I wish to go back to the phallic economy insofar as it is an economy of castration. What does this mean? An economy of castration is an economy of lack, of privation. It is one in which fear of loss (of the penis) plays a predominant function. In the logic of castration, the exclusive sense of the logic of either/or is given predominance. Value is attached to one object and its lack is perceived as valueless. The penis functions as this divider and symbol of value in the gender difference distinguishing boys from girls. Absence of the penis in this economy of castration means absence of value, since according to this logic everything hinges on the possession and use of this organ. The penis acquires a much broader significance than the bodily organ would have on its own. It becomes, at the level of meaning, the phallus (in Lacanian theory, the phallic signifier). The phallus comes to symbolize value, limit, measure, authority, the law. As such it is a placeholder for the personal pronoun I, as spoken by a masculine subject. (This is the only subject, if Irigaray is correct that subjectivity has been appropriated by the masculine.)

For its survival, the economy of castration needs the absolute repression of nonphallic value, which, according to this model, is also the value of difference, of that which cannot be reduced to the “same.” According to the presuppositions of the economy of castration, such aberrant value would be nonexistent or unreal. If real, it would have to be completely submissive to the former's capacity for penetration, for the imposition of meaning and measure. It would only have the status of matter, which can always be made pliable by the imposition of meaning and measure. It would only have the status of matter, which can always be made pliable by the imposition of form. “She” is the “dark continent,” the matrix, the matter, upon which “he,” the master of language and meaning, of logic and culture, of metaphysics and psychotherapy, will impose his “form”: his distinctions, his structures, his norms, his expected rate of productivity, of yield. Her pleasure and pain are guided by his interest. His laws govern her body, the rate and timing of her fertility. His morality governs her sexual movements and her sexual pleasure.

What about her universe, her hidden thoughts, her feelings, her experience? The phallic economy of castration does not recognize these unless their expression fits into the rules and categories of his thought. “Truth is One,” such an economy repeats ceaselessly. My truth—thus speaks the voice of this phallic economy—must therefore be your truth. There cannot be two (different) truths. Either my thoughts represent civilization or there is no civilization. As the (only) representative of civilization, I have the right and the duty to destroy, punish, silence, or otherwise restrain you if you challenge my ideas or my right to rule.

ALTERNATIVES

Previously we raised this question: if the object, the silenced, could speak, what would she say? Our analysis of the phallic economy of castration has begun to answer this question. The silenced woman would say what every oppressed being says to its oppressor: “No.” “Stop imposing your force on me.” “I don't want your system.” Clearly, women—as well as men aware of their oppression by sexism—would want a different system than the one ruled by the phallic economy of castration. But what does this mean? Is it possible to move toward such an economy? If our consciousness is distorted and bent out of shape by the results of the phallic economy of castration to which we have been subjected from infancy, where can we begin, as we turn toward the new life we desire?

We cannot simply replace some concepts with others, or change from one set of regulations to another. We must get behind the concept and the rule. To express our feelings as women we must bypass the phallic economy of castration in the unconscious. Woman can do this by imagining a region prior to language, a space prior to the knowledge of the Law of the Father, a source out of which she can draw her own figures of speech. There is no economy of lack in this region but one of superabundance (echoes of Nietzsche's Dionysian creativity?). Before the cut signifying the Law of the Father in the unconscious, and the limit of meaning defining the boundaries of our individual experience in our conscious mind, there is the fusion of the infant with the maternal body and the (adult) recovery of this boundless feeling in the specific characteristics of the feminine orgasm, which the French feminists refer to as jouissance (see Cixous 1981, 90-98, esp. 95).

To rekindle the flame of this lost horizon, Irigaray and other postmodern French feminists turn to writing—in particular, “writing the woman's body” (as they describe it). This writing emerges from the unconscious, from the pain or pleasure of sexual experience, from the “dark continent” of desire prior to its appropriation by the phallic law. It is the affirmation of a difference that cannot be conceptualized as long as the concept is tied to a law of meaning going back to the Name of the Father or phallic signifier. Once the structure of desire is released from the (repressive) Law of the Father, speech will follow women's desire as jouissance, rather than subdue it. This process will signify the reinvention of subjectivity. I say we must “reinvent” rather than “reconceptualize” subjectivity, for to reconceptualize it, according to Irigaray, would be merely to leave it where it is today.

POSTSCRIPT

Given the perspective Irigaray has put forward, a number of responses and/or criticisms could be offered. I will mention one issue only, namely, whether her argument changes our standard conception of the relation of gender to subjectivity and, if so, in what way. If, on the one hand, we accept the position that our present understanding of subjectivity is only a masculine construction, as Irigaray appears to suggest, then in order to be feminine, we would have to get rid of subjectivity altogether. We would rescue the feminine only at the price of destroying the subject. Although postmodern writers generally want to move in this direction, such an option seems to me, for the most part, a difficult one to put into practice because it seems to require the rejection of the notion of self. The concept of self is not reducible to that of subject, but insofar as it strives to offer an integrated perspective on subjectivity, it is not favored by postmodern theory, which prefers to work with what is fragmented and discontinuous in consciousness. Still, as I see it, it may be more worthwhile for feminist theory to reexamine the notion of self—including the discontinous manifestations that form its fragments—than to discard it altogether. This is an important topic that, regrettably, cannot be pursued here. In general, the question raised would have the following form: if a given notion of self or subject has so far been pervasively appropriated by a masculine bias, must the notion itself be given up as inevitably or necessarily masculine-defined or does the possibility exist of reexamining the notion from a feminist perspective? Unless there is reason to believe the notion itself no longer serves a good theoretical purpose, the tendency I would favor would be to explore feminist alternatives of interpretation. In fact, as will be shown shortly, it seems that Irigaray herself is willing to explore alternative notions of feminine subjectivity even if she does not refer to them by this name.

But if, on the other hand, we continue to hold that subjectivity is independent from gender, as the philosophical tradition has assumed so far, the result would be to dismiss Irigaray's analysis as absurd. Philosophy would continue to regard the “feminine” as only an “accident,” a modality logically distinct from the “subject.” The subject as such would be gender-free. Such a position is precisely what Irigaray considers to be the illness/illusion of modern philosophy.

Neither one of these two solutions appears acceptable: either the destruction of the subject or the subordination of the feminine to a theory of an independent (supposedly neutral but actually masculine) subject. I would argue, however, that there is yet another option. In this case, subjectivity would not be reducible to gender (as Irigaray describes it) but neither would it be independent from gender (as Western philosophy describes it). As I have already suggested, Irigaray's position can also be read as implying that we need to reinvent subjectivity. Reinventing subjectivity can be done in the process of reimagining gender. A new approach to gender would require two conditions, at least. One is to stop reifying woman's body as a commodity and/or object of sexual pleasure for the male gaze; the other is to get out of the normative definition of gender that has marked the concept of gender in our societies (e.g., the intrinsic and necessary association of the feminine, or “woman,” with motherhood, understood in subordination to phallic law). We need to take the notions of gender and subjectivity out of their present alienated state and rework them on our own terms.

To some extent Irigaray herself attempts to do this when she tries to imagine what it would be to release the notion of gender from compliance with phallic law. It will be recalled that one of the ways she proposes to initiate this resistance against compliance is to ask, what if the object were to speak? But if, indeed, the so-called object (woman) were to speak and we were to imagine her discourse (as Irigaray would have us do), wouldn't the object somehow position itself in the role of a subject? The difference between the subject, as imagined by Irigaray, and every other subject (the masculine one) is that the former is not constituted by its compliance with phallic law. If anything, it is constituted by rebellion against it. When Irigaray asks her readers to imagine a type of “short circuit” in the relation between subject and object, so that the object begins to speak and the subject is blown to pieces, losing its previous hegemony, couldn't this be construed as a reinvention of feminine subjectivity—namely, the positing of a feminist subjectivity whose principal activity would be the subversion of the entire phallocentric order? What might be important here, if we want to pursue this interpretation, is not to attempt to universalize Irigaray's proposed model of feminist subjectivity as if this were the exclusive option for overturning phallocentrism. There are more than a few cracks in the phallocentric edifice, so it makes sense to think of Irigaray's way of getting at them as one among other possibilities.

But now, someone might ask, what does all of this theory mean in practice? Is it possible to obtain a few details or possibly even some hints about the reinventing of subjectivity? How is this going to come about? Perhaps Irigaray would suggest that we begin by imagining a series of reversals of meaning in which the prohibitions inhibiting women's desires through phallic law become ineffective or absurd. “Once imagine that woman imagines and the object loses its fixed, obsessional character” (Irigaray 1985a, 133). If the obsessional, fixed character of the object is destabilized, so will be the identity-fixation of its corresponding subject of knowledge and desire. This means that subjective gender identity-fixation (of the masculine-type) would be destabilized. A fluid, undefinable type of subjectivity could then emerge in place of the old, identity-bound notion of the subject. But such a fluid conception of subjectivity or of subject-object relations does not in itself guarantee the emergence of a feminist perspective on the subject. If Irigaray is right, such a perspective would have to emerge from the repositioning of the object of desire (woman) in a different role than the one she generally occupies at present. “Woman” would have to operate as “other” than the object of sexual desire constituted through phallic law. This involves a refocusing on imagining a psychological “place” free from the scope of the law establishing the prohibition of incest and the binary system of oppositions for the construction of gender identities. Irigaray begins to take this path toward the invention or imagining of a feminist subjectivity when she comments on what Freud might have said about female sexuality but didn't:

For whereas the man Freud—or woman, were she to set her rights up in opposition—might have been able to interpret what the overdetermination of language (the effects of deferred action, its subterranean dreams and fantasies, its convulsive quakes, its paradoxes and contradictions) owed to the repression (which may yet return) of maternal power—or of the matriarchy, to adopt a still prehistorical point of reference—whereas he might have been able also to interpret the repression of the history of female sexuality, we shall in fact receive only confirmation of the discourse of the same, through comprehension and extension.

(Irigaray 1985a, 141)

The “might have been able to” referred to twice above becomes the site of the possibility of a feminist interpretation of female sexuality. But stated this way, the capacity to locate the site where a free feminist imagination intersects with the interpretive activity of human subjectivity appears deceptively simple. Irigaray wants to resist such an apparently simple solution to a difficult problem. “It is still better to speak only in riddles, allusions, hints, parables. Even if asked to clarify a few points,” she reiterates. “Even if people plead that they just don't understand. After all, they never have understood. So why not double the misprision to the limits of exasperation?” (Irigaray 1985a, 143) In other words, the short-circuiting of the rules of discourse demands a more provocative way of repositioning the established order's relation between subject and object. The object must disengage herself from the fetish into which she has been relegated and turn into a theoretically subversive, desiring, female subject.

This interpretation of Irigaray's imagining a different type of subjectivity releases us from the compulsion to construct another theory of the subject. The process of reinvention to which we become committed is not reducible to theory making, although it need not discount theory. What motivates us to create is the awareness that theoretical knowledge is always incomplete. From its silences and gaps new images and thoughts emerge, claiming ground for the differences left unarticulated by the previously hegemonic discourses. Seen in this way, the feminist task ahead of us is not to make categorical predictions about the future or to situate ourselves comfortably in an epistemic position of self-certainty. The immediate task is to break the phallocentric justification of knowledge and power still ruling over our present existence and to reclaim an imaginary order in which the boundaries imposed by phallic law will be disintegrated.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this paper was read at the Second International Meeting of Philosophical Feminism, sponsored by the Argentine Association of Women in Philosophy, Buenos Aires, November 1989. It was published in the association's journal Hiparquia 3:1 (1990) in Spanish translation by M. L. Femenías under the title “Irigaray y el problema de la subjectividad.”

2. Irigaray (1985b, 149). Originally published in France in 1977 as Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un. See also Irigaray (1985a) originally published in France in 1974 as Speculum de l'autre femme. For recent philosophical discussions of postmodern feminism see Nicholson (1990) and Butler (1990). See also Fraser and Bartky (1989). For an early review of works by Irigaray and Kristeva focusing on the psychoanalytical theme of subjectivity, see Josette Féral (1978).

3. For a feminist critique of Kant's theory of knowledge see Robin May Schott (1988).

4. Irigaray (1985a, 136-37). “Dark continents” is an expression used by Freud to refer to the adult woman's sexuality. See Gay (1988, 501-22).

5. Irigaray's critique presupposes Lacan's theory of the phallic signifier. See “The Signification of the Phallus,” in Lacan (1977, 281-91). For a clear explanation of Lacan's theory of desire see Butler (1987, 186-204). In Lacan's theory, “the paternally enforced prohibition against union with the mother is coextensive with language itself,” as is “the paternally enforced taboo against incest” (Butler 1987, 201). “The Phallus is thus understood to be the organizing principle of all kinship and all language” (Butler 1987, 202). For a Lacanian response to Irigaray's criticism see Ellie Ragland-Sullivan (1987, 267-308, esp. 295-304).

6. Irigaray uses the commodity concept particularly as it applies to the objectification of women in phallocentric society. See Irigaray (1985b, 192-97).

References

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