Irigaray, Luce

French psychoanalyst and philosopher Luce Irigaray is a central theorist in debates that shape the contours of Western feminist theory, including essentialism/antiessentialism, poststructuralism, psychoanalytic feminism, and issues concerning the sex/gender system and corporeality raised by queer theory and feminist theories of the body. Irigaray's work emphasizes questions concerning relationships among language and bodies, specifically male and female bodies and masculine and feminine language. Her focus is on the female body and how it has been constructed in phallocentric systems of thought, especially Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In feminist social theory, Irigaray is part of New French Feminism along with Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig.

Born in Belgium in 1932, Irigaray moved to France in the 1960s where she received her master's degree and subsequent first doctorate in linguistics. She earned a second doctorate in philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. While in France, she attended several psychoanalytic seminars with Jacque Lacan, and she trained and became a psychoanalyst. Irigaray's work has influenced the feminist movement in France and Italy for several decades. In the 1980s, she spoke in support of the Italian Communist Movement, touring and lecturing in Italy. Irigaray has conducted research over the last decade at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in Paris on the difference between the language of women and the language of men, which includes speakers of many different languages.

Central to Irigraray's work is critiquing phallocentric systems of language and culture and theorizing sexual difference as the single most important issue of our age. She theorizes the question of a female or feminine sexuality and what a feminine jouissance (sexual pleasure) might be when defined on its own terms. In The Speculum of the Other Woman (1985), Irigaray provides an analysis and feminist critique of sexual difference in Western thought from Freud (back) to Plato. Using psychoanalytic methods, she argues that throughout the history of Western thought, the feminine and femininity have permanently been excluded from language, representation, and culture. Language has been appropriated by a singular subject—the masculine subject—and defined by its parameters. The exclusion of the feminine and femininity constitutes the foundation of patriarchy upon which phallocentric social relations depend. Here, within the purview of the masculine, master subject, the world looks like him and the feminine as a mere copy of the selfsame but with a lack, reduction, and deficit.

Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Irigaray proposes the process of specularization as central to the repression of women. As such, Western philosophy or philosophical [Page 418]speculation is at once specularizing—a mirror back to the self and specular—invoking the presence of an absence coded as feminine. The concept of specularization is used to argue that philosophy, in its blind-spots, does not understand or provide a means to understand sexual difference. Instead, it speaks volumes about “universal sexual indifference” and hom(m)osexualite (a desire for the same). Her goal is to devise a method whereby the masculine does not determine everything and philosophy can change to hear and see and understand the feminine.

Irigaray takes Freud as an example of the “monosubjective, monosexualized, patriarchal and phallocentric” nature of philosophy. Freud is central to Western philosophy in his analysis of the unconscious, and thus the subject divided. Freud defined sexual difference through the masculine: the One sex. She then travels from Freud back to Plato to illustrate the absence of the feminine upon which Western thought rests.

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