Luce Irigaray Clustereditors Introduction

Luce Irigaray Cluster— Editor’s Introduction

LINDA MARTIN ALCOFF

The Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray has been one of the most prolific and provoca- tive of our original feminist thinkers over the last thirty-five years. Since the publication of her first book, Speculum de l’autre femme, Irigaray’s work has heralded a radical departure from all orthodoxies in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and linguistics, the three fields in which she was trained. The publication of this book caused her to be expelled from the Ecole Freudienne founded by her teacher, Jacques Lacan, and risked her institutional career. Thus she has not been a dutiful daughter, and has provided a powerful inspiration as a truly creative and imaginative thinker. Within feminism Irigaray’s work has managed to become somehow both iconoclas- tic and hugely influential. The explorations of female specificity and binary difference in her work clashes with anti-essentialist and eliminativist tendencies toward gender and sex difference. Yet feminist theorists from many fields continue to spend a great deal of energy on her work, hotly contesting how to interpret her account of difference as well as using her writings as a springboard for rethinking the relations between bodily morphology and language and for revising our concepts of freedom and community. Today interest in Irigaray’s work is resurging, as this found cluster of five papers reveals, each of which was submitted through our regular open issue process. These papers offer new insights into Irigaray’s work but also develop productive critical engagements that explore some of its most controversial aspects. Irigaray has come under sustained criticism for being either inattentive or under- attentive to issues of racial difference. The very category of embodied sexual difference would seem to be resistant to an intersectional analysis, based as it is in shared sexual characteristics, but even Irigaray’s explorations of female relationships are silent on the ways in which race, among other categories, surely complicates the dynamics. In “Between Races and Generations: Materializing Race and Kinship in Moraga and Irigaray,” Sabrina Hom brings the work of Cherrıe Moraga and recent developments in the psychoanalysis of race into dialogue with Irigaray on the topic of mother–daughter relations to develop a more plausibly complex account of the lat- ter. In this way Hom makes it possible to bring in the category of whiteness alongside the category of maleness as a master signifier that affects the terms of intra-familial relations. Hom argues that Irigaray’s work cannot be made intersectional as it stands, but that it does provide effective tools for understanding the fraught role of desire in these relationships.

Both Peta Hinton and Anne van Leeuwen revisit the issue of transcendentalism in Irigaray’s work. In her paper, “An Examination of Irigaray’s Commitment to Transcendental Phenomenology in The Forgetting of Air and The Way of Love,” van Leeuwen argues that some of the misunderstandings of Irigaray’s concepts have been the result of an under-appreciation of the role of phenomenology in her work. If we understand sexual difference via transcendental phenomenology, we can more readily understand that for Irigaray sexual difference is not an a priori category or outside of history. In particular, van Leeuwen suggests that we read Irigaray as engaging in productive conversation with Heidegger’s revisionist approach to transcendental phenomenology. In “The Divine Horizon: Rethinking Political Commu- nity in Luce Irigaray’s ‘Divine Women,’” Hinton’s concerns are with the conception of the divine. Hinton argues that Irigaray offers a new way to redeem the openness of the nature of the divine. She uses both textual sources and philosophical argument to persuade us that Irigaray’s concept is indebted to Feuerbach’s, and thus that for her the divine is a kind of material horizon that both contains and exceeds any particular or speciﬁc landscape. Far from Plato’s static Forms, Irigaray’s divine is an immanent transcendent that contains a dynamic of differentiation and an open telos. In “Living Politically: An Irigarayan Notion of Agency as a Way of Life,” Miri Rozmarin brings Irigaray’s work into the domain of political theory to address the vexed debate over agency. Irigaray draws a particularly doleful picture of the possibili- ties for female agency within phallocentric societies in which female difference is misrecognized or erased. While maintaining that we need a strong and effective conception of individual agency, Rozmarin suggests that we read Irigaray in light of Foucault’s notion of technologies of self-making. The resulting combinatory account presents us with a way to understand the political meaningfulness of self-making. This also helps us to understand Irigaray’s idea that women’s active subjectivity is inher- ently radical. Finally, the challenges that Irigaray’s work poses to female agency also ﬁgure in Sarah Tyson’s paper, “Reclamation from Absence? Luce Irigaray and Women in His- tory,” on the history of women in philosophy. On some accounts, it would not be possible on Irigaray’s understanding of the co-imbrication of language and phallocent- rism for women thinkers from the past to have expressed a true feminine subjectivity. Despite the fact that Irigaray has at times implied that women did not, and could not, contribute to the history of philosophy, Tyson argues that her reclamation of Diotima belies this absolute denial. Further, Irigaray’s creative reclamation of Diotima indicates precisely the sort of transformations of philosophical readings that can be important for expanding our capacity to hear women’s voices in a variety of venues that standard philosophical practices can overlook. These papers, together, indicate that feminist philosophy continues to expand its capacity for radical revisions with the help of Luce Irigaray.