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Irigaray and Politics a Critical Introduction

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Irigaray and Politics a Critical Introduction IRIGARAY AND POLITICS A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION Laura Roberts 66081_Roberts.indd081_Roberts.indd iiiiii 116/05/196/05/19 11:5811:58 AMAM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Laura Roberts, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 2281 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2283 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2282 6 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2284 0 (epub) The right of Laura Roberts to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 66081_Roberts.indd081_Roberts.indd iviv 116/05/196/05/19 11:5811:58 AMAM Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Notes 7 1 Beyond Freud and Lacan 11 The Psychoanalytic Critique of Western Thought 13 Freud’s Unconscious Phantasy 14 Lacan’s Mirror Stage 16 A Culture of Narcissism 20 Melanie Klein and Projective Identifi cation 21 Béla Grunberger and the Masculine Imaginary 23 Psychoanalysing the Psychoanalysts: Irigaray on Freud’s ‘Femininity’ 27 The Culture of Narcissism as Social Critique 33 Notes 35 2 Feminine Imaginaries 44 Philosophical Myths: Refi guring Western Space–Time 48 Language and Subjectivity: Labial Logics and Placental Economies 57 Notes 66 3 Genealogies and Subjectivity 72 Cultural Myth: Mother–Daughter Relations and Woman-to-Woman Sociality 73 Religious Myth: A Feminine Divine 76 New Politics and Sexuate Rights 80 Notes 84 4 Irigaray’s Dialectics 86 Tracing the Dialectic – Irigaray with Hegel 87 Diotima’s Dialectic – Refi guring Love, within and Between Us 91 The Interval of Breath 94 I Love to You: The Failure of Hegel’s Labour of Love 97 Listening and Wonder 102 Notes 105 66081_Roberts.indd081_Roberts.indd v 116/05/196/05/19 11:5811:58 AMAM irigaray and politics 5 Luce Irigaray with Gayatri Spivak 108 ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’ 111 French Feminism Revisited 119 Levinas and the Fecundity of the Caress 124 The Impossible Intimacy of the Ethical 126 Notes 129 6 A Politics of Proximity 134 Marxist Feminist Critique of the Family 136 Refounding the Family 141 Intercultural Couples 144 Politics of the Common 147 Where to Now? International New Municipalism 151 Barcelona en Comú and the Feminisation of Politics 154 Notes 157 Conclusion 159 Note 160 Afterword 161 Notes 166 Bibliography 167 Index 183 vi 66081_Roberts.indd081_Roberts.indd vivi 116/05/196/05/19 11:5811:58 AMAM Introduction The patriarchal foundation of our social existence is in fact overlooked in contemporary politics, even leftist politics. Up to now even Marxism has paid very little attention to the problems of the specifi c exploitation of women, and women’s struggles most often seem to disturb the Marxists. Even though these struggles could be interpreted with the help of the schemes for the analysis of social exploitation to which Marxist political programs lay specifi c claim. Provided, of course, that these schemas be used differently. But no politics has, up to now, questioned its own relation to phallocractic power . (Irigaray 1985b: 165) ‘Sexual difference’, Luce Irigaray announced almost thirty years ago, ‘is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age’ and ‘is probably the issue in our time which could be our “salvation” if we thought it through’ (Irigaray 1993a: 5). Irigaray insists that the philosophical signifi cance of sexual or, better, sexuate1 difference has been silenced in western culture. She says, whether I turn to philosophy, to science, or to religion, I fi nd this underlying issue still cries out in vain for our attention . Both in theory and in practice everything resists the discovery and affi rmation of such an advent or event. In theory, philosophy wants to be literature or rhetoric, wishing either to break with ontology or to regress to the ontological. Using the same ground and the same framework as ‘fi rst philosophy,’ working toward its disintegration but without proposing any other goals that might assure new foundations and new works. (Irigaray 1993a: 6) Irigaray’s task, as this book sets out to demonstrate, aims to uncover and acknowledge the philosophical signifi cance of the question of sexual difference in western thought. In doing so, Irigaray begins to crack open spaces where we can begin to articulate new founda- tions and new understandings of subjectivity which, in turn, will enable a refi guring of ethics and politics in the western tradition.2 1 66081_Roberts.indd081_Roberts.indd 1 116/05/196/05/19 11:5811:58 AMAM irigaray and politics We must understand Irigaray’s approach as double pronged: both critical and creative, both intellectual and concrete, both philosoph- ical and political. This is why, for Irigaray, it is important to take seriously the ongoing work, strategies and interventions that need to be carried out in order to bring about the ‘revolution in thought and ethics’ required for ‘the work of sexual difference to take place’ (Irigaray 1993a: 6). This philosophical, ethical and political revolu- tion that Irigaray calls for requires the so-called ‘neutral’ individual subject of western thought to be recast as an embodied relational subject, and as sexed. For Irigaray, this process begins with the culti- vation of autonomous feminine subjectivity and woman-to-woman sociality which will challenge western thinking of the subject as neu- tral and atomistic, and the continued silencing of sexual difference. The question of sexual difference is thus not only concerned with symbolic social and political change, we must also appreciate how it is deeply concerned with reimagining the foundational structures of existence and, of course, in how we fi gure subjectivity. Through a detailed philosophical analysis that reads some of Irigaray’s well- known texts alongside some of her less well-known writings, this book illustrates how, throughout her work, Irigaray connects the emergence of a psychoanalytically inspired autonomous feminine subjectivity with the transformations of ontological structures that ground thought, ethics and politics in the western tradition. It pro- vides a reading of Irigaray’s oeuvre as an ongoing project aimed at redefi ning the traditional western notion of ontology as neutral and transcendent, and in doing so, the very meaning of ethical citizen- ship and political subjectivity. Irigaray argues that the unfolding of an autonomous feminine subjectivity, would, in turn, create space for the possibility of rec- ognising – philosophically, culturally and politically – non-hierar- chal sexuate difference. The unfolding of a second feminine subject works to enable women (as subjects) to create their own cultural and spiritual representations and subjectivities, narratives and histories, appropriate to their own lived experiences. It enables women to exist as autonomous sexuate subjects, not defi ned in relation to ‘Man’, and allows access to a socio-political realm as self-defi ned women. Moreover, as autonomously defi ned sexuate subjects women can have positive relationships with other women because they are no longer competing with one another for the only role available in the patriarchal symbolic, that of ‘mother’. Irigaray notes: 2 66081_Roberts.indd081_Roberts.indd 2 116/05/196/05/19 11:5811:58 AMAM introduction Without rites and myths to teach us to love other women [nos semblables], to live with them, mutual destruction is a permanent possibility. We need values we can share if we are to coexist and create together. And it is important for us to exist and love one another as women if we are to love the other – man. Society and morality act as though woman, with- out being a full social or political person in her own right, had to love a social person: man. How is such love humanly possible without subjective status? (Irigaray 1991f: 192) Furthermore, as we will see, this refi guring of feminine subjectivity (subjectivity as sexuate) thus opens up space for the much needed refi guring of masculine subjectivity which remains largely confl ated with the characteristics of the modern western subject that emerges with the cogito of René Descartes: rational, transcendent, solip- sistic. Theorising subjectivity as sexuate and thus as relational, embodied and limited, has important consequences for thinking through political subjectivity and how we conceive of citizenship. Calling for women to positively symbolise feminine subjectivity, Irigaray is challenging the structure and dominance of the modern individual (wealthy, white, masculine) subject, which is currently the norm against which all other subjects are defi ned. This refi gur- ing of subjectivity thus opens up the way to challenge what Irigaray identifi es as a culture of narcissism undergirded by a logic of ‘One- ness’ and ‘Sameness’. Recognising the philosophical signifi cance of sexuate difference, and the implications this has for our imagining of subjectivity in the western tradition, thus opens up new founda- tions and the possibilities of rethinking politics based on relational sexuate subjects. Read with little knowledge of the breadth of Irigaray’s writings and contexts, the call to positively symbolise feminine subjectivity and to recognise sexual difference might initially strike readers as conservative rather than radical, and there is little surprise that the reception of Irigaray’s work over the past forty years has been fraught with misunderstandings.
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