Faculty of Humanities Research Institute for History and Culture (OGC) RMA Gender and Ethnicity, 2011-2012 The Other Woman. Towards a diffractive rereading of the oeuvres of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray. Research master thesis, Gender and Ethnicity Written by Evelien Geerts, 3615170 Supervisor: dr. Iris van der Tuin (Utrecht University) Second reader: dr. Annemie Halsema (VU-University) Utrecht, 20/07/2012. Abstract. This thesis project –a project that has to be located in the domains of Continental philosophy, feminist theory, and gender studies– wishes to overcome the Oedipalized reception history, or the Oedipal feminist narratives that have been created and told about the oeuvres of feminist philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray. I claim that this Oedipalized reception history –which will be thoroughly reviewed in this thesis– put the works of Beauvoir and Irigaray against one another in an oppositional and hierarchic manner, by first of all examining the wide-spread assumption that Irigaray should be seen as Beauvoir’s rebellious daughter, and by critically looking at the idea that Irigaray’s sexual (now relabeled as sexuate) difference philosophy then must be a flat-out refusal of Beauvoir’s humanist, existentialist feminism. My project hopes to shed light on this paralyzing constructed opposition, and wishes to move towards a different kind of feminist rereading and story-telling: namely, a diffractive and explicitly an-Oedipal way of telling of stories that would look for the lines of continuity between these two philosophies, without reducing them to another; without, to put it differently, falling back into the phallogocentric, reflective logic of sameness. The engagement to (re)read these oeuvres in a diffractive manner starts from the intuition that the feminist-philosophical differences between both philosophies have been extremely overaccentuated: as I will argue, both Beauvoir and Irigaray have been the victims of an Oedipal and Oedipalizing generational dialectics –a phallogocentric, dichotomizing dialectics that is at work in the reception history of feminist theory in general, which has made it almost impossible to look at feminist works from different generations in a continuous manner. Due to the combination of such an Oedipal dialectics, the Anglo-American (mis)construction of ‘French feminism,’ and the many mistranslations and misinterpretations of their works, the philosophies of Beauvoir and Irigaray have been read in an oppositional, fixating, and paralyzing manner: an Irigaray versus de Beauvoir dichotomy has been created, as if both philosophies could no longer speak to each other. Further supported by other binaries such as equality versus difference, and anti-essentialism versus essentialism, the stifled and stifling stories about these philosophies are extremely problematic, seen from a general feminist point of view, and seen from an Irigarayian perspective –a perspective that wishes to revalue the relationships between women, and mother and daughters in particular. In my project, I first of all give a detailed overview of the feminist reception history of i the works of Beauvoir and Irigaray, and present some of the reasons why these oeuvres have been read in such a discontinuous manner. I then focus on one specific Anglo-American misreading of the philosophies of Beauvoir and Irigaray, by evaluating American feminist philosopher and queer theorist Judith Butler’s engagement with these philosophies. Although I of course do not deny that Butler also has had a positive influence on the Anglo-American reception history of the feminist philosophies of Beauvoir and Irigaray, I nonetheless claim that Butler misread these oeuvres by making use of a particular Anglo-American sex versus gender terminology –a terminology that cannot adequately capture the complexities of both philosophies. As I will show, Butler in the end falls back into an Irigaray versus Beauvoir dichotomy, because she rereads both oeuvres through an ‘either/or’-framework. This critique, however, does not mean that I completely want to do away with Butler’s readings: I rather work through these readings in my thesis in order to come to another, hopefully more continuous rereading that would revalue Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray as autonomous feminist philosophers, instead of seeing them as each other’s feminist- philosophical rivals. In this project of working through stifled and stifling stories, I try to develop a Deleuzian-inspired an-Oedipal and feminist strategy of diffractive reading by looking at the feminist-conceptual origins of diffraction in the works of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. My project then finally –slowly and tentatively– unravels what such a philosophical-feminist diffractive reading of the philosophies of Beauvoir and Irigaray might look like, if one were to move away from the constructed Oedipal rivalry between these two oeuvres, and focus on a cross-fertilizing dialogue instead… ii Abbreviations. Most of the translations of French and Dutch books and texts were done by myself, unless stated otherwise. I have tried to refer to Simone de Beauvoir’s and Luce Irigaray’s original books, which I have abbreviated as follows. These abbreviations will be used when these works are referred to more than once in the footnotes. Simone de Beauvoir: DSa Le deuxième sexe. I. Les faits et les mythes. DSb Le deuxième sexe. II. L’expérience vécue. FBS Faut-il brûler Sade? Luce Irigaray: C Conversations. CS Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un. EDS Éthique de la différence sexuelle. JAT J’aime à toi. Esquisse d’une félicité dans l’histoire. JTN Je, tu, nous. Pour une culture de la différence. LIT Luce Irigaray. Teaching. PE Passions élémentaires. S Speculum de l’autre femme. SEP Sexes et parentés. STW Sharing the World. TWL The Way of Love iii Preface and acknowledgements. After having written two theses on Luce Irigaray’s philosophie féminine during my previous studies in philosophy –theses in which I focused on Irigaray’s radical feminist and subversive critiques of the Western canons of philosophy and psychoanalysis– I decided to do things differently this time. This is not to say that this thesis all of a sudden isn’t focusing on philosophy anymore: most of the authors I engage with in this project are first and foremost (feminist) philosophers, and I still consider myself to be a feminist, female philosopher –albeit a philosopher in training– as well, as you will see in the introduction. But it is true that my research interests have changed since I began studying at the gender studies department at Utrecht University, and whilst I was taking classes at the women’s studies department at the University of California, Los Angeles. My confrontation with gender studies really helped me to think differently, not only about the Western canon of philosophy in general, but also about the feminist philosophical tradition –a tradition that, alas, remained rather invisible during my years in philosophy. At Utrecht, I gained so many interesting and valuable new insights: I wasn’t only confronted with many new domains and theoretical frameworks, but I also learned that thinking critically about the tools and methodologies that you are using whilst doing feminist-philosophical research, is extremely important. Next to that, I also gained a lot from staying at UCLA for a quarter, where gender studies research was tackled rather differently: sexual difference philosophy, cultural analysis, and Foucault studies were of course also taught there, yet, American gender studies departments do seem to be more preoccupied with social scientific research than with humanities-based research. It is this second confrontation that made me realize that gender studies not only is a heterogeneous, inter- or even transdisciplinary research field, but that each department probably also has its own focus, and maybe even narrative about feminist theory and its multiple and diverse traditions. And this is where my thesis project comes back into the picture: although feminist Continental philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray were both accepted as important –and, dare I say so, canonical– figures at UCLA and Utrecht, I do have the feeling that –and my thesis touches upon that, too– the Anglo-American feminist tradition has originated from a Beauvoirian-like feminism. This intuitive feeling was later on confirmed when I took a sociological class on gendered bodies at UCLA that basically started with some readings of Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe, and then moved towards other texts that drew more radical conclusions from Beauvoir’s anti-essentialist premises. This emphasis on Beauvoir’s iv work surprised me: not because I thought that her oeuvre was no longer relevant, because it still is, obviously; but it rather made me think about the multiplicity of narratives that exist within feminist theory. Combined with my passion for Irigarayian studies, this idea then brought me to my thesis topic, namely a diffractive rereading of both the oeuvres of Beauvoir and Irigaray. This move towards a different kind of rereading was influenced by the fact that Beauvoir and Irigaray each had been welcomed rather differently in the reception history of feminist theory: although I wouldn’t go as far to say that feminist theory –like the philosophical canon– is divided into an Analytic versus Continental tradition, the Anglo- American narratives around Beauvoir seem to be a lot more positive than the (earlier) ones on Irigaray. This has always bothered me, and because I find that both Beauvoir and Irigaray should be valued as autonomous feminist philosophers, I try to unravel the different narratives about Beauvoir and Irigaray in this thesis, whilst working towards a different, diffractive readings strategy. This is all I am going to give away in this preface, but I sincerely hope that you –the reader– can agree with the premise of reading feminist narratives in a different, maybe even more open-minded manner, and also, once you have finished reading this thesis, are convinced of the fact that the feminist philosophies of Beauvoir and Irigaray can indeed be reread in a more continuous, feminist and cross-fertilizing way.