The Unacknowledged Socrates in the Works of Luce Irigaray

Hypatia ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-44
Author(s):  
Shaun O'Dwyer

In Luce Irigaray's thought, Socrates is a marginal figure compared to Plato or Hegel. However, she does identify the Socratic dialectical position as that of a ‘phallocrat’ and she does conflate Socratic and Platonic philosophy in her psychoanalytic reading of Plato in Speculum of the Other Woman. In this essay, I critically interpret both Irigaray's own texts and the Platonic dialogues in order to argue that: (1) the Socratic dialectical position is not ‘phallocratic’ by Irigaray's own understanding of the term; (2) that Socratic (early Platonic) philosophy should not be conflated with the mature Platonic metaphysics Irigaray criticizes; and (3) that Socratic dialectical method is similar in some respects with the dialectical method of Diotima, Socrates’ instructress in love and the subject of Irigaray's “Sorcerer Love” essay in An Ethics of Sexual Difference.

Author(s):  
Tina Chanter

Luce Irigaray holds doctorates in both linguistics and philosophy, and has practised as a psychoanalyst for many years. Author of over twenty books, she has established a reputation as a pre-eminent theorist of sexual difference – a term she would prefer to ‘feminist’. The latter carries with it the history of feminism as a struggle for equality, whereas Irigaray sees herself more as a feminist of difference, emphasizing the need to differentiate women from men over and above the need to establish parity between the sexes. Speculum de l’autre femme (1974) (Speculum of the Other Woman) (1985), the book that earned her international recognition, fuses philosophy with psychoanalysis, and employs a lyrical ‘mimesis’, or mimicry, that parodies and undercuts philosophical pretensions to universality. While adopting the standpoint of universality, objectivity and uniformity, the philosophical tradition in fact reflects a partial view of the world, one which is informed by those largely responsible for writing it: men. Without the material, maternal and nurturing succour provided by women as mothers and homemakers, men would not have had the freedom to reflect, the peace to think, or the time to write the philosophy that has shaped our culture. As such, women are suppressed and unacknowledged; femininity is the unthought ground of philosophy – philosophy’s other.


Hypatia ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ofelia Schutte

In Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Luce Irigaray argues that “any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the masculine.” This paper offers an analysis of Irigaray's critique of subjectivity and examines the psychological mechanism referred to as “the phallic economy of castration.” A different way of conceiving the relation between subject and object is explored by imagining a new subject of desire.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 119-126
Author(s):  
Razieh Faraji ◽  
Sahar Jamshidian

Unlike previous feminist critics who were seeking ways to reduce the otherness of the women to help them be the same as men, the subject, Luce Irigaray, strongly emphasizes the irreducibility of the women's place as the "other." Concerned with the concept of sexual difference and the otherness of women, Irigaray occupies a unique position among feminist critics. Irigaray aims not to be the "same," but to make a clear border between these two sexually different creatures. Based on sexual difference, both men and women should stand in their bordered place, and they cannot be substituted for the other. Accordingly, Irigaray seeks irreducible alterity for women in all aspects, which is the most crucial objective of this paper. Being a feminitst by spirit, Sandra Cisneros, the prize-winning chicana writer, in her novel, Caramelo (2002), dramatizes what Irigaray theorizes in her Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993). In this light, the current study analyzes Caramelo to illustrate how the "place" of the "other," that is women's "place," is occupied unfairly by the empowered men, and how female characters resist and/or succumb to the oppressive situations. The results of the study indicate that Lala, the main character, possesses the potentiality of being aware of "sexual difference" and "space," as key tools, to regain her place occupied by men, and reclaim her subjectivity, goals for which both Sandra Cisneros and Luce Irigary have aimed for years.


Author(s):  
Pamela Anderson

A reading of Luce Irigaray suggests the possibility of tracing sexual difference in philosophical accounts of personal identity. In particular, I argue that Irigaray raises the possibility of moving beyond the aporia of the other which lies at the heart of Paul Ricoeur's account of self-identity. My contention is that the self conceived in Ricoeur's Oneself as Another is male insofar as it is dependent upon the patriarchal monotheism which has shaped Western culture both socially and economically. Nevertheless there remains the possibility of developing Ricoeur's reference to 'the trace of the Other' in order to give a non-essential meaning to sexual difference. Such meaning will emerge when (i) both men and women have identities as subjects, and (ii) the difference between them can be expressed. I aim to elucidate both conditions by appropriating Irigaray's 'Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love.'


Hypatia ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 114-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Kozel

In this essay I explore the dynamic between Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as it unfolds in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993). Irigaray's strategy of mimesis is a powerful feminist tool, both philosophically and politically. Regarding textual engagement as analogous for relations between self and other beyond the text, I deliver a cautionary message: mimetic strategy is powerful but runs the risk of silencing the voice of the other.


2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (120) ◽  
pp. 55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo F. Chagas

O artigo mostra a trajetória do pensamento de Marx sob a perspectiva do método na sua determinação dupla, investigação e exposição, enquanto processo de apropriação e explicitação crítico-racional da imanência do próprio objeto pelo sujeito. O método dialético de Marx enquanto método de investigação e de exposição distingue, sem separar, esses dois momentos, pressupondo que o objeto só pode ser exposto depois de ser investigado, analisado, criticamente em suas determinações essenciais. Por isso, tal método constitui uma oposição ao positivismo acrítico, próprio da economia clássica moderna, que toma o objeto como uma imediatidade factual, dada, sem a mediação do pensamento, assumindo e ratificando a positividade do fato, e ao idealismo acrítico, típico da especulação e da dialética hegeliana, que tem o objeto como resultado de uma construção abstrata do pensamento que sintetiza tudo em si e se movimenta a partir de si mesmo, sendo, por isso, incapazes de realizar uma investigação sistemática da “lógica”, da “racionalidade”, imanente ao próprio real e uma exposição crítica desse real, reconstruindo, no plano ideal, a totalidade do movimento istemático do próprio real.Abstract: The article presents the trajectory of Marx’s thought under the perspective of the method in its double determination, i.e. research and exposition, seen as a process of appropriation and of critical rational explanation of the object’s immanence by the subject. Marx’s dialectical method, in its investigative and expositional nature, distinguishes these two moments without separating them, presupposing that the object can only be presented after being critically investigated, according to its essential determinations. Therefore, such a method is, on the one hand, opposed to acritical positivism, which is so characteristic of modern classical economics and takes the object as a factual immediate entity devoid of mediating thought, assuming and confirming the positivity of the fact, and, on the other hand, to acritical idealism, which is typical of Hegel’s speculation and dialectic which takes the object as a result of an abstract construction of thought that synthethizes everything in itself and moves by its own means. These two kinds of explanation are therefore incapable of performing both a systematic investigation of the “logics” and “rationality”, immanent to reality itself, and a critical exposition of this reality, reconstructing in the ideal plan the totality of the systematic movement of reality itself. 


Based on the issue of the genesis of subjectivity, the authors of the article turn to the Hegelian model, which captures the two-sided and fundamentally changeable nature of the relationship between subject and object. The article substantiates the idea that imagination, being considered outside of the context of psychologization or reduction of it only to the reproductive aspect, is a source of binary differences fundamental to philosophical thought. Following Hegel’s dialectical method, the authors note that the presence of the image already indicates the difference between the two dimensions of consciousness and knowledge. The image expresses the primary truth of substance and, at the same time, the way it is subjectively given. There is a differentiation of the subjective moment of Being with the realization of fantasy. All formations of Spirit are interpretations of the figurative series, primal scenes, the analog of which was studied by classical psychoanalysis. From this perspective, the genesis of such subjective modes as consciousness, self-consciousness and mind inevitably includes symbolization, interpretation of the "Self" images, cognizing, willing and acting in various situations and contexts. The study of the concepts developed by Hegel, Kennouche, Verene and Merleau-Ponty allows concluding about two arguments in favor of the fundamentality of imagination. This refers, on the one hand, to subjective imagination that generates meanings and the need for their interpretation and, on the other hand, to the initial form of synthesis, on the basis of which, the subject and object of cognition, formations of consciousness and types of knowledge characteristic of them are further distinguished. The image, being the first meeting of the concrete and universal, is capable of setting the plot of one or another form of subjectivity.


Hypatia ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabrina L. Hom

Juxtaposing Cherríe Moraga'sLoving in the War Yearsand Luce Irigaray'sSpeculum of the Other Woman, I explore the ways that sex and race intersect to complicate an Irigarayan account of the relations between mother and daughter. Irigaray's work is an effective tool for understanding the disruptive and potentially healing desire between mothers and daughters, but her insistence on sex as primary difference must be challenged in order to acknowledge the intersectionality of sex and race. Working from recent work on the psychoanalysis of race, I argue that whiteness functions as a master signifier in its own right, and as a means of differentiation between the light‐skinned Moraga and her brown‐skinned mother. Irigaray's concept of blood deepens Moraga's account of her healing and subversive return to her mother. The juxtaposition of Moraga, Irigaray, and contemporary psychoanalysis of race can allow for a necessary revision of Irigaray's psychoanalysis that acknowledges the ways in which sexual difference is indexed by race and sheds new light on her account of the mother–daughter relation.


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