📚 node [[luce irigaray]]

Luce Irigaray

Irigaray

Starting points

  • Lacan
  • role of language in patriarchic status quo
  • can we find a language that escapes the phalogocentrism that characterizes Western metaphysical discourse (Derrida)
  • If we can only perceive the world through language, then it will play a significant role in changing it
    • holds especially true for the language of philosophy
    • Marx: use value and exchange value of the female body.

Irigaray's contribution

  • philosophical discourse constitutes the discourse on discourse, thus it is precisely the discourse that must be questioned.

Mimicry

  • how would an alternative feminist philosophical discourse be?
  • we have to use a discourse, there is only this one
  • create a new one? according to Derrida this is impossible, but also dangerous because it may just introduce an additional logocenter
  • For Irigaray, mimicry is the solution imitate or mimic the philosophical discourse, undermining it from within
  • thus deconstruct male (phal)logocentric discourse
  • undermine and deconstruct the very logos that is at play
  • perpetual process that stays within the language (which we cannot escape) but that tries to uncover the hidden agendas at work
    • between dichotomizing
    • between enunciation and utterance
    • In Lacan's words: capitalize this bar between the signifier and signified

Women on the market

  • Phalogocentric economy: results from the exchange of women, a precondition for the market economy
  • why is it women that are exchanged?
    • Levi-Strauss states that they are scarce commodities (male polygamy makes women always scarce, plus not all women are equally desirable)
  • but Irigaray argues that there is actually an equilibrium between female and male births, and that most desirable men are also a minority, and that women could as well also have a tendency to polygamy.
  • thus why are men not objects of exchange among women?
  • this argument is thus a good example of naturalization. there is no field with more tendency to naturalize things as the one that constitutes the background for feminism's gender debates

Sex and gender

  • dichotomy assumes that our biological makeup defines as either men or women, gender roles are cultural constructs relatively independent of our sexes
  • how far is the concept of gender strange, bc can one actually device gender roles completely independent of the biological setup:
  • are women biologically not prone to polygamy? or has this been so determined by the symbolic order that created gender roles
  • is the exchange of women natural or cultural?. if such difference is so well delineated
  • it is women's bodies that are essential to social life and culture BUT because they become objects in the market circulation of their bodies, they are left out of this process.
  • if men were made part of such economy, would they disappear. or is the market a male phenomenon

Marx vs./and Lacan

  • Marx: the use value pf the female boy (reproduction) is turned into its exchange value and women are thus made invisible and devided
    • participation in society makes the body of a woman submit itself to a speculation, through which it transforms into an exchange object
    • this aspect coexists with the natural body of a woman
    • so, two aspects: the natural body and the exchangeable body (mimetic expression of masculine values). This split denotes a pathological state.

Female sexuality

  • economy of desire is men's business
  • women must maintain the material substratum of desire in her body, but she can can never access to it.
  • this economy subjects women to a schism without any possible profit to them and without any way to transcend it.
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