Luce 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.