Woman is the guardian of the blood. But as both she and it have had to use their substance to nourish the universal consciousness self, it is in the form of bloodless shadows-of unconscious fantasies-that they maintain an underground subsistence. Powerless on earth, she remains the very ground in which manifest mind secretly sets its roots and draws its strength. And self-certainty-in masculinity, in community, in government- owes the truth of its word and of the oath that binds men together to that substance common to all, repressed, unconscious and dumb, washed in the waters of oblivion. This enables us to understand why femininity consists essentially in laying the dead man back in the womb of the earth, and giving him eternal life. For the bloodless one is the mediation that she knows in her b eing, whereby a being-there that has given up being as a self here passes from something living and singular and deeply buried to essence at its most general. Woman can, therefore, by remembering this intermediary moment, preserve at least the soul of man and o f community from being lost and forgotten. She ensures the Erinnerung of the consciousness of self by forgetting herself.
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman.
Luce Irigaray, engaging with Hegel, questions his interpretation of Antigone to demonstrate how the community establishes itself through exclusion of the feminine.[1] She critiques how, for Hegel, man is active, outward, and rational, and woman is passive unity tied to blood, conception, and the cyclical body. As Whitford notes, in Hegel we encounter the process of naturalization: “Women, symbolically, remain part of the in-itself (en-soi); only men are allowed to be for-themselves (pour-soi). In Hegelian terms, women belong to the plant world – they are vegetates; only men have an animal life.”[2]
Woman thus embodies divine law (kinship, burial, and continuity of life) while man enacts human law (abstraction, and universality). Antigone’s revolt dramatizes this divide, as her fidelity to divine law and the dead turns into self-burial, sealing female desire in a crypt: “She is merely the passage that serves to transform the inessential whims of a still sensible and material nature into universal will.”[3] The State, embodied by Creon, survives as a bloodless sovereignty built on the repression of the maternal and the sensible. Woman becomes the unconscious ground of the community as the nourishing but forgotten substrate that sustains masculine memory (Erinnerung): “She ensures the Erinnerung of the consciousness of self by forgetting herself.”[4] Irigaray exposes the melancholia of this dialectic: this is a culture that achieves universality only by draining the living blood of its feminine source.
Woman has no gaze, no discourse for her specific specularization that would allow her to identify with herself (as same) -to return into the self- or break free of the natural specular process that now holds her-to get out of the self. Hence, woman dies not take an active part in the development of history, for she is never anything but the still undifferentiated opaqueness of sensible matter, the store (of) substance for the sublation of self, or being as what is, or what he is (or was), here and now.[5]
In Irigaray’s rereading, the shift from the matrilineal to the patriarchal order demands the daughter’s severance from her maternal bonds. Hegel acknowledges that the woman who remains faithful to the “red blood” of the mother, symbolizing kinship and female genealogy, must be excluded from the polis. This exclusion, embodied by Antigone, is not through death but through confinement and deprivation. She is denied light, air, love, and posterity. For Irigaray, this marks the founding gesture of patriarchy: the daughter’s forced betrayal of the maternal tie as the price for entry into the social and symbolic order.
As Whitford notes, Irigaray reads Hegel’s treatment of Antigone as revealing both his awareness and repression of woman’s role in sustaining the community.[7] Hegel imagines the brother-sister bond as a moment of reciprocal recognition (neither hierarchical nor sexual) but Irigaray exposes this as a fantasy meant to ease the guilt of women’s exclusion from the polis. But, the relation is not reciprocal: Antigone acts as the “living mirror” for her brother’s deeds and becomes guardian of the blood that nourishes society, but no one recognizes her act. Her devotion and burial of the dead mark the feminine as the hidden foundation of ethical life, confined to the family and sacrificed for the universality of the State. For Irigaray, Hegel’s dream of balance masks the fact that the very order of law and reason depends on the silencing and burial of the feminine.
[1] Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 214.
[2] Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1991), 95.
[3] Irigaray, Speculum, 225.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid. 224.
[6] Ibid. 225.
[7] Whitford, Philosophy in the Feminine, 120.
liquid ground 