But fire, in fact, what is that? A simple body, an elementary substance, that can be predicated on the basis of certain qualities. And light? The actual transparence of certain bodies that are potentially transparent: water, and many solids. Whereas at the beginning of epistemology, the philosopher was still marveling at such things as fire, and water, now they must be submitted to a rigorous scientific analysis so that their excessive power can be checked. They must be put in their place, within a general theory of being so as to lessen our fascination with them.
Luce Irigaray, Speculum Of the Other Woman
In her “elemental works”, which she centers on the four elements (earth, air, fire, water) and also on nature, Irigaray aims to reinterpret, challenge, and form a dialogue with philosophers of Western tradition. In answer to Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics as a “forgetting of Being,” Irigaray in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, critiques Heidegger’s emphasis on the element of earth as the ground of life and speech, and his oblivion of air in his existential-ontological account. Air is invisible but crucial as it sustains life. This work has been interpreted as a critique of Heidegger whereas Irigaray seeks to expand Heidegger’s philosophy to introduce the feminine, saying that she would like to “celebrate the work of Martin Heidegger. To succeed in this gesture implied not appropriating his thought but respecting it in its difference. To pay homage to Martin Heidegger in his relationship to the earth, to the sky, to the divinities and to the mortals presupposed for me the unveiling and the affirmation of another possible relation to this fourfold.”[1] The forgetting of air in Heidegger’s work symbolizes the exclusion of women in traditional philosophical discourse. Irigaray explores how traditional philosophy has been built on a patriarchal worldview, which prioritizes certain elements and concepts while neglecting others that might be associated with femininity, ephemerality and fluidity.
In Marine Lover of Nietzsche, Irigaray focuses on the element of water and encounters Nietzsche by addressing him in the second person (she only mentions Nietzsche’s name towards the end of the book). She touches on certain Nietzschean concepts, like eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, self‐overcoming, etc., questioning Nietzsche’s relationship with women. Water is the central element here, as for Irigaray, water is the element Nietzsche fears the most. She forms her narrative upon the complex relationship between the feminine and the fluid, engaging in an amorous dialogue with Nietzsche, and utilizing a lyrical dialogic, intimate prose. With the metaphor of sea, Irigaray alludes to the fluid and dynamic aspects of the feminine. Water represents the flow of life, the unconscious, and the feminine. Marine Lover embraces fluidity, change, and the interconnectedness of life, challenging the rigid, hierarchical structures. Irigaray critiques Nietzsche’s conceptualization of nature and the body, suggesting that he fails to embrace the material, embodied experience of existence often obfuscated or repressed by philosophies that prioritize the mind.
In Speculum of the Other Woman, presents an analysis of Plato’s epistemological model of the cave. In the well-known allegory, prisoners are confined in a dark cave since birth, and can only see the wall in front of them, and shadowy images cast against the wall. The shadows on the cave wall represent the world of sensory experience and the realm of appearances. The prisoners are watch the shadows on the cave wall as reality; thus, they are deceived by the appearances. When a prisoner goes to the outside world, he is blinded by the sunlight, but then his eyes adjust, and he witnesses the true reality of the physical world around him. The allegory of the cave is about the journey from ignorance to enlightenment, and to the world of real knowledge. The free prisoner can attain knowledge via reason and understanding of the Forms. Thus, “Plato’s allegory underscores the fundamental difference between knowledge (episteme) and opinion (doxa). Knowledge, in Plato’s view, is not derived from sensory perceptions alone, but from rational insight and understanding of the unchanging and eternal realm of Forms. Forms are the perfect, eternal, and universal ideals that serve as the foundation of true knowledge. In contrast, opinions are based on the imperfect and changing world of sensory appearances.”[2] It can be claimed that Plato’s epistemological model reveals the necessity of it constraining sensory perception as well as the deceptive nature of opinions formed based on appearances.
Irigaray, in “Plato’s Hystera” (as apparent in the title) uses the word “hystera” (uterus) instead of “cave”, presenting an “allegory in an allegory”[3] –hystera is fundamental as it is the ground: “For if the cave is made in the image of the world, the world is equally made in the image of the cave. In cave or “world” all is but the image of an image. For this cave is always already an attempt to re-present another cave, the hystera, the mold which silently dictates all replicas, all possible forms, all possible relation of forms and between forms, of any replica.”[4]
For Plato, categories of Being, Forms, reality, truth as well as wisdom remain outside the cave which implicates the natural-maternal-feminine framework. This view belongs to the phallogocentric structure that views the masculine as law, order, logic, structure, truth, reason, etc. Irigaray via her “allegory in an allegory” points at the “absence of women, the exclusion of the feminine, from the philosophical tradition not as something immediately or intentional, but rather an always-already presupposed, and remaining unquestioned, element that exists prior to, and is simply carried over into philosophical discourse.”[5] Irigaray writes,
Infinite projection – (the) Idea (of) Being (of the) Father – of the mystery of conception and the hystery where it is (re)produced. Blindness with regard to the original one who must be banished by fixing the eyes on pure light, to the point of not seeing (nothing) anymore – the show, the hole of nothing is back again – to the point at which the power of a mere bodily membrane is exceeded, and the gaze of the soul is rediscovered. A-lētheia.[6]
The seeker of knowledge must emerge from the dark materiality of the cave/hystera and simultaneously reject, conceal, repress it in order to attain the light of wisdom.
He must free himself from the materiality of the womb.
In Irigaray’s analysis, the founding masculine-feminine hierarchical imagery is demonstrated and emphasized. As such, masculine images appear as awakening, knowledge, etc., whereas feminine images appear as darkness, obscurity, lack.[7] The cave essentially is about
the epistemology of sight, which as per the psychoanalytic contingencies of corporeality is a phallic program [scopic regime], is over-validated as the certainty of knowledge-acquisition [a story of distance between the knowing subject and the known object is built upon this scientism, while political programs like the panopticon in colonial/criminological surveillance and cultural propensities such as scopophilia in cinema have been nourished by its ideological dependability] but the disseminated, plural and intimate epistemology of touch which is a feminine sense is excluded from reliability and responsibility of knowledge-making.[8]
Thus, Irigaray focuses on how subject of knowledge in Plato’s allegory essentially attempts to transcend nature and material world to engage with solid and fixed truths (conveyed via masculine imagery) in order to attain true knowledge. The masculine subject must escape from the cave of ignorance and attain the sunlight of wisdom by repressing the feminine.
[1] Quoted in Christina Grammatikopoulou, “Remembering the Air: Luce Irigaray’s Ontology of Breath,” https://interartive.org/2014/05/irigaray-air
[2] “Epistemology and the Allegory of the Cave,” 2023, https://licentiapoetica.com/epistemology-and-the-allegory-of-the-cave-887dea02dbe4
[3] Seraphina M. Karlyn, “Irigaray: ‘Plato’s Hystera,’ from Speculum of the Other Woman,” https://www.academia.edu/15334854/Irigaray_Plato_s_Hystera_from_Speculum_of_the_Other_Woman
[3] Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill, Cornell University Press, 1985, 315.
[4] Ibid., 246.
[5] Karlyn, “Irigaray: ‘Plato’s Hystera,’ from Speculum of the Other Woman.”
[6] Irigaray, Speculum, 315.
[7] Saunak Samajdar, Intimacy, Hospitalityn and Jouissance: A ‘Feminine’ Knowing of Difference, Michigan Feminist Studies, vol. 20, Issue title: Knowledge, Fall 2006-Spring 2007, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.ark5583.0020.004.
[8] Ibid.
liquid ground 