Tag: irigaray

• Irigaray Contra Hegel: Revisiting Antigone

  

  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.

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  [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.

  

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  antigone, divine law, hegel, human law, irigaray, the speculum of the other woman

• Irigaray’s elemental works and dialogues with male philosophers

  

  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.

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  [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.

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  tags: allegory of the cave, elemental works, heidegger, irigaray, luce irigaray, nietzsche, plato, speculum of the other woman, the feminine

  

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  writer

• With Irigaray: Feminine Imaginary

  

  How can I speak to you? You remain in flux, never congealing or solidifying. What will make that current flow into words? It is multiple, devoid of causes, meanings, simple qualities. Yet it cannot be decomposed. These movements cannot be described as the passage from a beginning to an end. These rivers flow into no single, definitive sea. These streams are without fixed banks, this body without fixed boundaries. This unceasing mobility. This life-which will perhaps be called our restlessness, whims, pretenses, or lies. All this remains very strange to anyone claiming to stand on solid ground. Speak, all the same. Between us, “hardness” isn’t necessary.¹

  Feminine imaginary, the non-identical excess that permeates and escapes the frameworks and formulations of the Symbolic; formless and amorphous.

  Margaret Whitford writes about how the Pythagoreans viewed the world as a mixture of principles that had determinate form (good) and were indeterminate (bad).² Formlessness and indeterminacy were bad or inferior as they implied irregularity, disorder, and chaos. Whitford draws a correspondence between Irigarayian imaginary that threatens rationality and the ontological categories of the pre-Socratics, opposing to critiques of Irigarayian imaginary and arguing that Irigaray aims to demonstrate patriarchy’s view of women as ‘natural’ and outside history.³

  The constitution of female subjectivity within and transforming the Symbolic order can be viewed as the forefronts of Irigaray’s project but the locus is the feminine imaginary that underlies the Symbolic as it is deeply connected to “the primitive materiality of experience, life and death, kin relationships, and the body.”⁴ It is also formative of Irigaray’s elemental works which she forms around natural elements -earth, air, fire, water- harnessing the feminine imaginary and embodied knowledge within the dominant structures of rationality.

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  1. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Cornell University Press, 1985), 214-15. ↩︎
  2. Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, (New York: Routledge, 1991), 59. ↩︎
  3. Ibid. ↩︎
  4. Ibid. ↩︎

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  tags: feminine imaginary, imaginary, irigaray, luce irigaray

  

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