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Irigaray On The Problem Subjectivity': Ofelia Schutte
Irigaray On The Problem Subjectivity': Ofelia Schutte
OFELIA SCHUTTE
In Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Luce lrigaray argues that “any theory
of the subject has always been appropriated by the masculine. This paper offers an
analysis of Irigaray’s critique of subjectivity and examines the psychological mecha-
nism referred to as “the phallic economy of castration.” A different way of conceiving
the relation between subject and object is explored by imagining a new subject of
desire.
“My sex is removed, at least as the property of a subject, from the predicative
mechanism that assures discursive coherence,” states Luce Irigaray in defense
of her unconventional critique of the logic of identity and the subject under-
taken in her study Speculum of the Other Woman.’ Her defiance of the “master
discourse” of philosophy and the attempt at subverting the logical order of
coherence upon which such a discourse is grounded place the activity of
feminist philosophizing in a difficult predicament with respect to the interpre-
tation of this work. Insofar as philosophy relies on a notion of coherence
rejected as phallocratic by Irigaray, it would seem that, if she is right, feminist
principles would bar one from trying to explain her thought in a manner
consistent with currently accepted tools of philosophical analysis. Yet refrain-
ing from explaining Irigaray’s position as clearly and coherently as possible
would only lead to the exclusion of her thoughts from philosophical attention,
a circumstance that would deprive us of the opportunity to understand one of
this century’s leading feminist authors. Indeed, the power of her critique of
“the subject” is enriching and stimulating not only to literary theory, linguis-
tics, and psychoanalysis but to philosophy as well. I take it, therefore, that a
philosophical reading of Irigaray is not a contradiction in terms, and in fact,
much can be learned from approaching her intentionally obscure work, Spec-
ulum, in a clear and coherent manner.
In Speculum Irigaray uses a postmodem perspective to challenge the hege-
mony of phallocentrism in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. I will focus
here on an examination of her thesis (given as a chapter title) that “Any
Hypatia vol. 6, no. 2 (Summer 1991) 0 by Ofelia Schutte
Ofelia Schutte 65
UNDER
PARADIGMS ATTACK
In this sense, the analyst, caught in his own discursive role, is blocked from
the possibility of understanding or appropriately interpreting the heteroge-
neous experiences of women. He is also kept from engaging in a feminist
questioning of current psychoanalytic theory, such as the one that ultimately
led Irigaray to break from the theoretical perspectives of Freud and Lacan.
For Irigaray, then, to say that the field of the unconscious contains some-
thing that is undefinable is to position the unconscious on the same side as the
woman whose otherness lies beyond representation before the phallic law. In
other words, if the transcendental subject has been linked to a male speaking
subject and he makes the unconscious a property of his language, the uncon-
scious (as other to the appropriating act) will come to stand for woman.
Speaking of woman, Irigaray states:
68 Hypatia
Unconsciousness she is, but not for herself, not with a subjec-
tivity that might take cognizance of it, recognize it as her own.
Close to herself, admittedly, but in a total ignorance (of
.
self) . . , she is the matter used for the imprint of forms.
(Irigaray 1985a, 141)
world also contains a side that cannot be penetrated by the subject (of
reflection) and his ubiquitous, persistent gaze. For Irigaray, this other side is
woman as undefinable to phallogocentric discourse and its correspondingly
fetishistic gaze. In this aspect woman stands for the theory-resistant field of the
unconscious. Metaphorically speaking,she is the dark continent that the white
man does not cease to try to penetrate and manipulate, whether sexually or
through his thoughts, ideology, and language.
In metaphysics, Irigaray’s view of woman undermines the traditional notions
of substance and accident, identity and difference, as elaborated by mainstream
Western philosophy. Her perspective shows the metaphysical privileging of
masculine subjectivity insofar as man is placed on the side of the same, and
woman on the side of the (appropriated) other. She also notes that the political
economy of the division between identity and difference in metaphysics is such
that the other is always reducible to the same. For example, she calls attention
to “the movement to speak of the ‘other’ in a language already systematized
by/for the same” (Irigaray 1985a, 139). “Other” in this context is a word
lacking specificity due to the fact that any specificity in language or logic is
drawn according to the categories imposed by the economy of the ‘(same.”If
the “other” had any real meaning, then, it would mean the boundless, the
undefinable, the unknown. Yet, as this reasoning would conclude, if woman is
on the side of the boundless and the undefinable, does this not mean that she
will always defy man’s control? Only if definition ceases to be the highest
instrument of control over the other. The strategic feminist struggle for Irigaray
thus becomes the subversion of the power of efficacy and predictability of
definition. Her counterproposal to the male speculative drive is the projection
of a “concave speculum,” a uniquely feminine mirror, one that is found
pirouetting ceaselessly upon itself (Irigaray 1985a, 134).This mirror will absorb
the light of the transcendent subject until it disintegrates him. The issue is to
fight the adversary not through arguments, whose rules of the game he controls,
but through images of the unconscious that will unleash an avalanche of
discursive displacements. The task is to “make it impossible for a while to
predict whence, whither, when, how, and why” (Irigaray 1985a, 142). As she
suggests: “Overthrow syntax by suspending its eternally teleological order, by
snipping the wires, cutting the current, breaking the circuits, switching the
connections, by modifying continuity, alternation, frequency, intensity’’
(Irigaray 1985a, 142). The intention is to break the nature of causal explana-
tion, break the subject’s assurance of linguistic control over reality, let the
unconscious explode. In short, the task is to break the hegemony of the
masculine narrative, in terms not only of its content, but also in terms of its
form (self-reflection, control over the unknown other).
70 Hypatia
functions as this divider and symbol of value in the gender difference distin-
guishing boys from girls. Absence of the penis in this economy of castration
means absence of value, since according to this logic everything hinges on the
possession and use of this organ. The penis acquires a much broader signifi-
cance than the bodily organ would have on its own. It becomes, at the level
of meaning, the phallus (in Lacanian theory, the phallic signifier). The phallus
comes to symbolize value, limit, measure, authority, the law. As such it is a
placeholder for the personal pronoun I, as spoken by a masculine subject. (This
is the only subject, if Irigaray is correct that subjectivity has been appropriated
by the masculine.)
For its survival, the economy of castration needs the absolute repression of
nonphallic value, which, according to this model, is also the value of differ-
ence, of that which cannot be reduced to the “same.” According to the
presuppositions of the economy of castration, such aberrant value would be
nonexistent or unreal. If real, it would have to be completely submissive to the
former’scapacity for penetration, for the imposition of meaning and measure.
It would only have the status of matter, which can always be made pliable by
the imposition of form. “She” is the “dark continent,” the matrix, the matter,
upon which “he,” the master of language and meaning, of logic and culture,
of metaphysics and psychotherapy, will impose his “form”: his distinctions, his
structures, his norms, his expected rate of productivity, of yield. Her pleasure
and pain are guided by his interest. His laws govern her body, the rate and
timing of her fertility. His morality governs her sexual movements and her
sexual pleasure.
What about her universe, her hidden thoughts, her feelings, her experience?
The phallic economy of castration does not recognize these unless their
expression fits into the rules and categories of his thought. “Truth is One,”
such an economy repeats ceaselessly. My truth-thus speaks the voice of this
phallic economy-must therefore be your truth. There cannot be two (differ-
ent) truths. Either my thoughts represent civilization or there is no civilization.
As the (only) representative of civilization, I have the right and the duty to
destroy, punish, silence, or otherwise restrain you if you challenge my ideas or
my right to rule.
ALTERNATIVES
Previously we raised this question: if the object, the silenced, could speak,
what would she say? Our analysis of the phallic economy of castration has
begun to answer this question. The silenced woman would say what every
oppressed being says to its oppressor: “No.” “Stop imposing your force on me.”
‘‘I don’t want your system.” Clearly, women-as well as men aware of their
oppression by sexism-would want a different system than the one ruled by
the phallic economy of castration. But what does this mean? Is it possible to
72 Hypatia
move toward such an economy? If our consciousness is distorted and bent out
of shape by the results of the phallic economy of castration to which we have
been subjected from infancy, where can we begin, as we turn toward the new
life we desire?
We cannot simply replace some concepts with others, or change from one
set of regulations to another. We must get behind the concept and the rule. To
express our feelingsas women we must bypass the phallic economy of castration
in the unconscious. Woman can do this by imagining a region prior to language,
a space prior to the knowledge of the Law of the Father, a source out of which
she can draw her own figures of speech. There is no economy of lack in this
region but one of superabundance (echoes of Nietzsche’s Dionysian creativ-
ity?). Before the cut signifying the Law of the Father in the unconscious, and
the limit of meaning defining the boundaries of our individual experience in
our conscious mind, there is the fusion of the infant with the maternal body
and the (adult) recovery of this boundless feeling in the specific characteristics
of the feminine orgasm, which the French feminists refer to as jouissunce (see
Cixous 1981,90-98, esp. 95).
To rekindle the flame of this lost horizon, Irigaray and other postmodern
French feminists turn to writing-in particular, “writing the woman’s body”
(as they describe it). This writing emerges from the unconscious, from the pain
or pleasure of sexual experience, from the “dark continent” of desire prior to
its appropriation by the phallic law. I t is the affirmation of a difference that
cannot be conceptualized as long as the concept is tied to a law of meaning
going back to the Name of the Father or phallic signifier. Once the structure
of desire is released from the (repressive) Law of the Father, speech will follow
women’s desire as jouissance,rather than subdue it. This process will signify the
reinvention of subjectivity. I say we must “reinvent” rather than “recon-
ceptualize” subjectivity, for to reconceptualize it, according to Irigaray, would
be merely to leave it where it is today.
POSTSCRIPT
Given the perspective Irigaray has put forward, a number of responses and/or
criticisms could be offered. I will mention one issue only, namely, whether her
argument changes our standard conception of the relation of gender to subjec-
tivity and, if so, in what way. If, on the one hand, we accept the position that
our present understanding of subjectivity is only a masculine construction, as
Irigaray appears to suggest, then in order to be feminine, we would have to get
rid of subjectivity altogether. We would rescue the feminine only at the price
of destroying the subject. Although postmodern writers generally want to
move in this direction, such an option seems to me, for the most part, a difficult
one to put into practice because it seems to require the rejection of the notion
of self. The concept of self is not reducible to that of subject, but insofar as it
Ofelia Schutte 73
her discourse (as Irigaray would have us do), wouldn’t the object somehow
position itself in the role of a subject? The difference between the subject, as
imagined by Irigaray, and every other subject (the masculine one) is that the
former is not constituted by its compliance with phallic law. If anything, it is
constituted by rebellion against it. When Irigaray asks her readers to imagine
a type of “short circuit” in the relation between subject and object, so that the
object begins to speak and the subject is blown to pieces, losing its previous
hegemony, couldn’t this be construed as a reinvention of feminine subjectiv-
ity-namely, the positing of a feminist subjectivity whose principal activity
would be the subversion of the entire phallocentric order? What might be
important here, if we want to pursue this interpretation, is not to attempt to
universalize Irigaray’s proposed model of feminist subjectivity as if this were
the exclusive option for overturning phallocentrism. There are more than a
few cracks in the phallocentric edifice, so it makes sense to think of Irigaray’s
way of getting at them as one among other possibilities.
But now, someone might ask, what does all of this theory mean in practice?
Is it possible to obtain a few details or possibly even some hints about the
reinventing of subjectivity?How is this going to come about?Perhaps Irigaray
would suggest that we begin by imagining a series of reversals of meaning in
which the prohibitions inhibiting women’s desires through phallic law become
ineffective or absurd. “Once imagine that woman imagines and the object loses
its fixed, obsessional character” (Irigaray 1985a, 133).If the obsessional, fixed
character of the object is destabilized, so will be the identity-fixation of its
corresponding subject of knowledge and desire. This means that subjective
gender identity-fixation (of the masculine-type) would be destabilized. A fluid,
undefinable type of subjectivity could then emerge in place of the old,
identity-bound notion of the subject. But such a fluid conception of subjectiv-
ity or of subject-object relations does not in itself guarantee the emergence of
a feminist perspective on the subject. If Irigaray is right, such a perspective
would have to emerge from the repositioning of the object of desire (woman)
in a different role than the one she generally occupies at present. “Woman”
would have to operate as “other” than the object of sexual desire constituted
through phallic law. This involves a refocusing on imagining a psychological
“place” free from the scope of the law establishing the prohibition of incest
and the binary system of oppositions for the construction of gender identities.
Irigaray begins to take this path toward the invention or imagining of a feminist
subjectivity when she comments on what Freud might have said about female
sexuality but didn’t:
For whereas the man Freud-r woman, were she to set her
rights up in opposition-might have been able to interpret
what the overdetermination of language (the effects of deferred
action, its subterranean dreams and fantasies, its convulsive
Ofelia Schutte 75
NOTES
1. An earlier version of this paper was read at the Second International Meeting of
Philosophical Feminism, sponsored by the Argentine Association of Women in Philoso-
phy, Buenos Aires, November 1989.It was published in the association’sjournal Hiparquia
3: 1 ( 1990) in Spanish translation by M. L. Femenias under the title “lrigaray y el problema
de la subjetividad.”
76 Hypatia
2. Irigaray (1985b, 149). Originally published in France in 1977 as Ce sexe qui n’en
est pas un. See also Irigaray (1985a) originally published in France in 1974 as Speculum
de I’autre femme. For recent philosophical discussions of postmodern feminism see Nich-
olson (1990) and Butler (1990). See also Fraser and Bartky (1989). For an early review
of works by Irigaray and Kristeva focusing on the psychoanalytical theme of sujectivity,
see Josette Feral (1978).
3. For a feminist critique of Kant’s theory of knowledge see Robin May Schott
(1988).
4. Irigaray (1985a, 136-37).“Dark continents” is an expression used by Freud to refer
to the adult woman’s sexuality. See Gay (1988,501-22).
5. Irigaray’s critique presupposes Lacan’s theory of the phallic signifier. See “The
Signification of the Phallus,” in Lacan (1977,281-91). For a clear explanation of Lacan’s
theory of desire see Butler (1987, 186-204). In Lacan’s theory, “the paternally enforced
prohibition against union with the mother is coextensive with language itself,” as is “the
paternally enforced taboo against incest” (Butler 1987, 201). “The Phallus is thus
understood to be the organizing principle of all kinship and all language” (Butler 1987,
202). For a Lacanian response to Irigaray’s criticism see Ellie Ragland-Sullivan (1987,
267-308, esp. 295-304).
6. Irigaray uses the commodityconcept particularlyas it applies to the objectification
of women in phallocentric society. See Irigaray (198513, 192-97).
REFERENCES