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Being as Relation
in Luce Irigaray
Emma R. Jones
Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray
Emma R. Jones
Being as Relation in
Luce Irigaray
Emma R. Jones
Livermore, CA, USA
ISBN 978-3-031-19304-0 ISBN 978-3-031-19305-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19305-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks are due to the friends and colleagues who have supported
this work over the years. I began writing this book during my time at the
University of Oregon, where Al Frankowski and Jessica Sims were espe-
cially supportive during the writing process. Many thanks also to John
Lysaker for his inspiring course on Heidegger and, for their intellectual
companionship, to the many individuals impacted by the work of Luce
Irigaray whom I met during that time at conferences around the world,
especially Anne van Leeuwen and Andrew Robinson. Thank you also to
Claudia Baracchi, whose courses on Ancient Greek thinking and French
Feminism at the New School captivated my interest decades ago in a way
that has never ceased.
Thank you to Luce Irigaray for sharing of herself via her writings, her
seminar in which I participated at the University of Nottingham in 2010,
and for our correspondence over the years.
Finally, thanks to those who always serve as humbling reminders of my
own specificity and their irreducible, and wonderful, otherness – my
family, close friends, and psychotherapy clients.
Portions of this research were supported by the Oregon Humanities
Center, who granted me a Graduate Student Research Support Fellowship
during the academic year 2011–2012.
v
vi Acknowledgments
Portions of Chapter Four appeared as “The Future of Sexuate

Difference: Irigaray, Heidegger, Ontology, and Ethics,” in L’Esprit
Createur, Vol. 52, No. 3, Fall 2012.
Portions of Chapter Five appeared as “Finding/Founding Our Place:
Thinking Luce Irigaray’s Ontology and Ethics of Sexuate Difference as a
Relational Limit” in Building a New World, Eds. Luce Irigaray and
Michael Marder (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Contents
1 Introduction:
Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray 1
Reading Irigaray, Listening 2
Terminology: Ontology, Subjectivity, Ethics 5
Relational Limit 7
Chapter Summaries 9
References 12
2 Muted
Receptions: Identity and Sexuate Difference 15
The Philosopher Who is Not One 17
Irigaray’s Three Phases 24
Femininity and The Transformation of “the Subject” 30
Identity Vs. Relation 37
References 39
3 Relation
and Refusal: Irigaray with Lacan 43
Lacan on Language, Subjectivity, and Sex 47
God or the Jouissance of the Woman: Irigaray and Lacan on
Sexual Difference 54
The Psychosis of the Masculine 68
References 71
vii
viii Contents
4 Hearing
Silence, Speaking Language: Irigaray with
Heidegger 73
Note on Terminology 76
Living Within Language as a Call to Respond: A Reading of
Heidegger’s “Language” 78
On the Way to the Other 91
References 99
5 The
Enunciation of Place: Irigaray on Subjectivity101
Aristotle’s Impasse of Place 103
Relational Limit: A “Double Loop” of Places 107
Speaking at the Limit: The Sharing of Speech 111
References 127
6 Toward
a Relationally Limited Future129
“Woman’s” Lack of Place: An Act of Violence 131
Identity (and) Politics 142
Encountering the World as a Sexuate Subject 145
Conclusion 157
References 160
I ndex163
About the Author
Emma R. Jones is a psychotherapist in private practice in the San

Francisco East Bay Area. She was educated at the New School; the
University of Oregon, where she earned her PhD in philosophy; and the
California Institute of Integral Studies, where she earned her clinical
degree. She is the author of several articles engaging the work of Luce
Irigaray as well as phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and Ancient Greek
philosophy.
ix
Abbreviations1
SOW Speculum of the Other Woman

SAF Speculum de l’autre femme
TS This Sex Which Is Not One
CS Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un
WOL The Way of Love
STW Sharing the World
ESD An Ethics of Sexual Difference
CV Conversations
ILTY I Love To You
JLI “Je- Luce Irigaray” (Interview)
TBT To Be Two
TBB To Be Born
STF Sharing the Fire
1
Texts By Luce Irigaray.
xi
1
Introduction: Being as Relation in Luce
Irigaray
In many of her post-millennium texts, the philosopher and psychoana-

lyst Luce Irigaray evokes the possibility of a living, creative dialogue: a
new kind of speaking and listening that would allow people to forge
respectful, creative connections with others who are fundamentally dif-
ferent from themselves.
Such a dialogue across differences requires a new way of approaching
limits: a new way of encountering otherness, difference, and our own
boundaries. The way in which Irigaray encourages us to sit with differ-
ence and limitation also foregrounds questions of relation—especially our
relation to that which exceeds the limit, that which is on the other side of
our current understanding. Irigaray’s work repeatedly gestures toward a
relation to difference that is distinctly positive and productive rather than
repressive and violent.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1

E. R. Jones, Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19305-7_1
2 E. R. Jones
Further, Irigaray often explores how the specific relation of sexuate dif-
ference1—her focus throughout all her works since 1974’s Speculum of the
Other Woman—supplies fertile conditions for this new way of speaking.
However, she suggests, sexuate difference will only supply these condi-
tions if we can learn to properly attune ourselves to hear this difference at
an ontological level.
Within this deceptively brief statement, however, many questions lurk.
What, after all, is “sexuate difference?” Does the vision of transformative
dialogue Irigaray describes require us to subscribe to naïve realist assump-
tions about biological sex and sexuality? If so, is this vision useful for
contemporary feminist thinking? And: what could it mean to attune our-
selves to the ontological meaning of sexuate difference, if it even has such
a meaning (rather than, say, primarily a cultural, biological, or even psy-
chological meaning)?
On the other hand, worldwide relations between individuals who are
“sexuately different” are frequently fraught with strife, and in fact out-
right violence. Therefore, Irigaray’s notion of a respectful, creative dia-
logue and relation between those who are sexuately different—a relation
that allows each to thrive—has potentially profound ramifications, if we
can find productive ways to receive her thinking. This book represents
one such attempt.
Reading Irigaray, Listening

To approach the work of Luce Irigaray is already to recognize one’s own
limits. Spanning the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminist theory,
and linguistics for more than 50 years, Irigaray’s prolific output has
explored an enormous variety of topics and is indebted to a wide variety
of philosophical interlocutors while at the same time advancing a
1
Irigaray has, in the past 20 years, almost fully transitioned from using the terms “sexual difference”
and “sexually-different other” to using the terms “sexuate difference” and “sexuate other.” The term
“sexuate,” a neologism coined by Irigaray (sexué in French), is intended to encompass the psycho-
logical, relational, cultural, and bodily aspects of being a sexed subject, without grounding sex in
any one of these (See Conversations [2008]). I use “sexuate” in this book, except when referring to
Lacan and Freud’s conceptions of sexual difference, or when directly referring to writings of
Irigaray’s that were composed before she consistently used this term.
1 Introduction: Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray 3
distinct, and increasingly sweeping, vision. Stylistically, too, her work

presents an interpretive challenge. What does it mean to read and to write
about the work of a thinker whose own voice is at once deeply entangled,
sometimes literally (through mimicry), with other voices from through-
out the history of philosophy—not to mention the fields referenced
above—and yet simultaneously distinct, insistent? How will we know
when we have finally “read” Irigaray? When will we have heard her speak?
Must we claim exhaustive knowledge of her many interlocutors (for
example, to name only a few: Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, Hegel, Lacan,
Freud, Saussure, Kant, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Nietzsche, the Pre-
Socratics, and de Beauvoir) to claim to have understood her? And even if
we could claim such exhaustive knowledge, would this ensure that we
grasped Irigaray’s own unique views and contributions?
Furthermore, reading Irigaray from the position of a fellow philoso-
pher (that is, as one who also reads the above thinkers in an independent
way) also raises the question of the status of Irigaray’s interactions with
these thinkers. Does she understand them? Misunderstand them?
Critique them? Copy them? Is it reductive, as a kind of “third party”
reader—that is, as one who is witness to the many dialogues (and dia-
tribes) found within Irigaray’s work—to read her interlocutors through
her, or her through them? What does it mean, in other words, to read
Irigaray reading? And what is the status of such a reading?
One might certainly ask if these questions are not equally pressing
regarding the reading of all philosophers—most of whom, after all, are in
at least implicit dialogue with multiple others, living and dead, and who
also, at their best, offer unique contributions to these ongoing dialogues.
However, the unusual nature of Irigaray’s style of engagement with her
interlocutors has forced these questions upon her readers in a more urgent
way. Margaret Whitford (1991) offers a helpful interpretation of the sta-
tus of Irigaray’s interactions with these interlocutors:
It seems to me that what Irigaray is trying to do in her writing is to effect

an intervention, so that her writing would function like the parole of the
psychoanalyst and set some change in motion. […] [Interventions] are
essentially aimed not primarily at ‘truth’ but at bringing about a change in
the psychic situation. (p. 36)
4 E. R. Jones
Irigaray’s texts, according to Whitford, cannot be considered treatises

proclaiming a certain “truth,” or even a straightforward “reading” of, say,
Freud or Plato. Rather, they must be understood as interventions into
existing philosophical discourses to bring about some deeper change: in
language, in the reader, in culture. I agree with Whitford and believe that
Irigaray’s unique manner of interacting with her philosophical influ-
ences—of using their texts simultaneously to spur her own development
as a thinker and to turn their words against themselves by reflecting them
back from a different point of view, a different place—reveals something
about how these discourses have been constituted, and about the condi-
tions of this constitution. Irigaray’s interventions, in this way, precipitate
a shift that would not have been possible had Irigaray not, through her
writing, provided the place for such revelations to occur.
In addition to these methodological peculiarities, Irigaray’s post-
millennium texts are immensely dense, distilling insights gleaned from
nearly five decades of her own work in linguistics, psychoanalysis, and
philosophy into deceptively brief, idiosyncratic works. They thus cannot
be fully digested in isolation from at least some consideration of the over-
all development of her work. Further, these texts are inherently dialogi-
cal: a reading of them cannot proceed in isolation from a reading of
Irigaray’s major psychoanalytic and philosophical interlocutors because
the thoughts at which Irigaray arrives in her recent works have been
developed precisely through a complex process of inheritance: an engage-
ment with the history of philosophy that at once contributes to a think-
ing of some of its most basic problems and destabilizes some of its most
basic assumptions.
Despite these facts, the aim of the current project is not to offer a com-
prehensive reading of Irigaray’s entire oeuvre—such a task would far
exceed the boundaries of a single monograph. Instead, I aim here to pro-
vide one interpretation of what I see as the core movement of Irigaray’s
oeuvre that, I contend, will uniquely help us to receive the ethical vision
put forward in her most recent texts as well as highlighting the continuity
of her work across the years—something some commentators have ques-
tioned (Cimitile and Miller 2007). Rather than attempting to exhaus-
tively enumerate all the sources on which Irigaray draws, then, I interpret
her work through the lens of my own reading not only of what I see as its
central themes of relation and limitation, but also of some of the work of
Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger, and Aristotle, while also situating my
interpretation in the context of debates within feminist theory about the
meaning of sexual difference.
I ultimately argue that Irigaray’s ethical vision is inextricable from her
development of a relational ontology of sexuate difference. The develop-
ment of this relational ontology, I demonstrate, can be fruitfully traced
through Irigaray’s primarily critical engagement with Lacan to her more
recent (and somewhat more positive) engagement with Heidegger. I
argue further that this relational ontology presents a deep transformation
of our understanding (and thus potentially our lived reality) of human
subjectivity—a transformation that ultimately re-figures subjectivity as
constitutively responsive to otherness. But what does this mean?
Terminology: Ontology, Subjectivity, Ethics

One challenge that arises in reading Irigaray’s works is interpreting what
she means by claiming that sexuate difference is ontological. The term
“ontology,” after all, is used in a variety of ways in the field of philosophy;
and some commentators on Irigaray’s work, for example Alison Stone,
have used the term primarily to mean “[a theory of ] what kinds of enti-
ties populate the world” (2006, p. 94). This way of receiving Irigray’s
invocation of ontology would place her work within a paradigm of defi-
nition or identity that is common in feminist philosophy (much ink,
after all, has been spilled over the question “what is a woman?” as I dis-
cuss in Chap. 2).
However, I suggest, as Rachel Jones (2011) also has, that Irigaray’s
work is more productively understood through the paradigm of
Heidegger’s fundamental ontology—a claim that gains support from the
fact that most of Irigaray’s post-millenium writings directly engage and
reference Heidegger. Fundamental ontology is, in the Heideggerian sense,
a way of characterizing the human while always situating it in relation to
something greater than and beyond it—being for Heidegger is not an
entity but an “event” that continually gives the human over to itself, in its
relation to the world. Thus, Heideggerian ontology is not a theory of
6 E. R. Jones
what kind of entities populate the world, but rather a theory of how a
“world” of “beings” becomes possible for us to experience in the first
place. In his later writing, Heidegger calls this event of being Ereignis, a
term which has been translated by Joan Stambaugh as “the event of
appropriation.”2 I simply use the term “event.” The event of being, then,
is neither reducible to the human nor situated only “beyond” the human,
but rather it first gives the human to itself as “in” the world and as mean-
ingfully related to that world.
Thus, when I speak of a “relational ontology,” I do not mean a theory
of beings as relational (as if beings first “were” in some unthought or
generic sense, and then were said to be “relational”). Instead, I mean a
theory of the event of being itself occurring as relation. In Heideggerian
terms, this means that relation is ontological as opposed to ontic. In
terms of sexuate difference, it means that “women” and “men” (or, to be
sure, any other sexuate identity) are not entities whose definitions pre-
cede the relation between them, but rather that the status of the relation
of sexuate difference produces these provisional “definitions” at any given
time.3 Importantly, however, this does not mean that the identities
thereby produced are exhaustively a matter of human construction.
Rather, the relation of sexuate difference both exceeds the human and is
given to us as a possibility and a task we are called upon to take up. Thus,
I will not propose that Irigaray’s ontology of “natural” sexuate difference
is the basis of a psychic or subjective “relational” difference (and therefore
that relational difference does not concern “being” as such). (Stone 2006)
Nor will I propose that this “relational” difference has no “being.”
(Deutscher 2002) Instead, I will argue that Irigaray rethinks being itself
as relation, and further, that “subjectivity” names the self-givenness of
this relation.
While Heidegger rejects the term “subject” because for him it comes
with metaphysical baggage (the “subject” as an underlying substance of
2
See, for instance, Identity and Difference (Heidegger, 2002).
3
It should be noted that this relational ontology marks a significant departure from Heidegger
(1999), who considers sexual difference (though he barely considers it at all) to be only an “ontic”
feature of Dasein. See Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity. Irigaray’s engagement with Heidegger
in my view pushes his style of thinking beyond this limitation by proposing a radical ontological
priority to both relationality and sexuate difference.
sorts to which one assigns predicates), preferring his term “Dasein”

(being-there), I believe Irigaray’s use of the term “subject” is actually
closer to Heidegger’s Dasein than it is to this metaphysical conception of
subjectivity. In sum, if Dasein is the being who encounters itself as an
issue and as a project to take up through its relations with the world, I
will argue here that the subject, for Irigaray, is the being that encounters
itself as always constitutively, ontologically limited by and related to
another, and as thereby called upon to become most fully itself in and
through this intersubjective relation. I will show that Irigaray’s vision of a
new, ethically enabling dialogue grows out of her ongoing transforma-
tional thinking of what it means to be a speaking, embodied human
subject. Further, since, for Irigaray, to be a “subject” is ultimately to
become and evolve in relation to what is other—to move toward the
other—there is, in Irigaray’s work, an ethical imperative inscribed in the
very movement of subjectivity itself. Thus “ethics” here refers not to a
rational system for discerning how one ought to act, but rather comes
closest to what Kelly Oliver has called “response ethics” (2019): the
notion that we are obligated to others based on innate features of subjec-
tivity itself, namely its inherently relational structure.
Relational Limit
I will use the lens of this overall interpretation—that the central move-
ment of Irigaray’s work consists in the development of a relational ontol-
ogy that transforms traditional concepts of subjectivity—to draw out
certain threads and dialogues within her work that, when taken together,
demonstrate a certain internal consistency (without, for all that, provid-
ing anything like exhaustive reading of this body of work). My focus
throughout my interpretive re-tracing of Irigaray’s dialogues with Lacan,
Heidegger, and Aristotle is above all on the question of limits—that is to
say, the question of what marks us off from what is “other” to us. My own
readings of these thinkers thus focus on their respective thinking of limits
as what mark the boundaries of meaning for human beings. I approach
this issue primarily through the ideas of both language as that which
enables the articulation of meaning due to a certain functioning of limits
8 E. R. Jones
and place as a unique category that, for Aristotle, names a kind of limit
that allows a being to become what it is. Indeed, language, we will see,
articulates the possibility of sameness and difference and in so doing, it
allows us to experience the world as meaningful (it should be noted, how-
ever, that the conceptions of language, limit, and meaning found in
Lacan and Heidegger are significantly different from one another and
proceed from radically different philosophical frameworks); and Aristotle’s
place provides a fascinating way to further the investigation of how we
come to be both limited and defined by a relation to something other.
Thus, these questions of limit and meaning are also bound up with the
question of sexuate difference as the question of our relation to what is
other to us—a point which Lacan’s work explicitly shows us, and a lens
that Irigaray brings to all her philosophical dialogues.
Through my textual analyses of Irigaray’s own engagements with these
thinkers, then, I show how Irigaray suggests, through her creative inheri-
tance of their thinking and her explicit concern with sexuate difference, a
new way of conceptualizing limitation—what I call “relational limit”—
that carries with it a vision of a new kind relationship to language, the
other, and the self. This new way of conceptualizing limit and relation is
implicit in Irigaray’s later work, and when drawn out by my interpreta-
tion, it will be revealed as crucial for understanding Irigaray’s explicitly
stated ontology and ethics of sexuate difference, as well as for building on
her project.
What, more precisely, is the content of this phrase “relational limit”—
a phrase not often explicitly used by Irigaray? By the time we reach
Irigaray’s most recent works, I argue, “limit” no longer indicates some-
thing that arises in response to a “lack,” that is, something beyond which
there is either nothing or madness, and which appears only through the
process of its own (destructive) transgression—as “limit” seems to mean
for Lacan (see Chap. 3). Nor does “limit” even indicate something which
gives the human to itself as the constitutive concealedness in an event of
disclosure, as it might be said to for Heidegger (see Chap. 4). Instead,
“relational limit” emerges as that which announces the plenitude and in-
finite of a positive relation through the very finitude of a limitation (see
Chap. 5). This way of conceiving of limits opens up the possibility for
subjectivity itself to be re-thought as a constitutively ethical process that
occurs in relation to a different, sexuate other.4 This ethical process of

negotiating a relational limit while unfolding as a subject carves out what
I have called, drawing on Irigaray and Aristotle, “psychic place” (Chaps 5
and 6)—a way of concretizing the idea of a sexuate subject as at once
embodied, linguistic, and relational without relying on traditional meta-
physical oppositions such as those between mind and body or form
and matter.
Chapter Summaries
In Chap. 2, I propose that Irigaray’s work does not fit into what I call the
paradigm of definition or identity with which feminist theory has fre-
quently been preoccupied. I review some historical context regarding the
women’s movements in France and in the U.S. that circumscribed the
early reception of Irigaray’s writings in the Anglophone world. I then
show how scholarship on Irigaray’s writing has, broadly speaking, vacil-
lated between seeing her as an essentialist who proposes a rigid definition
of what sexuate difference “is” and as a deconstructionist who seeks to
disrupt notions of identity completely. In my view, this vacillation exists
because the identity paradigm is insufficient to understand Irigaray’s
work. I briefly review the three phases of Irigaray’s work before turning to
Speculum of the Other Woman to show, through my reading of her seminal
4
This “positivity” of the limit in Irigaray’s work also indicates what I think is a uniqueness of her
ontological vision with respect to other post-Heideggerian accounts of relational being that have
been developed. Giorgio Agamben (2004), for instance, has argued that Heidegger’s ontology must
be re-thought because it opens the space of unconcealment only through the construction of a zone
of “concealment” that Agamben links to animal life. He thus believes that Heidegger’s ontology
produces as its remainder a zone of “bare life” that we can witness not only in Heidegger’s own
discussion of animality, but also in the totalitarian atrocities of the Twentieth Century. He speaks
about re-appropriating our relation to concealedness and thinking it “outside of being.” I have
argued elsewhere (Jones 2007) that Agamben neglects the question of sexual difference in this
discussion. Further, my analysis in this monograph shows that Irigaray also provides a rethinking
of our relation to concealedness but does so in a way that opens up the possibility of a relation to a
truly other subject on the other side of this limit. Jean-Luc Nancy has also proposed an ontology of
being as relation. But he does not offer a specific figure of what he calls “being-with,” which, I
argue, Irigaray uniquely does. For Irigaray, sexuate difference would perhaps be the very figure of
being-social that Nancy seeks—the very outline or figure for humanity that is “capable of opening
onto the ‘with’ as its border, the very limit of its outline” (Nancy 2000, p. 48).
10 E. R. Jones
essay on Freud, that even at this early phase of her work Irigaray’s focus
was already on questions of sexuate difference as a relation.
In Chap. 3, I present a reading of Jacques Lacan’s picture of subjectiv-
ity to illustrate how, for Lacan, “the phallus” comes to stand as a nonrela-
tional figure of limitation for the subject. For Lacan, I argue, the symbolic
phallus stands for the limit that opens up the possibility of the field of
language as shared human meaning: to lack its proper “installation” in
one’s psyche means to experience a radical break with this shared mean-
ing—a psychosis. However, in analyzing Irigaray’s interventions into
Lacan’s discourse of sexual difference in This Sex Which is Not One, I sug-
gest that these interventions reveal a crucial fact: that the lack of relation
Lacan identifies between the sexes (due to the fact that he sees the femi-
nine as primarily existing outside of the symbolic) is actually a performa-
tive effect of the masculine subject’s refusal of a possible mutual relation.
Thus, rather than accepting that the feminine is simply nonthematizable
in language, Irigaray will propose the development of a new, shared lan-
guage, because she identifies the fact that the feminine has been cast as
such by someone—namely, the masculine subject, who perpetually con-
flates his own perspective with “objective” reality. This understanding of
a nonrelational limit will help us understand Irigaray’s vision of sexuate
subjectivity as a response to a relational limit, by contrast, in the later
chapters of this book.
Chap. 4, then, begins with the following question: how, if Irigaray is
correct that Lacan’s discourse is the “truth” of the relation between the
sexes (or lack thereof ) under the rule of the “masculine” discourse, is a
woman to begin to speak? To what language can she appeal? I suggest that
Irigaray’s move toward a more sustained dialogue with Heidegger helps
us respond to this question, insofar as Heidegger offers an alternative to
Lacan’s structuralist thinking of language. Furthermore, Heidegger’s
ontological thinking of language helps me to link Irigaray’s earlier “criti-
cal” work with her later ontological work, since the latter can be under-
stood as the development of resources necessary for moving out of the
impossible situation Lacan’s discourse so paradigmatically portrays. I
offer a close reading of Heidegger’s essay “Language” in order to substan-
tiate my claim that, for Heidegger, language exceeds the human and calls
upon us to speak in a manner that would attune our speech to what he

calls the “speaking of language”—that is to say, to speak in such a way as
to attune ourselves to the structures that condition our existence. I then
turn to The Way of Love to show how Irigaray substantially develops a
Heideggerian ontology, and indeed shares his ontological thinking of lan-
guage. However, for Irigaray, unlike for Heidegger, to attune our speech
to the structures of our very existence means, above all, to attune our
speech to the relation of sexuate difference—thus, her conception of “the
speaking of language” is by necessity a conception of a shared language: a
language spoken in a living dialogue between two subjects.
In Chap. 5 I then more explicitly elaborate this ethical vision in
response to the overarching question of what exactly Irigaray means
by the “subject.” I argue that Irigaray, like Heidegger, proposes an
ontology that escapes the metaphysical conception of subjectivity as a
substance. However, unlike Heidegger, Irigaray maintains the lan-
guage of subjectivity to denote a movement alternately toward the
other and back into the self. This linguistic movement carves out a
“place” for the subject that is always internally enabled and limited by
the “place” of the other. Reading Irigaray along with Aristotle (whose
conception of place in The Physics she draws upon), I propose the idea
of psychic place as a way of understanding sexuate subjectivity as
structured by relational limits. I contrast these limits to the limit pro-
vided by the phallus in Lacan’s picture of language (the symbolic).
While the phallus determines meaning from “outside,” setting up a
network of structural relations, Irigaray’s relational limit consists in a
kind of shared obscurity between two “places,” developed through the
practice of a language, a speaking that perpetually constitutes and re-
constitutes its horizon of meaning in the living relation to another.
In Chap. 6, I turn to some practical implications of Irigaray’s work,
suggesting that the dialogic relation in which subjects develop and actual-
ize is deeply connected to social and political conditions. Such conditions
inform and constrain the possibilities of dialogue, while at the same time
the dialogues and movements of subjectivity envisioned by Irigaray have
the potential to alter social and political spheres. I use the example of
domestic violence to illustrate this point. Domestic violence, I suggest,
can be seen as both a consequence and a reinforcement of a nonrelational
12 E. R. Jones
comportment toward the other and its effects. The dynamics of domestic
violence encapsulate a deep truth about women’s lack of “place” in patri-
archal society and illustrate how the status of the ontological relation of
sexuate difference can manifest in grim everyday realities. Irigaray’s work
allows us to envision, and to create, a nonviolent relation with those who
are other to us. I also continue to argue in this chapter that shifting from
a paradigm of identity to one of relation has the potential to inform and
transform the way we conceive of many social and political issues. At the
same time, I acknowledge the impetus behind many of the questions that
arise from an identity politics framework, and I offer a response to some
questions about the meaning of “sexuate difference,” exploring how the
ideas I have developed can be applied not only to individuals who iden-
tify as cisgender men and women but also trans and nonbinary individu-
als. In this response, I continue to flesh out the notion of sexuate
subjectivity as place, drawing on Irigaray’s most recent texts, especially To
Be Born and Sharing the Fire.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004.
Cimitile, Maria C. and Elaine P. Miller, Eds. Returning to Irigaray. New York:
SUNY, 2007.
Deutscher, Penelope. A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce
Irigaray. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002.
Heidegger, Martin. Identity and Difference. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002.
———. Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity. Trans. John van Buren.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Jones, Emma R. “In the Presence of the Living Cockroach: The Moment of
Aliveness and the Gendered Body in Agamben and Lispector,” in PhaenEx,
Vol. 2, Iss. 2. (2007): 24–41.
Jones, Rachel. Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity

Press (2011).
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne
E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Oliver, Kelly. Response Ethics. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019.
Stone, Alison. Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Whitford, Margaret. Whitford, Margaret. Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the
Feminine. New York: Routledge, 1991.
2
Muted Receptions: Identity and Sexuate
Difference
We typically think of “relation” as something that comes into play after

identities are formed: in other words, I am I, you are you, and we may
choose whether to come into a relationship with one another. Or we may
consider more abstract relations—those of social position, for example,
or economic relations. These relations between abstract entities are typi-
cally thought of like points on a line: the points preexist the line that
connects them. But what if the relation itself were primary? Perhaps I am
not I prior to any relation, since I always develop in relation—certainly
in physical relation to a mother or birthing parent, certainly in relation to
many others during the course of my growth; but even as an adult, I may
encounter myself differently as a product of different relations to others.
What if being gives itself—and gives us to ourselves—as relation?
This book argues that for Luce Irigaray, this is precisely the case. And
further, for Irigaray, being gives itself to us as a sexuate relation. For her,
sexuation seems always to be the first figure of both relation and limita-
tion: my body, but also my being, is sexuately specific in some way, and
this makes me not simply a “neutral” human being who understands or
appropriates the experiences of all humans, but rather a specific being: one
who, in being limited, is always delineated in relation to something—to
someone—other.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 15

E. R. Jones, Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19305-7_2
16 E. R. Jones
To propose relation as primary in this way disrupts many features of

traditional philosophy and feminist theory. If relation is primary, how do
we understand identity politics, which is based on the notion that indi-
viduals who belong to a particular identity group have specific concerns,
vulnerabilities, and needs? What exactly does it mean to say that sexuate
difference is or could be a relation rather than an identity category: some-
thing grounded in nature, culture, language, or all three? And is this actu-
ally what Irigaray proposes? Further, how does this notion of a relational
ontology connect to Irigaray’s ethical project of proposing a new, more
respectful relationship between sexuately different subjects? These ques-
tions guide the development of this book. In this chapter, I will situate
them within the context of mid-century feminist movements in France
and the United States, which will help us to better understand what is at
stake in the difference between asking about sexuate difference as an
identity (or set of identities) and asking about it as a relation, as well as to
understand some of the ways Irigaray’s work has been received and inter-
preted by her readers.
I argue here that readers of Irigaray have long struggled to discern
the meaning of “sexuate difference” for her in part because of a perva-
sive assumption that sexuate difference is about identity rather than
relation. I offer a brief overview of Irigaray’s oeuvre and provide histori-
cal and scholarly context to show how a preoccupation with identity is
present in many of the scholarly debates surrounding this oeuvre. This
preoccupation, I suggest, also may be one reason why some scholars
have viewed Irigaray’s earlier and later works as discontinuous with
each other, though she herself views them as part of an overarching
philosophical project. Finally, I offer an interpretation of the first two
essays in Irigaray’s seminal text Speculum of the Other Woman to dem-
onstrate that, despite many readings to the contrary, and even at this
early stage in her work, Irigaray is in fact concerned above all with
questions of relationality.
2 Muted Receptions: Identity and Sexuate Difference 17
The Philosopher Who is Not One

The question of sexuate difference has stood at the heart of Irigaray’s phi-
losophy since the mid-1970s. But the meaning of this term is far from
settled. In fact, in much of the scholarly literature that has been produced
on Irigaray, one encounters a dizzying array of perspectives that often
seem to vacillate between branding her as a deconstructionist who
eschews any notion of “identity,” including sexuate identity, and as an
essentialist who problematically proposes unchanging male and female
identities. These vacillations point to real tensions within Irigaray’s work
over the decades. As Whitford (1991) writes:
[Irigaray] writes that women are the support of representation, that one
cannot speak of representation where women are concerned, and yet also
that they need images and representations of their own. […] Or that she is
not trying to provide an alternative to onto-theology, but also that women
need a religion of their own. (p. 135)
Furthermore, in the Anglophone feminist world and within the context

of identity politics, questions about what a woman is: who counts as one,
whether womanhood is “biological” or not, who can lay claim to this
identity, and so forth, have troubled feminism for decades, and continue
to do so today. I revisit some of these issues in greater detail in Chap. 6.
Below, I offer some context and history to elucidate Irigaray’s scholarly
reception in the U.S.
In both France and the U.S., women’s movements in the 1970s became
characterized by factions that disagreed over the nature of “women’s”
identity as a group. In France this debate took the form of what one
might call psychologically oriented versus materialist articulations of
feminism. The psychological side of this debate was linked with Lacanian
psychoanalysis while the materialist side was indebted to a feminist
uptake of Marx and Engels. In 1979, the debate came to a head and the
Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) formally split into two fac-
tions: Feministes Révolutionnaires (FR) and Psychanalyse et Politique (Psych.
18 E. R. Jones
et Po.). Some Anglophone feminists’ burgeoning interest in a possible

collaboration between feminism and psychoanalysis in the 1980s can be
traced to the influence of Psych. et Po. Oddly, in 1974 Juliet Mitchell (in
Psychoanalysis and Feminism, the earliest full-scale attempt to bring
Freudian psychoanalysis to Anglophone feminists, who had previously
rejected psychoanalysis for the most part wholesale) identifies Psych. et Po.
as a “Marxist” group, and she explains their mission as follows:
They argue that psychoanalysis gives us the concepts with which we can
comprehend how ideology functions [….] [I]t further offers an analysis of
the place and meaning of sexuality and of gender differences within society.
So where Marxist theory explains the historical and economic situation,
psychoanalysis, in conjunction with the notions of ideology already gained
by dialectical materialism, is the way into understanding ideology and sex-
uality. (p. xxii)
As Claire Duchen (1986) documents, however, it was the FR group that

primarily saw itself as a Marxist—or at least a materialist—group.
Members like Monique Wittig (1992) held a materialist view of sexuality,
believing that categories of “men” and “women” are purely class catego-
ries. From the perspective of most of the thinkers associated with the FR,
then, feminism does not necessarily need to explore sexuate difference in
a positive sense—or, at the very least, psychoanalysis is not the best tool
for such exploration. Rather, sexual difference is better understood as a
“difference” constructed and produced on the basis of power relations.
The Psych. et Po. group, on the other hand believed that material, polit-
ical transformation was insufficient to achieving feminist aims. Heavily
influenced by the work of Jacques Lacan, the group’s primary focus was
on elaborating a specifically feminine unconscious and on challenging
phallogocentric structures of both political power and language. Claire
Duchen describes the conflict thus: “The second area of conflict that has
existed in France since the early 1970s, is over the existence or not of a
specifically feminine difference. The issue is symptomatic of the incom-
patible approaches in the MLF to the whole question of women’s oppres-
sion and women’s liberation” (p. 20). While Irigaray herself was never
formally affiliated with either of these factions, her work is often
associated with that of Psych. et Po, due to her status as a trained psycho-
analyst as well as the focus, throughout her work, on the potentialities of
the “feminine” and the idea of the possibility of a specifically “feminine”
subjectivity. This has led to some political tensions concerning her popu-
larity in the English-speaking feminist world, since early commentators
on so-called “French Feminism” effectively erased the scholarship of
many members of the FR and presented the views of Psych. et Po. as
“French feminism” tout court. (Delphy 1995).
The reception of Irigaray’s work in the U.S. is complex, then, given the
context outlined above. Further, Anglophone readers also understand-
ably situated her works within the paradigms offered by feminist move-
ments in the Anglophone world, which lacked an equivalent to Psych et
Po. The Women’s Liberation Movement in the United States, nonethe-
less, was also characterized by nature/nurture debates and by a multiplic-
ity of factions. By the 1980s (when English translations of texts considered
part of “French feminism” became widely available), much of this strug-
gle had moved into an academic context, and feminist theorists were in
heated turmoil over the issue of whether or not one could claim an
“essence” common to women. Many were wary of attempts to claim such
an essence, since they viewed limiting definitions of “woman” as part and
parcel of women’s oppression under patriarchy—in other words as post
facto justifications for a subordinate social position. The charge of “essen-
tialism” took on added political force particularly during the “sex wars” of
1980s feminism, in which radical feminists (especially those arguing
against pornography like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon)
were attacked both for allegedly being “anti-sex” and for falsely universal-
izing and de-historicizing what it means to be a woman. (Schor 1994) In
subsequent years, the term became widely used as a criticism, with many
feminist thinkers deeply wary about, and on the lookout for, any theory
that seemed to reify patriarchal stereotypes of woman. At times this
resulted in a limitation of acceptable points of view within the field. As
Naomi Schor (1994) writes: “The word essentialism has been endowed
within the context of feminism with the power to reduce to silence, to
excommunicate, to consign to oblivion” (p. 59).
Unsurprisingly, given this social and political context, almost all early
debates within Irigaray scholarship focused overwhelmingly on this
20 E. R. Jones
question of “essentialism.” Very early on, she was taken to be a “radical,”

gynocentric feminist with much in common with American thinkers like
Mary Daly, Robin Morgan, or Susan Griffin, despite the fact that her
work seemed to borrow more from Lacan and Derrida, who famously
question “identity” (Young 1994). Monique Plaza (1978) read Irigaray
as, “an anti-feminist who echoes patriarchy’s recuperation of feminist
subversion” (Whitford 1991, p. 9). Toril Moi (1985) read her as an
“essentialist” in the gynocentric sense—she argued that Irigaray tries to
offer a contentful definition of “the feminine,” which thus limits her posi-
tion from the start by making it exclusionary. In Britain, Janet Sayers
(1987) accused Irigaray of biological essentialism, while Lynne Segal
called her a “psychic essentialist” (1987, both cited in Whitford, p. 9).
The common thread throughout these critiques is the idea that Irigaray is
offering some kind of deterministic account of what it means to be a
woman: either womanhood is determined by one’s anatomy (biological
essentialism) or it is determined by our position within the cultural sym-
bolic order (psychic essentialism). Representatives of both strands of
feminist critique agreed in their commitment to liberating women from
social roles based on just such determinist ideas.
The first major vacillation in Irigaray scholarship, then, consisted in a
move away from this “essentialist” or gynocentric reading toward one in
which scholars unearthed Irigaray’s connection to Lacan and Derrida
(who, through English translations, were also coming to popularity in
U.S. academic circles in the 1980s and 90s) and thus began to frame her
as a staunch anti-essentialist. These readers re-interpreted Irigaray’s proj-
ect as one of deconstructing identity tout court rather than one of naïvely
valuing a so-called “feminine” identity. In this characterization of Irigaray’s
endeavor, Derrida was seen as a major theoretical interlocutor, and her
goal was seen as primarily to disrupt masculine discourse through the
revelation of its inherent instability. Judith Butler, in her early works
(1990, 1993), endorsed Irigaray’ subversion of patriarchal discourse by
discovering the feminine as that which is “constitutively excluded” from
discourse itself, and thus from all constructions of identity; Elizabeth
Grosz (1994) celebrated the body as a site of inherent instability and
lability, and viewed Irigaray as an ally in this endeavor; Jane Gallop
(1984) read Irigaray as essentially a Lacanian who believed all identity
construction to be framed within a necessarily contingent (and thus sub-

ject to disruption) symbolic order; and Penelope Deutscher (2002) read
her as making a kind of Derridean appeal to an inherently “impossible”
figure of sexual difference.
Over the past two decades, however, as Irigaray has continued to
author new works, the scholarship has begun to shift back toward a dis-
cussion of “essentialism.” Despite the fact that 1990s monographs like
Tina Chanter’s Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Re-Writing of the Philosophers
(1994) and Margaret Whitford’s Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine
(1991) offered invaluable and nuanced readings of her work that explored
in depth her multifaceted connections to thinkers such as Lacan, Derrida,
Hiedegger, Beauvoir, and the Ancient Greeks, none of whom provide
facile understandings of “identity,” Irigaray’s increasing insistence on the
figure of “two” different sexuate subjects, her proposal of sexuate laws,
and her turns toward an ethics of dialogue with the sexuate other sparked
concerns. Critics again worried that Irigaray’s understanding of sexuate
difference was “essentialist” both in terms of potentially reinforcing patri-
archal stereotypes and in the sense of offering a decontextualized defini-
tion of woman, which (for example) is ahistorical and so analyzed apart
from, rather than in intersection with, race and class. (Cimitile and Miller
2007; Jones 2011).
Among those who still view Irigaray’s work as productive for feminism
today, Irigaray’s language of “ontology” has emerged as a possible locus
for responding to some of these concerns.1 However, there is at times an
ambiguity around this term, which to some seems to mean something
like a reference to men and women as fixed beings or “entities”—in other
words, some scholars believe that to invoke ontology is to invoke the
question of what a being is. Thus, these readers believe that in asserting
sexuate difference to be an ontological difference, Irigaray is precisely
resorting to a kind of essentialism, because she is proposing that men and
women have fixed identities. Drucilla Cornell, for instance, seems to
interpret “ontology” this way when she says “[w]hat [Irigaray] calls for is
1
While few monographs have yet encompassed her more recent works, several edited volumes and
special journal issues have appeared in the last two decades that engage some of the “later” works of
Luce Irigaray and which engage her dialogues with Heidegger. See for example Cimitile and Miller
(2007), Škof and Holmes (2013), Bostic (2012), Škof and Roberts (2022).
22 E. R. Jones
a set of sexuate rights appropriate to these entities, these beings, these

creatures, who are an ontological universal” (Grosz et al. 1998, p. 26).
According to Cornell this is precisely a politically “conservative” move
insofar as it reifies sexuate subjects as “entities.”
To be fair, Irigaray does speak about characteristics particular to men
and women, but the assumption that this means she is speaking about
entities and their predicates relies on a particular interpretation of her
understanding of ontology, one that uses the lens of identity. Alison Stone
(2006), for example, in her attentive and original text Luce Irigaray and
the Philosophy of Sexual Difference, has attempted a full-scale defense of
Irigaray against claims that her work is not useful for feminist purposes,
but she does so by affirming her essentialism rather than denying it. The
key, for Stone, is to re-think the meaning of “essence” according to
Schelling’s understanding of nature as a principle of self-differentiation.
But Stone herself subsumes ontology to identity when she writes “I have
used ‘ontology’ simply to mean a theory of what exists—of what kinds of
entities populate the world” (p. 94). And while she acknowledges that
Irigaray also appeals to Heideggerian ontology, which precisely does not
concern entities, Stone nevertheless argues that Irigaray’s philosophy is
fundamentally a philosophy of natural “essence,” namely, of “kinds of
entities.”
Stone’s reading also perpetuates the idea that the “ontological” aspect
of sexuate difference has to do with the body or nature while the rela-
tional “subjective” aspect has to do with the psyche and with culture.
(Mader 2008) But perhaps, as Rachel Jones (2011) points out, to think
through sexuate difference at a deeper ontological level would precisely
be to throw into question the traditional categories of (and the opposi-
tion between) mind and body, nature and culture.2 Irigaray herself says
that “[t]he feminine subject does not relate to the self, to the other(s), to
the world as a masculine subject does. This does not depend only on
bodily morphology and anatomy or on social stereotypes, as many people
2
Jones, in her especially lucid and comprehensive text Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy (Jones
2011), draws on Heidegger’s notion of poetic language as “projective announcement” to suggest
that Irigaray’s invocation of the features of sexuate identity is a creative, performative and poetic act
rather than a descriptive one. Jones also gestures toward the possibility of interpreting Irigaray as
proposing a relational ontology, though this possibility is not developed in detail in her text.
imagine. Rather, it is a question of relational identity that precisely realizes

the original connection between body and culture” (CV, p. 77, my empha-
sis). I contend that if “ontology” is interpreted to mean a theory of defini-
tion or identity, this re-thinking of sexuate difference as preceding the
mind/body or nature/culture distinctions will not occur.
In fact, I would argue that to focus on questions of the type “what is
x”—as in “what is woman?” “what is sexuate difference?”—is to remain
within a presumptive metaphysics that Irigaray’s work precisely tries to
disrupt. That is to say, the question “what is woman?” occurs to us as the
result of a situation that, for Irigaray, is already conditioned by the repres-
sion of sexuate difference. What does this mean? According to Irigaray’s
early works, as we will see, the “feminine” is precisely that which has been
repressed throughout the history of Western metaphysics—that which
has been relegated to the “outside” of any system of coherence: that which
is said to be “other,” and hence not meaningful. (SOW) When speaking
about human “subjects,” then, we are typically already operating within a
structure of meaning in which “subject” (as unified and “one”) is already
coded as “male.” The task of trying to define “woman” thus necessarily
begins after this move—after subjectivity has already been construed by
way of an erasure of the feminine. This is because if we imagine “women”
and “men” as “subjects” whose definitions we can debate, we approach
the problem from within a perspective which, in declaring itself to be
“objective,” begins with a presumption of subjective unity that is predi-
cated on the foreclosure of the feminine (we imagine that we are “sub-
jects” investigating the world of “objects”). Thus, from Irigaray’s
perspective, “defining” women could never uncover the deeper problem
of the masculine construction of human subjectivity itself. To read her
work as ultimately proposing such a definition, in my view, risks limiting
the ways in which we are able to hear the central contribution of that
work, which is precisely to change the configuration of subject and object:
indeed, the very definition of what it means to be a “subject.”
In sum, readings of Irigaray have gone from essentialist to deconstruc-
tionist and back again. Throughout Irigaray scholarship, many readers
have struggled to place Irigaray on one side or the other of this debate.
Often, we have expected Irigaray’s texts to provide us primarily with a
descriptive theory of what women are or are not; and many have read her
24 E. R. Jones
statements about sexuate difference, the feminine, and women, and even
ontology, to be offering such a theory. When read as a “deconstruction-
ist,” it seems that Irigaray has no way to say what women “are,” because
for her there is no underlying subject that could be anything—that could
possess “feminine” qualities. On this deconstructive reading the “femi-
nine” is a name for precisely that indeterminacy which disrupts substance
metaphysics. But when scholars read Irigaray’s recent work as inexplica-
bly asserting just such an underlying subject/substance—in fact, two of
them, “man and woman”—they often assume she must have made a
sharp departure from her earlier use of the term “feminine,” and must
now be using it in an essentialist sense. For those who have attempted
more sympathetic and continuous readings of Irigaray’s oeuvre, her invo-
cation of “ontology” is a locus of debate, with this term at times being
conflated with theories of nature and identity by both critics and sup-
porters. Most of these discussions, it should be noted, still remain within
a paradigm of definition—in other words they still concern themselves
with the what of sexuate difference.
Irigaray’s Three Phases

Irigaray has often noted that she views her work as divided into three
distinct, yet related, stages. She described them in a 1995 interview as
follows: “Thus, three phases: the first a critique, you might say, of the
auto-mono-centrism of the Western subject; the second, how to define a
second subject; and the third phase, how to define a relationship, a phi-
losophy, an ethic, a relationship between two different subjects” (JLI,
p. 3). The initial “disruptive” or critical phase of Irigaray’s work can clearly
be seen in texts like 1974’s Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex
Which Is Not One from 1977. In Speculum, Irigaray’s voice works to reveal
the hidden desires, projections, and repressions of the masculine subject
of psychoanalytic discourse and philosophy. For instance, in the first sec-
tion of the text (discussed in greater detail below), Irigaray performs a
reading of Freud’s lecture on femininity in which she critically mimes the
self-assured discourse of his “objective” and scientific observations. This
critical mimicry works to reveal that the supposedly “neutral” point of
view from which Freud speaks is in fact precisely a masculine point of

view—his lecture is, in fact, a matter of a man, speaking to other men,
about the object “woman.” Within this lecture, then, Irigaray identifies in
Freud’s “definition” of woman the identifications and projections occa-
sioned by this situation of dialogue and desire between men. She speaks
of what she calls “hom(m)osexuality” to designate the fact that men
(hommes) are the only subjects represented in this discourse on sexuality:
their “definitions” of woman are only projections of their own repressed
desires (SOW, p. 142; SAF, p. 246).
This Sex Which Is Not One is a collection of pieces published around the
same time as Speculum, and it also includes some pieces that respond to
questions following Speculum’s controversial publication.3 Here Irigaray
elaborates further on her critiques of psychoanalytic discourse (discussing
Freud, Horney, and Ernest Jones). She also more explicitly takes on
Lacan. In the essay, “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of
the Feminine,” Irigaray explicitly asserts the importance of critiquing
philosophy itself, claiming that she was led to a thoroughgoing critique
of Western metaphysics through the discovery of the metaphysical pre-
suppositions that circumscribe psychoanalytic thinking, especially those
concerning female sexuality. She writes: “it is indeed precisely philosophi-
cal discourse that we have to challenge, and disrupt, inasmuch as this
discourse sets forth the law for all others, inasmuch as it constitutes the
discourse on discourse” (TS, p. 74; CS, p. 73). She thus explicitly speaks
of “‘reopening’ the figures of philosophical discourse—idea, substance,
subject, transcendental subjectivity, absolute knowledge—in order to pry
out of them what they have borrowed that is feminine, from the femi-
nine, [les emprunts au/du feminin] to make them ‘render up’ and give back
what they owe the feminine” (TS, p. 74; CS, p. 72). Further, if “the femi-
nine” has been repressed throughout the history of Western philosophy,
Irigaray suggests, there is no possibility of simply claiming the “reality” of
woman as a subject, because to do so would already be to operate within
the masculine scheme of discourse. Instead: “There is, in an initial phase,
3
The publication of Speculum resulted in the termination of Irigaray’s teaching post at Vincennes,
as well as her expulsion from the group of Lacanian analysts with whom she had trained and
practiced.
26 E. R. Jones
perhaps only one ‘path,’ the one historically assigned to the feminine:
that of mimicry. One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which
means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation,
and thus to begin to thwart it” (TS, p. 76; CS, p. 75). This line can be
read as an explicit statement of the “critical mimicry” some readers iden-
tified in Irigaray’s early work. (Burke et al. 1994) Indeed, to “convert
[woman’s] form of subordination into an affirmation” is precisely to be a
bad mimic—to mimic in a way that is imperfect, inexact, and, as such, is
a form of imitation that reveals the mechanism of mimicry itself. Such a
revelation would, according to Irigaray, precisely destabilize the mascu-
line illusion of self-sufficiency.
In sum, this early “phase” of Irigaray’s work, comprised of primarily
Speculum and This Sex, fits well with the image of a feminist philosopher
engaged in immanent critique, deconstructing and subverting philo-
sophical and psychoanalytic paradigms from within, and offering, in the
name of the repressed “feminine,” a thoroughgoing indictment of “mas-
culine discourse.” These texts also remain the most widely read of Irigaray’s
work—the title essay from This Sex Which Is Not One, for instance,
appears in many feminist anthologies and across women’s studies
curricula.
But as previously noted, in light of the appearance of more English
translations of Irigaray’s texts of the 1980’s and early ‘90’s, some readers
began to identify what they perceived to be a distinct shift in Irigaray’s
work, in terms of both content and style. An Ethics of Sexual Difference,
written in 1984 (based on Irigaray’s lectures in philosophy at the
University of Rotterdam) and translated into English in 1993, in some
sense marked the beginning of this transition. While this text could still
be read as a re-interpretation of philosophical themes and figures (Irigaray
explicitly advocates there a re-thinking of place, space, and time, and
offers readings of Aristotle, Merleau-Ponty, Lévinas, and Diotima’s speech
from Plato’s Symposium), the goal of the text seems to be less a revelation
of the repressed feminine than a discussion of the repressed possibilities
of a relationship between two different sexes. Irigaray uses the language of
“woman” and “man” in this text, whereas previously she had more often
spoken of “masculine discourse” and the “feminine.” Additionally, texts
like Sexes and Genealogies (Irigaray 1993b), a series of lectures delivered in
the 1980’s and translated into English in 1993 (orig. Pub. 1987), Thinking
the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution (1994, orig. Pub. 1989) and Je,
Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference (1992, orig. Pub. 1990), pre-
sented a voice that was more topical, and seemed more to “own” its own
perspective, rather than mimicking or deconstructing. In these texts, for
instance, Irigaray responded to contemporary events such as the nuclear
disaster at Chernobyl, investigated the possibility of a feminine divinity,
commented on topics such as AIDS, women’s health, and beauty, and
developed her notion of “sexuate rights.” She developed the latter con-
cept further in I Love To You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity Within History
(1995a, orig. Pub. 1992), which is largely an engagement with Hegel, as
well as Democracy Begins Between Two (2000, orig. Pub. 1994) (originally
written in Italian, and reflecting her engagement with the Italian
Communist Party). During this middle period Irigaray also composed
several poetic texts, which invoked a more “positive” voice rather than a
strictly critical one: these could be said to include Marine Lover of
Friedrich Nietzsche (1991, orig. Pub. 1980), The Forgetting of Air In
Martin Heidegger (1999, orig. Pub. 1983), Elemental Passions (1992, orig.
Pub. 1982), and a book of poetry, Everyday Prayers, which, though pub-
lished in 2004, consisted of selected poems written during the 1990s.
Throughout the 1990s Irigaray continued to publish, with texts such
as To Be Two (2001, orig. Pub. Italian 1994) and I Love to You beginning
to explicitly explore the notion of a relation between two sexually differ-
ent subjects. Additionally, she continued to publish pieces about empiri-
cal research she has done with school children concerning differences in
language use between boys and girls (2002b).
In her works since the turn of the millennium, Irigaray has largely
come to focus on what she now almost exclusively calls “sexuate” differ-
ence as an explicitly “ontological” difference. The question of ontology,
for Irigaray, also involves the questions of the relation of the cultural to
the natural and of the spiritual to the material. This line of questioning is
developed through The Way of Love (2002a), which considers the ques-
tion of dialogue between sexuate subjects through an engagement with
Heidegger’s later work on language and ontology, and Sharing the World
(2008a), which in many ways continues the exploration Irigaray began in
The Way of Love. She has also published, in addition to a number of edited
28 E. R. Jones
and collaborative volumes, In the Beginning, She Was (2013), an explora-

tion of Pre-Socratic philosophy that attempts to uncover the mechanism
whereby lived experience becomes subject to a logos that halts its dynamic
becoming; To Be Born (2017), which explores how our early embodied
experiences become subject to discourses of domination; Sharing the Fire
(2019), which explores how Hegel’s conception of the dialectical move-
ment of Spirit and its striving for the Absolute does not adequately cap-
ture the movement of human becoming, because it is based on a
subject-object framework rather than a subject-subject or intersubjective
framework; and A New Culture of Energy (2021), which reflects on her
experiences as a practitioner of both psychoanalysis and yoga to continue
her exploration of relation and difference.4 But how are we to receive
these works, considering both Irigaray’s earlier works and her assertion
that her work forms three interconnected phases?
Indeed, we might still wonder: if these insights of Speculum and This
Sex are correct, how could Irigaray be justified in speaking as a “subject”
or an author in her own right? How, if the feminine is precisely that
which has been repressed within the discourse of identity, could she speak
in the name of a feminine “subject” about women’s rights and needs, or
of the ethical possibilities of a relation between “two” seemingly defined
subjects? Does such a move not reify sexuate difference in precisely the
manner of the previously skewered “masculine” discourse? Further, how
could any definition of feminine subjectivity avoid reifying patriarchal
stereotypes of women, not to mention reinforcing the gender binary?
Given these questions, we might further wonder: is the (seemingly decon-
structive) philosophical “framework,” such as it is, of Speculum and This
Sex, actually the framework for Irigaray’s later writings? Or has Irigaray
shifted toward a more “realist” view, or metaphysics, of sexuate
difference?
In a 2010 journal article, titled “Ethical Gestures Toward the Other,”
Irigaray states: “I could say that, from the beginning, the aim of my work
is to try to favor ethical relations between human beings. A thing that
4
As of this writing (2022), another volume edited by Irigaray titled Challenging a Fictitious
Neutrality: Heidegger in Question is going to press (Palgrave), containing a substantial chapter by
Irigaray on Heideggerian ontology as well as chapters by Mahon O’Brien, David Farrell Krell,
and myself.
proves impossible in a culture or tradition in which the subject appears as

neuter or neutral” (p. 3). Thus, we can consider the possibility that,
throughout all three stages of Irigaray’s work, ethical relations may prove
to be the uniting thread. Notably, in the quote offered above, Irigaray
even subsumes the issue of the disruption of masculine discourse and
culture to the issue of ethics. The quotation implies that the critique of
the culture of “one” male subject must be undertaken precisely because
ethical relations between humans cannot come into being, much less
thrive, in this monological climate. Considering this insight, Irigaray’s
early critical work could in fact be taken as a precondition for the con-
structive thinking of her later work. This is because the positivity of
Irigaray’s own voice and vision could not be developed without a thor-
oughgoing disruption of the monological, masculine definition of sub-
jectivity. A provisional answer to the question of how Irigaray might be
justified in speaking about a “feminine” subject in light of her critique of
masculine subjectivity in her early works, then, is that her work precisely
transforms the concept of subjectivity itself; and it performs this transfor-
mation in search of a more ethical relation between sexuate “subjects.”
In fact, upon a careful rereading—and indeed, we can now benefit by
reading her earlier works in light of the later ones—Irigaray’s philosophi-
cal project, beginning with Speculum, has always sought to undermine
the traditional definition of subjectivity; and, furthermore, it has always
been concerned with the question of relation over the question of iden-
tity. In the next section, I analyze crucial sections from Speculum to show
how this is the case.
30 E. R. Jones
Femininity and The Transformation

of “the Subject”
Speculum of the Other Woman, which began as Irigaray’s second doctoral
thesis,5 engages a plethora of interlocutors including Freud, Lacan, Kant,
Hegel, and Plato. The connecting theme of the text will here be presented
primarily through a discussion of the first section, “The Blind Spot of an
Old Dream of Symmetry,” in which Irigaray critiques/parodies Freud’s
lectures on “Femininity.” Irigaray’s guiding thesis here is that woman, or
the feminine, has been reduced, through a process of repression and
denial on the part of the masculine subject or “discourse,” to the function
of a mirror or “speculum” that would reflect the masculine back to him-
self, and that would thereby confirm his desire and his identity. Woman,
Irigaray suggests, has been denied any “positive” being because she has
been utilized only as the support for masculine identity, which is then
conflated with identity as such. Irigaray’s text proceeds by way of citing
long sections from Freud’s lecture and interspersing them with her “own”
voice. For ease of explication, I will briefly summarize Freud’s lecture, and
focus my textual analysis on Irigaray’s own words—although it is duly
noted that her very intervention shows the initial impossibility of these
words being truly her “own.”
In effect, Freud (1965) provides only one model of sexual develop-
ment: the model centered on the little boy’s Oedipal complex. His discus-
sion of the girl’s Oedipal complex is derivative of this. The story, to put it
briefly, goes as follows. The child (both the little boy and the little girl) is
originally libidinally attached to the mother. But castration anxiety inter-
venes in the following way: in seeing that the little girl appears “castrated,”
the boy becomes anxious because he believes that the girl’s penis has been
removed, perhaps by the father. Thus, the (first) resolution of the Oedipal
complex occurs, for Freud, precisely with the boy’s acknowledgement
(such as it is) of sexual difference. The fear of paternal authority thereby
5
Irigaray’s first doctoral thesis, Le langage des déments (1973), was prepared for her doctoral degree
in linguistics, for which she studied the speech pathology of patients with schizophrenia and senile
dementia. It is notable that she returned to empirical research in her later work to substantiate her
claims about the differences in language use between sexually different subjects.
incurred causes the boy to renounce his love for his mother and transfer
it onto another object. The girl, on the other hand, experiences the cas-
tration complex with regard to the mother, and her anger about the
mother’s lack of the penis (she cannot give it to the little girl) causes her
to transfer her desire not only to another object, but to the father, who is
a sexually different object. Then, because the father is not an appropriate
sexual object for her, she desires the phallus in the form of a (preferably
male) child.6
While this story would ostensibly constitute Freud’s explication of the
psychosexual impacts of sexual difference, Irigaray writes that this model
actually shows how “the Oedipus complex [does] not serve to articulate
the difference between the sexes, but to ensure the passage of the (socio-
symbolic) law of the father” (p. 31). Indeed, the girl’s “resolution” of the
Oedipus complex does not involve her becoming an adult by way of tak-
ing her place in a symbolic economy (of the psyche or of culture) as a
woman, but rather by rejecting a woman (the mother), and taking her
place in reality, as it were, only by way of the desire to pass on the phallus
through giving birth to a male child. Thus, rather than being truly a dis-
course concerning sexual difference, Freud’s discourse can actually be read
as being about sexual sameness, insofar as
we must admit that THE LITTLE GIRL IS THEREFORE A LITTLE

MAN. A little man who will suffer a more painful and complicated evolu-
tion than the little boy in order to become a normal woman! A little man
with a smaller penis. A disadvantaged little man. […] More envious and
jealous because less well-endowed … a little man who would have no other
desire than to be, or remain, a man. (p. 26)7
Freud, then, has paradoxically characterized the development of

“womanhood” beginning from the masculine position—hence the diffi-
culty he ascribes to women in their process of maturation. Certainly,
Irigaray’s remarks suggest, becoming a “normal” woman would be quite
difficult (and in fact quite impossible), in a situation where the only
6
See Freud, “Femininity,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1965).
7
Irigaray utilizes a rhetorical “we” throughout this essay, a “we” which she characterizes as a parodic,
masculine we: a “We Freud,” as she writes on p. 34.
32 E. R. Jones
model of sexual and psychic development is masculine. Furthermore,

Irigaray’s text reveals, underneath Freud’s analysis, the persistence of a
disavowed masculine desire—indeed, the desire to keep the feminine as
his analogue, his opposite; the desire to have her “prop…up” the “cur-
rency” of the phallus, to “collect hommage and bring it back to its rightful
owner” (p. 73). Within this model there is no suggestion that there could
be anything like a “feminine” desire: the male libido is the only one rec-
ognized by Freud. Thus:
[…] woman remains the place for the inscription of repressions. All of
which demands that, without knowing it, she should provide a basis for
such fantasies as the amputation of her sex organ, and that the ‘anatomy’ of
her body should put up the security for reality. […] She will therefore be
despoiled, without recourse, of all valid, valuable images of her sex/organs,
her body. She is condemned to ‘psychosis,’ or at best, ‘hysteria,’ for lack—
censorship? foreclusion? repression?—of a valid signifier for her ‘first’ desire
and for her sex/organs. (ibid., p. 55)
Rather than becoming a subject, or a place, in her own right, woman

is here said to remain the “place” for the inscription of male desire, male
repression. Further, her body “[puts] up the security for reality”: it is
effectively erased, held hostage so that “reality” can remain one, can
remain coherent and sane. Woman is effectively invisible on the Freudian
account. And yet, Irigaray identifies a kind of giveaway of the situation in
that Freud fails to “recognize” (or perhaps represses) the desire of the
father—that is, his own (inherited) desire to precisely keep the young girl
as phallic support, to not let her develop her own modalities of desire or
becoming. Thus, Irigaray writes that Freud is “himself a prisoner of a
certain economy of the logos, of a certain logic, notably of ‘desire,’ whose
link to classical philosophy he fails to see,” and that he “defines sexual
differences as a function of the a priori of the same, having recourse, to
support this demonstration, to the age-old processes: analogy, compari-
son, symmetry, dichotomic oppositions, and so on,” when (she continues),
as a card-carrying member of an ‘ideology’ that he never questions, [Freud]

insists that the sexual pleasure known as masculine is the paradigm for all
sexual pleasure, to which all representations of pleasure can but defer in

reference, support, and submission. In order to remain effective, all this
certainly needed at the very least to remain hidden! By exhibiting this
‘symptom,’ this crisis point in metaphysics where we find exposed that
sexual ‘indifference’ that had assured metaphysical coherence and ‘closure,’
Freud offers it up for our analysis. With his text offering itself to be under-
stood, to be read, as doubtless the most relevant re-mark of an ancient
dream of self…one that had never been interpreted. (p. 28)
This crucial passage displays both what we might call Irigaray’s central
“thesis” in the text, as well as her method. The “thesis” is exemplified in
her statement that Freud substitutes an a priori of the “same” for a true
thinking of sexual difference. In other words, Freud simply inserts the
feminine subject into the discourse on (masculine) sexuality, conveniently
“forgetting” that this sexuality is already specified as masculine, and thus
conflating “masculine” and “neuter.” This effectively constitutes an era-
sure of sexual difference, and instead offers a “sexual ‘indifference.’”
Further, Irigaray links this sexual indifference to the history of Western
metaphysics itself—the “ideology” that Freud never questions—as a dis-
course that seeks coherence and closure; that proceeds by way of analogy,
opposition, dichotomy, and that exploits the feminine to accomplish this
coherence.
The “method” on the other hand is announced when Irigaray says that
Freud “offers up” this ancient dream of “one” subject for analysis. She
thus suggests that, through a process of psychoanalyzing Freud’s text
itself, we might uncover the hidden desires, projections, condensations,
and so on that underlie it. Even if the “feminine” has been constructed so
as to not have her own voice, or access to her own “desire and her desire
for origin” (p. 42), Irigaray can at least expose the fissures at the heart of
this dream of symmetry: she can expose its underlying incoherencies, its
gaps, cracks, and inconsistencies. She can, in fact, expose the specular
function of the feminine in discourse. As a “hysteric” (in Freud’s dis-
course), woman becomes parodic, mimetic—she would be a “bad (copy of
a) work of art” (p. 125). Irigaray writes: “Woman’s special form of neuro-
sis would be to ‘mimic’ a work of art [….] Her neurosis would be recog-
nized as a counterfeit or parody of an artistic process. […] Artifice, lie,
34 E. R. Jones
deception, snare—these are the kinds of judgments society confers upon

the tableaux, the scenes, the dramas, the pantomimes produced by the
hysteric” (p. 125). Irigaray reveals, however, that hysteria is woman’s “spe-
cial” form of neurosis only because she has already been reduced to the
status of a mirror for masculine discourse. In a more direct reference to
the mirror, she also writes that the feminine is “The backside of (self )
representation, of the visual plane where [the masculine subject] gazes
upon himself?” (p. 135) Her fullness, her texture and materiality, have
indeed been reduced to the flat surface of a mirror in which the mascu-
line subject always and only finds himself: his analogue, or his opposite.
While it is tempting to view this proposal that the feminine, through
its revelation that dichotomic oppositions are founded on a repression,
holds the potential to dislodge the presumptive unity of the masculine
discourse as the ultimate goal of Irigaray’s writing, it is important to note
that, even at this early stage, Irigaray’s work is actually already focused on
the questions of subjectivity and of relation. In the second essay of
Speculum, titled “Every Theory of the Subject Has Always Been
Appropriated by the Masculine,” Irigaray shows how subjectivity itself, as
construed within Western philosophy, is founded upon what she
described earlier as the a priori of sameness. She writes of the threat the
positive existence of the feminine would thus pose to this self-enclosed,
self-same subject:
And even as man seeks to rise higher and higher—in his knowledge too—
so the ground fractures more and more beneath his feet […] at stake here
somewhere, ever more insistent in its deathly hauteur, is the risk that the
subject (as) self will crumble away. Also at stake, therefore, the ‘object’ and
the modes of dividing the economy between them. In particular the econ-
omy of discourse. Whereby the silent allegiance of the one guarantees the
auto-sufficiency, the auto-nomy of the other as long as no questioning of
this mutism as a symptom—of historical repression—is required. But what
if the ‘object’ started to speak? Which also means beginning to ‘see,’ etc.
What disaggregation of the subject would that entail? (SAL, p. 134–5)
At stake in the subject/object distinction, then, is precisely the repres-

sion of the feminine—she who must remain mute, reflective, negative in
order for the masculine subject to maintain his self-assurance and the
economy of his discourse. Irigaray suggests here, again, that to identify
this “mutism” as the effect of a historical repression on the part of the
masculine, rather than as a simple “fact,” is already to disrupt the scheme
of the masculine discourse, and thus to begin to transform what it means
to be a subject. Indeed, she writes:
Once imagine that woman imagines and the object loses its fixed, obses-
sional character. As a bench mark that is ultimately more crucial than the
subject, for he can sustain himself only by bouncing back off some objec-
tiveness, some objective. If there is no more ‘earth’ to press down/repress,
to work, to represent, but also and always to desire (for one’s own), no
opaque matter which in theory does not know herself, then what pedestal
remains for the ex-sistence of the ‘subject’? (ibid., p. 133)
The “subject,” then, is only such by “bouncing back” off some sort of
limit—a limit here constituted, Irigaray suggests, by the repression of the
feminine and its conflation with the “object,” rather than being under-
stood as another subject. This “nonrelational” limit as I will call it is thus,
in a sense, still a species of relation—but the relation is to an “object” and
not another subject, and thus it is not a relation in any full or reciprocal
sense. Thus, Irigaray already identifies here that what is at stake in the
masculine construction of subject and object (with woman as “object”) is
the repression or deformation of a mutual relation. Further, the above
quotation raises a crucial point. If Irigaray’s argument is that woman has
been reduced to a mirroring or “object” function in order for the mascu-
line discourse to take shape, and that it may be possible to disrupt this
discourse precisely by proposing her as her own subject, then she is clearly
not advocating for a simple “destruction,” or even deconstruction, of
identity or subjectivity. Indeed, she describes the idea of a deconstruction
of subjectivity as follows:
The ‘subject’ henceforth will be multiple, plural, sometimes di-formed, but

it will still postulate itself as the cause of all the mirages that can be enu-
merated endlessly and therefore put back together as one…A de-struc(tura)
36 E. R. Jones
tion in which the ‘subject’ is shattered, scuttled, while still claiming sur-
reptitiously that he is the reason for it all. (p. 135)
Rather than recommending either the retention of the “traditional”

conception of subjectivity or its deconstruction, I suggest that Irigaray is,
already at this earlier stage of her work, pointing toward the way in which
the limit of subjectivity must be re-thought to accommodate two sub-
jects. Here she indicates that if the subject were to become simply “mul-
tiple” this would be tantamount to his remaining one, since in being
“endlessly enumerable” the subject would be precisely unlimited and
would remain “the reason for it all.” Instead, Irigaray identifies the pos-
sibility that subjectivity itself (both “masculine” and “feminine”) might
be altered by the possibility of a positive, reciprocal relation. This concern
with a positive relation between two is further indicated in several pas-
sages of the Freud essay, where Irigaray already indicates a concern with
the erasure of the relationship of sexual difference. She writes, for
instance, that
The primary set of metaphors for desire would indeed appear to be corre-
lated, according to Freud, with what he calls the ‘maternal object.’ Not
with the father as such, since the father merely suffers the displacement of
the libido. Nor with the relation between father and mother, a man and a
woman, and thus with sexual difference” (p. 34).
And that, for Freud:
Desiring a representative of the ‘opposite’ sex entails, at least for the little
girl, rejecting a representative of one’s own sex and, indeed, as we shall see,
the representation of one’s own sex. Which will mean no possible cathexis
of the relation between the sexes? If one loves, desires one sex, one necessar-
ily denigrates, detests the other (p. 40).
Therefore, we might already suspect, from this reading of the first two
sections of Speculum, that Irigaray’s underlying concern is in fact with the
ways in which the masculine subject, in conflating himself with the “neu-
ter,” and thus conflating sexual difference with sexual indifference, has
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lives of
alchemystical philosophers
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Lives of alchemystical philosophers
Author: Arthur Edward Waite

Francis Barrett
Release date: August 5, 2022 [eBook #68687]
Language: English
Original publication: George Redway, 1888
Credits: deaurider, Amber Black and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIVES OF

ALCHEMYSTICAL PHILOSOPHERS ***
LIVES OF ALCHEMYSTICAL
PHILOSOPHERS.
LIVES
OF
Alchemystical Philosophers
BASED ON MATERIALS COLLECTED IN 1815

AND
SUPPLEMENTED BY RECENT RESEARCHES
WITH A PHILOSOPHICAL DEMONSTRATION OF THE TRUE

PRINCIPLES OF THE MAGNUM OPUS, OR GREAT WORK
OF ALCHEMICAL RE-CONSTRUCTION, AND SOME
ACCOUNT OF THE SPIRITUAL CHEMISTRY
BY
ARTHUR EDWARD WAITE
AUTHOR OF
“THE REAL HISTORY OF THE ROSICRUCIANS;” “THE MYSTERIES OF MAGIC:
A DIGEST OF THE WRITINGS OF ÉLIPHAS LÉVI,” ETC.
TO WHICH IS ADDED
A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ALCHEMY AND
HERMETIC PHILOSOPHY
LONDON
GEORGE REDWAY, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN
1888
PREFACE.
The foundation of this work will be found in “The Lives of
Alchemystical Philosophers; with a Critical Catalogue of Books in
Occult Chemistry, and a Selection of the most celebrated Treatises
on the Theory and Practice of the Hermetic Art,” which was
published in the year 1815 by Lackington, Allen, & Company, of
Finsbury Square, London. This anonymous book has been attributed
by certain collectors to Francis Barrett, author of the notorious
treatise entitled “The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer;” but it may be
safely affirmed that, alike in matter and treatment, it far transcends
the extremely meagre capacities of that credulous amateur in
occultism. It is indeed a work of much sense and unpretentious
discrimination, and is now a bibliographical rarity which is highly
prized by its possessors.
The independent researches which have supplemented the
biographical materials of the original compilation have produced in
the present volume what is practically a new work under an old title;
those lives which have been left substantially untouched as to facts
have been more or less rewritten with a view to the compression of
prolixities and the elimination of archaic forms, which would be
incongruous in a work so extensively modified by the addition of new
details. The “Alphabetical Catalogue of Works on Hermetic
Philosophy” has been considerably enlarged from such sources as
Langlet du Fresnoy’s Histoire de la Philosophie Hermétique. The
preliminary account of the “Physical Theory and Practice of the
Magnum Opus” is a slight original sketch which, to readers
unacquainted with alchemy, will afford some notion of the processes
of accredited adepts. The introductory essay on the object of
alchemical philosophy advocates new and important views
concerning the great question of psychal chemistry, and appreciates
at their true worth the conflicting theories advanced by the various
schools of Hermetic interpretation.
IMPORTANT NOTE.
I am forced to append to this Preface a correction of one or
two errors of absolutely vital importance, which were
unfortunately overlooked in the text. On page 188, line 18, the
date was intended to read 1643; on page 189, line 5, read
anno trigesimo tertio for trigesimo anno; and on line 6, anno
vigesimo tertio instead of vigesimo anno. But if these
emendations restore the passage to its original integrity, a
discovery which I have made while this work was passing
through the press has entirely cancelled its value. I have been
gratified with a sight of the original edition of Philalethes’
Introitus Apertus—a small octavo pamphlet in the original
paper cover as it was published at Amsterdam in the year
1667. It definitely establishes that its mysterious author was
born in or about the year 1623, or two years later than the
Welsh adept, Thomas Vaughan, with whom he has so long
been identified. This original edition is excessively scarce; I
believe I am the only English mystic who has seen it during
the present generation. The reader must please understand
that the calculation in the pages referred to was based on the
date 1643; this date, in the light of the original edition, has
proved erroneous, and by a curious chance, that which was
accidentally printed, turns out to be correct at the expense of
the calculation.
ANALYSIS OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
Preface 5
Introductory Essay on the True Principles and
Nature of the Magnum Opus, and on its Relation to 9
Spiritual Chemistry
On the Physical Theory and Practice of the
38
Magnum Opus
LIVES OF THE ALCHEMISTS.

Geber 44
Rhasis 46
Alfarabi 48
Avicenna 51
Morien 53
Albertus Magnus 57
Thomas Aquinas 61
Roger Bacon 63
Alain of Lisle 67
Raymond Lully 68
Arnold de Villanova 88
Jean de Meung 90
The Monk Ferarius 92
Pope John XXII. 93
Nicholas Flamel 95
Peter Bono 118
Johannes de Rupecissa 119
Basil Valentine 120
Isaac of Holland 123
Bernard Trévisan 124
John Fontaine 129
Thomas Norton 130
Thomas Dalton 133
Sir George Ripley 134
Picus de Mirandola 136
Paracelsus 137
Denis Zachaire 140
Berigard of Pisa 148
Thomas Charnock 148
Giovanni Braccesco 151
Leonardi Fioravanti 153
John Dee 153
Henry Khunrath 159
Michael Maier 160
Jacob Böhme 161
J. B. van Helmont 166
Butler 168
Jean D’Espagnet 170
Alexander Sethon 171
Michael Sendivogius 175
Gustenhover 181
Busardier 182
Anonymous Adept 184
Albert Belin 186
Eirenæus Philalethes 187
Pierre Jean Fabre 200
John Frederick Helvetius 201
Guiseppe Francesco Borri 208
John Heydon 210
Lascaris 211
Delisle 216
John Hermann Obereit 219
Travels, Adventures, and Imprisonments of Joseph
220
Balsamo
An Alphabetical Catalogue of Works on Hermetic

274
Philosophy and Alchemy
Appendix 307
Index 313
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
ON THE TRUE PRINCIPLES AND NATURE OF THE MAGNUM
OPUS, AND ON ITS RELATION TO SPIRITUAL CHEMISTRY.
Those unfamiliar with modern alchemical criticism, even if they
have some acquaintance with the mystical labyrinth of the turba
philosophorum, will probably learn with astonishment that the
opinions of competent judges are divided not only upon the methods
of the mysterious Hermetic science, but upon the object of alchemy
itself. That it is concerned with transmutation is granted, but with the
transmutation of metals, or of any physical substance, into material
gold, is strenuously denied by a select section of reputable students
of occultism. The transcendental theory of alchemy which they
expound is steadily gaining favour, though the two text-books which
at present represent it are both out of print and both exceedingly
scarce.
In the year 1850 “A Suggestive Inquiry concerning the Hermetic
Mystery and Alchemy, being an attempt to recover the Ancient
Experiment of Nature,” was published anonymously in London by a
lady of high intellectual gifts, but was almost immediately withdrawn
for reasons unknown, and which have given occasion, in
consequence, to several idle speculations. This curious and
meritorious volume, quaintly written in the manner of the last century,
originated the views which are in question and opened the
controversy.
Fifteen years after the appearance of the “Suggestive Inquiry,” an
American writer, named Hitchcock, after apparently independent
researches arriving at parallel conclusions, made public, also
anonymously, in the year 1865, some “Remarks on Alchemy and the
Alchemists,” in a small octavo volume of very considerable interest.
A psychic interpretation was placed by the previous author on the
arcana of Hermetic typology, and Mr Hitchcock, by adopting a moral
one, brought the general subject within the reach of the most
ordinary readers, and attracted considerable attention in
consequence.
The views thus enunciated have filtered slowly through, and,
combined with the Paracelsian theory of the psychic manufacture of
material gold by the instrumentality of the interior magnes, have
considerably influenced the revived occultism of the present day.
The question in itself, taken at its lowest standpoint, is one of the
most curious to be found within the whole circle of esoteric
archæology; and for students whose interest in the great alchemical
mystery is of another than antiquarian kind, it is truly of palmary
interest, and of supreme importance. In an account of the lives and
labours of the Hermetic adepts, it calls for adequate consideration;
and, after careful researches, I believe myself to have discovered a
true alchemical theory which will be equally acceptable to all schools
of interpretation.
The supreme and avowed object of every hierophant, as well as of
every postulant and pretender, in the ars magna discovered by
Hermes Trismegistus, has been commonly supposed to be the
chemical manufacture of material gold from commercially inferior
substances. On the other hand, Hitchcock, marshalling an
impressive series of verbatim citations from writers of all ages and all
nationalities, undertakes to demonstrate that the concealed subject
of every veritable adept is one only—namely, Man, the triune, and
that “the object also is one, to wit, his improvement, while the
method itself is no less one, to wit, nature directed by art in the
school of nature, and acting in conformity therewith; for the art is
nothing but ‘nature acting through man.’” Again, “the genuine
alchemists were not in pursuit of worldly wealth or honours. Their
real object was the perfection, or, at least, the improvement of man.
According to this theory, such perfection lies in a certain unity, a
living sense of the unity of the human with the divine nature, the
attainment of which I can liken to nothing so well as to the
experience known in religion as the New Birth. The desired
perfection, or unity, is a state of the soul, a condition of Being, and
not a mere condition of Knowing. This condition of Being is a
development of the nature of man from within, the result of a process
by which whatever is evil in our nature is cast out or suppressed,
under the name of superfluities, and the good thereby allowed
opportunities for free activity. As this result is scarcely accessible to
the unassisted natural man, and requires the concurrence of divine
power, it is called Donum Dei.”
When the individual man, by a natural and appropriate process,
devoid of haste or violence, is brought into unity with himself by the
harmonious action of intelligence and will, he is on the threshold of
comprehending that transcendent Unity which is the perfection of the
totality of Nature, “for what is called the ‘absolute,’ the ‘absolute
perfection,’ and the perfection of Nature, are one and the same.”
In the symbolism of the alchemists this writer tells us that sulphur
signifies Nature, and mercury the supernatural. The inseparable
connection of the two in man is called Sol, but “as these three are
seen to be indissolubly one, the terms may be used
interchangeably.” According to Hitchcock, the mystical and
mysterious instrument of preparation in the work of alchemy is the
conscience, which is called by a thousand misleading and
confessedly incongruous names. By means of this instrument,
quickened into vital activity under a sense of the presence of God,
the matter of the stone, namely, Man, is, in the first place, purged
and purified, to make possible the internal realisation of Truth. “By a
metonymy, the conscience itself is said to be purified, though, in fact,
the conscience needs no purification, but only the man, to the end
that the conscience may operate freely.”[A]
One of the names given by the alchemists to the conscience, on
this theory, is that of a middle substance which partakes of an
azurine sulphur—that is, of a celestial spirit—the Spirit of God. “The
still small voice is in alchemy, as in Scripture, compared to a fire,
which prepares the way for what many of the writers speak of as a
Light.”
Hitchcock elsewhere more emphatically asserts that there is but
one subject within the wide circle of human interests that can furnish
an interpretation of the citations which he gives, and it is that which
is known under the theological name of spiritual Regeneration. This
gift of God the alchemists investigated as a work of Nature within
Nature. “The repentance which in religion is said to begin
conversion, is the ‘philosophical contrition’ of Hermetic allegory. It is
the first step of man towards the discovery of his whole being. They
also called it the black state of the matter, in which was carried on
the work of dissolution, calcination, separation, &c., after which
results purification, the white state, which contains the red, as the
black contained the white.” The evolution of the glorious and radiant
red state resulted in the fixation or perfection of the matter, and then
the soul was supposed to have entered into its true rest in God.
As this interpretation is concerned chiefly with the conscience, I
have called it the moral theory of alchemy; but Hitchcock, as a man
of spiritual insight, could not fail to perceive that his explanatory
method treated of the way only, and the formless light of an “End,”
which he could not or would not treat of, is, upon his own admission,
continually glimmering before him.
For the rest, when the alchemists speak of a long life as one of the
endowments of the Stone, he considers that they mean immortality;
when they attribute to it the miraculous properties of a universal
medicine, it is their intention to deny any positive qualities to evil,
and, by inference, any perpetuity. When they assert that the
possession of the Stone is the annihilation of covetousness and of
every illicit desire, they mean that all evil affections disappear before
the light of the unveiled Truth. By the transmutation of metals they
signified the conversion of man from a lower to a higher order of
existence, from life natural to life spiritual, albeit these expressions
are inadequate to convey the real meaning of the adepts. The
powers of an ever active nature must be understood by such
expressions as “fires,” “menstruums,” &c., which work in unison
because they work in Nature, the alchemists unanimously denying
the existence of any disorder in the creation of God.
In conclusion, Hitchcock states once more that his object is to
point out the subject of alchemy. He does not attempt to make its
practical treatment plain to the end of the sublime operation. It is,
therefore, evident that he, at any rate, suspected the existence of
more transcendent secrets which he distrusted his ability to discuss,
and declined to speak of inadequately.
The author of the “Suggestive Inquiry” had already taken the
higher standpoint of psychic interpretation, and developed her
remarkable principles, which I must endeavour to reproduce as
briefly as possible.
According to this work, the modern art of chemistry has no
connection with alchemy except in its terminology, which was made
use of by the adepts to veil their divine mysteries. The process of the
whole Hermetic work is described with at least comparative
plainness in the writings of the philosophers, with the exception of
the vessel which is a holy arcanum, but without the knowledge of it
no one can attain to the magistery. Now, the publication of the
writings of Jacob Böhme caused the alchemists who were his
contemporaries to fear that their art could not much longer remain a
secret, and that the mystic vase in particular would be shortly
revealed to all. This vase is the vas insigne electionis, namely, Man,
who is the only all-containing subject, and who alone has need to be
investigated for the eventual discovery of all. The modern adepts
describe the life of man as a pure, naked, and unmingled fire of
illimitable capability. Man, therefore, is the true laboratory of the
Hermetic art; his life is the subject, the grand distillery, the thing
distilling, and the thing distilled; and self-knowledge is at the root of
all alchemical tradition.
“Modern discoveries are now tending to the identification of light,
the common vital sustenant, as in motive accord throughout the
human circulatory system with the planetary spheres, and
harmonious dispositions of the occult medium in space; and as
human physiology advances with the other sciences, the notion of
our natural correspondency enlarges, till at length the conscious
relationship would seem to be only wanting to confirm the ancient
tradition.”
In addition to the faculties which he commonly exerts to
communicate with the material universe, man possesses within him
the germ of a higher faculty, the revelation and evolution of which
give intuitive knowledge of the hidden springs of nature. This
Wisdom-faculty operates in a magical manner, and constitutes an
alliance with the Omniscient Nature, so that the illuminated
understanding of its possessor perceives the structure of the
universe, and enjoys free perspicacity of thought in universal
consciousness.
In support of this statement it is argued that the evidence of
natural reason, even in the affairs of common life, is intuition, that
intuitive faith has a certainty above and independent of reason, that
the subsistence of universals in the human mind includes a promise
far beyond itself, and is stable proof of another subsistence, however
consciously unknown.
The true methods and conditions of self-knowledge are to be
learned from the ancient writers. The discovery of the veritable Light
of alchemy is the reward of an adequate scrutiny of true psychical
experience. Alchemy proposes “such a reducation of nature as shall
discover this latex without destroying her vehicle, but only the modal
life; and professes that this has not alone been proved possible, but
that man by rationally conditionating has succeeded in developing
into action the Recreative Force.”
The One Thing needful, the sole act which must be perfectly
accomplished that man may know himself, is the exaltation, by the
adequately purified spirit, of the cognising faculty into intellectual
reminiscence. The transcendental philosophy of the mysteries
entirely hinges on the purification of the whole understanding,
without which they promise nothing.
The end in view is identical with Hermetists, Theurgists, and with
the ancient Greek mysteries alike. It is the conscious and hypostatic
union of the intellectual soul with Deity, and its participation in the life
of God; but the conception included in this divine name is one
infinitely transcendental, and in Hermetic operations, above all, it
must ever be remembered that God is within us. “The initiated
person sees the Divine Light itself, without any form or figure—that
light which is the true astrum solis, the mineral spiritual sun, which is
the Perpetual Motion of the Wise, and that Saturnian Salt, which
developed to intellect and made erect, subdues all nature to His will.
It is the Midnight Sun of Apuleius, the Ignited Stone of Anaxagoras,
the Triumphal Chariot of Antimony, the Armed Magnet of Helvetius,
the Fiery Chariot of Mercaba, and the Stone with the new name
written on it which is promised to him that overcometh, by the
initiating Saviour of mankind.”
This method of interpreting the Hermetic allegories is calculated to
exalt the alchemists indefinitely in the estimation of all thinking
minds. From possibly avaricious investigators of a by-way of physical
science, they are transfigured into dreamers of the sublimest
imaginable dream, while if that which they conceived was
accomplished, they are divine and illuminated monarchs who are
throned on the pinnacles of eternity, having dominion over their
infinite souls.
A theory so attractive, devised in the interests of men whom
romance has already magnified in the auriferous cloud of mystery
which envelopes both their claims and their persons, is eminently
liable to be accepted on insufficient grounds, because of its poetical
splendour, so it will be well to ascertain the facts and arguments on
which it is actually based.
Both Hitchcock and the unparalleled woman to whom we are
indebted for the “Suggestive Inquiry” appeal to alchemical writings in
support of their statements. A few of their quotations and
commentaries must therefore be submitted to the reader.
The first point which strikes the alchemical student is the
unanimous conviction of all the philosophers that certain initiatory
exercises of a moral and spiritual kind are an indispensable
preliminary to operations which are commonly supposed to be
physical. Here the incongruity is evident, and it is therefore urged
that the process itself is spiritual, and that it was materialised in the
writings of the adepts to confuse and mislead the profane, as well as
for the protection of esoteric psychologists in the days of the
Inquisition and the stake.
The following preparation for the study of Antimony is
recommended by Basil Valentin. “First, Invocation to God, with a
certain heavenly intention, drawn from the bottom of a sincere heart
and conscience, pure from all ambition, hypocrisy, and all other vices
which have any affinity with these; as arrogance, boldness, pride,
luxury, petulancy, oppression of the poor, and other similar evils, all
of which are to be eradicated from the heart; that when a man
desires to prostrate himself before the throne of grace, for obtaining
health, he may do so with a conscience free from unprofitable
weeds, that his body may be transmuted into a holy temple of God,
and be purged from all uncleanness. For God will not be mocked (of
which I would earnestly admonish all), as worldly men, pleasing and
flattering themselves with their own wisdom, think. God, I say, will
not be mocked, but the Creator of all things will be invoked with
reverential fear, and acknowledged with due obedience.... Which is
so very true that I am certainly assured no impious man shall ever be
partaker of the true medicine, much less of the eternal, heavenly
bread. Therefore place your whole intention and trust in God; call
upon him, and pray that he may impart his blessing to you. Let this
be the beginning of your work, that by the same you may obtain your
desired end, and at length effect what you intended. For the fear of
the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”
The second qualification is contemplation, by which, says Basil, “I
understand an accurate attention to the business itself, under which
will fall these considerations first to be noted. As, what are the
circumstances of anything; what the matter; what the form; whence
its operations proceed; whence it is infused and implanted; how
generated ... also how the body of everything may be ... resolved
into its first matter or essence. This contemplation is celestial, and to
be understood with spiritual reason; for the circumstances and
depths of things cannot be conceived in any other way than by the
spiritual cogitation of man: and this contemplation is two-fold. One is
called possible, the other impossible. The latter consists in copious
cogitations which never proceed to effects, nor exhibit any form of
matter which falls under the touch, as if any should endeavour to
comprehend the Eternity of the Most High, which is vain and
impossible; yea, it is a sin against the Holy Ghost, so arrogantly to
pry into the Divinity itself, which is immense, infinite, and eternal; and
to subject the incomprehensible counsel of the secrets of God to

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Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray

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Reading Irigaray, Listening

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sorts to which one assigns predicates), preferring his term “Dasein”

occurs in relation to a different, sexuate other.4 This ethical process of

upon us to speak in a manner that would attune our speech to what he

Jones, Rachel. Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity

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sexual pleasure, to which all representations of pleasure can but defer in

deception, snare—these are the kinds of judgments society confers upon

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