| Luce Irigaray | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1932 Belgium |
| Nationality | Belgian |
| Fields | Feminist theory, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, psychoanalysis |
| Influences | Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida |
Luce Irigaray (born 1932 in Belgium) is a Belgian feminist, philosopher, linguist, psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural theorist. She is best known for her works Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) and This Sex Which Is Not One (1977).
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Irigaray received a Master's Degree in Philosophy and Arts from the University of Louvain (Leuven) in 1955. She taught in a Brussels school from 1956 to 1959, then moved to France in the early 1960s. In 1961 she received a Master's Degree in psychology from the University of Paris. In 1962 she received a Diploma in Psychopathology. From 1962 to 1964 she worked for the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) in Belgium. She then began work as a research assistant at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris.
In the 1960s Irigaray participated in Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic seminars. She trained as and became an analyst. In 1968 she received a Doctorate in Linguistics. In 1969 she analyzed Antoinette Fouque, a leader of the French women's movement. From 1970 to 1974 she taught at the University of Vincennes. At this time Irigaray belonged to the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), a school directed by Lacan.
Irigaray's second doctoral thesis was "Speculum, de l'autre femme."
In the second semester of 1982, Irigaray held the chair in Philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Her research here resulted in the publication of An Ethics of Sexual Difference.
Irigaray has conducted research since the 1980s at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in Paris on the differences between the language of women and the language of men. In 1986 she transferred from the Psychology Commission to the Philosophy Commission as the latter is her preferred discipline.
In December 2003 the University of London conferred on Luce Irigaray the degree of Doctor of Literature honoris causa. From 2004 to 2006 Irigaray held a position as a visiting professor in the department of Modern Languages at the University of Nottingham. As of 2007[update] she will be affiliated with the University of Liverpool.
In 2008, Luce Irigaray was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by University College, London.
In an interview conducted in 1995 Luce Irigaray defined the three phases of her work:
Of the first she said, "It was the phase in which I showed how a single subject, traditionally the masculine subject, had constructed the world according to a single perspective." In the second phase she defined "those mediations that could permit the existence of a feminine subjectivity - that is to say, another subject". And the third she sees as "trying to define a new model of possible relations between man and woman, without submission of either one to the other".[1] In this interview she also discusses the problems of translation of her texts, most notably in reference to the title and subtile of "Speculum".
Luce Irigaray wishes to create two equally positive and autonomous terms, and to acknowledge two (at least, she sometimes adds) sexes, not one. Following this line of thought, with the theories of Lacan (mirror stage, forms of "sexuation") and of Derrida (logocentrism) in the background, Luce Irigaray also criticises the favouring of unitary truth within patriarchal society. In her theory for creating a new disruptive form of feminine writing (Écriture féminine), she focuses on the child’s pre-Oedipal phase when experience and knowledge depends on bodily contact, primarily with the mother. Here lies one major interest of Luce Irigaray's: the mother-daughter relationship, which she considers devalued in patriarchal society.
Women, she writes, must recast discourse in a form that does not preserve an implied masculine subject, harmonizing the machine of language in order to rethink the relations that make possible meaning, knowledge and presence. Accordingly, Luce Irigaray's oeuvre challenges phallogocentrism. She notes that society's two gender categories (genre), man and woman, are in fact only one, man, as he is made the universal referent. She works towards a theory of difference, that involves the creation of an other, woman, who is a feminine subject equal to the masculine subject in worth and dignity, yet radically different.
Many feminists criticize the essentialist position of Luce Irigaray.[2]
The phallogocentric argument as defended by Luce Irigaray has been criticised by W. A. Borody as misrepresenting the history of philosophies of "indeterminateness" in the West. Luce Irigaray's "black and white" claims that the masculine=determinateness and that the feminine=indeterminateness contain a degree of cultural and historical validity, but not when it is deployed to self-replicate a similar form of the gender-othering it originally sought to overcome.[3]
Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, in their book critiquing postmodern thought (Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science), criticize Luce Irigaray on several grounds. In their view, Luce Irigaray wrongly regards E=mc2 as a "sexed equation" because she argues that "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us". They also take issue with the assertion that fluid mechanics is unfairly neglected because it deals with "feminine" fluids in contrast to "masculine" rigid mechanics.[4]