Luce Irigaray (born 3 May 1930 in Belgium) is a Belgian-French philosopher, linguist, and psychoanalyst, one of the leading voices of so-called difference feminism. Holding doctorates in linguistics and in philosophy, she belonged to the Lacanian circle until the publication of her thesis, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), whose radical critique of psychoanalysis cost her expulsion from Jacques Lacan’s École freudienne de Paris and her teaching post at the University of Vincennes.

The problem that occupies her is the place of the feminine in Western language and philosophy. Her thesis is that this tradition is phallocentric: it thinks the subject, reason, and desire on the basis of a masculine model taken as neutral and universal, so that woman appears only as “lack,” as negative, or as the mirror of man — never in her own difference. To reread the great texts (from Plato and Aristotle to Freud) is, for her, to expose this erasure.

From there, Irigaray proposes to think sexual difference as a fundamental philosophical question and to seek a language and a culture that give the feminine a place. This project has provoked a persistent debate: critics accuse her of essentialism — of grounding difference in the female body — to which she replies that this is a strategy for subverting the “logic of the same,” not an assertion of natural essence.

Key Concepts

  • Phallocentrism: Western philosophy and psychoanalysis are organized around the masculine as norm; the feminine is defined only by privation (Freudian “penis envy” is the paradigmatic target).
  • The “logic of the same”: Western thought reduces otherness to the identical; woman is the “other of the same,” not a full difference.
  • Sexual difference (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 1984): the task of the present age would be to think the difference between the sexes as irreducible, without hierarchy or assimilation.
  • “This sex which is not one” (1977): female pleasure cannot be reduced to the single, phallic model; the image of the “two lips” suggests a plural sexuality of self-contact.
  • Parler femme (“speaking (as) woman”): the search for an enunciation that escapes the apparent — and masculine — neutrality of language.

Influenced by

  • Jacques Lacan — psychoanalysis (later broken with)
  • Sigmund Freud — a central critical target
  • Heidegger, Merleau Ponty, and Lévinas — difference, the body, and alterity

Influenced

  • Difference feminism and “écriture féminine”
  • Gender studies and feminist philosophy
  • The debates over essentialism and constructivism

Works

Speculum of the Other Woman (1974); This Sex Which Is Not One (1977); An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984); I Love to You (1990).

See also

Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan