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The Irigaray Reader
Lynn Tzeng
Introduction to Section I
(by Margaret
Whitford)
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Patriarchy (defined by Irigaray)—“an
exclusive respect for the genealogy of sons
and fathers, and the competition between
brothers” (Sexes et parentes, p.202)
maternal genealogy absent in western
thought and institutions
coexistence of two genealogies (patriarchy
and matriarchy), not simply a reversal or a
replacement (p. 23)
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“[W]hereas de Beauvoir emphasizes access
to the world of men (equality), Irigaray is
suggesting the creation of difference” (p.24).
develops de Beauvoir’s idea of Woman as
Other (I: the ‘other of the same’, the
necessary negative of the male subject, all
that he has repressed and disavowed.)
“but a self-defined woman who would not be
satisfied with sameness, but whose
otherness and difference would be given
social and symbolic representation. Each sex
would then be ‘other’ for the other sex” (p.
24-25).
“Equal or Different?” (1986; 1988; 1990)
 “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother”
(conference on “Women and Madness”,
Montreal, 1981)—
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 “western culture is founded not on parricide (as
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Freud hypothesized in Totem and Taboo, but on
matricide” (p.25).
I’s reinterpretation of the mythology (Clytemnestra)
= the installation of patriarchy, built over the
sacrifice of the mother and her daughters.
“The major cultural taboo is on the relationship with
the mother” (p.25).
“The stress on Oedipus, on castration, serves to conceal
another severance, the cutting of the umbilical cord to the
mother”
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hatred from men and archaic projection of male
imaginary (woman as devouring monster threatening
madness and death) has made women suffer culturally
“This relationship with the mother needs to be
brought out of silence and into representation”
contraception and the legalization of abortion =
control women’s reproduction = women’s identity as
women not as mothers (role as ‘reproducer of children,
as nurse, as reproducer of labour-power’)
warns the daughters against repeating the murder of
the mother.
To move out the role of ‘guardians of the body’ for
men
To put into words and symbolic representations the
primitive relation with the mothers’ body.
Speaking about the relationships between women =
create a new identity within the symbolic order
reiterated in “Women-Mothers: the Silent
Substratum of the Social Order” (interview)
 overlap the preoccupations of other English-speaking
feminists:
1. Women and madness
2. the inadequacy or failure of the ‘sexual revolution’
from women’s point of view
3. the importance of consciousness raising as a practice
4. the analysis of the family as a social device for
appropriating women’s labour
5. the mother-daughter relationship
6. the attack on psychoanalysis (a discourse which
normalize patriarchy); the re-evaluation of hysteria
(as the unheard voice of the woman who can only
speak through somatic symptoms)
7. Second-wave (post 1968) women (both as daughters
and mothers) must liberate themselves with their
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o
** the end of 1970—Anglo-American feminism: began
to theorize women’s difference (as a source of
cultural possibility rather than simply as a source of
oppression).
I = examining equality, mother’s function (as the
infrastructure of Western civilisation), and the
obliteration of women as women.
Speculum, 1974
Catholic countries (France and Italy) = the
importance of attending to motherhood as an
institution, sanctioned by the divine
“Volume with contours” (extract from Speculum)
male imaginary, philosophical logos and system (of
discourse and representation… ) that confine/define
women
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Dominant fantasy of the mother/Male
Representation of Women = a closed volume = a
‘receptacle for the (re)production of sameness’ and
the ‘the support of (re)production
men’s desire = immobilize women (control and
possession), appropriate by masculinity
men’s fear of the ‘open container’, the
‘incontournable volume’, the fluid, the mobile, not a
solid ground/earth, or not mirror for subject
contemporary theory in the feminine = a fresh
attempt at terrorialization of the maternal-feminine
I = an other woman (exterior to all these masculine
metaphorizations) = shake the foundation of
patriarchy
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I = oppose an ‘other woman’, a woman
‘without common measure’ (who cannot be
reduced to the qualifying measurements by
which she is domesticated in male systems,
who exceeds attempts to pin her down and
confine her within a theoretical system,
whose volume is ‘incontournable’ = against
Lacanian image of woman as a hole, oppose
the image of contiguity of two lips (motherdaughter, mother-father, maternal-paternal
genealogies) = woman’s desire could be
represented for-itself (not in male
representation) (p.28)
Simone de Beauvoir’s modern feminism
Luce Irigaray
*Attitude towards psychoanalysis
Resist psychoanalysis
Not always negative
not totally consistent: “One of our contradictions was
that we denied the unconscious” (p. 24).
de Beauvoir’s response to Irigaray in an interview
(1984): “[a]nyone who wants to work on women has to
break completely with Freud” (p. 24). For de Beauvoir,
Irigaray always began from Freud’s postulates, adopted
too readily the Freudian account of the inferiority of
women.
1. as an analyst (psychoanalyst, philosopher, and
linguist)—important for thinking sexual identity
(p.31)— (Freudian theory), challenging
2. uses and challenges philosophical traditions
(psychoanalysis for understanding the self-realization
of consciousness)
*concept of equal rights/sexual difference/Women’s Liberation
“equal” = “equal to men” = the imposition of a male
norm = genocide of woman. (Irigaray to de Beauvoir’s
response, p. 23)
Demanding equality = erroneous (presupposes a term of
comparison):
Q: Equal to what? What do women want to be equal to?
Men? A wage? A public position? Equal to what? Why
not to themselves? (p. 32)
Women need an identity as women = womankind (p.24)
favoured social justice and supported feminists
1949, The Second Sex (her own life story with
scientific data)—subordinated feminism to socialism,
helped women to be sexually freer by offering them a
socio-cultural model
Find value in being women, not simply mothers =
rethinking, transforming centuries of socio-cultural
values.
“Equal or Different?” (1986; 1988; 1990)
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most claims to equality = superficial critique of
culture, and utopian as a means to women’s liberation.
“The exploitation of women is based upon sexual
difference, and can only be resolved through sexual
difference” (p. 32).
neutralization of sex (contemporary feminists) =
end of human race (divided into two genres—ensure
its production and reproduction)
“Trying to suppress sexual difference is to invite a
genocide (destruction of women and all values) more
radical than any destruction that has ever existed in
History” (p. 32).
define the value of a sex-specific genre [genre as
sexuate (p. 33)] and form a culture that respects
both genres
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We are still in the childhood of culture: “People
constantly split into secondary but murderous
rivalries without realizing that their primary and
irreducible division is one between two genres” (p.
33).
We must give, or restore cultural values to female
subjectivity (not simply procreative) e.g. The Second
Sex
“The Bodily Encounter with the Mother”
(conference on “Women and Madness”,
Montreal, 1981)
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Men-practitioners’ absence = a sign of their
psychiatric practice (self-sufficient) = madness of
women: their words are not heard (p 35).
Scientific discourses, serious scientific practices,
therapeutic decisions and diagnoses = still the
privilege of men (who define women’s function, social
role, and the sexual identity)
“Each sex relates to madness in its own way” (p 35)
“All desire is connected to madness” (in the
relationship with the mother—a mad desire (the
‘dark continent’ par excellence)) = shadows of our
culture, it is its night and its hell
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the infrastructure of western culture = women as
mothers, the unacknowledged foundation of the
social order
“The maternal function underpins the social order
and the order of desire (satisfying the individual and
collective need) e.g. in the religious dimension of
need (women = mothers)
women’s/mothers’ own desire suppressed/forbidden
by the law of the father
Women’s looking for their sexual identity and the
meaning of motherhood: contraception, abortion…
“western culture is founded not on parricide (as
Freud hypothesized in Totem and Taboo, but on
matricide” (p.25).
Freud forgot a more archaic murder of the founding
of a certain order in the polis (of the primal horde)
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Clytemnestra myth—
forgot the tragedy of Iphigenia
Orestes (son) kills his mother for the establishment
of a new order (commanded by the God-Father
(Apollo))
The Furies = the ghosts of his mother = women in
revolt, rising up like hysterics against the patriarchal
power in the process of being established (p. 37).
the law of the primal horde and mythology:
men bury women beneath the sanctuary
regulation Athenas (virgin-goddess, born of the
father and obedient to his law in forsaking the
mother)= perfect models of femininity (always veiled
and dressed from head to toe)
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The murder of the mother →
the non-punishment of the son (Orestes), but
punishment on daughter (Electra)
the burial of the madness of women (e.g.
Clytemnestra)
the burial of women in madness (e.g. Jocasta)
In the process of the forming of the new
order (based on matricide), a symbolic
murder of the father is necessary for the
coming of the son’s revenge (murder of ) on
the mother:
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e.g. p. 38 1. Oedipus’ re-enacting of the madness of
Orestes (primal crime—“It was a son’s duty to kill his
father’s murderer’s, a duty that came before all
others. But a son who killed his mother was
abhorrent to gods and to men. A most sacred
obligation was bound up with a most atrocious crime”
(Hamilton 256))
Oedipus—violates the law of the father (Oedipus
Complex): ambivalence (“focused on the father, but
which is retroactively projected on to the archaic
relationship with the body of the mother”) towards
his father
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The mother’s body as an object for cathecting (to
invest emotional energy in (a person, object or idea))
and later decathecting (i.e., separate, detach, give up,
repress)
After the bodily encounter with the mother, Oedipus
grows up (to establish a new social symbolic order)
mother already torn into pieces:
by Oedipus’s hatred
torn between the sons and the fathers, between
sons (p.27, 38)
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the mother’s body (the life of the drives)
Partial drives – the body (primal womb—first home,
first love) which brought us whole (bound together)
into the world
Q: “The genital drive is said to be the drive thanks
to which the phallic penis takes back from the
mother the power to give birth, to nourish, to dwell,
to centre. The phallus erected where once there was
the umbilical cord (the first bond with the mother)?”
(p.38)
the father and his law: sever the over-intimate bond
with the primal womb (the danger of fusion, of death,
of the sleep of death)
a proper name/forename [an extra-corporeal
identity card] (language which privileges the
masculine genre) replaces the most irreducible mark
of birth: the navel (the irreducible trace of identity:
the scar left when the cord was cut)
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Psychoanalysis:
take a dim view of the first moment (bond with the
womb and the imaginary and the symbolic of intrauterine life)—“a taboo is in the air”
Psychoanalysis (the social order/our culture) → “the
mother must remain forbidden, excluded. The father
forbids the bodily encounter with the mother” (p. 38)
placenta (the first house surround us- child’s
security blanket):
men tend to go back to the primal womb [the
devouring mouth (p.41)] , seeking refuge in any open
body (of other women as well) [danger, threat of
contagion, contamination, engulfment in illness,
madness and death] but are NOT allowed.
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“No Jacob’s ladder for a return to the mother.
Jacob’s ladder always climbs up to heaven, to the
Father and his kingdom.” p. 40
men need to feed their libido (sexual urge or drive) p.
39 and distanced/removed from their
bodies/corporeal in (sexual) production p. 49 —need
wife-mother/ a woman-wife (p. 43) = need women’s
guardianship of their corporeal unity (p. 49)
Fantasy of Mother as a devouring monster and
her womb as the devouring mouth:
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able to give birth and life (power of procreation and
creation/generative power)
steal the creating power or life essence from men?
womb/the silent and threatening belly = capture net
of maternal power, the phallic mother → phallic
threat, anxiety, phobia of castration fear (p. 41)
[from man-father’s perspective]
Q: Fantasy based on Oedipus’s hatred: (still
uninterrupted)
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makes a hole in the bellies of women/identity = a
stake driven into the earth (p. 41)
“Torn between the sons and the fathers, the stake
or sacrifice in disputes between men (disputes for
the ownership of the mother’s body), she is
fragmented into bits and pieces, and therefore
‘unable to articulate her difference’” (p. 27)
“The (male) subject prefers to see her as the
maternal-feminine rather than as a woman
(castration and death, the unimaginable
heterogamous other)” (p. 27) → “A hole in the
texture of language corresponds to the forgetting of
the scar of the navel” (p. 41).
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Q: 1. phallic erection = the only sexual value? (in the
patriarchal tradition)
2. castration anxiety = the unconscious memory of
such sacrifice?
The murder of the father = “a desire for one who
artificially cut the link with the mother in order to
take over the creative power of all worlds, especially
the female world” (Wrong) →
“signifies a desire to take his [the father’s] place, a
rival and competitive desire” (p. 42)
Men’s Rebirth
(phallic erection =
masculine version of
the umbilical bond)
Should respect the life
of the mother,
reproduce the living
bond with her by
recreating the intrauterine life (the cord→
the breast→ the penis)
Women’s Rebirth
Free from man’s archaic
projection onto her, the
establishment of her own
sexual identity
1. No envy for men’s penis
(the distorted/biased
male representation of an
instrument of power to
dominate maternal power)
2. our auto-erotism,
narcissism,
heterosexuality and
homosexuality.
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Have fathers ever been asked to renounce being men?
We do not have to renounce being women in order to
be women”
“We are always mothers once we are women” (p. 43):
bring children; love, desire, language, art, the social,
the political, the religious…
We should give our mothers a new life instead of
killing her/sacrificing her to the law of the father.
We must invent a new language that does not
replace the bodily encounter (paternal language), but
which speaks corporeal while we seek a new
relationship with the body of our mother.
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Women should speak up rather than remain silent!! =
outlet of their emotion
We should assert the genealogy/history of women =
identity, subjectivity +
do not try to deny our mother (and her body) as our
love object
assert love for other women [women-sisters]
2 modes of women’s jouissance (enjoyment):
programmed in a male libidinal economy
with their own sexual identity (against the norms of
phallocratic economy)
Women-Mothers: the Silent Substratum
of the Social Order (published as an interview. )
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“The substratum is the woman who reproduces the
social order, who is made this order’s infrastructure:
the whole of our western culture is based upon the
murder of the mother. The man-god-father killed
the mother in order to take power” (p.47).
the hysteric—revolt and refusal, “a desire for/of
the living mother who would be more than a
reproductive body in the pay of the polis, a living,
loving woman” (p. 47-8)
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“the only path that remains open to us is madness”
(p. 48)
We need language to define madness.
Women suffer in their bodies (inaudible)
Patriarchy discourse = discourse of men about women
(objects/silence)
“Being guardians of their corporeal unity, we cannot
be beings of desire… desire is movement.”
the so-called ‘sexual liberation’ lay trap
(Greek) relationship to mother = relationship to
women
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Mother= function = no personal language and identity
mother/daughter, daughter/mother relationship
→ say goodbye to maternal omnipotence and
establish a woman-to-woman relationship of
reciprocity * mothers = daughters
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“Liberate ourselves along with our mothers” (p. 50)
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“We [women] lack speech”