Hard and wet: Luce Irigaray and the fascist body

Textual Practice

Volumn 12, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 199-223

  Gomel, Elana ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34347284460     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502369808582306     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 28. Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris, 1977).
2. Luce Irigaray, The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (London: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 105. The selection quoted is from Parler n'est jamais neutre (1991).
3. Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover: On Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Amante marine. De Friedrich Nietzsche (Paris, 1980).
4. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol.1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 230.
5. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (London: Polity Press, 1989), p. 3.
6. Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 89. Passions elementaires (Paris, 1982).
7. Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 274.
8. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 142.
9. Naomi Schor, 'This essentialism which is not one: coming to grips with Irigaray', in Naomi Schor, Bad Objects (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 53.
10. See also Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996).
11. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 26.
12. Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), p. 102.
13. By fascism I mean not only the political movements of Italian fascism and National Socialism but a whole complex of ideas that were widespread and deeply rooted in European culture in the period, approximately between the 1890s and the end of the Second World War. It is this complex that Zeev Sternhell describes very broadly as 'a particularistic and organicistic tradition, often dominated by a local variant of cultural nationalism that was sometimes, but not always, of a biological and racial character, very close to the volkish tradition in Germany' (Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, p. x)). I would stress 'the biological and racial character' of fascism which is strongly emphasized by much contemporary scholarship on the subject, especially Lifton, Proctor, Aly and Chroust and others. As will become clear from the discussion, I also support Klaus Theweleit's thesis that fascism means a particular organization of psychosomatic drives inscribed in its rhetoric of corporality. Like other ideologies, perhaps more so than most, fascism is word made flesh. It should also be clear that I do not ascribe any nefarious party leanings to Irigaray herself I am interested in the political unconscious of the discourse, not in the conscious political self-identification of the writer. The two are not the same and may even be opposed. See also Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
14. Adolf Hider, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), p. 151.
15. Maurizia Boscagli, Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford: Westview Press, 1996), p. 3.
16. Alfred Rosenberg, Selected "Writings (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), pp. 34-5. The importance of blood in facist discourse is immense. Blood, both figurative and literal, appears everywhere: the 'blood and soil' novel extols the mystic flow of vitality down the chain of generations; the 'blood banner' of the failed Munich putsch metonymically stands for the sacrifice of the fallen brownshirts; Nazi biologists attempt to prove the racial distinctiveness of blood types. For Hitler, blood is the primal force of history, for culture is created only by those of 'pure blood', while 'blood sin and the desecration of the race are the original sin' (p. 249). Hider is contemptuous of old German nationalism with its emphasis on state, law, shared language and cultural heritage. All these are important only insofar as they preserve the precious Aryan blood. Since in the Weimar Republic they failed to prevent mis- cegenation, they are inadequate as the foundation of the Volkish state. 'Race . does not lie in the language but exclusively in the blood' (p. 312).
17. Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover, pp. 37, 52, 55.
18. Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 48. Jaime a toi: Esquisse d'une felicite dans l'histoire (Paris: Grasset, 1992).
19. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St Martin's Press, 1987), p. 3.
20. Walter C. Lancer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report (New York: New American Library, 1972), p. 159.
21. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), pp. 11-12.
22. See Robert Jay Lifton's extensive discussion of the disease metaphor in relation to the Jews (Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986)).
23. Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso, 1994), p. 151.
24. Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and the jews' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 22.
25. Allison Weir, Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity (New York: Roudedge, 1996), p. 95. Weir's book offers a trenchant critique of Irigaray, rare among recent contributions to the debate on French feminism. She focuses, however, on the philosophical and political (mis) use of the notion of identity rather than on Irigaray's depiction of the female body.
26. Evelyn Fox Keller, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 17.
27. Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 103. Sexes et parentes (Paris, 1987).
28. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 121. Ethique de la difference sexuelle (Paris, 1984).
29. Christian Pross defines the foundation of fascism as a 'theory [that] provided ideological tools for a biological solution to a social problem'. See Gotz Aly, Peter Chroust and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 1.
30. J.P.Stern, Hitler: The Fuhrer and the People (London: Fontana, 1975), p. 48.
31. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1911), p. 200.