Labial feminism: Body against body with Luce Irigaray

Parallax

Volumn 3, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 65-79

  Boothroyd, Dave ^a,b,c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

^c TEESSIDE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 62449259374     PISSN: 13534645     EISSN: 1460700X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. The term corps-à-corps is here translated as 'body-against-body'. As C. Gill notes in her translation of Irigaray's essay "Le corps-à-corps avec la mère", the French term has connotations of a hand to hand struggle and figures in her text in the attempt at a new articulation of the relationship between mother and child. Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993): 9
2. Luce Irigaray, "Women's Exile", Interview in Ideology and Consciousness (1977): 1:62-76: 64
3. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985): 303
4. Op. cit., Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, 187
5. Op. cit., Irigaray, Speculum, 5
6. Luce Irigaray, This Sex, 9
7. Alice Jardine, Gynesis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985): 263
8. For an intriguing discussion of the phenomenon of 'Male Lesbianism', see J. N. Zita "Male Lesbians and the Postmodernist Body", Hypatia 7/4 (1992)
9. Op. cit., Irigaray, This Sex, 136
10. Alice Jardine, for instance, attributes die view that although "feminine writing does not require the signature of a woman, women, nonetheless, today (after psychoanalysis and Derrida) do have a privileged access to it"; whereas to Hélène Cixous, Irigaray's approach is considered to be more resolutely committed to a re-working of the philosophical tradition as represented largely by the hand of male philosophers. See op. cit., Jardine, Gynesis. 262
11. The word 'sexuate' is a neologism coined by Irigaray's English translators for the French term sexué (c.f. Margaret Whitford, ed., The Irigaray Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991): 18). It is an adjectival form of the term sexe which emphasises the substantiality of sex defined in relation to the morphology of the body
12. Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991)
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Random House, 1974): 34-5
14. Eric Blondel, Nietzsche. The Body and Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy, trans. Séan Hand (London: Athlone, 1991): 210
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals (New York: Random House, 1969): 57-60
16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Random House, 1967): 173
17. Op. cit., Blondel, Nietzsche. The Body and Culture, 219
18. For a discussion of the idea that Nietzsche's resentment of women is symptomatic of 'womb envy', see K. Ansell-Pearson's "Woman and Political Theory" in Paul Patton, ed., Nietzsche Feminism and Political Theory (London: Routledge, 1993): 27-47
19. The most comprehensive and recent account of die debate concerning essentialism in relation to Irigaray's thought is to be found in T. Chanter, The Ethics of Eros (London: Routledge, 1995): chapter 1
20. Op. cit., Jardine, Gynesis, 208-223
21. Michel Foucault, "What is an Audior" in Modern Criticism and Theory, ed., D. Lodge (Harlow: Longmann, 1988): 210
22. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1989): 17
23. Irigaray's term 'masculine-neutral' is a shorthand for die masculinist conceptual framework of the tradition. It signifies the masculine, sexed nature of the transcendental subject position associated with the valorisation of 'objectivity' and is understood as 'symbolic' discourse in which the female 'imaginary' cannot be expressed. Cf. esp. op. cit., Irigaray's chapter entitled, "Any Theory of the 'Subject' Has Always Been Appropriated by the Masculine", in Speculum, 133-146
24. Diane Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 1994): 53
25. Sigmund Freud, "The Ego and Id", The Standard Edition XIX (London: Hogarth, 1961): 26
26. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (London: Routledge, 1993): 258
27. Op. cit., Chanter, The Ethics of Eros, chapter, I
28. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993): 170
29. Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1991): 85
30. Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990): 95
31. op. cit., Butler, Bodies That Matter, 38
32. Joanne Hodge, "Irigaray Reading Heidegger", Engaging with Irigaray, eds., C. Burke, N. Schor, M. Whitford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994): 195
33. Op. cit., Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction, 53
34. Op. cit., Gallop, Thinking Through The Body
35. I wish to suggest an affinity of style here between Irigaray's writing on woman and Levinas' writing on ethical alterity. What Derrida once perceptively noted with regard to Levinas' discourse: that it is "neither purely descriptive nor purely deductive. It proceeds with the infinite insistence of waves on a beach: return and repetition..." could I suggest, be extended to Irigaray here. This effect causes him to wonder whemer he is reading a treatise or contemplating a work of art. C.f. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978): 312: ftnt.7
36. Op. cit., Irigaray, This Sex, 208
37. Op. cit., Irigaray, Marine Lover, 105
38. Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions (London: Athlone, 1992): 15-16
39. Op. cit., Whitford, The Irigaray Reader, 195
40. Michel Foucault, Order of Things (London: Routledge, 1986)
41. Op. cit., Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 87
42. Op. cit., Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction, 60
43. Luce Irigaray; I Love to You (London: Routledge, 1996): 13