Trained in linguistics, literature and psychoanalysis,
Luce Irigaray nonetheless insists that her works must be read, above
all, as philosophical texts—that is, as interventions
into the specific canon of thought "by means of which values are defined,"
in her view.1 She thus assigns primacy to the philosophical
not only as a dimension of her own multifarious writings, but within
culture generally: in the historical production of knowledge, meaning,
subjectivity, power. In fact, she suggests that it is because of philosophy's
unique historical potency that women have been so vehemently excluded
from its precincts—"the thing most refused to a woman is to do
philosophy"—even as their literary impulses have been
relatively indulged. Luce Irigaray inverts this arrangement, downplaying
the importance of her practice as a "writer" (along with her involvement
with psychoanalysis) while emphatically laying claim to the status of
philosopher. Moreover, she indicates that, in refusing or neglecting
to interrogate their own categories of thought, feminists who pursue
a "politics of equality" which demands "not to be behind, not to be
second," are complicitous in women's exclusion from philosophy: "the
way of changing argumentation in order to deconstruct a discourse [is]
absolutely not their problem," she remarks. Implicitly, then, the feminism
of equality is relatively well accommodated by the patriarchy while
efforts to develop "an autonomous politics" of the feminine, a feminism
of difference, meet with the same resistance as a woman's doing philosophy—and
for the same reason.
Corollary to Luce Irigaray's categorical rejection of a feminism of equality
is her equally categorical repudiation of any filiation with the work of Simone
de Beauvoir, whose egalitarianist "refus[al] to be Other" she contrasts with her
own "demand to be radically Other in order to exit from a [certain] horizon" of
thought. At the same time, while she grants having read Beauvoir's fiction "as
an adolescent," Luce Irigaray says that she has read only a small part of
The Second Sex—the epic work in which Beauvoir's famous theory of
woman as the absolute Other of Western culture is elaborated—and voices a deep
sense of "disappointment" at Beauvoir's failure to offer support during the
professional crisis precipitated by the publication of Speculum of the Other
Woman, Luce Irigaray's own controversial philosophical epic (which was also
her doctoral dissertation in philosophy), in 1974. Calling attention to the
rethinking of transcendence in her own writings, Luce Irigaray rejects the view,
which she ascribes to Beauvoir, that "woman remains always within the dimension
of immanence and that she's incapable of transcendence"—as if suggesting that
this gender segregation reinscribes, in another register, the gendered hierarchy
that privileges philosophy (the discourse of transcendence, in this coupling)
over literature (the discourse of immanence). Strategically or paradoxically,
the most significant "theoretical filiation" acknowledged by Luce Irigaray is
with a male-identified idiom from which women have been systematically excluded:
"the tradition of Western philosophy."
Beauvoir and Sartre were, of course, among the most celebrated couples of
their day; Luce Irigaray cites her own relationship with Renzo Imbeni in
discussing the possibility of a new relation between man and woman that would
also define "a different historical configuration" and "a new horizon" both
culturally and politically. The young, she thinks, are especially hungry for
such a relation, which would be characterized by "reciprocal respect,"
"autonomy," and "reciprocal affection," but which could only be predicated on
something that has always been lacking in Western tradition: a recognition of
the irreducible—that is, ontological—difference between man and woman. It is
clear that for Luce Irigaray the meaning of the much-vaunted expression "sexual
difference" is ontological before it is psychological, biological,
sociological, or epistemological. Whereas a purely "empirical" type of
negativity differentiates one woman (or one man) from another in the social
dialectic, "the negativity between a man and a woman" participates in the order
of being as such and so constitutes "a mystery," a negativity which—"contrary
to [that of] the Hegelian dialectic"—will "never [be] surmount[ed]" in any sort
of sublation. Unsuspected by (the Hegelian existentialist) Beauvoir, by the
feminism of equality, or indeed by the gay rights movement, this mystery also
houses the as-yet-unrealized possibility of a new kind of transcendence. As
distinct from the "vertical transcendence" of the "genealogical," parent/child,
relation "that has dominated our traditions"—including constructions of the
man/woman relation, as in Freud's account of the "successful" marriage in which
a wife replaces her husband's mother and he becomes her son—Luce Irigaray
envisions "a horizontal transcendence" between two mature but
irreducibly different subjects, man and woman. Since "sexual difference is a
fundamental parameter of the socio-cultural order" (what she calls "sexual
choice" is deemed "secondary"), it follows that "inventing a new relationship
[between man and woman] is fundamentally the same a inventing a new
socio-cultural order." By the same token, Luce Irigaray asserts that it is
precisely because she situates difference as such ("the difference and the
negative which I will never surmount") between the two genders rather than
elsewhere that she is "able to respect the differences everywhere: differences
between other races, differences between the generations, and so on."
This effort to think the man/woman couple in its twoness is the logical
culmination of a project that began, in Speculum, with a critique of
the monopoly of a single, masculine subject in Western tradition, then proceeded
to a "second phase" that attempted to "define those mediations that could permit
the existence of a feminine subjectivity." Contributing to this grand
philosophical project are a series of experiments conducted by Luce Irigaray in
recent years and designed to demonstrate the workings of sexual difference
within gendered patterns of language use«ultimately in order "to redistribute
discourse" between man and woman so as to promote that which has never yet taken
place: an authentic dialogue between the two. These experiments purport to
demystify the seeming neutrality of linguistic forms by uncovering the
different, sexuate relations that inform the use of language by men and women
respectively. They show, for example, that in a setting where girls typically
use the preposition "with" in relation to another human subject, boys in the
same setting will instead use it in relation to an inanimate object; girls thus
construct (and construct themselves within) a subject-subject dialectic where
boys construct a dialectic of subject and object. Similarly, girls typically use
the first-person pronoun ("I" or "Je") in dialectical relation with
another subject ("You" or "Tu"), whereas boys typically use it in
relation to an object or "it." The "I," then, always conceals a relation and is
not in fact one but two—sexed—a reality that Luce Irigaray proposes
to capture in the double reformulation "I-she" ("Je-elle") and "I-he"
("Je-il"). Through such discursive "redistributions," she believes, it
might become possible to construct the "double subjectivity" toward which her
work has always been directed. In a related vein, Luce Irigaray suggests that
feminism can undermine itself by fetishizing the authority of "personal
experience" understood in terms of "the purely narrative, autobiographical I,'
or the I' that expresses only affect"; by way of antidote, she urges a
recognition of the dialectic of subject and object, the doubleness, internal to
the subject as such: "I can't myself, all alone, affirm my own experience, since
this is something I know only after the fact, by means of discussion, and so on.
I can't affirm that this is always already the experience of a woman."
Experience should be understood dialectically, as the experience of an "I-she"
or "Je-elle"; in this sense, it forms a significant parameter of Luce
Irigaray's theorizing and a source of feminist insight.
Luce Irigaray's resistance to elaborating what she calls "a metadiscourse of
Luce Irigaray"—either within this interview or elsewhere—is in keeping with
the dialectical emphasis of her thought. To offer "commentary" of "a reflexive,
critical" sort on her own writing would be to subject it to precisely the kind
of "logical formalization" that, in her view, forecloses dialogue and precludes
the representation of sexual difference. In order to keep her text "always open"
she attempts to situate it "at the crossroads of a double mise en
forme," at or as "the encounter" between "a literary formalization" and a
"logical formalization"—thus, assimilable to neither. The pervasiveness of
interrogative constructions in her utterance serves a comparable intent: "the
text is always open onto a new sense, and onto a future sense" as well as "onto
a potential You,' a potential interlocutor." Despite, or perhaps because of,
this concern for preserving the dialogic character of her work, Luce Irigaray is
distressed by the misreadings that she feels have been widely visited upon her
text, whether as the result of mistranslation, the misrecognition of her
intellectual filiations, or both; and she expresses an insistent desire to
retain as much control as possible over the dissemination and interpretation of
her own words.
[Luce Irigaray requested that our exchange open with a brief comment from
her concerning her recent activities and the nature and evolution of her work to
date. Our questions to her begin just after these comments.]
LUCE IRIGARAY. Here's a book about which I'll talk a little bit called
J'aime à toi, the second one that I wrote directly in Italian. These
are books that have had great success, a large audience, especially but not only
among the young. They correspond to the third phase of my work, in which I am
trying to define a new model of possible relations between man and woman,
without the submission of either one to the other. Occasionally this displeases
some feminists, but these books inspire much hope and find much resonance,
especially with the young. The third phase of my work thus corresponds, as I
said, to the construction of an intersubjectivity respecting sexual difference.
This is something, a task, that no one has yet done, I think, something that's
completely new. The second phase of my work was to define those mediations that
could permit the existence of a feminine subjectivity—that is to say, another
subject—and the first phase was the most critical one, which comprehended,
above all, Speculum, This Sex Which Is Not One, and to some
extent An Ethics of Sexual Difference. It was the phase in which I
showed how a single subject, traditionally the masculine subject, had
constructed the world and interpreted the world according to a single
perspective. Thus, three phases: the first a critique, you might say, of the
auto-mono-centrism of the Western subject; the second, how to define a second
subject; and the third phase, how to define a relationship, a philosophy, an
ethic, a relationship between two different subjects. For this reason the last
book is called Essere due, Etre deux [Being Two], in
a sense at once philosophical and also in the sense of being two, two
things.
Before going to the questions I want to make a comment useful for you and, I
think, for many American readers and especially for many feminist readers, male
and female, worldwide. I think that in the United States my books are read
mainly in literature departments. But they are philosophical books and I think
that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about them because the heart of
my argument is philosophical, and literary scholars are not always prepared to
understand this philosophical core. Along these lines, I want to say that the
questions you pose are tied to your literary training and that the audience,
moreover, is literary. These are questions that speak only to certain aspects of
my work.2 Perhaps it's not pleasing that I say this, but at the same
time I think it's useful. To make a work rigorous, it's necessary to agree on
what's at stake in the work, and, even more, to agree that I speak as a woman
and that the thing most refused to a woman is to do philosophy. It's always been
admitted that women are able to create literature—at least a little, if they
have time—but philosophy, by means of which values are defined, that was
strictly reserved for men.
Also, to create a genuinely autonomous politics—not a politics of equality,
but an autonomous politics—that too is a point where there's great resistance.
What I've done recently in Scandinavia and before leaving Italy is for the first
time to explain myself more fully concerning my relationship to Simone de
Beauvoir, showing the radical difference between our two bodies of work. Thus,
if it interests you to repose questions about this, I can answer them.
Q. We've established a tradition of opening every interview with this
question: Do you consider yourself a writer?
A. How do you believe I could respond to you? Please note that you've put
"writer" (un écrivain) in the masculine, but let that pass. I don't
know if it's a problem of translation. What is a writer for you, in the first
place? And in the second place, is it really up to me to decide if I'm a writer
or not? I'm astonished to think that someone is able to decide for herself if
she is a writer or not.
Q. In general, it's history that decides.
A. Absolutely, we're in agreement.
Q. Many readers in the United States rely on translations in approaching your
work. In light of your concern with the phonetic specificity of languages, as
well as with the process of cultural sedimentation in language, what guidance
can you offer your would-be readers in the U.S.?
A. I don't understand what this means.
Q. Most fundamentally: Is your work translatable?
A. If my work—now, notice how I've put this—if my work represents
difficulties of translation, I'd say these are above all difficulties of syntax,
logical difficulties, more than phonetic ones. I also think that there are two
aspects of the problem of translation. The first thing that I've already spoken
about is that very few male or female translators really read me as a
philosopher and thus make interpretive errors about my text because of this
problem. Also, errors of translation may come from the fact that I am opening a
new field of thought. For example, there's a central part of Speculum
that's called "L'incontournable volume." The American woman who translated it
entitled this chapter "Volume Fluidity." In the anthology published by
Blackwell, the chapter is retranslated because the people at Blackwell and
Margaret Whitford retranslated it, but there are new errors in their
translation. My attention was drawn to the Italian translation made by someone
competent, a [female] philosopher, but for whom my thought was, more or less,
something completely new, at least then. But in Italian, in any case, the term
"incontornabile" exists. By "L'incontournable volume" I simply meant a volume
that can't be circumscribed because it's open. Thus, it didn't mean either
"volume fluidity" or "volume without contours." It's an allusion to the
morphology of the female body, and I say that this morphology is an open volume,
one that can't be circumscribed. A closed volume can be circumscribed; an open
volume can't be circumscribed. Why do people make this mistake? Because they
fail to listen and lack the imagination that corresponds to what I mean.
I want to give another example since you've spoken of translation.
Speculum has as its subtitle de l'autre femme, and it's true
that I was imprudent [in so titling it]. With this title and subtitle I meant
two things. Almost everybody understood the term "speculum" as simply the term
"mirror." But the title evokes much more than this: it's an allusion to those
European works (I'm no longer sure of exactly what era) that speak of the
"speculum mundi"—that is, the "mirror of the world." It's not simply a question
of a mirror in which one sees oneself, but of the way in which it's possible to
give an account of the world within a discourse: a mirror of the world. How I'm
going to try to give an account of the world in my discourse. It's in this sense
above all that I also played with the mirror, but not simply, because the mirror
in a simple sense, in which I see myself, has served for the most part to
constitute a masculine subject. An the subtitle was even more striking, because
in French it's de l'autre femme. Apparently I was imprudent because in
Speculum I play with words all the time. I should have put after de
l'autre a colon: de l'autre: femme [of the other: woman], meaning
the other as [en tant que] woman. Then in Italian the subtitle
became Speculum. L'altra donna [Speculum: The other
woman]. Everybody thought it was a question of the image of the other
woman—that is, they thought of an empirical relation between two women, for
example. This is absolutely not the project of Speculum. In American it
became Speculum of the Other Woman. That's worse, because it should
have been put, Speculum on the Other Woman or On the Other:
Woman. That would have been best. It was there, that moment, that marked
the counterpoint to Simone de Beauvoir. That is, Simone de Beauvoir refused to
be the Other because she refused to be second in Western culture. In order not
to be the Other she said, "I want to be the equal of man; I want to be the same
as man; finally, I want to be a man. I want to be a masculine subject." And that
point of view I find is a very important philosophical and political regression.
What I myself say is that there is no true Other in Western culture and that
what I want—certainly I don't want to be second—but I want there to be two
subjects. Thus, it was "On the Other: Woman." And these are things that have
involved an equally great misunderstanding of my work, so that it's been thought
that in the second part of my work I turn my back on the first, that I renounce
the first part. This error follows, among other things, from errors of
translation in the title and subtitle of Speculum. I've never been
repressive about homosexuality, but in Speculum I didn't want to treat
a problem between two women. I wanted to treat the problem of the Other as woman
in Western culture.
The advice I give to readers is to be bilingual; that's the best. And to
read, to read in English and French and compare them. To male and female
translators, I would advise that they talk with me about the translation. I
think it's very important not to sell texts with errors in them. Also for the
translator, because, as there are international translations, one day people
will laugh at a poor translation, and meanwhile at the cultural level several
years are lost with a bad translation.
Q. As a writer, you've resisted attempts to divide up the corpus of your work
according to the law of genre into fictional and nonfictional, philosophical or
poetic, essayistic and analytic texts. Why is it important to you to resist such
gestures? How can readers engage with the various registers of your writing
without resorting to such anatomies?
A. I recognize the point of this question although I'm now at another stage,
but I'll respond because it's a question for literary people, or at the frontier
between literature and philosophy. In the first place, I want to say that I
resist genres because in Western tradition to pigeon-hole onself in a genre is
to accept a hierarchy—let's say, between philosophy first and then art. Thus to
accept that the artistic subject is second in relation to the subject who
defines truth first. This I don't want. I resist perhaps because I'm a woman,
and traditionally women have always had a way of speaking, of expressing
themselves artistically rather than simply, coolly, logically, and I don't want
to participate in the repression of this mode of expression. Neither do I want
to remain within literature. I'd like to say also that I resist genres because,
and above all, what matters to me is opening new ways of thought. That is, I
want to think and I don't want simply to submit myself to the traditional
categories of logic and understanding, not simply. To accede to these new ways
of thought, it's necessary to find a new mode of thinking, a new mode of
speaking. I'm not the first to say so; for example, Nietzsche said so, Heideggr
said so. I think it's extremely important to accede to thinking and not remain
within the logical categories of an intelligence of commentary, or an
intelligence of abstract rationality. I want to find a way of thinking that's
been forgotten in Western tradition.
Q. Concerning the practice of parler femme and the role of the
poetic in your discourse, you remark in a 1980 interview with Suzanne Lamy and
André Roy, "I think it's necessary to deconstruct and argue, but with another
kind of argumentation, by means of a certain deconstruction of discourse." Can
you elaborate on this "other argumentation" as a means of feminist intervention?
Is it in any way related to what you call "Diotima's method" in "Sorcerer Love,"
which you describe as a four-term dialectic?
A. I see that all the questions are rather difficult. I don't know what's
meant by "feminist." Or let's say, more exactly, and there are many uses of this
word, that it constrains me to be called simply "feminist" knowing that I don't
have rapport with many other feminists. How can I say this? Are men going to be
called "homministes"? I think it's accepted that men will vary according to
different choices, philosophical choices, political choices, and so on. For me
it's very tiresome today to classify all women—all women and men who are
concerned closely or distantly with women's liberation—as being feminists or
not. There are feminists of equality and feminists of difference, to give just
one example, and I don't think that feminists of equality will ever be
interrogated, themselves, about the way of changing argumentation in order to
deconstruct a discourse; that's absolutely not their problem. They want to be
equal to men, not to be behind, not to be second. What matters to me is to make
possible a double subjectivity. In order to make possible a double subjectivity,
it's necessary that I exit the prison of a single discourse and that I show how
this discourse was necessarily limited to a single subject. But it troubles me a
little to call this, in the abstract, a feminist intervention. To the second
question I can't respond at the moment because today I wasn't able to get and
reread "Sorcerer Love," and the only thing I want to say is that, according to
my analysis of Diotima's discourse, that discourse isn't homogeneous; that is,
she doesn't have the same position at the beginning of the discourse that she
has at the end. And as much as I find the beginning of the discourse
innovative«I don't know quite how to say it—as much as it seems agreeable to
me, to the same extent I find that the end is very much more traditional and
less interesting.
Q. Your books seem to be composed or arranged in a variety of ways. For
example, the tripartite structure of Speculum and the relation between
and within its parts seems an essential aspect of the book's "argument." To very
different effect, the divisions and arrangement of An Ethics of Sexual
Difference seem equally deliberate, although the texts that comprise that
volume were composed as lectures and thus under various circumstances.
Elemental Passions seems composed according to some quite different
logic. Can you comment on the way these or other texts were composed as volumes?
A. Speculum isn't merely tripartite. It's a book written in three
parts, but it's also necessary to emphasize that the parts are historically
inverted. That is to say, it begins with Freud and ends with Plato, and there is
a redoubling in the very interior of the book; thus, the book is called
Speculum and the central part is called "Speculum." There is throughout
a play of historical reversals and of doubles that is much more than tripartite.
Accordingly, the middle of the book is called "L'incontournable volume"—that
is, the volume that can't be circumscribed. Ethique is a book that's
much less composed; it simply follows the historical order of my seminars.
Elemental Passions is composed directly, yes. Since you ask, "How were
these volumes composed?" I will restrict my comment to three words«how can I say
them? I can say first, I hope, artistically. That is, for me a book is
also an art object, thus I compose my book and I'm not at all content to have an
editor change my composition. In general I refuse changes. For example, when I
received the proofs to Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche all the
blanks had been suppressed and I had to recompose the whole thing. Thus, I would
say first, "artistically." At the philosophical level, I'd say there is in my
composition a counterpoint between—this is difficult, it's important to find
just the right words, otherwise they're going to make errors—between that which
concerns the order of schematism and that which concerns the order of discourse.
And I would say thirdly, I compose my books as if I were able to speak silently;
that is, I always create a counterpoint between speech [la parole] and
silence.
Q. In "The Three Genres" you characterize "style" in language as "that which
resists formalization." Can you elaborate on this definition? Do you accept the
identification of "style" with the feminine? How can a writer cultivate her
style? And finally, what's the importance of style in your own writing
practice?
A. I would like to note that most of the questions concern a meta-discourse
of Luce Irigaray (above all don't say Irigaray; I have a horror of that). In
other words, you always ask me to take a reflexive, critical position on my
work, which corresponds to one of the things I want to avoid. [Laughs.] I can do
it, but I'm afraid interviews of this type can undo the effect of the way in
which I write. It's for this reason too that at a certain moment I don't want to
offer commentary, I want to give some beacons, but no more. Above all, translate
my words literally. For example, when I speak of "schematism" I'm alluding to
Kant's word. If you use some other word, what I said no longer makes sense.
To continue to respond to your question: I want to say that in our tradition
we are submitted to a type of logical formalization. When I don't use a flat
pronouncement to explain myself, I cross the formalization of writing with
logical formalization. This is what makes my utterance [parole] place
itself at the crossroads of a double mise en forme. And that permits,
first, the production of new meaning effects and, above all, leaves the text
always open [entre-ouvert]—in that it's not enclosed within either a
logical formalization or a literary formalization. It's at the encounter of the
two. Thus, the text is always open onto a new sense, and onto a future sense,
and I would say also onto a potential "You" [Tu], a potential
interlocutor. That's what I'm able to say.
You ask, "Do you accept the idea that style is feminine?" I'm going to
respond in a way that's deliberately rather lapidary and for some people
provocative. If you think that the feminine is diverse, as I believe, because
subjectivity is diverse, then evidently style is diverse—short of its being a
pure and simple technology. But then I don't know if it's possible to talk about
a concrete subject, a feminine subject.
As to how a writer can develop her style, I'd respond much the same way.
Firstly, I don't think it's possible to have generalizations, and it displeases
me to issue a norm for others, but I'd say that thought seems to me to permit
the deployment of art, not only thought but also art, because it permits an
escape from imitation. Most people who write or paint have begun with imitation.
I think that if one permits it, thought will liberate itself from imitation and
create its own way. And that also permits its own liberation from the status of
pure and simple technique.
Q. One striking feature of your own writing practice for many years has been
the use of interrogatives to produce a wide range of effects. Would you comment
on this aspect of your "style"?
A. I think the importance of the interrogative is to leave a place for the
future, thus not to establish a truth that would be a truth once and for all,
and also to leave a place for the other—to leave a place for a way toward that
other or for the other toward me. I think that's the best explanation of the
interrogative. Interrogation is a very good means of passage because the way is
always open.
Q. In "The Three Genres" and elsewhere you argue that it's essential for
women to accede to the place of the "I" and you also call for "the
transformation of the autobiographical I' into a different cultural I'." But in
"A Chance for Life" you also urge women "never [to] give up subjective
experience as an element of knowledge." How do these concerns relate to the role
of the "I" in your own writings—for example, in Speculum and in your
more recent work? Does your theorizing draw upon your own "subjective
experience" as a woman?
A. I think that in these questions and in what you proffer as a possible
contradiction on my part there is manifest something that for me is a certain
impasse of subjectivity. No, I mean a certain way of feminine subjectivity
expressing itself, at least that which she's been permitted historically, and
that which risks becoming a certain impasse in the liberation of women. Then,
many women have understood (no doubt because they needed to), that liberation
for them was simply to say "I." They've begun to say "I" and have become a bit
lost in this "I" because this "I" lacks, as the philosophers say, categories. Or
then they fight among themselves to see who says "I" the loudest: your "I"
versus my "I." Certainly, it was important to begin to venture to take the word
and venture to say "I," but what seems more important to me, and in any case
indispensible to the stage we're now at, is to say not only "I" but to say
"I-she" (Je-elle)—that is, to live that "I" and define it not only as
a simple subjectivity that expresses itself, but in terms of a dialectic between
subjectivity and objectivity. Then, I myself write "I" as "I marked she" (Je
indice elle), which permits me to make visible that the subject is two,
that it's not a unique subject, and to pose all sorts of dialogic questions. For
example, what is a dialogue between "I-she" and "You-she," a dialogue between
"I-she" and "You-he," a dialogue between "I-he" and "You-she"? All these kinds
of question, the dialogic intersection between two differently adhering
subjects, two generically different subjects, become possible.
Thus, if you like, I think that the purely narrative, autobiographical "I,"
or the "I" that expresses only affect, risks being an "I" that collapses back
into a role traditionally granted to woman: an "I" of pathos, that the woman
also uses in her place, the home. It seems to me important to accede to a
different cultural "I"—that is, to construct a new objectivity that corresponds
not to an indifferent "I" but to an "I" that's sexed feminine. It's necessary to
remain both objective and subjective. And to remain within a dialectic between
the two. I think the way I use the "I" is different depending on each text. The
way of using "I" at one moment of my work is to refuse to pretend to dictate
truth for others; that is, it's a certain strategy for breaking with a
traditional philosophical subject and one that parenthesizes the fact that it's
"he" who dictates the truth. In other words, I, Luce Irigaray, at this moment in
history; I think there's a humility and a singularity at the philosophical
level. At certain times, I think there's a dialectical strategy, but especially
in the most recent books, for example, in Essere Due there are many
dialectical strategies already in the title but also in the interior of the
text, where I try to define what could be a double utterance [une parole à
deux] that would respect the "I" and the "You" [Tu]. Thus, I use
the "I" also to indicate speech [le discours]. The fact is I can't
offer a single explanation that would apply to the collection of my works.
Yes, I draw on my personal experience if that means that I don't write or
think in a purely abstract and insensible fashion. The truth I talk about is a
truth that's also a sensible truth, one that changes with experience. The
experience may be more immediately perceptual or more spiritual. I can say that,
and I can also say that I don't think simply in order to depart from the
thinking of others. Thus, yes, it goes by way of my personal experience—but I
don't want you to put it that way, because it's very complicated. I can't
myself, all alone, affirm my own experience, since this is something I know only
after the fact, by means of discussion, and so on. I can't affirm that this is
always already the experience of a woman. It must be a dialectic between
subjectivity and objectivity.
Q. Your linguistic experiments indicate that, contrary to certain commonly
held beliefs, women tend to speak more objectively than men, their "I"
more often giving way to the interlocutor or the subject matter of the
utterance. But as you also note in An Ethics of Sexual Difference and
elsewhere, it's men, not women, who continue to monopolize the rhetoric of
objectivity across the disciplines and in public life—a rhetoric that sometimes
operates by transposing the "I" to the third person or to impersonal
constructions such as il y a. How can feminists more effectively expose
the subjectivity of such masculinist rhetoric?
A. I'd say that they should do so in a rigorous fashion, and I propose as an
example "A Chance at Life," since you've cited it. That is, to make a rigorous
analysis of masculine discourse and to disassemble the mechanisms of masculine
discourse. I think that simply to engage in polemic will only augment distances
and obstacles. I want to say also that it's important not to confuse the third
person "he" [il] with the "there is" [il y a]. They're
different. For example, il y a in Heidegger isn't at all the
il. But, in any case, in responding to the question "How can they bring
to light more effectively the subjectivity of that masculine rhetoric?" I'd say
by making a rigorous analysis of masculine discourse and in drawing out the
conclusions of their analysis. If the liberation of woman is to become an
egotistical man, then it would be better if she stayed where she is. [Laughs.]
It's all the more necessary to pay attention because among feminists of
difference there are also two categories. [Laughs.] There's an Italian and
perhaps also an American party, I'm not sure, that says, "We, the women who are
different. Who are different from you" and who remain among themselves saying,
"We're different." This lacks something of dialectic, of humility, of the sense
of history. What really interests me is actually to change the relationship of
difference between the genders [genres]. I want to tell you why I'm not
sure that you've fully understood the feminism of difference. It's because of
the questions you'll ask me later on, for example, about homosexuals. If you
understood the feminism of difference you wouldn't ask these kind of
questions.
Q. In the United States your work is sometimes misunderstood as homophobic,
has been perceived as homophobic by certain writers. That's what inspires the
later question.
A. I think this isn't fair, because I believe that when Speculum was
understood as simply homophile, in part because of an error of
translation, and when it became clear that I wasn't simply a homophile, then
they said I was a homophobe, because people didn't know how to think the
difference fairly. Then, either one is a homophile or a homophobe? I found
myself in Toronto at a seminar where in the next room there was an American, I
think, who was giving a seminar on Speculum and I was in the next room
while she gave a seminar on Speculum against me. Oh yes, this is very
fashionable. Even if Speculum is the child I've disowned, abandoned,
now it's for them, isn't it, to do what they wish with this very difficult book
that they certainly don't understand. I think Speculum is discussed in
the way that Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason was, never mind
the fact that no one has actually read it. And this situation is equally
frequent, notably because of the misunderstanding I spoke about. So, I was a
homophile and I've become a homophobe. [Laughs.] It has nothing to do with all
that. Personally, I haven't changed positions.
Q. Your 1977 indictment of Lacanian analysis, "The Poverty of
Psychoanalysis," calls on male practitioners to analyse their own unanalyzed
drives and desires, including their homosexual desire and their desire to rape.
Would you address comparable requirements of self-analysis to would-be male
feminists?
A. I would require that every analyst, man or woman, feminist or not, in
order to listen to someone (as) other must analyse their homosexual desires,
their desire to rape and violate the other—man or woman, feminist or
non-feminist. What strikes me is that men don't listen to themselves talk. They
don't hear/know [entendent] what they're saying.
Q. In a 1987 interview with Alice Jardine, you note that Speculum
"is a difficult book, as it defines a new horizon of thought," and in a 1988
interview with Christine Lasagni you say that there is "no break" between your
earlier and your latest texts. Does Speculum perform a kind of
groundwork for your subsequent interventions in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and
cultural theory? How would you place it within the ongoing evolution of your
work, especially your recent experiments in linguistics?
A. I indicated already how I define the three stages of my work, so it's not
necessary to repeat that. The research in linguistics appeared during the second
part of my work when I was trying to define new mediations for the feminine
subject, and it continues to interest me also in order to see how to make
possible a relation between man and woman. When you see that if you ask a class
of high-school students to create a sentence with the preposition "with" and
that a girl will make a sentence of the type "I'm going out tonight with you"
[toi] or "I want to live with him" [lui] and that the boy will
create a sentence of the type "I'm going out with my bike" or "I wrote that
sentence with a pen," of course you ask yourself how you're going to get these
two subjects to live together, how you're going to create bridges. Thus, it's
important to start out again from discourse. I began these analyses of discourse
also because, obviously, when I changed language and culture people would always
say, since nothing is more portable than nationalism, "What's true for you, a
French speaker, isn't true for us." So I decided to make inquiries in a maximum
number of languages and cultures to be able to respond to these kinds of
criticisms. Now I'm a little better prepared: I know a little better how this
works out in a language where, let's say, gender doesn't express itself in
articles as it does in French. I know it's going to express itself
elsewhere—for example, in the use of prepositions. I think this also puts in
question the idea that there must be language universals. Probably today I'd say
that in a certain sense the universal is perhaps two at the level of
subjectivity and at the level of discourse, and that this can lead the way to a
consequent or secondary change at the level of language [langue]. This,
certainly, poses a thrilling but large problem—for computers, too.
Q. In Speculum you invoke an approach to dream interpretation that
would treat the dream not as the "rebus" of an "already given graphic order" but
as a kind of pictograph, an avatar of an other order of writing. More
recently you've argued that alphabetic writing is "linked historically to the
civil and religious codification of patriarchal power" and you've affirmed the
existence of an ancient social order where women's participation in civil and
religious life is linked somehow to "still partially figurative, non-abstract"
systems of written signs. Is there a connection between the pictographic dream
script of the unconscious and the "partially figurative" writing of this
pre-patriarchal history?
A. I'd say that in a book like This Sex Which Is Not One I asked
myself—and this seems to me to respond to your question—if woman didn't
correspond in one sense to that which we call the "unconscious." If the culture
is founded on a certain repression of the graphic order, and if that which
returns at night under the guise of the dream presents itself as a sort of
pictograph, isn't there the trace of a much more generalizable pictographic
order that had already been historically repressed, specifically in the West? In
order to know, it would be necessary to analyze the dreams of cultures in which
writing is still today more pictographic, but I haven't done that. I know that
cultures in which writing is more pictographic are generally more favorable to
the feminine subject and to a culture of the feminine.
Q. In "Gesture in Psychoanalysis" you say that girls and boys enter language
by means of different bodily gestures: the boy's, epitomized in the Freudian
fort/da, is apt to embody an alternating and linear motion that also mimics his
style of masturbation, whereas the girl's is apt to be circular,
self-enveloping, and expressive of rapport with, rather than mastery over, the
(m)other. Does this mean that the logic of mastery is in some sense inscribed in
the boy's anatomy, or at least in his capacity for autoeroticism? If cultural
reconstruction depends upon the reconstruction of language, must we alter the
very gestures by which boys and girls enter language?
A. Well, it seems to me that in this passage I was talking about the gesture
of the little boy [Hans, of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle].
That gesture is not entirely linear because it comes here, goes there, comes
into the bed and goes out of the bed. It's a bit more complicated than being
simply linear. Did I myself talk of masturbation?
Q. You might have said "autoerotic."
A. That's already better. It's not entirely the same thing. Autoerotic, yes,
but that's not masturbation. To the extent that it's a gesture of mastery, it's
not entirely similar. I think there are errors in the question, or in any case,
errors in the relation between the [English] text and me. Also, in this text I
oppose the triangular to the circular, especially the triangle of vowels. I pose
the opposition of vowels, the phonetic difference between the little girl and
the little boy, because I relate, I believe, the word of the little girl to the
OUM, the sacred syllable of the Far East. What I want to say about this, and
what seems to me interesting, is that when people set up oppositions in my work,
they oversimplify it. Here you are prepared, I'd say, to oppose the anatomical
to the cultural and to make a parallelism between the anatomical and the
cultural. But of course it's not simply a question of anatomy; it's a question
of the relation between two subjects. The relation of the little boy to his
mother is different from the little girl's relation. The little boy, in order to
situate himself vis-à-vis the mother, must have a strategy, perhaps a strategy
of mastery, because he finds himself in an extremely difficult situation. He's a
little boy. He has come out of a woman who's different from him. He himself will
never be able to engender, to give birth. He is therefore in a space of
unfathomable mystery. He must invent a strategy to keep himself from being
submerged, engulfed. For the little girl it's entirely different. She's a little
woman born of another woman. She is able to engender like hr mother; thus, she
has a sort of jubilation in being herself and in playing with herself. For the
little boy, it's necessary to construct a world in order to construct himself.
It's a very very different situation. It's not simply an anatomical question;
it's also a relational question. It's essential not to forget that the
anatomical is always entangled in the relational.
Now, I'm not sure the little boy accedes to language only in that way. It was
Freud who saw that one day and decided so. I think boys accede to language more
according to a subject-object relation—and this is verified by every linguistic
inquiry—and the girl more by means of a subject-subject relation. For example,
the little girl says to her mother, "Mama, will you play with me?" In other
words it's a little "I" that talks to a [feminine] "You" [une Tu] and
proposes to do something together while leaving her mother the right to respond.
The little boy says, "I want a little car" or "I want to play with a ball." He
places much less emphasis on the "together" [ensemble] and especially
on the two, and in general he doesn't ask for the opinion of the other. He
doesn't use questioning like the little girl.
So, must one modify these gestures? No, I don't think so at all. I think—and
this is rather like what I'm trying to do in the two recent books—that the
genealogical relation is a vertical relation with a vertical transcendence. If
we become capable of a horizontal relation between adult man and adult woman
with a horizontal transcendence—that is, an irreducibility between "I-woman"
[Je-femme] and "You-man" [Tu-homme]—then if a woman
constitutes her feminine identity, she can help man exit from a simple or a
difficult relation with his mother by means of a horizontal rapport between the
man and the woman. In taking leave of the genealogical relation that has
dominated our traditions and in trying to define a new relation of maturity, a
horizontal relation between two genders involving the negative, involving
irreducibility, involving difference. It's possible to advise the mother to
speak differently to the girl and boy, because if the little girl says to her
mother, "Mama, do you want to play with me?" or "Mama, can I comb your hair?"
it's a little bit of her discourse flowing to her mother. An utterance going
from mother to daughter might be, "Clean your room if you want to watch
television" or "Bring back some milk on your way home from school." That is, she
suppresses the dialogue; she suppresses the "doing together" [faire
ensemble]. The little girl who enters language and receives this kind of
response from her first partner—that's very serious. At the same time, when she
goes to school she will have a masculine partner imposed on her obligatorily.
Then when the little boy says, "I want a little car," the mother will say a
sentence like, "Do you want me to come and give you a kiss in bed before you go
to sleep?" That is, she poses many more questions to the little boy than to the
little girl. The "Tu" which the little girl has given her, she gives to
the little boy. One could teach the mother and teachers to pay more attention to
the discourse of the little girl. I think the most destructive thing in our
culture (mythology says the same thing, in Kora's [Proserpina's] abduction by
the god of the underworld), is the loss of the little girl's questions, her
discourse. Even more than that of the mother, the little girl's discourse is
destroyed.
Q. You're a practicing psychoanalyst and have written several papers on the
technique of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. To what extent can the analytic
encounter serve as a model for the sexuate reconstruction of language, such as
you've advocated—especially with reference to the relation between the "I" and
the "You"? Can the therapeutic encounter serve in other ways as a model for
collective, cultural transformation? Which aspects of clinical
technique seem most suggestive for this purpose?
A. I was practicing; I'm not at present. I'm not sure I understand
the question. I'd say that Freud in his analytical models talks little of sexual
difference, except in a biological way, not in a relational way. He talks a
great deal about genealogy and about castration. Otherwise, for him the model of
the successful couple is when the woman succeeds in becoming the mother of a
little boy and in this way succeeds in becoming her husband's mother. There
aren't really any couples in Freud. And much talk of castration. I myself would
say that castration seems a useless thing from the moment in which one thinks in
terms of two subjects, the limit of one subject sufficing to impose the limit of
the other subject. In this sense, difference—real and not merely theoretical
recognition, the real and not merely the theoretical drama of sexual
difference—would be for me the privileged means of conducting a course of
analysis. That is, at every moment to return difference to the patient,
reflecting back to the patient the difference in his or her life and above all
in creating the two.
I haven't written that much on the technique of psychoanalysis.3
I'm not sure I can respond well to this question, and I'm not sure I completely
understand it. I'm in the process of drafting a communication for an
intervention I'm going to make in Italy next week. For a time I proposed to
reconstruct society or the social community through encounters between two. This
was to escape from an abstract model of a disincarnate community, a totalitarian
community, and I'd say also to give me a grip on political life. If I accept
that there are others who are deciding in my place, if I accept those instances
of power where people decide in my place, then I'm completely impotent; I can do
nothing. Some years ago, out of discouragement, I decided that I would begin
again every moment of the day with the relation of two. This didn't go so
badly—it's interesting. Obviously, this two is always potentially a sexuate
two. It's difficult to explain, but interesting, because between man and woman
there's a negative, a type of irreducibility that doesn't exist between a woman
and a woman. Let's say between a man and a woman the negativity [la
négativité] is, dare I say it, of an ontological, irreducible type. Between
a woman and another woman it's of a much more empirical type and, furthermore,
can only be understood and can only live in the ontological difference between
man and woman. It's complicated.
This is a little like a refrain that returns throughout my book, which is the
title of a chapter, Toi qui ne sera jamais moi ni mien ["You Who'll
Never Be Me or Mine"].4 If I say this to you [looking at Gaëtan
Brulotte], it's true.5 If I respect reality, you'll never be me or
mine because we're different and moreover because we're each at a different
intersection of nature/culture, or of nature/relationality, which is not the
same thing. You have a different body, you are in a different relational world,
you are a boy born of a woman and that implies on your part a whole
world-construction different from mine, a different relational world, a
different cultural world. Between us there is really a mystery. Yes, there's an
irreducible mystery between man and woman. It's not at all the same kind of
mystery that exists between woman and woman or between man and man. It's not
similar. I don't know if this is easy to understand. But I think that it's
because I'm able to situate there the difference and the negative which
I will never surmount—contrary to the Hegelian negative, for example—it's
because I situate it there that I'm able to respect the differences everywhere:
differences between the other races, differences between the generations, and so
on. Because I've placed a limit on my horizon, on my power. And I'm not able to
put that limit anywhere but there, because I's real. I'm not able to place it in
the same way with another woman, where it's much less real, because we [she and
I] are not at the crossroads of nature and culture. This is factitious. If I put
the limit there, I risk doing harm either to her/it [elle] or to
myself. If I put it between us [Gaëtan Brulotte as a man and Luce
Irigaray as a woman], I think that you won't feel yourself to be injured when I
say, "You who will never be me or mine." That doesn't harm you at all, unless if
already at an imaginary level you've wanted to create your culture to the
detriment of my own subjectivity. Then that can perhaps hurt you, but in fact it
doesn't hurt you at all. It's a cultural error, I'd say. While if I put the
limit there I risk harming the other.
I prepared a book in which I labored for a long time toward a recognition of
this irreducible difference. I dedicated it to a man, an Italian politician with
whom I continue to work. In a very intense public debate that we had, I don't
quite know how to say it, he recognized my position and I recognized his, and
for perhaps one of the first times in my life I truly sensed that we were two.
And that helped me, I'd say, in putting togther a transcendental intuition and a
lived experience. It allowed me to reformulate the issue in a different manner.
And we work together, especially on the political level, trying always to remain
two. Sometimes he has it that the difference not be a sexuate, man-woman
difference, while I always try to return the difference to that. When we've made
certain book presentations and political debates together in Italy, I find it
extremely interesting to see the interest of those who come to hear us about
what transpires between us. People are extremely attentive, as if there were a
new horizon there and they want to come; they enjoy coming, especially the
young. When I presented this book with him, to whom it's dedicated,6
at the presentation where there were a lot of people, the young people came up
later to get the book autographed. So I put a brief inscription and, as he was
standing beside me, they presented the book to him saying, "you too." [Laughs.]
And he said, "But I don't want to, I didn't do anything"—because this is a man
of great integrity, very honest—and I said to him there's nothing wrong with
it. But what struck me was the desire of these people, especially the young
ones, for a relation between a man and a woman that was a relation of reciprocal
respect, of autonomy, and at the same time, yes, of reciprocal affection, so
that something changes in the cultural relation, the political relation, and so
on. It's really fascinating. It's a different historical configuration.
Feminists sometimes would like to talk in terms of a reversal of power. The
men have had it; now we'll take power. I don't think this is the gesture that
needs to be made. It's necessary to try to establish a relation of two. This is
by far the most important: two, but different from that which already
exists—that is, a completely new relation and without any horizontal submission
and without any submission of one sex to the other. This calls for a fundamental
rethinking of problems of sexual desire, because one is always left to deal with
the level of sexual desire, as the greatest feminists understand. If they're
homosexual then they no longer have that problem, or think they no longer have
it; if they're not homosexual then they're a little schizophrenic because
they're feminists on the social plane and on the personal plane they sometimes
relapse into the worst stereotypes of heterosexuality. So I think that to change
the mode of relationship between one and the other, between man and woman on the
civil and affective plane, I think this is one of the most important gestures of
our time.
Q. You sometimes use the language of pathology to talk about social and
cultural predicaments as well as individual ones. What is the status of the
therapeutic, of the idea of health and healing, in your work?
A. I've aid that it's profoundly pathogenic for girls to find themselves
always confronted with models and figures of masculine genealogy. I would say
that what interests me more and more is happiness and that to be in good health
can be an aid to happiness. But the relation to happiness beyond that to
normality, in short, is complicated.
Q. You call for a new ethics of the couple, apparently referring to various
kinds of couple—mother and daughter, sister and brother, for example, as well
as the father/son and mother/son couples that still secure patriarchal
genealogy. But you've said that in your view "man and woman is the most
mysterious and creative couple." Does the project of creating "a culture of
difference" and of critiquing what you've called "the hom(m)osexual imaginary"
depend upon a ranking of sexualities such that lesbians and gay men are
less mysterious and less creative than the man/woman couple?
Legally, what relationship is there between women's rights and the rights of
sexual minorities?
A. I think I responded to this question in part when I spoke about the
negative, about the irreducibly other of the horizontal transcendence. It seems
to me that the difference with other Others—for example, the difference with an
Other of the same gender—that to me is not the same as the difference with
someone who is of another gender. Note, it's essential not to confuse my
critique of the Western hom(m)osexual imaginary, that is, of a world of the
masculine subject, that can think itself only between masculine
subjects—hom(m)osexual with the "m" in parentheses—it's essential not to
confuse this critique, this ideological and cultural hom(m)osexualité
with the practice of homosexuality. It's not the same thing. Mine is an oeuvre
that concerns the relation of sexual difference; it's not necessary to demand
that I create the work of others. I think today there's a great risk of being
intellectual capitalists and believing that one can talk about everything, about
nothing, about everyone, regardless of one's own experience. About the man-woman
relation I have many other things to say. I think when people have looked at my
new books a little they're going to understand everything I've done as leading
to them.
And I'm amused by the last part of this question where it says, "From a legal
point of view, what's the relationship between women's rights and the rights of
sexual minorities?" In France since 1980 homosexuals have rights and women no
longer have them. That is, they are classified as men [hommes] with
regard to their rights. They have rights only as a share of men's rights. As
women they have no genuine rights. In France at present more attention is paid
to minorities than to that half of the world called women. In my opinion that's
because with the other minorities the patriarchy can remain that which
condescends generously toward minorities, whereas in the horizontal man-woman
relation there is no more patriarchy. We are two equal subjectivities, and
inventing a new relationship is fundamentally the same as inventing a new
socio-cultural order. I also think it's important not to confuse sexual choice
with sexual difference. For me sexual difference is a fundamental parameter of
the socio-cultural order; sexual choice is secondary. Even if one chooses to
remain among women, it's necessary to resolve the problem of sexual difference.
And likewise if one remains among men.
Q. By way of conclusion, we have a tradition of posing the following
question: Are you aware of any misreadings or misunderstandings of your work
that you'd like to address here?
A. There are certainly errors of translation; I've given you examples. There
are errors of interpretation which are tied to something I've already indicated:
the principal points of error derive from not being sufficiently attentive to my
philosophical training, and especially to my relationship to ontology and to the
negative. In the same vin, errors result from confusing a scientific with a
philosophical discipline, which aren't the same thing. Obviously, I represent a
snare for the reader to the extent that I have various scientific
trainings—linguistic, psychological, psychoanalytic, literary (my first studies
were literary)—and at the same time, a philosophical training. So I make use of
scientific techniques; sometimes I make an analysis of discourse using only a
scientific technique. Fundamentally, what I recur to the most in interpretation
is, I think finally, a certain philosophical level. So when I'm read simply as a
psychoanalyst or as a linguist, there are some levels of thought, intention, and
interpretation in my work that are already lost.
There is also another error. I think Simone de Beauvoir said that woman
remains always within the dimension of immanence and that she's incapable of
transcendence. But—by I don't know what mystery!—transcendence is something
that interests me very much. Often the way in which I'm read and interpreted is
too immanent, too much tied to contiguity, and the source and reference of my
work is misunderstood. It's true that a woman who has a relationship to
transcendence and to the transcendental in a real rather than a formal way is
something all too rare. But I'd say there's been a little of that in my
life.
Another error occurs when filiations are imputed to me that are not mine: for
example, it's said that I'm a daughter of Simone de Beauvoir and that I haven't
acknowledged enough the source of my thinking in relation to her. But that's
because I'm not a daughter of Simone de Beauvoir. I don't know her work well. I
read her novels when I was an adolescent. Two years ago I tried, for the sake of
my students, to take another look at The Second Sex; in fact, I read it
in 1952 and read only the Introduction and a little of the first chapter, but
this is not at all the source of my work. And I've even commented recently about
the time when Speculum came out and I sent it to Simone de Beauvoir,
and I was very disappointed when she didn't respond to me—very disappointed,
especially because I had much trouble on account of Speculum. I was
excluded from the university, and afterward in France I couldn't get a teaching
appointment. I still don't have one. So I'm not a daughter of Simone de
Beauvoir; I think my theoretical filiation, as I've always said (it's in all my
books), is much more to the tradition of Western philosophy. Now, I'm not saying
that Simone de Beauvoir isn't part of that tradition, but hers isn't an oeuvre
that I know well nor to which I myself especially refer. It's possible that I've
been influenced by her work by means of the ideological climate, but I'm not
someone who lives very much in that world. Once again, the question of the Other
as she treats it, and the question of the Other as I treat it, as I was just
saying, are radically different. She refuses to be Other and I demand to be
radically Other in order to exit from a horizon. I think they even say I'm a
disciple of Rousseau. I don't know Rousseau's oeuvre well. It's true that when
Rousseau's work is explained to me there are certain things that are somewhat
similar, but if I'd read much Rousseau I would have said so. I know well the
philosophers of whom I speak. Look at my work and you'll see.
