Luce irigaray the bodily encounter with the mother pdf

What does Sartre then conclude? Love is an impossibility. Love—or relationships—are bound to fail, because they lead to, among other things, sadism and masochism. First masochism: I make myself into an object for the Other and suffer for it by letting the Other enslave me.

Yet my lover does not want an object for a lover. By recognizing that I am the slave, I rebel viciously to recover my freedom back. Thus, masochism ends in failure.

The second sadism: I am the master and have control of the Other, thus I turn the Other into an object. I want no reciprocity for I want immediate appropriation of the Other. The flesh suddenly stands out where the parts of the body are not part of the totality, but instead isolated folds of flesh.

However, it fails as well because I do not want an object for a lover. Thus, sadism fails as well. There is no reconciliation. Thus, by starting with the fusion model, I try and find someone so that I can I appropriate the other. We should note that Sartre was trying to provide a new concept of love. His view, as we have seen, is that love is impossible because it leads to sadomasochism.

However, Sartre is still within the fusion tradition. He defines love as two individuals attempting to come into one. Yet this is the same definition that the fusion model provides. The difference is that traditionally, a fusion happens once one finds the partner.

Sartre is still within the rubric of the fusion model. Is there a way around this? I believe Irigaray provides an answer. Sexual Equality and Sexual Difference Earlier feminists wanted both of the sexes to be equal: equality through economics, workforce, and through social reform. Without equality, the game of love is torturous. In other words, equality means sameness.

If there happen to be any differences, the couple would try to get rid of them, ignore them, or confront them with stressful results. Suppose society did make it so that both sexes were equal: meaning equal standards of living and equal rights as men.

The differences are eradicated and any form of difference is seen to be inferior. Indeed, the feminine has been defined as the inverse of the masculine.

But for women to become speaking as woman, they would have to be subjects in their own right. By recognizing the differences, both would have contributions to society instead of one dominating the other.

Irigaray wants to see difference as a positive element. Difference does not mean opposed, compared, or complimentary. Any positive relationship between the sexes is conditioned on women finding terms that would relate herself to herself and not as a derivative or relational to men. The positive aspect allows a genuine difference, rather than an opposition between men and women. There are differences between the sexes that give two perspectives, two knowledges, and two truths.

Traditionally, two loving people can work only if they have equal share in the relationship. No one dominates the other. Irigaray finds this wrongheaded. One reason is because—as Sartre states, loving the Other means that one desires to be loved—love is narcissistic. Since woman has always been the other of man, woman has no other.

Criticism of Essentialism and Heteronormativity Irigaray has been criticized for being an essentialist. That is, by looking at the differences between the sexes, the critics claim that Irigaray is giving men and women an essential character which the older generation struggled so hard to get rid of.

By claiming essentialism, society would go back to the standards of women being inferior to men. However, a closer reading reveals something deeper than that. In other words, Irigaray does not mean to go back to genital or biological difference. Could sexual difference mean gender differences? Again no. My emphasis. Gender difference also generates problems from before where one sees the masculine gender and the one which is not masculine.

Perhaps another reason has to do with the interpretations of the texts themselves. Irigaray calls for sexed rights. Unfortunately, these do not translate to English easily. However, to claim something that is sexed or sexuate means to think of the self as sexed. The terms are used to describe the human subject as an identity while thinking of the body. It does not necessarily entail some essential quality.

As for the claim that she is aiming for heteronormativity, Irigaray replies that other sexual relationships are possible but [w]e are begotten by woman and man, we live in a society of women and men.

But this culture can become a model for a relationship in their diversity. Love, for Irigaray, does not entail a sexual relationship. Create Alert Alert. Share This Paper.

Background Citations. Methods Citations. Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type. More Filters. Gerais: Revista Interinstitucional de Psicologia. This paper aims to present the debate between Luce Irigaray and psychoanalysis.

Initially, it contextualizes her work within the feminist field. Irigaray composes its French strand that, in the … Expand. Irigaray and the Culture of Narcissism. This article recontextualizes Irigaray with reference to post-Freudian psychoanalytic theories of narcissism, and argues that a persistent theme in her work has been the diagnosis of the narcissism … Expand. The Oceanic Silence of Rebecca Horn. While Irigaray praises psychoanalysis for utilizing the method of analysis to reveal the plight of female subjectivity, she also thinks that it reinforces it.

Freud attempts to explain female subjectivity and sexuality according to a male model. From this perspective, female subjectivity looks like a deformed or insufficiently developed form of male subjectivity.

Irigaray argues that if Freud had turned the tools of analysis onto his own discourse, then he would have seen that female subjectivity cannot be understood through the lenses of a one-sex model.

In other words, negative views of women exist because of theoretical bias-not because of nature. Through her critiques of both philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Irigaray argues that women need to attain a social existence separate from the role of mother. However, this alone will not change the current state of affairs. For Irigaray is not suggesting that the social role of women will change if they merely step over the line of nature into culture. Irigaray believes that true social change will occur only if society challenges its perception of nature as unthinking matter to be dominated and controlled.

Thus, while women must attain subjectivity, men must become more embodied. Irigaray argues that both men and women have to reconfigure their subjectivity so that they both understand themselves as belonging equally to nature and culture.

Two main discourses that maintain a strong presence throughout her work are psychoanalysis, with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan as its representatives, and philosophy. Insofar as Lacanian psychoanalysis works out of a background in structural linguistics, both Lacan and Irigaray also focus on language. Irigaray engages with philosophy, psychoanalysis and linguistics in order to uncover the lack of true sexual difference in Western culture.

Irigaray states on the opening page of An Ethics of Sexual Difference that each age is defined by a philosophical issue that calls to be thoroughly examined-ours is sexual difference.

Sexual difference is often associated with the anatomical differences between the sexes. However, Irigaray follows the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in understanding sexual difference as a difference that is assigned in language. Freud introduces the idea of an imaginary body in The Ego and the Id , in the section of the same name, when he describes the ego self-consciousness as neither strictly a psychic phenomenon nor a bodily phenomenon.

Freud believes that an ego is formed in reference to a body, such that the manner in which an infant understands his or her selfhood is inseparable from his or her bodily existence.

Lacan states that the first of two key moments in subject formation is the projection of an imaginary body. This occurs in the mirror stage at roughly six months.

As a being who still lacks mobility and motor control, an infant who is placed in front of a mirror another person can serve here as well, typically the mother will identify with the unified, idealized image that is reflected back in the mirror. Rather than identify with him or herself as a helpless being, the child choose to identify with the idealized image of him or herself. Lacan believes that the element of fantasy and imagination involved in the identification with the mirror image marks the image as simultaneously representative and misrepresentative of the infant.

Irigaray agrees with Lacan that how we understand our biology is largely culturally influenced-thus does she accept the idea of an imaginary body. Irigaray argues that, like people, cultures project dominant imaginary schemes which then affect how that culture understands and defines itself. According to Irigaray, in Western culture, the imaginary body which dominates on a cultural level is a male body.

Irigaray thus argues that Western culture privileges identity, unity, and sight-all of which she believes are associated with male anatomy. She believes that fields such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, science and medicine are controlled by this imaginary.

Three examples from her work illustrate her view. She argues that Freud could not understand women because he was influenced by the one-sex theory of his time men exist and women are a variation of men , and expanded his own, male experience of the world into a general theory applicable to all humans. According to Irigaray, since Freud was unable to imagine another perspective, his reduction of women to male experience resulted in viewing women as defective men. Irigaray argues that Lacan failed to diagnose the error of his predecessor, Freud, and similarly understood the world-and especially language-in terms of a one-sex model of sexuality and subjectivity.

Although Lacan claims that the Phallus is not connected to male biology, his appropriation of Freud renders this claim false. Irigaray believes that if women are not understood in Western culture, it is because Western culture has yet to accept alternate paradigms for understanding them. While selfhood begins in the mirror stage with the imaginary body, it is not solidified until one enters the Symbolic order.

According to Lacan, the Symbolic order is an ahistorical system of language that must be entered for a person to have a coherent social identity. The Phallus is the privileged master signifier of the Symbolic order.

One must have a relationship to the Phallus if one is to attain social existence. According to Lacan, infants in the mirror stage do not differentiate between themselves and the world. The mother participates in a larger social context dominated by the Symbolic order. The infant fantasizes that if he or she could occupy the role of the Phallus-the master signifer of that Symbolic order-he or she could regain the full attention of the mother. However, this is impossible.

In exchange for giving up this fantasy-which the Father demands of the child in the Oedipus complex-the infant gains his or her own relationship to the Phallus. The infant must break with the mother nature, pre-symbolic in order to become a subject culture, symbolic order. According to Lacan, sexual difference is not about biological imperative e. Hence, in the Lacanian view, the body as humans understand it is something that is constructed in the mirror stage, and sexually differentiated in the entrance to the Symbolic order.

Irigaray critically appropriates this radical description of sexual difference. Irigaray is more concerned with how culture-and language as a product of culture-understands sexual difference and subjectivity than with arguing that truths about sexual difference or subjectivity emerge out of biology itself. However she distances herself from Lacan in two key manners.

Irigaray believes that language systems are malleable, and largely determined by power relationships that are in flux. According to Irigaray, the Phallus as the master signifier that can be traced back to male anatomy is evidence that the Symbolic order is constructed and not ahistorical. Irigaray is also influenced by her extensive study of the history of philosophy.

Speculum of the Other Woman discusses the elision of all things feminine in traditional thinkers such as Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel. An Ethics of Sexual Difference also discusses the elision of the feminine, but specifically from the perspective of ethical relationships between men and women.

Irigaray is also writing a series of texts devoted to the four elements. The elemental works Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche and The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger are sustained discussions of the exclusions implemented by key male philosophers. No one philosopher can be identified as influencing Irigaray. She appropriates from various thinkers while maintaining a critical distance.

For example, her method of mimesis resembles Derridian deconstruction. As another example, she agrees with Heidegger that every age has a concept that underlies and informs its beliefs, but is radically unknown to it.

While she is clearly influenced by the history of philosophy, her own project of creating a new space for redefining women does not permit her to privilege any one philosophical approach. Irigaray describes herself as analyzing both the analysts and the philosophers. Perhaps the most famous critical tool employed by Irigaray is mimesis.

Mimesis is a process of resubmitting women to stereotypical views of women in order to call the views themselves into question. Key to mimesis is that the stereotypical views are not repeated faithfully.

One example is that if women are viewed as illogical, women should speak logically about this view. According to Irigaray, the juxtaposition of illogical and logical undermines the claim that women are illogical. This type of mimesis is also known as strategic essentialism.

According to Irigaray, the very possibility of repeating a negative view unfaithfully suggests that women are something other than the view expressed. Irigaray repeats the views because she believes that overcoming harmful views of women cannot occur through simply ignoring the views. True to the methodology of psychoanalysis, she believes that negative views can only be overcome when they are exposed and demystified.

When successfully employed, mimesis repeats a negative view-without reducing women to that view-and makes fun of it such that the view itself must be discarded.

Male dominance has defined Western culture for centuries. According to Irigaray, the logic will not be altered until we call attention to the fact that subjectivity has changed before when male dominance has not. We must ask after the feminine other. Irigaray believes that only by asking after the other through mimesis will it be possible to affect a paradigm shift. While the goal of mimesis is to problematize the male definition of femininity to such a degree that a new definition of and, ultimately, an embodied subject position for women can emerge, Irigaray says in her earlier work that she will not prescribe in advance either the definition or the subject position.

In This Sex Which Is Not One , Irigaray clearly indicates that she will not redefine femininity because it would interfere with women redefining themselves for themselves. Further, she believes that she cannot describe the feminine e. A new definition for women has to emerge out of a mimetic engagement with the old definitions, and it is a collective process.

Irigaray is, however, willing to provide material to help ignite the process of redefinition. The material she offers varies from new concepts about religion and bodies-expressed through both the novel use of existing words and the creation of new words-to utopian ideals.

Irigaray introduces these concepts in order to disrupt male dominance in religion. Irigaray follows Feuerbach in interpreting the divine as an organizing principle for both identity and culture. Religion is thus viewed as caught up in power and culture. Irigaray specifically targets male dominated religions that posit a transcendental God.

She suggests that in place of a religion that focuses on a transcendent God, we construct a divinity that is both sensible and transcendental. An example of utopian ideals can be found in Sexes and Genealogies, thinking the difference , and je, tu, nous. In these texts, Irigaray describes civil laws that she believes would help women achieve social existence mature subjectivity in Western culture.

In one law she suggests that virginity needs to be protected under the law so that women have control over their own sexuality. When these texts were first published, these views were widely interpreted as suggestions intended to initiate discussions between women utopian ideals and not as prescriptions for social change. For example, she discusses the myth of Demeter, the goddess of the earth agriculture , and her daughter Persephone. Hades has fallen in love with Persephone and wants her to be queen of the underworld.

When Demeter learns that her daughter is missing, she is devastated and abandons her role as goddess of the earth. The earth becomes barren. To reestablish harmony in the world, Zeus needs Demeter to return to her divine responsibilities.

Zeus orders Hades to return Persephone. However, Persephone is tricked into eating a pomegranate seed that binds her to Hades forever. Under the persuasion of Zeus, Hades agrees to release Persephone from the underworld for half of each year.

Demeter and Persephone love each other and Demeter strives to protect her daughter. However, in this myth they are ultimately at the mercy of the more powerful males.

The myth is also an example of men exchanging women as if they were commodities. Zeus conspires with his brother and, in effect, gives his daughter away without consulting either Persephone or Demeter. Irigaray utilizes myth to suggest that mothers and daughters need to protect their relationships and strengthen their bonds to one another. For example, in je, tu, nous , Irigaray offers suggestions for developing mother-daughter relationships such as displaying images of the mother-daughter couple, or consciously emphasizing that the daughter and the mother are both subjects in their own right.

Changing relationships between mothers and daughters also requires language work. Since Irigaray agrees with Lacan that one must enter language culture in order to be a subject, she believes that language itself must change if women are to have their own subjectivity that is recognized at a cultural level.