8. Psychoanalysis, Post-structuralism and Feminism- Luce Irigaray-"The Power of Discourse and The Subordination of The Female"

Question 1

“The Power of Discourse and The Subordination of the Feminine”

Answer 1

• Luce Irigaray’s work is also strongly influenced by Lacan and, as Hélène Cixous, she also emphasizes the role that language plays in keeping up the patriarchic status quo.
• If we, indeed, can perceive the world only by means of language, then it plays an even greater role in changing it. And this also – and specifically – holds true for the language of philosophy.

Question 2

Mimicry

Answer 2

• “Unless we limit ourselves naively – or perhaps strategically – to some kind of limited or marginal issue, it is indeed precisely philosophical discourse that we have to challenge, and disrupt, inasmuch as this discourse sets forth the law for all others, inasmuch as it constitutes the discourse on discourse…
• There is, in an initial phase, perhaps only one ‘path,’ the one historically assigned to the feminine: that of mimicry. One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus begin to thwart it. Whereas a direct feminine challenge to this condition means demanding to speak as a (masculine) ‘subject,’ that is, it means to postulate a relation to the intelligible that would maintain sexual difference” (795)

Question 3

Deconstructing Male Discourse

Answer 3

• “In other words, the issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which woman be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of suspending its pretension to the production of a truth and of a meaning that are excessively univocal. Which presupposes that women do not aspire simply to be men’s equals in knowledge. That they do not claim rivaling men in constructing a logic of the feminine that would still take onto-theo-logic as its model, but that they are rather attempting to wrest this question away from the economy of the logos” (796)
• Strong echoes of Derrida can be heard here. Seen from a feminist point of view, the logocentrism of Western metaphysics does not simply perpetuate the assumption of being as presence, but of presence as male presence – and the absence of the female.
• In psychosexual, Lacanian/Freudian terms, this is why the female vagina can only be conceived of as the “lack” or absence of a phallus, and not as the presence of something other that said phallus.
• A language and form of “theory” has to be devised that escapes just this economy of the (phal)logos.
• Consequently, “every dichotomizing – and at the same time redoubling – break, including the one between enunciation and utterance has to be disrupted” (797).