Ethical Theory: Irigaray (Lexicon)

Question 1

Sexual Difference

Answer 1

Irigaray says that sexual difference does not exist. True sexual difference would require that men and women are equally able to achieve subjectivity. Men are subjects while women are others.

Question 2

Space/Envelope/Container

Answer 2

Traditionally woman represents place for man, making her a thing. Maternal feminine serves as a starting point from which man limits his things.

Question 3

Wonder

Answer 3

Descartes first passion. Wonder has no opposite and exists always as for the first time. Man and woman are always meeting as though for the first time because they can never be substituted for the other.

Question 4

Angels

Answer 4

Mediators of the envelopes.
“Irreducible to philosophy, theology, morality, angels appear as the messengers of ethics evoked by art—sculpture, painting, or music—without its being possible to say anything more than the gesture that represents them.”

Question 5

Lips

Answer 5

They blur boundaries by touching. They are in constant self-sexual contact.

Question 6

Revolution in Ethics

Answer 6

Needed if the work of sexual difference is to take place. Everything has been written in masculine form and therefore needs to be reinterpreted.

Question 7

Third Term

Answer 7

“Once there was an enveloping body and the enveloped body” “It is moreover a danger if no third term can occur within the one who contains as a relation of the latter to his or her own limits: relation to the divine, to death, to the social to the cosmic. If a third term does not exist within and for the container, he or she becomes all-powerful”

Question 8

Other

Answer 8

“Who or what the other is, I never know. But other who is forever unknowable is the one who differs from me sexually”