Hypatia vol. 28, no. 3 (Summer 2013) © by Hypatia, Inc.

Luce Irigaray Cluster—Editor’s Introduction

LINDA MART�IN ALCOFF

The Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray has been one of the most prolific and provoca-tive of our original feminist thinkers over the last thirty-five years. Since the publica-tion of her first book, Speculum de l’autre femme, Irigaray’s work has heralded a radicaldeparture from all orthodoxies in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and linguistics, thethree fields in which she was trained. The publication of this book caused her to beexpelled from the Ecole Freudienne founded by her teacher, Jacques Lacan, and riskedher institutional career. Thus she has not been a dutiful daughter, and has provided apowerful inspiration as a truly creative and imaginative thinker.

Within feminism Irigaray’s work has managed to become somehow both iconoclas-tic and hugely influential. The explorations of female specificity and binary differencein her work clashes with anti-essentialist and eliminativist tendencies toward genderand sex difference. Yet feminist theorists from many fields continue to spend a greatdeal of energy on her work, hotly contesting how to interpret her account of differ-ence as well as using her writings as a springboard for rethinking the relationsbetween bodily morphology and language and for revising our concepts of freedomand community.

Today interest in Irigaray’s work is resurging, as this found cluster of five papersreveals, each of which was submitted through our regular open issue process. Thesepapers offer new insights into Irigaray’s work but also develop productive criticalengagements that explore some of its most controversial aspects.

Irigaray has come under sustained criticism for being either inattentive or under-attentive to issues of racial difference. The very category of embodied sexual differ-ence would seem to be resistant to an intersectional analysis, based as it is in sharedsexual characteristics, but even Irigaray’s explorations of female relationships aresilent on the ways in which race, among other categories, surely complicates thedynamics. In “Between Races and Generations: Materializing Race and Kinship inMoraga and Irigaray,” Sabrina Hom brings the work of Cherr�ıe Moraga and recentdevelopments in the psychoanalysis of race into dialogue with Irigaray on the topicof mother–daughter relations to develop a more plausibly complex account of the lat-ter. In this way Hom makes it possible to bring in the category of whiteness alongsidethe category of maleness as a master signifier that affects the terms of intra-familialrelations. Hom argues that Irigaray’s work cannot be made intersectional as it stands,but that it does provide effective tools for understanding the fraught role of desire inthese relationships.

Both Peta Hinton and Anne van Leeuwen revisit the issue of transcendentalismin Irigaray’s work. In her paper, “An Examination of Irigaray’s Commitment toTranscendental Phenomenology in The Forgetting of Air and The Way of Love,” vanLeeuwen argues that some of the misunderstandings of Irigaray’s concepts havebeen the result of an under-appreciation of the role of phenomenology in her work.If we understand sexual difference via transcendental phenomenology, we can morereadily understand that for Irigaray sexual difference is not an a priori category oroutside of history. In particular, van Leeuwen suggests that we read Irigaray asengaging in productive conversation with Heidegger’s revisionist approach to tran-scendental phenomenology. In “The Divine Horizon: Rethinking Political Commu-nity in Luce Irigaray’s ‘Divine Women,’” Hinton’s concerns are with theconception of the divine. Hinton argues that Irigaray offers a new way to redeemthe openness of the nature of the divine. She uses both textual sources and philo-sophical argument to persuade us that Irigaray’s concept is indebted to Feuerbach’s,and thus that for her the divine is a kind of material horizon that both contains andexceeds any particular or specific landscape. Far from Plato’s static Forms, Irigaray’sdivine is an immanent transcendent that contains a dynamic of differentiation andan open telos.

In “Living Politically: An Irigarayan Notion of Agency as a Way of Life,” MiriRozmarin brings Irigaray’s work into the domain of political theory to address thevexed debate over agency. Irigaray draws a particularly doleful picture of the possibili-ties for female agency within phallocentric societies in which female difference ismisrecognized or erased. While maintaining that we need a strong and effective con-ception of individual agency, Rozmarin suggests that we read Irigaray in light ofFoucault’s notion of technologies of self-making. The resulting combinatory accountpresents us with a way to understand the political meaningfulness of self-making. Thisalso helps us to understand Irigaray’s idea that women’s active subjectivity is inher-ently radical.

Finally, the challenges that Irigaray’s work poses to female agency also figure inSarah Tyson’s paper, “Reclamation from Absence? Luce Irigaray and Women in His-tory,” on the history of women in philosophy. On some accounts, it would not bepossible on Irigaray’s understanding of the co-imbrication of language and phallocent-rism for women thinkers from the past to have expressed a true feminine subjectivity.Despite the fact that Irigaray has at times implied that women did not, and couldnot, contribute to the history of philosophy, Tyson argues that her reclamation ofDiotima belies this absolute denial. Further, Irigaray’s creative reclamation of Diotimaindicates precisely the sort of transformations of philosophical readings that can beimportant for expanding our capacity to hear women’s voices in a variety of venuesthat standard philosophical practices can overlook.

These papers, together, indicate that feminist philosophy continues to expand itscapacity for radical revisions with the help of Luce Irigaray.

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