In this essay, I aim to elaborate on the framework and concepts that Luce Irigaray has utilized in her philosophy and place them in relation to an epistemological perspective. Some of the central notions and themes addressed by Irigaray are establishing sexual difference, constructing feminine subjectivity and changing the paternal/masculine Symbolic order. She prioritizes a critique of Western philosophical tradition, and two facets of this critique are rationalism and traditional subject-object binary that reveal the absence, repression or subjugation of the feminine. Irigaray emphasizes the power of feminine imaginary and the unconscious which can challenge as well as restructure established foundations of the Symbolic. The first section of this essay outlines the central notions of Irigaray’s philosophical framework. The second section focuses on her ideas about feminine subjectivity, criticism towards rationalism, and subject-object divide inherent in Western thought, by integrating her concept of female imaginary. The third section looks at how Irigaray approached key male philosophers, particularly focusing on her reading of Plato’s allegory of the cave as a fundamental epistemological model. The last section focuses on Irigaray’s understanding of the Symbolic order and its transformation for novel epistemological approaches.
THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS OF LUCE IRIGARAY’S PHILOSOPHY
ILGIN YILDIZ
INTRODUCTION
In this essay, I aim to elaborate on the framework and concepts that Luce Irigaray has utilized in her philosophy and place them in relation to an epistemological perspective. Some of the central notions and themes addressed by Irigaray are establishing sexual difference, constructing feminine subjectivity and changing the paternal/masculine Symbolic order. She prioritizes a critique of Western philosophical tradition, and two facets of this critique are rationalism and traditional subject-object binary that reveal the absence, repression or subjugation of the feminine. Irigaray emphasizes the power of feminine imaginary and the unconscious which can challenge as well as restructure established foundations of the Symbolic. The first section of this essay outlines the central notions of Irigaray’s philosophical framework. The second section focuses on her ideas about feminine subjectivity, criticism towards rationalism, and subject-object divide inherent in Western thought, by integrating her concept of female imaginary. The third section looks at how Irigaray approached key male philosophers, particularly focusing on her reading of Plato’s allegory of the cave as a fundamental epistemological model. The last section focuses on Irigaray’s understanding of the Symbolic order and its transformation for novel epistemological approaches.
I. IRIGARAY’S PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK
Luce Irigaray s work fundamentally focuses on the analysis and critique of the ways feminine subjectivity has been traditionally assimilated to masculine subjectivity. She is concerned with revealing the absence of the feminine subject within Western philosophical tradition. Thus, constitution of sexual difference and the feminine subject is central to her project. Esteemed Irigaray scholar Margaret Whitford observes that Irigaray’s work engages with “a single problem, in its multiple aspects: the absence of and exclusion of woman/women from the symbolic/social order, their representation as nature.”1
Irigaray usually utilizes a lyrical, playful, slippery, and at times challenging prose, and has been famously interpreted as a difficult philosopher to disentangle. Indeed, Whitford admits in the introduction of her book on Irigaray, that “Irigaray fascinates me despite myself and in a completely different way. She is more than a little inaccessible; she is associative rather than systematic in her reasoning; it has been a struggle to read and elucidate her, and to come to some understanding of her critique of rationality which appeared to go against my whole intellectual training ... However, I have come to the conclusion that, albeit from a completely different perspective, Irigaray is also committed to ‘the work of the universal’ and to the centrality of ethics, preoccupations which have been somewhat obscured by the reception of her work, and indeed by the difficulty of the language in which she presents them.”2 Albeit her mysterious, complicated, and oftentimes inaccessible style, Whitford concludes that Irigaray “needs her readers and interpreters, and that this need is inherent in her theory.”3
For Irigaray, Western philosophical tradition has viewed the feminine as passive and associated it with nature. It ascribed the feminine the role of the mother, whereas the masculine has been viewed as an active, full subject. Women have been unrecognized within the sociocultural system as well as within language, at the same time paradoxically serving as the ground that these structures are built on. As such, their separate subjectivity and contribution to society haven’t been recognized. Irigaray believes that the in this order, the mother is sacrificed. This is the masculine economy of the Self-same within which women are alienated, submit -willingly or not willingly- to the masculine. The only subjectivity that exists in the Western culture is male and women speak with masculine language. So, Irigaray believes that sexual difference does not exist in this culture: if there were sexual difference, there would be a feminine subjectivity. She engages with the issue of how sexual difference can be established, searching for ways for women to reconfigure their identity, at the same time, far from being didactic or offering clear-cut solutions, stating that the feminine subject should find this new identity herself, in her own way. “Irigaray refrains from prescribing a new identity because she wants women to determine for themselves how they want to be defined.”4
Irigaray utilizes psychoanalytic theory and philosophy in her work, both being influenced by them and simultaneously demonstrating how they exclude and submit women to totalizing views. Their discourses, too, essentially ignore the difference and alterity of women or reduce them to a form of male subjectivity. Western philosophical tradition, which Irigaray views as the master discourse, demonstrates ontological, epistemological, and metaphysical “truths” from a masculine perspective. Psychoanalysis, too, views the feminine as deformed, lacking, and insufficient form of male subjectivity, even though it provides important methods that can be utilized to further the agenda of establishing female subjectivity -this is a one-sex model of the self-same. As Cixous and Clement write:
The same masters dominate history from the beginning, inscribing on it the marks of their appropriating economy: history, as a story of phallocentrism, hasn’t moved except to repeat itself. “With a difference,” as Joyce says. Always the same, with other clothes. Nor has Freud (who is, moreover, the heir of Hegel and Nietzsche) made anything up. All the great theorists of destiny or of human history have reproduced the most commonplace logic of desire, the one that keeps the movement toward the other staged in a patriarchal production, under Man’s law. History, history of phallocentrism, history of propriation: a single history. History of an identity: that of man’s becoming recognized by the other (son or woman), reminding him that, as Hegel says, death is his master.5
For Irigaray, women should form separate identities and attain a social existence separate from the role of mother, and cultural stereotypes regarding nature should be transformed, and this process includes men as well: “while women must attain subjectivity, men must become more embodied ... both men and women have to reconfigure their subjectivity so that they both understand themselves as belonging equally to nature and culture.”6 She argues for transforming language and the Symbolic order and the ethico-political framework, arguing for or utilizing tools and ideas such as mimesis, strategic essentialism, utopian ideals, transforming the mother/daughter relationship, and employing novel language that can be utilized for transforming the system.7 She explains:
the issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which woman would be the subject or the object, but ofjamming 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 to be 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. They should not put it, then, in the form “What is woman?” but rather, repeating/interpreting the way in which, within discourse, the feminine finds itself defined as lack, deficiency, or as imitation and negative image of the subject, they should signify that with respect to this logic a disruptive excess is possible on the feminine side.8
Above quote also explains what Irigaray means by her famous phrase jamming the theoretical machinery.” For Irigaray, as well as for other I’ecriiure feminine philosophers and writers, the interplay between nature, maternal, and separate feminine knowledge is a central theme. Irigaray’s work often utilizes feminine morphological language and valorizes the feminine body, however this is viewed as a tool to “deconstruct the phallic organization and ordering of sexuality and the bodies which perform it.”9 Phallocentrism constitutes the social order as well as the socio-cultural structure of male desire “in which women are the objects of, and currency of exchange between, men—or rather this currency is constituted by possession of women’s bodies and sexualities.”10 Women’s sexualities for Irigaray are multiple, plural, not one, and cannot be constrained by male libidinal economy: “Irigaray thus positions women as sexual subjects, not as sexual objects of male desire.”11 What she aims to do is reveal the feminine as such, to form a disruption within an phallocentric culture, and attempt to challenge the Symbolic.
II. FEMININE SUBJECTIVITY AND CRITIQUE OF RATIONALISM AND WESTERN EPISTEMOLOGY
From a feminist perspective, briefly, the dichotomies of subjective and objective or rational and “irrational” are not determined by a transcendental/absolute knower, universal position or a meta-discourse, but rather reflect the cultural, political, and philosophical discourses of the masculine that delineates certain positions and ascribes certain roles to the feminine. As Donna Haraway write, “Feminist critiques challenge assertions of objective knowledge, illuminate the ways in which information and positions become aligned with particular subjectivities that are entangled with gendered binaries or poles.”12 As such, language, discourses, and political structures stemming from such grounds exclude or reduce all others, such as women and minorities. Thus, epistemology essentially reflects the intricate framework of cultural and political masculine power and discourse structures, and specific understandings of ethics: The Self-same demonstrates a very specific identity of phallocentrism.
There is phallocentrism. History has never produced or recorded anything else -which does not mean that this form is destinal or natural ... men and women are caught up in a web of age-old cultural determinations that are almost unanalyzable in their complexity. One can no more speak of ‘woman’ than of ‘man’ without being trapped within an ideological theater where the proliferation of representations, images, reflections, myths, identifications, transform, deform, constantly change everyone’s Imaginary and invalidate in advance any conceptualization.13
The group of French feminists -l ecriture feminine- with which Irigaray is associated with, mainly problematize the paternal/patriarchal Symbolic order as the domain of knowledge, the Name-of- the-Father as a kind of transcendental signifier. Irigaray views epistemology, metaphysics, and psychology as reflecting the masculinist paradigm. With regard to epistemology, she questions the theories built on a constituent or foundational divide between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge.14 The “classical paradigm” for this knowing subject is formulated by Kant, and roughly refers to “a transcendental subject ofknowledge coordinates and controls the multiplicity of sensations and impressions received from sense experience, thus forming a unified field of experience.”15 Opposing this formulation, Irigaray argues that this transcendental subject, via its assumed distance form an ascribed object in fact -paradoxically- loses its foundational (empirical) relation to it (Irigaray 1985a, 134). In Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray critiques philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, exploring the theoretical edifices “in which the formal conditions of knowledge privilege male subjectivity as foundational to the epistemic enterprise.”16 For Irigaray, “subject” in these enterprises is very specifically the Western masculine subject that erases or obfuscates the feminine, demonstrating the fact that “the possibility of (masculine) theorizing is feminine silence.”17
The main model of Western epistemologies is interlinked with the metaphysical framework that is based on the exclusion or absence of the feminine. The feminine has been “alienated from the systems of knowledge, and the knowledge of knowledge.”18 This has been an unstoppable operation that has taken place despite opposition from women philosophers, and despite “the fact that the malestream esoterics of learning, cognition, mentation and knowledge have often come pretty close to admitting that the woman is either at the source or at the core of all mental processes, conscious or unconscious.”19
Rationality
Traditional Western epistemology is concerned with mainly three issues with regard to knowing; “source of knowledge, nature or type of knowledge, and the method of corroboration.”20 In these concerns the notion of rationality plays a significant role. However, the notion of rationality itself displays issues when viewed via the dichotomical lens of Western tradition. In this dichotomical framework, man is “culturally synonymized to the phallic of the species as opposed to the ‘woman’ whose cultural nemesis is to be marked as an irrational creature with and of a lacking body ... the non-corporeal, asexual imperative of rationality in traditional theories of knowledge becomes both the philosophical testimony and the handmaiden of hierarchizing the difference between sexed bodies.” Rosi Braidotti emphasizes the “bodily roots of the thinking process”21, and speaks of philosophers such as Lovibond who deemed theories of reason “as fantasies of ignoring, absenting, humiliating or denying embodiment ... which in effect is also the denial or discounting of the feminine.”22 For Lovibond, there is a consensus among feminist theoreticians about the fact that there has been a crisis in rationalist values.23 Feminists claim that “conventional scientific research procedure reflects an objectifying, control-seeking attitude to its subject-matter which can be regarded on psychological grounds as characteristically masculine”24 and she conveys the belief that entry of women into natural sciences can lead to a development of “a more empathetic and conservationist style of enquiry:”25 “Sometimes there is an attempt to introduce new moral categories informed by feminist reflection on the shortcomings of ‘normal science’, such as Lorraine Code’s ‘epistemic responsibility’. Sometimes however, and more iconoclastically, it is argued that reason is an inherently gendered concept -an element in a discursive system organized by the assumption of male superiority.”26
Whitford likens Irigaray’s work to a psychoanalysis of Western tradition, in which she searches for “what underpins its fragile rationality, looking for the ‘repressed’ or unconscious of culture.”27 Irigaray’s aim in critiquing rationality is not favoring or arguing for a certain feminine irrationality and eliminating rationality as such. Deeming rationality as “masculine” is “to argue that it has a certain structure, that the subject of enunciation which subtends the rational discourse is constructed in a certain way, through repression of the feminine.”28 Whitford’s analysis of Irigaray’s critique of rationalism relies on her conception of the Irigarayian notion of imaginary, and her struggle to wrest it from Lacanian framework. The imaginary refers to one of the Lacanian orders (the other two being the Real and the Symbolic) and refers -very roughly- to the dimension of “unconscious phantasy.”29 For Irigaray, rationality should be “fertile and creative, rather than infertile and sterile, it must not be conceived of as transcending or exclusive of the female element.”30 Creativity is not about domination or subordination, or the one-way arrow of subjectobject positions, but is essentially fertile interplay. Whitford points out that for Irigaray,
the conceptualization of rationality is inseparable from the conceptualization of sexual difference; thus the imbalance in the symbolization of sexual difference is a clue to other forms of imbalance that have far-reaching consequences: sexual difference is a problematic which might enable us to put in check the manifold forms of destruction of the world ... The critique of rationality is couched, at least partly, in the vocabulary of fertility/sterility, creation/destruction, health/sickness; rationality as we know it is implicated in a whole cultural pathology.31
Irigaray s work conveys the view that rationality has been symbolized as male, and reveals a connection between “the morphology of the body and the morphology of different kinds of thought processes.”32 The body Irigaray talks about is not the empirical body but the symbolic body, and the relationship to anatomy is metaphorical or imaginary; and the imaginary morphology of rationality is comprised of “the principle of identity (also expressed in terms of quantity or ownership); the principle of non-contradiction (in which ambiguity, ambivalence, or multivalence have been reduced to a minimum); and binarism (e.g. nature/reason, subject/object, matter/energy, inertia/movement) - as though everything had to be either one thing or another.”33 These principles rely on “the possibility of individuating”34 and processes of demarcation and distinguishing, and “the belief in the necessity of stable forms.”35 Thus, in Irigaray’s work, the (symbolic) phallus, stable form, identity, and individuation are interlinked. She associates the logic of identity with masculinity as it is phallomorphic, whereas the feminine is associated with a certain excess that doesn’t properly fit within the masculine paradigm. With regard to the female imaginary, individuating as such does not take place, as woman “is neither one nor two”36, she is “within herself, she is “already two but not divisible into one(s)”37, “she resists all adequate definition,”38 “more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly imagined in an imaginary rather too narrowly focused on sameness.”39 Utilizing morphological language, she questions the solid ground of rationality:
How can I speak to you? You remain in flux, never congealing or solidifying. What will make that current flow into words? It is multiple, devoid of causes, meanings, simple qualities. Yet it cannot be decomposed. These movements cannot be described as the passage from a beginning to an end. These rivers flow into no single, definitive sea. These streams are without fixed banks, this body without fixed boundaries. This unceasing mobility. This life-which will perhaps be called our restlessness, whims, pretenses, or lies. All this remains very strange to anyone claiming to stand on solid ground. Speak, all the same. Between us, “hardness” isn’t necessary.40
The female imaginary is conceived by Irigaray as non-identical excess that permeates and escapes all dominant rationalist frameworks and formulations. It is formless and amorphous.41 Whitford mentions how the Pythagoreans viewed the world as a mixture of principles that had determinate form (good) and were indeterminate (bad).42 (Formlessness was bad or inferior as it denoted irregularity, disorder, chaos). She draws a correspondence between Irigarayian imaginary that threatens rationality and the ontological categories of the pre-Socratics. Whitford opposes to critiques of Irigaray’s notion of the imaginary, (among them Joanna Hodge who argued that for Irigaray women have no history), arguing that Irigaray rather aims to demonstrate patriarchy’s view of women as ‘natural’ and outside history.43 The constitution of female subjectivity within the Symbolic order and transforming the Symbolic order can be viewed as the forefronts of Irigaray’s project but the feminine imaginary that underlies the Symbolic is foundational and it is deeply connected to “the primitive materiality of experience, life and death, kin relationships, and the body.”44 Thus, it is also formative of Irigaray’s elemental works which she forms around natural elements (earth, air, fire, water), harnessing the feminine imaginary and embodied knowledge within the dominant structures of rationality.
Subject-object positions
It can be argued that the epistemological tradition Irigaray critiques relies on the founding division between subject and object of knowledge. Irigaray views this division as the splitting of a larger whole into two parts understood as ‘sides:’
Although she believes that the positions of subject and object are pregiven in language and are thus, in a sense, preconstructed for any speaker, as a writer she takes advantage of the distinction (as a split) to bolster her view of the excluded feminine. In her writing, through the use of analogy as well as literary devices such as metaphor and metonymy, a number of other referents are explicitly placed on the ‘side’ of the subject, while their counterparts are positioned to appear on the ‘side’ of the object. Accordingly, the subject of knowledge acquires two other characteristics: a masculine gender identity (the properties of the masculine pronoun he) and the role of the subject of speech, the “I speak” of discourse.45
Irigaray mixes and blends the categories of “subject of knowledge”, “masculinity”, and “speaking subject”; thus, the subject of knowledge amounts to the male speaker, and male speaker and subject of knowledge become interchangeable.46 Following this, a woman philosopher when in the role of the (Kantian) transcendental subject adopts “a male voice and articulating a masculine vision of the universe.”47 The object of knowledge is passive, lacks subjectivity, and does not speak; thus, “the object is the denied feminine, or fetishized woman. She uses the feminine pronoun she to refer to the object of knowledge, a reminder of the status of fetishized femininity as constructed by the masculine gaze.”48 Within the one-way and one-sex structure of subject-object relations, the (feminine) fetishized object becomes repressed, silenced, and literally objectified. This is inherently political, as “under Irigaray’s scrutiny, epistemology is quickly converted into sexual politics.”49 The (masculine) subject of knowledge takes a distance from its object where he can be in control, while the (feminine) object of knowledge is the constituted and dominated woman, as such, “the human process of becoming conscious of oneself as subject is strongly or entirely dominated by a masculine notion of subjectivity. The paradigm of selfconsciousness, used pervasively in historical struggles for equality, freedom, justice, and self-determination, appears tainted by a male bias.”50 Thus, Irigaray critiques how the very notion of self-consciousness belongs to a masculine paradigm. The passive object of knowledge is ultimately the product of power-knowledge structures. As Rogowska-Stangret writes, “Presenting the world/nature/object of study as inactive is how power relations enslave, colonize, and dominate. Feminist projects attempt to recognize how power works and acknowledge that they do not rule over or control the world ... feminist situated knowledges open themselves for new, unexpected, unthought-of, and surprising forms of knowledge production, which may unfold from interrelated material-semiotic worlds.”51
The suppression or repression of the feminine is closely linked with the notion of the unconscious and its relation to feminine subjectivity. Viewing the subject of the unconscious as feminine can open routes for interpreting the “potential reservoir of feminine energy, yet to be tapped”52 but on the other hand, the study of the unconscious, like the other fields of analysis, is dominated by the masculine-oriented, objectifying idea of knowledge. Irigaray criticizes Freud and Lacan as they demonstrate the drive to knowledge of the transcendental subject: “‘He’ had expressed his dominance over the object by attributing to himself, to his capacity for knowledge, the qualities of elevation (height) and clarity. Eventually, ‘he’ is going to be attracted to the study of the unconscious with its opposing and therefore challenging attributes of ‘darkness’ and ‘depth.’”53 Irigaray is strongly critical of this framework, as it will make the unconscious a “property of his language.”54 She is mainly concerned about the ways how the unconscious can be manipulated via “language that.. .is tied to a psychological law giving dominance to the position of the male speaker over that ofhis female counterpart.”55
The concern with manipulation of the epistemological subject is also seen in her writing around femininity and hysteria. The hysteric feminine subject who is objectified and dominated under the psychiatric power essentially reveals an epistemological crisis (approached via the diagnostic indeterminacy concerning the hysteric) and a crisis of language. Irigaray explores the potentiality of resistance of the hysteric as a captured, dominated, and objectified feminine figure when she questions the ambiguous pathology of hysteria, and observes its concealed power: “there is always, in hysteria, both a reserve power and a paralyzed power.”56 The power of the hysteric is repressed “by virtue of the subordination of feminine desire to phallocratism; a power constrained to silence and mimicry, owing to the submission of the ‘perceptible,’ of ‘matter,’ to the intelligible and its discourse ... And in hysteria there is ... the possibility of another mode of ‘production,’ notably gestural and lingual.”57 The hysterical feminine patient as the object of psychiatric powerknowledge structure (to borrow a Foucauldian term), and from this perspective, she is manipulated and subjugated via the dispositif of psychiatry, submitted to its experimentations and violence in that name of a clear-cut diagnostic explanations.
For Irigaray, the subject of epistemology viewed as such remain within the self-same paradigm and control meaning-making processes in a way that maintains and protects its continuity, positioning itself as the ultimate point of reference. Irigaray also notes that the Other is always reduced to the same since “the movement to speak of the ‘other’ in a language already systematized by/for the same.”58 Thus, it is not possible to speak of the Other as such, as it is already lost in its specificity in language and is subjugated to categories of the same.
III. IRIGARAY ON WORKS OF MALE PHILOSOPHERS
In her elemental works , which she centers around the four elements (earth, air, fire, water) and also on nature, Irigaray aims to reinterpret, challenge, and form a dialogue with philosophers of Western tradition. In answer to Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics as a “forgetting of Being,” Irigaray in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, critiques Heidegger’s emphasis on the element of earth as the ground of life and speech, and his oblivion of air in his existential- ontological account. Her analysis is placed within the broader context of her feminist critique of Western tradition. Air is invisible but crucial as it sustains life. This work has been interpreted as a critique of Heidegger whereas Irigaray seeks to expand Heidegger’s philosophy to introduce the feminine, saying that she would like to “celebrate the work of Martin Heidegger. To succeed in this gesture implied not appropriating his thought but respecting it in its difference. To pay homage to Martin Heidegger in his relationship to the earth, to the sky, to the divinities and to the mortals presupposed for me the unveiling and the affirmation of another possible relation to this fourfold.”59 The forgetting of air in Heidegger’s work symbolizes the exclusion of women in traditional philosophical discourse. Thus, Irigaray explores how traditional philosophy has been built on a patriarchal worldview, which prioritizes certain elements and concepts while neglecting others that might be associated with femininity, ephemerality and fluidity.
In Marine Lover of Nietzsche, Irigaray focuses on the element of water and encounters Nietzsche by addressing him in the second person (in fact, she only mentions Nietzsche’s name towards the end of the book). She touches on certain Nietzschean concepts, like eternal recurrence, the Ubermensch, self-overcoming, etc., and also questioning Nietzsche’s relationship with women. Water is the central element here, as for Irigaray, water is the element Nietzsche fears the most. She forms her narrative upon the complex relationship between the feminine and the fluid, engaging in an amorous dialogue with Nietzsche, and utilizing a lyrical dialogic, intimate prose. With the metaphor of sea, Irigaray alludes to the fluid and dynamic aspects of the feminine. Water represents the flow of life, the unconscious, and the feminine. Marine Lover embraces fluidity, change, and the interconnectedness of life, challenging the rigid, hierarchical structures. Irigaray critiques Nietzsche’s conceptualization of nature and the body, arguing that he fails to embrace the material, embodied experience of existence often obfuscated or repressed by philosophies that prioritize the mind.
Lastly, I would like to focus on Irigaray’s engagement with Plato. Irigaray, In Speculum of the Other Woman, presents an analysis of Plato’s epistemological model of the cave. In the well- known allegory, prisoners are confined in a dark cave since birth, and can only see the wall in front of them, and shadowy images cast against the wall. The shadows on the cave wall represent the world of sensory experience and the realm of appearances. The prisoners are watch the shadows on the cave wall as reality; thus, they are deceived by the appearances. When a prisoner goes to the outside world, he is blinded by the sunlight, but then his eyes adjust, and he witnesses the true reality of the physical world around him. Thus, the allegory of the cave is about the journey from ignorance to enlightenment, and to the world of real knowledge. The free prisoner can attain knowledge via reason and understanding of the Forms. Thus, “Plato’s allegory underscores the fundamental difference between knowledge (episteme) and opinion (doxa). Knowledge, in Plato’s view, is not derived from sensory perceptions alone, but from rational insight and understanding of the unchanging and eternal realm ofForms. Forms are the perfect, eternal, and universal ideals that serve as the foundation of true knowledge. In contrast, opinions are based on the imperfect and changing world of sensory appearances.”60 It can be claimed that Plato’s epistemological model reveals the necessity of it constraining sensory perception as well as the deceptive nature of opinions formed based on appearances.
Irigaray, in “Plato’s Hystera” (as apparent in the title) uses the word “hystera” (uterus) instead of “cave”, presenting an “allegory in an allegory”61 - hystera is fundamental in that it is the ground: “For if the cave is made in the image of the world, the world is equally made in the image of the cave. In cave or “world” all is but the image of an image. For this cave is always already an attempt to re-present another cave, the hystera, the mold which silently dictates all replicas, all possible forms, all possible relation of forms and between forms, of any replica.”62
For Plato, categories of Being, Forms, reality, truth as well as wisdom are decidedly outside the cave which implicates the natural-maternal-feminine. This view belongs to the phallogocentric framework that deems the masculine as the law, order, logic, structure, truth, reason, etc. Irigaray via her “allegory in an allegory” points at the “absence of women, the exclusion of the feminine, from the philosophical tradition not as something immediately or intentional, but rather an always- already presupposed, and remaining unquestioned, element that exists prior to, and is simply carried over into philosophical discourse.”63 Irigaray writes:
Infinite projection - (the) Idea (of) Being (of the) Father - of the mystery of conception and the hystery where it is (re)produced. Blindness with regard to the original one who must be banished by fixing the eyes on pure light, to the point of not seeing (nothing) anymore - the show, the hole of nothing is back again - to the point at which the power of a mere bodily membrane is exceeded, and the gaze of the soul is rediscovered. A-letheia.64
The lover of knowledge must emerge from the dark materiality of the cave/hystera and simultaneously reject, conceal, repress it in order to attain the light of wisdom. He must free himself from the materiality of the womb. In Irigaray’s analysis, the founding masculine-feminine hierarchical imagery is demonstrated and emphasized. As such, masculine images appear as awakening, knowledge, etc., whereas feminine images appear as darkness, obscurity, lack, etc.65 The cave essentially is about
the epistemology of sight, which as per the psychoanalytic contingencies of corporeality is a phallic program [scopic regime], is over-validated as the certainty of knowledge-acquisition [a story of distance between the knowing subject and the known object is built upon this scientism, while political programs like the panopticon in colonial/criminological surveillance and cultural propensities such as scopophilia in cinema have been nourished by its ideological dependability] but the disseminated, plural and intimate epistemology of touch which is a feminine sense is excluded from reliability and responsibility ofknowledge-making.66
Thus, Irigaray focuses on how subject of knowledge in Plato s allegory essentially attempts to transcend nature and material world to engage with solid and fixed truths (conveyed via masculine imagery) in order to attain true knowledge. The masculine subject must escape from the cave of ignorance and attain the sunlight of wisdom by repressing the feminine. . ... ...
IV. SYMBOLIC ORDER AND ITS TRANSFORMATION
A central question of feminist theories is how feminism can form diverging or new discourses within the current Symbolic order. This question is closely tied with “the reconstructive project of feminist epistemology, which asks how feminist knowledge can effect an epistemological break that produces new ways to know the world.”67 For Irigaray, this kind of epistemological break can be realized by transforming the “language and systems of representation”68 which form the structure of the Symbolic order.
Irigaray criticizes the view that excepts the Symbolic order “as an ontological condition for all subjects at all times.”69 In This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray talks about the “hom(m)o- sexual”70 order of men, where the masculine subject recognizes only the other masculine subjects. This order is built upon the network and structures of material and symbolic exchange among men, particularly on the exchange of women as wives, daughters, sisters, etc. Thus, women in this order have certain exchange values. For Whitford, the Irigarayian notion of the hom(m)o-sexual order is essentially a critique of a patriarchal social contract -the “between-men culture.”71 Irigaray writes: “Women cannot be self-assured without language and systems of representations being transformed, because these are appropriate to men’s subjectivity, they are reassuring to the between-men culture.”72 The homosexual order of men is “the sexuated socio-symbolic order that founds the forms of fraternal sociality.”73 The Symbolic order is a “masculine social order which produces women as social objects.”74
With regard to transforming the Symbolic order, Irigaray mainly relies on ideas like the transformative engagement with language, constructing “a female sociality, a female symbolic and female social contract, a horizontal relation between women.”75 She calls for a horizontal relation between women because she believes that the Symbolic order represents a horizontal relation between men. Women must create novel language and systems of representations in order to change the Symbolic. Irigaray argues for deconstructing the master philosophical discourse and reconstructing via the creation of a female imaginary and symbolic.76 Central to this project, is the necessity for the female subject of enunciation to become an epistemological subject. Irigaray argues that women must become knowing subjects. Whitford suggests that, for Irigaray, “the women’s movement, in drawing attention to the male subject of enunciation, has staked a claim for the right of the female subject to be an epistemological subject too.”77
As feminist academia and intellectual life is also an aspect of thisjourney, an example can be presented: the feminist new materialist and posthumanist turn have been influential in recent years in terms of their goals to produce novel epistemological frameworks that prioritize relationality and interactionism. In general, these feminist thinkers aim to move beyond the historicist, (phallo-)anthropocentric, classifixationist sphere of thought, using tools and methodologies such as anti-representationalist, non-hierarchical, pluralistic, diffractive analyses, de-centering and generationalism: Revelles-Benavente et. al define this ethico-political and onto- epistemological turn as “deeply committed to de-centralizing knowledge production and focusing on processes transversing hierarchies of power relations that organize diverse forms of life.”78
Irigaray’s work continues to influence feminist philosophers and academicians working both within linguistic and materialistic frameworks. Her theoretical heritage has been influential and proved that it can still be utilized for diverse agendas and priorities, both in theoretical work and in practice.
CONCLUSION
I have presented Irigaray’s theoretical framework and central notions in relation with an epistemological perspective. Irigaray’s theoretical project centers on the formation of the separate subjectivity of the feminine and the transformation of the socio-symbolic structures. She critiques traditional Western ideas of rationalism and subject-object relations, emphasizing the potentiality of feminine imaginary and unconscious as dynamic notions that can serve to transform the onto- epistemological structures. As Whitford writes, “the problem for feminists is to move from enunciation to epistemology.”79 This is possible through the transformation of the Symbolic order by the feminine subject. The role of the masculine as the transcendental signifier has to be eradicated for all differences including sexual difference to be taken into account. As Irigaray writes that women
want to have complete access to discourse. To become I s who produce truth: cultural, political, religious truth. Masculine utterances have generally already been transformed into the third person. In this way the subject is masked by and within the world, the truth. But this universe is the subject’s construction. The he is a transformation, a transposition of the I. Which uses the edifice of language to blur the enunciation. And denies also who it is who has produced this grammar, this meaning, and the rules governing them. This he can also turn into a there is, one more mask for the I.80
The transformation of the masculine utterances into umversal/totalizmg discourses must be addressed for the Symbolic to be transformed. From an Irigarayian perspective, to retrieve back language or more accurately, to engage with experimentations with and inventing novel language is fundamental for the transformation of the traditional onto-epistemological framework. ...
***
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Epistemology and the Allegory of the Cave, 2023, https://hcentiapoetica.com/epistemology-and-the- allegory-of-the-cave-887dea02dbe4.
Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology, Routledge, 2004.
Cixous Helene & Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman, translated by Betsy Wing, University of MinnesotaPress, 1988.
Haraway, Donna. Quoted in Yasminah Beebeejaun, “Fracking and epistemic injustice: A feminist critique ofknowledge formation,” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 42(2), https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544211036465.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Luce Irigaray,” 2024, https://iep.utm.edu/irigaray/
Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics ofSexual Difference, translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, Cornell UniversityPress, 1993.
Irigaray, Luce. Quoted in Christina Grammatikopoulou, “Remembering the Air: Luce Irigaray’s Ontology ofBreath,” https://interartive.org/2014/05/irigaray-air
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum ofthe Other Woman, translated by Gillian, C. Gill, Cornell University Press, 198.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, Cornell UniversityPress, 1985.
Karlyn, Seraphina M. “Irigaray: ‘Plato’s Hystera,’ from Speculum ofthe Other Woman,” https://www.academia.edu/15334854/Irigaray_Plato_s_Hystera_from_Speculum_of_the_Other_Woman Lovibond, Sabina. “Feminism and the ‘Crisis ofRationality,’” New LeftReview, (September-October 1994), https://newleftreview.org/issues/i207/articles/sabina-lovibond-feminism-and-the-crisis-of- rationality
Revelles Benavente, Beatriz. Monika Rogowska-Stangret and Waltraud Ernst, “Feminist New Materialisms: Activating Ethico-Politics through Genealogies in Social Sciences,” MDPI, 2020.
Rogowska-Stangret, Monika. “Situated Knowledges”, New Materialism, https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/s/situated-knowledges.html
Samajdar, Saunak. “Intimacy, Hospitality and Jouissance: A ‘Feminine’ Knowing of Difference,” Michigan FeministStudies, vol. 20, Issue title: Knowledge, Fall 2006-Spring 2007, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.ark5583.0020.004.
Schutte, Ofelia. “Irigaray on the Problem ofSubjectivity,” Hypatia, Summer, 1991, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Summer, 1991), 64-76, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3810096.
Stanley, Liz & Sue Wise. Breaking Out Again: Feminist Ontology and Epistemology, Routledge, 2002.
Whitford, Margaret. Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, New York: Routledge, 1991.
[...]
1 Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, (New York: Routledge, 1991), 170.
2 Whitford summarizes the critique Irigaray has received as: “Irigaray’s inaccessibility makes her elitist; she does not recognize the contribution of other women; she is not really a feminist; she reduces the diversity of women to a falsifying unity by ignoring forms of otherness - racial and class differences for example - which are not sexual otherness; she is essentialist, hypostatizing ‘woman’; hertheory is not materialist.” Whitford observes these critiques are essentially directed at feminist theory on behalf of the women’s movement [Whitford, Philosophy in the Feminine, 5.]
3 Whitford, Philosophy in the Feminine, 5.
4 Internet Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy, “Luce Irigaray,” 2024, https://iep.utm.edu/irigaray/
5 Helene Cixous & Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, (University ofMinnesota Press, 1988),79.
6 Internet Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy, “Luce Irigaray,” 2024, https://iep.utm.edu/irigaray/
7 Ibid.
8 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Cornell University Press, 1985),78.
9 Liz Stanley & Sue Wise, Breaking out again: Feminist Ontology and Epistemology, (Routledge, 2002), 198.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Donna Haraway, quoted in Yasminah Beebeejaun, “Fracking and epistemic injustice: A feminist critique of knowledge formation,” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 42 (2), 250-267. https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544211036465.
13 Helene Cixous & Catherine Clement, The NewlyBorn Woman, 83.
14 Ofelia Schutte, “Irigaray on the Problem of Subjectivity,” Hypatia, Summer, 1991, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Summer, 1991), 64-76, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3810096.
15 Ibid., 65.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Saunak Samajdar, Intimacy, Hospitalityn and Jouissance: A ‘Feminine’ Knowing ofDifference, Michigan Feminist Studies, vol. 20, Issue title: Knowledge, Fall 2006-Spring 2007, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.ark5583.0020.004.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Sabina Lovibond, “Feminism and the ‘Crisis ofRationality’”, New LeftReview, (September-October 1994), https://newleftreview.org/issues/i207/articles/sabina-lovibond-feminism-and-the-crisis-of-rationality
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Whitford, Philosophy in the Feminine, 33.
28 Ibid., 53.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 58.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 59.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Irigaray, This Sex, 26.
37 Ibid., 24.
38 Ibid., 26.
39 This sex,214-15.
40 Whitford, Philosophy in the Feminine, 59.
41 Ibid., 60.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Ofelia Schutte, “Irigaray on the Problem of Subjectivity,” 65.
45 Ibid., 66.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Monika Rogowska-Stangret, “Situated Knowledges”, New Materialism, https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/s/situated-knowledges.html
51 Ofelia Schutte, “Irigaray on the Problem of Subjectivity,” 66.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
55 Irigaray, This Sex, 138.
56 Ibid.
57 Luce Irigaray, Speculum ofthe Other Woman, translated by Gillian C. Gill, (Cornell University Press, 1985), 139.
58 Quoted in Christina Grammatikopoulou, “Remembering the Air: Luce Irigaray’s Ontology ofBreath,” https://interartive.org/2014/05/irigaray-air
59 “Epistemology andthe Allegory of the Cave,” 2023, https://licentiapoetica.com/epistemology-and-the-allegoiy- of-the-cave-887dea02dbe4)
60 Seraphina M. Karlyn, “Irigaray: ‘Plato’s Hystera,’ from Speculum of the Other Woman,” https://www.academia.edu/15334854/Irigaray_Plato_s_Hystera_from_Speculum_of_the_Other_Woman 61 Irigaray, Speculum, 315.
61 Ibid., 246.
62 Seraphina M. Karlyn, “Irigaray: “Plato’s Hystera,’ from Speculum of the Other Woman.”
63 Irigaray, Speculum, 315.
64 Samajdar, “A ‘feminine’ Knowing ofDifference.”
65 Ibid.
66 Kirsten Campbell, Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology, (Routledge, 2004), 127.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., 127.
69 Irigaray, This Sex, 171.
70 Whitford, Philosophy in the Feminine, 181-2.
71 Quoted in Campbell, Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology, 127.
72 Quoted in Ibid., 161.
73 Ibid. 161.
74 Whitford, Philosophy in the Feminine, 78.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid., 49.
77 Beatriz Revelles Benavente, Monika Rogowska-Stangret and Waltraud Ernst, “Feminist New Materialisms: Activating Ethico-Politics through Genealogies in Social Sciences,” MDPI, 2020.
78 Whitford, Philosophy in the Feminine, 49.
79 Irigaray, An Ethics ofSexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, (Cornell University Press, 1993), 137.
Frequently asked questions
What is the central theme of "THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS OF LUCE IRIGARAY’S PHILOSOPHY"?
The essay explores the framework and concepts Luce Irigaray uses in her philosophy, placing them within an epistemological perspective. It focuses on establishing sexual difference, constructing feminine subjectivity, and challenging the paternal/masculine symbolic order. Irigaray critiques Western philosophical traditions, particularly rationalism and the subject-object binary, highlighting the absence or subjugation of the feminine.
What are some key notions in Irigaray's philosophical framework?
Key notions include the absence of the feminine subject in Western thought, the constitution of sexual difference, the feminine subject, and the critique of how feminine subjectivity has been traditionally assimilated to masculine subjectivity. Irigaray also emphasizes the power of the feminine imaginary and unconscious in challenging established foundations of the Symbolic.
How does Irigaray critique rationalism and Western epistemology?
Irigaray critiques theories based on a constituent divide between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge. She questions the notion of a transcendental subject, arguing it loses its empirical relation to the object. She views epistemology, metaphysics, and psychology as reflecting a masculinist paradigm, which erases or obfuscates the feminine. She also associates rationality with masculine principles, highlighting the need for a fertile and creative rationality that includes the female element.
What is Irigaray's view on the subject-object relationship in Western thought?
Irigaray views the division between subject and object of knowledge as a splitting of a larger whole, with the "subject" being associated with masculinity, the speaking subject, and the "object" being associated with femininity, passivity, and silence. She argues that this structure represses and objectifies the feminine, turning epistemology into sexual politics.
How does Irigaray engage with works of male philosophers?
Irigaray reinterprets and challenges philosophers like Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Plato. In her elemental works, she critiques Heidegger's oblivion of air, engages in a lyrical dialogue with Nietzsche concerning his fears about the feminine and the fluid element of water, and presents an analysis of Plato's allegory of the cave, reinterpreting it as "Plato's Hystera" to expose the exclusion of the feminine from philosophical tradition.
What is Irigaray's perspective on the Symbolic order and its transformation?
Irigaray criticizes accepting the Symbolic order as an ontological condition. She speaks about the "hom(m)o-sexual" order of men, built on exchanges among men, including women as objects of exchange. To transform the Symbolic order, she advocates for a transformative engagement with language, constructing a female sociality and symbolic, creating novel languages and systems of representation, and ensuring that the female subject becomes an epistemological subject.
What does Irigaray mean by "jamming the theoretical machinery"?
It signifies disrupting the established theoretical frameworks that claim to produce a univocal truth, particularly those within Western philosophical tradition. It involves repeating/interpreting the ways in which the feminine is defined as lack or imitation within discourse, thus signifying a disruptive excess on the feminine side.
- Quote paper
- Ilgin Yildiz (Author), 2024, The epistemological dimensions of Luce Irigaray’s philosophy, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1500954
