Luce Irigaray

Luce Irigaray (born 3 May 1930) is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examines the uses and misuses of language in relation to women.

Luce Irigaray received a bachelor's degree from the University of Louvain in 1954, a master's degree from the same university in 1956, and taught at a high school in Brussels from 1956 to 1959.

In 1960, she moved to Paris to pursue a master's degree in Psychology from the University of Paris, which she earned in 1961.

In the 1960s, Irigaray started attending the psychoanalytic seminars of Jacques Lacan and joined the École Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris), directed by Lacan.

She also received a specialist diploma in Psychopathology from the school in 1962.

She held a research post at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique since 1964, where she is now a Director of Research in Philosophy.

Her initial research focused on dementia patients, about whom she produced a study of the differences between the language of male and female patients.

It has also been noted that in her writings, Irigaray has stated a concern that an interest in her biography would affect the interpretation of her ideas, as the entrance of women into intellectual discussions has often also included the challenging of women's point of view based on biographical material.

Her most extensive autobiographical statements thus far are gathered in Through Vegetal Being (co-authored with Michael Marder).

Overall, she maintains the belief that biographical details pertaining to her personal life hold the possibility to be used against her within the male dominated educational establishment as a tool to discredit her work.

However, at age 91, she published A New Culture of Energy: Beyond East and West (2021) in which she discusses her decades-long practices of yoga asanas (postures) and pranayama (breathing) and maintains that yoga builds a bridge between body and spirit.

In 1968, she received a doctorate in Linguistics from Paris X Nanterre.

Her thesis was titled Approche psycholinguistique du langage des déments.

She completed a PhD in linguistics in 1968 from the University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis (University of Paris VIII).

Her dissertation on speech patterns of subjects suffering from dementia became her first book, Le langage des déments, published in 1973.

Irigaray's first and most well known book, published in 1974, was Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), which analyzes the texts of Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant through the lens of phallocentrism.

In 1974, she earned a second PhD in Philosophy.

She was expelled from this school in 1974, after the publication of her second doctoral thesis (doctorat d'État), Speculum of the Other Woman (Speculum: La fonction de la femme dans le discours philosophique, later retitled as Speculum: De l'autre femme), which received much criticism from both the Lacanian and Freudian schools of psychoanalysis.

This criticism brought her recognition, but she was removed from her position as an instructor at the University of Vincennes as well as ostracized from the Lacanian community.

Her first major book, Speculum of the Other Woman, based on her second dissertation, was published in 1974.

In Speculum, Irigaray engages in close analyses of phallocentrism in Western philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, analyzing texts by Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant.

The book's most cited essay, "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream," critiques Freud's lecture on femininity.

Irigaray is the author of works analyzing many thinkers, including This Sex Which Is Not One (1977), which discusses Lacan's work as well as political economy; Elemental Passions (1982) can be read as a response to Merleau‐Ponty's article “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible, and in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1999), Irigaray critiques Heidegger's emphasis on the element of earth as the ground of life and speech and his "oblivion" or forgetting of air.

Irigaray employs three different modes in her investigations into the nature of gender, language, and identity: the analytic, the essayistic, and the lyrical poetic.

As of October 2021, she is active in the Women's Movements in both France and Italy.

In 1977, Irigaray published This Sex Which is Not One (Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un) which was subsequently translated into English with that title and published in 1985, along with Speculum.

In addition to more commentary on psychoanalysis, including discussions of Lacan's work, This Sex Which is Not One also comments on political economy, drawing on structuralist writers such as Lévi-Strauss.

For example, Irigaray argues that the phallic economy places women alongside signs and currency, since all forms of exchange are conducted exclusively between men.

Irigaray draws upon Karl Marx’s theory of capital and commodities to claim that women are exchanged between men in the same way as any other commodity is.

She argues that our entire society is predicated on this exchange of women.

Her exchange value is determined by society, while her use value is her natural qualities.

Thus, a woman’s self is divided between her use and exchange values, and she is only desired for the exchange value.

This system creates three types of women: the mother, who is all use value; the virgin, who is all exchange value; and the prostitute, who embodies both use and exchange value.

She further uses additional Marxist foundations to argue that women are in demand due to their perceived shortage and as a result, males seek "to have them all," or seek a surplus like the excess of commodity buying power, capital, that capitalists seek constantly.

Irigaray speculates thus that perhaps, "the way women are used matter less than their number."

In this further analogy of women "on the market," understood through Marxist terms, Irigaray points out that women, like commodities, are moved between men based on their exchange value rather than just their use value, and the desire will always be surplus – making women almost seem like capital, in this case, to be accumulated.

"As commodities, women are thus two things at once: utilitarian objects and bearers of value."

Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions (1982) could be read as a response to Merleau‐Ponty's article “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible.

Like Merleau‐Ponty, Irigaray describes corporeal intertwining or vision and touch.

Counteracting the narcissistic strain in Merleau‐Ponty's chiasm, she assumes that sexual difference must precede the intertwining.