Divine love

Luce Irigaray, Women, Gender, and Religion

Morny Joy

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847795250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'Divine love' explores the work of Luce Irigaray for the first time from the perspective of Religious Studies. The book examines the development of religious themes in Irigaray's work from 'Speculum of the Other Woman', in which she rejects traditional forms of western religion, to her more recent explorations of eastern religions. Irigaray's ideas on love, the divine, the ethics of sexual difference and normative heterosexuality are analysed and placed in the context of the reception of her work by secular feminists such as Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell and Elizabeth Grosz, as well as by feminists in Religious Studies such as Pamela Sue Anderson, Ellen Armour, Amy Hollywood and Grace Jantzen. Finally, Irigaray's own spiritual path, which has been influenced by eastern religions, specifically the disciplines of yoga and tantra in Hinduism and Buddhism, is evaluated on the light of recent theoretical developments in orientalism and postcolonialism.

CHAPTER 1
What’s God got to do with it?

God conceives and loves himself. That part of God has always been denied us. Thus we women have become weak, formless, insecure, aggressive, devoted to the other because unaware of our selves, submissive to the other because we were unable to establish our own order. If we are not to obey the other, we have to set a goal of our own, make our own law or laws. If we are to escape slavery it is not enough to destroy the master. Only the divine offers us that freedom – enjoins it upon us. Only a God constitutes a rallying point for us that can let us free – nothing else. (1993b: 68)

Introduction

The early work of Luce Irigaray resonates with references to God and the divine. From her first books, Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a) and This Sex Which Is Not One (1985b), Irigaray has been keenly involved with religion. She both rejects what she considers outmoded beliefs, structures and practices and explores innovative ways of (re-)introducing myths and ideals. This chapter will follow Irigaray’s investigations of women and of their relation to the concept of o/Otherness, particularly as this term has featured in acts of denial that have deprived women of an identity of their own. Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan are major influences, but she does not accept their work at face value. Irigaray’s oeuvre also needs to be set in the wider context of the developments in French thought since 1930, specifically the impact of such diverse thinkers as Hegel, Freud and Heidegger. Irigaray is neither a theologian nor a philosopher of religion in the traditional sense, and I think it is a mistake to try to make her one. The body of her work, especially her mythopoetic explorations and her use of mimesis – as both a critical and creative tool1 – provide a radical opposition to received notions of divinity and the ‘feminine’, in what Irigaray names as patriarchy.2 This chapter also examines Irigaray’s critical response to traditional ideas of God in terms of women’s o/Other, and her proposal to substitute imaginative constructs of the divine ideals. Irigaray will propose an alternative ‘feminine imaginary’. She asserts that women need to affirm their status and identity as distinct from men, and to become divine. The focus of the chapter will be on certain sections from Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a), This Sex Which Is Not One (1985b), and particular essays from Sexes and Genealogies (1993b).

Preliminary diagnosis

Irigaray’s initial investigations of the situation of women and their relation to God, as well as of the notion of desire, are undertaken in Speculum. In this intertextual exercise, Irigaray interacts with selective themes in the work of western philosophers – Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Descartes, Kant and Hegel. It is the opening study of Freud, entitled ‘The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry’, however, which both sets the tone and frames the issue that Irigaray discerns as critical for the position of women in the western intellectual and religious traditions. For Irigaray, it is basically a male-centred system that has prevailed, where man has been regarded as the norm or ideal of the human species. It is also the male image, with additional attributes of power and transcendence, that has been equated with God. Woman, in contrast, has been deemed inferior, if not alien to all those qualities that are associated with reason and morality, let alone with the deity. In this essay, Irigaray questions Freud’s depiction of a girl’s resolution to the oedipal conflict which he regards as opposite to that of a boy.

Does ‘opposite’ mean ‘placed over against something on the other or farther side of the intervening line; contrary in position’? Or does it mean ‘opposed,’ ‘hostile,’ or ‘harmful to,’ contrary like Mary in the rhyme or as the dictionary develops the meaning.

This decisive moment in sexual structuring is then supposedly produced in the little girl’s case as the ‘opposite’ of the (so-called) masculine economy. Or so Freud would wish, as he thinks of sexual difference from within the realm of the same, and attributes all the properties (and improprieties) of the dictionary definition listed above to the sex ‘opposite’ his own. (Irigaray 1985a: 83)

This explication places woman as the opposite or other of man within a framework work that Irigaray terms ‘an economy of sameness’. As such, a woman’s difference from man, when not deemed a deficiency, is subsumed by a model of masculine identity that incorporates any diversity into its own monolithic system – hence the notion of sameness. While such a system has definite Hegelian connections, Irigaray also places it within another context of the interplay of identity and difference – that of Greek philosophy. Here, in the work of Plato, all that is multiple issues from, and returns to the unity of the Idea or the One. In her study entitled ‘Plato’s Hystera’, also within Speculum, Irigaray describes this process, detecting a similar unifying procedure in both Platonic and Hegelian modes of dialectical interchange: ‘The Idea of Ideas, alone, is itself in itself.… It neither indicates nor indexes anything other than itself, however akin. And needs no heterogeneous vehicle, no foreign receptacle, in order to signify and represent itself. The idea goes beyond such mere methodological, generative procedures. It is the end of every road, even the road of dialectic’ (Irigaray 1985a: 298).

As a result, though Irigaray doesn’t spell out her argument in precise detail, her implication is clear. This is that, in the western philosophic/theological heritage, a self-same unity or identity has been connected not just with the Platonic Ideas or Forms, and with the Hegelian Spirit, but also with an absolute God, most often designated in a male and paternal mode:

The One produces the even by subsuming under it the less and the more, and the gaps between them, which are operative in the dyad, and in this way the One swells to infinity. But as sameness: the One (of) the Idea.… What is to be said, then, of him who, now and forever, through all eternity, contains all these essences, these powers, while going beyond them in a pre-existence that engenders them as such and regulates the connections between them? The Good (of) God-the-Father. (1985a: 359–60)

In Irigaray’s view, this God-the-Father, particularly the god of Christianity, stands supported by religious philosophy and theology as the bulwark of a traditional system that demeans women. This model of God has been subjected to rigorous psychoanalytic scrutiny, firstly by Freud and then by Jacques Lacan. Yet though the actual existence of God may be put into question from the materialist perspectives of both Lacan and Freud, Irigaray also detects in their psychoanalytic procedures a movement that continues to ‘deify’ the male sex and the symbol of its power, the phallus.3 For Irigaray, the male who accedes to his god like inheritance of phallic identity does so only as a result of a repression of the mother and, by extension, of women. In this male-focused, psychoanalytic setting, woman, as the other of men, functions both as fetish object in the guise of mother-substitute fixations and as a mirroring device, reflecting to men their own narcissistic self-preoccupations – their sameness.4

What a mockery of generation, parody of copulation and genealogy, drawing its strength from the same model, from the model of the same: the subject. In whose sight everything outside remains forever a condition making possible the image and the reproduction of the self. A faithful polished mirror, empty of altering reflections. Immaculate of all auto-copies. Other because wholly in the service of the same subject to whom it would project its surfaces, candid in their self-ignorance. (1985a: 136)

Within a religious setting, Irigaray detects a subtle move whereby this idealised male self-image, which from a psychoanalytic perspective is primarily an imaginary projection, becomes solidified in cultural productions as a symbolic figure of authority. In this unconscious process, the debt to the maternal other will be replaced by a projection on to an idealised Other, God. As Elizabeth Grosz explains it:

A whole history of philosophy [and religion] seems intent on rationalizing this debt [to the mother] away by providing men with a series of images of self-creation culminating in the idea of God as the paternal ‘mother’, creator of the universe in place of women/mothers. Man’s self-reflecting Other, God, functions to obliterate the positive fecundity and creativity of women. Born of woman, man devises religion, theory, and culture as an attempt to disavow this foundational, unspeakable debt. (1990: 181)

A fundamental element in the deciphering of both Lacan’s and Irigaray’s positions is an appreciation of the uses of the term o/Other – a borrowing from Hegel – that features as a central term in Lacan’s repertoire. The o/Other is a multifaceted term.5 In his extrapolation of Hegel’s notion of difference, Lacan has reworked the Freudian transition from preoedipal to oedipal by first expanding on the what he names as the imaginary or mirror phase. Otherness plays a vital role in this process. Grosz discusses this development in Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction: ‘In the mirror stage … the child enters an imaginary relation with the other, with others, including the mother, father, nurturer, or mirror-image (represented by autre [other]).… The mirror stage generates the child’s ego or moi which is built upon its imaginary identification with the other’ (74). This imaginary phase sets the scene for the development of both sexual and social identity. For Lacan, much of life a person’s life is spent in a (fruitless) endeavour to re-experience this imaginary relation with the m/other figure who represents a state of primal plenitude.

This imaginary autre/other is distinct from Autre/the Other, which, according to Lacan, ‘is embodied in the figure of the symbolic father, who intervenes in the narcissistic imaginary stage of total gratification’ (Grosz 74). Lacan designates the shift from other to the Other as a passage from a narcissistic imaginary stage with its maternal symbiosis to a paternal symbolic one, which involves the acquisition of language and of its accompanying socio-cultural structures.6 Grosz again elucidates:

The Other (represented by Autre) enters the Oedipal triangle as a point outside the dual imaginary structure. As the law of symbolic functioning, the Other is embodied in the figure of the symbolic father, who intervenes into the narcissistic, imaginary, and incestual structure of identifications and gratifications. The relation between self/moi and other is necessary for the initiation of social exchange, and the articulation of the unconscious. The locus of the Other is at the same time that site within the subject known as the unconscious. (74)

The o/Other in Lacanian theory has thus come to indicate two aspects of one process. It registers the change from the imaginary (unconscious) to symbolic (conscious) cultural conventions. At the same time, it indicates the site of an original maternal bond that has been repressed in this transaction. While it is the mistaken conflation of the imaginary with the symbolic representations that Lacan appreciates as the work of analysis to deflate, Irigaray will undertake her own diagnosis of this hypothesis.7 She investigates the erasure of women that she believes underlies western civilisation. Needless to say, in her analysis of the conflation of men’s unconscious fabrications with the symbolic designation of God, Irigaray is not impressed by the way that this male Ideal Other has functioned so as to limit women’s spheres of activity, specifically their ability to function as independent subjects. According to Irigaray, women have been reduced to acting a masquerade of femininity that men have ordained. ‘What do I mean by masquerade? In particular what Freud calls “femininity” … whereas a man is a man from the outset … [a] woman has to become a normal woman … she has to enter the masquerade of femininity’ (1985b: 134).8 Irigaray speculates on the potential of women to oppose this designation. She also gives some intimation of the momentous upheaval that could result if this dormant force of the repressed maternal were to stir in terms of her own unconscious ‘otherness’, and question symbolic Otherness.

But what if the ‘object’ started to speak? Which also means beginning to ‘see’, etc. What disaggregation of the [male] subject would that entail? Not only on the level of the split between him and his other, his variously specified alter ego, or between him and the Other, who is always to some extent his Other, even if he does not recognize himself in it, even if he is so overwhelmed by it as to bar himself out of it and into it so as to retain at the very least the power to promote his own forms. (135)

Most of Irigaray’s work is, I believe, vitally concerned with both the strategies and the implications involved when women refuse to support the symbolic process which determines their silencing and ‘othering’. As a corollary, Irigaray is also concerned with eliciting the key elements that would support women’s imaginary reclamations of a divine ideal of their own. This will entail women expressing their own unfettered desires. Inevitably, this will have repercussions for present definitions of desire and identity as well as for the nature of god and religion.

The lure of desire

Love of the other without love of self, without love of God, implies submission of the female one, the other. (Irigaray 1993b: 68)

In refusing to let women remain the basis of the male economy of sameness, Irigaray’s intention is for women to recognise their own desires, which have been inhibited by their cultural conditioning. For Irigaray, these desires are not simply libidinal urges, which result from repression of a woman’s relationship to the m(other). Their new formulation will result from a revision of Freud’s definition of sublimation and repression, and the relation to the phallus, as it is refined by Lacan (1985b: 69–75). It will involve a woman coming to understand herself as a person in her own right, not simply as a vehicle for reproduction.9 The reclamation of women’s individuality, as distinct from her restricted maternal role, will allow women access to constructive forms of self-representation.

Irigaray describes the problem: ‘Freud can discuss the little girl’s relation to the place of origin only as a vacancy, a taking leave of the mother: as rejection, or hatred of the mother … she is left with a void, a lack of all representation, representation, and even strictly speaking of all mimesis of her desire for origin’ (Irigaray 1985a: 42). Irigaray is, however, not only combating Freud’s denial of women’s desire as an active force that would allow her both a positive self-image, she also wishes to resist Lacan’s further amendments of Freudian theory that associates women’s fundamental lack – her being ‘not-all’ (pas tout) – not simply with the deprivation of a penis but with an absence both of awareness and of an ability to articulate her condition. In the article ‘God and the Jouissance of

Women’ (Lacan in Mitchell and Rose 1983: 137–48), Lacan expands on these opinions about women. ‘The woman can only be written with The crossed through. There is no such thing as The woman, where the definite article stands for the universal. There is no such thing as The woman since of her essence … she is not all’ (144).10 In one sense, Lacan could be making a similar observation to that of Derrida – that there can be no universal definition of woman. On another level, however, Lacan is describing woman’s non-existence from a symbolic perspective. As ‘The woman’, she exists only as a male fantasy (48). However, there is also another possible reference which elaborates on Freud’s definition of women as incomplete – they lack a penis. In Lacan’s reformulation of Freud, women are incomplete in so far as they lack the phallus which represents the power to function within the symbolic.

In Speculum Irigaray’s criticisms are directed mainly at Freud, but in This Sex Which Is Not One (1985b), she takes direct aim at Lacan’s recasting of the castration complex. Irigaray’s ‘Così Fan Tutti’ [sic] demonstrates how Lacan’s phallic frame of reference, particularly in its dry, verbal analyses of desire, is still caught in its own desire for the same. It reaffirms ‘the narcissistic pleasure that the master, believing himself to be unique, confuses with that of the One’ (103). She vehemently rebukes Lacan for his amendment of Freud’s description of women’s deficiency – her lack of the phallus (1985b: 61).11 The ultimate inequity, however, from Irigaray’s perspective, is Lacan’s presumption that women do not have access to consciousness. Delegated to a role of the unconscious womb or source of man’s language, women are prevented not only from being aware of their own desires but from acquiring language, the symbolic means to elucidate their condition. According to Irigaray, women are thus barred from the possibility of representing a God/Other of their own.

As for women, unless raised to the dignity of the male essence, they would have no access to the sublime circles of sameness, to the heights of the intelligible … women are incapable of realizing whether some idea – Idea – in fact corresponds to themselves, or whether it is only a more or less passable imitation of men’s ideas. Unaware of the value of the names given them by the logos – assuming that some really specific names exist – women would, it seems, not know their definition, their representation, or the relationships with others, and with the All, that are maintained in this way. (1985a: 342)

To counter this muting of their voices, Irigaray posits that women need to begin to understand how Lacan manipulates the manifestations of desire. This term ‘desire’ will be decisive in the development of Irigaray’s thought. In one sense, for both Irigaray and Lacan, it retains the associations of Platonic eros, which during its voyage through western thought, particularly through Hegel, and its later Freudian and Lacanian adaptations, has undergone various permutations. In her book Subjects of Desire (1987), Judith Butler traces its trajectory from Hegel to Lacan, especially as it was mediated in France during the1930s by the lectures of Alexandre Kojève.12 For Hegel ‘desire signifies the reflexivity of consciousness, the necessity that it become other to itself in order to know itself’ which is achieved by the dialectical engagement with negativity, or otherness (Butler 1987: 7). By the time of Lacan, however, ‘Desire can no longer be said to reveal, express, or thematise the reflexive structure of consciousness, but is, rather, the precise moment of consciousness’ opacity’ (186). Desire, as it is employ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: encountering Irigaray
• 1 What’s God got to do with it?
• 2 Cartesian mediations
• 3 Effacements: Emmanuel Levinas and Irigaray
• 4 Love and the labour of the negative: Irigaray and Hegel
• 5 Homo- and heterogeneous zones: Irigaray and Mary Daly
• 6 Irigaray’s eastern excursion
• 7 Conclusion: a world of difference
• Notes
• References
• Index