Ethics of Eros

Irigaray's Re-writing of the Philosophers

Tina Chanter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134712250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Ethics of Eros sheds light on contemporary feminist discourse by questioning the basic distinctions and categories in feminist theory. Tina Chanter uses the work of Luce Irigaray as the focus for a critique of French and Anglo-American feminism as it is articulated in the debate over essentialism. While these two branches of feminism represent opposing views, Chanter advocates a productive exchange between the two.

notes

NOTES TO PREFACE

1. Recent discussions of the prominence of gender in feminism include Butler, 1990; De Lauretis, 1987; Flax, 1987; Scott, 1986; and Showalter, 1989.

2. I borrow this phrase from Whitford, 1991: 20, who applies it to another critic, because it serves well to make the point that I neither mean to ignore the usefulness of Sho waiter’s analysis in other respects, nor to reduce the impact of her thought to a position she takes at one point in one of many texts.

3. In contrast to Showalter, Rosalind Delmar says that the focus on sexual difference and the “employment of psychoanalysis and critical theory to question the unity of the subject, to emphasize the fragmented subject, is potentially subversive of any view which asserts a ‘central’ organizing principle of social conflict” (1986: 28). Disagreement about the discourse of sexual difference is further complicated by the fact that some American theorists have adopted the term “gender” to refer to what British and French feminists call “sexual difference.” On the confusion between the terms sexual difference and gender, see Elliot, 1991: 3–4.

4. The same disjunction is to be found in a phrase Schor uses in order to distinguish between Beauvoirs and Irigaray’s conception of the subject, “For Irigaray … the main attribute of the subject is not activity but language” (1989: 44).

5. See, for example, Weedon’s comments on feminist uses of psychoanalytic theory (1987: 71).

6. Tavor Bannet, 1989: 19–20.

7. I have in mind, for example, the position of those Schor describes as elaborating a “linguistic critique” of essentialism. For them, she says, “Within the symbolic order centered on the phallus there can be no immediate access to the body: the fine mesh of language screens off the body from any apprehension that is not already encultured” (1989: 41).

8. One of the earliest arguments against Irigaray’s alleged essentialism is Plaza, 1978.

9. Segal, 1987: 132–34; and Moi, 1985: 139.

10. Fuss, 1989: xiii, and chap. 4, 55–72. Fuss makes some pertinent and valuable observations in relation to other critics of Irigaray, such as her comments on Moi (1989: 56), and on Plaza (1989: 67), but she still thinks that “Irigaray might rightly be accused … of a certain tendency to universalize and to homogenize, to subsume all women under the category of ‘Woman’” (1989: 68). Fuss concludes, that “Irigaray works towards securing a woman’s access to an essence of her own, without actually prescribing what that essence might be” (1989: 72). Fuss’ reading attests to the confusion that still surrounds the charge of essentialism. I want to suggest that to characterize Irigaray as aspiring to secure “a woman’s access to an essence of her own” is to misrepresent her work. If Irigaray is read in the context of Heidegger’s questioning of traditional concepts of essence, and Derrida’s elaboration of Heidegger, the inadequacy of the idea that Irigaray would try to secure an essence for women, or the implication that she might conceivably prescribe such an essence, quickly emerges.

11. As Gatens says, “Critics of feminists of difference tend to divide the entire theoretical field of social enquiry into an exclusive disjunction: social theory is either environmentalist or it is essentialist. Therefore, and it follows quite logically from this premise, if feminist theories are not environmentalist then they must be essentialist” (1991a: 141).

12. This insight is by no means new. Showaiter, for example, acknowledges that to talk about gender “is a constant reminder of the other categories of difference, such as race and class, that structure our lives and texts, just as theorizing gender emphasizes the parallels between feminist criticism and other forms of minority discourse” (1989: 3). Once Irigaray’s questioning of sexual difference is understood not so much as a refusal to consider gender, as an insight that gender cannot be adequately analyzed without a confrontation with the nature of sexual difference, the distance between Showalter and Irigaray does not seem so great. Also see Kaplan, 1986: 148, whom Showalter quotes.

13. Whitford, 1991. Also see Grosz, who by emphasizing the importance of what she calls “sexed corporeality” (1993: 188), argues for a reading of Irigaray that seems to me consonant with my own. According to Grosz, Irigaray’s “work is a facing up to the implications of” what Grosz identifies as “the crisis of reason,” that is, “to know (as woman, as other) the knower (as man has been and woman is now becoming). Her work poses the question of the partiality, that is, the sexualization of all knowledges” (1993: 210).

14. In the introductory remarks to her book, Whitford says, “Although Irigaray’s relation to Hegelian and post-Hegelian philosophy is undoubtedly one of the perspectives which would shed considerable light on her formulations of questions of desire, subjectivity, identity, and death, it is not the theme in this book. For in order to examine her from this perspective, it would be necessary to see her first as a philosopher, and this is the position that I want to establish here” (1991: 3). The present work builds upon the groundwork that Whitford has laid with her careful and cogent analysis. The appearance of Whitford’s book enabled me to pursue my discussion of Irigaray’s philosophical sources, without feeling a responsibility to cover every aspect of her work. Nonetheless, by reading her philosophical interventions both in terms of her inheritance of phenomenological and post-phenomenological analyses, and as a critique of that tradition, I hope to provide an overall picture of Irigaray’s work.

15. I am grateful to Adelaide Russo, and particularly to Michelle Masse for discussions on the question of finding a voice.

16. See Kelly Oliver’s discussion of the “importing” of “the French Feminists” (1993: 163–80).

17. Here I am echoing Whitford when she points to the problems associated with “Irigaray’s stardom” (1991: 5). Whitford elaborates these difficulties when she says of Irigarays work, “Because of the power of her critique, she runs the risk of being taken for a guru, someone with special powers of insight, who can be expected to pronounce with authority on every social issue, from nuclear power to test-tube babies” (1991: 17).

18. See Whitford’s comments on the relationship between Beauvoirs and Irigarays work (IR: 24–25).

19. Nancy F. Cott expresses the sorts of tensions I have in mind when she says, “Feminism is nothing if not paradoxical. It aims for individual freedoms by mobilizing sex solidarity. It acknowledges diversity among women while positing that women recognize their unity. It requires gender consciousness for its basis, yet calls for the elimination of prescribed gender roles” (1986: 49).

20. For a more detailed account of Irigarays use of psychoanalytic concepts, see Whitford, 1991. See also Hirsh (forthcoming, 1994).

21. If Irigaray had not written a book called An Ethics of Sexual Difference, I would have used that as my title!

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

1. For a more detailed analysis of the differences between feminists who focus upon sexual difference, and those who see sexual equality as more central, see Jaggar (1990: 239–54).

2. Also see Scott, 1988b: 167–77. For another useful discussion of the case of Sears against the EEOC that delineates the issues of sexual difference versus sexual equality see Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Legal Perspectives on Sexual Difference” (Rhode, 1990: 213–25). See also Frug, 1992: 12–18.

3. See, for example, Culler, 1982: 43–64; Felman, 1981; Fuss, 1988; Heilbrun, 1988; Jacobus, 1986; Kamuf, 1982, 1988; Kamuf and Miller, 1990; Miller, 1991; Okm, in Rhode, 1990: 145–59; Showalter, 1977, 1987; Spacks, 1975.

4. It has to be added that some of the ground that Jacobus assumes is in danger of being lost. As Faludi (1991) has documented, there is a backlash against the successes achieved by the feminist movement. In tandem with this backlash, often in the context of debates over political correctness, some campuses are witnessing increasingly visible opposition to women’s studies and multicultural courses that try to give women and minorities the voices that they have long been denied. While Jacobus could assume in 1986 that the act of reading women’s texts in feminist classrooms is uncontested, this is no longer something that can be taken for granted.

5. See Spacks, 1975.

6. This is Miller in dialogue with Kamuf (1982).

7. Susan Fraiman echoes Miller’s call to re focus energies on “Women’s Studies,” rather than “Gender Studies,” when she says, in the closing lines of an enlightening article, “Go and teach women’s studies. Fight Gendrification!” “Against Gendrification: Agendas for Feminist Scholarship and Teaching in Women’s Studies” (1990: 9). Showalter declares “premature” Jehlen’s “call for radical comparativism” “since [in 1981] we had no body of criticism that explored the issues of gender in male authors as gynocriticism had done for female authors” (1989: 5); see Jehlen, 1981. Showalter’s warning can be placed alongside the caution that Fraiman and Miller exhort feminists to exercise about “gendrification.” Also see Showaiter, 1982.

8. Kamuf elaborates her position in the following questions: “If feminist theory lets itself be guided by questions such as what is women’s language, literature, style or experience from where does it get its faith in the form of these questions to get at truth, if not from the same central store that supplies humanism with its faith in the universal truth of man? And what if notions such as ‘getting-at-the-truth-of-the-object’ represented a principal means by which the power of power structures are sustained and even extended?” (1982: 44); “Yet what is it about those structures [of power that have prevented knowledge of the feminine in the past] which could have succeeded until now in e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• one Tracking Essentialism with the Help of a Sex/Gender Map
• two The Legacy of Simone De Beauvoir
• three Looking at Hegel’s Antigone Through Irigaray’s Speculum
• four Irigaray, Heidegger, and the Greeks
• five Levinas and the Question of the Other
• six Derrida, Irigaray, and Feminism
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index