Irigaray Luce (b.1930), French feminist philosopher and psychoanalyst. Her earliest work was in psychoanalysis and linguistics, focusing on the role of negation in the language of schizophrenics (Languages, 1966). A trained analyst with a private practice, she attended Lacan’s seminars at the École Normale Supérieure and for several years taught a course in the psychoanalysis department at Vincennes. With the publication of Speculum, De l’autre femme (Speculum of the Other Woman) in 1974 she was dismissed from Vincennes. She argues that psychoanalysis, specifically its attitude toward women, is historically and culturally determined and that its phallocentric bias is treated as universal truth.
With the publication of Speculum and Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un (This Sex Which Is Not One) in 1977, her work extends beyond psychoanalysis and begins a critical examination of philosophy. Influenced primarily by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, her work is a critique of the fundamental categories of philosophical thought: one/many, identity/difference, being/non-being, rational/irrational, mind/body, form/matter, transcendental/sensible. She sets out to show the concealed aspect of metaphysical constructions and what they depend on, namely, the unacknowledged mother. In Speculum, the mirror figures as interpretation and criticism of the enclosure of the Western subject within the mirror’s frame, constituted solely through the masculine imaginary. Her project is one of constituting the world – and not only the specular world – of the other as woman. This engagement with the history of philosophy emphasizes the historical and sexual determinants of philosophical discourse, and insists on bringing the transcendental back to the elements of the earth and embodiment. Her major contribution to philosophy is the notion of sexual difference. An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984) claims that the central contemporary philosophical task is to think through sexual difference. Although her notion of sexual difference is sometimes taken to be an essentialist view of the feminine, in fact it is an articulation of the difference between the sexes that calls into question an understanding of either the feminine or masculine as possessing a rigid gender identity. Instead, sexual difference is the erotic desire for otherness. Insofar as it is an origin that is continuously differentiating itself from itself, it challenges Aristotle’s understanding of the arche as solid ground or hypokeimenon. As aition or first cause, sexual difference is responsible for something coming into being and is that to which things are indebted for their being. This indebtedness allows Irigaray to formulate an ethics of sexual difference. Her latest work continues to rethink the foundations of ethics. Both Towards a Culture of Difference (1990) and I Love To You (1995) claim that there is no civil identity proper to women and therefore no possibility of equivalent social and political status for men and women. She argues for a legal basis to ground the reciprocity between the sexes; that there is no living universal, that is, a universal that reflects sexual difference; and that this lack of a living universal leads to an absence of rights and responsibilities which reflects both men and women. She claims, therefore, that it is necessary to ‘sexuate’ rights. These latest works continue to make explicit the erotic and ethical project that informs all her work: to think through the dimension of sexual difference that opens up access to the alliances between living beings who are engendered and not fabricated, and who refuse to sacrifice desire for death, power, or money. See also FREUD, HEGEL, HEIDEGGER , NIE- TZSCHE , POSTMODER. P.Bi.