On selections (1977-1993) by Irigaray as presented in the French Feminism Reader (2000), ed. Kelly Oliver. Returning guest Jenny Hansen joins Mark, Seth, and Dylan to discuss the introduction she wrote in this book, plus parts of Irigaray’s The Sex Which Is Not One (1977) and to a lesser degree An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984), “Sexes and Genealogies: Each Sex Must Have Its Own Rights” (1993), and “Body Against Body: In Relation to the Mother” (1993).
What role should sexual difference play in philosophy and society? Irigaray is a “second-wave” feminist: First-wave ones just stress that we should treat women equally; third-wave ones (e.g. Judith Butler) think we should radically rethink or even discard notions of gender. Second-wave feminists instead stress sexual difference, in that justice demands that we do treat women differently because they have different needs than men: For instance, job structures need to take pregnancy into account.
Irigaray is more concerned with the intellectual and emotional contributions that she claims femininity can specifically make. Since nearly all historical philosophy was constructed by men, it incorporates a male point of view that has in effect “de-subjectivized” women: Women are never the thinkers, never the first-person point of view doing the phenomenological evaluation of experience. So when they are able to do philosophy, they have to articulate themselves by aping the male philosophers, expressing themselves through conceptual tools that are foreign to their femininity. Irigaray was trained in psychoanalysis and is making use of Jacques Lacan’s distinction between language as the “name of the father” and “the real,” which is all that slips between the cracks of our conceptual distinctions. What would be uniquely feminine in its expression is inexpressible in male-constructed language, so it’s up to creative women to innovate artistically to devise new forms of expression.
How does one use language to transcend language? Well, you can use the male language in a mocking, deconstructive way. So she plays with the format of delivering philosophy in a manner reminiscent of Nietzsche’s irreverence. Unlike Christine Korsgaard, who (per the method of analytic philosophy) tries to lay out her arguments as clearly as possible, Irigaray often tries to jar us out of traditional ways of thinking through purposefully inflammatory language. However, she shifts her style to meet the purpose of the moment, and she just as often is soliciting male cooperation: Won’t love and sex be better, fellas, if you treat your lady as a full subject with a point of view, and not as just an object to reflect back on yourself?
In our very first feminism episode (from 2011), Carol Gilligan explained how a feminine point of view can improve our notions: Away from seeing impartiality (per Kant and utilitarianism) as the goal and towards and ethics of care (see our recent episodes on sympathy/empathy). More recently, we discussed Donna Haraway’s feminist philosophy of science, where she questioned the notion of scientific objectivity and the overall “master mentality,” i.e. the controlling character of science, which she thought influenced what we consider legitimate scientific questions, methods, and goals.
Irigaray’s most concrete contribution to this strain is in the final selection, where she argues to a group of psychoanalysts that Freud’s models of development do not do justice to women’s experiences and wrongly point us away from investigation of our uncomfortable relationship to our biological (i.e. maternal) origins. Though Irigaray also tells us (e.g. in the first essay) that the feminine can cause us to completely redefine the project of philosophy, she is here more inspirational/aspirational than demonstrative. It is unclear what a new ground a specifically feminine perspective can open up that was unavailable to male innovators like Nietzsche, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Whitehead, Buddhist and Daoist thinkers, etc. Toward the end of this first part of our discussion, we do get into her cheeky metaphor that male-dominated philosophy uses a mirror to reflect on itself (i.e. not challenge fundamental historical assumptions), whereas feminists can add the speculum, which as curved doesn’t just reflect back the investigator but allows a survey of the surrounding (cultural, introspective, biological) environment.
This is related to a criticism often aimed at second-wave feminists re. essentialism: It was the point of first-wave feminism that the entire vista of human experience is open to everyone equally. It’s not just men who think they can connect with those of foreign dispositions through literature, art, conversation, and imagination, but this is in fact open to anyone: Women are not “aping” male philosophers any more than male philosophers are simply imitating each other. The distance between any two human beings is greater than the distance between “male” and “female,” and so one should be equally pessimistic about men understanding other men or women understanding other women than the sexes understanding each other. It’s not that women are from Venus and men are from Mars; we are all from our own individual planets, or alternatively, we’re all from the same planet facing the same basic, human challenges even while in unique circumstances. This is also why third-wave feminists might want to simply get rid of the notion of gender; this bifurcation simply can’t do justice to the diversity among us, even in the area of sexually-related self-expression.
Still, there are certainly ways to argue for the unique experiences and needs common to many women having been unfairly marginalized by the male-dominated intellectual cultures of the past, such that women should feel fully empowered to do innovative, creative work even when their instincts fly in the face of institutional norms, and Irigaray is a skillful rhetorician in this area. In addition to taking straightforwardly political lessons from works like this (e.g. don’t assume by default that a philosopher or just about any other role is a man), we should certainly question whether metaphysical and methodological assumptions we make in philosophy and social sciences have been covertly conditioned by gender norms (she mentions our traditional work-week and patterns of endeavor more generally as being shaped according to male libidinal patterns of tension and release in particular, a reference that I found frankly baffling), just as we should question whether these have been conditioned by our economic status (per Marx), religious assumptions (per Nietzsche), by our unconscious desires (per Freud), or other aspects of our cultural and psychological situation.
Read the text for yourself, or buy the French Feminism Reader that contains it.
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Transcript
0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 375 is what impact, if any, should sexual difference have on philosophy and society? We read several selections published between 1977 and 1993 by Luce Irigaray, as presented in Chapter 7 of the year 2000 edition of the Rowman and Littlefield French Feminism Reader, edited by Kelly Oliver, with an introduction written by today's guests. For more information about the text in the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer reducing the rising tide of abstraction through concrete sacrificial goats in Madison, Wisconsin.
0:47 Seth: This is Seth Paskin struggling to find pleasure in the phallic economy in Austin, Texas.
0:52 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey engaging in the economy of desire in Madison, Wisconsin.
0:57 Jenny: And our special guest, this is Jenny Hansen, trying to find some space for a voice in the phallogocentric economy.
1:07 Mark: Well, I'm glad that I could cue you when to talk. I'll make sure to tell you every second of this discussion. When you're allowed to talk. When. And I'll cut your mic. We don't do that. Thanks for coming back, Jenny. Wes was going to take a vacation. I. I wanted to pick something that he didn't care that much about. So he doesn't. It's not like he flees when he hears about this kind of topic. It's just that now, when he is going to be fleeing anyway, we pick this kind of topic. And we're always happy to have you back. Folks who remember Jenny from what? You were on one of the abortion discussions, and you were on one of the Beauvoir discussions, and you were on Philosophy versus Improv twice.
1:43 Jenny: And Butler.
1:44 Mark: Oh, Judith Butler, that's right.
1:46 Jenny: Yeah.
1:46 Mark: Yes. So we've had lots of history with you. Yeah. And you, you picked this reader. I mean, I had asked about Irigaray because I think you had brought her up last time as somebody we should definitely get to. And we had not gotten to yet, so I didn't know anything about Seth. Had you read any of her?
2:03 Jenny: Yeah.
2:04 Mark: Okay. So, Seth, she's Heideggerian just as much as she's Lacanian, but. Yeah. Jenny, give us the little intro. Tell the audience why they should care about this. What's going on here?
2:14 Jenny: Well, I guess I think because she spends a lot of her time demonstrating the ways in which philosophy as a discipline depends upon a fundamental matricide. Right. That the philosophy is Structured as a discipline. And the methods and the norms and the tools that it uses all require the repression of women as beings in the world. I guess if we're using Heideggerian language as subjects, that seems like a pretty weighty endeavor. And I will add this. It is often challenging to read Irigaray, but if you stop worrying about reading her in a way that is trying to pull out the arguments, but kind of allow what she's doing to affect your own imagination, it's inspiring.
And it was inspiring to me as a graduate student, even though I don't work on it anymore. There were kind of things going on in her text that I really had to think about and gave me more speculative ideas, I guess, than critical ideas that I appreciated.
3:22 Mark: Yeah, poetic is a good word. And it's good that we had a selection. This is like, really four different works. A couple things from This Sex Which Is Not One, 1977. A chunk from an Ethics of Sexual Difference, 1984, which is sort of more concrete. And you could apply this socially. Sexes and genealogies. Each sex must have its own rights. Yet more like actually like suggesting some things about the legal system. And then Body against body in Relation to the mother, 1990. Those last two are 1993, which is a speech to a psychoanalytic organization very much, you know, let's. Let's talk about ancient Greek literature. Let's talk. The fundamental matricide is from that. That formulation of it. She doesn't put it quite that way in the other essays. So we get a little bit of stylistic variation. Yeah.
4:08 Seth: What.
4:08 Mark: What did I know. I was talking to Dylan beforehand, and he was a little, maybe put off by the style.
4:13 Dylan: Okay, Mark, thank you.
4:14 Mark: I'm just.
4:16 Jenny: You wouldn't be the only one.
4:17 Mark: You can. You can. Did I misunderstand?
4:20 Dylan: No, no, no. You understood. So she. In ways that I like, in ways that I find myself routinely frustrated by embodies, reminds me a lot of French postmodernism and French Marxian philosophy and stuff like that. And on that spectrum, I find someone like Lacan basically insufferable. I mean, I was recounting to Mark, remembering that he is, I think, the only author for whom we. While we read a selection of his work, we just gave up and read Brian something's summary of him. It's the first time I've ever done that. And not to put too fine a point on it, there was nothing about what I read of his that made me want to read him.
So he's, like, on the far end. And then on the other end is someone like Foucault, who I found really super digestible, and I read a lot of him. And then there's Derrida, who falls significantly closer to Lacan, but not closer, full Lacan. And she falls somewhere probably to the Foucault side of Derrida for me. And so there is this poetic aspect to it where I really like your formulation, Jenny, that you need to listen to the words and the presentation of what she's saying and not presume that she's going to be making an argument in a typical way that you're used to being making an argument.
And she's not the only one. And the French intellectual, French post modernists aren't the only ones that do this, but you reminded me of that. Her work is like that. And there's a whole group of people whose work's like that, and you have to remind yourself to read it that way.
6:03 Seth: And I would qualify this by saying we read several essays, and even within the essays, there's quite a bit of variation. If you hadn't told me that she had written Women on the Market, it could have been by any, well, let's call it contemporary, but post 19, whatever, feminist. And I would have been like, okay, that makes. It's a pretty straightforward Marxist analysis, right, of women as commodities, that one's. And I came away from that, and I was super excited because I was like, oh, because my memory is similar to yours, Dylan, of, you know, trying to struggle.
But ultimately that one grabbed me the most for sure, and I'm excited to talk about that. But the other thing is too. I'm sure these. One of them was. There was some adaptation from an interview. And I'm sure, Jenny, you and Kelly picked these because they're not at the extreme end of stylistically what you want to introduce. It's called the Feminist Reader, not the feminist decipherer or cryptographic text or something like that.
7:04 Dylan: The one other sort of just reaction that I. And this goes to the analysis question and makes me think about wanting some more analysis in it is a little bit of struggle, honestly, with recognizing myself in the world that I interact with while recognizing what she's talking about and recognizing what she's portraying or thinking about, recognizing that, not seeing other things that I recognize in what she's pointing at with respect to my masculinity, respect to other women and my interactions with my children and my interactions with my colleagues.
And part of that might be the sort of she really, especially in the first one really grabs a hold of that sort of polemical feel that Marxist stuff has. And so that might be part of it. And it's helpful to have the sort of the practical, pragmatic stuff. But I found myself thinking, oh, how much of this is just me and I'm in this I don't get it kind of thing, or am I? So I was just, as a. Just a general reaction, I was finding myself having to think about that in a way, which is probably good. But I was having to. That voice inside my head of, okay, you need to pay attention.
And that was in the context of something. Question marks. I had lots of question marks.
8:32 Mark: So, yeah, let's get concrete about what you're reacting to, because it really wildly varies between very practical advice, like if sexual relationships, if marriages, if relationships are not based on equality, then you're not going to get that Hegelian thing of recognition of yourself through the other, because the other, the woman, is not being treated as a subject. So that's, you know, using something very abstract to get something very real. And yeah, wouldn't you want to have sex where the woman is. Is not just sort of performing what has she's been told that she has to perform, but is actually into it and like in touch with her own desires.
And you're communicating with each other. Like, that's a real concrete thing. But then that's quite different than other places of like our entire society. And the history of philosophy is based on matricide, is based on the subjugation and commodification of women. And look how this works in Plato. Look at, you know, there's a lot of references to her initial or her second dissertation, I guess a Speculum of the Other Woman, which I guess goes through the whole history of philosophy. So what we read is just sort of hand wavy about this kind of stuff.
Just. There's one part where she specifically gets into a section of Hegel's Phenomenology, which we never read on this podcast. That section of Hegel's Phenomenology, I tried to go decipher those couple of pages, but it was hard. You know, it's always hard with Hegel to do something in the abstract. But it's not the master slave part. You know, she refers to that. But it's apparently later in the book, he actually discusses kind of the fundamental point that Aristotle starts with in his Politics, where the family as the fundamental political unit that then is going to expand and like, well, is the family really this indissoluble unitary thing that has no relations within it because it's really just the boss, the man and his.
They even are explicit. Aristotle, like, it's his whole household. It's the servants, it's the. The cattle. It's like. So there's not leaving anything in there for, like, a fundamental political relationship between members of the family, or at least not stress, you know, only. Only maybe a sort of master and servant one such that then. Oh, the family is then the servant of the wider state.
10:50 Jenny: Yeah.
10:51 Mark: So there's some stuff that relates to literature that we've actually read, but it seems to me a little bit of a separate task to. Okay, is this a good analysis of Antigone? Is this a good analysis of the Oresteia, these. These ancient Greek things, or Hegel, or this very detailed thing? It's really good that we did Marx on commodities, you know, eight months ago. That it's in our recent past. Because one of the readings, this. This women on the market is going through that chapter. Exactly. And telling you, here's what Mark says. Here's how I want to tweak it so that this is what I say. Yeah. So there's a lot for us to get through. Jenny, any other initial.
11:29 Jenny: Well, I guess I have two things that popped into my head while you guys were talking about that. On the one hand, like, is some of this, you know, a little bit too polemical or too over the top? And then, you know, some of the other stuff about how good of a reading it is. Two things. One was recently when you were just talking about the Hegel section, It made me think about our current political moment where Pete Hegseth, you know, re. Whatever you call it now, X retweeted his at least one of his congregations. And this idea, again, of reasserting a kind of patient patriarchy where the man is the voice of the family and that everything serves the man.
And another thing that I was thinking about, the way she writes and so, like, the way she'll get into a text like Hegel or Aristotle or Plato or Lacan. It's referred to as mimicry or mimetic, you know, her method. And a side note to connect it to the Butler. Butler's notion of performativity, genders, performance was directly influenced by this method. But I was thinking, like, how is this. How can I connect it to this moment? And I think, you know, think about the. Maybe you agree, don't agree, but the sort of rhetorical sort of brilliance of Gavin Newsom's team.
12:43 Dylan: Right.
12:44 Jenny: Now, that is going on and actually mimicking Trump's style of describing his policies or his greatness or what he's going to do. And I think that's a way to kind of unlock what she's doing. Everyone who's tried to make an argument in this sort of classical sense with evidence and, you know, pointing out misinformation, disinformation, Right. Anyone who's trying to sort of approach us in a way that, like, we all agree to the rules of the game, it's not working. Right. Whereas I think Newsom's team is onto something, because if you don't like his posts, then you have to also not like Trump's posts.
Right. I mean, he's literally imitating his style. So I think those are just things that kind of popped in my head. I was reading it now, even though there might be some datedness to some of this. On the other hand, we're seeing kind of a resurgence of some of the ideas of, you know, kind of returning to a strong patriarchal society. And we're dealing with people that don't feel like they need to check other, you know, counter. Provide arguments or evidence or provide counter arguments, and if you try to do the frontal assault, show that their argument's bad, it doesn't work.
So she's given us a strategy for pointing out what's going on there in some of that discourse.
13:58 Mark: Let's start in on this questions section in the sex, which is not one. So it's again, a book from 1977. Our second selection. The Women on the Market, is also from that same book. But we read a series of. Do you think these are actual questions and her answers that were posed to her when she was being examined by. I forget what the body was, it says. Or is this sort of her recreation in literature? Like, is this a recording of a. Do we know, Jenny? Is this sort of a recording?
14:27 Jenny: I think it's actually because she has several books worth years, interviews like this. I think it, like, it was probably an exchange that got then transcribed at her thesis defense.
14:37 Dylan: I took it as her thesis defense. Right. For her second PhD.
14:43 Jenny: That's what I took, actually. I don't know. I should have looked that up. But I just know from reading a lot of her work, especially the work that's more. That's easier to grasp, she often has these kind of interviews because she's been, like, at a political event and people in the audience have asked questions. But you might be right. That's kind of an interesting speculum.
15:01 Mark: Was Published as a book in 74. And this is 74.
15:04 Jenny: Yeah. And that would have been. And most of Speculum is not like this. It's much. Well, maybe closer to like, yeah, the women on the market.
15:11 Dylan: The first note, which I'd have to. Let me double check where it is, but the first note says these three questions were raised explicitly or implicitly by members of the jury during a doctoral thesis defense in the philosophy department of the University of Vincennes.
15:24 Jenny: That makes sense.
15:25 Dylan: Okay.
15:25 Jenny: Yes.
15:26 Mark: Yeah. So the first one, why is she think I am a sexualized female? She thinks it's impossible to say in our language. So this is one of those kind of things.
15:34 Dylan: Right.
15:34 Mark: We had a famous philosophy of science episode like, oh, you know, the fact that science has been male dominated controls the metaphors, it controls the language. And so in philosophy and even just being a female subject, which is, you know, being a subject has been the foundation of philosophy at least since Descartes doing phenomenology. She sometimes thinks that that is self contradictory as stated, that if you are stating, you know, you're either like Descartes, I am just a thinking thing, or maybe you're adding I am sexualized, but that invariably means male historically.
And I'm not sure, like even if it's. And I don't want to sort of just get her and you, Jenny, defensive about this immediately. But like, yes, even if that was, you know, most philosophers that you read who are doing phenomenology are coming from that. I don't know why this would preclude different people. You know, that's heterophenomenology. People report on different things they experience. We don't expect. I mean, I guess that's sort of built into Husserl's idea that like everybody's experience of fundamental things, of essences, they're just going to be the same.
But she seems to be in this, in this part gesturing at something like, well, you know, because it's been male dominated. That's why we have like an object oriented ontology. This is why we have, we think about things instead of processes. And so if we just would open ourselves to real heterophenomenology, to a female point of view, to other points of view that have been silenced in the past, then we would have a whole different take on philosophy, we would have a whole different metaphysics, a whole different way of relating to God, et cetera.
17:14 Jenny: So this first part, I mean, I don't know if you wanted me to definitely be the first one to respond to it. But this part, I think, is how helpful. Well, to me, it was extremely helpful as a graduate student in the 90s, and there were not a lot of women in philosophy. And I didn't. I think at one of my graduate programs, there weren't even. There wasn't even a single tenured woman. And so that's just a little bit of a context, right? Like, it actually took me by surprise to realize that when philosophers were. Were speaking, you know, as I. Or even just individuals saying I.
That it was the generic male, that it's not. We don't think of it that way, but essentially it is sort of a gendered. I implicitly. And that helped me a lot, too. I did my dissertation on philosophy, psychiatry, and. And, you know, thinking ahead to the last one, where she's like, talking at two clinicians about hysteria and none of the men are coming, right? Like, I think there was. I understood the ways in which there's assumptions made about your identity that you're male unless someone sees you. Like, if you say, I'm a doctor, you know, there's that old kind of like, mystery about, like, I don't know, like a.
And his dad get in an accident. The dad dies and the son's rushed to the hospital. And then the doctor says, I can't operate on the son. You're supposed to guess why. And people are like, what? How could it be? Is it like, you know, and it takes people. I don't think this is the case anymore. But at the time, it would take people a while to realize, oh, it's the mother, right? So this kind of way in which that there's a kind of assumption there that the male subject is just sort of the generic subject. And that a lot of the attributes that we value about philosophers, rationality, linear, stoic maybe, you know, like all the things that might be considered valuable traits of a philosopher are actually just sort of idealizations of the male and then abstracted, if that makes sense.
And so I think there was a time when that really spoke to me because I felt my difference a lot. Like, I felt my difference in very overt sexism and very overt comments about, you know, I was like an affirmative action admit or, you know, if I got heated, then I was being emotional or, you know, that I even had a professor once say, I don't think women are capable of doing this extremely abstract metaphysics. And I had been a chemical engineering student who got interested in philosophy. So it was, you know, there was a lot of that. And I think it is possible now that it doesn't speak to people the same way.
But I think that that resonated with my experience at the time. And I kind of thought, yeah, there's no way for me to embody this role of philosopher or say, other professions unless I sort of say I'm a female philosopher. And then the minute I say that, it diminishes my value in some ways.
20:06 Dylan: I found myself wondering while acknowledging that perspectivism that comes in, you know, I sort of unearthing that out of, you know, the history of philosophy and thinking about that problem. You know, even if there's stated ambitions of universality or understanding all the metaphysics and the kinds of beings there are or all that kind, that it's infected with the context and the positions and the, you know, biases involved by the people who are doing it, and that it's also work to recognize those and think about what it means for the work that you're doing and how much of it infects the work, the philosophy itself, or how much of it affects the activity of doing philosophy.
So, for instance, it's perfectly possible that all the philosophy work that's being done is good, but the, the institution of higher learning is completely corrupt right now. It's probably not true that those two are completely opposite from one another, but it makes me wonder about the categorization of that difference as being the only or the primary difference in terms of the problem of identity and bias and how it affects our work. Or is it an example of one that there are a practical things to deal with, but also there are philosophical things to deal with in terms of how you understand the world.
It might affect your metaphysics, but not from the standpoint of necessarily having gender be a different axis or race be a different axis or, you know, any other kind of thing like that. It made me wonder just about like someone like Foucault would go the direction of, well, it's all about power. I mean, you abstract out from specific identities and have them be instances. And so, I mean, there's lots of ways this could play for Irigaray, right? It could be a practical point that's being made that that informs like changes she wants to make in the world.
Or it could be the philosophical point that, yes, actually, you know, things are metaphysically gendered in that way.
22:30 Mark: I want to throw out Another quote, page 207. So this is the second page of what we read, this aporia of discourse as to the female sex, whether it is envisaged as a limit of Rationality itself. Whereas women's powerlessness to speak coherently raises a question, even provokes a crisis which may be analyzed in various specific areas, but which in order to be interpreted have to pass through the master discourse, the one that prescribes in the last analysis, the organization of language, the one that lays down the law to others, including even the discourse held on the subjects of these others.
The discourse on discourses philosophical discourse in order to interrogate its stranglehold on history, its historical domination. So this seems like it is calling for. Right. It's a part of the mimesis is a genealogy that. Yeah, I mean that throughout this. I think we should be judging her prose by Nietzsche rules. And this might be a thing like, oh well, if a man can act all crazy ass in his style and you just say what a genius. Well, when a woman does that, you're like, oh, this doesn't make any sense.
23:32 Seth: No.
23:32 Mark: And we expect we just read or Heidegger rules. Right. Well, exactly, exactly. What was the ethicist that we just read?
23:43 Seth: Korsgaard.
23:44 Mark: Yes. Christine Korsgaard, who is so clear about everything and is just really. There's nothing hand wavy. She's really, really trying to focus. And maybe a Rigori does this in her other works. I don't know. In this is extremely hand wavy because it's just whether a limit of rationality itself or as women's powerlessness to speak coherently. So the second one is what you were talking about, Jenny is like, yeah, people think that women can't be philosophers and that's stupid. But you could also see it, and this is. She even wants to play on this a little bit of like what you think of as rational step by step argumentation.
There's something at least prototypically masculine about that or particular kind of masculine. Obviously Nietzsche doesn't think that way. Obviously lots of men don't think that way. But there's something that can be, if you're going to talk about the. That which is beyond that is closer to religion that is beyond what we can say. So what Lacan calls the real, right. So the symbolic order, this is. This is Lacan being sprayed all over this. This is the phallic order, Right. The name of the father is the putting things in language. But what about all the experiences that we have, all the emotions that we have, everything that slips between language that the artist has to come along and present and she's suggesting that, well, if women would do philosophy, you get a lot more of that.
You'd get those views. You Know, it's comparable to, like, if women ran more governments, we wouldn't have all these wars. Well, if women ran these philosophy departments, we would have a more artistic, really more faithful to are experienced and not as reductive type of philosophy.
25:23 Jenny: So this is a great moment for me to point out, like, one of the tasks I felt like I always had when I was working more on Irigaray was defending her from kind of what you're suggesting, that she's an essentialist, or also defending her from sort of reducing all the problems down to just understanding sexual difference as the fundamental difference. Right. And I think this is why she has to adopt different writing styles, because she could write in a very clear, maybe not as precise as the person. You're Christine Korsgaard.
26:00 Mark: Yes.
26:01 Jenny: Yeah. I mean, I know what you're talking about with that style. But she's capable of being intelligible and speaking to audiences that don't want to think about what chiasmus or envelope mean. Right. But when she's done that, then people, I think, can't understand that she's not. That she's trying to sort of reconstruct, to use Dewey's words, some of these terms. So when she's thinking about sexual difference. And I think there's been a lot of interesting work that shows that it doesn't just have to come down to her, actually, like affirming heterosexuality or affirming that there's only two sexes.
But she's trying to come up with a different metaphysics, a different ontology. And this is the way she does it. And I think it's much more open to just in general making a space for, to use another pragmatist term, pluralism, or the recognition that we are all blind to experiences of others, that there are certain shortcomings to our own points of view that we need to be aware of. But the problem is that when she goes into that more clear, intelligible speech, then it sounds like she's saying things like, women essentially are anti war, or women are essentially pro nature, or women are essentially X.
27:17 Mark: And then you're like, oh, so you want Kristi Noem in charge? She's a woman.
27:21 Jenny: I mean, if anything, like, I know that Seth liked the women on the market. I kind of figured he would. And I hope he says stuff about it because there were moments in that piece where I think she actually does address the way that women like Kristi Noem are. I think she has more of critique of the women that sort of inhabit the role of the femininity that. That is prized by a certain dominant patriarchy or sort of a, you know, a sort of certain. What has been the dominant self patriarchy that they are used in a certain way to enhance, like to create value and relationships among men.
Right. So I don't know. I think that's always her problem and I think that a lot of people have read her and. And sometimes I think she falls into it as sort of suggesting that there's this essential difference between men and women. But I like to think of it her being a phenomenologist and just pointing out that we are embodied, we live in bodies. Our bodies are medium to the world and others. And that a different body leads to profound differences maybe of what we see, how we see it, how we interpret it.
28:29 Dylan: Well, yeah, when you go and emphasize that, then you have a metaphysics that emphasizes the individual instances as having their own being that isn't wholly derivative from the category or the species that they're a being of. And so it would be very natural to be, in addition to, you know, going along the direction of saying, well, women aren't derivative beings as beings from men. And she points to the history of philosophy and there's all kinds of other history in which that kind of argument is made that informs power relations and social relations in addition to.
In that way, then a certain thread of philosophy becomes apologetics for a political structure. But if you go and say, well, okay, so women aren't from following a metaphysical argument. We need to revise that. And she called upon Hegel in this respect and so forth, you would go further. I think you're. I like what you're saying about. From a pragmatic point of view, you would begin to emphasize the individual beings is not wholly defined, wholly encompassed by their species or their, you know, as instances. They have their own individual beingness.
29:51 Jenny: I would just add, though, you just made me think about this. And I think in that again, opening pages, she uses the term eidetic. Right. Eidos. And I think that she does, however, want to say that there is sort of, let's say, a shape or a model for male. But that allows for a diversity of experiences within that shape, but that. That you would need more than one shape. Like human beings shouldn't. We shouldn't be able to just say there's an Eidos that we can collapse all of this sort of differences of human beings into. So women don't really have like a set of images, a sort of imaginary that allows them to give themselves a Sense of coherence or selfhood in like, again, sorry Lacanian terms, like the mirror stage.
They don't have a way to insert themselves so that they can be subjects of discourse and participate in discourse because they have to kind of find their way in a shape that is male, like the Eidos male.
30:57 Dylan: I'm just getting reminded about how in talking about her rhetoric, her way of speaking, it's of course common for it to be very purposefully chosen amongst authors and philosophers. Some of them feel like they've sort of. Their rhetoric is less purposeful and just sort of accidental. I feel like Kant's rhetoric is basically just. That's just the way he just worked. Right. Nietzsche. I think Marx. Right. Nietzsche has a very, very self conscious mode of rhetoric. And my gut feeling is that Marx just talked the way he writes. He just yells at you all the time.
And that's less self consciously rhetorical. But I can just see in the variety of ways of writing and speaking for Irigaray that she clearly is very conscious of the context and the audience that she's speaking to. And my impression is that that's going to be intimately informed with her both what she's trying to say and also what she's diagnosed as being the challenge of saying things. And that from being a female philosopher and that she's recognizing that in a way that I think if you got her over a glass of wine, she'd be saying, of course I'm doing that right.
That there's no other way for me to interact and I have to be more conscious of it than somebody like Kant who would have just been just speaking the way. The way he just speaks.
32:26 Jenny: Yeah, I think you're right.
32:27 Mark: You mentioned the mirror stage.
32:28 Dylan: Let's.
32:29 Mark: There's some mirror imagery in this. And of course the idea of the speculum is.
32:33 Jenny: Yeah.
32:35 Mark: What she's arguing against. And this is way bewitch. And Dylan was saying, I'm not sure I recognize myself as male or something like in this edifice that she's protesting. And again, this could be. It's the 70s because I compared her rhetoric to Nietzsche because I think she is being overly sweeping and dramatic even though she's saying things that sound more Heideggerian or Merleau-Ponty in terms of like, hey, we're in bodies, we're not. We're not truly spiritual beings. I mean Nietzsche makes that kind of point as well. But that Nietzsche feels like he can say something in an overly simplistic way because he wants to give you a slogan.
He wants to hit you over the head with something to make you think about it and not necessarily, like, be his own Walter Kaufmann to interpret and translate it to. Nice language. Yeah. So I'm looking at 2,210. Relations among subjects have always have recourse, explicitly or more often implicitly, to the flat mirror. That is, to what privileges the relation of man to his fellow man. A flat mirror has always subtended and traversed speculation. What effects of linear projection, of circular turning back onto the self as the same? What eruptions in signifying points of identity has it entailed?
What subject has ever found in it finally its due? What other has been reduced to it by the hard to represent function of the negative? A function enveloped in that glass and also in its void of reflections. Where the historical development of discourse has been projected and reassured. Or again, a function assigned to the role of matter. An opaque and silent matrix, a reserve for the specularizations to come. A pole of a certain opposition whose fetishist dues have still not all been paid. All right, that's probably. This is every sentence. You could spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out what this was.
But I was trying to figure out what this flat mirror. She talks a lot, a lot in this about, like, being the philosopher's wife. And I, of course, think about my own tendency to, like. Yeah, I want. Everybody wants to talk and have other people to bounce ideas off other people. And so if that's what the woman is doing is just being a. I'm a listening ear and I will bounce things back. And maybe she knew more about the Beauvoir Sartre relationship that. I don't know what exactly she's referring to in this. But I certainly can see ways. Yeah. So having some.
If the normal thing is not the Hegelian subject to subject, but is just. I just want a mirror. I just want somebody to say back what I've been saying to them so I can know that I'm real. And that's like this man's craziness on this earth. That is very isolating.
35:08 Dylan: I see what you're saying, Mark, but I interpreted her, especially right from where you ended, to interpret the mirror's intervention. To discover what it may have kept suspended in an unreflected blaze of its brilliance. What it may have congealed in its decisive cut. What may have frozen of the other flowing and vice versa. Of course, this is what's at stake. I interpreted her as saying, okay, recognizing that we are seeing ourselves through a reflection and seeing our world Through a reflection. She's pointing to that fact as being the mirror itself, affecting the way in which we see ourselves in the world.
And I think you might be right, that there's that aspect too of just. Well, women are just the reflect. Mirror. The mirror, not mirror. The tain of the mirror, the mirror reflection. But I thought she was not indicting, but causing us to consider, I want to say the word reflect. Consider the fact that we interpret the world through a mirror. So in some ways embracing a Hegelian interpretation of ourselves and how we interact with each other and how we understand ourselves through act of reflection and wanting to revise that. That analogy.
36:31 Jenny: So to me, the mirror stuff was really important in my work. And I should have looked up the quotation, but there is a quotation from Virginia Woolf that is something like women is the mirror that reflects men twice the size or something. And I think, you know, specularization, speculum, speculate. She's playing on these terms. And I think another way to think about it, if the mirror thing doesn't always hit, is the ways in which women or femininity is often. They're often the metaphors that men have used to explain things. They're doing. So the midwife, Socrates, midwife. Or in a lot of sort of discussions of science as, I don't know,
37:16 Seth: looking at the skirt of nature plowing
37:18 Jenny: the fields or, I don't know, I can't think of all of them. But there's a lot of work that's been done. And actually, one of my other dissertation advisors, Eva Kittay, wrote a really great paper on woman as metaphor, mostly coming out of the philosophy of linguistics. But she makes the same point in a way that's maybe more accessible than Irigaray. But the idea here is that for Irigaray, again, if you use a Jamesian view, there's more than we can grasp, right? The world is teeming and pulsating and full of changes, and each of us grasps a part of it.
What she wants to say is that like sort of the Western philosophical tradition or Western culture has taken sort of an interpretation or a slice of out of that and kind of perpetuated that. And then everything has been set up to keep mirroring that back those assumptions back when in fact, the world's way more complicated than way more in changing and pulsating and rearranging than we want. But when, say, male scientists or male philosophers have used metaphors that tend to take what is sort of the natural women's thing, like giving birth or Nurturing or nourishing or being an envelope or a womb or a matrix, whatever matter.
When those metaphors have been used to then explain a different domain that has never been described before, like what doing philosophy is or what doing science is. I think Irigaray's point is that then there's no place for women to be part of that process of building a sort of new body of knowledge or a set of tools, because they're already being imported as non subjects, as non knowers into the explanation. Because, you know, again, how do you describe something that's never been done before? You have to use metaphors, and metaphors use something that you know well to describe something that is kind of a novel domain to explain it.
And so I think, yeah, she uses the mirror, or you could use metaphor. And I think that's the problem. And so she uses different writing strategies in order to kind of like point out the moments where things aren't said. You know, kind of create moments that sort of shows there's a little bit sleight of hand going on here in the way this has been articulated.
39:30 Mark: So the improvement over the flat mirror is the curved mirror.
39:34 Jenny: The curved mirror. The concave mirror.
39:36 Seth: Yeah.
39:36 Mark: Which as a speculum, like. Well, all. No, no. Nobody goes into gynecology because they want to look at themselves in the speculate. Like you actually get an idea of what's going on inside and the surrounding the, you know, metaphorically. You know, we want to look at the genealogy, we want to look at. We want to deconstruct the situation of thinking itself. We want to, you know, see what all the presuppositions are going into the creation of this phenomenological subject or Cartesian subject or, you know, and the metaphysical implications of that.
So that we can put things in perspective and not think that we're just reporting on the objective truth as we, the armchair phenomenologists see it. But our understanding how right that that jump from that ideal Husserlian view of phenomenology is. I can, yeah, we're all going to see the same phenomena. That's the objective essence of the world. No, no. When you get Heidegger and following people like, no, how do many things about your background warp how you see the phenomena? So we, you know, can move from phenomenology, which is really the only perspective that we have, you know, is your own perspective wondering about stuff, to the idea of heterophenomenology and grasping like that there are others and what are the very.
What there are things that I am missing that there Are things that I necessarily cannot see. It could be my class. It could be many things, you know, that are determining what I report on as objective phenomena.
41:00 Dylan: I struggled with the. What she was trying to do with the curved mirror because I interpreted her as trying to say, well, the mirror would be curved in order to look back on ourselves in a different way than a mirror reflects back. This might be because I'm a physicist, but I'm like, that's not how a mirror works. And so I'm like, the curving of the mirror is going to lead to an image that's distorted.
41:29 Jenny: Distorted.
41:30 Dylan: Yeah, distorted in a different way than a current mirror is distorted.
41:34 Mark: Right.
41:34 Dylan: I mean, a regular flat mirror is distorted in specific ways, but it's definitely distorted in ways that are not. We're used to the distortion of right and left being flipped. Okay. And maybe depth. But the funhouse mirror, that's curved, you know, that makes all the distances seem different. So you get the distorted. But what it doesn't do is it doesn't allow you to see the back of your head or something like that, you know, or the inside. You know, I found myself. It felt like the image went. It became much more. The curving became yet another layer of analogy.
42:10 Seth: Yeah. The metaphor, I think, ultimately fails. Or let's not say fails. Let's say the metaphor ultimately reaches the end of its utility.
42:19 Dylan: Sure.
42:20 Seth: Which I think is indicated. I'll just reference at the end of. I think it's the last essay we read. She just sort of makes a closing comment about presentation versus representation, where the masculine is presentation and the feminine is representation or representation. Or maybe. I'm sorry, she didn't say representation. She says reproduction to bring it back to the biological metaphor. And ultimately, her project of trying to find a way to make space for a true female subjectivity. The concave mirror is not going to do the trick. And that's maybe the different. I don't. I'm not a scholar. Maybe this is early versus later kind of. Maybe. You know, but we probably shouldn't get too hung up on the mirror at this point, or we'll never make it to anything else in the second part.
43:07 Mark: Well, let's wrap up our first part. We've at least gotten a taste of the speculum. We've got it. That's. I don't want to put those words together. And we'll talk much more about this. We'll get to this. Women on the market at the very least, and some bits of the other ones which are more practical. And I think we've stumbled into the themes that are in the later essays already quite a bit here. So it's not like we're stuck on page four here, even though we're technically stuck on page four. So if folks want to hear that Immediately, go to partiallyexaminedlife.comsupport and you can sign up to be a member through our website, through Patreon, through Apple and get that. Actually, Apple will still get get you it next week. In any case, we'll see y' all in Part two.
43:50 Seth: Bye bye.
43:52 Jenny: Bye, bye bye.
Jenny absolutely bodies the boys club on this one. It’s a reminder that classically-trained male philosophers struggle with the concept that the discipline of philosophy is reductionist because of the structural limitations of man. We can’t escape our perceptive framework of the world, but Jenny sure as hell has more practice in attempting to do frameshift!