Ep. 375: Luce Irigaray’s Feminism (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: It's the Partially Examined Life, episode 375 part 2. We've been discussing Luce Irigaray with guest Jenny Hansen here. We were in the middle of this This Sex Which Is Not One book from 1977. There is an essay in there called Woman on the Market that is very tightly related to the Karl Marx on commodity fetishism that we talked about earlier this year. Folks might want to even pause and go listen to that if you don't know anything about that, but we'll try to lay out the of the rest relevant portions. Seth, did you want to get us going on this?

0:43 Dylan: Sure.

0:44 Seth: I'm going to start with a quote because I think it's a strong opening. So this is on page 211 to 212. It is because women's bodies, through their use, consumption and circulation, provide for the condition making social life and culture possible, although they remain an unknown quote unquote infrastructure of the elaboration of that social life and culture, the exploitation of the matter that has been sexualized. Female is so integral a part of our socio cultural horizon that there is no way to interpret it except within this horizon. And when I read that at first I was, you know, I wanted to say, okay, well what do you mean when you say women are commodities?

What does that mean? And she elaborates a little further, but essentially she's referring to the fact, just the bald fact, that if, if you think about, let's call it a family unit or even a tribal unit or something like that, if women don't leave their families and go and marry, I'm not even going to say marry or do not reproduce with men from other families, then the human race essentially can't perpetuate itself. And so the whole the family structure is kind of the nucleus of the system of production, which involves the exchange of women from one family to another.

And I was like, wow. And then, you know, she refers to the incest taboo. And I know there's a lot of psychoanalytic Work on that. I don't want to get too far into it because that will draw your attention to like, well, they have to, you know, like, how would. The human species couldn't. Yes. She knows she's going to come back to that point about how we've kind of biologized the whole concept in a way that it sort of defines female sexuality. But her point is, you know, we don't even think about this. It's so. It underlies. It's just a basic fact of the way that the species exists or perpetuates itself or functions that we don't even think about the fact that there is a way in which women are commoditized.

And if you then say, okay, well, let's take a look more deeply at what that means and what. What does that do for our attitudes about women versus men and about. And she brings in, and she sort of elaborates on Marx's notion of use value and exchange value in commodities and then goes on from there. But it really just opening up the discussion that way. I was just sort of thunderstruck. It's one of those insights, to me anyway, that the whole. It's so obvious, nobody sees it. This is water, whatever. What is water? That kind of a thing. But I think also, given what we know about, because she is going to also bring in.

She talked about earlier Hegel and Hegel's views on the family, but also just the idea that it's just throughout history, you can look at the idea that the family is somehow the model for the state and, you know, all these patriarchal, so to speak, structures. You know, she says, she points out, we're going to talk about the way we can look at women as, you know, the way they're treated like commodities. But it also defines a lot of the power relations within the family. And ultimately that'll get us to the discussion about the relationship between daughters and mothers and sons and mothers in one of the other essays.

But that's kind of the premise. So a little further on, she says the production of women, signs and commodities is always referred back to men. When a man buys a girl, he pays the father or the brother, not the mother. They always pass from one man to another, from one group of men to another. The workforce is thus always assumed to be masculine and the products are objects to be used, object of transaction among men alone.

4:27 Mark: Just when she starts to get that specific, then I'm like, okay, I see this in Game of Thrones. I see this in the Gilded Age or whatever. But like, is this the way you're presenting it, Seth, is. It's like a fundamental thing, you know, the incest taboo that is practically required. Maybe we don't have to be so objectivizing about it, but that, you know, it has been the foundation for tribal society. It's not just, you know, a fringe thing. You know, I guess I had been thinking the narrative is. Is generally shaped the fact that you're saying it's.

It's something we don't even notice. I think this is helpful because it's not like when a. The royal family has a daughter, they're like, yay, we have a commodity to exchange with another country. You know, they just like, okay, we have extra daughters that will do that with them. But it's when you have the male heir, that's what matters. You know, we'll get really excited about that because it's the patriarchal line that's going. So this is kind of comparable to. I think it was Derek Bell that we read in Philosophy of Race where he makes some sort of claim I could be confusing with one of the other authors, but that, you know, the whole foundation of white society is based on oppression of black people.

And if we didn't have the black people, we wouldn't even know what to do with ourselves. We wouldn't be able to contrast ourselves with this lower class or something like that. And I. That always struck me as. As false because I think racists would rather make the black people invisible. They would rather not think the black. They would rather have that. It's not that they are. They're fetishizing the black. And so I think there's something similar going on here, that if Bell's going to claim that, he would have to say, well, it's all implicit.

It's not that like all white people are obsessed with black people and their superiority over black people, though maybe they were, you know, the Klan members, like, sure, that. That's great. But it would be the same thing here that men are not fetishizing. Wow. If we didn't have this, if I was not able to, you know, make some land deal by selling off a daughter, our whole society would fall apart. I mean, is that at all what it seems like? It's more he's. She's saying something much more fundamental here than just that sort of what we would say, archaic and fringe element, that even for the people, there would not be something.

They would say this is the foundation. They would not admit that this is the foundation of their society.

6:43 Jenny: At the Very least, I think that she's saying more than the biological imperative when I reread that section, thinking, well, first of all, I always have been interested in her neologism, hommosexuality. I don't know. She's trying to sort of not. She's using the French term for man. Right. And so she's not trying to describe gay men, but she's trying to describe sort of this way in which the, I guess, exchange of women or the sort of the value of women and exchanging women further consolidates the power of men and creates this, you know, sort of whatever.

7:22 Mark: So. So take the word homosexual, add another M next to the first m and put parentheses around the second M. This is this thing that she uses over and over again.

7:31 Jenny: Right.

7:31 Seth: Look, look.

7:32 Mark: It's like the French word for man.

7:33 Jenny: It's very French to play on. Yeah. On language.

7:36 Dylan: Even though I'm studying French right now, I completely miss the fact that it was hom. Sexuality.

7:43 Jenny: Yeah. Well. And so again, I don't know. I can't help it because I think about. I try to, as I teach, and I'm always trying to think, if I was going to teach this now, how would I make this explain something current, you know, going on in our world? And, you know, the Epstein situation. Right. I mean, there's this trafficking of women. I mean, it's not really out of, you know, it's not really about desiring beautiful women. It's about increasing the value and importance of the men that participate in this exchange of women. So there are commodities in that way, but they're commodities that they're not sort of individually valuable.

I don't know. They're valuable only insofar as they kind of meet this other standard that's been fabricated by men. That the kind of labor that men have done on woman that is to create this notion of femininity, of a certain kind of femininity that they think women should embody, you know, which we see again, I guess, in the. What does my daughter call me call it? Sorry. There's all these, like, tiktoks on conservative makeup or whatever. Like the kind of maga conservative makeup look, you know, this, like big long extensions and. Yeah. So there's a kind of fabrication of what that commodity should look like.

And then that commodity is used really to consolidate men's power. But there's another way to look at it, which when I used to teach it years ago, when I taught at Gettysburg College, and there was a much more of a Greek system there. There was a very famous book years ago that was called, like, fraternity Gang rape or whatever. It was written by an anthropologist at University of Pennsylvania, Peggy Sanday. And her argument was that women, the sort of sexualization, objectification of women is kind of the means by which men completely bond with each other.

So I guess there's a special.

9:27 Mark: We have something in common, you and I.

9:29 Jenny: What's that, a secret?

9:30 Mark: No, I'm just acting out the supposed greeting card between Trump and Epstein.

9:36 Dylan: It's a locker room, locker, locker room talk kind of argument. Yeah.

9:39 Jenny: But Sanday also goes so far to say that like. Like it's a way to make permissible kind of the homoeroticness between men.

9:48 Dylan: Oh, sure.

9:50 Jenny: By mediating it through this hyper objectification of women. So those are just kind of, instead

9:58 Dylan: of bringing each other flowers, they bring

10:00 Jenny: each other women so they can like, touch and hug and I love you, man. Because it's all mediated around this hyper toxic masculinity, whatever we call it now,

10:10 Seth: that's certainly the sexualized aspect of it. And Irigaray fundamentally too, is talking about just again, this whole notion of subjectivity. It's like the consumer, the producer is the subject. The commodity cannot have subjectivity. And not only that, their worth essentially can be measured by other commodities. And so how could you be a subjectivity? How could you have an identity if I could just trade you for two others of the same kind or what have you. Or say like, well, here's a coat. Right. She brings up the coat.

10:44 Jenny: Yes.

10:44 Seth: What's the. The other commodity? I can't even. Linen.

10:47 Jenny: Yeah,

10:49 Seth: yeah. And then brilliantly talks about how, of course, when you talk about. That's bartering. Right. There's the commodity value in an exchange format. But then when you finally get to money and pricing, there's the transcendental concept against which all commodities are measured, which is not part of the commodity. So in other words, the thing that gives her worth is outside of the reach of her own existence. And it's a brilliant little turn. And I wanted to say something just to what Mark said at the beginning. The one thing I did think about since I read the essay days ago in the interim is the commodity analysis is strictly related to capitalism.

And Marx is very specific about how this is just commodity capitalism. But she starts off talking about incest taboo and this notion of exchange, which obviously would predate commodity capitalism. So we do have to think about. I think she would just situate it as the current economic exchange metaphor we have is around the commodity. But I bet you could do the same Thing talking about because the behavior was the same in feudal times. And of course, if we want to go back to Aristotelian times, we'll talk about the woman being shuttered in the house and slavery and all these.

There are many other economic systems which all ultimately result in the same. But the whole notion of use and exchange value, I think, really, really is. It's a brilliant little analysis.

12:13 Mark: I think I need to understand this a little better, because if you want to say women are commodities, they're treated like hunks of meat. They're treated like just female body parts that are traded around. They're never given subjectivity. That I understand. But this idea Jenny pointed to, like what the practical upshot is, is a woman has her use value to men, which is sex, but then is converted to something that is an artificial, like the. The. The sex is a natural use value. But you know, just like Marx wants to say that, we're not saying that if we say one coat is worth five spools of linen, we're not saying that the coat is five times more useful than the linen.

We're saying that there's an abstract labor value that we can assign equally to both of these and use money to capture that. And so the equivalent is what Jenny was describing as the constructed femininity that a woman gets not just treated like a cattle, but treated like a commodity in that she is converted from use value, which is already a very demeaning term to. To provide applied to a person, but to exchange value, which is, you know, what is the market value right now? It. Does it value those trad wives? You have to be hot in a certain way.

You have to make yourself up. You have to learn the manners. You have to do all this stuff so that it becomes, you know, it was already dehumanized. It's even worse. It's even more dehumanized because it's making her into this artificial thing that is then seen as the status symbol.

13:47 Seth: Yeah. No, no, but that's exactly the point. So just look at page 214. The use made of women is thus of less value than their appropriation one by one. And their usefulness is not what counts most. Women's price is not determined by the properties of her body, although her body constitutes the material support of that price. Woman has the value in the market by virtue of one single quality, that of being the product of man's labor. And she has value thus only in that she can be exchanged. And so it's the idea that I Guess initially, if we talk about women being commodities, we might think, oh, that's because we need to use their bodies for reproduction.

And she's saying, no, it's worse. It's way worse. Worse than that. Right. It's that men have to use their bodies. In other words, it's their use by another. By an other, specifically by men, that gives them the value. So it's not even specifically what the. What the use is. It's more because they are a commodity in that way. They only have value through the labor of the consumer or the seller or what have you.

14:56 Mark: But what is the labor? It's that men have gone in and done the hair of the women and created the models to make them. Aphrodite. Like, that's not the thing that we value. Like, if you're saying that, you know, I've got my trophy wife and you've got your trophy wife. It's not that. Like, you. Like, I put in so much more labor to construct my trophy wife. We're not all having these Pygmalion experiences with our, you know, that's. I just. I feel like she really wants to follow Marx's analysis point by point. And I just don't know that it ultimately makes complete sense as an analogy.

15:29 Seth: Listen, maybe just like the other metaphors and analogies we. We talked about there, it runs into a problem. But think about it. Think about it from the woman's perspective.

15:40 Mark: What?

15:41 Seth: Yeah, if a man says, what do I need to be whole? What do I need to make myself into the man I'm going to become? I got to get a job. I got to get a wife, I got to have kids, I need a house, blah, blah, blah. So all of those things are. And again, are reflections on me to go back to the mirror. So if you're a woman, what do you say? You say, I have to get a man to do this for me or to get this for me or to do. There's no. It's not like she says, oh, I have to get a man so I can have a family. That's not the way it works from that perspective. Or, I have to get a job.

It's that I have to give myself over to. Or I have to be acquired by a man in order to have meaning or give structure to my life. And so she just doesn't have that agency and subjectivity. So labor is, you know, don't think about the man making the woman think about labor just being the agency and the subjectivity in the relationship or playing the active role. That's how I read it.

16:34 Jenny: I think that's exactly right. And it reminds me of a similar argument that Simone Beauvoir makes in the Woman in Love. I think we even talked about that. But the labor is not like the man ensuring that the woman has got the extensions and the makeup. I think the labor is creating an ideal of what a woman then has to fit herself into. In a world where she's not allowed to have her own agency or subjectivity. The only power she gets is aligning herself with a powerful man. So she has to try to meet that ideal to get that power. I think similar to what.

17:15 Dylan: So in this way then, a woman is a currency of exchange among men.

17:23 Jenny: She's Bitcoin.

17:26 Dylan: But like all the other things, like the kids and the land and the other stuff. And so in this rendition then there is a economy of status among men that involves a whole bunch of different things. And among men and between men and their hierarchy among men. But in that economy there are lots of objects. And in her articulation, women are just amongst those objects that are part of that currency of exchange.

17:57 Jenny: Yeah, but I was thinking more about like the Epstein thing again, right. Like, I haven't really thought this through, but you know, ostensibly what he was creating was these like really interesting groups of big thinkers. Mostly I think men, you know, like scientists and technologists and philosophers. But somehow the way that you entice these people to come and entertain and do all this stuff is like this background exchange of women as commodities.

18:32 Dylan: So that's interesting in the bit that I've. So I think there's lots of speculation and I have not yet heard, except for maybe the example that is Prince Andrew, where there's clearly involved with this. If I were trying to analyze what I know of that situation, it would seem like it was part of Epstein's attempt to ingratiate himself and display himself as a powerful man to be a. Spending his money to bring all these people together and ingratiating himself with them in that way. And that part of his own self presentation was clearly having young women hanging around him all the time at these things.

And there were a multitude of reactions to this. Some people considered it really weird. And some people considered it exactly the way he wanted them to consider it. Like, oh, look how powerful he is. It is working as a currency, even if the other people aren't all. It's part of the currency that Epstein's putting in there. And it's working in some way.

19:39 Jenny: I was thinking too, it's an array of things. So some of it is the young beautiful women, some of it is the private jets rides or the island, you know, so it's like an array of commodities that being around those or being lured by those is gaining more power and affirming that you are powerful.

19:58 Mark: So again, is this just a Nietzschean overstatement? Because what you're saying is it's an economy of status and women are one thing, one element and they're treated as objects within that currency. But even if there were no women available or they were considered beneath contempt, or maybe you had slaves or you had other more, then there would be other. So they're just pawns. So to say at the one point women are just pawns in this game and then to say the whole system depends on this foundation of this subjugation of women. No, we're actually seeing women are just an optional part, are just a pawn.

They would play their stupid ass male hommosexual games with each other whether there were women around or not. And even in days if we're not allowed to treat women like that anymore, men are still going to be playing those games with each other. It's just maybe women will get in on it. They'll get in on the status competitions and the shallow bullshit.

20:53 Jenny: Well, I think that definitely happens. But yeah, I mean I think that if woman or femininity is just defined as the deficiency or the inferior non subject, whatever the like everything that a man is, it's, it's the opposite and the deficient qualities then I guess there's also just like reasserting, that's that mirroring thing. There's a reasserting of the value of the man because like you can, like these women are just like commodities, they're playthings, they're, they're things that you conquer and that you use at your disposal is the way that I see some of what she's arguing there.

And so yeah, I mean it can be an array of things, but I mean it's like a fundamental thing that a man has to reassert in this story she's telling. Right. A man asserts his entire identity as a subject depends upon negating that he is not a woman. And so to negate that you're not a woman means that you have to show dominance over women and then you create these bonds among other men that way as well.

21:58 Mark: So this is part of a general, you know, a critique from. I don't know if it was from her intro or from your intro where you're describing the Whole economy as set up on along a pattern of male sexual patterns. Like the workday was compared to, I guess the weekend is the orgasm. And I found that a weird analogy because I don't feel like the work day is the action part of sex. And then the weekend, like, I'm not sure exactly where this is going. I mean, I see in general, the idea of libido is what gets you out there and makes you want to be a business tycoon or really accomplish anything thing.

Right. This is on the Freudian model. And so, of course, if insofar as it is gendered, then it becomes one of, as you're saying, dominance and collecting. You know, that having the. The trophy wife is not just one among many, but is like the prime way that you show, you know, like they say, let's have a dick measuring contest in terms of, like, who's. Who's got the power? Did Putin or Trump, when they pulled it out in Alaska, I don't know. They didn't bring their women with them. So I think that's why we don't know.

23:08 Dylan: I was reminded by my wife, who is overhearing my part of this conversation, that in the Epstein case, there's even another dimension of the economy going on because Epstein was taking pictures of people and using them to extort other people and also extort those women. And so there's a variety of levels of this commodification going on that also

23:33 Jenny: goes again to the sort of through line in her work about women not being able to kind of have their own subjectivity, their own sexuality, their own agency. Right. I mean, yes, you're ashamed for being sexual. And so there's, you know, I guess I could understand, like, Mark reading this and going like, I'm not this, you know, way. But I think, like, when you earlier were saying we should see this as like a genealogy, it's more helpful. It's. She's laying out a story for how it is. And we have remnants of it. We still have remnants of this. I mean, it's still the case that.

That trophy wives are real things. And it's still the case that, you know, maybe a lot of men think that the way to get good at sex is to watch pornography that really kind of is not gonna teach them how to please women, that there's remnants of it. It may not be the case, though. Like, this is like, absolutely the way all men, I mean, all men are. And certainly I don't think that's her goal. I think she's trying to Sort of describe how women became subjugated and denied. I think she's just picking up where de Beauvoir left off and going in a new direction.

24:36 Dylan: And I think I like Marx reminding us of someone like Nietzsche, who is stating something in a very bold and straightforward way. And you're overreading him if you make existential or a complete analytical claim on him. I think this goes to what you said at the beginning, Jenny, that it's important to be reading her. And again, I don't think she's unique in this respect in a way that recognizes the role, the rhetoric that she's using. Not in the sense to diminish it, but just to reckon, but not to misinterpret it.

25:14 Mark: So this whole women on the market thing ends with this section on the status of women in such a social order. And I think this hooks up well with the final essay, Body Against Body in Relation to the mother, 1993, which we're otherwise not going to talk about because we just are going to run out of time that you don't sell your mom. That's the limit. You know, the mom is where you came from. And the mom is protected. Like, once she's in that, okay, she's not. Not treated as a subject. She's. She has to do her mom things, stay, you know, serve the children, serve the husband, blah, blah, blah.

But she doesn't get sold off. It's the virginity. It is the thing. The mother is again, the use value. No, we have converted by creating the young version. We've created the exchange value that can then go. That you can sell the Jeffrey Epstein or whatever. So in doing that, in this, this final essay, she focuses on. This is where the matricide comes in. It's a purposeful or something. We have to uncover genealogically, forgetting of our own origins. And she compares like, well, you know, you think that Freud is so. So concerned with sexuality.

He would be all about, like, aren't you really uncomfortable with the fact that you came from some other person, a part of their body? And isn't, you know, your relationship with your parents and with your mother in particular is always going to be really weird because of that? And he should be obsessed with that. But yet he sees the foundation of society in patricide. In Totem and Taboo, he tells the story of the sort of the first society. This is his version of the social contract, is a bunch of sons gathering together and saying, no more tyranny, let's kill the father.

And setting that up as like, you Know the new name of the fathers, the social, the society is the thing that happens when you get an actual collaboration between people that are fundamentally brothers. Well, where's the mother in that? The mother is just ignored in that story. And she wants to counter Freud's weird myth with her own weird myths, which, you know, are very much explored by, in our past episode on Kristeva, that like, yeah, we should be very concerned with how to get back in touch with and reinterpret the fact that we are, are not spiritual beings, purely thinking things as Descartes would have us, but that we are biological beings that come from a biological origin.

And let's not just have respect for these women that we're no longer going to trade and commoditize, we're going to let them be subjects. But like make the mother a subject and focus on, you know, the Hegelian master and slave thing. Well, our first interaction is with the mother is like. So that is where you know, which like the master and slave is, is very asymmetric. You know, your mother has a whole sense of herself hopefully and is trying to build you, the child as an individual. Build an individual that can then, you know, separate out from the mother in some way.

But you know, on Irigaray's analysis, we have separated out too much by becoming citizens. I'm now in the public life, I'm a man walking among men. We've forgotten our origins and we need to sort of connect back to house and home. And likewise, you know, as part of this make daughters actually have full subjectivity and explore their relationship with their mother, which is going to be complicated in a slightly different way.

28:38 Jenny: So I've always been interested in like women in madness and depression and stuff like that. So part of what I really like in this essay, I was just looking at a passage on 242 and he's describing the description. So it's the top of like the middle paragraph. He says this relation of desire to madness works in a privileged manner in the relation to the mother for man as well as for woman. But all too often man rids himself of that madness and unloads it upon woman or women. And that really just resonates, I think, for a lot of women. Because another thing that happens is like part of going out in the public sphere is to have these sort of hyper controlled, rational, like measured logical attributes and all of that complexity of humans. You bifurcate it and you sort of make the woman absorb all that anxiety in the home.

29:33 Seth: Right?

29:34 Jenny: Like the woman becomes the kind of repository for the fears, the anxiety, the stress. And then, you know. So I think she's pointing out that the failure to let mothers or women be subject to. Not only does that practically mean that when we hear women speak, if we listen, it sounds like madness to us. Like they don't have an intelligible way of communicating within this hommosexual realm, but that they also become the container of all the parts of the man that he cannot take with him out into the polis. I guess let me just sneak in one other thing in case we don't get to it.

But I think to me, the thing that was most magical about Irigaray, that's a part of her the Ethics of Sexual Difference essay is the role she gives to wonder. And I think what she's trying to imagine is a world in which that instead of the woman just being subjugated or repressed in order to erect the male in every sense, what if, I guess she uses the word chiasmus or whatever. What if they're both equally. I think she uses like poles, like negative and positive, but instead of just one attracting like they're constantly. It's the healing thing, becoming subjects through the interaction with each other.

But again, going back to this fabrication of femininity, one of the downers for men and the ways in which relationships, sexual relationships would be awful for men is sort of already knowing what your partner wants or thinks or is right. I mean, sort of like projecting a certain idea of what a woman is and then just making that woman, assuming that that woman is operating in that construction in your head. Whereas in her world of sort of imagining greater difference, difference that can't be assumed into like a single eidos or form. There's the role for wonder.

And wonder is maybe a better way of approaching difference, approaching even like in just dating, like relationships, like. Like I have no idea what this person thinks. I. Even after 30 years, I don't know what this person thinks. I can't possibly exhaust what there is to know about this person. If I stop sort of projecting what I think. Oh, well, they're, you know, this and they're going to say this. And it's the same old argument, a more kind of like, wow, there's this excess going on in a person. There's more than I can ever master. And I need to kind of have a different attitude.

Not of appropriation and commodification, but. But wonder and awe. So I just wanted to sneak that in.

32:04 Mark: Yeah, yeah. All this positive stuff I think is a great, you know, we need to. Even if we were, the point, we need to conclude on at whatever length is the positive stuff that comes out of it. So, yes, we've created this economy of desire that desubjectivizes women. We have this history of philosophy that desubjectivizes women. We have committed the fundamental act of matricide that makes us not comfortable with our biological organs. And so we present, you know, as part of, you know, what's wrong with Cartesian philosophy and the stuff that's based on that is pretending that we are floating consciousnesses, thinking things detached from the.

The biological. And yes, this is going to veer into essentialism, but this is the way she kind of starts like that. She is a second wave feminist. First wave feminist. I just listened on the Internet to something about this, so just. You can tell me if I'm wrong here, but first wave feminism was like, we want to be. We're just as smart as you. We want to have all the same rights. Second wave feminism is no respect the difference. We don't want to just fit into the spaces you have created for men, which for instance, don't allow for maternity leave.

Like we want. You have to create new things that fit our bodies and our needs. Third wave feminism is maybe more the butler. Like, let's just get rid of gender altogether. It's just too much trouble. But. But that she's stuck in the. Not stuck, but like, she lands in the second wave of like vive la différence. Like. Like that we. There is something to be added. So an ethics of sexual Difference Since 1984 and the third essay, The Sexes and Genealogies. Each sex must have Its own right, 1993 are very concrete things about ethics and law that needs to take these things into account.

And look how much we would get. You know, we would get these advantages. Like you're talking about in personal relationships. Men have, you know, by using the mirror, by using. Just treating the woman as an object and assuming we know what they want and using them as a way to try to relate as a distance to other men. Like, that's not going to be as satisfying for us. So, you know, that's. She's not saying, screw you men, you're evil. She's trying to sell the men on. Like, this is way better for everybody if you allow full subjectivity to women.

Right. We get a whole new poetics out of it. We get a new conception of space and time. Process ontology, basically.

34:30 Seth: Yeah.

34:31 Jenny: I think that we're losing out on. I think poetics is the Right word. Like if there's kind of one dominant idea of sexuality and like what counts as, you know, you know, again, if the model of sexuality is like tension release, right, or if there's, you know, a kind of one idea about what our relationship to nature is, which is to conquer it and master it, then we trap ourselves in a certain way of living and we disregard other models and other ideas. And so again, it doesn't have to be about sexual difference, right? I mean, a lot of this we see now in contemporary ideas about reclaiming ideas from native communities about how living with nature or native communities to think about economy and exchange instead of capitalism.

And so I think she's just trying to point out that mirroring or that monism, let's say that sort of single way of, of carving out what the world should look like and how everything, you know, is kind of modeled on one biological kind of being traps us and we're freer if we can recognize there's limits and there's different ways there's, you know, there's limits that cannot be overcome or subsumed or made to reduce things down to one. That these, that they provide different ideas for us about living with each other in the world and what we want from each other.

35:48 Dylan: And yeah, yeah, I think you're right, Jenny, that this particular note is embodied in this section on wonder, which she keys off of Descartes. And she points to not that wonder which beholds what it sees always as if for the first Descartes is not this way, but the one that she wants to point to is that wonder which beholds what it sees always as if for the first time never taking hold of it, of the other as its object. It does not try to seize, possess or reduce this object, but leaves its subjectives still free. And so it's maintaining a disposition of kind of curiosity and well, wonder is the right word with respect to it.

And the trick there is maintaining that. I think she means it broadly speaking, embodied in sort of like in your face with respect to sexual difference. But. But with respect to philosophical interaction with the world and understanding the world in general. And it seems that a bit of the trick is going to be cultivating wonder while at the same time developing understanding and not having understanding. Quash wonder. For me, something like this is where you get into the different kind of the part of the understanding of science, as I think of it, versus kind of the pejorative scientisms that people would point to, where you say, well, I figured it out.

I have all the answers. And for me, that's exactly the wrong interpretation of what the activity of doing science is, which is why I end up on sort of the pragmatic interpretation of it, which is there's a sort of infinite well of things to look at. If you feel like the well is running dry, you need to work on your wonderful about it.

37:38 Jenny: Yeah, I guess one last thought about that last essay and that women sort of don't have their own lineage or genealogy. They get kind of assumed into the male, you know, even when we do family trees. Right. Is part of what has to happen, and I think men have to participate in it, is that there has to be space or there has to be new images, new shapes that allow women to reach their potentials or to become themselves where they're not sort of thinking about it through what men want. Like what's put out there is what they think men want. Right. So, like, even now, again, with like social media and the ways in which still we're dealing with young women and eating disorders and.

Or women in corporate environments, how am I assertive but don't come off as a bitch or, you know, I mean, there's a lot of cramping of what women can be because there's not sort of models out there that aren't in some way a react or a relation to male. And that goes again, also to your point about the first wave. I mean, the criticism of the first wave was equality. To whom? Like what standards? Like the standards need to be called into question. We need different models, different standards and new poetics. We need different ways of inhabiting ourselves, you know, and becoming.

That doesn't cramp us.

38:55 Seth: So I think about this in terms of human capital. Like, there's 10 billion. What is there, 8 billion, 10 billion people on the planet. And if you're like, you know what? We're just basically not going to educate half of them. We're not going to give food and water to three quarters of them. And like, we're just these somewhere in that, you know, 6 billion is probably somebody who could achieve something great for the entirety of the human race. And, you know, she kind of encapsulates this at the. Again in the end of the essay where she says, you know, you don't ask men to choose between being a man and a citizen, but women have.

It's like, do you want to be a woman or a mother? You have to make a choice. Either you. You reproduce or you don't get to fulfill your potential. And of course, there are nuances in many ways to that. But ultimately why is there so much hostility towards like saying to empowering people until it's saying like we would like for everybody on the, you know, everyone to have the opportunity to fulfill whatever it is that they can become, whatever it is that they might be best at. And when you just sort of draw a line and say you don't even get the chance.

And obviously it varies society to society, but at least in our hyper commoditized, so called advanced first world milieu, we don't seem to be going in the right direction.

40:25 Jenny: I mean, you said it. Why do structures that want to artificially constrain competition? I mean, I want to call it competition, right? Just why do we sort of, I don't know, monopoly. Like some people are starting at a better place than others instead of, of realizing that there's so much in people that we can't know in advance that they're not worth giving our time or resources or attention to, that there's some kind of narcissism or there's some kind of anxiety there that wants people that have been used to being on the top, they want to just stay there. And so they constrain the possibilities for a whole bunch of billions of other people. And seems like the problem of our time right now.

41:09 Mark: So as much as it seems like we're really getting to the gist of this by getting to the common sense, very liberatory sentiments that we should be taking out of this, I want to look a little more in a remaining time at some of the weird stuff in here because even these essays in the middle, they get weird and poetic. That, you know, right after that part that Dylan read about, you know, don't try to seize and possess and reduce the object. Leave it subjective, still free. He talks about, she makes a pun on consummation. Right, Consummation. You think that, oh, that's having sex.

Oh, the wedding's, you know, the marriage is official. The idea is a delusion. One sex is not entirely consumable by the other. Like I never thought about consummation as what this is. When they get to go eat each other, the woman will finally become food for the man. She says there's always a remainder. Right. So this is like again, this is what Lacan called the real, this expressible, this, the otherness that is going to escape, you know, is going to make you endlessly fascinating my love to me. Because I will never understand her no matter how much time I spend around her.

And she says that, you know, this remainder should not just be reserved for God.

42:17 Jenny: The ineffable.

42:18 Seth: Yeah, yes.

42:19 Mark: That we think that we fit. Oh, that's when, you know, we'll, we'll go contemplate the ineffable when it comes to religion or whatever, but it should even be, you know, sex as a religious act. It's essentially that you are contemplating the otherness that is beyond your ability to directly experience. And we haven't brought up what she called certain oriental traditions.

42:41 Jenny: Yeah, yeah.

42:42 Mark: That, you know, she really does in, on some level at least is willing to play with the metaphor of male and female as sort of yin and yang. And you know, in our Taoism episodes like these things are defined in terms of each other. Opposites define each other. And so. Right. If you only have the male and you don't acknowledge the natural opposite, you know, the, the, the disembodied subject versus the biological substrate or something like that, then, you know, obviously she doesn't want to be an essentialist and say, oh, women are all just about the biological substrate. But she does want to say that there is something to that difference. Such that a full life should involve and a full culture should evolve. Acknowledging both these things like this is what, how you get an accurate multivalent metaphysics that's not just some atoms in the void or other static bullshit.

43:33 Jenny: Yeah, that's exactly how that that's playing out is. Is looking for models where it's not a hierarchy. The sexes isn't like a hierarchy, but there's complementarity or you know, that there's. I think there's problems with that. We'd have to like do a whole different episode. She wrote a book called east west and it's. Yeah, there's some issues there, but I think the best of the charitable thing there is exactly what you're saying is trying to see these all as valuable human attributes and experiences and ways of organizing ourselves and representing the world in our projects instead of. Some of them are inferior projects and some of them are superior projects.

44:09 Mark: And just to point to, people can go and read these essays themselves. But she has a long section on angels as non fulfilled fulfillment of the sexual act. The fact that we talk about angels because we just don't have a way of connecting with the divine, with the ineffable. So we have this image of what if somebody can dart down and, you know, give you messages and carry, go back up to God and they're really pretty, but you don't have sex with the angel. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, you're sort of a asexual.

44:36 Jenny: Yeah. I don't think in this, in the page or in the essays we read that she introduced her notion of the sensible transcendental. She probably didn't. I don't remember seeing it, but. But, yeah, I mean, I get. She is, I mean, I guess an overarching theme. And the angels is. I don't know. I mean, it's hard to kind of place that. But I think that an overarching theme, again, is that the more that we allow our renderings of the world or our descriptions of the world to be so abstract and generic that they take us far from the kind of like wildness of nature, the worse off we are as a population.

But the sensible transcendental is the idea that we still need shapes or eidos or categories, I suppose. I hate using that word to allow multiple points of view. And we need people to be able to sort of recognize themselves in a shape. I'm not man, I'm something else. Right. So there's like, ways to create something rooted and maybe sensible. That then is a articulation of a kind of subject that you are in that is not just a completely abstract ego or, you know, transcendental ego or, you know, whatever that has to be rooted in the facts of matter.

45:49 Dylan: There's an embodiedness required in the mirroring.

45:52 Jenny: Yeah.

45:53 Seth: I don't know if it's worth. I had a take on the whole angel section. Even though I.

45:56 Dylan: Cool.

45:57 Jenny: I would love to hear it because I'm kind of lost.

46:00 Seth: So earlier in. And in several of the other essays, right. There's talking about the way that subjectivity traditionally, philosophically requires the transcendent. And that ultimately in the Christian conception, that transcendent is God. And in this essay she's talking about how do we conceive of a sexual. An identity like something. Sexual difference, something outside of our current form of sexual difference, whatever. Traditionally, angels are not. They're not gendered, they're asexual. And they also sit in a place sort of between humankind and God.

So I think she was just trying to invoke a concept of sort of like. Let's just call it non gendered, like mediated being that we could maybe look to and say, is this something? Does this provide a model for thinking about a subjectivity which is not caught up in this masculine, feminine. I don't even want to call it a binary opposition, but more like subject, object kind of relationship? You know, it's just sort of like a. What about this? And then on to the next thing. But that's how. That's what I thought. And of course, as soon as I started reading it.

Not, of course, because I'm probably the only one on this call that thinks this, but if you've ever seen Constantine, the movie Constantine with Keanu Reeves, the actor who plays the angel, that's the British woman, I think, and she's red hair and she always plays a kind of. It seems like she's always this type of character.

47:32 Jenny: Tilda Swinton.

47:33 Seth: Tilda Swinton, yeah.

47:34 Jenny: Very androgynous.

47:35 Seth: Yeah, totally androgynous. And knows exactly how she was. You know, like, I was like, oh, yeah. No, I mean, if you want to make Tilda Swinton your new avatar of a gender model, I'm all on board, like, sign me up for that train. And so that made me happy.

47:50 Jenny: I like it. Very cool.

47:52 Mark: So there's a lot more. I would love to spend some time in some form, whether we do a part three or. Or whatever. Just talking about this section in Hegel. Maybe it's even worth, you know, a separate episode on that part of Hegel and then bring back in Irigaray's analysis of. Of the family, you know, the upshot. And she. He discusses, even in the original, the phenomenology discusses Antigone that she's playing off of, which, of course, we've done an episode on. So this is interesting. I think the story fits in very much with what we've already said here, which is that the woman gets associated with, you know, hearth and home and duty toward nature.

You know, so these bonds with the siblings. And I'm not going to let my brother just rot out, even if, as opposed to the law, the name of the father, the. The phallus that is representing what society tells you. And so, you know, that Antigone gets caught in the middle of that. That she is being judged by the. These foreign standards where she is clinging to the, you know, the natural as opposed to the merely social. Is that. Is that the point? Jenny's nodding, so I guess.

49:02 Jenny: Yeah. Well, no, it makes sense. I mean, there's so much in that last essay too. Like, I think I'd confuse it earlier with women on the market, but this whole notion of Athenas too, like. And.

49:12 Mark: Yes.

49:12 Seth: Yeah.

49:13 Mark: So Kristi Noem is in Athena.

49:15 Jenny: Yes, the Athena. Right, right.

49:18 Mark: Serves the society faithfully and is attractive,

49:21 Jenny: but it's not really about. Because you're attracting people. It's. I don't know. Yeah, no, there's a lot to unpack there with the Antigone The Athenas, the Oresteia. Yeah, Oresteia, yeah. And so I think she's trying to read these against the grain a little bit, but not like completely on her own. You're right. There's some of this in Hegel for sure.

49:40 Seth: Hey, I can tell you that her analysis of the Oresteia I was taught at reed College in 1987.

49:48 Jenny: Cool.

49:48 Seth: At least a form of it. You know, the idea that the transition essentially from. They characterized it slightly differently. Not the feminist interpretation, but the idea that it represents the transition from like the realm of mythology and blood, redemption and all this sort of thing to the world of laws. But the critical piece about Athena. So she mentions Apollo, right. Because Apollo is Orestes champion and he's like, yeah, no, he's not going to get punished. He prevents the Furies from punishing and extracting the bloodlust. But Athena, who ultimately implements the law and who is feminine, but she springs full grown from the head of Zeus.

And so she's not born, she doesn't have a mother. And I was like, oh, yeah, I forgot about that piece of it. And it's just. It's a brilliant. Like, this is what you need. Like, you need autochthony to create the new order, or at least you need the idea of autochthony to erase the old order. Maternal.

50:43 Mark: Yes.

50:44 Jenny: To let go of that desire for the maternal or the pull of the maternal, or the. The fact that. Yeah. Like your body's marked by that being in that maternal body.

50:53 Seth: Yeah. Yep.

50:54 Mark: All right, well, there's a lot. Thanks for coming, Jenny, and spending a couple hours talking with us about this stuff. This is, you know, a fascinating world. We've. We've opened things up to. I don't know if. Do you feel like my reference to all this is being a little hand wavy, that. Oh, no. If you just read her whole books, she's going to give you the. You know, if you really want to see why philosophy is hopelessly gendered in this way and how it needs a complete reconstruction. Like, she hasn't made that case in these little bits. She just said it.

51:23 Jenny: Yeah.

51:23 Mark: Do you feel like that is worth folks time to try to really dive in and get more of this or she just knows she's saying something. These provocative things for you to think about. She's not going to lay it out in more detail in a more convincing way elsewhere?

51:36 Jenny: Well, I think Speculum is where she makes that case. But she does it in that style, that mimetic style. So you have to Read a lot of her to kind of figure her out. You get lost in her. So I do. I think she makes the case, but she doesn't make the case as, you know, in like a sort of discursive argument.

51:56 Mark: It's much more concentric norms. She doesn't make the case that way.

52:01 Jenny: Yeah. So she's just trying to kind of, like, I think at once, something I've written about her, I say she's basically putting these thinkers, these male thinkers on the couch, you know, and she's trying to get the unsaid out of their said. Right. So that's what she's doing. But she does it in a way, you know, I guess maybe somebody who does it in a way that's more easily graspable is like Genevieve Lloyd's book, I think so. Early Feminist Epistemologists. I'm forgetting the name of it, where it's kind of the arguments made much more in a recognizable, sort of mainstream philosophical way. I think she does it, but you have to kind of sit with her writing and figure it out and discuss like we're doing. And look at. We couldn't even exhaust all of this. It could go on forever.

52:42 Mark: The man of Reason, Male and Female in Western Philosophy, 1984.

52:46 Jenny: Yeah. So that if you want that argument, maybe in a way that's less poetic, that's the book you go read.

52:53 Mark: Cool. All right. Any other last words from anybody?

52:56 Dylan: Thanks for joining us, Jenny. It was great.

52:58 Jenny: Thanks for having me. I always have a great time, and I get a lot out of it, so thank you.

53:03 Dylan: Awesome.

53:03 Mark: Next time we're going to discuss Plato's Dialogue of the Laws, you can suggest things to us by emailing us peltialexaminedlife.com There's a contact form on our website. You can make comments on the blog post there. You could reach out to us through Twitter or Facebook. Good night, everybody.

53:21 Dylan: Good night.

53:21 Seth: Good night.

53:22 Jenny: Good night.