The Long ConversationA timeline of world philosophy

Philosopher

Luce Irigaray

born 1930

Belgian-born philosopher, linguist and psychoanalyst whose Speculum of the Other Woman exposed women's exclusion from philosophy and called for true sexual difference.

Born in Belgium in 1930, Luce Irigaray holds doctorates in philosophy and in linguistics; she is also a practising psychoanalyst. She dislikes personal questions, believing that biography is used to undermine women’s credibility, so little is known of her life. Since 1964 she has been a researcher at France’s national research centre, the CNRS, in Paris.

A student of Jacques Lacan, she broke with him in Speculum of the Other Woman, which made her a leading feminist theorist. She has also been active in the Italian feminist movement, working on initiatives to build respect for sexual difference into culture and government.

Key ideas

No female subject position
Western thought has tied women to matter and nature. Women can become subjects only by assimilating to male subjectivity; a subject position of their own does not yet exist, and so there is no true sexual difference.
Mimesis
Irigaray’s best-known tool repeats stereotypes of women unfaithfully, to call them into question: if women are called illogical, speak logically about that claim. The very possibility of such repetition shows women are more than the stereotype.
Reading the canon for what it leaves out
Speculum traces the erasure of the feminine in Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and Hegel, and later works do the same for Plato, Spinoza, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Tradition
Western
Region
Belgium, Paris and Italy

Influences

Influenced by

Luce Irigarayborn 1930

Influenced by

Luce Irigarayborn 1930

Where these links come from
  • Luce Irigaray drew on and argued against Martin Heidegger. Source: Sarah K. Donovan, Luce Irigaray, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Luce Irigaray argued against Jacques Derrida. Source: Sarah K. Donovan, Luce Irigaray, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Key works

  • Speculum of the Other Woman
  • This Sex Which Is Not One
  • An Ethics of Sexual Difference

Sources

  1. Sarah K. Donovan, Luce Irigaray, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy