Lecture: Luce Irigaray at the ICA

Lecture: Luce Irigaray at the ICA

21 July, 2008
by: Tom Jeffreys

Although Luce Irigaray is one of the big guns of contemporary gender theory, I have to confess that I have never read any of her books. Judith Butler? Yes, lots: loved Gender Trouble. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick? Yes, Between Men is great. What about Kristeva, Spivak, Cixous et al? Yeah, bits and bobs here and there. But strangely, never Irigaray. So this lecture at the ICA seemed like a good way to be introduced to her thoughts, and so it proved. But not quite in the way I had anticipated.

The lecture takes the form of a dialogue between Judith Still, Professor of French and Critical Theory at Nottingham, and Irigaray herself. Still reads passages from Irigaray's new book, Sharing the World, and then asks her a question. Irigaray answers at some length and on we go. The discussion sweeps over a variety of different topics – nature, hospitality, sexual difference, identity, desire, motherhood and birth – and several key points emerge.

Primarily, this new book is about methods of approaching the other as other. That is to say, how can one seek to relate to the other (person, society, culture, gender…) without perforce some act of appropriation, exploitation or domination? How can one understand the other whilst respecting (and maintaining) its status as other?

Irigaray suggests several strategies: the central one involves an attempt to return to a pure natural origin, without constructed principles. For Irigaray this pure natural origin is gender difference: she posits a 'return to a universal real that all living beings share' and, for her, this universal real is sexual difference. 'It is not an imposed principle but a beginning shared by all humanity'.

Already here she excludes living beings that are not human. And besides, as it has been argued by so many – Butler, Derrida, Sedgwick, Nietzsche... – this is an arbitrary choice for a starting point. Why not, for example, age? Or sexuality or race? Or number of arms, or hair colour? Where do (unisexual) plants fit in this binary schematic? Or hermaphrodites? She talks of the significance of the Middle Voice (used in Sanskrit, Icelandic and Classical Greek) but neglects the position of the middle sex.

As well as the dubious basis for this emphasis on sexual difference, it is a policy that results in a number of problems for Irigaray. She makes clear throughout the lecture her dislike (both personal and professional) for Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Effectively this seems to boil down to the fact that although she attended seminars held by both of these philosophers, they never attended hers. 'I am a woman,' she proclaims. 'I have not been unconditionally welcomed in my thinking. They have not recognised that I have come to enter another world.'

The problem with Irigaray's insistence on difference is that it will always be oppositional. And opposition always give rise to exclusion, hostility rather than hospitality. Again: 'I am a woman. I know what it is like to give hospitality in myself. Perhaps it is something that a man cannot feel.' So, she seems to be arguing that a man cannot give hospitality, cannot respect the other as other because he has never been pregnant. But what about women who, for whatever reason, have never been pregnant? There is nothing intrinsic to man that makes him unable to give hospitality, just as there is nothing intrinsic to woman that makes her any more able to do so. Why is the physicality of pregnancy so important to the concept of hospitality?

Irigaray is an engaging speaker, and quite charming despite the slightly broken English. She's almost like a wise old aunt dispensing common sense advice: respect others, respect their difference, listen, share, look after the environment. But these attacks on Levinas and Derrida are particularly galling because they don't seem to take into account what either has actually written. If you're going to take on thinkers this major, it's probably best to have read and understood their theories.

And here we come across my hypocrisy. As I've said, I've never read any of Irigaray's books and yet I feel comfortable asserting my opinion, and asserting that it's right. Maybe it's just because I'm a man, and without the capacity for pregnancy I lack the capacity to really understand the other. Maybe, but I doubt it.

Click here to see all London lectures.
Click here to see all London exhibitions.
Click here for things to do in Piccadilly.

Tom Jeffreys