LUCE IRIGARAY BY ISABELLE HAMLEY

is a continental philosopher often classed as a french philosopher even though she's actually belgian she's part of a group of feminist philosophers together with six su and christeva who are often described as the french french feminist holy trinity so she shares quite a lot of her background with those those other women she was educated in a continental philosophy kind of climate she first studied psychoanalysis actually and got her first phd in psychoanalysis she trained in the lacanian school and that's influenced her very significantly but she then went on to do a second phd which gave rise to her book speculum where she actually critiqued lacanian philosophy and that led her to be ostracized by the french intelligencia really and she was expelled from teaching at the sorbonne and generally seen with a lot of suspicion because of her attempt at critiquing the very foundations on which philosophy and western philosophy mostly is actually based she has been writing for many years she's also studied and written on linguistics so as a philosopher she's actually very broad she has three main strands to everything that she writes which is psychoanalysis philosophy and linguistics and it's very difficult to understand irrigate unless you pay close attention to all those three strands her early work is very strongly marked by psychoanalysis more so than anything else so her grade debut book speculum of the other woman is an analysis and deconstruction of western philosophy but according to psychoanalytic models she starts with freud and actually looks at what isn't there in freud and what she calls the eurasia of the feminine and then she from freud then goes back backwards through the history of philosophy asking the question where is the feminine in this her basic argument is that philosophy ever since plato and even before has been based on the idea of a single operating subject that looks at the reality around it and tries to understand it as a single subject and that that's predicated on the erasure of difference and the eurasia of the feminine so in speculum what irigar is trying to do is to bring out the unconscious of philosophy so just as a psychoanalyst would sit and listen to their client she says she's listening and she's listening for the silences of philosophy how does she do this well she uses deconstruction and that means that she fits within the post-modern enterprise she deconstructs philosophy she asks questions she brings out those tensions and those ambiguities that are inherent in philosophy she looks at binary pairs and questions whether they should really be binary or whether there are third options everywhere however she very strongly feels that deconstruction should not and never be an end in itself she actually calls deconstruction for its own sake a nihilistic folly so she stands in an interesting position of sharing a lot of the methodology of postmodern philosophers but actually distancing herself from their from their ends and saying that what she wants to do is construct something new now in her early work deconstruction is most prominent and that's most of what she does so to get back to speculum she does deconstruct freud and in a very witty manner i think is marked by playfulness with language just like many other postmoderns she means as much through how she says things as to as with what she actually says so with fraud she often takes what freud says gets into the language of what freud says and then gets her own point of view through sarcasm and humor and what she called inversions it means that in order to read regarding you need to be conversant with the philosophers with whom she's in dialogue because she doesn't use quotation marks she doesn't tell you when she's quoting freud and when she's quoting him ironically and when she's half quoting him and half changing him which means that in the whole of her works and she does that with all the other philosophers as well you need to know exactly who it is she's talking about what they're saying in order to identify where her own voice is coming in and that makes her a very difficult read if you're not conversant with continental philosophy i think it can be very difficult to read speculum fortunately she's written other books that are easier to read than this first one so with freud she gets into that and then questions some of his basic assumptions and basically what she says is freud is looking at the world as a man as a subject he feels he's able to say i look at the world as a neutral subject as an observer and i am telling you how it all works now she questions two of those basic assumptions one which is well how can you as a man actually make observations of the whole of reality because you are only half of humanity and her second assumption is the idea that she brings out is the idea of neutrality is it possible to be an external observer to the world or as an observer do you automatically participate into a relationship that changes the dynamics of the world so she argues like many other postmodern philosophers that we cannot simply observe without being part and that all of us have a subjective position which influences the way in which we understand the world so high looks at freud and his understanding of the world through the pleasure principle and his understanding of human beings as being either the ones with the phallus or the ones without it as essentially a male way of understanding the world one that reduces everything to either the one or the non-one the one or the one who isn't one so she's saying that freud demonstrates something that has been evident in the history of philosophy for two millennia which is that there is no space for an other to emerge that everything is either the ideal the one the totality or its negative image and that for an other to truly emerge you would have to smash this logic of the black and the white of the one and the non-one and she then goes back down in the history of philosophy she goes to descartes for instance next and critiques her famous kogito ergosum i think therefore i am she's scathing about descartes and says that descartes reinvents what it means to be human on a subject by actually erasing the very thing that makes us human which is being born of another human being she argues that descartes by positing being as identical with thinking actually denies his own materiality his own belonging to a body and therefore relationship with other human beings for higher identity needs to be essentially relational as human beings we do not exist as subject on our own but we exist as subjects that are essentially embodied subjects in relation with other subjects so her critique of western philosophy isn't just a critique of the way in which we build our identity as single unifying subjects but also in which we build our identity as divorced from the material where she would say that western philosophy for many many years has privileged the spiritual and intellectual the philosophical over the material and she's not arguing that you need to return to the material she's not saying that you can have access to an unmediated body she she would argue that awareness of the body is mediated by language and relationships but that it's important not to forget that language and relationships and philosophies equally are mediated by the body so she would say that for instance gender is not either pure nature or pure culture but actually the relationship between nature and culture which is worked out relationally in culture and in that sense she stands with a bit of difference from a lot of other feminist thinkers she's clearly a continental feminist she's not an equality feminist as most anglo saxon feminists would be she feels very ambiguous about calling herself a feminist actually because what she thinks needs doing isn't so much enabling women's voices to be heard or enabling women to be equal but for the whole idea of what it means to be human to be rethought so for higher there has never been the opportunity for the masculine or the feminine to be defined properly in history because of this logic of the this logic of the same this idea that you've got the one and the non-one and what she would argue is that in this logic we build our identity over and against the other but by defining the other rather than allowing the other to emerge for themselves and that means that we forget that we ourselves are only finite and therefore we do not have a true idea of who we are in relationship to others and so when feminists anglo-saxon feminists in particular are actually striving for equality equality with what she would say that's still going back to the idea of one typical idea in the platonic sense of a human being you have a norm that we all try to strive towards and we're good or not so good copies of that norm but she would say that is still this mono-subjective rule of one human and she says and we don't have a proper incarnation of that human it's an idea not a reality and so she disagrees with equality feminists and says that what we need is to work out what it means to be human together different one from another and yet all human together and for her being human is can only be arrived at through a dialogue between masculine and feminine between all our differences now from then on there are two things that are important to remember one is that irigari isn't an essentialist she's not saying there is an essential femininity and an essential masculinity that are set in stone what she's saying is that our bodies give us a starting point and how we construct what that difference means in practice is relational and always evolving but she says it's important to have that difference because it enables us to be part of something bigger than us she says being human is having an experience of both being instantiating of being individuals who are all different but we can't just fragment ourselves into multiple instantiations multiple individuals we need bridges that enable us to relate to other human beings and she sees gender as one of these bridges gender is something that enables us to be different from one another and yet to belong to a horizon of being that is bigger than us that can give us a bridge with other human beings but also a boundary to who we are so that identity is boundaried rather than just always

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Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 04 2016