In 1974, following the publication of her thesis, Luce Irigaray was effectively excommunicated from Jacques Lacan’s circle and from the École Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris), the institution where she had trained and which Lacan founded. She was, as one of her commentators puts it, censured for being politically committed, for politicizing psychoanalysis …
In 1974, following the publication of her thesis, Luce Irigaray was effectively excommunicated from Jacques Lacan’s circle and from the École Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris), the institution where she had trained and which Lacan founded. She was, as one of her commentators puts it, censured for being politically committed, for politicizing psychoanalysis and questioning its patriarchal lineage.1 Her thesis was Speculum of the Other Woman. The book argued, among other things, that the entire history of Western thought had been organized around a logic of the same that could not register sexual difference, and that psychoanalysis, claiming to describe the structure of subjectivity, had simply repeated the operation it claimed to diagnose.
By the late 1980s, in the Anglo-American feminist circles that had absorbed Lacanian psychoanalysis as their theoretical idiom, Speculum and the books that followed it were being charged with biological essentialism. The charge has had remarkable longevity, has been addressed repeatedly and decisively by Irigaray’s most careful readers, and yet circulates undiminished. To argue that Irigaray is an essentialist is, in some quarters, still considered the responsible feminist position; to argue she is not is to be suspected of soft-pedaling the body in the name of a poetics nobody asked for.
This essay is about what that persistence means. It is not about whether Irigaray is or isn’t an essentialist. That question has been answered too many times to be interesting, and the answer, when read with even modest patience, is no. It is about why the charge keeps coming back, and about what reading Irigaray materially and genealogically rather than as either essentialist or anti-essentialist actually opens up. The diagnosis Naomi Schor offered in 1989, that the essentialism critique had become its own kind of orthodoxy and that “essentialism is not one”2 has only become more accurate. Forty years later, the dogma has hardened further, and the questions it forecloses are exactly the ones that require most attention.
The case against Irigaray, when made well, looks something like this. She insists that the feminine has been excluded from the symbolic order, and she gestures toward another economy –fluid, multiple, two-lipped– that has supposedly survived the imposition of the masculine logos. The metaphors come from anatomy: lips, mucus, water, the womb. The political program, insofar as one can be reconstructed, depends on women returning to themselves through this body and finding in it a language and a form of relation that the masculine symbolic has refused. The risk is obvious. To ground feminine subjectivity in feminine anatomy is to repeat the move feminism spent the postwar decades trying to dismantle: the move that says biology is destiny, that the womb determines the woman, that anatomy is fate. This was the version of essentialism Beauvoir had already shown to be incoherent; Irigaray, in the worst reading, was reinventing it.
Toril Moi gives the charge its sharpest early form. Irigaray’s metaphors of lips and fluids, Moi argues, replace historical analysis with mystification. Her strategy of mimicry –speaking woman in the language of patriarchy in order to expose its limits– works only as long as the ironic distance is preserved. As soon as the quotation marks fall away, mimicry becomes imitation, and the imitation becomes a positive theory of femininity that defines woman exactly the way patriarchy defined her, only with a value-sign reversal. To define woman, even in mimicry, is to essentialize her. Add to this Irigaray’s tendency to treat patriarchy as a single global structure, ahistorical and unified, and the result is a feminism that has lost its grip on history and politics in favor of a kind of high-literary mysticism —what Moi calls Irigaray’s “infuriating passion for the Greek alphabet” and her “uncompromising intellectualism.”3
The Lacanian version of the charge runs deeper. Jacqueline Rose argues that when Lacan describes sexual difference as phallic, he is not endorsing male dominance but exposing the arbitrary nature of how difference is structured in language. There is no feminine outside the symbolic, because there is no outside the symbolic. To posit a pre-linguistic feminine economy, as Irigaray seems to do, is to repeat the very move psychoanalysis exists to refuse: the supposition of a body, a desire, a self that is real before it is signified. The Lacanian Irigaray is not a biological essentialist, exactly, but a psychic one, and the second mistake is more philosophically embarrassing than the first.4
Judith Butler, who has been at once the most influential and the most ambivalent reader of Irigaray, gathers both lines of critique. In Gender Trouble, they worry that Irigaray’s two sexes reinstall the heteronormative binary, that her appeal to feminine pleasure outside the symbolic is politically inoperative, that her totalizing critique of patriarchy enacts the very universalism it diagnoses. Bodies That Matter extends the worry further: if the phallus can be detached from the penis, as Butler argues, then the feminine imaginary loses any morphological coherence at all. There is no body that is properly female; there is only the citational performance of femininity, and the imaginary is at best a useful fiction.5
These are serious arguments, and they deserve serious engagement. Irigaray’s defenders have not always given them that. But the charge, when it returns, almost never returns in this form. What returns instead is a posture —a knowing dismissal, a citation of the lips as if no one had read what Irigaray actually said about them, a reflex that takes the word “essentialism” as sufficient grounds to stop reading. That posture is what Schor saw forming in 1989, and what has hardened since.
The first thing that goes wrong in the essentialist reading is that it treats Irigaray’s prose as if it were saying what its surface seems to say. On inspection, this is a strange way to approach a writer whose entire method is mimetic. Speculum is structured as a series of inhabitations – of Plato’s cave, of Freud’s lecture on femininity, of Plotinus’s hypostases – in which Irigaray takes up the voice of the philosopher she is reading and lets it overstate itself until it cracks. The strategy is mimesis. To do feminist philosophy under conditions where the only available language is masculine is to be obliged to speak it, but with a difference; to repeat the masculine text with such fidelity that what it has been built to repress becomes audible in spite of itself. Irigaray learned this from Lacan and Derrida, but she takes it further than either of them because she has more to repress.
What follows from this method matters for the essentialism debate. If Irigaray’s writing is mimetic, then body in Irigaray is never just body; it is morphology, the body taken up in discourse, lived and signified, unreachable behind its representations. Words are not just words; they carry the weight of the bodies they have organized and erased. Ethics is not separate from poetics; it is poethics, a writing that knows what writing does to bodies and what bodies do to writing. Naomi Schor distinguishes three levels of mimesis to make this exact point: masquerade (repetition of misogynist discourse in its own voice), parody (a canny mimicry that exaggerates and mocks), and a third that she reserves for Irigaray, where mimesis becomes “difference as positivity, a joyful reappropriation of the attributes of the other that is not in any way to be confused with a mere reversal.”6 Elizabeth Grosz puts the move precisely: “Rather than act as a mimic, Irigaray mimics the hysteric’s mimicry. She mimes mime itself.”7 To mime mimicry is to inhabit the position of the woman who has been forced to perform femininity, and to perform that performance one turn further, until the performance becomes visible as performance. The body invoked is real and figurative at once. The femininity invoked is given and constructed at once. The text refuses to settle on either side of the distinction, because the distinction itself is what produced the woman who has no place to speak from in the first place. Read mimetically, the two lips, the fluids, the elemental imaginary are neither anatomical claims nor pure figures of speech; they are operations on the boundary the debate takes for granted. They live in the entanglement, and the entanglement is the argument.
To read her metaphors of lips, fluids, the elemental and to take them as descriptions of female biology is to miss the operation entirely. Jane Gallop argues that Irigaray’s references to anatomy are not descriptive but poetic. When Irigaray writes of “the sex which is one” or “the sex which is not one,” she is not making a claim about anatomy; she is exposing how phallomorphic logic has constructed a body in language, foregrounding the penis and erasing everything else, and showing how a different morphology –Gallop calls it Irigaray’s “vulvomorphic logic”8– could be constructed in the same way. The body in Irigaray is always already a body in discourse. There is no pre-discursive ground from which she is speaking. The question of whether her metaphors are “literally true” is not a question Irigaray’s text invites; the text is doing something else.
Elizabeth Grosz makes the same point in a different register. In Irigaray, morphology is not a synonym for anatomy. Morphology is the way the body is taken up into language, lived, signified, and represented. It is, in Grosz’s phrase, “the effect of a sociosymbolic inscription of the body.”9 To accuse Irigaray of biological essentialism on the basis of her morphological vocabulary is to substitute one term for another and then to attack what one has substituted. Grosz puts this with some asperity. The accusations, she writes, “substantialize or ontologize what, for Irigaray, is a discursive or deconstructive strategy.”10 When Toril Moi dismisses morphology by equating it with anatomy and dismisses it precisely on the grounds that Irigaray distinguishes the two, the gesture is symptomatic of the dogma it serves.
In her essay “This Sex Which Is Not One,” Irigaray introduces the figure of the two lips as a counter-image to the phallic model of sexuality that organizes Western thought. Where masculine sexual subjectivity depends on a single, visible, definable organ, the feminine, she argues, is irreducibly plural and tactile from the beginning. “Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time,” she writes, “and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two — but not divisible into one(s) — that caress each other”.11 The lips refuse the masculine count. They are not a single organ that can be named, identified, or possessed, nor are they two distinct organs. “She is neither one nor two,” Irigaray writes; “rigorously speaking, she cannot be identified either as one person, or as two. She resists all adequate definition.”12 The two lips, then, are less a description of female anatomy than a figure for a feminine that exceeds the metaphysics of the One —a sexuality and subjectivity that remains in continuous contact with itself, auto-affective, plural, and without proper name.
The “two lips” is probably Irigaray’s most-discussed metaphor. Read literally –as Janet Sayers, Kate McCluskie, and Kaja Silverman read it– the lips are an anatomical claim: female sexuality is multiple in a way male sexuality is single, and this multiplicity is the natural ground from which a feminine language can spring. Read this way, the metaphor is essentialism in its most legible form. But this is not the way Irigaray uses it, and it is not the way her best readers receive it. For Carolyn Burke, Jan Montefiore, Gallop, Grosz, Anna Munster, and Margaret Whitford, the lips are a figure, a symbolic operator that does specific work: it deconstructs the count of sexual difference (one and not-one), it unsettles the inside-outside boundary that organizes the visual economy of phallocentric desire, it gives the feminine a morphological signifier where masculine discourse has insisted she has none. Whitford’s reading is the most careful: the metaphor must not be read literally, because biology is not destiny, but neither must it be read as pure textual play, because the political stakes are real. The lips are a “struggle concept,” in Braidotti’s phrase. They are an intervention into the symbolic, designed to give women a representational form adequate to their embodied difference.
What is striking, when one assembles the literature, is how complete this rehabilitation has been at the level of expert reading and how incomplete at the level of received opinion. The two-lips controversy was already, by the mid-1990s, the example of how not to read Irigaray. And yet the literal reading still circulates. The lips are still cited as the smoking gun. Irigaray is still the woman who confused metaphor with anatomy.
This is not a problem of evidence. It is a problem of what the charge of essentialism is being used to do. To call Irigaray an essentialist is, in the present feminist landscape, to perform a certain kind of theoretical sophistication: to demonstrate that one has read Butler, that one knows the body is constructed, that one is not naive about biology. The charge is, in this register, less a reading of Irigaray than a self-positioning. Schor saw this clearly. The anti-essentialism that had once been a critical instrument had, by the late 1980s, become the universal value it accused essentialism of being. To be against essentialism was, simply, to be on the right side. And the right side did not require detailed engagement with the texts the wrong side had supposedly written.
The charge fails as a reading of Irigaray’s writing. It also fails as a reading of what Irigaray is doing philosophically. To put this in its sharpest form: Irigaray is not arguing, as she is sometimes accused of arguing, that there is a feminine essence that has been repressed by patriarchy and waits to be recovered. She is arguing that Western philosophy has itself been essentialist all along, organized around an unmarked masculine universal that takes itself for the human, and that the appearance of an “essential feminine” in her own texts is the exposure of this prior essentialism, not an alternative to it. Whitford has the cleanest formulation of the irony. “It is ironic,” she writes, “that someone who is arguing for the restructuring and resymbolizing of male and female ‘nature’ should be seen as essentializing, i.e., as assigning a fixed nature to each sex.”13 The accusation reverses what is going on in the text. Irigaray’s whole point is that there is no fixed feminine nature, but only a long history of attempts to assign one. Her work is a diagnosis of those attempts, written in the only voice the diagnosis could be written in: a voice that mimics the assignment in order to make its work visible.
This is what is meant by strategic essentialism, a phrase that has had its own troubled career in feminist theory since Spivak first proposed it. The basic claim is that to refuse all reference to women as a class –in the name of avoiding essentialism– is to lose the ground on which feminist politics can stand. There has to be some “we,” some category around which struggle organizes, even if the category is provisional, contested, and known to be a construction. Strategic essentialism is the use of essentialism, with full knowledge that it is being used, to make a political move that anti-essentialism cannot make. Rosi Braidotti has been the most articulate defender of this position: that affirming sexual difference as rooted in materiality is the epistemological foundation of feminist theory, that the question of essence cannot be evaded but must be confronted, and that feminism must take up the ontological dimension of the question rather than dismiss metaphysics as outdated.14
Strategic essentialism is what mimesis can be made to look like once the essentialism / anti-essentialism binary has imposed its terms. But mimesis, taken on its own ground, is something stronger; it is not the calculated deployment of an essentialism known to be fictional, but rather a performative operation that does not stand outside the binary it works on. The strategic-essentialism defense is right as far as it goes; it just concedes more ground to the binary than the writing itself does.
Whitford, characteristically, declines to choose between the readings of Irigaray on offer. Where Grosz argues that Irigaray operates entirely within discourse, treating sexual difference as a strategic intervention, and Braidotti argues that Irigaray treats sexual difference as ontologically real “like mortality, always already there,” Whitford suggests that both can be true. “Why assume that she is doing either one or the other?” she asks. “Particularly as both see her as employing strategies, so that positing ontological difference might itself be a mimetic or discursive tactic.”15 This both/and is, I think, exactly right. Irigaray’s text is doing both things at once, and the apparent contradiction between the discursive and the ontological reading is itself a residue of the essentialist/anti-essentialist binary the text is trying to escape.
This is where the dogma has its most damaging effect. The binary opposition between essentialism and anti-essentialism has organized feminist debate so thoroughly that any position that does not fit cleanly on one side or the other gets metabolized as the side it is closest to. Irigaray’s complex materialism –Schor’s phrase– is read as essentialism because it is not pure constructivism. Construction is the only alternative the binary admits. As Schor puts it, “it is on the rock of materialism and not of essentialism that Irigaray seeks to establish the truth of her claim.”16 Materialism is not essentialism. It is something the binary cannot see, and what it cannot see, it converts into what it can.
If the strategic-essentialism defense answers the charge of essentialism on its own terms, the more interesting move would be to refuse the terms altogether. The essentialism / anti-essentialism binary is itself a residue of the metaphysics Irigaray was trying to dismantle, the metaphysics of identity and self-sameness that organizes a thing as either “having an essence” or “having no essence” and cannot register the third possibility: that what is unfolds in time, that identity is constituted through reinterpretation rather than possession, that what holds the feminine together as something to think about is not an essence but a history.
This is what Alison Stone proposes in her work on feminist genealogy.17 Stone argues that the essentialism debate fragmented women as a collective political subject in the name of refusing essentialism, and that strategic essentialism does not finally solve the problem, because it depends on descriptive claims about women as a class that turn out to be false. Iris Marion Young’s “women as a series” doesn’t solve it either; the seriality smuggles universality back in. Stone’s alternative is genealogical. Drawing on Nietzsche and Butler, she proposes that women are connected by overlapping histories of reinterpretation rather than by a shared essence. Each generation inherits the cultural constructions of femininity that previous generations made, and reworks them; the reworking is what makes the inheritor a woman. The chains of reinterpretation branch, diverge, intersect; they sustain diversity, discontinuity, and power differences while still grounding feminist solidarity.18 There is no essence. There is also no purely contingent dispersion. There is a history that one enters and remakes.
What is striking, against this frame, is how much of Irigaray’s project already operates this way. The call for a maternal genealogy, the insistence on “women among themselves,” the recovery of a feminine inheritance that has been disavowed in the masculine symbolic –these are not appeals to a feminine nature but proposals for a feminine genealogy, in something close to Stone’s sense. Irigaray writes that “the turn, or return, of genealogy is repeated indefinitely in woman/women, among women, like a ceaseless voyage.”19 A ceaseless voyage is not an essence. It is the temporal mode through which a feminine subject becomes recognizable to herself and to others, by reactivating a transmission the dominant order has tried to interrupt.
Read genealogically, the apparent essentialism of Irigaray’s text dissolves. The feminine she is trying to make sayable is not a property women possess but a relation women enter and continue. The metaphors of lips, fluids, the elemental, the maternal are not descriptions of what woman is. They are figures for the relational, embodied, temporal mode of becoming through which she comes to be. The materialism is real –bodies are not nothing, biology is not nothing– but the materialism is genealogical rather than substantial. It is not the matter that grounds the feminine; it is the feminine that takes up and works through the matter, generation after generation, in forms that are continuous with their inheritances and not determined by them.
This is, I think, the most generative way to read Irigaray. It does not require her to be exonerated of essentialism, because it does not accept the binary in which essentialism has its home. It places her among contemporary feminist thinkers for whom the question is no longer whether women share defining characteristics but how feminine subjectivity is transmitted, transformed, and reauthored across time. It allows her metaphors their full poetic and political weight without freighting them with metaphysical claims they were never making. And it preserves what is irreplaceable in her work: the insistence that the feminine has a specificity, that the specificity matters, and that giving it a representational form is an ethical and political task.
The reason this still matters is that the essentialism question, which had seemed to be receding into the archive of feminist debate by the 2000s, has come back in a different register. It has returned in the new materialism, in the philosophy of the Anthropocene, in the urgent and divisive political fights over what biology means and who is permitted to claim it. It has returned in the ecological feminisms that take seriously the embodied, more-than-human entanglements the Lacanian symbolic could not see.
The position that the body must be honored as a material reality is not, by itself, essentialist; it never was. The position that the body is constructed in discourse is not, by itself, the answer to essentialism; it never was. The interesting work is and has always been in the third position, the one the essentialism / anti-essentialism binary cannot see: the materialism that is also a genealogy, the body that is also a history, the feminine that is neither given nor invented but continuously transmitted and remade. Reading Irigaray opens up a method for thinking about what women become, and how, and in relation to whom, and at what cost. It does not provide a settled answer to the question of what women are. The essentialism that has been attributed to her was never there. The materialism that was always there is the resource we need now.
What the two lips cannot say is one. They have never been able to. They have never desired to. More fundamentally, what they cannot say is the choice between essence and construction that the debate has spent forty years demanding of them. They speak something older, stranger, more material. The mistake has been to keep asking them to say what they cannot. The dogma that has refused to hear them, like all dogmas, is an obstacle to thinking. We could, at this point, simply put it down.
Link to Bibliography & Footnotes
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