Abstract
Luce Irigaray’s thinking through of intersubjectivity in terms of the relations between two sexuate subjects raises the question, as Gail Schwab suggests, of thinking through sexuate difference as a global model for ethics.1 In this chapter, I turn to Gayatri Spivak’s work in order to meditate further on the possibility of thinking through an Irigarayan-inspired ethics of sexuate difference in our contemporary global contexts. How can we articulate a universal ethics of sexuate difference? What issues does this raise for structuring relations between and among women? How do we communicate cross-culturally between traditions in a way that, as I argue elsewhere, Luce Irigaray attempts to do in Between East and West?2 With these questions in mind, this chapter examines how Spivak mobilises Irigaray’s work on sexuate difference to address women’s solidarity and what this suggests about the possibility of cross-cultural communication between and among women.
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Notes
- 1.
Schwab, ‘Sexual Difference as a Model’. For a thorough explanation of Irigaray’s notion of sexuate difference, see Jones, ‘Irigaray’, p. 4.
- 2.
Roberts, Cultivating Difference, pp. 58–76.
- 3.
I use Ofelia Schutte’s phrase ‘cross-cultural communication’ to indicate non-hierarchical continuously negotiated relations of cultural difference. Schutte, ‘Cultural Alterity’, p. 53.
- 4.
Spivak goes on in later work to critique and problematise the use of this phrase. For more on this point, see Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, p. 55.
- 5.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism’, p. 80.
- 6.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism’, p. 180.
- 7.
Irigaray, Teaching, p. 231.
- 8.
See Malabou and Ziarek, ‘Negativity’, and Roberts, ‘A Revolution of Love’, for more on how Irigaray’s reworking of the Hegelian dialectic enables a refiguring of sexuate subjectivity as necessarily limited and always in relation with the sexuate other.
- 9.
While Irigaray’s work has been criticised for privileging sexuate over other differences, this chapter highlights how Spivak’s reading that links women together via a complex matrix of radical uncertainty demonstrates how an Irigarayan conception of sexuate difference can be mobilised in ways that do not hierarchise differences of skin colour, class, religion, age, disability, sexuality.
- 10.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism’, p. 154.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
Spivak explains that her concern with structural functionalism is that it ‘takes a ‘“disinterested” stance on society as functioning structure. Its implicit interest is to applaud a system—in this case sexual—because it functions’ (Spivak, ‘French Feminism’, pp. 154–155).
- 14.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism’, p. 155.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Understood within phallocentric logic, these three Indian women would have been constructed as an all-encompassing single ‘other’ when in fact there are multiple sites of difference between them, including, for example, class, religion and caste.
- 19.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism’, p. 156. In terms of these ‘shared channels of communication’, we might argue that much has changed since 1981 in terms of Internet access across the globe. Indeed, the fourth wave of feminism is commonly linked to global Internet activism and consciousness-raising. However, for those in the ‘pores of capitalism’ how much has actually changed? People living in the ‘pores’ do not have access to clean drinking water and food, never mind the Internet.
- 20.
Ibid., pp. 156–157.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 177.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Spivak goes on, in future work, to argue that it is not enough (or that simple) to reverse power relations between colonial/postcolonial. Rather, we must recognise these binary relations cannot ‘simply’ be reversed because there are not two separate ‘pure’ ‘cultures’ or ‘subjects’. Spivak argues we must destabilise these problematic relationships of colonial power in order to demonstrate how imperialism constructs the idea of a ‘pure native’ or ‘native hegemony’ and vice versa, how this (false) idea of ‘native hegemony’ constructs the ‘colonial subject’. I believe Spivak takes this central point in her philosophy from her early engagements with Irigaray (and Kofman) in these works that I explore here. For more on Irigaray’s use of mimesis as a reading strategy, see Grosz (1989), Whitford (1991) and Jones (2011). See Gedalof (1999) for an interesting perspective on constructions of purity, colonial subjectivity and ‘French Feminist’ thought.
- 24.
Spivak writes:
As soon as one steps out of the classroom, if indeed a ‘teacher’ ever fully can, the dangers rather than the benefits of academic feminism, French or otherwise, become more insistent. Institutional changes against sexism here or in France may mean nothing or indirectly, further harm for women in the Third World. This discontinuity ought to be recognized and worked at. Otherwise, the focus remains defined by the investigator as subject. (Spivak, ‘French Feminism’, p. 179, my emphasis)
- 25.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism’, p. 179.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 180.
- 27.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism’, p. 180.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 181. Spivak quotes Irigaray here:
In order for woman to arrive at the point where she can enjoy her pleasure as a woman, a long detour by the analysis of the various systems of oppression which affect her is certainly necessary. By claiming to resort to pleasure alone as the solution to her problem, she runs the risk of missing the reconsideration of a social practice upon which her pleasure depends. (Irigaray cited in Spivak, ‘French Feminism’, p. 105)
- 29.
Spivak notes that in Irigaray’s Speculum we find: ‘…the analysis brilliantly deploys the deconstructive themes of indeterminacy, critique of identity, and the absence of a totalizable analytic foothold, from a feminist point of view’ (ibid., p. 177).
- 30.
Ibid., p. 183.
- 31.
See, for example, Irigaray’s This Sex Which is Not One, where she writes:
Perhaps it is time to return to that repressed entity, the female imaginary. So woman does not have a sex organ? She has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as ones. Indeed, she has many more. Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural. Is this the way culture is seeking to characterize itself now? Is this the way texts write themselves/are written now? Without quite knowing what censorship they are evading? Indeed, women’s pleasure does not have to choose between clitoral activity and vaginal passivity, for example. The pleasure of the vaginal caress does not have to be substituted for that of the clitoral caress. They each contribute, irreplaceably, to women’s pleasure. Among other caresses…Fondling the breasts, touching the vulva, spreading the lips, stroking the posterior wall of the vagina, brushing against the mouth of the uterus, and so on. To evoke only a few of the most specifically female pleasures. Pleasures which are somewhat misunderstood in sexual difference as it is imagined—or not imagined, the other sex being only the indispensible complement to the only sex. (Irigaray, This Sex, p. 28)
- 32.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism’, p. 181.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 183.
- 34.
Irigaray, This Sex, p. 23.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 25.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 26.
- 37.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism’, p. 156.
- 38.
Ibid., pp. 183–184.
- 39.
- 40.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism’, p. 184 my emphasis.
- 41.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism Revisited’, p. 144.
- 42.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism Revisited’, p. 145. While I have no desire to reduce either ‘feminist’ to a definition, for the purposes of the problematic Spivak is attempting to unravel, I point to very general meanings of these terms; postcolonial as ‘occurring or existing after the end of colonial rule’ and metropolitan as ‘belonging to, forming or forming part of, a mother country as distinct from its colonies etc. (metropolitan France)’ (The Australian Oxford Dictionary, 4th ed). This suggests to me that Spivak is specifically acknowledging that this particular essay is working within this French postcolonial setting. Moreover, this paragraph illustrates that relation(s) between a metropolitan and postcolonial feminist are not reducible to the (patriarchal) coloniser/colonised relationship that the canonical texts of postcolonial theory have attempted to unravel.
- 43.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism Revisited’, p. 141.
- 44.
Ibid., my emphasis.
- 45.
Ibid.
- 46.
In order to make her point, Spivak quotes a passage from Chafika Marouf (1988) and I cite this here in order to provide context for Spivak’s further comments:
Current research on the family in Algeria and in the Maghreb cannot be evaluated without a retrospective view, however brief, of the movement of ideas that have emerged in Europe, and in Anglo-Saxon and transatlantic countries…The paradigms of academic intelligibility of feminism in Algeria and the Maghreb have been, for the large part, modulated in the intellectual configurations of Western thought: They have offered the frame and the genesis.…’ (Marouf cited in Spivak, ‘French Feminism Revisited’, p. 142)
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
This refers back to a point Spivak made earlier where she notes: ‘Assuming that classes and audiences are collections of selves ignores the details of their intimate and inaccessible alterity’ (‘French Feminism Revisited’, p. 142).
- 49.
Spivak ‘French Feminism Revisited’, p. 146 my emphasis.
- 50.
Recall, again, how the labial logic of the two lips is ‘always touching, always open’, confusing the binary of self/other logic? This notion of mischief can also be thought of in relation to what Michelle Boulous Walker calls labial logic. Boulous Walker (1998) links Irigarayan labial logic with Derrida’s play of differance, noting that:
It is deconstructive because it shifts ‘language’ away from an oppositional logic of reference versus metaphor toward something much closer to the play of difference…The singularity of the labia is always double, never one. This labial logic confounds oppositional thinking. It displaces oppositions such as inside and outside, self and other, reference and metaphor. (Boulous Walker, Philosophy and the Maternal Body, p. 157)
Consequently, we might think of this ‘common mischief’ in terms of Derrida’s notion of differance and play as disruptive to binary logic that he explores in his 1968 lecture ‘Differance’ (‘Difference’, p. 282). Furthermore, Irigaray’s early remarks on women laughing in This Sex Which Is Not One evoke this notion of playful mischievousness to challenge the notion that sexual difference is a simple reversal of binary positions. Irigaray writes:
Isn’t laughter the first form of liberation from a secular oppression? Isn’t the phallic tantamount to the seriousness of meaning? Perhaps women, and the sexual relation, transcend it ‘first’ in laughter? Besides, women among themselves begin by laughing. To escape from a pure and simple reversal of the masculine position means in any case not to forget to laugh. (Irigaray, This Sex, p. 163)
- 51.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism Revisited’, p. 165.
- 52.
Derrida writes:
Differance is not simply active (any more than it is a subjective accomplishment); it rather indicates the middle voice, it precedes and sets up the opposition between passivity and activity. With its a, differance more properly refers to what in classical language would be called the origin or production of difference and the differences between differences, the play [jue] of differences. Differance is neither a word nor a concept. In it, however, we shall see the juncture—rather than the summation—of what has been most decisively inscribed in the thought of what is conveniently called our ‘epoch’: the difference of forces in Nietzsche, Saussure’s principle of semiological difference, differing as the possibility of [neurone] facilitation, impression and delayed effect in Freud, difference as the irreducibility of the trace of the other in Levinas, and the ontic-ontological difference in Heidegger. (Derrida, ‘Differance’, 279)
I think we can add Luce Irigaray’s ontology of sexuate difference to the ‘juncture’ of our ‘epoch’ that Derrida describes earlier.
- 53.
Importantly, Irigaray sets out this labial logic in her earliest works and so we can recognise that Irigaray’s call for a double sexuate universal must be understood as part of her overall ontological challenge to the very notion of traditional conceptions of ontology and metaphysics in Western philosophy.
- 54.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism Revisited’, pp. 170–171.
- 55.
Ibid., p. 166.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 167.
- 57.
Chanter, Ethics of Eros, p. 209.
- 58.
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 215.
- 59.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism Revisited’, p. 167.
- 60.
Ibid., p. 165.
- 61.
Irigaray, An Ethics, p. 204.
- 62.
To bring both the maternal and erotic into relation is to go beyond Levinas. As Tina Chanter writes:
Plenty could be said about the stereotypical restrictions on sex roles in play in Levinas’ texts. Levinas limits the appearance of the feminine figure either to the realm of the erotic (where, in one respect, it turns out to be a poor imitation of the ethical), or to the elevated heights of maternity. It is not, perhaps, too extreme to accuse Levinas of expressing the traditional denigration and deification of the feminine in the restricted possibilities he extends to the feminine […] However far it might be from his intentions, it is hard not to find in Levinas’ work the opposition between good wife and mother and wayward sex symbol. (Chanter, Ethics of Eros, p. 199)
- 63.
This is why the two subjects are not necessarily heterosexual. The difference is created within the relation to the maternal and to the other. There is no normative sexual function whereby the couple reproduce a child, the relation is in excess of this. It is within this difference that we become sexuate subjects, that we are born as a ‘loving woman’ that is beyond the reproductive function.
- 64.
Spivak then quotes Irigaray from a 1986 translation of the text. I quote the 1993 An Ethics of Sexual Difference translation as I think it evokes the point being made here more clearly than the earlier translation (Irigaray, An Ethics, p. 187).
- 65.
Irigaray, An Ethics, p. 187.
- 66.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism Revisited’, p. 168.
- 67.
Ibid., p. 169.
- 68.
Ibid., pp. 169–170, my emphasis.
- 69.
Irigaray, An Ethics, p. 204.
- 70.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism Revisited’, pp. 170–171.
- 71.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism Revisited’, p. 146, my emphasis.
- 72.
Ibid., p. 145.
- 73.
Ibid., pp. 170–171.
- 74.
Spivak, ‘French Feminism Revisited’, p. 171, my emphasis.
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Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Michelle Boulous Walker, Bryan Mukandi, the editor of this collection Rafael Winkler and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and encouraging feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter.
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Roberts, L. (2016). Making Mischief: Thinking Through Women’s Solidarity and Sexuate Difference with Luce Irigaray and Gayatri Spivak. In: Winkler, R. (eds) Identity and Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40427-1_9
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