Abstract
Luce Irigaray uses Aristotle’s concept of place (topos) to illustrate her vision of an interdependent relation between the sexes as two positively defined subjects rather than one and its (his) opposite. I further explore the concept of topos as a concept that defies the oppositions between form and matter, or spiritual and material, and propose the idea of “psychic place” as a bodily and linguistic container that, through the perpetual negotiation and articulation of what I call a “relational limit,” comes to form sexuate subjectivity. I draw upon Irigaray’s works The Way of Love and Sharing the World, among others, to illustrate how her vision of dialogue is not a dialogue between two previously-existing subjects thought of as discrete entities but rather a relational event of unfolding that creates the conditions of possibility for sexuate subjectivity—for each sexuate subject to establish its own place through a process of growth and development.
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Notes
- 1.
I examine in greater detail the relation of both Aristotle’s and Plato’s accounts of “place” (Topos and Chora) to Newtonian physics in my article “The Nature of Place and the Place of Nature in Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s Physics,” (Epoché, Spring 2012). I further explain how, although contemporary physics has rejected Newton, his conceptions of Absolute Space and Time still hold a certain intuitive sway.
- 2.
This also seems to be true in an empirical sense, as examples of children raised with little or no early human contact and who are therefore not fully able to inhabit human language have shown.
- 3.
The reader will note, of course, that this particular expression of God seems to be specific to monotheistic traditions. For Irigaray’s own explorations of alternative expressions of God (and the possibility of a God in the feminine), see “Divine Women” in Sexes and Genealogies (1993), Between East and West (2003), A New Culture of Energy (2021), and the “Religion” section of Key Writings (2004).
- 4.
Or mother figure. I presume Irigaray is referring both to the relation between a birthing parent and baby before the latter is born, but also to the relation to one’s primary caregivers as one grows and becomes a speaking subject.
References
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Casey, Edward S. Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993.
Heidegger, Martin. Pathmarks. Trans. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. (Includes “Letter on Humanism” and “The Essence and Concept of Φυσις in Aristotle’s Physics BI”).
Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. (orig. pub. 1984)
———. Sexes and Genealogies. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
———. The Way of Love trans. Heidi Bostic and Steven Pluhacek. London: Continuum, 2002. (WOL)
———. Between East and West: From Singularity to Community. Trans. Stephen Pluhacek. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
———. Key Writings. New York: Continuum, 2004.
———. Sharing the World. New York: Continuum, 2008. (STW)
———. In the Beginning, She Was. Trans. Stephen Pluhacek. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
———. A New Culture of Energy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.
Jones, Emma R. (2012). “The Nature of Place and the Place of Nature in Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s Physics.” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 16 (2):247–268.
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Jones, E.R. (2023). The Enunciation of Place: Irigaray on Subjectivity. In: Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19305-7_5
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