Luce Irigaray

Luce Irigaray (born May 3, 1930 in Blaton , Belgium ) is a French feminist psychoanalyst and cultural theorist. Her best-known works are Speculum, Mirror of the Other Sex (1974) and The Sex That Is Not One (1977).

biography

Irigaray received his master's degree from the Catholic University of Leuven in 1955 . From 1956 to 1959 she taught at a school in Brussels . She went to France in the early 1960s. In 1961 she obtained a master's degree in psychology from the University of Paris , where she also received a doctorate in linguistics in 1968. In 1962 she obtained a diploma in psychopathology . From 1962 to 1964 she worked for the Fondation Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) in Belgium . She then worked as a research assistant for the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris.

In 1968 she received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Paris VIII in Vincennes . In 1969 she analyzed Antoinette Fouque , a leading feminist at the time. From 1970 to 1974 she taught at the University of Vincennes. Soon after Irigaray's second doctoral thesis, “Speculum, Mirror of the Opposite Sex” (1974), her teaching career in Vincennes ended.

In the 1960s Irigaray was also a member of the École freudienne de Paris (EFP) founded by Jacques Lacan ; she attended Lacan's psychoanalytic seminar, where she trained as a psychoanalyst .

Irigaray has been researching at the Center National de Recherche Scientifique in Paris since the 1980s . In 1982 she was offered a professorship at the Erasmus University Rotterdam . Her research resulted in the publication of The Ethics of Sexual Difference (1991).

Irigaray is extremely suspicious of revealing biographical information and even basic life data, so that not even her year of birth can be considered certain. As a result, no details are known about her childhood and upbringing. Irigaray is of the opinion that critics within the male-dominated academic establishment would only twist such information and use it to the detriment of argumentative thinkers.

plant

Irigaray is inspired by Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theories and Jacques Derrida's deconstruction . Three intentions are fundamental to her work:

1. to work out the masculine ideology assumed by her, which underlies our entire system of meanings and therefore our language;
2. to find a female “counter-language” in order to “enable a positive sexual identity for women”;
3. wanting to establish a new kind of intersubjective relationship between men and women.

One of their core ideas concerns the “logic of the same” or phallogocentrism , a concept that is intended to express how, despite the usual division into two genders, only one, namely the male, serves as a universal point of reference. Following this thought and Lacan's mirror stage as well as Derrida's theory of logocentrism in the background, Irigaray criticizes the search for the 'one' truth in a patriarchal society. In her theory of a “feminine” script (“Écriture féminine”), she mainly refers to the pre- oedipal phase of child development, which was first considered by Melanie Klein .

Luce Irigaray's work is often associated with that of Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva .

Fonts

• Goods, bodies, language: the crazy discourse of women. Translated by Eva Meyer and Heidi Paris. Merve , Berlin 1976.
• Unconscious, women, psychoanalysis . Translated by Eva Meyer. Merve, Berlin 1977.
• The gender that is not one. Translated by Eva Meyer and Heidi Paris. Merve, Berlin 1979.
• Speculum. Mirror of the opposite sex . Suhrkamp , Frankfurt am Main 1980.
• On the gender difference: interviews and Lectures. Wiener Frauenverlag, Vienna 1987.
• The time of difference: for a peaceful revolution. Translated by Xenia Rajewski. Campus , Frankfurt am Main / New York 1991.
• Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated from the French by Xenia Rajewski. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991.
• The mystery of Mary. Translated from the French by Angelika Dickmann. Tredition, Hamburg 2011.

Secondary literature

• Urs Schällibaum: Gender difference and ambivalence. A comparison between Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida. Passagen-Verlag, Vienna 1991.
• Irene Sigmund-Wild: Recognition of the mad. On Luce Irigaray's draft of an “ethics of sexual difference”. Tectum-Verlag, Marburg 2000, ISBN 978-3-8288-8169-3 .
• Tove Soiland : Luce Irigaray's Thinking of Sexual Difference. A third position in the dispute between Lacan and the historists . Turia + Kant, Vienna / Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-85132-582-9 .
• Bussmann, Anne: Elements of Feminist Philosophy in Luce Irigaray's Work. Viademica, Frankfurt an der Oder 1998.
• Schor, Naomi: " This essentialism that is nobody - understanding Irigaray ", in: Vinken, Barbara (ed.): Dekonstruktiver Feminismus. Literary Studies in America. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt on May. Pp. 219-246.
• Whitford, Margaret: Luce Irigaray. Philosophy in the Feminine . Routledge, London 1991.

Web links

• Literature by and about Luce Irigaray in the catalog of the German National Library .
• Sarah K. Donovan:  Entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy . .

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Luce Irigaray , article in the Encyclopædia Britannica .