Reading Luce Irigaray as a Prophet of Interfaith Dialogue

UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN

TRINITY COLLEGE

IRISH SCHOOL OF ECUMENICS

Reading Luce Irigaray

as a Prophet of Interfaith Dialogue

by

Brian Harrington

A Dissertation submitted to the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College, Dublin,

in partial fulfilment of the award of the degree of M. Phil. (IT & IS)

August 2012

2

Abstract

Openness to otherness and the transcendent spiritual expressions of others is a key quality

that interfaith dialogue strives to generate respect for in all parties involved in the

dialogue. Openness to the other as other is also a key consideration for feminist theorists.

This thesis then explores the relevance of the ideas and insights of Belgian academic

Luce Irigaray, a leading contributor to feminist theory over the last four decades, to see if

her insights can be applied to the area of interfaith dialogue in order to generate a

comprehensive, dynamic and compassionate hermeneutic for such dialogue. Some

commentators see the inclusion of women’s voices (and associated feminist theory) as the

missing link in interfaith dialogue and interreligious cooperation.

The text begins by introducing Luce Irigaray, a noted contributor to feminist theory since

the mid-1970’s who continues to publish today. Chapter One considers how Irigaray’s

background in psychology and linguistics as well as philosophy inform her theories.

Chapter Two examines how a possible interfaith hermeneutic can be generated from

Irigaray’s theories. Chapter Three looks at Irigaray in perspective by examining her

theories alongside two similar interfaith hermeneutical schemata that have been presented

in the literature. The Conclusion endorses Irigaray as a type of Prophetic figure for

interfaith dialogue whose theories may point the way forward for a greater

rapprochement amoung the world’s religions.

3

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank all my family and friends for the support and encouragement they

extended during the undertaking of this course. I would also like to thank all the lecturers

and students whom I have met at the School, in particular course director, Dr. Andrew

Pierce, and lecturer and supervisor for my thesis, Dr. Norbert Hintersteiner. Without

exception they have all striven to exemplify the courage, compassion and charity that are

essential traits for those working and studying in this field of differing Christian

traditions and differing global religions, and for this I am very grateful.

4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 6

Translating God(s) Istanbul conference 6

Feminist theology and Interfaith dialogue 8

The transformative impact of the inclusion of women’s

perspectives and voices 10

Introducing Luce Irigaray 11

The Importance of Philosophy for Irigaray 12

The Importance of Religion for Irigaray 13

Chapter One Situating Irigaray amoung feminist thinkers 17

Key Influences on Luce Irigaray 17

Luce Irigaray as a post-structural feminist 17

Irigaray as a critic of Lacanian psychoanalysis 18

Psychoanalytic account of the development of subjectivity 19

Irigarian reading of the development of male and female

subjectivities 20

Irigaray and the Speculum 22

Irigaray on Woman, Religion and the Divine 23

Irigaray and the establishing Myth of Antigone 27

Chapter Two Reading Irigaray as an Interfaith Theologian 32

Irigaray and the Religions 32

Irigaray and interfaith hermeneutics 34

Building an adequate interfaith hermeneutic 35

Interfaith Hermeneutical Key for Irigaray: Liberating

Female Subjectivity 36

Interfaith hermeneutical Key: Reimagining the Divine 38

Interfaith hermeneutical Key: Educating for Diversity 40

Interfaith hermeneutical Key: accepting the dominance of

ethically conditioned behaviours over morally conditioned ones 41

Interfaith hermeneutical Key: Respect for diverse

locales of transcendence 43

Interfaith hermeneutical Key: Having in place the goal of

the fulfillment of all of humanity 45

Interfaith hermeneutical Key: Retrieving of the female imaginary

through the generation of new cultural symbols, some Irigarian

concepts and motifs 48

Examining the most recent published work of Irigaray:

Sharing the World 57

5

Irigaray’s key hope 59

Chapter Three Irigaray in Perspective 61

Irigaray and Other Hermeneutical Approaches 61

Irigaray and Engendered Comparative Theology 62

Irigaray in contrast with an Interreligious

hermeneutics of love 64

Irigaray and the Problem of Essentialism 66

Irigaray and the Problem of Idealism 67

Comparing the theory with the reality: Women

and interfaith dialogue, the practical experience 69

Conclusion 70

Irigaray and the primary importance of the creation

of a culture of sexual difference 70

Irigaray’s philosophy endorsed by Fasching’s narrative

reading of Global ethics 72

Charles Taylor and the contemporary quest for human authenticity 73

Irigaray as a Prophetic voice for Interfaith Dialogue 75

Bibliography 77

Introduction

6

Introduction

“From Speculum on, my project has been how to render possible a philosophy, and more

generally a culture, of two subjects.”1 – Luce Irigaray, Luce Irigaray, Key Writings

Translating God(s) Istanbul conference

The moment that was the genesis for this thesis was one of an uncomfortable

silence and hesitation which followed a question from a young female German theology

student at an interfaith conference in Istanbul.

It was late afternoon on Friday the 6th

of May 2011, in a plush lecture hall at the

campus of the Faculty of Divinity of Marmara University in Istanbul. A panel discussion

session of a “Translating God(s)” interfaith conference was in session. Present on the

panel were a Jewish Rabbi (with his translator – thought his English was quite adequate),

an Orthodox Priest and a local Imam (all from the Istanbul area), chairing the session was

the (Muslim) head of the faculty of Divinity. The question that generated the

uncomfortable silence was why there were no women present on the discussion panel.

Four of the men present on the panel turned to the Rabbi for inspiration (perhaps because

he represented the oldest faith present.). The Rabbi shifted uncomfortably and tried a

humorous response: “Well, my wife is the real boss at home, believe me!” This attempt at

humour fell flat and for the next fifteen minutes the panel attempted to paint their

respective faiths as moving with the times to find structures to facilitate a more inclusive

role for females in all aspects of their faiths. The Rabbi and the Orthodox Priest claimed

that their faiths were working on new structures to include women, with the Priest saying

his superiors were holding up this process. The Imam claimed that that year (2011) the

first woman Imam would take up work amoung Istanbul’s 20,000 or so state sponsored

male Imams. All panellists agreed that more needed to be done. Still the sense of having

touched on a nerve, of a discomfiting moment, lingered. Perhaps as feminist philosopher

Luce Irigaray2 might argue an aporia at the heart of interreligious dialogue (at least

1 Irigaray, Luce, Luce Irigaray, Key Writings, (Tower Building, London, Continuum Publishing, 2004),

From Preface vii 2 Luce Irigaray. P.9 Interview Hirsh, E. and Olsen G. A., ‘Je - Luce Irigaray’: A Meeting with Luce

Irigaray, JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, 1996, 16.3, accessed online at:

Introduction

7

between the world’s main monotheistic faiths) had been exposed: that this dialogue was

taking place mainly between men and that this dialogue-of-the-Patriarch’s was excluding

the otherness of women and thus, Luce Irigaray would argue, genuine otherness and the

subjectivity of genuine otherness altogether.

Irigaray argues that if one’s faith does not make room for sexual difference in its

expression then one can never fully come to terms with the other as other and thus one’s

efforts at dialogue are doomed to sterility. In Irigaray’s essay Questions to Emmanuel

Levinas: On the Divinity of Love3, Irigaray's first question to Levinas, ‘Is there otherness

outside of sexual difference?’ is answered in the negative. For Irigaray otherness without

sexual difference is a masked form of ‘self-sameness’. Irigaray calls ‘self-same’ the male

subject who measures his identity against the same idealized standard as every other man.

Traditionally God has represented this ideal for man. Irigaray confronts the male self-

sameness of the philosopher who is constituted in relation to the one God of classical

theism. Irigaray thus places sexual difference at the centre of any hermeneutic that seeks

to make space for the genuinely other.

Participants in interfaith dialogue and ecumenical dialogue have felt that they

have reached something of a hiatus in their efforts to grow closer structural and personal

community in the last decade. Perhaps what is required is to build a desire to go beyond

the ways-of-our-fathers in thinking about faith and the structure of faith communities.

Thus the aim of this thesis is to examine the thinking on otherness and in particular

sexual otherness of philosopher Luce Irigaray in order to inform a hermeneutics of how a

passing beyond our current cosy, but sterilely academic, consensus can take place.

http://www.cas.usf.edu/JAC/163/irigaray.html; Thought this text refers to her both by surname only and by

full name, Luce Irigaray prefers to be addressed by her full name because that alone is identifiable as

feminine. feminine}. 3 Tracing Sexual Difference: Beyond the Aporia of the Other, Paper by Pamela Anderson to 20

th world

congress of philosophy, quoting Irigaray’s Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love.

Accessed at http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Gend/GendAnde.htm on 8th

July 2012.

http://www.cas.usf.edu/JAC/163/irigaray.html

http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Gend/GendAnde.htm

Introduction

8

Feminist theology and Interfaith dialogue

Various feminist theologians have argued that their insights into participation and

exclusion are equally applicable in the interfaith domain and that they themselves are

more dexterous partners in dialogue than their traditionally male counterparts. Emeritus

Professor Ursula King of Bristol University argues that feminism insights are the missing

dimension in the dialogue of religions. She states in her essay Feminism: The Missing

Dimension in the Dialogue of Religions: “… narrowness is evident with regard to the

marginalization, invisibility and exclusion of women, for wherever interreligious

dialogue has developed, women seem to have had little part in it, at least at the official

level. Proof for this is found in every single book on interfaith dialogue, religious

pluralism, the theology of religions, or the ‘wider ecumenism’ of global interreligious

encounter.... can these 'religious leaders' today still legitimately voice the concerns of

women and speak on their behalf as if women could not speak for themselves.”4 King

concludes: “women’s interreligious dialogue, where it exists, does not yet critically

analyze and call into question the androcentrism and exclusiveness of male dialogue.”5

Swedish feminist and interfaith theologian Helene Egnell6, states that “to a certain

extent, feminist theology and theology of religions deal with the same issues, and pose

similar challenges to the churches. They also pose challenges to each other, which could

enrich theological creativity in both fields if taken seriously.”7 Egnell identifies a

collaborative and self-critical hermeneutic in feminist theologians approach to interfaith

dialogue: “As does feminist theology in general, feminist approaches to interfaith

dialogue include a deconstructive as well as a constructive project. Unlike most other

4 King, Ursula: Feminism: The Missing Dimension in the Dialogue of Religions in May, John (Ed.):

Pluralism and the Religions: The Theological and Political Dimensions, (Tower Building, London,

Continuum Publishing, 1998) 5 From article by Professor Ursula King, Gender and Interreligious Dialogue, accessed online at

http://eapi.admu.edu.ph/content/gender-and-interreligious-dialogue 6 Rev. Dr. Helene Egnell was ordained for Stockholm Diocese (of the (Lutheran) Church of Sweden) in

1988, and has worked as a parish minister for many years. She earned her PhD from Uppsala University in

2006 with the dissertation: Other Voices. A Study of Christian Feminist Approaches to Religious Plurality

East and West. She is a Director of The Centre for Inter Faith Dialogue in Stockholm. 7 Egnell, Helene, Dialogue for Life: Feminist Approaches to Interfaith Dialogue, from Mortensen, Viggo

(Ed.), Theology and the Religions: A Dialogue (Grand Rapids, Michigan, Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003),

P.249

http://eapi.admu.edu.ph/content/gender-and-interreligious-dialogue

Introduction

9

dialogue settings, the participants generally do not come with the presupposition that

their own traditions are sufficient. On the contrary, they come with the deeply felt insight

that all religious traditions include elements that are oppressive for women, and they seek

to identity the sources of oppression, as well as the means to change the traditions,

together.”8 Egnell states that resources uncovered in feminist theology can be of use in

dealing with welcome otherness in the interfaith field: “Otherness is a theme that has

been developed in feminist theology …This otherness is made into a resource, which

could be especially useful to a theology of religions, which has to account for otherness

without subsuming it or annihilating it, and without abandoning one’s own distinctive

religious identity.”9

Egnell argues that ‘women in interfaith dialogue have fewer ‘vested interests’ in

their religious institutions, and thus are able to articulate more freely their personal

feelings and opinions. Thereby they can challenge ‘malestream’ interfaith dialogue to a

critical evaluation of the oppressive aspects of religions.’10

Egnell also argues that a

feminist interfaith dialogue is ‘a dialogue of life … (that) the criterion for judging diverse

expressions of religion is whether they are life-enhancing or life-denying … dogmatic

issues are considered important only insofar as they can provide tools for creating a just

society and mutual relations, or contribute to the survival of the planet.’11

In a similar vein, Lucy Irigaray argues that a more thorough appropriation of the

dynamic spirit of God’s holiness by women would go far to bringing a deeper

equilibrium to the Christian Churches and through these to the wider world. Irigaray also

places faith at the very centre of human identity and culture. If the dynamic faith at the

core of living culture is excluded, cultural atrophy and decay follow, Irigaray argues, as

only faith, and the transcendent hope it causes to exist, enable positive growth and change

in human systems. Thus interfaith dialogue is seen as a key societal activity in our

multicultural world.

8 Egnell, Helene, Dialogue for Life: Feminist Approaches to Interfaith Dialogue, from Mortensen, Viggo

(Ed.), Theology and the Religions: A Dialogue (Grand Rapids, Michigan, Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003),

P.252 9, Ibid, P.254

10 Ibid, P.252

11 Ibid, P.253

Introduction

10

The transformative impact of the inclusion of women’s perspectives and voices

A Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida, Tampa,

Darrell J Fasching, who is a proponent of narrative theology12

, in his work Comparative

Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach to Global Ethics, considers ‘the missing voices

of women in the world’s religions and how the inclusion of their voices may alter

comparative religious ethics by introducing themes of interdependence and ecology.’13

According to Fasching ‘the contemporary inclusion of women’s voices is having

a transformative impact on virtually all religious traditions.’14

Anecdotal evidence

suggests he is correct, even if we seem to currently exist in a liminal, transitional phase in

global religious life. One up to date example of this proceeding transformation (July

2012) details how the conservative Muslim countries of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Brunei

are sending female athletes to compete in the London 2012 Olympic games for the first

time ever.15

A Saudi Arabian woman Wojdan Shahrkani competed in the women’s judo

following negotiations which enabled her to wear a modified hijab (head covering) to

compete. Her participation made positive headlines round the world, with her female co-

religionists in Saudi hailing it as a particularly important step forward toward their full

participation in Saudi society. 16

12

Narrative theology is associated with the idea that we are not primarily to learn principles, rules or laws

from Scripture, but rather we are to learn to relate to God, and how to play our part in the greater panorama

of our salvation. 13

Fasching, Darrell J., Dell Deschant and David M. Lantigua, Comparative Religious Ethics, A Narrative

approach to Global ethics, Second Edition, (Chichester, West Sussex, Wiley & Sons, 2011), P.8 14

Ibid, P.9 15

Accessed at BBC News website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18813543 on 8th July

2012. 16

Accessed at Idaho Press website: http://www.idahopress.com/news/world/saudi-woman-s-olympic-judo-

bout-over-in-seconds/article_d4e1db3b-5175-51f5-9740-a8bbe7a35e03.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18813543

Introduction

11

Introducing Luce Irigaray

Luce Irigaray was born in Belgium in 1932. She is a noted feminist, philosopher,

linguist, psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural theorist. She holds doctoral degrees in

philosophy and linguistics. She is also a trained psychoanalyst.17

Luce Irigaray received a Masters degree in Philosophy and Art from the

University of Louvain in Belgium in 1955. She then taught high school in Brussels from

1956 to 1959. In 1960 she moved to France to study psychology at the University of Paris

and she received a Masters degree in psychology in 1961. In 1962, Luce Irigaray received

a Diploma in Psychopathology.

From 1962 to 1964 she worked for the Fondation National de la Recherche

Scientifique (FNRS) in Belgium. In 1964 she began work as a research assistant at the

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. Also in the 1960s Luce

Irigaray trained to become a psychoanalyst under Psychologist Jacques Lacan (1901-81),

after participating in his psychoanalytic seminars. In 1968 she received her first

Doctorate in the field of Linguistics.18

From 1970 to 1974 she taught at the University of Vincennes, Paris. (This was a

new University founded a year after and partly in response to the Paris riots of 1968. It’s

faculty were highly politicized and extreme opinions and controversies were not

uncommon amoung faculty members.) At this time Irigaray was also a member of the

Ecole Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris) which was directed by Jacques

Lacan. While studying at the Ecole Freudienne de Paris in 1974, Luce Irigaray published

17

In a 1993 interview Luce Irigaray specifically says that she does not like to be asked personal questions.

She does not want opinions about her everyday life to interfere with interpretations of her ideas. In

consequence detailed biographical information about Irigaray is limited. (Sourced from “Luce Irigaray

(1932-Present),” article by Sarah K. Donovan, Villanova University, on The Internet Encyclopedia of

Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/irigaray/, 15th July 2012)) 18

Collated from biographical data on the following websites: from “Luce Irigaray (1932-Present),” article

by Sarah K. Donovan, Villanova University, on The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

http://www.iep.utm.edu/irigaray/, 15th July 2012 & Luce Irigaray: A Biography, Bridget Holland, 1998 on

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/irigaray.html & Irigaray’s publisher Continuum Books at

http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=167896&SubjectId=997&Subject2Id=988

http://www.egs.edu/library/jacques-lacan/biography/



http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/irigaray.html

Introduction

12

her second doctoral thesis entitled Speculum, de l’autre femme (Speculum19

of the Other

Woman).

This controversial piece of work focused on the idea of gendered assumptions and

phallocentrism20

in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Luce Irigaray criticized the

male and phallus-centered point of view in psychoanalytic (and philosophical) theory.

The publication of Luce Irigarary’s thesis led to her expulsion from her position at the

University of Vincennes and she was ostracized by the Lacanian community in Paris.

(Though she continued to work at the CNRS, Paris.)

During the second academic semester of 1982, Irigaray held a visiting professor

chair in Philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Research and lecturing here

resulted in the publication of An Ethics of Sexual Difference, establishing Irigaray as a

major continental philosopher. This and subsequent works provide a comprehensive

analysis and critique of the exclusion of women from the history of philosophy,

psychoanalytic theory and structural linguistics and argue for a remoulding of society in

language and structures in order to achieve respect for the subjectivity of women, to

inculcate a culture of tolerance for alterity in society and to allow for what Irigaray calls

the ‘becoming divine in the body’ of each person in community.

Luce Irigaray is still with Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS),

Paris and currently operates as a Director of Research in Philosophy. Though she is now

of advanced years she continues her researches and her latest work, In the Beginning, She

was, is due to be published in December 2012.

The Importance of Philosophy for Irigaray

Though Irigaray is trained in linguistics, literature and psychoanalysis, she wishes

her writings to be viewed as philosophical texts because she believes that philosophy has

the primacy within culture in the ongoing historical production of knowledge, meaning,

19

A speculum is a medical tool for investigating body cavities, with a form dependent on the body cavity

for which it is designed. Irigaray used the term speculum to emphasize the importance for her of sexual

difference and also in contrast to Lacan’s use of the image of the mirror in his account of the psychological

development of the individual. 20

Phallocentrism is defined as a belief that is focused on the phallus and the superiority of the male sex.

Introduction

13

subjectivity and consequent power.21

Irigaray argues that it is because of philosophy’s

historical potency that women have been excluded from its practice, while women’s

efforts in the field of literature have been more indulged. Irigaray criticizes feminists who

insist on operating as carbon copies of men within male defined structures without

critiquing those structures. What she calls ‘the feminism of equality’ is therefore

relatively well accommodated, while attempts to create a feminism of difference met with

resistance. Irigaray therefore views herself as ‘working as a psychoanalyst amoung the

philosophers to liberate a long repressed female imaginary into the symbolic realm of

language, discourses and culture.’22

The importance of religion for Irigaray

Initially in rebellion against what she perceived to be a repressive, patriarchal and

institutional continental Catholicism, Irigaray turned against all religion and spirituality.

From the 1980s and especially since the publication of the collection of essays Sexes and

Genealogies in 1993, Irigaray has returned to spirituality and religion as perhaps the key

for establishing and defending genuine subjectivity and alterity in community. Irigaray

however is not so much interested in formal religious structures but rather how human

transcendence and Divine presence can be brought together to create a community of

fulfilled human subjects.

In an essay from her work Sexes and Genealogies entitled Women, the Sacred,

Money, Irigaray notes that ‘it seems we are unable to eliminate or suppress the

phenomenon of religion.’ Therefore she concludes: “it is crucial that we rethink religion,

and especially religious structures, categories, initiations, rules, and utopias, all of which

have been masculine for centuries.”23

The transcendence afforded by the concept of the Divine for Irigaray gives

woman the possibility of successfully establishing her subjectivity even in a male

21

Hirsh, Elizabeth and Olson, Gary A., “Je-Luce Irigaray”: A Meeting with Luce Irigaray, 1996, JAC: A

Journal of Composition Theory, 16.3, http://www.cas.usf.edu/JAC/163/irigaray.html, P.341, Introduction 22

Ibid, P.341, Introduction 23

Ed. John Charles Hawley, Divine Aporia: Postmodern Converstations about the Other, 2000, (Cranbury,

NJ, Associated University Presses, 2000), P.208. Ch.10 Reconceiving God: Luce Irigaray’s “Divine

Women” by Sam McBride, quoting Sexes and Genealogies, (1993, 75). (accessed via google e-books, 10th

July 2012)


Introduction

14

dominated world. She writes: “To posit a gender, a God is necessary; guaranteeing the

infinite …. If woman has no God, they are unable either to communicate or commune

with one another … As long as woman lacks a divine made in her image she cannot

establish her subjectivity.”24

Irigaray develops this argument further by calling both men and women to

embrace a conception of the Divine that defends both their subjectivities (or envelopes to

use Irigaray’s term below). Further, in an overtly spiritual motif, Irigaray argues that all

male female interactions should be mediated by God so as to prevent domination (or

envelopment) of the male by the female or visa a versa.

“Between man and woman, whatever the differences may be and despite the fact

that the concept of the one, male or female, cannot envelop that of the other, certain

bridges can be built, through two approaches: - that of generation, - that of God.

…. Could it be that God is he who intervenes so that there should be a reciprocal

limitation of envelopes for both? … The openings in the envelopes between men and

woman should always be mediated by God. Faithless to God, man lays down the law for

woman, imprisons her in his conception(s), or at least in accordance with his conceptions

instead of covering her only for God, while awaiting God. Woman, who enveloped man

before birth, until he could live outside her, finds herself encircled by a language, by

places that she cannot conceive of, and from which she cannot escape.”25

Irigaray begins her description of a community that supports both equality and

difference, which is a key hermeneutical criterion for interreligious dialogue, in an

attempt to define, articulate and defend difference firstly at the level of sexual

difference.26

This for Irigaray is the key first step, the sine qua non, of a hermeneutic

supporting otherness and multiple subjectivities. The first paragraph of An Ethics of

Sexual Difference reads:

24

From Divinity and Sexuality: Luce Irigaray and Christology, Modern Theology, Volume 12, Issue 2

P.221-237, April 1996 quoting Sexes and Genealogies P.61-3. (accessed via google e-books, 10th

July

2012) 25

Irigaray, Luce, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, (Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1993), P.93-

94. (accessed via google e-books, 12th

July 2012) 26

Deutscher, Penelope, A Politics of Impossible Difference, the later work of Luce Irigaray, (Ithaca, New

York, Cornell University Press, 2002), P.7 quoting Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, “How can

the double demand – for both equality and difference – be articulated?”

Introduction

15

“Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our

age. According to Heidegger, each age has one issue to think through and one only.

Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our ‘salvation’ if we

thought it through.”27

For Irigaray, in order to have successful engagement between religions and

cultures, one must first endeavour to create a foundation that defends male and female

subjectivities. Irigaray states: “Across the whole world, there are, there are only, men and

women. Being we means being at least two.”28

Irigaray ultimately also founds the motivation and resources driving her vision for

human fulfillment in the principle of the Divine: “Love of God …. shows the way. God

forces us to do nothing except become. The only task, the only obligation laid upon us is:

to become divine men and women, to become perfectly, to refuse to allow parts of

ourselves to shrivel and die that have the potential for growth and fulfilment.”29

Irigaray believes that the release of Divine energy supporting and facilitating

human subjectivity and fulfilment can lead to the spiritual regeneration of our age. She

states: “To pursue human becoming to its divine fulfilment, such seems the spiritual task

most adapted to our age. Not simply to submit to already established truths, dogmas and

rites, but to search for the way of a human flourishing still to come. And to do this

beyond enclosure within a single tradition that ends up making God the property of a

religious community. It is the human as such, in a universal perspective, that we have to

question today.”30

Irigaray argues that now that humanity, at the beginning of the 21st

Century, has discovered ‘a panoramic view of the whole of humanity and its history,’31

a

review and revaluation of our practices and hermeneutics is necessary in which

‘globalisation and the development of technologies’32

are providentially bringing the

27

Irigaray, Luce, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, (Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1993), P.5.

(accessed via google e-books, 12th

July 2012). 28

Irigaray, Luce, I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History, (New York, Routlege, 1996), P.47 29

Jantzen, Grace, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion, (Bloomington, Indiana,

Indiana University Press, 1999), P.6 Quoting Irigaray. 30

Irigaray, Luce, Luce Irigaray, Key Writings, (Tower Building, London, Continuum Publishing, 2004),

P.186 31

Ibid, P.186 32

Ibid, P.187

Introduction

16

religions together to facilitate this process. Irigaray sees herself as an active participant in

providing philosophical structures and hermeneutics to facilitate this becoming.

Chapter One in this exposition of the relevance of Irigarian thinking to interfaith

dialogue therefore examines some of the key influences informing Irigaray’s work.

Chapter Two looks into how key Irigarian concepts and motifs can inform an interfaith

hermeneutic of radical openness to alterity. Chapter Three compares and contrasts that an

Irigarian hermeneutic with other hermeneutical attempts at including feminist and

relational thinking in interfaith hermeneutics. A concluding chapter then summarises the

findings.

Chapter 1 Situating Irigaray amoung Feminist thinkers

17


“There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness.”

(Sophocles, Antigone, vv. 332-333)33

Key Influences on Luce Irigaray

The introduction to the book Religion in French Feminist Thought, Critical

Perspectives begins by stating that ‘since the late 1980s, French feminist thought has

emerged as an increasingly significant interpretive tool in the theological and religious

studies of the English-speaking world.’34

Particularly influential have been translations of

the works of feminist authors Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Their

body of work is informed by contemporary French philosophy and psychoanalytic theory

and thus is best viewed within the context of poststructuralist and postmodern thought as

well as within psychoanalytic paradigms.

Luce Irigaray as a post-structural feminist

The post-structuralist movement emerged as a body of distinct responses to

Structuralism. Structuralism argued that human culture may be understood by means of a

structure, modeled on language (i.e. structural linguistics), that is distinct both from the

organization of reality and the organization of ideas and imagination, constituting a ‘third

order.’ The precise nature of the revision or critique of structuralism differs with each

post-structuralist author, though common themes include the rejection of the self-

sufficiency of the structures that structuralism posits and an interrogation of the binary

oppositions that constitute those structures.

Luce Irigaray can be described as a post-structural feminist. Post-structural

feminism emphasizes the contingent nature of all identities, and in particular the social

construction of gendered subjectivities. Like post-structuralism itself, the feminist branch

is in large part a tool for literary analysis, but it also deals in psychoanalysis and socio-

33

Irigaray, Luce, Between East and West, from Singularity to Community, (New York, Columbia

University Press, 2002), Introduction, P.1, Quotation from Sophocles’ Antigone. 34

Ed. Joy, Morny, Kathleen O’Grady and Judith L. Poxon, Religion in French Feminist Thought, Critical

Perspectives, (Fetter Lane, London, Routledge, 2003), Editors Introduction, P.xv

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_linguistics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_opposition

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_opposition


18

cultural critique, and seeks to explore relationships between language, sociology,

subjectivity and power-relations as they impact upon gender in particular. Post structural

feminism also seeks to criticize patriarchy, particularly through an analysis of the

pervasiveness of male discourse in the construction of social knowledge. 35

Irigaray as a critic of Lacanian psychoanalysis

Perhaps the strongest influence on Irigaray’s work has been her interpretations

and re-interpretations of the work of the French psychologist Jacques Lacan (1901 -

1981), whom she studied under in Paris in the 1960s and early 1970s. Feminist

psychoanalytic readings of philosophy and theology (and of psychoanalytic analysis

itself) inform much of Irigaray’s work. As the late Canadian feminist theologian Grace

Jantzen36

(1948 - 2006) noted: “… one of the basic insights of the psychoanalysts which

sets them apart from the religious and philosophical tradition of Augustine and Descartes

and Locke is that human subjectivity is not a simple given.”37

Freud, Lacan and

subsequently Irigaray delineate the processes, perils and dangers involved in becoming a

human subject through social and historic construction. This struggle for human

subjectivity (and for Irigaray especially the human subjectivity of women) presents itself

as a key motif running through Irigaray’s work.

Jacques Lacan, who described himself as a Freudian psychoanalyst, believed (as

did Freud) in three states of consciousness: the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic.

Irigaray subscribes to this description. The imaginary and symbolic (corresponding to

pre-oedipal and oedipal phases in the Freudian description of the development of

subjective identity) are conceptualized as separate, polarized realms associated with

respectively the mother and father. The feminine and maternal is associated with the

imaginary, the fusional, the oceanic, wholeness, the un-individuated (in Freud and Lacan)

and set in contrast to masculine symbolic culture which is characterized by civilization,

35

Definitions from Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Peer reviewed Academic Resource,

http://www.iep.utm.edu/irigaray/, Article by Sarah K. Donovan, Villanova University. 36

Canadian feminist theologian Grace Marion Jantzen (1948 – 2006) was a feminist philosopher and

theologian. She was professor of religion, culture and gender at Manchester University from 1996 until her

death from cancer at the early age of 57. 37

Jantzen, Grace, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington, Indiana,

Indiana University Press, 1999), P.8

http://www.iep.utm.edu/irigaray/


19

rationality and culture. All women are thus associated with the role of ‘mother’, whether

or not a woman is a mother, as well as being objectified sexually within this male

symbolic order. Therefore, according to Irigaray’s critique of Freud and Lacan, women as

thinking spiritual subjects are effectively excluded from the Symbolic order in culture

(and language) and thus struggle to give meaning to their world, their self, their bodies

and their identities as subjects. They are effectively repressed as generators of cultural

and linguistic signifiers within the Symbolic order.38

That is to say that the French

feminists in general and Irigaray in particular, see psychoanalysis (and a critical reading

of psychoanalytic texts) as a useful tool to unveil a universal patriarchal theory of the

psychic construction of gender identity based on repression (and not merely on conscious

oppression) of women.

Psychoanalytic account of the development of subjectivity

In the Freudian account of the achievement of subjectivity, the young boy must

pass from the pre-Oedipal to the Oedipal phase of subjectivity. Under threat of castration

he represses his desire for this mother and tries to become like his father, eventually

hoping to take his father’s place in society. It is argued that this repression is so painful

that it results in ‘anger, fear or hatred towards anyone who reminds him of it: this can be

recognized as one of the roots of the misogyny and homophobia of western modernity

and their reinforcement in religious doctrines and rituals.’39

In Freud’s model there is no place for femininity unless it is related to

masculinity. To enter the Oedipus-complex, a girl must hate her mother. For Irigaray this

view makes it impossible for a girl to give meaning to the relationship with her mother.40

38

This reading is constructed primarily from course lecture notes of Dr. Melanie Feratova-Loidolt,

University of Vienna, “Heret(h)ics: Feminist Negotiations of the Divine, Religion, and Dogmatic

Iconographies of the Female Body In Quest for an Ethical Space.” accessed at

http://homepage.univie.ac.at/melanie.loidolt/courses/ws2005/memos/poststr.htm on 4th August 2012. Also

Jantzen, Grace, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington, Indiana,

Indiana University Press, 1999), P.10-15 and further information on Jacques Lacan from psychoanalysis

website http://www.goodtherapy.org/famous-psychologists/jacques-lacan.html 39

Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion Grace Jantzen,

(Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1999), P.9 40

Ibid, P.9

http://homepage.univie.ac.at/melanie.loidolt/courses/ws2005/memos/poststr.htm

http://www.goodtherapy.org/famous-psychologists/jacques-lacan.html


20

Irigarian reading of the development of male and female subjectivities

The groundbreaking argument feminist theory makes is that in this logocentric

binary Western logic of the universal subject, woman is needed so that her difference can

be used as a category to set up the idea of the subject, and to affirm man's superiority. In

this sense woman is omnipresent in culture as a (social) construct of what a woman is:

body, nature, irrationality; but is at the same time absent as existent subject in her own

right, with her own originality and authenticity. The difference that is set up between man

and woman by the patriarchal logic is a difference constituted in opposition (positive-

negative, mind-body) which leaves no room for a difference to be set outside this

established system (i.e. a genuine open ended alterity).

In feminist theory therefore we find a fundamental rejection of the universality of

the unsexed but implicitly male knowing subject and a critique of the complicity equating

masculinity and rationality. This critique has led to a renewed interest in the sex specific

nature of the subject and a notion that when speaking subjectivity one must begin with

the idea of embodiment. French feminism develops its argument from French postmodern

philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004) who fundamentally criticizes Lacan by

arguing that Lacan’s project, while critical of some philosophical and psychoanalytic

assumptions, is itself logocentric as Lacan’s concept of the (male) phallus as

transcendental signifier merely takes the place of the traditional philosophical Logos in

his work, leading Derrida to characterize Lacan’s work as ‘phallologocentric’.

Irigaray asserts that the ideal of the maternal oneness associated with the

imaginary (as posited by Freud and Lacan) does not describe a pre-symbolic “reality”

prior to phallic definition which can be recovered, but has to be demystified as a fantasy

of the Oedipal/symbolic itself which can only operate in terms of loss and split.41

Within

Irigaray's theoretical framework the only possibility for mother and daughter to emerge

41 Dr. Melanie Feratova-Loidolt, excerpts from her 2005 doctoral thesis: “Dancing With Death. Women's

Painful, Feverish and Fatal Encounters With Life and Love. A Study on the Patriarchal Denial of Female

Subjectivity and Woman's Quest for Heterosexual Recognition. A Feminist Theoretical Investigation & a

Gender Comparative Analysis of the Theme in Literary Representation of the 19th and Early 20th cent.”




21

as sexual subjects would be a fundamental transformation of spatio-temporal structures,

which centrally involves a re-consideration of the pre-oedipal, the imaginary.

Irigaray suggests that to trace a female libidinal and representational economy we

have to ‘… try to go back through the masculine imaginary, to interpret the way it

reduced us to silence ... and at the same time re-discover a possible space for the feminine

imaginary.’42

That is to say, the focal point should not merely rest on how patriarchal

exclusionary practices obstruct representations of the female and social relationships

between women, but on how the masculine imaginary or cultural unconscious has

‘imagined’ woman, since this imaginary construct not only informs the symbolic law, but

also guarantees the perpetuation of this economy.

Psychoanalytically viewed, Irigaray's argument puts not only the Oedipal

polarized system and the privileging of the father into question, but especially the

conception of the pre-oedipal, undifferentiated mother-child bond. An important element

of Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference therefore is the recovery of ‘that repressed entity,

the female imaginary.’43

As Judith L. Poxon explains: “… Lacan … posits the imaginary as the pre-

symbolic phase of subjectification, in which the nascent subject misapprehends its mirror

image as proof of its own wholeness. What is unique to Irigaray’s imaginary … is the

element of sexual difference. As a corrective to the implicit and explicit masculinity of

Lacan’s imaginary … Irigaray suggests a ‘return to that repressed entity, the female

imaginary’, an imaginary that she describes primarily by way of the … image of the two

lips … Irigaray sees both the imaginary and the culture and discourse that grow out of it

as necessarily sexed, either (morphologically) male – and thus characterized by unity and

self-identity – or (morphologically) female – and thus characterized by plurality and

fluidity. … Irigaray’s wager, in positing a female imaginary, is that …. a ‘vulvomorphic’

42

Irigaray, Luce, This Sex which is not one, (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1985), P.164 43

Irigaray, Luce, This Sex which is not one, (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1985), P.28


22

logic might empower women, and serve as a foundation for a feminist politics based on

the emergence of a feminine subjectivity.”44

Irigaray claims that woman cannot enter subjectively into the male symbolic and

language (in order to have her sense of independence and self-representation verified)

and is only represented objectively. This compels woman to a condition of mimesis or

masquerade within pre-fabricated roles and with a language that is not hers. For Irigaray

women are thus both captives of the symbolic order and repressed within the imaginary

which generates the symbolic order. Woman is not a genuine other, but the ‘other’ of the

same. Woman is not perceived as an other sex but just as a version of his sex, because her

sexuality is only described in male parameters, using male psychological constructs. In

the Symbolic women have to live up to an idea of femininity that is only conceptualized

in masculine terms (Irigaray calls this an enforced masquerade) and according to

imaginary conceptions of the mother: silent, passive, object of desire (roles in the object

case). Irigaray cites the Greek myth of Narcissus is used to illustrate this dynamic in

which the man is in love with his own reflection, while the woman, named Echo in the

myth, is only heard and understood in ways that mime and repeat his own words; her own

voice is not heard at all, neither is she seen: she is repressed in his presence, there only as

absence.

Irigaray and the Speculum

In Irigaray ‘s view women lack a mirror for becoming women. Her claim is that

they would need a concave mirror, a speculum45

, that reflects their specificity and

disturbs exclusive male parameters. The single sex perspective sees only one dimension

(composed of subject and object) whilst the concave mirror would open the perspective

for two subjects. The substituting of the curved for the flat mirror challenges

psychoanalysis's attempt to deny woman ‘all valid, valuable images of her sex, her

44

Joy, Morny, Kathleen O’Grady and Judith L. Poxon (Ed.’s), Religion in French Feminist Thought,

Critical Perspectives, (Fetter Lane, London, Routledge, 2003), P.46-47 Irigaray and the Problem of the

Ideal, Judith L. Poxon 45

A speculum is a medical tool for investigating body cavities, with a form dependent on the body cavity

for which it is designed. Irigaray used the term speculum to emphasize the importance for her of sexual

difference and also in contrast to Lacan’s use of the image of the mirror in his account of the psychological

development of the individual.


23

organs, her body’46

, condemning her to psychosis or hysteria for lack ‘of a valid signifier

for her desire and for her sex.’47

Irigaray suggests that the acceptance of woman as subject would change the

symbolic order so fundamentally that men would occupy wholly new positions too, so

both would be freed from the phallocentric order.

For Irigaray an ethics based on sexual difference cannot be assimilated to either

side of the gender dichotomy. It cannot be assimilated to sex because this is understood in

strictly biological terms. It cannot be assimilated to gender, because this is understood in

strictly cultural terms. Sexual difference is neither sex nor gender, neither nature nor

culture – it undoes the dualism between the body and the psyche/mind which are not

regarded as opposed in this proposed new culture.

Irigaray on Woman, Religion and the Divine

The symbolic in French thought designates not just language but forms such as

music, art and ritual and the basic concepts that underpin a culture. Primary discourses in

this regard in the construction of culture are those of law, science, economics and

religion. The late feminist theologian Grace Jantzen argues that the ‘masculinist

symbolic’ of the west is undergirded by a ‘concept of God as Divine Father, a God who is

also Word, and who in his eternal disembodiment, omnipotence, and omniscience is the

epitome of value.’48

Even atheists define themselves in opposition to this conception of

God. Thus disembodied power and rationality is valorised in Western culture. The divine

is what guarantees meaning.

Jantzen quotes the philosopher Jacques Derrida in stating that it is the assumption

of the divine presence (even when that presence is held to be absent, as in secularism)

that ultimately grounds the system of signs, and brings to rest the ceaselessly shifting

signifiers, holding them all together in an onto-theological unity.

46

Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman, (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, [1977], 1985), P.55 47

Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman, (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, [1977], 1985), P.55 48


(Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1999), P.9


24

As discussed above, according to psychoanalytic theory subjectivity is achieved

by repression of unacceptable desires and entry into language (and the symbolic more

generally) which is identified with the masculine. Little boys become men but what of

little girls? Jantzen states that according to Lacan, to the extent that women take up

subject positions, entering into the symbolic, the discourses of western civilization, to

that extent women also become masculinised. Jantzen argues that ‘Either women learn to

play men’s roles by men’s rules, or else we take up the ‘feminine’ roles of motherhood

and service structured for us by men. And it is abundantly clear that, along with

discourses such as law and science and economics, religion as it has been constituted in

the west has done a great deal to keep such subject positions – both subjectivity and

subjection – firmly in place, not least in its emphasis on life after death. And the

philosophy of religion has not seen fit to challenge it.’49

For Irigaray then the question of women achieving her own speech is obviously closely

tied up with the question of women achieving subjectivity.

If becoming a subject means entry into language, and if language is always already

masculine, then a woman could achieve subjectivity only to the extent that she entered

into masculinist structures of rationality and discourse and did not rock the boat. For

Irigaray however Freud and Lacan have first consigning women to silence by defining

language as masculine, and then complain that women have nothing to say!

Jantzen writes that ‘Freud had seen women in terms of a lack; Lacan had glossed this lack

as the impossibility of woman as subject within phallocentric discourse. Rather than

engage in some variety of asserting woman’s right to equality with men, Irigaray is

simply not interested in women becoming subjects in the old masculinist ‘economy of the

Same’, taking up what would in fact be a male position.’50

Irigaray argues in This Sex which is not One that:

“The issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which woman would be the

subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of

49






25

suspending its pretension to the production of a truth and of a meaning that are

exclusively univocal.”51

For Jantzen ‘the whole subject-object binary in which women and men have been

inscribed in phallocentric discourse need to be destabilized.’52

Or as Ellen Armour of

Vanderbilt Divinity School puts it, Irigaray wishes to ‘set in motion a disruption in that

discourse that will open it up for a different discourse, that of the feminine imaginary.’53

Irigaray elaborates that ‘for woman it is not a matter of installing herself within this lack,

this negative, even by denouncing it, nor of reversing the economy of sameness by

turning the feminine into the standard for ‘sexual difference’; it is rather a matter of

trying to practice that difference.’54

Irigaray’s strategy therefore implies a different

agenda for the analysis and development of religious language than is standard in

traditional philosophy of religion.

A Feminine Divine Becoming

The masculine religious symbolic must be disrupted and space made for the

female divine. Irigaray calls on women to imagine God as a women in order to see God

as the perfection of their subjectivity as women. Jantzen states that ‘what Irigaray

advocates is that women begin deliberately to project the divine according to their

gender, as men have always done according to theirs. At present, men construct not only

the symbolic of the divine, but also that of women’s roles and relationships to the divine:

women are those who are called to be the suffering servants of humanity in the

reproduction of the world, and are seen as saintly if they accept that position with

humility and modesty. For this they, like men, may be rewarded with eternal blessedness

in a life after death. But this forcing of women into the roles constructed for us by men is

in the end a loss for both sexes.’55

For feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz currently neither

51

Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One, (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1985), P.78 52



Armour, Ellen T., Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference: Subverting the

Race / Gender Divide (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999), P.125 54

Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One, (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, [1977], 1985), P.159 55




26

men nor women are able to grow to adulthood together and become divinized together,

which Gorsz states is a loss for woman herself, for the community and for God.

Irigaray therefore proposes an understanding of the Divine as the creative

possibility for fecundity and flourishing. Jantzen invokes this under the symbol of what

she calls natality. Irigaray moves to create a new horizon of human becoming, a ‘new

morning in the world’, in which natality can be explored as the opening of new

possibilities.’56

Elizabeth Grosz articulates this sense of becoming:

“For Irigaray, the divine is not simply the reward for earthly virtue, all wishes

come true; it is rather the field of creativity, fertility, production, an always

uncertain and pre-empted field. It is the field or domain of what is new, what

has not existed before, a mode of transcendence, a projection of the past into a

future that gives the present new meaning and direction. The divine is a

movement ….. a movement of love …..”57

Irigaray sees the incarnation of Jesus as the beginning for humanity and that the

incarnation of all bodies (men’s and women’s) renders all potentially divine and replete

with the potential of divine becoming. Grace Jantzen therefore calls for philosophers and

theologians to … focus on forces of ‘natality’ (via a feminine symbolic) that celebrates

beauty, desire and the creative impulse.58

Beauty and the Sensible Transcendental

Luce Irigaray speaks in terms of a ‘sensible transcendental’, a transcendence

which is wholly immanent, not in opposition to the flesh but as the projected horizon for

our (embodied) becoming. Irigaray describes the trajectory of the person who perceives

beauty, loves it, and by uniting with beauty becomes divine. Jantzen quotes Irigaray as

writing: ‘The person would have attained what I shall call a sensible transcendental, the material

texture of beauty …. Beauty itself is seen as that which confounds the opposition between

56




(Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1999), P.15 Quoting Elizabeth Grosz 58




27

immanence and transcendence.’59 Just as beauty cannot be detached and float free from the

physical matter of a painting or sculpture, nor can transcendence float free of its sensible

configuration. Irigaray introduces the concepts of the sensible transcendental and female

divinity negatively in order to disrupt male dominance in religion and positively in order

to make space for a new becoming of both men and women.

An Ethics of Sexual Difference

In one of Irigaray’s most well received works An Ethics of Sexual Difference she

argues that ethical love cannot occur between men and women until there is respect and

wonder for the irreducible difference of the other, and an admittance and acceptance of

one’s finiteness. In Ethics Irigaray engages with a dialogue with a list of western

philosophers in order to expose underlying assumptions and prejudices in their work.

These include Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. Irigaray

argues that it is unethical that women have not had access to subjectivity, and that the

universals of our culture have been dominated by a male imaginary. Irigaray believes that

we must think of both otherness and divinity in conjunction with embodiment. Women

must become full subjects, and men must recognize that they too are embodied subjects.

Furthermore, ethical love relationships must be based in respect for alterity and

creativity.60

This line of thought will be considered further in the next chapter and its

implications for those engaged in interfaith dialogue explored.

Irigaray and the establishing Myth of Antigone

One of the establishing motifs that runs through the entire corpus of Irigaray’s

work from Speculum (1974) to the soon to be published In the Beginning, She was

(2012), is her reading of Sophocles’ play Antigone61

. The basic themes of Irigaray’s

analysis and philosophy are present in her critique of this ancient text. In her reading of

59



Donovan, Sarah K., Luce Irigaray, (Villanova University), article on peer reviewed Philosophy website

Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/irigaray/ 61

Sophocles was an Athenian playwright who wrote Antigone in or before 441 B.C.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/irigaray/


28

Antigone, Irigaray follows in the footsteps of German philosopher Martin Heidegger

(1889 – 1976) whose 1942 commentary (in part on Antigone) was inspired in turn by

German Romantic poet Friedrich Holderlin (1770 – 1843). Philosopher George Hegel62

(1770-1831), one of the creators of German idealism, also published a commentary on

Antigone.

Irigaray’s mentor in psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan, published a reading of

Sophocles’ Antigone as an enactment of an ethics of psychonalysis in 1959. Lacan

presented Sophocles’ Antigone as a model of pure desire for a seminar he gave entitled:

‘The Ethics of Psychoanalysis’.

Irigaray is quoted as noting that, despite subsequent additions and subtractions,

our (western) imagination functions according to the foundations put in place by ancient

Greek myth and tragedy.

This has additional significance for psychoanalysts, for Irigaray as for Lacan and

Freud, because ‘tragedy can be read by psychoanalysis as an externalized acting out of

the most basic processes of the human psyche.’63

Thus the great tragic myths of a culture

open a window unto the cultural subconscious of that culture and thus for Irigaray a re-

reading of those myths to bring up repressed elements can lead to a revivification and

redirection of that culture or pointers to same.

Outline of the story of Sophocles’ Antigone

Antigone is a daughter of the unwittingly incestuous marriage between the tragic

King Oedipus (of Thebes) and his own mother Jocasta. Oedipus has been fated to

unknowingly kill his father and marry his mother. When Oedipus’s true identity is

revealed, he goes into exile and subsequently dies. Sophocles’ version of the legend

opens with Oedipus’s sons Eteocles and Polynices agreeing to share power between

themselves, ruling in alternate years. Eteocles however refuses to relinquish power after

his year is over. Polynices therefore gathers an army and attacks the city of Thebes in a

conflict immortalized by another ancient Athenian playwright Aeschylus in a play

62

He of Hegelian dialectic fame (i.e. thesis, antithesis, synthesis) 63

Walsh, Lisa, Her Mother Her Self: The Ethics of the Antigone Family Romance, P.96 -125, Hypatia

Journal, vol. 14, no. 3 (Summer 1999) accessed at http://www.jstor.org/stable/3810488.


29

entitled the Seven Against Thebes. The Thebans win the war, but both sons of Oedipus

are killed, leaving Creon, brother of Jocasta, serving as regent for Laodamas, the son of

Etocles. Creon gives Eteocles a full and honorable burial, but orders (under penalty of

death) that Polynices' corpse be left to rot on the battlefield as punishment for his treason.

This state of non-burial was considered a frightening and terrible prospect in the culture

of ancient Greece, as one could not be judged by the Gods if not buried.

Antigone, a daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, who is betrothed to Creon's son,

Haemon, defies him by burying her brother, and is condemned to be entombed alive as

punishment. Creon upon reflection finally relents from carrying out this punishment on

Antigone. However, when Creon arrives at the tomb where she was to be interred,

Antigone has already hung herself rather than submit to being buried alive. Creon’s son,

Haemon, then threatens Creon and tries to kill him but ends up taking his own life. When

Creon's wife, Eurydice, is informed of Haemon's death she takes her own life out of grief

and with her last breath curses Creon. In the play's final scene Creon blames himself for

all the tragedies.

Another key character in the play is Antigone’s sister Ismene. Ismene serves as

the compassionate but rational and prudent counterpart to Antigone's headstrong style of

decision-making with no regard for consequence. While Antigone resolves to honor her

brother at all costs, Ismene laments that while she too loves her brother, her disposition

does not allow her to defy the state and become an outlaw. Ismene therefore refuses to

take part in the outlawed burial rites.

In the play, Creon is pitted against Antigone, who holds up the will of the gods

and the honor of her family above all else, and thus he appears to be against these values.

A well established theme in Antigone is the right of the individual to reject society's

infringement on her freedom to perform a personal obligation (in this case of a religious

or spiritual character), obvious in Antigone’s refusal to let Creon dictate what she is

allowed to do with her family members. She says to Ismene about Creon's edict, ‘He has

no right to keep me from my own.’ Related to this theme is the question whether

Antigone's will to bury her brother is based on rational thought or instinct, a debate

whose contributors include greats writers such as the German Goethe.


30

Irigaray reads Antigone as the story of a woman struggling to determine her own

subjective identity and destiny in an overwhelmingly Patriarchal culture. She is willing to

lie down in death with her brother rather than conform to Attic law. Though Irigaray

recognizes that Greek tragic drama is itself an art form derived from Patriarchal dialectic,

she moves beyond Hegel to Lacan’s reading of the drama to focus on Antigone’s desire

as the driving force for her ethical stance. Irigaray criticizes Lacan for underplaying the

role of Antigone’s mother Jocaste in the drama. Lacan states that Antigone takes up her

mother’s part in the drama but for Irigaray this reduces Antigone to a cipher for her

mother and disregards Antigone’s own subjectivity. Irigaray doesn’t disregard the fact

that Antigone commits suicide, (following her mother Jocasta) and thus indeed is

motivated by a death drive of some sort, yet (for Irigaray), Antigone hangs herself in

order not to become another phallic mother, but to stay the female subject she truly is.

Next to her search for female subjectivity, Antigone also appears to be longing for the

reinstatement of a maternal, female genealogy, which would make it possible for women

to be subjects of their own.64

The Irigarayian Antigone continues as an emblem of Irigaray’s ethics of sexual

difference and of feminist political philosophy referenced continually in Irigaray’s work

up to and including this years (2012) In the beginning, She was. Therefore in order to

come to a true ethics of sexual difference, the role historically allotted to women needs to

be transformed. Irigaray claims that ‘Antigone could be an ethical inspiration to us, by

stating that “she must be allowed to speak” so that a more feminine Symbolic might start

to rise up. This (re)creation of a feminine Symbolic would not only make female

subjectivity possible, but would also bring men and women closer together, according to

Irigaray, since women would now have the right to be conscious subjects (unlike Hegel’s

Antigone), and men would no longer be closed up in solipsism (like Hegel’s Creon).’65

64

Evelien Geerts, Antigone and Ismene reclaimed. From tragic female figures to feminist-political

paradigms. Post-graduate research paper, Dept. of Gender and Ethnicity, Utrecht University. Accessed

online at:

http://uu.academia.edu/EvelienGeerts/Papers/777499/Antigone_and_Ismene_reclaimed._From_tragic_fem

ale_figures_to_feminist-political_paradigms 65

Evelien Geerts, Antigone and Ismene reclaimed. From tragic female figures to feminist-political

paradigms. Post-graduate research paper, Dept. of Gender and Ethnicity, Utrecht University. P.4, Accessed

online at:

http://uu.academia.edu/EvelienGeerts/Papers/777499/Antigone_and_Ismene_reclaimed._From_tragic_female_figures_to_feminist-political_paradigms



31

Here Irigaray engages in a plausible interpretation of a classic literary work of the

western canon, an interpretation at least as plausible as that of Hegel or Lacan, though the

reader needs to bear in mind that Irigaray embraces psychoanalytic and philosophic

readings of a text simultaneously in order to generate her arguments.

http://uu.academia.edu/EvelienGeerts/Papers/777499/Antigone_and_Ismene_reclaimed._From_tragic_fem

ale_figures_to_feminist-political_paradigms



Chapter 2 Reading Irigaray as an Interfaith Theologian


“But – by I don’t know what mystery! – transcendence is something that interests me

very much. Often the way in which I’m read and interpreted is too immanent, too much

tied to contiguity, and the source and reference of my work is misunderstood. It’s true

that a woman who has a relationship to transcendence and to the transcendental in a real

rather than a formal way is something all too rare. But I’d say there’s been a little of that

in my life.”66

– Luce Irigaray, ‘Je - Luce Irigaray’: A Meeting with Luce Irigaray

Irigaray and the Religions

For Irigaray religion in some mysterious way ‘holds together the totality of the

self, of the community, of culture.’67

It ‘infuses an additional life into the individual and

collective dimensions that unite the corporeal with the spiritual, the sensible with the

mental, and the self with the other.’68

She calls for a re-imagining of God and particularly the God of the monotheistic

faiths in order that we have renewed ‘confidence in our divine possibilities.’69

. Irigaray

expands on this theme, stating: “We could abandon the object-entity God – letting him

keep his name for the time being – to restore to him a form of energy that would inspire

us to develop fully into ourselves, and to live fully our relation to the other, to others, and

to the world around us.”70

This line of thinking is similar to the American theologian John D. Caputo, a

noted commentator on postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida, when Caputo speaks of

the event that is harboured (but not contained) by the name of God.71

66

Hirsh, E. and Olsen G. A., ‘Je - Luce Irigaray’: A Meeting with Luce Irigaray,

JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, 1996, 16.3, accessed online at:

http://www.cas.usf.edu/JAC/163/irigaray.html, P.360 67


P.171 Ch.15 Spiritual Tasks for Our Age 68

Ibid, P.171 69

Ibid, P.172 70

Ibid, P.172 71

Caputo, John D., The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, (Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana

University Press, 2006), P.44.



33

American religious studies Professor and Christian philosopher Carl Raschke also

reads Derrida as stating that faith itself undermines the fixed narrative structure of

organized religion. Faiths openness to the coming of the impossible event (the eschaton)

and the impossible other (messianism) undermines fixity in religious expression. Faith

deconstructs static religious observance because of its messianic yearning.

Derrida himself says of the disclosure of the Messianic structure of reality through

deconstruction, that it is a movement towards the Other as Other. The Other is precisely

what is not invented and therefore deconstructive inventiveness can consist only in

opening foreclusionary structures, so as to allow for the passage toward the Other.

John D. Caputo in his work Towards a Weak Theology: a theology of the event

points out the paradoxes in theology. Firstly that the name of God contains an event it

cannot contain, in a relative stability which will always be undone, deconstructed, by the

event itself. The event contained in the name of God is the possibility of the impossible,

something unforeseeable that shatters our horizons (of logic) or expectation.

For interfaith encounter this theology is important because the uncontainability of

the event (of God) and the endless translatability of the name (of God) means that, as

Caputo argues, “an event (God) cuts across the distinctions amoung the various

confessions, and even across the distinction between the confessional faiths and secular

unbelief, in order to touch upon a more elemental, if ambiguous, quality of our lives,

however this quality is given words or formulated, with or without what is conventionally

called religion or theology.”72

Indeed it is in the gift of future time and our desire to have the undeconstructibles

(perfect justice, friendship, hospitality) come to perfect fulfillment in the here and now

that gives witness to our openness to the God event as the bringer of the impossible

beyond creed or lack thereof. Thus Caputo’s Weak theology, like Martin Buber’s

dialogical community, involves the sanctification of the person through and because of

the sanctification of the Community of Persons as distinct from the sanctification of one’s

own being in classic onto-theology (or being centered theology). (i.e. ‘I’ centred theology

rather than I-thou centred theology).

72

Caputo, John D., The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, (Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana

University Press, 2006), P.4


34

Thus Irigaray call on the religions to champion “an indeterminate absolute that

determines us nonetheless.”73

While “we must … continue to inquire into the letter and

the spirit, the spirit (should be) … conceived as a kind of energy that must be channeled,

or conducted, without reducing it to the letter, which would annihilate it.”

Irigaray concludes: “No tradition …. can claim to possess the religious truth of

humanity, until it has discovered the best possible way to spiritualize that energy without

crippling it in order to make it impervious to other traditions. (Italics added). While no

tradition should want to carry out religious colonization, there should be an effort to

liberate other traditions from closure, with an eye to a more fully human spiritual

development.”74

Irigaray and interfaith hermeneutics

In her introduction to the text Interreligious Hermeneutics, Catherine Cornille

cites four major approaches to interreligious hermeneutics. These are: ‘(i) the

hermeneutical retrieval of resources for dialogue within one’s own tradition (ii) the

pursuit of proper understanding of the other (iii) the appropriation and reinterpretation of

the other within one’s own religious framework (iv) the borrowing of hermeneutical

principles of another religion.’75

Of interest when considering what contribution Luce

Irigaray’s work can make to interreligious dialogue are the categories of interreligious

hermeneutics considered as the hermeneutical retrieval of resources for dialogue within

one’s own tradition and interreligious hermeneutics as the pursuit of the proper

understanding of the other.76

73

Key writings, P.172 74

Ibid, P.172 75

Ed. Cornille, Catherine and Christopher Conway, Interreligious Hermeneutics, (Eugene, OR, Wipf and

Stock, 2010), x, Introduction 76


Stock, 2010), xi and xiii, Introduction


35

Building an adequate interfaith hermeneutic

An adequate philosophy and hermeneutic77

of alterity and otherness is necessary

for those who engage in interfaith dialogue, to open up mental and cultural space to

welcome the other in their otherness. This is particularly true for the main monotheistic

faiths where pre-rehearsed dogmatic answers can dominate interfaith encounters either

openly or passively. It is the main argument of this thesis that a close reading of

Irigaraian thought can inform and educate here, that Irigaray’s sensitivity to the sexual

other and to the construction or retrieval of an original two subjectivity culture, can

inform a culture of growth with the religious other in a era of peaceful human becoming.

The construction of such a self-critical and reflective hermeneutic from Irigarian

concepts is in line with the thinking of Catherine Cornille of Boston College when she

writes “there can be no doubt that dialogue will require some degree of hermeneutical

effort and religious creativity from every religious tradition.”78

and also that dialogue

“leads to a sharper realization of some of the religious beliefs and attitudes that inhibit an

open and constructive exchange with other religions.”79

Elsewhere, in her introduction to the collection of essays entitled Interreligious

Hermeneutics, Cornille writes that one major challenge in interreligious hermeneutics is

the effort required to retrieve internal resources for dialogue within a religious tradition.

She states that “few religions are naturally disposed to reaching out toward the religious

other … the possibility of interreligious understanding and dialogue, therefore, generally

presupposes some degree of internal hermeneutical effort.”80

Cornille writes that

hermeneutics “is based on the presupposition that all understanding … is always in

process and subject to development and change, depending on the personal and cultural

horizon of the reader and on the particular set of questions brought to the text.”81

What is

77

Hermeneutics here is understood to mean the study of the interpretation of not just written texts but

everything in the interpretative process including verbal and nonverbal forms of communication as well as

presuppositions, the meaning and philosophy of language, and semiotics. 78

Cornille, Catherine, the im-possibility of interreligious dialogue, (New York, Crossroad Publishing

Company, 2008), P.215 79

Ibid, P.215 80


Stock, 2010), Introduction, xi 81


Stock, 2010), Introduction, xi


36

sought is the “retrieval of resources that might engender greater openness toward other

religions.”82

Interfaith Hermeneutical Key for Irigaray: Liberating Female Subjectivity

For Luce Irigaray the way forward for the religions in general and for interfaith

dialogue in particular, is to generate a culture that respects both the subjectivity of

women and their capacity to mediate the transcendent in a corporal way. Thus she places

great store on the importance of the inclusion of the female voice in the generation of

hermeneutics and in the renewal of contemporary culture. Irigaray also argues that

feminine use of language trends toward the increased use of and evolution of dialogue

and away from direct confrontation:

“This culture needs other means of expression and communication than those of a

culture in the masculine. As the discourses of boys and girls, men and women show us,

language is not used in the same way by the two sexes. Without any doubt, speech will

become more close to dialogue in a culture in the feminine, requiring the preferred use of

other linguistic functions. Women intend less to control and appropriate the whole world

through a certain logic which secures their autonomy with respect to nature. They

emphasize less naming, defining, fixing – and all which exists in ideas or concepts. They

want more to enter into communication with the world and above all with the other(s),

quite apart from any objects, at least any tangible objects. Woman is more familiar with

being in communication or communion before the constitution of objects as such. She

communicates through air, through blood, through milk, and even through voice and love

before and beyond any perceptible thing … the problem, for her, is how to distinguish the

other from herself, how to be capable of remaining herself or returning to herself without

flowing into the other(s). … Woman, unlike man, wants to speak-with more then to

speak-of … She prefers to be-with rather than appropriating, possessing, making and

exchanging objects or things.”83

82

Ibid, Introduction, xi 83


from Preface, xiii


37

For Irigaray, women are psychologically more prepared to maintain a duality of

subjectivities in their approach to dialogue:

“Speaking-with and being-with necessitate a respect for difference which will

preserve the duality of subjects. The space between the two will be kept by silence, …

This silence maintains the possibility of entering into presence as two, two different, and

of talking together a language which is neither already defined nor the same for each one.

Such a way of communicating requires another sort of listening-to: no longer an

acknowledging of meanings already coded for transmitting information but a listening to

the still unspoken words of the other, to his or her singular personal discourse,

furthermore addressed to a specific person. The accent is then displaced from an only

mental activity to a global perceptive attention. ….”84

Irigaray’s basic thesis is that if feminine subjectivity can be adequately respected

in culture and dialogue then feminine capacities for welcoming alterity can result in the

transformation of human culture:

“Duality in the feminine subjectivity rather corresponds to a search for entering

into dialogue and being with the other. Here, this dual situation would be the basis for all

relations, not only emotional, sexual or maternal. … If woman succeeds in respecting the

transcendence of the other, …. she could allow man to have access to a new relational

behaviour. Another age of humanity could result from that, an age in which its most

specific dimension will finally be accomplished: relating with the other not only at the

level of instinct or drive in all its forms but at the levels of breath, of love, of speaking-

with and listening-to, of thinking.”85

For Irigaray one cannot begin to dialogue with and appreciate any alterity,

including the religious other, unless one has released a feminine subjectivity in culture:

“We have to begin with the sexuate difference because it is the most basic and

universal, the one which first articulates nature and culture. Without working through this

relation from the very beginning, we cannot succeed in entering into relation with all the

kinds of other, not even with the same as ourselves. ….

84

Ibid, Preface, xiv 85

Ibid, Preface, xv


38

Working for the liberation or construction of a feminine subjectivity and a culture

of two subjects, we are really working towards the liberation of humanity itself, and

towards another time of our becoming as humans. Such a task is especially appropriate in

a multicultural era as is ours if we intend to reach a pacific and democratic global society

and culture.”86

Interfaith hermeneutical Key: Reimagining the Divine

Irigaray has also called for ‘a reconception of divinity in a feminine mode.’87

Irigaray sees this as essential for building a culture in which alternative subjectivities are

supported. In order for women to embark on a culture changing course they need to

conceive of God, the Divine, the transcendent as with them in their endeavors. This

applies to all world religions and reads as another hermeneutical key for Irigaray as an

interfaith theologian. She states: “Divinity is what we need to become, free, autonomous,

sovereign … If women have no God, they are unable either to communicate or commune

with one another. They need, we need, an infinite if they are to share a little”.88

Women

must begin to claim their own subjectivity by imaging a God who guarantees feminine

identity by mirroring woman, as Irigaray explains: “Woman has no mirror with which to

become woman. Having a God and becoming one’s gender go hand in hand. God is the

other that we absolutely cannot be without. In order to become, we need some shadowy

perception of achievement; not a fixed objective, not a One postulated to be immutable

but rather a cohesion and a horizon that assures us the passage between past and future …

God alone can save us, keep us safe. The feeling or experience of a positive, objective,

glorious, existence, the feeling of subjectivity, is essential for us. Just like a God who

helps us and lead us in the path of becoming, who keeps track of our limits and our

infinite possibilities – as women – who inspires our projects.”89

86


from Preface, xv 87


Critical Perspectives, (Fetter Lane, London, Routledge, 2003), P.41, Judith L. Poxon, Corporeality and

Divinity, Irigaray and the Problem of the Ideal 88

Irigaray, Luce, Sexes and Genealogies, (New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 1993), P.62 89

Irigaray, Luce, Sexes and Genealogies, (New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 1993), P.67


39

Thus woman needs to re-imagine the Divine as a foundation for feminine

subjectivity in order that women can move towards feminine ideals of perfection. Stated

negatively Irigaray argues: “the only diabolical thing about women is their lack of a God

and the fact that, deprived of God, they are forced to comply with models that do not

match them, that exile, double, mask them, cut them off from themselves and from one

another, stripping away their ability to move forward into love, art, thought, towards their

ideal and divine fulfillment.”90

As Irigaray states above91

, the religions cripple the energy of the spirit of God

when they try to make themselves impervious to other traditions. Irigaray urges the

religions in dialogue together ‘to liberate other traditions from closure, with an eye to a

more fully human spiritual development.’92

Irigaray recommends that one embrace a provisional, apophatic, partial and even

fractured understanding of the Divine, in order to leave room for the other in our

encounters. She stated that ‘a single Whole cannot hold together everyone and

everything.’93

Irigaray says that the western tendency to attach the fullness of the

meaning of logos to our understanding of God is tantamount to reducing the concept ‘to

death more than to keeping it as something still to germinate.’ She concludes that ‘the

space kept free for approaching is then already filled, and the approach becomes

impossible, except in a fictive way and in the name of an unconscious bondage to a

common death.’94

When we do abandon this metaphysical fullness however we may be

rewarded with another type of fullness, that is, ‘the fruit of an encounter that it would be

fitting to celebrate and remember without wanting it to be permanent or at the disposal of

one person alone.’95

90

Irigaray, Luce, Sexes and Genealogies, (New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 1993), P.64 91

See section ‘Irigaray and the Religions’, Ch. 2., this text. 92



Irigaray, Luce, the Way of Love, (Tower Building, London, Continuum Publishing, 2004), P.157 94


Irigaray, Luce, the Way of Love, (Tower Building, London, Continuum Publishing, 2004), P.157


40

Interfaith hermeneutical Key: Educating for Diversity

Irigaray asserts that systems of education and broader generators of human

cultures must be geared toward the development of the individual such that they are able

to relate to the other as other: “Individual development cannot be closed off in one unique

truth, morality, or cult – all offspring of the same religious family, or at times the same

politico-religious family – but must be linked to the development of relations to the other

as other.”96

Irigaray discerns that the key to developing compassion for the other as other is

first to liberate oneself from love of the same as the self which is inherited from family

and genealogy (both physical and spiritual). Irigaray cites in this regard the Eastern

tradition of being reborn autonomously through breathing, through mastery of the breath.

“Relationships would then be characterized not by degrees of more or less, but rather by

difference, the most universal example of which is sexual difference.”97

Irigaray’s hope is that “we would become capable of mutual transmission of energy, an

energy that is not necessarily subject to the same truth. We could experience this through

an encounter with (those) practicing another spiritual tradition … We can also come to

know it … in the encounter with a spiritually autonomous person of the other sex.”98

Irigaray also asserts that the spiritual attraction between mature people of the

opposite sex can give rise to a spiritual dynamic in which personal development can

occur. “In effect the spiritual attraction between the sexes remains indeterminate; nothing

can express it, or fix it into laws or representations without abolishing it.”99

Spirituality

and religion thus becomes a matter of “maintaining the attraction … in the life of the

relationship, not through the seduction or subjugation of the one by the other, or even

through moral regulation, but rather through a spiritual dynamic in each one. This

requires that the development of each leave an opening for the encounter with the other

96



Irigaray, Lu Irigaray, Luce, Luce Irigaray, Key Writings, (Tower Building, London, Continuum

Publishing, 2004), P.172 Ch.15 Spiritual Tasks for Our Age ce, Luce Irigaray, Key Writings, (Tower

Building, London, Continuum Publishing, 2004), P.173 Ch.15 Spiritual Tasks for Our Age 98




P.173 Ch.15 Spiritual Tasks for Our Age


41

as other. Development is thus accomplished through the search for a personal absolute

that accepts being questioned, modified, and fecundated by the development of the other

towards their absolute.”100

(Italics added).Thus for Irigaray learning to have “a spiritual

relationship between the sexes would allow us to reunite human and divine elements that

have been artificially separated by the domination of one sex over the other, by the

dominance of the values of one sex over those of the other.”101

An example of learning in

this new mode is the many new religious communities within the post-Vatican II Catholic

Church which have embraced mixed sex communities in the hope and expectation of just

such advancement in human spiritual maturity.

Interfaith hermeneutical Key: accepting the dominance of ethically

conditioned behaviours over morally conditioned ones

Irigaray identifies a Patriarchal moralism, at the heart of the monotheistic faiths in

particular, that inhibits both the becoming of female subjectivity and genuine encounter

with the other as other. Irigaray states: “… in our patriarchal monotheistic traditions

today, what a man means by the name of God is very different from what a woman

means, even if her quest for the absolute is already oriented by necessities proper to the

male subject – which paralyses a part of her spiritual energy into a kind of idolatry or

passivity. Fortunately women’s religious feeling, taking root below men’s beliefs and

rites, can generally preserve a part of itself.”102

Irigaray critiques the moulding of believers into an undifferentiated mass by

patriarchal religions: ‘What needs to be called into question in the development of

patriarchal spirituality is the loss of differentiation among believers, and the

predominance of a model of the Absolute in relation to them. …. This supposedly

universal model, indicating behaviour with respect to the other, confines itself to the

generalities of an elementary construction of personal and collective identity …’103

100





Ibid, P.175 Ch.15 Spiritual Tasks for Our Age 103




42

In the contemporary world, she argues that ‘our consciences seek a more subtle

spiritual guidance, perhaps because our multicultural times are more attentive to

difference, despite resistance to it on the part of blindly egalitarian doctrines and politics.

Moreover, acquaintance with other traditions shows us how their moral paths are

sometimes subtler, more diversified, less abstract, and less undifferentiated than ours are.

…the almost daily contact with other traditions, the evolution of relations between

the sexes, gradually leads us from a universal morality inscribed within each of us,

towards an ethics which takes into account particularities, differences, contingencies,

and requires us to rediscover the other as other, and to invent, along with him or her, a

style of comportment that could in no way pre-exist our encounter, without risking the

denial of the other in his or her alterity.’104

Irigaray argues that this new ethical approach leads the person into a new type of

subjectivity in the contemporary world: ‘Where a written law was used to dictate to my

conscience once and for all what had to be done, I now find that I am required to open up

within myself a non-inscribed space, a virgin space, if you will, from which I can listen to

and welcome the other, and invent, along with him or her, a relation that goes beyond the

elementary imperatives of respect for natural life and for possessions, towards the

development of a new kind of spiritual relation to the other. This relation cannot, at the

risk of failing to respect the other as other, remain within the horizon of the Absolute of

one and only one tradition. It must be able to open up, towards the other and with the

other, a space liberated from the imperatives of one single culture, so that encounter and

dialogue become possible.’105

Thus ethical praxis worked out in dialogue between faiths and in other

relationships need to take a certain precedence over singular moralistic claims. Irigaray

believes that ‘ethics must come to replace – or at least accompany – more individualistic

morals, since ethics cares about the cultural space, the spiritual space, both contextual

and interior, where the other exists as other. .... Ethics … require that law not be an a

104






43

priori universal, except in the case of a law of silence, of attentiveness, of co-existence

and communication in consideration for difference, and differences.’

Irigaray argues, in a manner similar to French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas but

different also in her insistence on the sexed other, that ethics must be considered as first

philosophy or in Irigaray’s writing that the wisdom of love be given priority over the love

of wisdom. Irigaray also insists that women themselves are more suited naturally to

accommodate this change: ‘Women are probably somewhat better prepared for this step

forward required for the spiritual development of humanity. Actually, on a daily basis,

they are led to respect the life of the other, in maternity and in love itself. Abstract

behaviour is of little use to them for managing their pregnancies, their motherhood, or

their love life. … Women are called upon directly to fulfill an ethical task, to respect the

other as other …’106

Interfaith hermeneutical Key: Respect for diverse locales of transcendence

Irigaray argues that when we respect the otherness of the other we are introduced

to ‘another relation to transcendence’ within our discourses ‘whose elaboration and

safeguarding are now incumbent upon us, as it has been incumbent upon the Greek

philosophers to define the kind of transcendence that we have now to relinquish, to

abandon.’107

Irigaray describes this new relation to transcendence as ‘no longer a

question of approaching an unattainable perfection, situated outside our subjectivity, of

our world, of which it nevertheless represents a model.’108

She argues that ‘the task is

rather (one) of transforming ourselves at every moment in order to respect and care about

the subsistence and becoming of both myself and the other, that is, of two radically

different subjects.’109

Irigaray states that ‘the journey is now more internal and the other

is no longer the one – the One – whom I have to become, even though I know that this

106



Irigaray, Luce (Ed.) and Mary Green, Luce Irigaray: Teaching, (Tower Building, London, Continuum

Publishing, 2008), P.238-9 108


Publishing, 2008), P.239 109


Publishing, 2008), P.239


44

Other is unattainable. On the contrary, the other is the one I must keep different from me.

It is by maintaining the difference between our two subjectivities that I construct

transcendence, mine and, as far as is possible, that of the other.’110

For Irigaray, the

necessity is to pass beyond the old mental construct of transcendence and engage with

transcendence in a way that transfigures ‘all that we are: body, breath, heart, word (and)

mind.’111

Thus a new authority can exist, ‘an authority that results from our becoming

human in a more accomplished way. An authority that imposes nothing if not a certain

respect, attention and questioning. … An authority that calls the other to a transformation

of himself or herself, to a becoming with the accomplishment of humanity in view. An

authority that does not amount to the exercise of power that is more or less repressive, but

is teaching itself.’112

A teaching that is teaching the other to transcend his or her self in

new ways towards new ends.

This task, of engaging with transcendence in a new way, Irigaray feels, is one which is

appropriate to our times in that it allows us to coexist in difference and is particularly

appropriate for those searching for a way forward together for the religions. Thus we

have a duty ‘to make transcendence exist beyond the fall of past idols. It teaches us how

to respect difference amoungst ourselves, instead of difference becoming a source of

conflicts and wars, notably between transcendences or idols. It entrusts us to a becoming

of humanity on our scale … and permits us to use the sciences, including social and

psychological sciences, in a manner which is not destructive for humanity.’113

For Irigaray this respect for transcendence must occur first between the sexes, ‘it

means changing … towards respect for the other as transcendent to me, to another I will

never know, either corporeally or mentally, and never make into my possession, not even

as my hypothetical human “other half”.’114

Irigaray identifies woman as naturally

inclined to allow the transcendence of the other, when she states that ‘…….the first

ethical gesture of a woman is to let the other exist, not through over-valorizing this other

in traditional transcendence, but through accepting the other must remain unknown to her

110

Ibid, P.239 111

Ibid, P.239 112

Ibid, P.240 113


Publishing, 2008), P.240 114




45

and not appropriated by her, neither as lover, nor as child. This amounts to recognizing

the other as transcendent to the self – not superior, but rather irreducibly other.’115

Irigaray posits that this respect for the transcendence of the other as other also leads

organically to a non-utilitarian attitude to the cosmos about us, moreover the cosmos

itself then becomes a referand in the construction of these new identities: ‘Respect for the

transcendence of the other as other within sexual difference will also allow us to relearn

to respect the cosmos as having an existence other than ours and that is not at the

disposal of our needs and our desires. Cosmic nature, moreover, represents an

indispensable universal for having access to the recognition of the other as irreducible to

the self, since our tradition cannot serve as third term in arranging a specific identity for

each of us.’116

The respect for mystery in this new relation enables both men and women to

continue along their own spiritual paths, permitting a spiritual evolution of their relation.

Irigaray writes that ‘the traditional opposition between darkness and light gives way to

the discovery that a certain manner of conceiving the light in our tradition has prevented

us from perceiving another light, the light that emanates from the other but that we cannot

understand. Renouncing possession of the other becomes not just a simple ascetic

privation, but the means of achieving a kind of relation we do not yet know, one that is

more religious and at the same time more likely to attain beatitude in the here and now.

A beatitude not granted to those who make the way alone, but rather to those who try to

share the way with the other, in the respect for different identities and journeys.’117

Interfaith hermeneutical Key: Having in place the goal of the fulfillment of

all of humanity

One critique than can be leveled at interfaith dialogue is that its long term goals

and ambitions are too modest and therefore its corresponding methodologies and

practices are too limited. Irigaray however insists that the creation of a modus Vivendi in

115






P.182


46

contemporary multi-cultural societies is not and should not be enough. What she calls for

is for an open acknowledgement that the long term goal for all parties should be the

fulfillment of the community of human persons, including their spiritual fulfillment, and

that any hermeneutic that falls short of this is deficient. Irigaray is aware that

‘globalization requires consideration for the differences among cultures, and the search

for a fecund co-existence in respect for their respective paths.’118

Irigaray argues that we must go beyond our received religious instruction and

tradition (our spiritual genealogy – to use Irigaray’s term) in order ‘to search for the way

of human flourishing still to come.’119

We cannot do this enclosed ‘ within a single

tradition that ends up making God the property of a religious community. It is the human

as such, in a universal perspective, that we have to question today.’120

Especially in this

time because we now are for the first time ‘discovering a panoramic view of the whole of

humanity and its history.’121

At a personal level Irigaray argues that ‘it is necessary to learn to be active in a

way that does not prevent receptiveness to grace’122

, which she defines as ‘a qualitatively

unpredictable gift.’123

In order to be both active and open to spiritual growth for Irigaray

it is necessary to seek out ways of mediating between the active and passive modes in

ones life. ‘The same mediations do not necessarily suit each one, man or woman. It is

important to actively seek those adapted to oneself: reading, music, walking in nature,

collective ritual practice, silent in-gathering … What counts is assuring a constant

passage from an inanimate material to a living flesh, from a corporeal inertia to a body

animated with intentions, from a conformity to a natural or cultural innateness or received

118


P.183 119


P.186 120


P.186 121


P.186 122

Ibid, P.187 123

Ibid, P.187


47

practice to the transformation, transfiguration of these givens into means allowing natural

and spiritual growth.’124

Irigaray is critical of an unthinking, unreflected upon spiritual conformity because for her

this does not just denote spiritual immaturity but also marks a failure to take the measure

of one’s human spiritual becoming and thus a failure to engage in what Irigaray regards

as the essential task of living.

“Each one must take charge of accomplishing the becoming of humanity,

divine becoming, in oneself and for oneself, for others, for the evolution of

history. Any form of conformity, of submission, of slavery is a non-religious

gesture, in the sense that it paralyses becoming.

For an adult human, obeying blindly does not correspond to a religious

comportment except in certain moments of absolute disarray when giving up

is the way to survival. In other times, the conquest of liberty linked to maturity

and the autonomy that it allows are more favourable to a spiritual

development. Not to venture towards them makes it difficult to measure

oneself with the divine as a human dimension.”

She is also critical of her own Catholic western tradition of orientating the

spiritual gaze of the believer heavenward at every opportunity to the neglect of the

reception of the other as other who is close at hand: ‘By measuring every subjectivity in

relation to a Wholly Other, our tradition has underestimated the importance of the alterity

of the other with whom I enter into relation every day. Nevertheless, respect for the other

as such corresponds to an ethical task which supports my spiritual becoming.’125

For Irigaray we must today direct our gaze towards the other in their otherness in

order to proceed towards the goal of the fulfillment of all humanity. ‘Particularly

accomplished is the gesture that succeeds in passing from – without for all that destroying

– a vertical transcendence linked to genealogy to a horizontal transcendence linked to a

124


P.188 125


P.189


48

difference both natural and cultural between subjects.’126

This is necessary ‘in order to

continue human becoming.’127

Interfaith hermeneutical Key: Retrieving of the female imaginary through

the generation of new cultural symbols, some Irigarian concepts and motifs

Irigaray deliberately avoids offering a set plan to bring about a culture that

respects diverse subjectivities because for her a set plan is itself a western construct of a

masculine culture which would merely realign an existing order rather than establish a

new way of becoming in a human, spiritual, political and economic sense. As Margaret

Whitford puts it: ‘She (Irigaray) wants to persuade her readers, but she also wants to

allow for the possibility of something new emerging from the dialogue between her and

her readers. With her texts, there is a tension between an invitation to create collectively

an unknown future and a strong affirmative will… .’128

Instead of definitions what

Irigaray offers some motifs and concepts that can be useful, in her view, in connecting

with a submerged feminine imaginary in order to generate new cultural symbols.

In an interview for an academic journal, Irigaray states:

“In the first place, I want to say that I resist genres because in Western

tradition to pigeon-hole oneself in a genre is to accept a hierarchy-let's say,

between philosophy first and then art, thus to accept that the artistic subject is

second in relation to the subject who defines truth first.

This I don't want. I resist perhaps because I'm a woman, and traditionally

women have always had a way of speaking, of expressing themselves

artistically rather than simply, coolly, logically, and I don't want to participate

in the repression of this mode of expression. Neither do I want to remain

within literature.

126


P.190 127


P.190 128

Madison, Gary B. & Fairbairn, Marty (Ed.’s), The Ethics of Postmodernity, Current Trends in

Continental Thought (Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1999), Morny Joy essay

Metamorphosis: Luce Irigaray and an Erotics of Ethics and Hermeneutics, P.198


49

I'd like to say also that I resist genres because, and above all, what matters to

me is opening new ways of thought. That is, I want to think and I don't want

simply to submit myself to the traditional categories of logic and

understanding, not simply. To accede to these new ways of thought, it's

necessary to find a new mode of thinking, a new mode of speaking. I'm not

the first to say so; for example, Nietzsche said so, Heidegger said so. I think

it's extremely important to accede to thinking and not remain within the

logical categories of an intelligence of commentary, or an intelligence of

abstract rationality. I want to find a way of thinking that's been forgotten in

Western tradition.”129

That is to say, for Irigaray, a way of thinking that has been repressed in western

culture since the time of the ancient Greeks. Indeed in the past decade Irigaray’s ideas

have been taken up and applied to disclose repressed meanings in such diverse fields as

the study of Renaissance Literature, in Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture,130

(2004)

and culture and contemporary film studies, in A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray,

Women and Film,131

(2008). Caroline Bainbridge, author of A Feminine Cinematics: Luce

Irigaray, Women and Film summarizes Irigaray’s struggle for articulation and

representation as being ‘bound up with issues of genealogy and subjectivity, as well as

with her critique of the dominant metaphysics of presence which focuses on the

privileging of the visual and the logocentric within the symbolic order and its discursive

and representational systems. Irigaray’s critique of phallogocentrism and her attempts to

evoke a feminine imaginary depend on our symbolic notions of what representation is

and how it can be constituted.’132

Thus what Irigaray brings to the table so to speak, are

concepts and motifs that enable one engaged in dialogue to do so with an outlook which

129

Hirsh, E. and Olsen G. A., ‘Je - Luce Irigaray’: A Meeting with Luce Irigaray, JAC: A Journal of

Composition Theory, 1996, 16.3, P.7 of interview text, accessed online at:

http://www.cas.usf.edu/JAC/163/irigaray.html 130

Krier, Theresa and Elizabeth D. Harvey (Ed.’s), Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture, Thresholds of

history, (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2004) 131

Bainbridge, Caroline, A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film, (175 Fifth Avenue,

New York, Palgrave MacMillan ,2008). The films of director Sofia Coppola including The Virgin Suicides

and Lost in Translation could be referenced in this context. 132

Bainbridge, Caroline, A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film, (175 Fifth Avenue,

New York, Palgrave MacMillan ,2008), P.11



50

embraces gendered otherness (including religious otherness) in a receptive and

wholesome way. In essence with Irigaray one becomes an active defender of the

subjectivity of the other.

Irigaraian Concept: Double Syntax

Irigaray calls for a ‘double syntax’ to be operative in our construction of human

subjectivity. For Irigaray there is a double syntax within the Symbolic; where ‘at present,

the phallocentric syntax is virtually the only one at play, and the syntax appropriate to

women is almost unknown.’133

Irigaray argues that there is a ‘logic or syntax, the logic of

the unconscious that is quite other than the Greek logos or rationality.’134

Her hope is that

this syntax can be constructed through dialogue with the other as other so that ‘the double

syntax – the divisions between consciousness and unconscious, for example – can be

rendered internal to each sex. Because problematically in the present culture

‘symbolically, the line of cleavage goes between the two sexes. Men continue to

transcend ‘nature’ – biology, mortality – by allotting ‘nature’ to the side of women

(leaving aside for the moment the question of what ‘nature’ means). But because of the

operations of the double syntax, the unwanted or transcended functions have been subject

to cultural repression and splitting; they are, in a certain sense, unconscious….’135

Irigaray therefore is arguing for ‘a symbolic redistribution, so that men can accept

that part of themselves which is ‘nature’, without needing to attribute it to women, and so

that women can accede to the transcendental functions previously allotted to men.’136

(Where the term ‘sensible transcendental’ serves to indicate the aim of this redistribution

(see section below)). In the words of noted commentator on Irigaray, Margaret Whitford:

‘ideally, the “male” and “female” readings should be linked (“both at once”) in a kind of

creative and fertile partnership, which would correspond to the amorous exchange that

appears so often as an image in Irigaray’s work. In the double gesture, neither would be

133

Brand, Peg Zeglin, Beauty Matters, (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 2000), P.249 134

, Whitford, Margaret, Luce Irigaray, Philosophy in the Feminine, (29 West 35th

St., New York, NY,

Routledge, 1991), P.93 135

Whitford, Margaret, Luce Irigaray, Philosophy in the Feminine, (29 West 35th

St., New York, NY,

Routledge, 1991), P.93 136

Ibid, P.93


51

elevated over the other, and interpretation would embody the symbolic possibilities of

sexual difference.’137

For commentator Morny Joy, Irigaray’s project ranges beyond the

intellectual to where the realm of lived embodied experience of woman becomes the

starting point for the creation of a new culture: ‘Her (Irigaray’s) goal is one of

metamorphosis. To do this, Irigaray exploits all possible gradations of meaning in her

double style. Thus, for Irigaray, a woman’s body is at once verbal, imaginary, carnal,

social and philosophical. It can have multiple pleasures as well as infinite ways of

subverting established limits and thus realigning the terms of reference regarding

sameness and otherness. These novel constellations are never absolute or final, yet their

permutations have reverberations for both how women think and act – and how, in turn,

males conceive of and relate to women.’138

Irigaraian Concept: the Sensible Transcendental

With the concept of the sensible transcendental, Irigaray is proposing an

embodied spirituality to counteract what she sees as the dominant (male) transcendental

God of western metaphysics. She introduces this concept in the hope of collapsing the

dichotomy between immanence and transcendence that she sees in western culture which

is hindering our becoming as human subjects. In this she is not far removed from the

projects of the Christian Personalists who stress the ‘inviolable mystery’139

at the heart of

the human person and also both vertical and horizontal transcendence in the person

(though the locus of horizontal transcendence for the Personalists is always an interior

movement). Irigaray states that ‘the religious aspect of our becoming has not been

considered enough as a way to achieve a greater perfection of our humanity. Human

identity and divine identity have been artificially separated. And we generally fail to

137



Metamorphosis: Luce Irigaray and an Erotics of Ethics and Hermeneutics, P.198 138



Metamorphosis: Luce Irigaray and an Erotics of Ethics and Hermeneutics, P.207-208 139

Words of Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, a noted Personalist philosopher, in a pre-Vatican II council

letter.


52

recognise that becoming divine corresponds to becoming perfectly human.’140

She

identifies that our energies are divided between the human and the divine and thus inhibit

our becoming divine. For Irigaray we must ‘work to cultivate our breath, our gestures,

our words in order to guide our becoming towards more wisdom, fluidity, communication

with the other.’141

Religious studies Professor Mary L. Keller argues that Irigaray’s

sensible transcendental is ‘a classic post-structuralist effort to deconstruct the binary

opposition between the transcendental and sensible.’142

She reminds us also that it is a

sexuate other that is at the heart of difference for Irigaray: “The sensible transcendental

therefore begins not with the other as the ground that precedes philosophy (Levinas’s

position), but with the sexuate other as the ground that precedes philosophy. Sexual

difference is the paradigmatic model of the otherness of the other.”143

According to

Carolyn M. Tilghman, University of Texas, Irigaray desires to ‘(re)invent, a non-unitary,

multi-registered language in which one can freely speak women’s sexual difference, and do so

from outside the trajectory of phallic language. Therefore, she chooses words that startle, elude,

and provocatively question established certainties. …Her refusal of typical meanings and her

eroticization of abstract discourse also allow women to find a sensual transcendence in language

that places them in immediate and unimpeachable relationship to the divine.’144

Thus recreating

culture in order that women can ‘reclaim the unmediated right to transcendence.’145

For

Tilghman, Irigaray’s argument that women must be allowed to re-create themselves from the

horizon of their sexual difference ‘is crucial for re-thinking philosophical, theological, juridical,

and scientific discourses.’146

And men also need the language of the sensible transcendental. ‘

men also need the language of the sensible transcendental. They must be made aware of the

inextricable kinship between the air a man’s body breathes and the spirit his God breathes into

him. They must be made so self-consciously sensible that they no longer neglect dwelling within

140


Critical Perspectives, (Fetter Lane, London, Routledge, 2003), P.8. 141

Ibid, P.8 142


Critical Perspectives, (Fetter Lane, London, Routledge, 2003), P.68 143

Ibid, P.72 144

Tilghman, Carolyn M., The Flesh Made Word: Luce Irigaray’s Rendering of the Sensible

Transcendental, University of Texas, Tyler accessed at http://www.janushead.org/11-1/Tilghman.pdf, P.7 145




Transcendental, University of Texas, Tyler accessed at http://www.janushead.org/11-1/Tilghman.pdf, P.11

http://www.janushead.org/11-1/Tilghman.pdf




53

their own male flesh or fail to respect woman’s need for … a world ordered for her on her own

terms.’147

Irigaraian Concept: Fluidity

One final concept of Irigaray’s we can consider is that of fluidity. (Indeed she has

written a book entitled Marine Lover of Fredrich Nietzsche148

). Irigaray believes that the

morphology of the female body can be described as an open volume, that is to say, one

that can’t be circumscribed.149

Thus the female body in its fluidity challenges the fixed

hierarchies, suppositions and constructs of logocentric western philosophy.

Irigarian Motif: Air

Irigaray argues that genuine alterity and otherness are providential gifts which

enable dominant subjects to reconfigure their culture in order to afford breathing space

for alterity, thereby transforming culture. Beyond language Irigaray identifies a value to

silence and presence, a silence where the self can be said and indeed often a self that

cannot be said without this silence. She uses the motif of air and becoming aware of its

presence around and between us to pass beyond the subject – object dialectic of the

classical western philosopher into an inter-subjective realm in which what is unsaid,

indeed what cannot be said or delineated rationally, is accorded its due significance. Air

is also a ‘something’ between subjects, a guarantor of subjectivity.

Irigaray calls this type of difference between subjects the unthinkable difference and

argues that it can be symbolized by elliptical rather than circular motion.

“Such a difference (between subjects) resists every thematization and a

representative thinking can only misjudge it, forget it. But it is this difference

that ensures the becoming of a dialectic of two subjects recognized in their

alterity.

147



Irigaray, Luce, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, (New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 1991) 149



http://www.cas.usf.edu/JAC/163/irigaray.html, P.346, in a discussion on misinterpretations of her work




54

The movement there will no longer be circular but elliptical, given the duality of

focuses and sources of impulse, of resistance, of withdrawal, of restraint.

Perfection will not correspond to a movement internal to the circle of Being, as

one and unique, but to a movement between two different Beings interweaving

attention to the other and to his, or her, contribution and fidelity to self,

including in order to secure a possible reference to this other.

An elliptical movement, rather than circular movement, between persons,

because in such a movement, mastery of the whole eludes each one. Therefore

becoming comprises ellipses and eclipses. Invisibility and silence take part in

becoming. This becoming moreover appeals to other senses more than a

speculative dialectic does.”150

Irigaray argues that the articulation of speech (using air) can be used not only to convey

information on the status of things but can point a meaningful way forward for persons in

the (still air filled and substantial) silence between what is said if that is attended to by

the (listening) subjects.

“The Western philosopher wonders very little about the relation of speaking

between subjects. It is the relation between a subject and an object or a thing

that he tries to say or to analyze, hardly caring about speaking to the other, in

particular starting from a listening to the other. … In the gathering of the

world thanks to speech alone, the other cannot say their own self, and talking

to the other has become impossible. In fact, their exist different worlds that

require silence in order to say themselves, to hear one another, to

communicate between them. So that finding the appropriate words becomes

an infinite task and it is not certain that they always refer to things. Sometimes

they are simple paths going from the one to the other, which can be forgotten.

They convey toward, and the direction to take is then more important than the

thing being said. … It happens that speaking is necessary to create the silence

in which to approach. (italics added)”151

150

Irigaray, Luce, the Way of Love, (Tower Building, London, Continuum Publishing, 2004), P.99, 100 151



55

For Irigaray, remembering the very air between us, far from leading to a

disconnectedness can serve as a leaven to allow a greater sensitivity to the subjectivity of

the other to emerge and grow, in the knowledge that the interval between subjects can

never be overcome: ‘… Respecting the air between us and drawing from it in the present

a part of the flesh of our words, grants an approach that nourishes the existence of each

one, that allows each to be and to become. … Air is what is left common between

subjects living in different worlds.’152

For Irigaray, the remembering of air is then a type of liberation in human interactivity

which frees us from our stuff intellectual a prior’s. (How many times in this context have

we used the phrase, ‘I need to get some fresh air!’):

“The interval between the other and me … has to be cleared of a priori’s, freed

from prescribed or solipsistic certitudes, arranged as a reserve of silence

appropriate neither simply to me nor simply to the other, space between us

where we are going our way toward one another through the gesture (of)

speaking.

… The transcendence between us, this one which is fecund with graces and in

words, requires an interval, it engenders it also.

…It is better that the space which separates us turns back to the materiality of

the air rather than becoming an emptiness, … Air is the environment where

humans come into the world, where they grow, live and work.”153

Irigarian Motif: Breath

Another key Irigarian motif closely related to that of air is breath. For Irigaray,

especially since her studies of eastern faiths which culminated in the writing of Between

East and West, breathing first of all comes to symbolize a type of spiritual becoming or

rebirth. ‘In the East it is more common to remember that living is equivalent to breathing.

And the Sages there care about acquiring a proper life through practicing a conscious

breathing. This breathing brings them little by little to a second birth, a birth assumed by

152




56

oneself, willed by oneself and not only by our parents, and a physiology that dictates its

laws to us.’154

Because it is impossible to appropriate breath, the master in becoming

through breathing can only teach by compassion and through example.155

Irigaray also believes that attentiveness to breath can lead us to consider how men

and women relate differently to breath and in that attentiveness to consider how we can

orient our culture to accommodate that difference. Irigaray argues that ‘the human

species is made up of two genders, irreducibly different, attracted to one another by the

mystery that they represent to each other, an undisclosable mystery that is a source of

natural and spiritual life.’156

She concludes that ‘In fact, what attracts man and woman to

each other, beyond a simple corporeal difference, is a difference of subjectivity, and

notably a difference of relation to the breath.’157

Irigaray diagnoses that in using his breath, his soul, his spiritual energy

continually outside of himself to construct his civilization, man’s create energy for

relating is fettered and crimped: ‘Man uses his energy in order to fabricate, to make, to

create outside of himself. He puts his vital or spiritual breath into the things that he

produces; he employs it in order to build a world, his world. He keeps little of his breath,

his soul, in him. And, in order to maintain it there, he needs instruments: concepts,

dogmas, rites, etc. But breath is then no longer free, no longer shareable.’158

Woman however prioritizes her breath differently: ‘Woman, more spontaneously,

keeps breath inside her. It is a question of physiological identity, and a question of

relational identity as well. … She knows that the source of life is in her, that she need not

construct it outside of herself. Her breath need not leave her in order to build, to fabricate,

to create. It needs, on the contrary, to remain in her to be able to be shared, to be made

154


University Press, 2002), P.74 155










57

fertile.’159

Women are therefore naturally more conscious in their approach to life of

respecting not just the natural life but the interiority and spiritual life of the other:

‘For woman, the ethical gesture begins with respect for the spiritual life, and not only the

natural life of the other. … The awakening of consciousness, for a woman, is situated at a

spiritually higher level: not only to not destroy the life of the other, but to respect his or

her spiritual life and, often, to awaken the other to a spiritual life that he or she does not

yet know.’160

Thus what is needed is a cultural transformation such that the ‘breath’ of woman

is attended to: ‘This passage to another epoch of the reign of spirit depends upon a

cultivation of respiration, a cultivation of breathing in and by women. They are the ones

who can share with the other, in particular with man, natural life and spiritual or divine

life, if they are capable of transforming their vital breath into spiritual breath. This task is

great, yet passionate and beautiful. It is indispensable for the liberation of women

themselves and, more generally, for a culture of life and of love.’161

Examining the most recent published work of Irigaray: Sharing the World

Another Irigaray book is due out in December this year (2012) entitled In the

beginning, She was. Though unavailable for examination here even its title (and also its

chapter headings available online) suggests that she is being faithful to the trajectory of

her previous works. Her latest published book prior to this year was Sharing the World in

2008. Irigaray work has been described as being ‘divisible into three interrelated stages -

a critique of the phallogocentrism of Western philosophy, an attempt to theorize female

subjectivity, and finally an attempt to construct the symbolic foundation for

intersubjective relations founded on love.’162

Sharing the World falls squarely into the

latter category. As the title might suggest, Irigaray addresses the multicultural nature of

159







Review of The Way of Love by Gwendolyn Blue, accessed at

http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/180/161

http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/180/161


58

many contemporary societies: Irigaray states that ‘the current multicultural era opens us

up to perspectives on the relative aspects of our tradition. We believed our world to be

the only one, but we discover that it is a partial and incomplete evolution of humanity. A

part, until now unrecognized, of our truth can be revealed to us thanks to the other, if we

accept to partially open our own horizon in order to perceive and welcome the other as

other without intending to dominate, to colonize, or to integrate this other into our past.

To recognize the share of truth that the other conveys can help us to resolve certain

challenges of our time.’163

The presence of the other challenges us to ‘provide ourselves with limits in order

to let the other be as other.’164

For Irigaray ‘the other is at first (firstly) woman.’165

We

should not underestimate the difficulty of this movement because ‘to open a place for the

other, for a world different from ours, from the inside of our tradition, is the first and

most difficult multicultural gesture.’166

Irigaray is aware that a trivial or educational

meeting with the stranger outside our own boundaries is not challenging and can even

satisfy our aspirations, ‘as long as we can return home and appropriate between ourselves

what we have in this way discovered.’167

However ‘to be forced to limit and change our

home, or our way of being at home, is much more difficult, especially without being

unfaithful to ourselves.’168

What we must elaborate is a new type of subjectivity that

accepts coexistence and exchange with those who are unlike us and stand outside our

own tradition.

Irigaray considers the a truly peaceful harmonious human community will remain

illusive ‘as long as the universal is not considered as being two, and humanity as being a

place of fruitful cultural coexistence between two irreducibly different genders, a culture

will never stop imposing its colour and values upon another, including through morality

and religion.’169

163

Irigaray, Luce, Sharing the World, (Tower Building, London, Continuum Publishing, 2008), P.132 164



Ibid, P.133 167

Ibid, P.133 168

Ibid, P.133 169

Ibid, P.134


59

One’s understanding of Transcendence is a partial understanding

Another key theme for interfaith dialogue elaborated in Sharing the World is that

of the recognition of our subjective understanding of transcendence. Irigaray argues that

to recognize the partial nature of one’s projection of transcendence is itself a step along

the way to realizing an even more profound understanding of transcendence. Irigaray tells

us that ‘As soon as I recognize the otherness of the other as irreducible to me or to my

own, the world itself becomes irreducible to a single world: there are always at least two

worlds.’170

Because each person ‘has his or her own way of projecting a horizon that

gathers the totality of existing beings, the transcendental gesture that is fitting to their

human existence becomes one of building with the other a relation in which space and

time are, at any moment, in-finite and in becoming.’171

What is at stake is the encounter with the other as another subject: ‘The other asks

me to interrupt the composition of my own weaving of time and space, not in order to go

from a subjective to an objective perspective – as is the case in a scientific approach – but

to be capable of meeting another subjectivity.’172

Irigaray’s key hope

It is worth noting again at the end of this chapter Irigaray’s key hope. That is that

the liberation of a female subjectivity to create a culture of two subjectivities will serve as

the bedrock from which a global community united in its respect for shared by differing

subjectivities can be constructed.

Concluding her text Between East and West, from Singularity to Community,

Irigaray argues:

“Civil community is based on the family entity, this in its turn being founded

upon the union of man and woman. The duality of the sexes cuts across all

races, all cultures, all traditions. It is therefore possible to organize a society

170

Irigaray, Luce, Sharing the World, (Tower Building, London, Continuum Publishing, 2008),

Introduction, X 171


Introduction, X 172


Introduction, P.86-87


60

starting from this difference. It presents the double advantage of being

globally shared and of being able to join together the most elemental aspect of

the natural with the most spiritual aspect of the cultural.

… I am thinking of a relation between the sexes in which woman and

man each have a different subjectivity, based notably on both a relational

identity of their own and a relation to language of their own.

… Managing to respect the other of sexual difference, without

reducing the two to the one, to the same, to the similar … represents a

universal way for attaining the respect of other differences.”173

For Irigaray, the wholehearted embrace of the multicultural and multireligious

nature of our societies can lead to a proliferation of novel spiritual and symbolic

productions which can positively transform our cultures and societies. Moreover, if such

novel cultural transformation is resisted, cultural stagnation and regression may be the

only other possible outcome. Irigaray states that ‘…, it would be important from now on

to know how to intertwine love of the same and love of the other, faithfulness to self and

becoming with the other, … Cultural fertility would no longer be tied to the improvement

of a single subject in relation, whether as accomplice or rival, with its peers. It would

result from listening and the effects of mixing, difference revealing itself there as a

source, not only of natural fertility between man and woman, but also of spiritual and

symbolic productions the novel character of which would be proportional to the situation

with which we are confronted daily.’174

This concludes our reading of Luce Irigaray as an interfaith theologian. The next

chapter brings her contribution into perspective alongside like contributions in the field.

173





Chapter 3 Irigaray in Perspective

Chapter 3: Irigaray in Perspective

“What is essential to retain from my teachings, declares Jesus, is the spirit and not the

letter.” 175

- Luce Irigaray, The Redemption of Women

Irigaray and Other Hermeneutical Approaches

Irigaray’s writings sit well amid broader emerging trends within theology. As

Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider state in their introduction to Polydoxy:

Theology of Multiplicity and Relation:

“In recent years, a discernable movement within theology has emerged

around a triune intuition: the daunting differences of multiplicity, the

evolutionary uncertainty it unfolds, and the relationality that it implies are

not problems to be overcome in religious thought. They are starting points

for it. Divinity understood in terms of multiplicity, open-endedness, and

relationality now forms a matrix of revelation rather than a distortion, or

evidence of its lack. The challenges and passions of theological creativity

blossoming at the edges of tradition and at the margins of power have

shown themselves, far from being distractions from doctrinal or

doxological integrity, to be indispensable to its life. And this vitality belies

at once the dreary prophecies of pure secularism and the hard grip of

credulous certainties.”176

Bearing this in mind and in order to give critical perspective to our reading of

Irigaray, it is proposed in this chapter to examine two related but differing hermeneutical

perspectives and to consider how Irigaray’s though holds its ground in relation to these

perspectives and in relation to other criticisms that have been levelled at her work.

175

Luce Irigaray writing on Roman Christianity, Luce Irigaray, Key Writings, (Tower Building, London,

Continuum Publishing, 2004), P.150, Ch.13 The Redemption of Women. 176

Keller, Catherine and Schneider, Laurel C. (Eds), Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation, (2

Park Square, Abingdon, Oxon, Routlege, 2011), Introduction, P.1.


62

Irigaray and Engendered Comparative Theology

The first of these perspectives comes from the essay Gendering Comparative

Theology by Michelle Voss Roberts.177

In this essay Roberts embarks headlong into an

analysis of gender in comparative theology. Comparative theology as an intellectual

technique within interfaith dialogue is largely championed by the American Jesuit

Francis X. Clooney. He defines comparative theology as the work of ‘reading one’s home

theological tradition … after a serious engagement in the reading of another tradition.’178

For the (mostly) Christian writers who engage in this process it is used to expose to

question norms and hierarchies within the community that are heirs to the patrimony and

generators of fresh interpretations of mostly Western Christian theology.

Michelle Voss Roberts in her essay compares renunciation and asceticism

amoung European women in the in 13th

Century (the era of the Beguines) with a similar

female movement of renunciation taking place contemporaneously within the Hindu

tradition. Neither of these movements found favour with the (male) religious authorities

of their respective faiths. Roberts concludes that ‘women become marginal subjects when

the highest religious paths in their traditions are designed for men.’179

Roberts chooses to

label women with the moniker of ‘outsiders within’ and states that it is this ambiguous

status which leaves them ‘bereft of the adhikara (competence or privilege) to participate

in the practices that properly define theology.’180

She quotes Clooney in support of this

position, when he states that the ‘exclusion of female experiences and images’ in

theology leaves ‘a diminished set of experiences to draw upon in addressing God.’181

Roberts states that gender analysis has been slow to emerge in comparative theology but

that methodologies developed in the area of feminist theology can be imported to help the

discipline. Roberts asserts that comparative theologians are insiders in dialogue with

177

Clooney, Francis X, S.J. (Ed.), The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next

Generation, (Tower Building, London, Continuum Publishing, 2010), P.109 178

Ibid, P.89 179






Generation, (Tower Building, London, Continuum Publishing, 2010), P.113


63

other insiders in the various spiritual traditions. Feminist theologians on the other hand

‘lift up persons on the margins of discourse and the underside of power relations’.182

Roberts concludes that ‘ ‘woman’ … is a subject on the margins of religious traditions

whose subject position is worth exploring in comparative perspective because of the ways

she challenges our definitions of traditions and of theology.’183

Roberts argues that a

feminist stance in theology is almost by definition ‘interreligious and comparative.’184

Noting that women’s spiritual wisdom often stands outside ‘the standards of the formal

religious or philosophical training afforded to men’185

, Roberts argues for a ‘new

definition of theology capacious enough to include women’s wisdom in various

genres.’186

In a similar way to Irigaray, Roberts identifies the metaphor of fluidity as an

important one for women in describing their relationship with the Divine. In a fluid

ontology we are to flow out to others as God flows out to us. Thus feminine spirituality is

anchored in ‘material, social, embodied reality’ which provide ‘constructive alternatives

to other more dualistic, hierarchical models of thought’.187

Roberts argues that a

hermeneutics of suspicion must be applied by comparative theologians to detect the

transmission of patriarchal values in the texts handed down to them as well as those they

themselves generate.188

Roberts believes with Irigaray that when one ‘stir’s in women’s

voices (into the theological mix),’ one does more than ‘supplement androcentric

theological discourse with projects that focus on women’, one is instead dealing with an

altered cake in which ‘hegemonic definitions of orthodoxy and orthopraxy’ are

challenged and a new order emerges.189

Thus ‘comparative theologians with feminist

norms and perspectives’ must mobilize their work toward liberative ends.190

Roberts

identifies (at least) two inherited patriarchal obstacles to women’s religious expression:

182



Ibid, P.115 184

Ibid, P.117 185

Ibid, P.117 186

Ibid, P.118 187

Ibid, P.119-120 188

Ibid, P.120 189



Ibid, P.124


64

the silencing of women’s (spiritual) desire and the fear of women’s bodies within male

dominated religious traditions.191

Roberts concludes that ‘the intersection of feminist and

comparative theologies promises a mutually beneficial exchange’ by which discipline can

perform liberative work.192

Though she does not cite Irigaray, Roberts’ broad themes and conclusion can be

seen to be very much in line with Irigarian thought. Her themes of fluidity and the

liberation of repressed subjectivities in the field of comparative theology echo Irigaray’s

work. Roberts does highlight the problem of essentialism in feminist thought which will

be addressed in relation to Irigaray below. One aspect of Robert’s language that would

not sit well alongside Irigarian thinking however is her insistence of the use of the term

‘outsider within’, which while it has the use of identifying the problem seems to run the

parallel risk of perpetuating it by claiming a title that serves to marginalize and diminish

rather than liberate.

Irigaray in contrast with an Interreligious hermeneutics of love

In his essay in Catherine Cornille’s Interreligious Hermeneutics, Werner G.

Jeanrond proposes an interreligious hermeneutics of love. Though love is a broad and

often contentious term, Werner argues that that term alone can do justice to the encounter

with the other as other. Also it is an active term and signifies an active and transformative

encounter with the other. ‘A hermeneutics of love is interested in the dynamics of

encounter and its eschatological openness to transcendence and transformation.’193

For

Jeanrond hermeneutics needs to function as a ‘tool for a more general, open-ended

methodological reflection on human understanding of self and other’194

. Citing Cornille

in The Im-Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue, Jeanrond argues that facilitating

interreligious dialogue above all is a matter of understanding the hermeneutical principles

191


Generation, (Tower Building, London, Continuum Publishing, 2010),, P.125 192

Ibid, P.128 193

P Cornille, Catherine (Ed.), and Christopher Conway, Interreligious Hermeneutics, (Eugene, OR, Wipf

and Stock, 2010) P.53, Ch.2 Toward an Interreligious Hermeneutics of Love 194

Cornille, Catherine (Ed.), and Christopher Conway, Interreligious Hermeneutics, (Eugene, OR, Wipf

and Stock, 2010), P.49


65

that are brought to bear when a religion articulates its self-understanding.195

Jeanrond

however proposes ‘a somewhat larger model of interreligious hermeneutics that

acknowledges the always already-existing, complex human forms of communicative

interaction, and that conceptualizes them in terms of a hermeneutics of love.’196

Thus

Jeanrond takes his reflection further ‘in the direction of a more radical philosophical

exploration of human possibilities of meeting self and other.’197

Jeanrond quotes Rowan

Williams in stating that one goal of dialogue is the generation and continuance of what

Williams calls ‘conversations of charity’ for their own sake.198

A key for Jeanrond is that

‘love promotes mutual acknowledgement without insisting on symmetrical

reciprocity’199

, that is to say in love one can accept and acknowledge the other in their

otherness. Jeanrond sets forth the task of a ‘critical interdisciplinary hermeneutics of

love’ as that of exploring ‘the basic commonality of communication and love as the

horizon through which religious traditions can be encountered, understood, explored,

assessed and transformed’200

with love being ‘the eschatological force that encourages us

to face real difference without fear’201

. Jeanrond’s essay and arguments therefore read as

something of an introduction to those of Irigaray, who has thought and written

extensively on the meaning and place of love in a culture of the two subjectivities

generated by sexual difference. Irigaray urges us to ‘rediscover love within difference,

love that is neither possession of the one by the other, nor exploitation of the one by the

other in order to satisfy personal, or even procreative, instincts.’202

She states that ‘we

must achieve … a love that respects the other as transcendent to the self, particularly in

regard to their understanding of the divine, thus a love that will help both the one and the

other to accomplish their own divinity.’203

For Irigaray though it is specifically embodied

love between man and woman that if rethought can open the way for the transformation

195

Cornille, Catherine (Ed.), and Christopher Conway, Interreligious Hermeneutics, (Eugene, OR, Wipf

and Stock, 2010), P.51 196

Ibid, P.51 197

Ibid, P.51 198

Ibid, P.55 199

Ibid, P.56 200

Ibid, P.60 201

Ibid, P.60 202


P.179 203

Ibid, P.179


66

of human cultures and the ‘spiritualization of humanity’.204

Irigaray therefore moves

beyond Jeanrond in her aims and ambitions, however both begin by identifying love as a

valid starting point for the construction of an interreligious hermeneutic.

Irigaray and the Problem of Essentialism

Michell Voss Roberts (quoted above) and Judith L. Poxon, amoungst others, cite

feminist theory as being quite wary of a gender essentialism, that is of grouping all

women into the one amorphous category of ‘woman’, ‘which falls short beside the

embodied experience of women who differ from one another in a multitude of ways.

Essentialist notions of gender not only exclude women who fail to live up to the feminine

ideal; they also perpetuate restrictive social models with the notion that biology is

destiny.’205

Poxon in particular is troubled ‘by biological essentialism’ in the work of

Irigaray.206

I would argue that Irigaray engages in a type of strategic essentialism (or

essentialism as a necessary strategy) and also writes in the way she does in keeping with

her understanding of how her particular philosophy can come to be articulated. Irigaray

eschews definitions and ‘logical formalization’ in her work because they, in her view,

foreclose dialogue and preclude the representation of sexual difference. Indeed in order to

keep her text ‘always open’ she attempts to situate it at the crossroads between a literary

and a logical formalization and thus assimilable to neither. Thus the text is ‘always open

onto a new sense, and onto a future sense’ as well as ‘onto a potential ‘You’, a potential

interlocutor.’207

Because Irigaray believes sexual difference to be irreducible, she elevates

it to the status of an ontological difference between man and woman. Thus for Irigaray

sexual difference is ontological before it is psychological, biological, sociological or

epistemological and thus Irigaray gives herself license to explore this difference at that

204


P.180 205




Critical Perspectives, (Fetter Lane, London, Routledge, 2003), P.41 207

Hirsh, Elizabeth and Olson, Gary A., “Je-Luce Irigaray”: A Meeting with Luce Irigaray, P.344, JAC


67

level first.208

As a corollary to this Irigaray argues that it is precisely because she situates

difference between the two genders rather than elsewhere that she is ‘able to respect the

differences everywhere: differences between other races, differences between the

generations, and so on.’209

Irigaray and the Problem of Idealism

Another charge levelled against Irigaray in her writing is that she operates within

the same Platonic logic of idealisation that she criticises as excluding the feminine other.

‘Irigaray’s theorisations of feminine corporeality… are marked by the same Platonic

logic of idealisation that drives Irigaray’s invocation of feminine divinity.’210

For Irigaray

feminism must imagine a different God from the ‘immutable one, upon which the

masculine identity of Western metaphysics is premised.’211

Women need a feminine

conception of divinity to embody specifically feminine ideals of perfection, ideals that

will serve as a foundation for feminine subjectivity.212

However Poxon argues that ‘in

invoking divinity as an idealised model for women’s becoming, Irigaray has recapitulated

the Platonic positing of an eternal realm of Ideals, models in whose essence the copies

(bodies, thoughts) participate and to which they conform. Thus ‘an idealised image that

would function as a goal for becoming cannot help but retain a normativity that

dominates the process of subjectification.’213

And in Poxon’s reading thus provokes

critiques from marginalised, ‘unidealizable’ women. In my estimation this reading again

downplays the foundation of sexual difference at the heart of Irigaray’s thinking. Her’s is

208

Ibid, P.342 JAC. 209


Journal of Composition Theory, 16.3, http://www.cas.usf.edu/JAC/163/irigaray.html 210


Critical Perspectives, (Fetter Lane, London, Routledge, 2003), P.42, Judith L. Poxon, Irigaray and the

problem of the Ideal 211








Critical Perspectives, (Fetter Lane, London, Routledge, 2003),P.45 Judith L. Poxon, Irigaray and the

problem of the Ideal



68

not a metaphysics of equality and sameness but a celebration of difference beginning

with sexual difference between man and woman. Irigaray always leaves room for the play

of difference and thus cannot be accused of foisting a totalizing image of God on women.

Her God is rather one of change and fluidity as well as being a ‘sensible transcendental’.

For Ewa Ziarek, it is a reading of Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference that reveal

Irigaray’s ability to mediate between two different lines of ethical enquiry and give

expression to ‘different trajectories of engendered becoming’. Ziarek notes two

trajectories in postmodern ethics: “Although the two trajectories both depart from the

notion of morality as a universal system of law and judgement, they represent different

approaches to freedom and obligation. For Levinas, Derrida, and Lyotard, the ethical

significance of alterity disrupts social systems of signification and, in this sense, marks

transcendence as a break in discourse, whereas for Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault,

otherness is expressed within the endless variations of becoming.”214

Ziarek asserts that

Irigaray’s work “refuses to align itself with either side of this divide. Originating in the

very gap between liberation and responsibility, self and other, immanence and

transcendence, freedom and obligation, the feminist ethics of sexual difference cannot

disregard any of these claims. For Irigaray, the ethics of sexual difference has to enable

different trajectories of gendered becomings without forgetting the obligation to the

other. In fact, Irigrary argues that the responsibility to the other who differs sexually is

the very source of such becomings.”215

Ziarek also argues that the female imaginary

‘opposes the idea of “one universe” because of the temporality of the body, the time

dependent nature of becoming which calls into question fixed identity thinking and the

concept of an “identitary time”.216

214

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, Toward a Radical Female Imaginary: Temporality and Embodiment in

Irigaray's Ethics, Vol. 28, No. 1, Irigaray and the Political Future of Sexual Difference (Spring, 1998), pp.

59-75 The Johns Hopkins University Press, Article at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566324, P.59 215

Ibid., P.59 216

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, Toward a Radical Female Imaginary: Temporality and Embodiment in

Irigaray's Ethics, Vol. 28, No. 1, Irigaray and the Political Future of Sexual Difference (Spring, 1998), pp.

59-75 The Johns Hopkins University Press, Article at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566324, P.64

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566324

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1566324


69

Comparing the theory with the reality: Women and interfaith dialogue, the

practical experience

Sister Pauline Rae SMSM, stated in an address to Yarra Theological Union,

Australia, that ‘in the forums of formal interfaith dialogue we are waiting for the voices

of women to rise above a whisper.’ They are ‘…still heard rarely at international

conferences where the dialogue of religious experience and scholarship is carried out.’

Instead women’s voices come largely from ‘homes, markets, small meeting places,

villages and all-women conferences, not places much frequented by reporters with

microphones and cameras’.217

Muriel Orevillo-Montenegro’s book The Jesus of Asian Women, though not

explicitly about interreligious dialogue does address the subject of women in patriarchal

Asian societies and their struggles for liberty as subjects by empowering themselves

through a re-imagination of the traditional images of Jesus presented to them. Orevillo-

Montenegro prefaces her book with a dedication to ‘my sisters in Asia who struggle to

claim their voices.’218

Orevillo-Montenegro points out that Asian women, ‘when freed

from patriarchal blinders, are able to articulate their own understanding about Jesus the

Christ creatively.’219

She states that women’s creative reading of the Gospel messages

‘show the life-giving character of Jesus and negate the traditional social, political, and

economic hierarchies.’220

Orevillo-Montenegro as a Filipino woman has extensive

experience of women in relation to culture and religion, particularly in India, Korea and,

of course, the Philippines. Her message echoes that of Irigaray, that when women

discover their voices, their subjectivities, within their respective religions, this has a

transformative impact on their self-understanding and on the formation of culture in their

societies: a liberation of the marginalized and oppressed does occur.

217

Sister Pauline Rae SMSM, Interfaith Dialogue – the Voices of Women, Address at Mission Day, Yarra

Theological Union, l997 accessed at

http://www.watac.net/docs/schoolkit/Women%20and%20Interfaith%20dialogue.pdf 218

Orevillo-Montenegro, Muriel, The Jesus of Asian Women, (Maryknoll, New York, Orbis Books, 2006),

dedication page. 219

Orevillo-Montenegro, Muriel, The Jesus of Asian Women, (Maryknoll, New York, Orbis Books, 2006),

P.194 220

Ibid, P.194

Conclusion

Conclusion

“The ideal condition would be, I admit, that men should be right by instinct; but since we

are all likely to go astray, the reasonable thing is to learn from those who can teach.” -

Sophocles, Antigone

Irigaray and the primary importance of

the creation of a culture of sexual difference

It seems that in all cultures round the world, we are in the process of liberating the

subjectivities of women who have heretofore been marginalised and repressed in the

formation and regeneration of world cultures. This great work has been embarked upon

but its final ends and implications for world cultures are not yet in view. What can be said

is that the voices of women are gradually transforming the self-perception of the world’s

major religions. No mainstream world faith stands in splendid isolation anymore. All are

caught up in dialogue, in debate, in the global community of humanity. All are subject to

question and revision. As ideas circulate with every increasing rapidity round the globe,

born by swiftly evolving technologies, the speed of cultural generation and

transformation is increasing.

All people, men and women, would be free. Systems of government, of education,

of economic development and of spirituality that most aid their freedom development as

subjects, their becoming as fulfilled persons, are those systems that are being more and

more sought out and implemented across the globe.

It is here that we turn to Irigaray as Sophocles says ‘to learn from one who can

teach.’ Irigaray believes that philosophy is important. She assigns primacy to the

philosophical not only within her own writings ‘but within culture generally: in the

historical production of knowledge, meaning, subjectivity, power.’221

She even argues (as

221


Journal of Composition Theory, 16.3, http://www.cas.usf.edu/JAC/163/irigaray.html, Introduction to

Interview


Conclusion

71

mentioned in the Introduction) ‘that it is because of philosophy's unique historical

potency that women have been so vehemently excluded from its precincts.’222

She states

that ‘the thing most refused to a woman is to do philosophy.’223

She believes that her

philosophy is important. Indeed she believes she is addressing the critical issue of our

time. As she has written in the introduction to An Ethics of Sexual Difference, ‘Sexual

difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age. … Sexual

difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our “salvation” if we thought

it through.’224

For Irigaray ‘sexual difference entails not only a reorganization of social

and economic relations between the sexes but involves the entire restructuring of the

symbolic order, of the social apparatuses, including language, forms of knowledge and

modes of representation. It entails rethinking thought itself.’225

Irigaray believes that the

creation of a culture that hallows sexual difference would inaugurate ‘a new age of

thought, art, poetry and language: the creation of a new poetics.’226

Irigaray is calling for ‘a revolution in thought and ethics’227

between the subject

and all it interacts with ‘beginning with the way the subject has always been written in

the masculine form, as man, even when it is claimed to be universal or neutral.’228

Irigaray wishes to take historically given forms and materials of knowledges, of concepts

and languages, and attempts to present and use them differently, to open them up and

present them differently. What Irigaray is suggesting is a certain kind of insinuation of

sexual difference back into those places where it has been elided, the insistence on the

necessity of every practice, method, and knowledge can be undertaken differently than

222



Interview 223



Interview 224

Irigaray, Luce, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, (Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1993),

Introduction, P.5 225

Elizabeth Grosz, Feminist Futures: The Time of Thought, essay in études feminists; numéro 1-2,

juillet/décembre 2002 accessed at http://www.tanianavarroswain.com.br/labrys/labrys1_2/grosz2.html.

Comment from this essay by author. 226






Introduction, P.5



http://www.tanianavarroswain.com.br/labrys/labrys1_2/grosz2.html

Conclusion

72

the ways that it previously has.229

Irigaray argues that various fields of knowledge can act

by virtue of their production and regeneration by men as agents of suppression and

coercion and thus act against the expression of a culture of sexual difference. According

to Elizabeth Gorsz of Rutledge University Women’s Studies department, this opening up

of knowledge and culture to a strand of genuine alterity begins with sexual difference and

can lead to a new springtime for human cultures:

“Sexual difference implies that there are at least two ways of doing anything,

without being able to specify in what ways they may develop or what form

they may take. Which means that the production of concepts themselves must

provide at least two paths of development, modes or processes, at least two

modes of (possibly incommensurable) existence and practice: two modes not

in competition with each other to find which is the best, nor two modes which

augment each other to provide a more complete picture, but two singularities,

two modes that may either conflict or complement, that may be altogether

incomparable or simply different. There is no way to judge in advance what

forms and paths sexual difference, the perspectives of at least two sexes, may

have to offer to concepts, thought, knowledges, except that sexual difference

makes and marks a difference everywhere.”230

Irigaray’s philosophy endorsed by Fasching’s narrative reading of Global ethics

Darrell J. Fasching, Professor of Religious Studies of the University of South

Florida, puts forward a narrative theory of ethics in his work Comparative Religious

Ethics, in which the myths and stories formed around ethical actors (actors willing to

question and challenge the sacred order with holy questioning words and deeds) project a

type of soul-force or renewed ethical standard into the wider culture, which, upon

reflection, causes that culture to renew itself in accommodating to the new higher ethic of

action the story of which has been told to it. Fasching argues that ‘because women have

229


juillet/décembre 2002 accessed at http://www.tanianavarroswain.com.br/labrys/labrys1_2/grosz2.html 230


juillet/décembre 2002 accessed at http://www.tanianavarroswain.com.br/labrys/labrys1_2/grosz2.html



Conclusion

73

typically been raised to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their relationships to others

(family, spouse, children), they have not developed a strong sense of self.’231

This,

according to Fasching, reinforces a sense of ‘relationality or interdependence within the

web of life.’232

Fasching posits that ‘feminist spirituality can bring a mediating voice to

the dialogue among religions by balancing interdependence with audacity – the audacity

to call into question the spirituality of “life through death” of the self. … women need to

balance their relational ethic to care with a masculine ethic of justice as two

complementary elements of one ethic. In this composite ethic men need to learn to

temper their sense of autonomy and affirm their independence with all things, and

women, already sensitive to interdependence, need to assert their autonomy as selves.’233

Fasching quotes from the work of feminist Carol Gilligan on the application of feminist

theory to ethics. Gilligan concludes that ‘men need to discover that their self only occurs

in interdependence with other selves and women need to discover that interdependence

requires them to have a self.’234

Citing the example of the moral ordering of society,

Gilligan argues that ‘a feminist perspective brings to the masculine approach (to the

moral order) an emphasis on thinking contextually and narratively rather than

emphasizing the logical priority of one principle over another. It encourages a

consequential and relational way of thinking rather than the violence of principled

thinking.’235

It is clear that Irigaray’s thinking fits comfortably within the broader

contemporary movement in feminist and environmentalist thinking.

Charles Taylor and the contemporary quest for human authenticity

Eminent Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in his work A Secular Age

identifies the direct contemporary quest for the holy rather than the conventional sacred

in society as the coming of an age of authenticity,236

again echoing Irigaray’s arguments.

231


approach to Global ethics, Second Edition, (Chichester, West Sussex, Wiley & Sons, 2011), P.300 232

Ibid, P.300 233

Ibid, P.300 234

Ibid, P.309-310 235

Ibid, P.310 236

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (Harvard, Harvard University Press, 2007), P.473

Conclusion

74

He defines contemporary society as seeking to create a ‘culture of “authenticity” –

that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important

to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model

imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or

political authority. … a growing sense of the right, even duty, to resist “bourgeois” or

established codes and standards, to declare openly for the art and the mode of life that

they felt inspired to create and live.’237

Taylor identifies this as a quest for wisdom on a scale not seen before in humanity

(in particular in Western society). This is so because of the general cultural perception

post- Auschwitz and Hiroshima that ‘the understanding … that the vindication of faith is

not complete emerges, for instance, in Dostoyevsky’s famous saying that if he had to

choose between Christ and the truth, he would choose Christ.’238

Taylor agues that the search for authenticity creates instability and flux in the

spiritual, moral and cultural landscape which can have positive and creative effects as

well as destructive ones:

“I have argued that the developments of Western modernity have destabilized and

rendered virtually unsustainable earlier forms of religious life, but that new forms have

sprung up. Moreover this process of destabilization and recomposition is not a once-for-

all change, but is continuing. As a result the religious life of Western societies is much

more fragmented than ever before, and also much more unstable, as people change their

positions during a lifetime, or between generations, to a greater degree than ever before.

The whole culture experiences cross pressures, between the draw of the narratives

of closed immanence on one side, and the sense of their inadequacy on the other,

strengthened by encounter with existing milieu of religious practice, or just by some

intimations of the transcendent.’239

Thus the quest for the underlying meaning or meanings to the human project

continues through life to an even greater extent than heretofore in history.240

This quest

237

Ibid, P.475 238

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (Harvard, Harvard University Press, 2007), P.593 239

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (Harvard, Harvard University Press, 2007), P. 594, 595 240

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (Harvard, Harvard University Press, 2007), P. 677, “since the individual

projects and the recurring routine (of one’s life) all have their purpose, the question comes as a higher order

one: what is the meaning of all these particular purposes?”

Conclusion

75

for purpose, for authenticity, therefore can be informed by holy ethical actors to the

extent that they have faith in the holiness of their ethic and are willing to become living

exemplars of that ethic.

Irigaray as a Prophetic voice for Interfaith Dialogue

On the face of it viewed from a classic western logocentric hermeneutical

perspective, Irigaray’s claims for oppression and repression of women’s subjectivity, her

quest to liberate the feminine imaginary and with it women’s true identity as subjects free

to generate and renew world cultures, seem fanciful. However when the prevailing

cultural dynamic has brought the western world to the nadir of Auschwitz and

Horoshima, perhaps Irigaray’s claims are indeed the corrective that is required in

Irigaray’s words bring about ‘a way of human flourishing still to come.’241

This would be

doubly true in the interfaith world in which (largely male) official dialogue pathways and

institutions have entered a phase of comfortable lassitude. Perhaps a renewed focus on

the inclusion of women’s voices and ideas represent the way forward in this field

especially.

In the same manner as Irigaray, American ecofeminist and theologian Rosemary

Ruether argues in her work Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing,

that thought the Greek, Latin and Hebrew roots of Western civilization coalesced

between 500 B.C. and 800 A.D. to form a patriarchal civilization, yet this can still ‘give

birth to a new cultural consciousness and a new spirituality capable of healing our

relationship to nature and to each other.’242

It seems fitting therefore to conclude by way

of reference to Luce Irigaray’s essay entitled Fulfilling Our Humanity in which she urges

societies and cultures to ‘pursue human becoming to its divine fulfillment, (because) such

seems the spiritual task most adapted to our age. Not simply to submit to already

241


P.186, Ch.16 Fulfilling Our Humanity 242


approach to Global ethics, Second Edition, (Chichester, West Sussex, Wiley & Sons, 2011), P.319

Conclusion

76

established truths, dogmas and rites, but to search for the way of a human flourishing still

to come. ’243

(As mentioned in the Introduction on Irigaray and Religion.)

We conclude therefore with Irigaray’s appeal for a general spiritual and cultural

renewal. A romantic ideal perhaps but to quote another romantic writer in French, Victor

Hugo: ‘nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come’ or to utilize a more

precise Irigarian turn of phrase, a becoming whose time has come. Irigaray states that:

‘Awareness of what we are and of the task incumbent upon us as human beings,

men and women, can awaken or reawaken our consciences, not to the established order,

but to an order yet to be invented, and respected by us: in relation to ourselves, to the

other and to others, and to the world.

Might this not correspond to what Judaeo-Christianity designates as the third age

of the salvation of humanity: the time of the spirit? That is an advent, in us and between

us, which would render us divine, and ensure transitions between this tradition and other

traditions, by favouring the breath, the universal principle of natural and spiritual life.’244

243


P.186, Ch.16 Fulfilling Our Humanity 244

Ibid, P.184, Ch.16 Fulfilling Our Humanity

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Reading Luce Irigaray as a Prophet of Interfaith Dialogue

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