Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T23:40:01.601Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Irigaray on the Problem of Subjectivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Abstract

In Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Luce Irigaray argues that “any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the masculine.” This paper offers an analysis of Irigaray's critique of subjectivity and examines the psychological mechanism referred to as “the phallic economy of castration.” A different way of conceiving the relation between subject and object is explored by imagining a new subject of desire.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

An earlier version of this paper was read at the Second International Meeting of Philosophical Feminism, sponsored by the Argentine Association of Women in Philosophy, Buenos Aires, November 1989. It was published in the association's journal Hiparquia 3:1 (1990) in Spanish translation by M.L. Femenías under the title “Irigaray y el problema de la subjetividad.”

References

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1987. Subjects of desire. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Cixous, Hélène. 1981. Sorties. In New French feminisms. Marks, Elaine and de Courtivron, Isabelle, eds. New York: Schocken Books.Google Scholar
Féral, Josette. 1978. Antigone or the irony of the tribe. Diacritics September: 214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fraser, Nancy, and Bartky, Sandra, eds. 1989. Special issue on French feminist philosophy. Hypatia 3: 3.Google Scholar
Gay, Peter. 1988. Freud: A life for our time. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Irigaray, Luce. 1985a. Speculum of the other woman. Gill, Gillian G., trans. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Irigaray, Luce. 1985b. This sex which is not one. Porter, Catherine with Burke, Carolyn, trans. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Écrits. Sheridan, Alan, trans. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Lacan, Jacques. 1978. The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. Miller, Jacques‐Alain, ed. Sheridan, Alan, trans. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Nicholson, Linda, ed. 1990. Feminism/postmodernism. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ragland‐Sullivan, Ellie. 1987. Jacques Lacan and the philosophy of psychoanalysis. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Schott, Robin May. 1988. Cognition and eros: A critique of the Kantian paradigm. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar