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Irigaray's Cave: Feminist Theory and the Politics of French Classicism1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Miriam Leonard
Miriam Leonard*
Affiliation:
Newnham College, Cambridge
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Although there are countless feminist readings of Plato and readings of Plato as (a) feminist, the French feminist theorist Luce Irigaray's extended—nearly 200 page!—reading of the cave passage from Book 7 of Plato's Republic may still come as something of a surprise to the classicist. In the recently published book Feminist Interpretations of Plato, however, there is an essay by Irigaray on Plato's Symposium included as just another example of this now established genre. Just any other?—well not quite… As in its sister volume Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle, the editors have decided that unlike any other article in the collection, Irigaray's contribution needs some further exegesis for the classical scholar. An essay on Irigaray reading Plato appears in tandem to her own article. Just like in the Aristotle volume, this essay presents itself as a guide to the perplexed, explaining to the ancient philosopher schooled in a more traditional idiom of Anglo-Saxon academic research some of the context for Irigaray's seemingly inappropriate style. Freeland writes of Irigaray's Aristotle piece: ‘Irigaray's essay will be astonishing to the Aristotle scholar who reads it unaware of Irigaray's earlier writings’; in fact, she continues, ‘…it may seem unclear whether one is reading Aristotle scholarship, a primitive biology text or an erotic novel ….Reading her then,’ she concludes, ‘is far different from reading the usual commentators on the Physics. Clearly, style is paramount to Irigaray's method of reading.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , 1999 , pp. 152 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1999

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Footnotes

1.

This paper was originally delivered at a workshop on ‘Feminism and Nationalism: Between Europe and America’ at the Feminism and Classics III conference at the University of Southern California in May 2000. I would like to thank my audience at USC for the lively discussion that ensued. Special thanks to my co-presenters on the panel, Helen Morales and Simon Goldhill, and to Tony Boyle for his help in bringing about its present form.

References

2. For history of this debate and extensive bibliography see Bluestone, Natalie, Women in the Ideal Society: Plato’s Republic and Modern Myths of Gender (Amherst 1987Google Scholar) and Buchan, MoragWomen in Plato’s Republic (Basingstoke 1999Google Scholar). The bibliography is huge and wide-ranging but some moments would include: Pomeroy, S.B., ‘Feminism in Book V of Plato’s Republic’, Apeiron 8.1 (1974), 33-35Google Scholar; Fortenbaugh, W., ‘On Plato’s Feminism in Republic V’, Apeiron 9.2 (1975), 1-4Google Scholar; Annas, Julia, ‘Plato’s Republic and Feminism’, Philosophy 51 (1976), 307-21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the articles assembled in Tuana, Nancy (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Plato (University Park PA 1994Google Scholar), especially Gregory Vlastos, ‘Was Plato a Feminist?’ (11-24), Arlene Saxenhouse,‘The Philosopher and the Female in the Political Thought of Plato’ (67-86), Elizabeth Spelman, ‘Hairy Cobbler and Philosopher-Queens’ (87-109) and Page duBois, ‘The Platonic Appropriation of Reproduction’ (139-56).

3. Irigaray, Luce, Spéculum de l’autre femme (Paris 1974Google Scholar), translated as Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman, tr. Gill, Gillian C. (Ithaca 1985Google Scholar).

4. Tuana (n.2 above)

5. Luce Irigaray, ‘Sorcer Love: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium, Diotima’s Speech’, in Tuana (n.2 above), 181-96.

6. Freeland, Cynthia, Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (University Park PA 1998Google Scholar).

7. Cynthia Freeland, ‘On Irigaray on Aristotle’, in Freeland (n.6 above), 60.

8. Freeland (n.7 above), 78-86.

9. Apart from Skinner’s more extensive engagement—Marilyn Skinner, B. ‘Woman and Language in Archaic Greece., or Why is Sappho a Woman?’ (125-144)—of the essays in Rabinowitz, Nancy and Richlin, Amy (eds.), Feminist Theory and Classics (New York and London 1993Google Scholar), Irigaray is mentioned briefly by Barbara Gold, ‘“But Ariadne Was Never There in the First Place”: Finding the Female in Roman Poetry’ (75-101), Diana Robin, ‘Film Theory and the Gendered Voice in Seneca’ (102-24) and Rose, Peter W., ‘The Case for Not Ignoring Marx in the Study of Women in Antiquity’ (211-37). Page duBois acknowledges her debt to her in Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (Chicago 1988Google Scholar) and Torture and Truth (New York and London 1991Google Scholar). Halperin, David, as we will see, is heavily influenced by her (’Why is Diotima a Woman?’, in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality [New York and London 1990], 113-51Google Scholar). Cavarero, Adriana, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, tr. Anderlini-D’Onofrio, Seran and Healy, Aine (Cambridge 1995Google Scholar), is an openly Irigarayan reading of Plato by an Italian classicist. McCoskey, Denise, ‘Reading Cynthia and Sexual Difference in Propertius’, Ramus 28 (1999), 16-39CrossRefGoogle Scholar, seeks to apply Irigarayan notions of sexual difference to Propertian love elegy. See also brief references in Goldhill, Simon, ‘Greek Drama and Political Theory’, in Rowe, Christopher and Schofield, Malcolm (eds.), Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought (Cambridge 2000), 60-88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Skinner (n.9 above), 125.

11. Skinner (n.9 above), 130.

12. Halperin (n.9 above).

13. See Halperin (n.9 above), 210 n.226.

14. Freeman, Barbara, ‘Irigaray at Plato’s Symposium: Speaking Otherwise’, Oxford Literary Review 8.1-2 (1986), 170-77CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 171.

15. In Irigaray, Luce, Éthique de la différence sexuelle (Paris 1984Google Scholar), and conveniently republished in translation as Irigaray (n.5 above).

16. Halperin (n.9 above), 145.

17. Halperin (n.9 above), 208 n.208.

18. Freeman (n.14 above).

19. Skinner (n.9 above), 128. My italics.

20. Skinner (n.9 above), 129.

21. See Spivak, Gayatri, In Others’ Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London and New York 1987Google Scholar); Butler, Judith, ‘Contingent Foundations’, in Nicholson, L. (ed.), Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York 1995), 35-58Google Scholar; and the essays collected in Cohen, Joshua, Howard, Matthew and Nussbaum, Martha C. (eds.), Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton 1999Google Scholar).

22. The term comes from Marks, Elaine and de Coutrivon, Isabelle (eds.), New French Feminisms (Brighton 1980Google Scholar). Again the bibliography is large and ever expanding but see Eisenstein, Hester and Jardine, Alice (eds.), The Future of Difference (New York 1980Google Scholar); Abel, Elizabeth (ed.), Writing and Sexual Difference (Brighton 1982Google Scholar); Duchen, Claire, Feminism in France from May ’68 to Mitterand (London 1986Google Scholar); Miller, Nancy K. (ed.), The Poetics of Gender (New York 1986Google Scholar); Allen, Jeffner and Young, Iris (eds.), The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philosophy (Bloomington 1989Google Scholar).

23. Over the past years, Cixous’s major output has been as a novelist/playwright rather than a ‘theorist’ as such; on which see Leonard, Miriam, ‘Creating a Dawn: Writing Through Antiquity in the Works of Hélène Cixous’, Arethusa 33.1 (2000), 121-48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kristeva has become especially influential in the fields of semiotics and psychoanalysis; see Schor, Naomi, ‘Previous Engagements: The Receptions of Irigaray’, in Burke, C., Schor, N. and Whitford, M. (eds.), Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modem Thought (Columbia 1994), 3-14Google Scholar.

24. See Schor (n.23 above), 4, who argues that in contrast to Cixous and Kristeva, ‘it is becoming apparent that, as the major French theoretician, Irigaray is actually Simone de Beauvoir’s chief successor’.

25. Some major texts would include Irigaray, Luce, Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris 1977Google Scholar); Amante Marine. De Friedrich Nietzsche (Paris 1980Google Scholar); the essay cited at n.5 above; Parler n’est jamais neutre (Paris 1985Google Scholar); Le Temps de la difference: pour une révolution pacifique (Paris 1989Google Scholar). For more complete bibliography of Irigaray’s works see Whitford, Margaret, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London and New York 1991Google Scholar).

26. Irigaray (n.3 above).

27. See Mitchell, Juliet and Rose, Jacqueline (eds.), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne (London 1992Google Scholar); Gallop, Jane, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter’s Seduction (London and Basingstoke 1982CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Brennan, Teresa (ed.), Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London and New York 1989CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Whitford (n.25 above).

28. Moi, Toril, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York 1985), 146Google Scholar. On this tradition see also Berg, Maggie, ‘Escaping the Cave: Luce Irigaray and her Feminist Critics’, in Wihl, Gary and Williams, David (eds.), Literature and Ethics: Essays Presented to A.E. Malloch (Kingston and Montreal 1988), 62-76Google Scholar; Schor (n.23 above); and Tina Chanter, , The Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York 1995Google Scholar).

29. Miller, Paul Allen, ‘The Classical Roots of Post-Structuralism: Lacan, Derrida and Foucaulf’, IJCT 5 (1998-99), 204-25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. Miller (n.29 above), 204.

31. See Moi (n.28 above); on her relationship to Derrida see Spivak (n.21 above). See also Whitford (n.25 above).

32. See especially Fuss, Diana, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York 1989Google Scholar); but also Moi (n.28 above); Domna Stanton, ‘Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva’, in Miller (n.22 above), 157-82; Berg (n.28 above); Gallop (n.27 above); Chanter (n.28 above).

33. In this context one could equally well think of Irigaray’s challenge to Hegel’s reading of the Antigone in Irigaray (n.3 above, n.15 above and n.25 above 1989) on which see Chanter (n.28 above). See also Goldhill (n.9 above), 65-67.

34. Chanter (n.28 above).

35. For another perspective on Irigaray’s relationship to Heidegger, see Ellen Mortensen, ‘Woman’s Untruth and le féminin: Reading Luce Irigaray with Nietzsche and Heidegger’, in Burke/Schor/Whitford (n.23 above), 211-28.

36. Chanter (n.28 above), 130.

37. Roth, Michael, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Cornell 1988), 60Google Scholar.

38. Derrida, Jacques, ‘Nous autres Grecs’, in Cassin, Barbara (ed.), Nos Grecs et leurs modernes: Les stratégies contemporaines d’appropriation de l’antiquité (Paris 1992), 251-76Google Scholar, is a highly sophisticated self-analysis of Derrida’s own debt to a Heideggerian reading of the Greeks. Derrida’s comments about the limits of the Heideggerian influence on his analysis of Platonic and Greek philosophy more generally are equally instructive for Irigaray.

39. See Farías, Victor, Heidegger et le Nazisme (Verdier 1987Google Scholar), which was at the heart of this controversy when it was published in French.

40. I have discussed the classical context of this problematic Franco-German relationship in Leonard (n.23 above), 123-26.

41. For comprehensive study of the role of Heidegger in post-war French thought see Rockmore, Tom, Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Anti-Humanism and Being (New York and London 1995CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Although Irigaray is not mentioned, Rockmore’s analysis of the cultural and institutional privileging of Heidegger in the French philosophical establishment provides a crucial background to her work.

42. She does however have an extensive engagement with the Pre-Socratics in her later work: Irigaray (n.25 above 1980). The influence here is, of course, more obviously Nietzschean than Heideggerian.

43. Whitford (n.25 above), 105.

44. Whitford (n.25 above), 105.

45. Whitford (n.25 above), 105.

46. Irigaray (n.3 above 1985), 265. Page duBois comes very close to this formulation in her reading of Plato (n.9 above 1988, 183):‘The male philosopher becomes the site of metaphorical reproduction, the subject of philosophical generation; the female, stripped of her metaphorical otherness, becomes a defective male, defined by lack.’ In her introduction (ibid. 15f.), duBois cites Irigaray’s Speculum as a major influence on her project: ‘[it ] show[s] that we can begin, from within a world where psychoanalysis is the dominant explanatory discourse, to see beyond it.’ She also makes reference to Irigaray’s reading of Plato in duBois (n.9 above 1991), 121. My thanks to Peter O’Neill and Amy Richlin for indicating to me the interconnections between Irigaray’s and duBois’s work.

47. For discussion of Heidegger’s etymology of άλཱུθεια see duBois (n.9 above 1991), 127-40.

48. Irigaray (n.3 above 1985), 253.

49. Irigaray (n.3 above 1985), 246f.

50. Irigaray (n.3 above 1985), 247.

51. See Pomeroy (n.2 above); Fortenbaugh (n.2 above); Annas (n.2 above); Vlastos (n.2 above); Saxenhouse (n.2 above); Spelman (n.2 above). On the history of this debate see Bluestone (n.2 above). See also Buchan (n.2 above).

52. It could be objected at this juncture that Irigaray had her school education and the first part of her university education in Belgium and not France. Although there are significant features of the Belgian education system which differ from those in France, the influence of the French model on Francophone schools was dominant. Although she did her first degree at Louvain, she wrote her doctoral dissertation at the University of Paris VIII—see Mortley, Raoul, French Philosophers in Conversation: Lévinas, Schneider, Serres, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Derrida (London 1991), 62Google Scholar. It must also be stressed that Irigaray, as it were, actively writes herself into this French educational milieu when she starts publishing in Paris. The classicist Marcel Detienne is another ‘Parisian intellectual’ who shares Irigaray’s Belgian educational background. In fact, it is one of the paradoxes of so called ‘French theory’ that so many of its proponents are not so uncomplicatedly ‘French’ as one might originally have thought—see Leonard (n.23 above), 124 n.10.

53. There is, of course, an important question of canons here. The Platonic texts which formed the core of the French philosophical programme were limited. That there should be such a heavy concentration around the Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus and Timaeus makes a big difference to the conceptualisation of ‘Platonism’ with which they operated. The ‘ever since Plato…’ formulation which appears in so many of these texts is the product of a highly partial—in all senses of the term—reading of Plato. I thank Tony Boyle for making me think a little harder about this issue.

54. Amongst countless others, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, Derrida and Foucault all passed through its hall both as students and as teachers. On the École Normale Supérieure see Sirinelli, Jean-François, Génération Intellectuelle: Khâgneux et Normaliens dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris 1988Google Scholar) and Rubenstein, Diane, What’s Left? The Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Right (Wisconsin 1990Google Scholar).

55. See Sirinelli (n.54 above), 92. Sirinelli’s book on the Khâgne (preparatory school for the École Normale) and the École Normale is, in fact, littered with references to Plato, electing him to the status of an honorary member of this elite French educational establishment. He quotes Giraudoux on the Khâgne: ‘l’académie, la vraie, celle de Platon, celle du dèbut de la vie et non celle de la fin’, quoted in Sirinelli (n.54 above), 18.

56. Andrea Nye, ‘Irigaray and Diotima at Plato’s Symposium’, in Tuana (n.2 above), 197-216, at 205.

57. On Vernant’s intellectual (auto)biography see Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Entre Mythe et Politique (Paris 1996Google Scholar), and La volunté de comprendre (Paris 1999Google Scholar).

58. Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, Mémoires—La brisure et l’attente 1930-55 (Paris 1995Google Scholar), and Mém-oires—Le trouble et la lumière (Paris 1998Google Scholar).

59. Vidal-Naquet (n.56 above), 243. See also Hartog, François, Schmitt, Pauline and Schnapp, Alain (eds.), Pierre Vidal-Naquet: un historien dans la cité (Paris 1998Google Scholar).

60. See Miller (n.29 above), 221.

61. For influence of psychoanalysis on Loraux’s work see Vidal-Naquet (n.58 above 1998), 233.

62. I am elsewhere conducting a more detailed analysis of the relationship between the (so called) ‘Parisian school’ and the wider currents of (post)structuralist thought in post-war France.

63. Derrida is perhaps the French post-war philosopher who has had the most rigorous engagement with Plato. From Derrida, Jacques, ‘La pharmarcie de Platon’, in La dissémination (Paris 1972), 71-197Google Scholar, which got the deconstructive enterprise off the ground, to his most recent works (see in particular Politiques de l’amitié [Paris 1994]Google Scholar), Plato has remained a constant point of reference. Derrida has written about this relationship and the role of Plato in his work and French thought more generally in ‘Nous autres Grecs’ (n.38 above). I have discussed Derrida’s use of Plato in his Politics of Friendship in Leonard, Miriam, ‘Politiques de l’amitié: Derrida’s Greeks and a National Politics of Classical Scholarship’, forthcoming in PCPS (2000Google Scholar).

64. I have no intention here of involving myself in the contentious debate over Plato’s appropriation by the left and right which would take us back at least as far as Popper, Karl, The Open Society and its Enemies (5th ed., London 1966Google Scholar) and beyond. It would, of course, be fascinating to relate an analysis of the reception of Plato in post-war French thought to this wider controversy.

65. This is, of course, a vast over-simplification. And yet as a general statement it seems to be largely supported by Stray, Christopher, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities and Society in England, 1830-1960 (Oxford 1998Google Scholar)—a comprehensive analysis of the history of classical learning in England over the last century.

66. Irigaray played an important role in the history of the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes) where she wrote her doctorate. Vincennes was an experimental foundation set up by leading intellectuals in the wake of the ’68 revolution and was famous for pioneering an entirely non-hierarchical model of higher education. Irigaray later lost her teaching post there: see Jardine, Alice and Menke, Anne (eds.), Shifting Scenes: Interviews on Women, Writing and Politics in Post-’68 France (New York 1991), 210sGoogle Scholar. On Vincennes see Soulié, Charles, ‘Le destin d’une institution d’avant-garde: Histoire du département de philosophie de Paris VIII’, Histoire de l’éducation (1998), 47-69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67. See Whitford (n.25 above); Jardine/Menke (n.66 above), 98 and 210; and Mitchell/Rose (n.27 above).