***"Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our 'salvation' if we thought it through." *— Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference

In *An Ethics of Sexual Difference *(1993), Luce Irigaray tells us how each age has a philosophical question to work out, and sexual difference is the question for our age. Sexual difference, according to Irigaray, is the first difference, an original difference on which other kinds of differences are modelled. This is an argument that has won her detractors, equal parts radical and conservative. Critics accuse her of committing essentialism, reducing women to sex, she reasserts it as a “strategic essentialism.” In any case, the claim that binary sex difference is the linchpin for all other, politically and socially significant differences is a strong stance. At the heart of her argument is a challenging and curious metaphysics.

Irigaray examines the way that sexual difference is handled throughout the history of Western Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis, arguing that true sexual difference has been obliterated and displaced by a false difference, one according to which the concept of woman is simply the opposite of man, the negation of masculinity. Obliteration is a technical term she borrows from Heidegger, and it means not only forgetting something, but forgetting that you have forgotten it. In this case what is forgotten is the mother, and she means this in a metaphysical register.

What is unique about Irigaray’s argument is that she is making a metaphysical argument: In order to examine the foundations for thinking difference — any difference is for us problematic — we must go back to ancient concepts of space at the root of the falsification of sexual difference. It is not a very intuitive argument, but Irigaray makes a rather good case for this approach. As I detail in my series on the history of space and place, the concept of space (or *chora *in the Ancient Greek) is the matrix or womb, also described as a nurse of all becoming. The Western subject, the one defined as transcendent temporality — and more to the point, as masculine — is born just as space looses it power of active receptivity, the power to hold and nurture the beings that move into and out of existence through the matrix. Space becomes empty and inert, with no properties of its own. And the scene of a crime, of matricide.

An Ethics of Sexual Difference is a collection of essays, each of which takes up a version of this idea from ancient to modern times. It is written in a style that is quite unique to Irigaray. Influenced by psychoanalysis, Irigaray gives us a diagnostic reading of the western tradition; she does not give us arguments in a traditional, linear fashion but, as many of this generation of thinkers, experiments with language and with the written form, pushing language to say that of which it has been forbidden to speak.

Here are the first couple of paragraphs from “The Fecundity of the Caress” on Levinas, to give you a taste:

"On the horizon of a story is found what was in the beginning: this naive or native sense of touch, in which the subject does not yet exist. Submerged in pathos or aisthesis: astonishment, wonder, and sometimes terror before that which surrounds it. Eros prior to any eros defined or framed as such. The sensual pleasure of birth into a world where the look itself remains tactile -open to the light. Still carnal. Voluptuous without knowing it. Always at the beginning and not based on the origin of a subject that sees, grows old, and dies of losing touch with the enthusiasm and innocence of a perpetual beginning. A subject already 'fixed.' Not 'free as the wind.' A subject that already knows its objects and controls its relations with the world and with others. Already closed to any initiation. Already solipsistic. In charge of a world it enjoys only through possession. With no communion and childlike acceptance of that which is given. A consumer who consumes what he produces without wonder at that which offers itself to him before any finished product occurs."

Like Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva — with whom she was associated early on, as three “French Feminists,” though none are natively French — and like Deleuze and Derrida as well, reading Irigaray is an encounter at the margins of meaning. Irigaray’s Ethics is a fascinating and quite compelling work, and one of the most original works not only in feminism, but in 20th Century Continental European Philosophy.

I am planning a piece on “Sorcer Love: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium, ‘Diotima’s Speech’,” a great place to dive into Irigaray for those who have read Plato’s Symposium.

To Be Continued…

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