Luce Irigaray’s irreverence is what drew me to her writing. She takes on the biggest and baddest patriarchs and triturates them into memes. At the time I first encountered her writing, I was wrestling with my own favorite patriarch, Aristotle, so naturally, I appreciated her voice.
Point in case, Irigaray begins “Sexual Difference” by mocking the most important thinker of her time, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger claims that the question of our age is the question of Being, “Why are there beings rather than nothing?” She counters:
“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.”
She pays him homage, and in the same gesture highlights his insistence that there be one “and one only.” This is indicative of the problem, an inability to think beyond the one to difference. The question of our age is how to think difference, and for Irigaray, that begins with sexual difference. We have to get to get to at least two, woman and man, and we can’t do that as long as the concept of “woman” is but the negative underside of man — man is rational, woman emotional, likewise transcendence vs. immanence, subject vs. object, etc. You are probably already familiar with these dichotomies — they run deep and are as old as our Western cultures.
The word “salvation” here has always bothered me. She may be using the word to dramatic effect, but I think it is more than that. Heidegger’s whole framework is secretly theological, and she knows it. The scare quotes are the tell. The influence of scholasticism on Heidegger, a scholasticism that seeks to synthesize Christian theology with classical philosophy (especially Aristotle), cannot be overstated. And yet, he wants his writing in Being and Time to be secular — he explicitly brackets theology out. We could take it even one step further, because his closet Christianity, as it turns out, was also a patriarchal Christian Nationalism. He was more than a politically naive Nazi symp, as we argued for years before the Black Notebooks was published. It reminds me so much of the Noam Chomsky situ with Epstein…
Later in life, in his “witchy years” (#irony), Heidegger discovers his inner pagan, and writes that “only a god can save us.” Seems like he ran right into the point and still missed it, which his to say he discovered for himself the paganism secreted away at the heart of Christian patriarchy. But still, the language of salvation, of needing to be saved after an original sin and the concomitant desire for redemption, it should all be suspect.
“But whether I turn to philosophy, to science or to religion, I find this underlying issue still cries out in vain for our attention.”
The cries are a Levinasian trope, the call of the Other who remains unintelligible, and the feminine Other is representative of the Other par excellence. But first, why does Irigaray single out philosophy, science, and religion? I think it is because all three are discourses with a claim to truth. Recall how Socrates, after hearing from the Oracle at Delphi that he was the most wise, went around questioning those his society considered wise, only to find them lacking. Socrates concluded that he was wisest in that he knew that he didn’t know, finding wisdom in knowledge of his ignorance. Likewise, Irigaray here is going to the discourses that make a claim to truth and knowledge, and as you may imagine, she finds them lacking where it comes to her question.
“Think of it as an approach that would allow us to check the many forms that destruction takes in our world, to counteract a nihilism that merely affirms the reversal or the repetitive proliferation of status quo values. Whether you call them the consumer society, the circularity of discourse, the more or less cancerous diseases of our age, the unreliability of words, the end of philosophy, religious despair or regression to religiosity, scientistic or technical imperialism — technical imperialism that fails to consider the living subject.”
Nihilism says nothing has value or matters, and thus allows for the status quo to continue. This is a relatable point: this is the nihilism that would have us give up in advance, and accept the destruction of our planet earth, our political institutions, and our communities. A nihilism that shows disdain for what is here now, that would set its sights on Mars.
Technical imperialism, the extension of power, control, and dominance, over all visible and even invisible worlds, through technological means. Technical imperialism isn’t just AI or LLMs, but the asymmetry of knowledge used to create dependence, to dismantle human autonomy. It is a public internet built for extraction and surveillance, digital analogs for the extraction of labor and wealth; and legal and regulatory structures that remain outside of local control. In other words, it is an ideology that gathers to itself any and all tools to serve its ends. Technical imperialism is not the tools themselves, but we fall into that trap with endless debates about AI instead of the ideology that produced the LLMs and AI that we have ended up with.
Irigaray’s funny word “scientistic“ again refers to Heidegger and his critique of technological thinking, a mode of revealing (read, an ideology) that reduces everything to “standing reserve” or the raw materials for re/production. Everything that is, from nature to woman, gets its value, under capitalism, through their transformation into commodities. This mindset seeks control of these “resources,” expressed as a masculinist will to dominate. We are talking about the death cult that is patriarchy here. Irigaray is mining her favorite patriarch, Heidegger, for the resources to counter patriarchal domination. She is using the masters tools just about as well as you can.
It “fails to consider the living subject.”
Understanding this one will take some work… Aristotle’s study of beings, his ontology, takes objects as chief examples for the kinds of things that exist. He talks about chairs and acorns, things produced by techne (craft, tools, technique, technology) or naturally made. But these objects only show up for us in our capacity as as subjects who care. We make chairs so that we can sit and rest, for a reason with a purpose. This is why, for Heidegger, the study of beings should begin with the kind of beings that we ourselves are, mapping who we ourselves are, our subjectivity. Aristotle overlooks his own position as a subject because it is so close to him that he cannot see it, like water is to the fish swimming in it. So far so good. However, for Irigaray Heidegger does not go far enough with his critique of Aristotle. She issues a corrective, again in mimicry form: Just as Aristotle fails to consider the subject, Heidegger fails to consider the living subject.
Heidegger begins his account only after the subject is already there on the scene. He wants to bracket out certain questions, uncomfortable with asking after the question of where everything comes from. As a consequence, his subject presents itself as an object, objectified in advance, dead on arrival. A subject oriented towards death that cannot turn to contemplate its own impossibility.
An animating desire/fear for patriarchs and broligarchs alike is a fear of natality or birth, resulting in the concomitant desire to create beings (consciousness, intelligent beings) outside of biological reproduction. The virgin birth, the ghost in the machine, AI, a belief in supernatural powers is never far. Take Patriarch Doug Wilson (Christian nationalist pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, anti-empathy campaigner) who expresses his horror of women saying they are “the kind of people that people come out of.” It is the desire/fear animating the hype around AI, and it is as old as patriarchy, which cut its teeth by obliterating pagan matriarchies. And I mean obliterate in the technical, philosophical sense — not only to forget, but to forget that you forgot. Husserl, Heidegger, Freud, Lacan all have versions of this idea of the abject. Julia Kristeva writes at length about it in Powers of Horror (1980).
Underlying the array of problems she mentions (”the consumer society, the circularity of discourse, the more or less cancerous diseases of our age, the unreliability of words, the end of philosophy, religious despair or regression to religiosity, scientistic or technical imperialism”) is a common root in Irigaray’s question of sexual difference. The question of sexual difference and the failure to consider the living subject go hand in hand.
Heidegger’s question of Being, “Why are there essents rather than nothing? is subordinated to a problematic he simply could not face, as the question of Being ultimately resolves into the question of sexual difference. He was asking the right kind of question — ontological, metaphysical — but got the question itself wrong. So now, what about this question of sexual difference? How are we to interpret it?
To be continued…
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis J. Schmidt, State University of New York Press, 2010.
Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, Cornell University Press, 1993. (Published in French in 1984 as Éthique de la différence sexuelle.)
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Lonzi, Carla. “Let’s Spit on Hegel.” Translated by Veronica Newman. Italian Feminist Thought, edited by Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, Blackwell, 1991.
de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage Books, 2011.
Our title, “Let’s Spit On Heidegger” takes after Carla Lonzi’s “Let’s Spit on Hegel” (Sputiamo su Hegel), 1970. Originally a manifesto wheat-pasted on walls in Rome and Milan by her feminist collective Rivolta Femminile. Collected in book form as Sputiamo su Hegel: La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale e altri scritti (Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1974). English translation by Veronica Newman in Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, eds., Italian Feminist Thought (1991).