Luce Irigaray

Psychoanalyst

• Born: c. 1930
• Birthplace: Belgium

Early Life

Psychoanalyst. Little is known of Luce Irigaray’s early life. She was born in Belgium, where she spent her childhood. In 1955, she received a master’s degree in philosophy and literature from the University of Lovain, completing a thesis on the writer Paul Velery. In 1956, she became a secondary schoolteacher in Brussels, Belgium, a post she retained until 1959.

Life’s Work

In 1959, Irigaray moved to Paris and began studying for what was to be the first of many advanced degrees she was to receive in France. In 1961, she received a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Paris, and in 1962, she was awarded a diploma in psychopathology from the Institut de Psychologie de Paris. Also in 1962, she accepted a position at the Fondation Nationale de Recherche Scientifique in Belgium, where she remained until 1964, when she returned to Paris as an assistant researcher at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. She remained attached to this organization and was named its director of research in 1986. Upon her return to Paris, she began work on more advanced degrees. In 1968, she completed a doctoral degree in linguistics at the University of Paris X at Nanterre.

In 1974, she was awarded another doctorate, this time in philosophy, from the University of Paris VIII. She also obtained psychoanalytic training at the Freudian School, where she studied with Jacques Lacan, many of whose texts she was later to examine and reinterpret in her own writing. During her time as a student, she was also an instructor at the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes. Her first dissertation, which dealt with the language patterns of mentally disturbed individuals—specifically, victims of senility—was later published, and she refers to the information she gleaned in this study in other works.

Her second dissertation, however, was the cause of great controversy. The work, Speculum of the Other Woman, reexamined the basic tenets of Freudian theory, criticizing the extremely patriarchal system Sigmund Freud had created and Lacan was in many senses continuing. Irigaray went on to obtain her doctorate with highest distinction, but she was an outcast in the Freudian School after the publication of Speculum of the Other Woman. She also found considerable difficulty in finding teaching positions in the Paris universities because her views were seen as far too radical.

However, Irigaray continued to produce an astonishing corpus of work, all the while working as a private psychoanalyst and continuing her work with the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique. During the 1970s, when the women’s movement was growing rapidly in France, she participated in demonstrations and rallies designed to help legalize contraceptives and provide women open access to medical abortion. Although she never joined any particular group, she continued to use her position as a respected feminist critic to advance the causes of women socially.

As Irigaray’s work began to be translated into English and other languages in the 1980s, her fame as a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and linguist grew. She spoke at numerous scholarly conferences and was named the Jan Tinbergen Chair of Philosophy at Erasmus University in Rotterdam in 1982. During her tenure at Erasmus, she produced a series of lectures that was later published as An Ethics of Sexual Difference. The University of Bologna invited her to give a seminar in 1985, and in that year, she also returned to teach in Paris at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. In June 1987, she presented a monthlong seminar at the International Summer Institute of Semiotic and Structuralist Studies in Toronto, Canada. In 1988, she began a two-year teaching assignment at the College International de Philosophie in Paris, and in 1989 and 1990, she also taught at the Centre Americain d’Études Critiques. She continued to publish in book form and in scholarly journals, and her impact grew steadily as more of her works were translated.

In the twenty-first century, Irigaray continued to advocate for women's rights and produce influential works, including Between East and West: From Singularity to Community (2001), Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (2016), and, in her nineties, A New Culture of Energy: Beyond East and West (2021).

Influence

Irigaray’s work in the area of language and its relation to women’s oppression in the West has been her most important contribution for feminist philosophers, but her work is also deemed crucial by literary theorists, students of gender theory, sociologists, and linguists. Her texts are extremely difficult to read because she assumes that her readers are familiar with her earlier works as well as the major philosophical texts of the Western canon. She also engages in a great deal of word play whereby she bends grammar, creates new words, uses hyphens and italics to highlight familiar words, and uses sentence fragments and other unorthodox constructions to make her points. Because one of her enduring points is that language is inadequate to express certain truths, especially female truths, her use of language is part of her message as much as the contents of her essays. Nevertheless, the unusual way in which she expresses her powerful ideas has no doubt estranged some of her potential readers, just as it has endeared her to many others. As her work continues to receive attention throughout the world, Irigaray will no doubt cement her position as one of the most important voices of the modern age.

Bibliography

Chanter, Tina. Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers. Routledge, 1995.

Deutscher, Penelope. The Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray. CP, 2002.

Höpfl, Heather. "Luce Irigaray (1930b)." The Oxford Handbook of Process Philosophy and Organization Studies. Ed. Jenny Helin, Tor Hernes, Daniel Hjorth, and Robin Holt. Oxford UP, 2014. 534–48.

Jones, Jane Clare. "Jane Clare Jones on Luce Irigaray: The Murder of the Mother." New Statesman, 14 May 2014, www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/05/jane-clare-jones-luce-irigaray-murder-mother. Accessed 25 Apr. 2023.

Lehtinen, Virpi. Luce Irigaray's Phenomenology of Feminine Being. State U of New York P, 2015.

Mortley, Raoul. French Philosophers in Conversation: Levinas, Schneider, Serres, Irigaray, LeDoeuff, Derrida. Routledge, 1991.

Nordquist, Joan. French Feminist Theory (III): Luce Irigaray and Helen Cixous. Reference and Research Services, 1996.

Pinggong, Zhang. "Reclaiming Luce Irigaray: Language and Space of the 'Other.'" Linguistics and Literature Studies, vol. 6, no. 5, 2018, pp. 250-258, doi.org/10.13189/lls.2018.060508. Accessed 25 Apr. 2023.

Ross, Stephen David. Plenishment in the Earth: An Ethic of Inclusion. State U of New York P, 1995.

Whitford, Margaret. Introduction to The Irigaray Reader, by Luce Irigaray. Blackwell, 1991.