Luce Irigaray's Phenomenology of Feminine Being by Virpi Lehtinen

Author:Virpi Lehtinen [Lehtinen, Virpi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Philosophy, Movements, Phenomenology, General
ISBN: 9781438451299
Google: MOKVAwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 23322077
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2014-05-14T02:58:47+00:00

Irigaray’s Challenge: Levinas’ Eros as a Lapse in the Dichotomous Hierarchy of the Masculine and the Feminine

Irigaray argues that there is a methodological tension in Levinas’s thinking and that this tension produces the problems of his articulation of the caress and the erotic relation. Irigaray claims that Levinas’s methodology is a mixture of two diverse discursive approaches. On the one hand, there is the descriptive-phenomenological method. On the other, there is a metaphysical or onto-theological conviction of the Other, which situates itself within the paternal genealogy of the father and son (QEL, 183). The genealogical aspects of his account make the supposedly neutral face of the Other appear as masculine and exclude the possibility of a feminine face (QEL, 183; cf. Sandford 2000, 39, 42). Irigaray refers to Levinas’s earlier work and argues that the feminine face and the masculine face cannot substitute for one another (QEL, 179, 181, 183). The feminine other is not perceived as someone to be heard without special effort and the call of the beloved woman is not responded to; her face is not seen before it is detached from the habitual (ESD, 192, 208/E, 178–179, 191).

Irigaray claims that Levinas’s account makes the erotic relation between the self and the feminine other appear as a relation of substitution but in another way than in Sartre’s account. For Levinas, the lovers become parents, mother and father, instead of being transformed as woman and man. This is because a son operates as the guarantee of the fecundity of eros in Levinas’s account. Irigaray interprets this by saying that that Levinas’s eros remains sterile in cases where the lovers do not take the roles of the parents. These “lovers” do not form a couple regulated by the aims of remaining two and fertilizing each other. However, it is not only the lover who needs to assume his position as an ethical subject; the beloved woman also acts complicitly in this process insofar as she forgets to follow her duty to become lover instead of beloved woman (ESD, 198/E, 184).

According to Irigaray, animality, perversity, and infancy are all “appearances presupposing the feminine.” They are mistakenly thought to disclose the feminine as such, but they are only capable of disclosing the feminine insofar as it is within the limits self-posited by the masculine subject (E, 192/ESD, 209). Thus, Irigaray’s critique is ultimately that Levinas’s discourse does not respect the feminine other, she is not respected in her identity and freedom, i.e., as another person or a subject. Woman does not have either a face or her own form of temporality. Rather, the beloved woman serves as a constituent for the temporality of the other: she conditions the future of the lover (QEL, 179). This implies the abandonment of that which is most prominent in the loving gesture: to open to the other here and now.

Irigaray claims that in Levinas’s “desire-seduction,” the beloved woman is a part of the lover’s world or his field of activity, and lacks her own desire and expressive activity.

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