Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray by Gail M. Schwab

Author:Gail M. Schwab [Schwab, Gail M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438477824
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2021-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Freedom

As noted previously, Irigaray’s engagement with Sartre’s thought is less direct in Sharing the World than it was in To Be Two. In Sharing the World, she is not precisely reading specific Sartrean texts the way she was in the earlier book, and she is thinking of and addressing Heidegger’s thought as much as or more than Sartre’s. There are, nevertheless, significant echoes of French existentialism in Sharing the World; it is in many ways a book about (among other things) freedom, one of the central preoccupations of Being and Nothingness and of Sartre’s thought in its entirety. Thus, a brief (and oversimplified) look at the Sartrean conception of freedom can be illuminating if we wish to come to an understanding both of Irigaray’s relationship to Sartre and of her construction of freedom in Sharing the World. We know that the Sartrean existentialist subject is endowed with a radical freedom; even the prisoner of war, the woman in a harem, or the slave is still free “to choose” her or his project and how she or he lives the circumstances of life (Sartre 439–40). In Being and Nothingness, Sartre—due to some extent to his developing leftist politics—did, however, acknowledge that even radically free beings are engaged in an historical moment and in the life embedded in it and that their freedom is thus necessarily dependent upon what he calls their “situation” (487).

Sonia Kruks has done a detailed analysis of the Sartrean concept of situation, showing how difficult it was philosophically for Sartre to curtail the freedom of the existentialist subject by integrating it into the constraints of a situation (Kruks 1990, 146–80).12 Kruks demonstrates that, although there are certain nuances in Sartre’s understanding of situation (nuances not relevant here in the context of this argument [See ibid. for extensive analysis of the problem]), it is possible to conclude that for the most part, in Being and Nothingness, it is the existentialist subject’s project that constitutes “situation” (Kruks 66–69); that is to say that situation can impose limits on freedom only within the context of the subject’s freely chosen projects. In other words, if the subject had not chosen to pursue some particular goal, no empirical reality, no given historical or social conditions or state of things could limit, or indeed further, that goal; it is the subject who sets the parameters for “situation” with his or her decisions to undertake projects and pursue goals.13 For the radically free existentialist, the prisoner of war, the slave, and the harem girl can “choose” to live the constraints of their captivity in such a way as to affirm their freedom; I would note that Sartre provides no concrete examples explaining how the prisoner, the slave, and the harem girl might actually go about doing this.

Irigaray will take a very different view of the subject’s freedom in the context of her or his historical, social, and cultural situation; it might even be said that in some ways, she lies at the opposite extreme from Sartre.

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