Beauvoir, Irigaray, and the Possibility of Feminist Phenomenology

The majority of philosophies have taken sexual difference for granted without attempting to explain it.

—Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age.

—Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference

It is quite easy to quickly pass over these two remarks without granting them any particular significance or weight. And yet, if we linger upon these statements for a moment, an altogether obvious but nevertheless important affinity between Beauvoir and Irigaray comes into view. Indeed, we see that what Beauvoir identifies as a failure of philosophical inquiry, Irigaray formulates as its positive task. At stake for each of these thinkers is the possibility of raising the question of sexual difference as a philosophical question. Of course, it is hardly remarkable to suggest that what these two canonical feminist philosophers share is a desire to pose the question of sexual difference in these terms. This moment of congruence, then, is not significant in and of itself but, rather, in virtue of the horizon of questioning that is opened up by it. The issue it raises is this: What does it mean to pose the question of sexual difference as a philosophical question? Minimally, for both Beauvoir and Irigaray, to take up this question in these terms is to investigate the constitution of sexual difference rather than proceeding from the givenness of this difference. Feminist philosophy begins, in other words, by questioning the status of the object and the givenness of the very thing that is at the center of its inquiry. In this sense, the possibility of broaching sexual difference as a philosophical question is, for Beauvoir and Irigaray, identical with the possibility of feminist phenomenology.

If the task of this essay is to elucidate this possibility, this task takes on a new sense of urgency in light of the increasing prominence of new materialist approaches in contemporary feminist theory. While these approaches cannot be reduced to a single thesis or circumscribed in terms of a single gesture, the articulation that is most relevant here concerns what has been formulated in various guises as the challenge of immanence in relation to a thinking of difference.¹ The force of this challenge can be articulated in the following terms:² Phenomenology is ostensibly committed to the immanence of philosophical inquiry; yet, insofar as it is also committed to a transcendental method, broadly understood as an inquiry into the conditions of that which shows itself within the domain of immanence, phenomenology is ostensibly recalcitrant to a thinking of difference (i.e., the other, the contingent, the new).³ That is, according to its materialist critics, phenomenological inquiry inevitably domesticates difference insofar as it asserts the existence of a relation of heterogeneity and identity between phenomena and the conditions of their appearance. As a result of this gesture, phenomenological inquiry appears to ineluctably co-opt and contain the emergence of difference within the purview of sameness or identity. Thus, in its most incisive articulation, the materialist turn calls into question the very possibility of a feminist philosophy that remains within the parameters of this phenomenological project.⁴

By turning to the work of Beauvoir and Irigaray, however, I will attempt to defend the possibility of feminist phenomenology in the wake of the new materialist challenge. That is, accepting that a thinking difference is indeed essential for feminist philosophy, I will attempt to show that, in different ways, the phenomenological projects of Beauvoir and Irigaray take up precisely this task. Having largely overlooked this moment of congruence between these two thinkers, contemporary feminist thought finds itself in the paradoxical position of having moved beyond a tradition that has not yet taken place to the extent that the possibility of feminist phenomenology that is given expression in the work of Beauvoir and Irigaray has not yet been fully elaborated.⁵ Consequently, not only do these new materialist approaches impel renewed consideration of the possibility of feminist phenomenology, but elucidating this possibility in turn puts pressure on the force of the new materialist challenge.

Part I...