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78 3 The Place of Sexual Difference Idealizing Heterosexual Desire If traditionally, and as a mother, woman represents place for man, such a limit means that she becomes a thing, with some possibility of change from one historical period to another. She finds herself delineated as a thing. Moreover, the maternal-feminine also serves as an envelope, a container, the starting point from which man limits his things. The relationship between envelope and things constitutes one of the aporias, or the aporia, of Aristotelianism and of the philosophical systems derived from it. —LUCE IRIGARAY, “Sexual Difference,” An Ethics of Sexual Difference Every oppositional discourse will produce its outside. —JUDITH BUTLER, “Bodies That Matter,” Bodies That Matter In turning explicitly to ethical concerns in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Luce Irigaray does not take the routes that many Anglo-American philosophers might assume are the proper categories or presuppositions of ethics. She does not turn, at least not explicitly, toward questions of rights or duties or even rationality or utility.1 Rather, heeding her own call for us to “reconsider the whole problematic of space and time” (1993a, 7), she turns toward the figuration and question of ‘place,’ which she reads as manifesting a logic of containment—a clear expression of the logic of the limit. As a central figure that must be redeployed if we are to rethink our fundamental categories and reorient our very experiences, ‘place’ becomes a vexing and fascinating site through which to consider our subjectivities , particularly those subjectivities of phallicized whiteness who conceive of themselves as a ‘place’ in the world. Irigaray interrogates several foundational texts from the history of western metaphysics on this question of ‘place.’ Casting her concerns as explicitly ethical, 79 The Place of Sexual Difference these essays mark a turning point in Irigaray’s work, which had thus far been focused on ‘interrupting’ and thereby calling into question presuppositions of the phallocentric economies of western metaphysics through various strategies of deconstructive mimicry. But, as Carolyn Burke, the translator of both An Ethics of Sexual Difference and This Sex Which Is Not One from French into English, so nicely develops, Irigaray’s move toward more explicit ethical concerns cannot be divorced from her prior work both in and on the language of western metaphysics.2 While there is a subtle shift in style in these essays of An Ethics of Sexual Difference, in which Irigaray speaks, with puzzling irony and playful impossibility abounding, ‘in her own voice,’ these essays continue to call for the sort of double reading that her prior work invites. To grasp both the interruptive space she creates in various texts from the history of western philosophy and the work on and in language which these readings enact, we must read simultaneously in two manners: conceptually and performatively.3 We must read both for what she is saying about the concepts, questions, or figures at hand and how she is saying it. Often, we are tempted to divide these reading strategies according to a prior categorization of Irigaray’s texts. This is particularly tempting in the essays of An Ethics of Sexual Difference, where Irigaray’s styles are apparently neatly divided for us: six of the essays are ‘about’ or ‘on’ a text from the history of western philosophy and five of the essays are ‘in Irigaray’s own voice.’ The six explicitly on other texts thus clearly call for conceptual readings of the ‘matter’ or problem taken up in the text and the other five call for performative readings of what Irigaray is doing with language, a language often read as more poetic and mythical than ‘philosophical.’ But this very divide does a real and frighteningly phallomorphic violence to Irigaray’s texts. As several theorists and astute readers of Irigaray have developed at length, Irigaray’s texts call into question this very division into binary poles— a division that undergirds virtually all western metaphysical systems, grounded as it is in the basic principle of non-contradiction.4 Such binary polarization often reduces one pole to the specular partner of the dominant pole, which effectively erases the subordinate pole as carrying any meaning other than that which it reflects back into the dominant pole. For example, in the most simple reading of non-contradiction, x ⫽ ⫺x, the dominant pole finds its simple negation of itself reflected back to it in its specular partner; only one term is finally at work in the logical operation. To paraphrase Judith Butler...

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