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3. Irigaray’s Plato
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123 Chapter Three Irigaray’s Plato Luce Irigaray is one of France’s leading feminist philosophers. Her substantial oeuvre has had an important impact on Continental thinking, not only within feminist circles, but with the psychoanalytic community, the postmodern movement, as well as those interested in the history of philosophy, on which she has commented often and in depth. Although references to and comments upon Plato occur regularly throughout Irigaray’s work, in two of her works she addresses aspects of Plato in great depth, and it is on those that I shall concentrate in this chapter. These are her 1974 work, Speculum of the Other Woman,1 which contains a complicated interpretation of the cave analogy in the Republic in a long chapter entitled “Plato’s Hystera,” and her 1984 book, An Ethics of Sexual Difference,2 which contains an important chapter entitled “Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato, Symposium, Diotima’s Speech.” I shall begin with the earlier work. “PLATO’S HYSTERA” I want to begin, however, with a passage from an interview among four feminist philosophers, Pheng Cheah and Elizabeth Grosz, editors 123 w 124 Questioning Platonism of Diacritics, who are interviewing Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell (“The Future of Sexual Difference: An interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell,” Diacritics 28.1: 19–42, Spring 1998, p. 19. The entire issue is devoted to Irigaray). The passage I quote is Judith Butler’s first remark, answering Elizabeth Grosz’s question about the influence of Irigaray on her own thinking. I quote it because it succinctly formulates a slew of problems raised in reading Irigaray’s Speculum. I think that probably early on, when I started working on French feminism as a graduate student in the early ‘80s, I was not interested in her at all because she seemed to me to be an essentialist and that was a term we used quite easily then, when we thought we knew what it meant. In the late ‘80s, I started to rethink my objections to her on that basis and found that she was, among the feminist theorists I had read, perhaps the most versed in philosophy and that her engagement with philosophy was a curious mixture of both loyalty and aggression. And it became very interesting to me when I started thinking about her whole practice of critical mimesis—what she was doing when she was reading Freud, what was she doing when she was reading Plato—and I read Speculum again and again, frightened by its anger, compelled by the closeness of the reading , confused by the mimetism of the text. Was she enslaved to these texts, was she displacing them radically, was she perhaps in the bind of being in both positions at the same time? And I realized that whatever the feminine was for her, it was not a substance, not a spiritual reality that might be isolated, but it had something to do with this strange practice of reading, one in which she was reading texts that she was not authorized to read, texts from which she was as a woman explicitly excluded or explicitly demeaned, and that she would read them anyway. And then the question is: what would it mean to read from a position of radical deauthorization in order to expose the contingent authority of the text? That struck me as a feminist critical practice, a critical reading practice that I could learn from, and from that point on, highly influenced by both Drucilla’s [Cornell] work and Naomi Schor’s work, I started to read her quite thoroughly. Let me begin by raising a very general issue. The cave analogy that Irigaray addresses is, obviously, an analogy. Alternatively, we may [3.234.143.63] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:08 GMT) Irigaray’s Plato 125 say that it is a metaphor. Now whenever any author employs analogy or metaphor, we are immediately presented with a problem. The analogy is an analogy because we are supposed to see certain similarities between the analogy and its object, of what it is intended to be an analogy. But “supposed to see” and “intended” already invoke the intention of the author. That is, the author employs, invents the analogy because she feels that it is an effective or dramatic way of showing a certain similarity to the matter under discussion. The first point, then, is that it is very difficult to make any sense of the meaning of an analogy without invoking...