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Reclamation from Absence? Luce Irigaray and Women in the History of Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Sarah Tyson
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Abstract

Luce Irigaray's work does not present an obvious resource for projects seeking to reclaim women in the history of philosophy. Indeed, many authors introduce their reclamation project with an argument against conceptions, attributed to Irigaray or “French feminists” more generally, that the feminine is the excluded other of discourse. These authors claim that if the feminine is the excluded other of discourse, then we must conclude that even if women have written philosophy they have not given voice to feminine subjectivity; therefore, reclamation is a futile project. In this essay, I argue against such conclusions. Rather, I argue, Irigaray's work requires that philosophy be transformed through the reclamation of women's writing. She gives us a method of reclamation for the most difficult cases: those in which we have no record of women's writing. Irigaray offers this method through an engagement with the character of Diotima in Plato's Symposium. The method Irigaray demonstrates is reclamation as love.

Type
Found Cluster on Luce Irigaray
Information
Hypatia , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , Summer 2013 , pp. 483 - 498
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

For their excellent feedback I would like to thank Penelope Deutscher, Gregg Horowitz, Kelly Oliver, and two anonymous Hypatia reviewers. I owe a special thanks to Lisa Guenther for her help in nurturing this idea from acorn to oak.

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