Notes On 'This Sex Which Is Not One' Irigaray Notes

Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY, 1985 (6^th printing, 1996)

Themes

Criticisms of psychoanalysis; sociocultural issues: Psychoanalysis does not question, or far too little, its own historical determinants and enmeshment in discourse. Freud advises caution, especially re: the determining social factors that partially conceal what feminine sexuality might be. Still, these appeals for caution don’t keep Freud from neglecting the analysis of determining socio-economic and cultural factors. He himself is enmeshed in a power structure. Justifies male aggression and female passivity in terms of anatomical-physiological imperatives. ‘Penis envy’ translates woman’s resentment and jealousy at being deprived of the advantages reserved for men (‘autonomy’ ‘power’ etc) but also expresses resentment at having been largely excluded from political, social and cultural responsibilities.

Considering existing systems: Women are deprived of the worth of their sex – no one is supposed to know who’s deprived them or why, and ‘nature’ is held accountable. ‘But that order is indeed the one that lays down the law today. To fail to recognize this would be as naive as to let it continue to rule without questioning the conditions that make its domination possible.’ In order for a woman to reach the place where she takes pleasure as a woman, analysis of systems of oppression brought to bear upon her is necessary. What role has been marked off for her in the organisation of property, the philosophical systems, the religious mythologies that have dominated the West for centuries?

Reversal is not progress: It’s still a binary and thus still within patriarchal parameters. Where pleasure is concerned, the master is not necessarily well served. Thus, to reverse the relation – especially in the economy of sexuality – does not seem desirable. What’s important is to disconcert the staging of representation according to exclusively ‘masculine’ parameters. Not replacing, but disrupting and modifying. No good to redistribute power but leave structure intact. Reversal would still be caught up in the economy of the same. Women may “dream” of a phallic “seizure of power” and it may sometimes be accomplished marginally, but for society as a whole such a reversal is impossible. Reversal constitutes an attempt to duplicate the exclusion of what exceeds representation: the other, woman. Putting woman in the position of ‘masculine subject.’ Not a matter of reversing but hierarchization. There may be a compelling need for women to remain among themselves; especially as a political tactic. But danger of reversal: phallic power closes itself in on a circle.

Psychoanalytic Theory: For Freud, the first phases of sexual development unfold in the same way for boys and girls. Freud noted the aggressive impulses of the girl and her ‘incredible phallic activity’. For ‘femininity’ to arise, a much greater repression of these instincts will be required; especially the transformation of sexual ‘activity’ into ‘passivity.’ ‘Freud has little to say about the effects of the repression for/by women of this infantile sexual energy.’ Specificity of the Feminine Castration Complex: Freud states that, if the castration complex marks the decline of the Oedipus complex of the boy, the reverse is true for the girl, who sees that her clitoris is unworthy. Continuing penis envy. Enters into desire for father. She needn’t fear the loss of an organ that she does not have, and only repeated frustrations from her father will lead her belatedly and often incompletely to deflect her desire away from him. The development of a little girl into a normal woman requires transformations that are much more complex than those required in the more linear development of male sexuality. Indeed, ‘penis envy’, as a desire, is overly ‘active’ and so still has to give way to ‘passive’ receptivity. Clitoris has to give way to vagina: girl has to change not only her sexual object but also her erogenous zone. Move towards passivity ‘is indispensable.’ Freud saw the female’s larger amount of narcissism, physical vanity etc as ‘concealment of genital deficiency.’ This seems to belong for Freud to the ‘normal’ evolution of femininity. Freud: ‘more constraint...applied to the libido when it is pressed into the service of the feminine function’. The accomplishment of the aim of biology has been entrusted to the aggressiveness of men, independent of women’s consent. The idea that frigidity might be the effect of such a conception – violent, violating – of sexual relations does not appear in Freud’s analyses. Re: masochism, Freud states that ‘the suppression of women’s aggressiveness which is prescribed for them constitutionally and imposed on them socially favours the development of powerful masochistic impulses...diverted inwards. Thus, masochism, as people say, is truly feminine’. Whatever Freud wrote on the development of women, the topic remained quite enigmatic – a ‘dark continent’ – to him.

Girl’s early active desire (and suppression thereof): Ovum’s not passive. Jones distinguishes castration from aphanisis, which would represent the complete and permanent disappearance of all sexual pleasure. Fear of ‘aphanisis’, following upon the radical frustration of her Oedipal desires, is what induces the girl to renounce her femininity in order to identify herself with the sex that eludes her pleasure. Precocious femininity in the so-called ‘pregenital’ stages. ‘Penis envy’ in the girl is secondary, and often defensive, with respect to a specifically feminine desire to enjoy the penis. Deutsch emphasises masochism: ‘I want to be castrated’ takes over from unrealisable phallic desires. Lacan, however, argues that an inadequate differentiation of the registers of the real, imaginary and symbolic leads psychoanalysts to reduce the symbolic dimension – the real issue in castration – to a frustration of the oral type....

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