The Bodily Encounter with the Mother—Lucy Irigaray

Lucy Irigaray, the famous Student of Jacques Lacan, is the prominent figure in the contemporary French Feminism. The interdisciplinary thinker whose plethora expands through philosophy, psychoanalysis and linguistics, provides a comprehensive study and account of the elimination of women form the history of philosophy, psychoanalytic theory and structural linguistics. Irigaray argues that women are traditionally associates with matter and nature. The subjectivity of women is always in question unless women associates themselves with the subjectivity of men. While there is an independent subject position is present for men, the subject positon of women is absent. Irigaray questions this object-position of women and tries to unveil this absence of “female subject position, the relegation of all things feminine to nature/matter, and, ultimately, the absenceof true sexual difference in Western culture” (Donovan).

According to Irigaray, since the ancient times women are associated as mothers. Even though they are not mothers their identity is moulded on the very concept of motherhood. They are often identified with nature and unthinkable matter. In contrast to this, men are always associated with culture and subjectivity and women who are precluded from subjectivity are positioned to provide unacknowledged support. That means, even though women are not privileged with a subjectivity, their role is essential in the well-functioning of society. According to Irigaray, the Western culture itself is founded upon a primary sacrifice of the mother, and all women through it. In her famous essay, “This sex which is not one,” she observes, “female sexuality has always been theorized within masculine parameters” (Irigaray, “This Sex Which is not One” 384).

Irigaray argues that sexual difference does not exist. Because, in true sexual difference both men and women could reach subjectivity. But in reality, while men enjoys the elevated power of subjectivity, women are “the other” or this subjects. For Irigaray only one form of subjectivity exists in Western culture and it is male.

There are two main discourses that played important role in the formation of critic in Irigaray; the psychoanalysis and philosophy. Lacanian view of sexual difference as a difference that is assigned in language is acceptable for Irigaray. She is influenced by Lacanian interpretation of Freud’s theory of subject formation. But she is not uncritical about Lacan.

According to Irigaray, in Western culture, the imaginary body which dominates on a cultural level is a male body. Irigaray thus argues that Western privileges identity, unity, and sight-all of which she believes are associated with male anatomy. She believes that fields such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, science and medicine are controlled by this imaginary. (Donovan)

Like Freud, Irigaray argues, Lacan also failed diagnose the error of his predecessor and understood the world and language in one-sex model of sexuality and subjectivity. Even science, according to her, is biased to the category of masculine.

Scientific discourses and serious scientific practices are still the privilege of men, as is the management of the political in general and of the most private aspects of our lives as women. Their discourses, their values, their dreams and their desires have the force of law, everywhere and in all things. Everywhere and in all things, they define women’s function and social role, and the sexual identity they are, or are not, to have. They know, they have access to the truth; we do not. Often, we scarcely have access to fiction. (Irigaray, “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother” 533)

 Western culture has yet not grown to accept the alternative paradigms of subjectivity and sexuality. She disagrees with Lacan in two key manners. Firstly, Lacan’s depiction of Symbolic order as ahistorical and unchanging is unacceptable for Irigaray. And secondly, Irigaray is unconvinced of Lacan’s claims that the Phallus is an ahistorical master signifier of the Symbolic order that has no connection to male anatomy.

In the philosophical side, her books, Speculum of the Other Woman and An Ethics of Sexual Difference is apt examples of her grasp in the discourse. She questions the traditional thinkers like Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and Hegel and their elision of all things that are feminine.

The mother/daughter relationship is a constant theme in Irigaray’s work. She believes that women’s social and political situation must be understood in a global level. She adheres that changes must begin from the individual relationship between women. She also insists they to assert the subjectivity of women, men also reposition their subjectivity to inculcate women’s subjective role.

In her essay, “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother” all these motifs can be observed. She argues that, “relationship with the mother is a mad desire, because it is the ‘dark continent’ par excellence. It remains the shadows of our culture” (The Bodily Encounter with the Mother 533). The maternal feminine power is always underpinned. It is always used for the satisfying of individual and collective needs and her desire, desire for her, is forbidden by the law of the father figure. The patriarchal power always censor, repress, the desire of the feminine or mother. Women’s sexual identity is relational to men’s sexuality. Her own subjectivity and sexuality is at stake.

Irigaray point out, in the primary level, our culture and society functions on the basis of matricide. Irigaray points out that while Freud in his Totem and Taboo explains the murder of the father as founding the primal horde, he forgets amore archaic murder, that of the mother. She uses the mythological background of Clytemnestra in the Oresteia to explain the point. Clystmnestra, who slays her husband, is killed by Orestes, her son. Because the rule of the father requires it. Irigaray points out that even in the contemporary society, the women in struggle are kept under the rule of the father, the patriarchy. They are placed at the sanctuary of home, within the orders.

Irigaray argues that through the rules of the father, the patriarchal power, the feminine self, the motherhood is ousted from the cultural and social space. The umbilical cord, which connects the child and mother, nourishes the body of the child is replaced by the phallus.

The phallus erected where once there was the umbilical cord? It becomes the organized of the world of and through the man—father, in the place where the umbilical cord, the first bond with the mother, gave birth to the body of both man and woman. That took place in a primal womb, our first nourishing earth, first waters, first envelopes, where the child was whole, the mother whole through the mediation of her blood. They were bound together, albeit in an asymmetrical relationship, before any cutting, any cutting up of their bodies into fragments. (“The Bodily Encounter with the Mother” 536).

Irigaray argues, when a child is given a proper name, it replaces the most irreducible mark of birth, th enavel. It eraces the very identit of the child and a new coating is given to the child, a “coating” based on the rules of the father. The mother is kept forbidden and excluded from the child.

The possibility for the going back to the primal womb, seeking refuge in open body is prevented by the threats of the contagion, contamination, illness and madness and death. Thus, the opennes of the mother and the opening ot the mother is prevented. “The mother has become a devouring monster as an inverted effect of the blind assumption of mother” (537).

In the desire to take the role of the sole creator and denying the role of mother, the father creates his own universe of language and symbols which is totally fatal to the mother. The female sex and subjectivity are alien to this universe of language and symbols. In Irigaray own words, it makes “hole in the bellies of women and in the site of their identity” (537). As a result, the female womb, the very sacred place where bodies are formed is imagines as a “devouring mouth, a cloaca or anal and urethral outfall, a phallic threat” (537). Since there is not any valid representations of female sexuality, the imaginary womb merges with the women’s se as a whole.

Irigaray adheres for a change, a creation of new dimension in the relationship with the women, in the creation of a new language, which represents the female subjectivity and identity. Women not only mother they are also the creators of love, desire, language, art, the social, the political, the religious etc. But they are forbidden from them for centuries. Women must also appropriate this maternal dimension. Irigaray points out that women have to aware about “our sexual identity, the singularity of our desire, of our autoerotism, of our narcissism, of our heterosexuality and of our homosexuality” (539).

The importance of the formation of a female genealogy is very important for the assertion of female identity:

It is also necessary, if we are to be accomplices in the murder of the mother, for us to assert that there is a genealogy of women. There is a genealogy of women within our family: on our mother’s side we have mothers, grandmothers and great-grand mothers, and daughters. Given our exile in the family of the father-husband, we tend to forget this genealogy of women, and we are often persuaded to deny it. Let us try to situate ourselves within this female genealogy so as to conquer and keep our identity. (539)

Irigaray concluded with the necessity of forming a female subjectivity and asserting female sexuality. Instead of the singular subjective position, singular sexuality, the women also could identify her own subjectivity and sexuality. The father-husband rules that cemented in the cultural and social space must be rearticulated to place the distinct and multidimensional female sexuality and identity.

Bibliography

Donovan, Sarah K. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. n.d. Web. 22 November 2015.

Irigaray, Lucy. “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother.” Lodge, David and Nigel Wood. Modern Criticism and Theory. Harlow: Pearson, 1998. 531-540. Print.

Irigaray, Lucy. “This sex which is not one.” R., McCann Carole and Seung-kyung Kim. Feminist Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2010. 384-389. Print.