A ‘Fleshy Metaphysics’: Irigaray and Battersby on Female Subjectivity

Abstract

In The Phenomenal Woman (1998), Christine Battersby purports to rethink subjectivity by shifting the focus to embodied female selves, particularly where the female body is understood in its capacity for birthing. Thus, like Irigaray, Battersby aims to reconceptualize subjectivity in terms of the fluid and heterogeneous nature of female body experience. However, Battersby is critical of Irigaray in several respects. First, she claims that Irigaray fails to move beyond the Lacanian framework which underpins her thought. Second, she suggests that Irigaray's evocation of a ‘feminine imaginary’ is utopian and sentimentalized. Finally, she invites caution at what she considers as Irigaray's downplaying of women artists’ and writers’ contributions to our understanding of birth and motherhood. This article revisits two of Luce Irigaray's most incisive challenges to traditional philosophical conceptions of subjectivity and embodiment: first, her idea of a ‘placental economy’ and, second, the ‘prenatal sojourn’ in ‘The Invisible of the Flesh’ (2004)—her response to Merleau-Ponty's ‘The Intertwining—The Chiasm’ (1968). Laura Green argues that Battersby and Irigaray coalesce around the idea of a ‘fleshy embodiment’ which is mediated by both nature and culture, and which prefigures the female body as a generative site of difference. Moreover, she reads Irigaray in light of Battersby's call for a specifically female subjectivity which evokes the ‘fleshiness’ of female embodiment. Battersby's interest in art complements Irigaray's own project by extending the ‘symbolic’ to encompass women's creative and reproductive potentialities. Green argues, however, that Battersby is too quick to reject Irigaray on the basis of her Lacanian/Heideggerian reading of western philosophy. On the contrary, it is suggested that Irigaray's early thought provides a comprehensive framework for describing the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’, one that implies layers of interdependence and respect for difference, but which also resists ‘sentimentalizing’ and abstracting the ‘other’.