Irigaray, Dialogue and the Interview

Abstract

There is no doubt thatthe question of dialogue is a central concern ofLuce Irigaray' s work. It is a quest, in fact, more than a concern. For her thesis in Speculum is that, in being symbolically reduced to matter, women have been silenced in history. 1 What distinguishes this claim from apparently related work on the English scene, such as Sheila Rowbotham's Hidden from History, 2 is that Irigaray has always sought a specificity in the feminine. And in contrast to readings given to some North American feminists writing in the 1970s,3 she has never sought out a female essence, nor imagined woman as a unified subject, the hapless or defiant victim of systems of dominance that are largely external to her. From her earliest publications Irigaray has worked within a tradition of French Hegelianism, such that for her women are always constituted in and through their relation with the other. The problem as she sees it is that woman's otherness has been defined in a patriarchal system that prefers the same to the other, so while the fight for recognition between men could entail the warring respect for the enemy who is a potential equal, the