The Ironic Other

Abstract

Sexual difference is structured by a binary system, one of whose terms, almost invariably the masculine one, is always privileged. In The Second Sex,1 Simone de Beauvoir describes this binary system as the duality of Self and Other. Societies, she argues, are organized on the assumption that man is self and woman other, the consequences being always deleterious to women. This conception of alterity is echoed by Shoshana Felman, for example: ‘[t]heoretically subordinated to the concept of masculinity, the woman is viewed by man as his opposite, that is to say, as his other, the negative of the positive, and not, in her own right, different, other, Otherness itself’.2 Woman then tends to be constructed negatively in an androcentric society. She is defined by what she lacks and enters history with a piece missing. Such conception of an incomplete other subordinated to a masculine self is the point of departure of Luce Irigaray’s Speculum de Vautre femme.3 In her reading of Freud’s lecture on femininity, she points out that, for Freud, sexual difference comes down to the simple fact that the male has an obvious sex organ, not the female. Female difference is then perceived as an absence or the negative of the male norm. Woman is not only the other but man’s other, his negative or mirror-image, man’s specularized other which has meaning only in relation to him. ‘Caught in the specular logic of patriarchy, woman can choose either to remain silent, producing incomprehensible babble (any utterance that falls outside the logic of the same will by definition be incomprehensible to the male master discourse) or to enact the specular representation of herself as a lesser male.’4