The Politics of Un-Identified Women

Abstract

Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva both confront Western ontology for its unwillingness to attend to difference. Irigaray shows that the male writers such as Plato and Freud repress and claim to replace sexual difference by reducing it to complementary opposition. Kristeva theorizes the speaking subject as heterogeneous, split and in process between logical orderliness and the desiring body. The straight thinking of modern Western reason and politics represses this heterogeneity and reduces the subject to unity. Feminists in the U.S. have also recently reflected on difference in two senses: the positive difference of women from men and the differences among women. The idiom and aim of these American reflections on difference intersect only painfully with the sweeping and text-oriented reflections of Irigaray and Kristeva. I argue in this paper, however, that bringing the analyses of these French women into the pragmatic American context produces important results for political philosophy and practical emancipatory politics. With Irigaray's understanding of feminine difference as incomensurable with masculine unity, of feminine touch as multiple and proliferating, and Kristeva's understanding of rational discourse and power as potentially embodied and sensuous, we can build a vision of positively heterogeneous and sensuous public life.