Voices from the Depths: Reading "Love" in Luce Irigaray's Marine Lover

Abstract

Yet, except for the case of the Hymn, which combines the dedication and the text itself, what follows the dedication (i.e., the work itself) has little relation to this dedication. The object I give is no longer tautological (I give you what I give you), it is interpretable; it has a meaning (meanings) greatly in excess of its address; though I write your name on my work, it is for them that it has been written (the others, the readers). Hence it is a fatality of writing that we cannot say of a text that it is but only, at best, that it has been created amorously, like a cake or an embroidered slipper. —Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments If, as Barthes writes, it is by a fatality of writing itself that a text cannot be amorous, then Luce Irigaray's Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche—written for, about, and with Nietzsche—can be read precisely as a revitalization of writing. Suppose we were to read Marine Lover not only as a critique, but as an encounter with Nietzsche: an amorous encounter, which serves to bring to life Nietzsche's dedication of his work to the philosophers of the future. In her interpretation of his work, Irigaray poses to Nietzsche the possibility that his of the might be a woman, even though his various stylizations of woman (as a trope for truth, dissimulation, shame, prudishness, seduction, and slavish dependency, among other things) seem to preclude actual women as readers of Nietzsche's work. Although he writes woman's name continually over his texts, women are not the ones to whom Nietzsche dedicates his work: the philosopher of the future to whom he beckons is presumed him to share certain prejudices—philosophers' prejudices—about women. What does this mean for his women readers? Feminism's encounter with Nietzsche has been interesting and productive, but never easy. A number of excellent accounts of Marine Lover have already been published that enumerate Irigaray's criticisms of Nietzsche, reading her elemental address to him in terms of his forgotten relation to certain women (his mother, his sister, and a postulated lover). 1 I would like to contribute a new dimension to this conversation, exploring the effects of the affective relation that Irigaray sets up between herself and Nietzsche in Marine Lover. In particular, I am interested in how her critique of Nietzsche's text quickens—or enlivens—his philosophy. Irigaray presents Marine Lover as an address directly to Nietzsche, writing from the perspective of the reader whom his philosophy