Speculum of the Other Woman

by Luce Irigaray, Gillian Gill (Translator)

Speculum of the Other Woman by Luce Irigaray is incontestably one of the most important works in feminist theory to have been published in this generation. For the profession of psychoanalysis, Irigaray believes, female sexuality has remained a "dark continent," unfathomable and unapproachable; its nature can only be misunderstood by those who continue to regard women in masculine terms. In the first section of the book, "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry," Irigaray rereads Freud's essay "Femininity," and his other writings on women, bringing to the fore the masculine ideology implicit in psychoanalytic theory and in Western discourse in general: woman is defined as a disadvantaged man, a male construct with no status of her own.

In the last section, "Plato's Hystera," Irigaray reinterprets Plato's myth of the cave, of the womb, in an attempt to discover the origins of that ideology, to ascertain precisely the way in which metaphors were fathered that henceforth became vehicles of meaning, to trace how woman came to be excluded from the production of discourse. Between these two sections is "Speculum"--ten meditative, widely ranging, and freely associational essays, each concerned with an aspect of the history of Western philosophy in its relation to woman, in which Irigaray explores woman's essential difference from man.

Genres: Feminism, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Gender

416 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1974

About the author

Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst and cultural theorist. She is best known for her works Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One. Presently, she is active in the Women's Movements in both France and Italy.

Reviews

[Bryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Take that Plato and Lacan. You fuckers are pigs!

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a ride! The first section where she basically tears apart the assumptions of Freud (emasculates him...? castrates him...?) was enough, but the rest of the book moved well.

I get the sense from reviews that maybe Irigaray is an "angry feminist" to some. I would ask for a reconsideration. Angry? Not at all. A point of the book is to to uncover how angry and reactionary male-dominated theory has been through history. Irigaray argues that this has gone un-minded since the era of the Greeks. She's a sharp critic, but I felt it's more a calm feminist replying to a bunch of angry chauvinists then vice versa (my two cents for future readers.)

The downside for me was her Derri(dadist) language. She's not as imcomprehensible and pretentious as her mentor, but the book is loaded with a lot of intellectual glossolalia that the parrots will tell you is evidence of her great depth (it's not.)

[Maura Brewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think some people find Luce Irigaray annoying, but she is probably my favorite feminist author. This book is mostly impossible to read straight through - but the individual chapters are beautifully wirtten, and truly radical in their world view. I find myself coming back to this book all the time. It has been a major source for my studio work.

[Haley · Rating 5 out of 5]

studied this over an entire summer course.
yes just this.
i broke it down, beyotch.

[Maria Hiers · Rating 5 out of 5]

She *read* freud

[Cassidy Brinn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Irigaray upsets traditional words, syntax, and value hierarchies. Supposedly. She does accept fundamental sexual difference, it's just that men and their cocky eyeballs have all misconstrued the terms of that difference. Okay, so what's real femininity? She never got to that explication, instead spent the whole book censuring tradition. Is femininity wordless? So why did she choose the form of an argumentative academic text? Or maybe femininity's only power is to insert question marks and s/lashes into masculine productions? -- that and bleeding.

But I am unfair. The point of this book was to show psychoanalysis the back of its head, and it could be considered successful in that, I'm not qualified to say. I asked too much from this, Irigaray's debut work. And anyway, I actually got a kick out of all that pun!ctuation.

[Tory · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, like many other examples of post-structuralist French criticism, features an opaque writing style and wide-ranging references to the Western philosophical canon, which makes it difficult to read. However, this one is worth it. Irigaray's argumentation is problematic at times, but always compelling, and her account of the Western subject is a revelation. I particularly respect her guts in going after not only Freud, but Plato and Hegel as well. This book, while over 3o years old, has not lost its relevance. I would highly recommend it for any feminist scholar.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascism requires alterity to thrive. Sexism thrives when women are only objects defined by the subjective whim of men. Irigaray is trapped in the ludicrous paradigms of 1975 and takes the functional realities that explains women and upturns them for their stifling realities.

All psychoanalytical truths of 1975 were nothing more than cocktail party psychological babble. Irigaray is trapped within the world she is thrown into and accepts Lacan, Freud and Marx and shows the reality that their myths imposed onto women through destroying them as individual agents.

Deleuze’s book “Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia” was published 3 years before this book. Irigaray’s methodology follows Deleuze. Deleuze undermines psychoanalysis in the process while destroying fascism through staying within the paradigms they were thrown into while Irigaray applies her ire to the stupidity of sexism and the regaining of agency for women and girls.

Both writers make the grievous error of not realizing that the psychological paradigms are nonsense and were the problems themselves. They force themselves into pretzel logic to be heard and try to make fundamental change within the epistemological bubble they were trapped in.

Fascists and sexists need otherness through imaginary constructs such as race and making women only a reflection of what men are not. The absence of the presence (‘penis envy’) is as real to them as their certainty of their own superiority. Reality gets trumped by ideological identity for fascists and sexists. Today’s MAGA abstracts individuals into otherness and employs ICE onto those who are not them.

The flaw of this book, the author works within the paradigm of her times. The strength of this book, the author works within the paradigm of her times. It cracks me up looking at these kinds of books at how much idiocy was believed to subject others through alterity.

[n]

Crazy how enduring the onto-theologic of this text is

[samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Woman, Science’s Unknown
• Open Freud’s “Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity”
• All this, certainly, is very embarrassing and you are going to be led to conclude that "what constitutes masculinity or femininity is an unknown characteristic which anatomy cannot lay hold of" (p. 114). It is, thus, the expectation of the discovery of an unknown that arrests and obstructs the objectivity of scientific or at least anatomical discourse, as far as sex difference is concerned.
• So psychology does not offer us the key to the mystery of femininity-that black box, strongbox, earth-abyss that remains outside the sphere of ts investigations: light must no doubt come from elsewhere
• In conformity with its peculiar nature, psycho-analysis does not try to describe what a woman is-that would be a task scarcely performable-but sets about enquiring how she comes into being, how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposi¬tion"
• Therefore, the feminine must be de¬ ciphered as inter-diet: within the or between them, between the realized meanings, between the lines. . . and as a function of the (re)productive necessities of an intentionally phallic currency, which, for lack of the collaboration of a (potentially female) other, can immediately be assumed to need its other, a sort of inverted or negative alter ego¬-- “black" too, like a photographic negative. Inverse, contrary, contradic¬tory even, necessary if the male subject's process of specul(ariz)ation is to be raised and sublated.
• be/become, have/not have sex (organ), phallic, penis/clitoris or else penis/vaginaJ plus/minus, dearly representa¬ble/dark continent, logos/silence or idle chatter, desire for the mother/desire to be the mother, etc.
• But as far as "becoming woman" is concerned-and the task will consist mainly in recognizing and accepting her atrophied member-one might stress in passing that in the elaboration of analytic theory there will be little question of reducing bisexual tendencies in men.
• So we must admit that THE LITTLE GIRL IS THEREFORE A LITTLE MAN. A little man who will suffer a more painful and complicated evolution than the little boy in order to become a normal woman! A little man with a smaller penis. A disadvantaged little man. A little man whose libido will suffer a greater repression, and yet whose faculty for sublimating instincts will remain weaker. Whose needs arc less catered to by nature and who will yet have a lesser share of culture. A more narcissistic little man because of the mediocrity of her genital organs
• Thus Freud discovers-in a sort of blind reversal of repressions¬ certain variously disguised cards that are kept preserved or stored away and that lie beneath the hierarchy ofvalues of the game, of all the games: the desire for the same, for the self-identical, the self (as) same, and again ofthe similar, the alter ego and, to put it in a nutshell, the desire for the auto . . . the homo . . . the male, dominates the representational econo¬my.
• So, to return to the issue of weaning, it would seem pertinent to say that the little girl is weaned with far greater trauma than the little boy as she will have nothing-at least as things stand at present-to make up for, substitute for, or defer this final break in physical contact with her mother: she cannot turn back toward her mother, or lay claim to seeing or knowing what is to be seen and known of that place of origin; she will not represent "her" relation to "her" origin; she will never go back inside the mother; she will never give the mother a drink of sperm from her penis, in a substitution-reversal of the lost breast and milk
o She is left with a void, a lack of all representation, re-presentation, and even strictly speaking of all mimesis of her desire for origin.
• Now the little girl, the woman, supposedly has nothing you can see. She exposes, exhibits the possibility of a nothing to see. Or at any rate she shows nothing that is penis-shaped or could substitute for a penis. This is the odd, the uncanny thing, as far as the eye can see, this nothing around which lingers in horror, now and forever, an overcathexis of the eye, of appropriation by the gaze, and of the phallomorphic sexual metaphors, its reassuring accomplices.
• If woman had desires other than "penis-envy," this would call into question the unity, the uniqueness, the simplicity of the mirror charged with sending man's image back to him-albeit inverted. Call into question its flatness. The specularization, and speculation, of purpose of(his) desire could no longer be two-dimensionaL Or again: the "penis-envy" attributed to woman soothes the anguish man feels, Freud feels, about the coherence of his narcissistic construction and reassures him against what he calls castration anxiety.
• So let us speculate that things happen this way because, in psycho¬ analytic parlance, the death drives can be worked out only by man, never, under any circumstances, by woman. She merely "services" the work of the death instincts. O f man.
• Of course, let us not neglect the fact that the woman, the hysteric, is particularly liable to submission, to suggestion, to fabrication even, where the discourse-desire of the other is concerned. And that what she comes to say while in analysis will not be very different from what she is expected to say there.
• Freud will admit in his old age-and curiously also at the end of the text, of this text written at the end of his life-"that the duration [Freud's italics] of this attachment had also been greatly underestimated," "that a number of women remain arrested in their original attachment to their mother and never achieve a true change-over towards men," that "the pre-Oedipus phase in women gains an importance which we have not attributed to it hitherto," and "we must retract the universality of the thesis that the Oedipus complex is the nucleus ofall neuroses."
• Unlike the little boy—who exhibits, therefore, two psychologically distinct ties: a straightforward sexual object-cathexis towards his mother and an identification with his father which takes him as his model"53-the little girl takes her mother as her fust object of love and also as her privileged identificatory reference point for her "ego" as well as for her sex. In point of fact, if all the implications of Freud's discourse were followed through, after the little girl discovers her own castration and that of her mother-her "ob¬ject," the narcissistic representative of all her instincts-she would have no recourse other than melancholia. ****
• Symptoms of melancholia
o -profoundly painful dejection, which can be diagnosed by the absence of any libidinal activity and by the loss of interest in masturbation that occurs when the previously cathected organ and object are devalued.
o -abrogation of interest in the outside world, which, in the case of the little girl, takes the form of a faltering effort to master the external world. The latter is perpetuated in women's "weaker social interests" and their "few contributions to the discoveries and in¬ventions in the history of civilization”
o loss of the capacity for love, which leads the little girl to "turn away from her mother" and indeed from all women, herself included. Her desire for her father would in no way imply "love"; "the wish with which the girl turns to her father is no doubt originally the wish for the penis which her mother has refused her and which she now expects from her father.
o -inhibition of all activity
o -fall in self-esteem which, for the little girl, signals the end of the phallic phase
• The whole symptomology of melancholia could be explained thus: " A n object-choice, an attachment of the libido to a particular person, had at one time existed; then, owing to a real slight or disappointment com¬ing from this loved person, the object-relationship was shattered. The result was not the normal one of a withdrawal of the libido from this object and a displacement of it to a new one, but something different, for whose coming-about various conditions seem to be necessary. The ob¬ject-cathexis proved to have little power of resistance and was brought to an end. But the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served to establish an identification [Freud's italics] of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object. In this way an object-loss was transformed into an ego-loss, and the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical faculty of the ego and the ego as altered by identification [with the castrated moth¬ er, woman, little girl]. MELANCHOLIA DEF
• "The feminine situation is only established, however, if the wish for a penis is replaced by one for a baby, if, that a baby takes the place of a penis in accordance with an ancient symbolic equivalence"
Speculum
• We can assume that any theory of the subject has always been appro¬priated by the "masculine." When she submits to (such a) theory, wom¬an fails to realize that she is renouncing the specificity of her own relationship to the imaginary. Subjecting herself to objectivization in discourse-by being "female." Re-objectivizing her own self whenever she claims to identify herself "as" a masculine subject. A "subject" that would re-search itself as lost (maternal-feminine) "object"?
• Woman, for her part, remains in unrealized potentiality-unrealized, for/by herself . Is she, by nature, a being that exists for/by another?
• Is she unnecessary in and of herself, but essential as the non-subjective subjectum? SUBJECTUM
Plato’s Hysteria
• The myth of the cave, for example, or as an example, is a good place to start.1 Read it this time as a metaphor of the inner space, of the den, the womb or hystera, sometimes of the earth-though we shall see that the text inscribes the metaphor as, strictly speaking, impossible
• As the story goes, then, men-with no specification of sex-are living in one, same, place. A place shaped like a cave or a womb.
• The hystera, faceless, unseen, will never be presented, represented as such. But the representational scheme and sketch for the hystera-which can never be fulfilled-sub-tends, englobes, encircles, connotes, overdetermines every sight, every sighting, face, feature, figure, form, presentification, presence. Blindly.
• There is a passage: But what has been forgotten in all these opposi¬tions, and with good reason, is how to pass through the passage, how to negotiate it-the forgotten transition. The corridor, the narrow pass, the neck. Forgotten vagina.
• It always operates inside the cave. It re-marks the breaking into fractions, speculates on its potency, tries to anticipate the split, the bar, and to take advantage of it. Sometimes by breaking and enter¬ing. But always inside. All such interventions defer penetration.
• For the holes, cracks, tears-in the diaphragma for example-or the faults and failings of the hysterein must, in their turn, be re-marked, reinscribed. Particularly in the memory. Which is not to say that they will or can be represented, but that by their very elimination, their very reserve, they will set up the economy of that representation.
• But this cave is already, and ipso facto, a speculum. An inner space of reflection. Polished, and polishing, fake offspring. Opening, enlarging, contriving the scene of representation, the world as representation. All is organized into cavities, spheres, sockets, chambers, enclosures, simply because the speculum is put in the way.

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Speculum, opera magna di Luce Irigaray e uno dei più grandi rimpianti della psicologia analitica del femminile.
Premettendo che chi scrive lo fa con cognizione di causa, ho trovato nel libro una critica puntuale e precisa alle teorie freudiane originali, tuttavia:
1) Credo che nessun terapeuta sano di mente prenda ancora alla lettera le teorie di Freud, che giustamente nel corso degli anni sono state rimodellate sulla base del contesto odierno; inoltre, la persona di Freud viene attacata in maniera insensatamente feroce, come se si trattasse di un misogino di fine 1900 e non di un neurologo di fine 1800 che ha dato voce alla sofferenza di milioni di donne.
2) Luce Irigaray è definitivamente la chica male della psicoanalisi: il suo stile di scrittura è polemico e politico in modo davvero esasperato e poco adatto ad un testo simile; in altre parole, è scritto davvero male. Sembra il copione di un comizio: un comizio che ascolterei volentieri, ma che leggerei un pò meno. Avete presente quando la maestra vi diceva "quando scrivete non dovete farlo usando il linguaggio che usate per parlare quotidianamente"? Quel giorno Luce ha marinato, andando a pisciare sulla tomba di Lacan (sacrosanto passatempo).
3) Che Freud sia stato cieco nella formulazione del femminile è palese, ma quindi? Qual è l'alternativa? Dove ricominciare? Silenzio.

Irigaray scrive un testo dal grande potenziale (prima di delirare in opere successive), che dovrebbe essere letto in ogni corso di psicologia, se non fosse che è davvero illeggibile, inutilmente e pretenziosamente complicato e pieno di citazionismo inutile con il solo scopo di confutare l'antitesi; l'attesa della tesi resterà vana.

Contenuti: 7
Scrittura: 2

[Robert Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

a remarkable book, particularly the first chapter that closely reads Freud's claims on feminine sexuality, revealing their patriarchal conventionality, and then reading them against their grain precisely to reveal how fragile the masculine subject, and how dependent it is on the construction of this non-subjectivity to prop it up. Irigaray builds her reading of western philosophy off of Lacan's concept of the mirror stage, the misrecognition of the subject as a completed, and self-inclosed whole. However, she takes that concept in a feminist direction that would eventually get her kicked out of the Freudian school. The later chapters are more fragmentary and impressionistic, but continue to develop that concept of the mirror. There is more to say, but I'll leave it there.

[Amanda books_ergo_sum · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Copernican revolution has yet to have its final effects in the male imaginary. And by centering man outside himself, it has occasioned above all man's ex-stasis within the transcendental (subject)."

This book does, to an incredibly high degree, what I think the best critical philosophy has to do. Namely, lay a foundation of solid interpretation of the philosophy it’s responding to and then smash through all that with a groundbreaking idea. I was not expecting Irigaray’s discussion of philosophers to be as close and careful a reading of their texts as it was. And the ideas are truly ‘out there’ in the best way possible. Also, the puns, the riddles, the double (or triple?) entendres—the language was so evocative that it read like poetry.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This distinct flagship of Post-Modern Feminism delivers a whopping blow to naysayers and conservatives of the feminist movement. While "Speculum" may not hold the historically significant weight of "Second Sex" or "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," it definitely merits a place of distinction in the canon of Feminist non-fiction.

[Zack2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterwork of negative philosophy. Irigaray manages to camouflage herself as her philosophical opponents, expounding their views straightforwardly but allowing a mocking echo to resound in the reader's mind. The web of concepts that she is able to stitch together from centuries of philosophy is seriously impressive. I enjoyed every bit of this book.

[Natasha11 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forewarning, Irigaray can be difficult to get through. Her theories can sound a bit odd, nonetheless she is incredibly profound and in my opinion one of the most substantial true Feminists in the past 30 years. Highly respectable.

[Red · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is where my love of french (feminist) philosophy began. (i'm not counting satre or lacan or ....)

[Nathalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I remember right, this is the book that got Irigaray sacked by Lacan.

[Amber Manning · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The (re)productive power of the mother, the sex of the woman, are both at stake in the proliferation of system, those houses of ill fame for the subject, of fetish-words, sign-objevts who certified truths seek to palliate the risk that values may be recast into/by the other. But no clear univocal utterance, can in fact, pay off this mortgage since all are already trapped in the same credit structure. All can be recuperated when issued by the signifying order in its place. It is still better to speak only in riddles, allusions, hints, parables. Even if asked to clarify a few points. Even if people plead that they just don’t understand. After all, they have never understood. So why not double the misprision to the limits of exasperation? Until the ear tunes into another music, the voice starts to sing again, the very gaze stops squinting over the signs of auto-representation, and (re) production no longer inevitably amounts to the same and returns to the same forms, with some minor variation.”

[Clara Jeanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important text I had to read if I want to consider myself well-versed in feminist theory. Irigaray explores the under-researched and misunderstood genre of female sexuality. What is so scary about female sexuality you might ask? Well to start, it has always, always, always been defined by masculine terms.

In this stunning book that dismantles traditional (and misogynistic) traditions of psychoanalysis, Irigaray examines writings like Freud's "Femininity," or Plato's myth of the cave to discover the origins of gendered ideologies and how women got left out of that discourse. Essentially, the premise of this book I would argue, is how women are essentially different from men, but Western philosophy and history has genrefied humankind into "man," where women are merely defined as a disadvantaged man. I read this book after reading her piece "The Sex Which Is Not One," which would be my suggested order for diving into her literature.

[Giselle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este clásico de la teoría feminista es uno de los libros más dificiles que he leído en mucho tiempo, no por el contenido, si no por cómo está escrito. Tengo muchas ideas al respecto, pero sobre todo recomiendo el ensayo que da título a la colección donde desarrolla todo un discurso que conecta a la mujer con el lenguaje utilizando el Espéculo ginecológico (del latín Speculum, espejo) como metáfora para ilustrar la relación de poder intrínseca en el acto de "nombrar". Irigaray plantea que la relación de la mujer con el lenguaje falogocéntrico es la misma que tiene con el Espéculo, algo que nos abre el cuerpo en dos, que no nos permite vernos, pero si ser vistas.

[Juan Ortiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

una obra con un duro comenzar pero que a medida que se avanza y se acostumbra a la escritura de Irigaray se disfruta y permite una abertura al pensamiento feminista, y a repensar las teorías filosóficas desde otro punto de vista.

[Tiffany K · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve circled, underlined, bent, and annotated every page of this and I’m still unsure if I fully absorbed it. When feminism meets psych, things get knotty. What a lovely undoing of assumptions’ past.

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

c'est difficile mais necessaire

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Freud stuff was perfect. The rest of it went right over my head.

[Sara G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. I'm going to leave it at that for now.

[Reegan Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very difficult and quite slow going but verrrrry worth it imo

[Cyra]

dnf’d

[Laura]

Wird in "We are Feminists" in Bezug auf die feministische Theorie erwähnt (S. 56)

[caity · Rating 4 out of 5]

do yourself a favour read this and then the commonly used terms and phrases on google books