Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph of Prologue]
The following essay has a purpose more than a thesis. This essay explains the central tenets of Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference through an understanding her work as that of a "symbolist philosopher." Symbolist poetry and French Feminist philosophy like Irigaray's have several qualities in common. One is that the literal level of language is not where the action is. A reader must think associatively on many levels at once in order to gather and interpret the several indirect messages sent by a particular image or metaphor. Another is an acquired comfort with paradox. Paradoxes lie at the heart of Irigaray's ethics; hers is most strenuously a both-and logic: both the body and mind must be honored, both men and women must honored; both the physical world and the spiritual world… The kicker is that while each of these terms retains its own identity and characteristics, they are also meshed in important ways. The spiritual world is (in, part of, manifests through) the sensible or physical world. This seems like a paradox, and if it is, it is not one that we are to resolve in favor of one term or the other. Irigaray's philosophy of the sexes and her ethics are both heavily influenced by Tantric philosophies, in which paradoxes are taken as a sign of truth. A symbolist, quasi-deconstructive sort of truth, granted. An additional aspect of Irigaray's thought is that she is often discussing her ideas on several levels simultaneously: at the level of the gendered person her and himself; at the level of gender as a cultural phenomena with a history; at the level of culture as a set of aesthetic and philosophical products; and at the level society as a set of laws and practices. Only a condensed or symbolist style could accomplish such a multi-leveled discussion with any elegance. This essay teases out each of those levels of meaning at work in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. It also argues that an ethics of difference, and a poetics to support it, are needed in order to move the course of history in a more fruitful and fecund direction.
Repository Citation
Roberts, Simone. "Burn the Panopticon: Irigaray's Ethics, Difference, Poetics." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 5, no. 1, 2025, pp. 1–54. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol5/iss1/7
Included in
Aesthetics Commons, Applied Ethics Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Feminist Philosophy Commons, French and Francophone Literature Commons
Comments
This article was originally split up into separate web pages for each of the sections. The sections were merged into one document for the archive.