This philosophy which is not one: Luce Irigaray, teacher for sexual difference with Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

This thesis is to research the work of Luce Irigaray on sexual difference, with focus on the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, and Emmanuel Levinas, for philosophy of education. The Nietzsche/Levinas nexus in Irigaray is a new area of research. The research engages with the spatial and temporal conditionsfor sexual difference that will be required to bring about a shift from the Western historical negation of the feminine and therefore of sexual difference. I will argue symbolic negation of the feminine is in continuity with material subordination of the feminine. Luce Irigaray is a leading French philosopher of the feminine, articulated in terms of sexual difference, and an ethics of passionate rationality. Irigaray claims sexual difference as 'the issue of our age'. The affirmation of sexual difference is addressed to the construction and creation of knowledge which has been predicated on the norm of the masculine universal and the negation of (sexual) difference. As a teacher and genealogist, Irigaray critiques of the negation of the feminine embedded in knowledge and in philosophy, and urges the creation of new knowledge to correspond with the regeneration of culture through sexual difference. Irigaray has written 'Western philosophy, perhaps all philosophy, has been constructed around a singular subject. For centuries no one imagined that different subjects might exist, or that man and woman in particular might be different subjects' (1998a). While the thesis refers to lrigaray's work as a whole, it is focused on her 1991 text, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche.. It engages with Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals (1956), and with the wider corpus of Nietzsche's work. Marine Lover refers to Nietzsche's major philosophical themes regarding time and space,subjectivity, ethics and power; it is written in a style of dialogue with Nietzsche through the persona of Zarathustra of Thus Spake hrathustra (Nietzsche 1932). Irigaray applies Nietzschean critique with and against Nietzsche's proposals for breaking with the metaphysical tradition and the overcoming of 'man'. In Irigaray's estimation the eternal return, the pathos of distance and aesthetic recreation, depend on an unacknowledged debt to the feminine, and Nietzsche is therefore in continuity with the tradition of privilege to masculine values.