ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapter, I attempted to demonstrate how, in the work of at least one French feminist materialist, Monique Wittig, anti-essentialism is made both possible and impossible, at once tenable and tentative, by the essentialist moments upon which it elaborates its own system. In the present chapter, I turn to the work of Luce Irigaray, a French psychoanalyst and philosopher, a "psychophilosophical" writer in Carolyn Burke's words (1981, 289), in order to deconstruct the essentialist/constructionist binarism "from the other side"—the side of essentialism and, in this instance, of psychoanalysis. If essentialism symptomatically inheres in antiessentialist formulations, is it possible that essentialism may itself be predicated, in turn, on some mode of anti-essentialism? Does essentialism, when pushed to its extreme, collapse into anti-essentialism? What might be at stake in deploying essentialism for strategic purposes? In short, are there ways to think and to talk about essence that might not, necessarily, "always already," ipso facto, be reactionary?
