ABSTRACT
This chapter examines potential for making legible certain material practices in art, not to position such practices as illustrations of an Irigarayan morphology, but to allow for the play of a morpho-logic as prior to, and providing for, the production of what Luce Irigaray terms a 'syntax' in the Symbolic. Although the term 'morphology' is indeed from the Greek morphe, meaning 'form', it does not automatically imply an anatomical reading. In 1986, Margaret Whitford placed the empirical in a relation of difference with the textual – 'the "female", "feminine" or "other", where "female" stands metaphorically for the genuinely other in a relation of difference'. The terms that Irigaray uses most often to mediate the play of women's morphology are 'the lips' and, increasingly through her writings of the 1980s, 'mucous'. Various commentators have attempted to describe Irigaray's use of the morphology of lips and the mucous within extant grammatical formations.
