ABSTRACT
In his study of modernity and vision, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought 1 Martin Jay argues that Luce Irigaray is an antivisual theorist. Jay bases his assessment of Irigaray's position on her account of the ocularcentrism of Western philosophy, selecting her work as the most polemical of the many contributors to the post-1968 feminist debate in France who have drawn associations between ocularcentrism and masculine identity. 2 However, Jay's discussion omits aspects of Irigaray's interest in the representability of feminine subjectivity and eroticism that have not been considered by theorists of vision in general. Rather than confining her project to an elaboration of the implication of metaphors of light in the representation of a masculine identity, I will argue that Irigaray also adopts and develops a genealogical approach to the material conditions of that which comes to light. Though Irigaray's project in Speculum 3 is to retrace the movement by which a maternal genealogy is lost in the dissemination of light, she also has an ongoing interest in redefining a love of light that is dependent on its embodied, material conditions and, above all, its sexuate beginnings. This theme can be traced in a series of provocative alliances that Irigaray makes with various philosophers, particularly in An Ethics of Sexual Difference 4 In this chapter I will discuss the way in which Irigaray takes up the theme in relation to Emmanuel Lévinas's depiction of the feminine in his “Phenomenology of Eros.” 5
