ABSTRACT
Language des déments (1973; The Language of the Demented), focused on the collapse of language among those suffering from dementia. Her doctoral thesis Speculum de l’autre femme (1974; translated as Speculum of the Other Woman, 1985) and the subsequent Ce sexe qui n’est pas un (1977; translated as This Sex Which Is Not One, 1985) established Irigaray firmly as one of the key thinkers around the notion of an écriture feminine or feminine style of writing based on a complex analysis of the relation between the biological body, the unconscious, and women’s, and indeed men’s, relation to language and systems of symbolic signification. From a lesbian perspective Irigaray’s celebration of the multiple sexual and sensual opportunities the female body offers for its own pleasure and that of other women provided a welcome shift from the Freudian notion of woman as lack and inadequate. It is, in fact, to a certain kind of so-called French feminism, which includes the work of Irigaray but also of Julia Kristeva and of Hélène Cixous, that lesbians owe the reintroduction of the notion of pleasure or jouissance-as opposed to guilt and self-loathing-into the idea and reality of the female body. The notion of an écriture feminine, much celebrated in Anglo-American feminist criticism of the 1980s, has since undergone a rigorous critique, but Irigaray’s analysis of the gender/language relation in the context of her analysis of sexual and capitalist regimes has made her one of the foremost feminist critics among Italian feminists, who have embraced her ideas very strongly. Following on from her first two volumes, which made her into an internationally renowned feminist theorist, Irigaray produced a whole range of texts elaborating on her earlier positions. These include Amante marine: de Friedrich Nietzsche (1983; translated as Marine Lover: Of Friedrich Nietzsche, 1991), Sexes et parentés (1987; translated as Sexes and Genealogies, 1993), Je, tu, nous (1990; translated as Je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, 1993), Elemental Passions (1992), An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993), I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History (1995), The Forgetting of Air (1999), Why Different? Collected Interviews (1999), To Speak Is Never Neuter (1999), To Be Two (2000), Democracy Begins between Two (2001), and Daily Prayers (2002). Irigaray is director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.
