Vox Irigaray

   From "Womanizing Nietzsche, Philosophy's Relation to the
   'Feminine' ", Kelly Oliver, Routledge, 1995, pp. 57, 106.


   For centuries philosophers have been concerned with
   ontological difference and have forgotten about sexual
   difference. For Irigaray the problem of sexual difference
   is the most pressing problem of our age (ESD 5). If, as
   Descartes suggests, wonder is the first passion and
   therefore the heart of philosophy, then the wonder at
   sexual difference should be a beginning for philosophy. Few
   experiences are as wonder-full:


      Thus man and woman, woman and man are always meeting as
      though for the first time because they cannot be
      substituted one for the other. I will never be in a
      man's place, never will a man be in mine. Whatever
      identifications are possible, one will never exactly
      occupy the place of the other -- they are irreducible
      one to the other.... Who or what the other is, I never
      know. But the other who is forever unknowable is the one
      who differs from me sexually. This feeling of surprise,
      astonishment, and wonder in the face of the unknowable
      ought to be returned to its locus: that of sexual
      difference. (ESD 13)


   Irigaray calls for an acknowledgment of sexual difference
   that gives rise to an experience of wonder and awe that is
   the source of all thinking. Not only may sexual difference
   be inseparable from the constitution of the subject, but it
   may also engender a radical wonder that has been identified
   with the very possibility of philosophical thought from
   Plato through Descartes to Husserl. If ontological
   difference is in any way dependent on sexual difference --
   either because sexual difference is primary or because
   sexual difference stands in a dialectical relation to
   ontological difference -- then self-consciousness, ethics,
   love, and the possibility of philosophical thought are
   intimately tied to sexual difference. As long as the
   feminine is excluded from cultural significance and allowed
   only to subsist, ethics, love and thought are impoverished,
   starving for an exchange with an other that can provide the
   breath of life. ...


   In the first part of this book I took up the question "How
   can a woman read the texts of Freud, Nietzsche, and
   Derrida? " My thesis is that all three of them try to
   formulate a theory that opens onto the other of theory --
   the body, the unconscious, nonmeaning -- but at the same
   time they close off the specifically feminine other. I
   analyzed the styles used by Nietzsche and Derrida to
   attempt this opening that also ends up closing. In this
   part I turn to the question "how can we open philosophy to
   sexual difference?" ...


   Derrida offers the beginning of an interpretation of
   Nietzsche's eternal return in The Ear of the Other where,
   like Deleuze, he claims that the eternal return is a
   selective principle (45). What returns is the double
   affirmation, the self-affirmation of the hymen, the "yes,
   yes." Only the affirmative returns while the negative falls
   into the past. Like Deleuze, Derrida maintains that forces
   return; the eternal return, contra Heidegger, is not the
   return of beings, and it is not metaphysical (EO, 46). The
   force that returns is the "self's" gift to itself, its
   double affirmation, its "yes, yes" to itself.


   Like Heidegger, and unlike her French contemporaries,
   Deleuze and Derrida, fathers of the so-called new
   Nietzsche, Irigaray reads Nietzsche's eternal return as the
   return of the same. On Irigaray's reading the eternal
   return is not the mechanism through which the self becomes
   other; rather it is a mechanism through which the other
   becomes reabsorbed into the self. Although as a student of
   Nietzsche's writings, I am more sympathetic to a reading of
   the eternal return as the return of difference over
   sameness, there is something fascinating, even compelling,
   about Irigaray's reading of Nietzsche's eternal return.


   For Irigaray, like Heidegger, the problem with Nietzsche's
   eternal return is a metaphysical problem, and it is a
   problem of difference. Unlike Heidegger, however, her
   concern is with the primacy of sexual difference and not
   the primacy of ontological difference. Irigaray's writings
   suggest that there is no ontological difference without
   sexual difference. Sexual difference is primary. And the
   history of the West is a history of only one sex; it is a
   history of the erasure of sexual difference. Now, with
   Irigaray, I ask, How and why has philosophy continued to
   forget, or cover over, sexual difference?