Abstract

Luce Irigaray claims that sexual difference is perhaps the significant issue of our age. I argue that Irigaray's essays on central figures in the history of Western philosophy must be read in terms of the issue of sexual difference. I situate Irigaray within a recent, feminist theoretical focus on the status of "the body" . The body, until recently, like woman herself, has been neglected both by philosophy and by feminism. Rather than being considered a worthy topic of investigation, the body has been conceived as merely neutral and passive. Likewise, sexual difference has been simply assumed. For Irigaray, to think through the issue of sexual difference means to rethink the relation between man and woman--as well as between all traditional categories of opposition. I propose that, by emphasizing a positive sense of ambiguity, Irigaray reworks traditional binaries to establish an "innovative" relation. I conclude that Irigaray's project, interpreted in terms of the issue of sexual difference, has particular significance for recent scholarship in the area of "race." "Racial difference," like "sexual difference," is a concept that relies on hidden assumptions regarding the body. To bring these assumptions to the forefront is, therefore, to rethink the relation between the races. ;I support the thesis of the dissertation by providing readings of Irigaray's readings of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel. Essays central to dissertation chapters are: "Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato, Symposium, 'Diotima's Speech,"' and "Place, Interval: A Reading of Aristotle, Physics IV" in An Ethics of Sexual Difference; and "The Eternal Irony of the Community" in Speculum of the Other Woman. I demonstrate that while "sexual difference" has been thematically neglected by the tradition of Western metaphysics, the issue is nonetheless revealed in the precise texts that avoid or omit it. I argue that Irigaray's claim with respect to sexual difference is, thereby, two-fold: Irigaray maintains that sexual difference has not been thought by the Western philosophical tradition, while she simultaneously locates and discloses a genuine thinking of sexual difference within the tradition she criticizes. Irigaray neither dismisses the tradition nor adopts it in its usual rendering. Likewise, "sexual difference" , although elided by Western philosophy and feminism, resists a complete obliteration. The ability of "sexual difference" to resist erasure, I suggest, parallels the "nature" of bodies to extend the borders of traditional frameworks. This claim regarding bodies is shown to hold not only for the sexually marked body, but also for the racially marked one