Abstract

Through a careful reading of the philosophical inter-texts in Amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche, this dissertation interrogates Irigaray's meditation on sexual difference in light of the nihilism problematic as it is thought by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Chapter I shows how recent "feminist" appropriations of Irigaray are unaware of Irigaray's polemos with the dominant philosophemes of Western metaphysics in general, and with Nietzsche's and Heidegger's thinking in particular. The sometimes reductive and obscuring appropriations of Jane Gallop and Toril Moi focus almost exclusively on the psychoanalytic gesture of Irigaray's writing and reduce her work to a methodology for critical ideological practices. Because of this veiling, I introduce the problem of appropriation per se through the Heideggerian notion of 'das Ereignis,' which opens up Irigaray's text to a rigorous ontological questioning. ;The Second Chapter shows how interpretation is predicated upon an ontological pre-understanding and how this question is implicated within the basic rubrics of Nietzsche's thinking on nihilism and, subsequently, within Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche. What this chiasm unveils is how Irigaray appropriates Nietzsche's transvaluative philosophy, which, founded on a Cartesian subjectivity, irretrievably confines both within the metaphysics they attempt to overcome. ;Chapter III deconstructs Irigaray's reading of Nietzsche's discourse, from which she tries to retrieve his most muted and oracular Pre-Socratic language. Irigaray attempts to "listen" to the silent mater-ial ground upon which Nietzsche erects his philosophy. But she aligns this elemental ground with Heidegger's Being. Hence, she names that which cannot be named; so she inevitably falls back into metaphysics. ;Nietzsche's radical separation between "woman" and "truth" forms the basis for the discussion in Chapter IV. For Irigaray, there is no "raging discord" between the two, since they both belong to the logic of the same. She posits 'le feminin' as a transvaluation of "femininity," which exceeds and eludes this logic. Irigaray thus affirms 'le feminin' as a transvalued value--as Dionysus sans Apollo, and in so doing reproduces the very metaphysical logic which she seeks to undo