Luce Irigaray and divine matter
Alison Martin
Seldom can an intellectual appeal have appeared so intempestif as Luce
Irigaray’s call for a female divine. When not entirely swept up in the
whirlwind of pragmatic existence, progressives have been consecrating their
creative and political energies to the struggle with metaphysical identities and
the limits imposed by heterosexist culture, while recourse to the divine has
largely been the preserve of conservatives clinging defensively to the certain-
ties of a guaranteed order. Analogies with Heidegger’s ontological need come
to mind, with its seeming .superfluousness at a time of rapid change and
imminent crisis. Yet, since Sexes et parentes,1 the need for the divine has
occupied a pivotal if not central role in Irigaray’s philosophy, as she attempts
to envisage a beyond to the confines of patriarchy and, indeed, to envisage an
ethics of sexual difference. Here I will attempt a mere general outline of
Irigaray’s position; I contend that her divine is both very material and one that
might function to release relations between women from a purely moral
horizon. By extension, women might be released from their social role as the
moral guardians of unethical societies.
Irigaray’s divine matter is to be compared with two other forms of
materialism: historical materialism and Bataille ,s Nietzschean Iibidinal mate-
rialism, the one predicting the death of God, the other declaring it a fait
accompli^ The one leading to the reduction of man to a means, the other
leading to the violent negation of man. Historical materialism might be
construed as having no outside in its circle of material as always already social,
and Bataille ,s general economy of base materialism might be said to have no
inside as energy flows ineluctably towards its own expenditure, all excess.
The divine matter of Irigaray depends simultaneously on the need for an
outside and an inside; it is both within and without. It is unashamedly positive,
1 Paris, 1987.
2 I do not have the space to fully develop this comparison here, although it does inform this
paper.