Luce Irigaray and divine matter
133
in that it expresses her desire to go beyond pure negation in order to avoid the
politics of simply making demands, since Irigaray insists that slavery is not
overcome by the mere defeat of the masters.3 Of course, any such positivity
risks accusations of collusion of some sort, risks some colonising assimilation.
It would be vain to attempt to exempt Irigaray from such criticism, for
acceptance of her analysis and its solutions does inevitably entail such risks.
However, suspending cynicism for a moment, the following considerations
should be bome in mind. Irigaray is not engaged in an exercise of transcen-
dental idealism; she has no privileged access to truth and is as hermeneutically
situated as her critics. She is not claiming to represent woman or women, nor
play the role of prophet, mediating between divine will and the popular mass.
She is less concerned with stating what the divine is (or should be) than with
setting out the structural possibility or necessity of the divine; she is more
concerned to elaborate the ontological possibility of the divine as an existen-
tial-hermeneutic condition, than to list its features as if it were a being, ontically
conceived. That said, as this divine is not mystical, she does on occasion offer
ways of interpreting, appropriating and creating it, at least for the female
divine.4 This because I believe that she, more than anyone, is aware of how
strange a conception it is, not only because we have rationalised God out of
any credible discourse (except as a logical buttress for a given system in which
affective needs are deemed to be misplaced), but because the female divine
has been outlawed in monotheistic cultures and tends to evoke images of
weekend Mother Earth cults—await the ensuing outburst of laughter at such
an incomprehensible absurdity.
3 In her most recent work, J'aime a toi, Paris, 1992, Irigaray continues to develop what she
sees as the third stage of her oeuvre, that is, to examine the possibility for relations between
the male and female sexes (the first stage being a critique of patriarchy, the second an
exploration of Ie feminin). She signals her interest in Hegel and attempts to develop a dialectic
for the two sexes. Thus, any positivity will be mediated by the labour of the negative,
reworked by Irigaray as the limit gender represents.
4 For example, her discussions of women’s ngħt to virginity and to motherhood are more than
just legalistic strategies; they offer valorised ideals for women. See Tourquoi definir des
droits sexues?’ in√e, tu, nous, Paris, 1990,101-15.