Luce Irigaray and divine matter

Luce Irigaray and divine matter

true source of his own divine), his objectivity has to be infinite to enable him
to realize his Iinitude. Without the projection of a perfection as a collective
affirmation, man as such could not exist; no subjectivity or society has existed
without divine assistance.

No wonder, then, Irigaray argues, that woman struggles to define herself
as such, that she has neither subjectivity nor objectivity.⁶ For woman has no
God, no divine, no goal. WithoutaGod_jWhatbecomesofherwill? Tothe
extent that it can be said to be hers at all, it is a kind of amorphous meandering,
at best a passive nihilism, for not even affirmative nihilism is possible for those
with no God to destroy. Her will, such as it is, is tied to the will of the other,
which because totally other, not from within her at all, leads to her subjection
and alienation in external goals (whether in the form of man, child or social
duty). And it is pertinent to ask, I believe, if this lack of an objective outside
appropriate to the will of women does in fact leave them in a chasm where
wills shoot out and deflect off one another in seemingly random fashion so
that the only way to seek to grasp and comprehend them seems to be
individually, consequently in terms of morality alone. The search and specu-
lation is endless, however, if the individuality in question does indeed turn out
to be a black hole.

The problem, according to Irigaray, gravitates around the fact that man
has defined himself with reference to his own genre, and in so doing believed
his divine to be representative of the whole of the genre humain. Hence the
logos is given to be neuter, or as the masculine generic, just as, she argues the
il(s) functions in language.⁷ Should the question of sexual difference be raised,
then the neutrality of this representation is thrown into doubt, as when, for
example, a woman wishes to represent the divine and to speak the word of the
divine during the Christian sacraments. If the universal nature of the masculine
is then invoked, she must attempt to embody his words, but even that has
proved an unacceptable image of incarnation until very recently, when the
rationalised religion has finally begun to accept the logic of its own rationalism

6 See ‘Femmes divines’ in Sexes, 67-85.

7 Throughout her work, but for a summary see, Je, tu, nous.

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