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is less subject to alternations of tension-discharge,
to conservation of required
energy, to maintaining states of
equilibrium, to functioning as a closed
circuit that opens up through saturation...If
a scientifi c model is needed,
female sexuality would perhaps fi t
better with what Prigogine calls „dissipatory”
structures, which function
through exchanges with the exterior
world, which proceed in steps from
one energy level to another, and which
are not organized to search equilibrium
but rather to cross thresholds, a
procedure that corresponds to going
beyond disorder or entropy without
discharge.” 13
Introducing Irigaray in Hungary 14 by
her essay on Platonic eros I have to
mention at fi rst her famous psychoanalytic
interpretation of the Platonic cave
offered in her phd- thesis, published
under the title of „Speculum of the
Other Women” (Speculum de l’autre
femme) in Paris 1974. This book
made her known to a wider audience.
It containes a close, critical feminist
reading of Freud’s essay „On Feminity”
and of Plato’s myth of the Cave.
She interprets the cave as womb, the
way out of the cave to the light as birth
in a corporeal sense. Plato and Freud
are the founder and re-founder of patriarchal
order. From her fi rst book on
Irigaray’s task has been to deconstuct
classical philosophical texts. She has
been doing it as a philosopher and a
psychoanalyst, following Heidegger’s
or Derrida’s way or even Freud’s. - In
a sense psychoanalytic interpretation
is a kind of deconstructive reading
as well as feminist interpretation.(see
Part 1.)
I will focus on three concepts challenging
and widening the Freudian
theory from a feminist, critical standpoint.
They are the following 1. the
idea of matricide underlying western
culture, as opposed to Freud’s idea of
parricide; 2. the concept of wombenvy
characteristic of men, side by
side with the penis envy of women;
3. regeneration and creation by love,
Ellentmondásos
tradíció
eros instead of generation for women
or sublimation from desire for men.
These can be partly attributed to Irigaray
15 alone, partly to her follower.
The idea of womb envy was also conceived
as early as the next generation
of psychoanalysts after Freud.
Underlying of Irigaray’s works is a
sense of challenge to the Lacanian theory,
to his concepts such as the law of
the father, the phallus and woman as
lack etc. Reading Irigaray, the female
reader has the chance to see herself in
a better mirror of another woman than
in Lacan’s works where she is nothing
but a lack.
1. Matricide
Freud thinks the foundational act of
culture is a parricide commited by
the males of the tribe (Totem and Taboo).
According to Irigaray there is a
more fundamental, original murder,
the murder of the mother (matricide)
on which the whole culture, language,
mythology in the West rests. /The
Body Encounter with the Mother 16
/. It is symbolised in the founding of
metaphysics, in logocentrism, in the
symbolic order which excludes women
as body, matter. In this foundation
woman functions as the reproducer
of social order, acting as the infrastructure
of that order, the underpinning
on which the edifi ce is built. Her
idea, the psychoanalytic concept of
matricide has a bearing on the core
of the feminist critique of the binary
oppositions of Western philosophy,
an enterprise aimed at detecting the
underlying hierarchy. The value-laden
term in these dichotomies has a defi -
nite identity, the other side has no
identity of its own. The positive side
of the dichotomies fi gures as the symbolic
representation of Man (identity,
the Same), the other side represents
woman, it is a non-representation, a
negative defi nition. 17 Woman is the
Other. His identity is grounded on
what he is not, on her. Her identity is
extinguished - the material, maternal,
corporeal has been murdered, it is in
a symbolic sense matricide. The idea
has been developped from her fi rst
groundbreaking work „Speculum” on,
in her interpretation of the Platonic
cave as womb. This time my subject is
her reading of Symposium, Diotima’s
speech, the „Sorcerer Love”, which is
the fi rst piece in a series of lectures
given on the ethics of the passions in,
at Erasmus University in Rotterdam,
in 1982. The lectures were published
under the title „An Ethics of Sexual
Difference” 18 , and dealt with certain
13
KÉK
works of Plato, Aristote, Descartes,
Spinoza, Hegel, Lévinas and Merleau-
Ponty. Before turning to this essay (in
which she does not mention matricide
as she is developing the idea of a positive
female potential), I would like to
mention two works infl uenced or inspired
by her idea. the one is Adriana
Cavarero’s, the other is Page du Bois’
s „Sowing the Body” Both belong to
scholarship on ancient philosophy
or to classical studies infl uenced by
feminism and psychoanalysis. Adriana
Cavarero’s work „In spite of Plato” 19
analyses female fi gures of ancient philosophy
Penelope, Demeter, the maidservant
from Thrace in Plato’s dialogue
Theaetet and Diotima. In her essay on
Diotima she takes up Irigaray’s concept
of matricide and localizes it in
the hierarchy of mental creativity over
corporeal fertility. The Platonic text in
Symposium is unique because it keeps
traces of a maternal power and shows