Speculum of the Other Woman

by Luce Irigaray, Gillian Gill (Translator)

Overview

"Speculum of the Other Woman is a major text in the post-1968 feminist inquiry in France. It will be of interest to feminists, psychoanalysts, philosophers, and literary critics. There is no other text that attempts to do readings of major texts within the Western philosophical tradition using Lacanian, Derridean, and feminist tools. Gillian C. Gill offers a remarkable performance in translating without betraying a very challenging text."
―Elaine Marks, Department of French and Italian and Women's Studies Program, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Speculum of the Other Woman by Luce Irigaray is incontestably one of the most important works in feminist theory to have been published in this generation. For the profession of psychoanalysis, Irigaray believes, female sexuality has remained a "dark continent," unfathomable and unapproachable; its nature can only be misunderstood by those who continue to regard women in masculine terms. In the first section of the book, "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry," Irigaray rereads Freud's essay "Femininity," and his other writings on women, bringing to the fore the masculine ideology implicit in psychoanalytic theory and in Western discourse in general: woman is defined as a disadvantaged man, a male construct with no status of her own.

In the last section, "Plato's Hystera," Irigaray reinterprets Plato's myth of the cave, of the womb, in an attempt to discover the origins of that ideology, to ascertain precisely the way in which metaphors were fathered that henceforth became vehicles of meaning, to trace how woman came to be excluded from the production of discourse.

Between these two sections is "Speculum"—ten meditative, widely ranging, and freely associational essays, each concerned with an aspect of the history of Western philosophy in its relation to woman, in which Irigaray explores woman's essential difference from man.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801416637
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	05/10/1985
Series:	11/27/1996
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.19(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Luce Irigaray, a trained, psychoanalyst, has two doctorates, one in linguistics and one in philosophy. Her books include Speculum of the Other, This Sex Which is Not One, and Ethics of Sexual Difference, all published by Cornell University Press.

Table of Contents

THE BLIND SPOT OF AN OLD DREAM OF SYMMETRYWoman, Science's Unknown
How Can They Immediately Be So Sure?; The Anatomical Model; A Science That Still Cannot Make Up Its Mind; A Question of Method; What Is Involved in (Re) production, and How It Aids and Abets the Phallic Order; A Difference Not Taken into Account; The Labor "to Become a Woman"The Little Girl Is (Only) a Little Boy
An Inferior Little Man; The Cards Turned Over; The Dream Interpreters Themselves; Penis Masturbation: A Necessarily Phallic Auto-eroticism; The Change of "Object" or the Crisis of a Devaluation; The Law of the Self-sameIs Her End in Her Beginning?
An Unsuspected Love; The Desire to Have a Child by the Mother; The Father's Seduction: Law but Not Sex; The "Reasons" Why a Girl Hates Her Mother and a Boy Goes on Loving His; An Economy of Primal Desire That Cannot Be Represented; One More ChildAnother "Cause"—Castration
As Might Be Expected; The Gaze, Always at Stake; Anatomy Is "Destiny"; What the Father's Discourse Covers Up; The Negative in Phallocentric Dialectic; Is Working Out the Death Drives Limited to Men Only?"Penis-Envy"
Waiting in Vain; An Indirect Sublimation; "Envy" or "Desire" for the Penis?; Repression, or Inexorable Censorship?; Mimesis ImposedA Painful Way to Become a Woman
And the Father, Neutral and Benevolent, Washes His Hands of the Matter; A (Female) A-Sex?; Is the Oedipus Complex Universal or Not?; Free Association on OnanismA Very Black Sexuality?
Symptoms Almost Like Those of Melancholia; A Setback She Cannot Mourn; That Open Wound That Draws Everything to Itself; That Necessary Remainder: HysteriaThe Penis = the Father's Child
The Primacy of Anal Erotism; Those Party to a Certain Lease; Woman Island Also Mother; Forbidden Games; The Hymen of Oedipus, Father and SonThe Deferred Action of Castration
Capitalism without Complexes; The Metaphorical Veil of the Eternal Feminine; The Other Side of History; The Submission of a Slave?; A Super-ego That Rather Despises the Female SexAn Indispensable Wave of Passivity
A Redistribution of Partial Instincts, Especially Sadistic-anal Instincts; "There Is Only One Libido"; Idealization, What Is One's Own; The (Re)productive Organ; Confirmation of FrigidityFemale Hom(m)osexuality
The "Constitutional Factor" Is Decisive; Homosexual Choice Clearly Expounded; A Cure Fails for Lack of Transference(s); Female SamenessAn Impracticable Sexual Relationship
An Ideal Love; Were It Not for Her Mother?; Or Her Mother-in-law?; Squaring the Family Circle; Generation Gap, or Being Historically out of Phase?; Woman's Enigmatic Bisexuality"Woman Is a Woman as a Result of a Certain Lack of Characteristics"
An Ex-orbitant Narcissism; The Vanity of a Commodity; The Shame That Demands Vicious Conformity; Women Have Never Invented Anything but Weaving; A Very Envious Nature; Society Holds No Interest for Women; A Fault in Sublimation; "La Femme de Trente Ans"SPECULUM
Any Theory of the "Subject" Has Always Been Appropriated by the "Masculine"
Kore: Young Virgin, Pupil of the Eye
On the Index of Plato's Works: Woman How to Conceive (of) a Girl
Une Mère de Glace
"... and if, taking the eye of a man recently dead... "
La Mystérique
Paradox A Priori
The Eternal Irony of the Community
Volume-FluidityPLATO'S HysteriaThe Stage Setup
Turned Upside-down and Back-to-front; Special Status for the Side Opposite; A Fire in the Image of a Sun; The Forgotten Path; Paraphragm/Diaphragm; The Magic Show; A Waste of Time?; A Specular CaveThe Dialogues
One Speaks, the Others Are Silent; Like Ourselves, They Submit to a Like Principle of Identity; Provided They Have a Head, Turned in the Right Direction; What Is = What They See, and Vice Versa; The A-letheia, a Necessary Denegation among Men; Even Her Voice Is Taken Away from Echo; A Double Topographic Error, Its ConsequencesThe Avoidance of (Masculine) Hysteria
A Hypnotic Method; That Buries and Forbids "Madness"; A Remainder of Aphasia; The Misprison of Difference; The Unreflected Dazzle of SeductionThe "Way Out" of the Cave
The "Passage"; A Difficult Delivery; Then Whence and How Does He Get Out?; A World Peopled by GhostsThe Time Needed to Focus and Adjust the Vision
Impossible to Turn Back (or Over); Were It Not, Right Now, for a Sophistry Played with Doubles; A Frozen Nature; The Auto... Taken in by the A-letheia; Bastard or Legitimate Offspring?The Father's Vision: Engendering with No History of Problems
A Hymen of Glass/Ice; The Unbegotten Begetter; Exorcism of the Dark Night; Astrology as Thaumaturgy: A Semblance (of a) Sun; A Question of PropertyA Form That Is Always the Same
The Passage Confusing Big and Little, and Vice Versa; The Standard Itself/Himself; Better to Revolve upon Oneself-But This Is Possible Only for God-the-Father; The Mother, Happily, Does Not Remember; A Source-mirror of All That Is; The Analysis of That Projection Will Never Take (or Have Taken) PlaceCompletion of the Paideia
The Failings of an Organ That Is Still Too Sensible; A Seminar in Good Working Order; An Immaculate Conception; The Deferred Action of an Ideal Jouissance; The End of ChildhoodLife in Philosophy
Always the Same (He); An Autistic Completeness; Love Turned Away from Inferior Species and Genera/Gender; The Privilege of the Immortals; The Science of Desire; A Kore Dilated to the Whole Field of the Gaze and Mirroring HerselfDivine Knowledge
The Back Reserved for God; The Divine Mystery; This Power Cannot Be Imitated by Mortals; How, Then, Can They Evaluate Their Potency?; Except over Someone Like Themselves?; The Father Knows the Front Side and Back Side of Everything, at Least in Theory; The Meaning of Death for a PhilosopherAn Unarticulated/Inarticulate Go-Between: The Split between Sensible and Intelligible
A Failure of Relations between the Father and Mother; A One-way Passage; Compulsory Participation in the Attributes of the Type; A Misprized Incest and an Unrealizable IncestReturn to the Name of the Father
The Impossible Regression toward the Mother; A Competition the Philosopher Will Decline to Enter; Two Modes of Repetition: Property and Proximity; Better to Work the Earth on the Father's Account Than to Return to It: Metaphor/Metonymy; The Threat of Castration"Woman's" Jouissance
A Dead Cave Which Puts Representation Back into Play; That Marvelously Solitary Pleasure of God; A Diagonal Helps to Temper the Excessiveness of the One; The Infinite of an Ideal Which Covers the Slit (of a) Void; Losing Sight of "the Other"; The Vengeance of Children Freed from Their Chains

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Speculum of the Other Woman is a major text in the post-1968 feminist inquiry in France. It will be of interest to feminists, psychoanalysts, philosophers, and literary critics. There is no other text that attempts to do readings of major texts within the Western philosophical tradition using Lacanian, Derridean, and feminist tools. Gillian C. Gill offers a remarkable performance in translating without betraying a very challenging text.

Editorial Reviews

The publication of these two translations is an event to be celebrated by feminists of all persuasions.

Women's Review of Books

The publication of these two translations is an event to be celebrated by feminists of all persuasions.

-- "Women's Review of Books"

From the Publisher