MIMING THE CRUCIFIXION: Mimesis and the Affirmation of the ”Other” in Irigaray and Adorno

Christopher Craig Brittain

A recent article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (”Cindy Shermans kleine Schwestern,” 26 Aug/98) describes the ”Appropriation Art” of three feminist artists who challenge the representational norms of the ”Feminine” in society by exaggerating stereotypical images of the female body in order to undermine them. As the article observes, this practice has drawn considerable criticism within feminist circles, as many fear that such ironic imitations merely serve to reinforce those stereotypes, or even suggest a female ‘essentialism’ that risks confining women’s identity within specific and limiting boundaries. These artists, however, assert that in their search for the roots of identity formation, it makes little sense to imply that one can step outside the structures of repression, and that this necessitates challenging the representation of women from within through an ironic imitation of repressive cultural norms. Luce Irigaray is a feminist theorist whose work has been surrounded by similar controversies. Arguing that within the confining boundaries of phallocentrism the identity of women has remained hidden and silenced, Irigaray seeks to uncover this identity by adopting two strategies to challenge the male ”logic of the Same.” First, she practices a mimicry of male philosophy and norms, arguing that her playful imitation of the place of women within the social order will help undermine the system itself. Secondly, Irigaray insists that a constructive step is required to help women ‘live into’ their own identity. This strategy includes the need to develop an understanding of a feminine divine - a ”Divine Woman” - to guide women’s emergence towards wholeness. This paper examines Irigaray’s proposal for a mimicry of phallocentric male norms as a feminist strategy, and compares it with the concept of mimesis within the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno. While many similarities exist between the attempts of these two theorists to privilege the ”other” repressed by traditional philosophy and understandings of subjectivity, significant differences also emerge which highlight some problematic features of Irigaray’s work. Irigaray, unlike Adorno, understands the traditions of the Enlightenment to be hopelessly corrupt, and as a result establishes a dualistic split between male and female, reason and mimesis, which completely ignores the dialectical relationship between subject and object, emphatic mimesis and reason, which Adorno’s work develops. Irigaray presents the dilemma facing women as a choice between total domination or total bliss, while ignoring the ”broken middle” between these extreme positions in which human beings can struggle and negotiate for a better life together. Furthermore, by opting for an abstract ‘feminine divine’ that heals divisions through some mystical escape beyond/before language, Irigaray leaves little room for the hard work of social analysis, or the concrete voices of women and those others repressed by the norms of society. In her celebration of ”lack”, Irigaray’s mimicry may actually engage in an imitation of the traditional Christian emphasis on dispossession and sacrifice, which coincides with, and contributes all too well to, the systems of capitalist exchange and the suppression of women which Irigaray seeks to overcome.

At the outset of her book An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Luce Irigaray makes a startling claim: ”Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our ”salvation” if we thought it through.” [1] But, if we are to achieve this ”new age,” she adds, it will require ”a revolution in thought and ethics.” Such a revolution is the goal of her work, beginning in her first book, Speculum of the Other Woman. Speculum argues that all the classic western philosophical texts tell the same story - ”the story of the Same.” In Irigaray’s view, the western philosophical tradition is consistently characterized by a drive to establish identity, to generate conceptual systems, establish binary opposites, and point to an a priori central principle as the source of authority. She concludes that the result of this trend is to make real difference impossible - the central principle establishes identity in relation to itself, and shuts out all that does not conform to its model. With this "logic of the Same," all otherness is hidden from view. As she asserts in another essay: At best this singular model would allow for a balancing act between the one and the many, but the one remains the model which, more or less openly, controls the hierarchy of multiplicity: the singular is unique and/but ideal, Man. Concrete singularity is only a copy of the ideal, an image. [2]

As this statement suggests, Irigaray argues that with this "logic of the Same" philosophy is also gendered. The central principle, or the "One," is always male; for ”any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the ´masculine.'" Women, in fact, have no identity of their own, but can only serve as a ”mirror” for the male gaze to reflect upon itself. In her analysis of Freud's theory of sexual difference, Irigaray concludes that "There never is (or will be) a little girl." She is merely the "blind spot" hidden by the masculine "logic of the Same." [3]

In these arguments, Irigaray draws upon the psychoanalytic thought of Jacques Lacan. She focuses on his theory of pre-discursive experience, or the conceptualization of unconscious phantasy that Lacan calls "the imaginary." She argues that the imaginary bears the morphological marks of the male body: philosophy is unitary, singular and linear; in other words, it is in the image of the male Phallus. When Irigaray examines Lacan’s idea of the mirror stage, which mediates the subject’s entry into the Symbolic order (language, culture), she asks why he focuses on a flat mirror, which "reflects the greater part of women's sexual organs only as a hole." [4] With such a mirror, all that can be seen is either a male body, or a defective male body. Women merely appear as not-male, as "lack," or simply as "other." She cannot see herself in this mirror, but can only function as a mirror for the male. The entire Symbolic order of phallocentric culture is dependent upon woman remaining this blind spot, so that men may construct their subjectivity on the basis of her silence and hiddenness, guaranteeing their illusions of ”auto-autonomy” and self-sufficiency. Men build their reason and identity on the foundations of nature and woman, but then repress their dependency upon them, through a drive to dominate and control them. This relegates woman’s identity to "no place." Thus, if women's sexual identity is to be discovered, a different sort of mirror will be required (a concave speculum) and a different way of thinking. And so Irigaray asks, ”what if the ”object” started to speak.... What disaggregation of the subject would that entail?” [5] If women were to uncover an identity not defined or dependent upon the fantasies of phallocentric culture - if they were to establish ”sexual difference” and respect for woman’s distinct identity - the result would be to ”jam the theoretical machinery” of the patriarchal social order. [6] But, uncovering this hidden identity is no simple matter, for "woman's desire would not be expected to speak the same language as man's." Irigaray insists that simply to claim a subjectivity on the basis of equality to men would remain caught within the ”logic of the Same,” and would result in a ”new prison, a new cloister.” [7]

Thus, in order to deconstruct western phallocentrism, Irigaray adopts a strategy similar to that of Jacques Derrida. Derrida's tactic for overcoming strict metaphysical oppositions is to privilege the subordinated term and then introduce a mechanism or trope which can prevent the opposition from reasserting itself - something to continue the process of deconstruction and defer or leave "undecidable" any reconstruction of metaphysical oppositions. Within a society dominated by phallocentrism and constructed around a strict male/non-male opposition, therefore, Irigaray asserts that "One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to thwart it." These assumptions form the basis of Irigaray’s strategy of mimicry. Through a mimetic parody of phallocentric discourse, she hopes to "short-circuit" misogynist theory and push towards a new concept of woman. Rather than re-introduce sexual difference into the cultural order based on some new idea of what the ”feminine” is (which, within the current social order, could only be based on phallocentrism), Irigaray argues that women must ”resubmit” themselves to ideas about the feminine ”elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make them ”visible” by an effect of playful repetition.” Because the dominant Symbolic has been internalized by women, as Rosi Braidotti argues, it ”cannot be cast off like an old garment. Discursive practices, like ideological beliefs, are tattooed on bodies .” [8] One cannot simply pretend that the norms for ”feminine” identity do not exist, and incorrectly assume that one can easily cast them aside and move beyond them. Thus, women must challenge the norms they oppose from within. Through such mimetic action, Irigaray asserts that ”what was supposed to remain invisible” is ”unveiled,” [9] and the phallocentric order will be racked ”with radical convulsions” that may ”turn everything upside down” and ”disperse, diffract, deflect endlessly, making energy explode sometimes, with no possibility of returning to one single origin.” [10] Irigaray, therefore, distinguishes her mimétisme from Platonic mimesis, which she links with phallic power. In Plato’s classical understanding, she argues, a model or universal is assumed (or imposed) whose truth and original essence is to be copied. Thus, imitation and repetition becomes the model for the production of knowledge and authority. [11] Before proceeding to examine Irigaray’s mimetic strategy any further, at this point it is helpful to observe some similarities she shares with the understanding of mimesis in the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno also wishes to surpass the conventional understanding of mimesis as imitation or representation. For him, mimesis is ”a process of making oneself similar to the environment,” in which ”the outside serves as a model onto which the inside molds itself” (anschmiegen). As Michael Cahn argues, the German verb anschmiegen suggests a conception of mimesis that is understood as a relationship of contiguity. Adorno conceives of the term as involving a sense of molding ”onto” (an) rather than being an imitation ”of.” He understands mimesis to possess a behavioural dimension in which a flexible subject approaches an object with an adaptive behaviour, seeking a relationship of affinity. [12]

Adorno’s motivation for exploring the concept of mimesis is not unlike that of Irigaray. His philosophical perspective seeks to uncover the sources of domination contained within the western philosophical tradition, and he concludes that in their drive to establish totality through concepts, traditional theory and idealist philosophy are guilty of developing theories abstracted from reality. This dynamic forces objects in the world into the mold of theory, and annihilates what does not conform. Such ”identity thinking,” Adorno asserts, is an act of violence against the "other." It represents a drive to make unlikes alike; a drive that leads him to reconsider the nature of the knowing subject. The central thrust of Adorno’s theoretical work becomes, then, an attempt to affirm the non-identity of the ”other” which remains outside the boundaries of identity thinking. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and his college Max Horkheimer locate the roots of mimetic practice in an anthropological context. For them, the early roots of mimesis are found in the manner in which animals adapt to their surroundings for purposes of survival (Chameleon, feigning death in the face of danger, etc.). This practice finds similar expression in prehistorical shamanic rites which hoped to appease the violent forces of nature by imitating them, or in acts of the magician, who draws magic circles, steps into them and ”imitates demons... in order to frighten then or appease them.” While this action is manipulative, it still acknowledges nature on its own terms. Furthermore, nature is not made into an object of knowledge, but is identified with; the magician does not believe he has the power to control nature, but instead attempts to become part of the same order from which the threat emanates. [13]

In this description, Adorno and Horkheimer emphasize that the mimetic possesses a behavioural element, which goes beyond the simply representational or visual. In this, Adorno is influenced by the writing of Walter Benjamin, in whose work Adorno contends, ”thought presses close to its object, as if through touching, smelling, tasting, it wanted to transform itself.” [14] Benjamin’s work, and Adorno’s after him, emphasizes the importance of the mimetic faculty in all higher functions: ”[humanity’s] gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a role.” [15]

Although this desire to push beyond the visual is not unlike that of Irigaray, who argues that all knowledge and reason are based in ”sensual pleasure” and experience, Irigaray draws a much sharper division between rationality and her understanding of mimétisme than does Adorno. Her emphasis on the domination of the ”logic of the Same” leads her to assert that ”an unchallengeable split forever divides intelligible and sensible.” When reason is allowed to act as an intermediary for knowledge of the object, it acts as a ”mirror” whose confining boundaries restrict the object’s freedom. Thus, Irigaray concludes that the ”dry desolation of reason” is an barrier to uncovering women’s identity. It negates the ”intrinsic quality of the sensible world” which women inhabit, and makes the object a slave to the power of vision, object to a gaze that freezes all it looks upon. [16]

The task of uncovering sexual difference depends, therefore, on surpassing the boundaries of reason. She calls upon women to overcome the visible and ”go back to a moment of prediscursive experience.” This involves, she asserts, an emphasis on tactile experience - on touch rather than vision - for, ”sensual pleasure can reopen and reverse” the ”schemas by which the other is defined.” [17] Repressed nature and women’s identity may be released from their prison through ”immediate perception” which possesses an ”openness barred by no consciousness.” [18] Woman has a particular affinity for such an openness, Irigaray claims, for the restricted ”oneness” of the male sexual imaginary ”is foreign to her own pleasure.” Taking autoeroticism as an example, Irigaray argues that "in order to touch himself, man needs an instrument: his hand, a woman's body, language." A woman, however, touches herself "without any need of mediation," for "her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two - but not divisible into one(s) - that caress each other." While male sexuality is unitary, controlling, and singular, the sexuality of woman "always at least double, goes even further: it is plural." Woman "has sex organs more or less everywhere;" She is "indefinitely other in herself: neither one nor two." Because of this "She resists all definition" and transcends the repressive phallocentrism of the logic of the same. This particular nature of her sexuality, Irigaray asserts, helps woman resist the confines of rationality, and remain ”in touch with herself.” [19]

This sharp division between reason and sensual experience which Irigaray establishes stands in sharp contrast to Adorno’s understanding of the relationship between rationality and the mimetic. Although in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer locate the origin of the Enlightenment’s decent ”into a new kind of barbarism” [20] in the individual’s desire to repress the "otherness" within the self - her/his own connection with nature - as their argument develops, it becomes clear that they understand mimesis and reason to be profoundly interconnected. In the first excursus of the book, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the origin of civilization emerges out of the struggle of humanity to free itself from myth. Odysseus' battle against irrational nature and myth is seen as a prototype for the development of the rational bourgeois subject. To defeat the mythic figures he encounters, Odysseus relies on rational cunning and deceit, but his accomplishment comes at a price. The domination of nature involves self-sacrifice - the repression of his own connection to nature. Horkheimer and Adorno assert that "Man's domination over himself, which grounds his selfhood, is almost always the destruction of the subject in whose service it is undertaken." [21] In order to outwit the Cyclops, Odysseus must change his name to "Nobody," but his "self-assertion - as in all epics, as in civilization as a whole - is self-denial." His mimicry of a nameless person is the enactment of the truth of his own identity. Knowledge becomes something based on control, and the tragedy of the Enlightenment is demonstrated in the fact that "practical reason" (the basis for morality and aesthetics) has been colonized by "instrumental reason" (the rationality of science and logic), so that ”Man knows things only as so far as he can make them." Enlightenment has become "mythic fear turned radical.” [22] Thus, as the dialectic of enlightenment progresses from the mimicry of nature in prehistorical times, to the myths of the ancient world, and into the metaphysics of the modern, various conceptual models are left behind, but Adorno and Horkheimer argue that a mimetic moment remains secretly contained within them all, and continually resurfaces in various ways. ”False mimesis” results in a loss of its fluid approach to its object, as one’s fear of nature becomes a violent rage that expresses itself in such destructive historical forces as antisemitism and misogyny. ”False” mimesis tries to make ”the environment like itself; it ”confuses the inner and outer world and defines the most intimate experiences as hostile.” [23] As Karla Schultz states, ”Odysseus, longing for a home, establishes himself as master;” while in the section on Marquis de Sade entitled ”Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality,” ”Juliette, longing for pleasure, practices utmost self-discipline.” Schultz sums up this dynamic nicely: ”Pressed into service by instrumental reason, mimesis changes from child’s play to compulsion, from erotic attitude to destructive fury.” [24]

Yet the dynamic of ”false mimesis” should not be misunderstood to imply that for Adorno mimesis is the opposite to reason, as is sometimes claimed. [25] As he argues in Aesthetic Theory, ”[t] he survival of mimesis, the nonconceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other, defines art as a form of knowledge and to that extent as rational.” [26] Mimesis is not superstitious belief, ”unmediated nature,” nor is it irrational. It represents the longing to approach (or mold oneself onto) the other in a way that leaves the other intact. Mimesis, Adorno argues, is contrary to spirit and yet also that on which spirit ignites. In artworks, spirit has become their principle of construction, although it fulfills its telos only when it emerges from what is to be constructed, from the mimetic impulses, by shaping itself to them rather than allowing itself to be imposed on them by sovereign rule. [27]

In this theory of aesthetics, Adorno sees both reason and mimesis together in a creative tension, which together contain the potential for reconciliation between subject and object, rationality and nature. The diagnosis of western culture by Adorno has resonances with that of Irigaray, who, as we have seen, believes the entire philosophical tradition represses difference and ”otherness” through a ”logic of the Same.” When Dialectic of Enlightenment’s observations concerning the place of women are added to this comparison, the similarities are all the more striking: ”As a representative of nature, woman in bourgeois society has become the enigmatic image of irrestistibility and powerlessness. In this way she reflects for domination the pure lie that posits the subjection instead of the redemption of nature.” [28] But, unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, Irigaray does not attempt to locate the historical roots of mimesis, other than to criticize its place in the patriarchal-classical understanding of it as an imitation of a universal model (whose roots she examines through Lacanian psychoanalysis). Perhaps this is one reason she fails to believe it possible to conceive of a positive connection between mimesis and reason. For in her critique of reason’s ”logic of the Same” and her celebration of the potentiality of the tactile and sensual, Irigaray’s work fails to leave open any possibility for a positive rejuvenation of rationality’s potential. Her savage critique of unified visions aside, Irigaray presents a monological understanding of reason and the traditions of the Enlightenment. As Dialectic of Enlightenment makes all to clear, rationality and Enlightenment thought contain the capacity to unlease barbaric forces of destruction; yet Adorno and Horkheimer never neglect the fact that these same traditions have also encouraged the concepts of freedom, agency, justice, and happiness. Their critique, unlike that of Irigaray, is ”intended to prepare the way for a positive notion of enlightenment, which will release it from entanglement in blind domination.” [29] ”False mimesis” is, for Adorno, a distortion of its emancipatory potential within rationality, while for Irigaray, it is exactly a ”bad mimesis” that shuns its connection to reason which she advocates, for she believes that rationality is hopelessly contaminated in the current social order. With such a perspective, Irigaray falls into the tendency of postmodernism to present a totalizing vision of the Enlightenment. This monological view carries with it serious implications for women, for the roots of feminism are contained within these same Enlightenment ideals. As Seyla Benhabib argues, ”In many ways, the contemporary women’s movement is the culmination of the logic of modernity.” [30] In making this point, it is important to note that in some ways Irigaray’s work attempts to progress beyond the tendency of postmodern theory to dismiss subjectivity and celebrate the ”death of the subject.”. While attempting to deconstruct the metaphysics of western philosophy and the ideal of the autonomous subject, she also insists upon the need for women to reclaim an identity of their own in order to re-establish sexual difference into the social order. Since woman ”is unable to constitute, within herself, the place that she is” she remains a ”blind spot” within phallocentrism and ”outside herself,” for ”[n] ot to be in self means being in something other.” However, an analysis of what she understands to constitute this subjectivity reveals that Irigaray leaves women few tools with which to oppose their marginalization and oppression. [31]

For, from what source will this subjectivity emerge? Behind Irigaray’s assertion that women’s strategic mimétisme of imposed feminine roles does not amount to a mere re-production of those same norms is her conviction that women share the same relationship towards phallocentric reason as does repressed nature: ”if women are such good mimics, it is because they are not simply absorbed in this function. They remain elsewhere: another case of the persistence of matter.” [32] Because women’s different sexual identity, and her unique ”feminine pleasure” are, like nature, repressed and inarticulate within ”masculine” language, ”they are capable of bringing new nourishment” to the operation of mimesis. To purposely mimic their ”lack” serves to help make visible ”what was supposed the remain invisible.” Philippa Berry highlights how Irigaray’s conception of mimesis suggests an act of forcing open, discursively, through rhetorical ”dilation” ( écarter), which can signify both to part or divide and also to deviate, to turn or move aside. [33] Through this strategy, Irigaray intends what Naomi Schor refers to as a mimesis that signifies difference as positivity: ”a joyful reappropriation of the attributes of the other” which does not signify a reversal of misogyny, ”but an emergence of the feminine, and the feminine can only emerge from within or beneath...femininity, within which it lies buried. The difference within mimesis is the difference within difference” [34]

On this basis Irigaray justifies her strategy of mimétisme. In her influential interpretation of this positive mimicry, Margaret Whitford understands Irigaray to assert a subjectivity for women that surpasses the limitations of the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida. Derrida employs the term "woman" as a trope for the undecidable, or one of the names of différance; but, of course, in his thought this trope is no longer required once the phallocentric male/female opposition is deconstructed. As he states it, ”you can use the force of woman to reverse, to undermine this first stage of opposition,” but that ”the opposition between men and women stops being pertinent” once the ”feminine force” has achieved the intended reversal. [35] From Irigaray's perspective, Derrida colonizes women's voice by temporarily speaking like a woman, and denying women the right to speak as a woman. Unlike Derrida, then, Irigaray argues for the positive construction of a new identity. Women are to construct a feminine identity and claim a space within discursive reality. Without it, the primacy of the male Derrida deconstructs will only reassert itself. [36] Whitford and other interpreters of Irigaray assert that this position prevents Irigaray’s theory from being vulnerable to charges that she leaves women without any concrete subjectivity or agency from which to resist oppression. Irigaray’s answer to such questions is found in her second strategy for reintroducing sexual difference into the social order - the envisioning of a feminine divine. Here one can see what the ”difference within difference” looks like. Through the disruption caused by mimicry, Irigaray believes that access to the initial preoedipal mother-daughter relationship is opened up, out of which a new Symbolic may emerge. For Irigaray, this requires reclaiming the divine for women, "the vertical dimension [which] is always being taken away from female becoming;" because "if women have no God, they are unable to communicate." Just as ”Man is able to exist because God helps him define his gender,” Irigaray concludes that ”to posit a gender, a God is necessary: guaranteeing the infinite. ”[37] Irigaray argues that it is impossible "to eliminate or suppress the phenomenon of religion." It serves a crucial social function by constructing cultural identity. Following Feuerbach, she argues that "Having a goal is ‘essentially' religious." [38] Because patriarchal religion has suppressed women, an alternative feminine divine must be constructed to direct women's own "becoming." Just as men use women as a screen or mirror on which they project their identity, and just as the patriarchal "God is the mirror of man," women need a mirror of their own, because "Having a God and becoming his/her genre go together." The mirror women employ, if it is to escape the logic of the Same, must not be derived from reason or established cultural norms. For Irigaray, access to this feminine divine is through the unsymbolized aspects of women's existence - hidden or suppressed by patriarchal culture - which can be brought to consciousness by the creation of new symbols and images. This involves, of course, a turn to female morphology, but also to a study of the four elements of Empedocles' philosophy, medieval alchemy, and mystical spirituality. The feminine divine is found in the ”dark spaces” and cracks that exist beyond or before phallocentrism. As is the case with her mimétisme, Irigaray believes woman have a special capacity to reach outside the rigid boundaries of the symbolic order; ”the poorest in science and the most ignorant were the most eloquent, the richest in revelations. Historically, that is, women.” [39] Irigaray adds ”historically”, one assumes, to avoid suggesting an essential nature for women, and yet she fails to examine historically the possible reasons for the fact that women have often been excluded from established access to knowledge, and in response developed alternative traditions. Instead, the argument she develops leads Irigaray to continue to establish a problematic split between reason and nature, which underlies the ”ontological” difference she wants to establish between male and female. Despite the declaimers that she is not developing a theory of female ”essence”, some critics of Irigaray continue to assert that in advocating a strategy of mimicry, and developing an ontological conception of a feminine divine, Irigaray "falls into the essentialist trap." The strategy of mimicry, Toril Moi argues, which might initially challenge phallocentrism and the exploitation of women, "ceases to be perceived as such" and becomes "a perfect reproduction of the logic of the Same." By moving to female morphology and a focus on sexual difference, her critics claim, Irigaray constructs a feminine ontology that describes a feminine "essence" and reproduces the domination of differences among women. [40] Irigaray's defenders reply that such criticism has misunderstood her intentions. Margaret Whitford argues that the positive construction Irigaray undertakes is necessary to keep a blank space open in Western discourse for women to begin to occupy. It is merely a "tactical mimesis," agrees Naomi Schor, who insists that Irigaray's use of feminine morphology and women's language ( parler femme) is ”ultimately less concerned with theorizing feminine specificity than with debunking the oppressive fiction of the universal subject. To speak of woman is, above all, not to speak universal.” [41] This ”strategic essentialism” merely ”risks” associating women and nature for the sake of making it possible for their bodies to be recognized as different from how they appear through the ”gaze” of phallocentrism. In her book God Between Their Lips, Kathryn Bond Stockton states that even the claim that Irigaray practices a ”strategic essentialism” is misleading, for it seems to suggest that she reemphasizes the body, while, in fact, ”Irigaray poeticizes the body that many readers think she essentializes.” Rather than suggesting some essential nature of the female body, Irigaray ”elaborately mystifies it.” This argument by Stockton is convincing; however, one is led to ask whether this ”mystification” is a good thing? Stockton observes that Irigaray wants to escape from phallocentrism back to feminine bodies - to the bodily enigmas that exist ”beyond/before language.” In this analysis, Stockton defines ”material” as what is ”most elusive,” for ”the material and economic relations of production can only make themselves known through representations.” That which is ”most real” cannot be seen, she argues, and thus ”every materialist must poeticize, must mystify, and even make mystical...nondiscursive reality.” With this assumption, Stockton advocates a ‘real body’ mysticism; the belief (not certainty) ”that real bodies exist on their own terms but that we can reach them only by the same visionary means that separate us from their reality.” [42] This interpretation by Stockton helps clarify why Irigaray ‘s attempt to construct a discursive space for women’s ”becoming” is drawn repeatedly to religious language. Her use of the discourse of mysticism emerges in an effort to uncover the ”buried material” that has been shut out by phallocentrism, in the belief that something else lies beyond that can be uncovered. And, since Irigaray has already argued that reason and vision are hopelessly corrupt, women are to proceed towards the divine solely though sensual experience and revelations. To ”flee the logic that has framed her,” woman ”will have to wander randomly and in darkness,” enter a place ”beyond the mind’s speculation.” This ”sweet confusion” is described as ”passive waiting, unmediated abandon,” and is understood to lead ultimately to ”the inexhaustible abundance of her underground source.” [43] Once again these passages illustrate how for Irigaray, the eye is the guardian for reason, and thus women must slip from sight and into some form of concealment. This returns her to the significance she finds in female morphology, as she brings into visibility what is supposed to remain invisible - women’s genitals. Stockton elaborates on this point: ”Yet the lips wear their material concealment for all to see - it is the lack of closure between her lips.” (32) God, is thus imagined, ”between the lips” of women, as the divine ”casts ‘His’ lot with lack.” Because of this approach, Stockton calls Irigaray an ”opaque essentialist” and a ”theologian of lack.” [44] The identity for women that Irigaray calls for, then, is one that remains concealed and hidden, accessible only through mystical respect and ”wonder.” One looks in vain for any more specific or concrete content to the specificity of woman’s sexual identity in Irigaray’s work. It remains unclear, therefore, what potential this abstract vision could possibly have for nurturing women’s struggles against oppression. Before judging her too quickly, however, one might, perhaps, encounter an argument that actually seems to support Irigaray’s project of mimétisme by returning to Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Adorno argues that art contains a critical element; that it ”is the social antithesis of society.” [45] But, in modern society, whose governing principle is instrumental reason and capitalist exchange, Adorno argues that modernist art risks reducing itself to the logic of the status quo - resists claiming to communicate meaning - in order to avoid being reduced to a commodity. Its mimesis mimes the meaninglessness of the age, although not merely to imitate it. In his essay ”Trying to Understand Endgame,” Adorno asserts that, in its parody of communicative language, Beckett’s play represents a critical miming of the ”throw away language of a commodified world.” In a reified society, art mimics the language of reification, not to affirm, but to shock its audience into awareness. As Karla Schultz observes, ”Adorno likens this shock of recognition to the body’s startled reaction to a curative poison.” [46] Like the medical understanding of inoculation, in which a controlled outbreak of a disease is used to immunize a patient against that same disease, Adorno’s aesthetic theory understands modern artworks to ”relinquish themselves mimetically to reification, their principle of death.” For ”without the admixture of poison” art could be reduced to advertising or to a commodity and ”amount to nothing more than impotent comfort.” [47] Perhaps interpreters of Irigaray could argue that her mimetic strategy performs a similar function. Perhaps those who interpret her mimicry as supporting the status quo might be accused of misunderstanding Irigaray’s work, much in the same way that Beckett and Adorno himself were accused of political resignation and aesthetic elitism? [48] Could one claim that, much in the same way that Endgame enacts a subversive mimesis that reveals what should not be, Irigaray’s strategy of mimicry performs a similar subversive disruption? This is certainly her goal, and those who emphasize the radicality of Irigaray’s ”style,” and believe it enables her ”to write the culture’s symptoms and to evoke a different symbolic organization” would perhaps see in Adorno’s aesthetics a compatible conversation partner. [49]

Remaining within the medical metaphor, Irigaray links her mimétisme with ”hysteria,” ”the feminine neurosis par excellence” according to Elizabeth Grosz, since hysterics can be said to mime the disorders of others in order to cope with the demands of patriarchal society. As such, hysterics could be understood as converting an imposed passivity into an active defiance and rejection of alienating cultural norms. [50] With such a perspective, Irigaray’s philosophical ”hysteria” is understood as the attempt to reveal and unleash a ”reserve” that lies beyond the phallocentric symbolic - that which is ”beneath all those/her appearances,” her ”borrowed finery,” to that ”female other [who] still sub-sists.” [51] But, this perspective, rather than demonstrating an affinity with Adorno’s work, helps illustrate the difference between the two approaches. Despite the inoculation metaphor in his aesthetic theory, Adorno never adopted a view, common among those influenced by Deleuze and Foucault, of considering sickness in an unjust society as a sign of health or positive resistance. Given his insistence that ”the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern,” it seems unlikely that he would endorse Grosz’s contention that women’s anorexia can be understood as an expression of defiance against the cultural norms of femininity. [52]

Furthermore, it is also this sense of escaping to a place ”Beyond/Before” phallocentrism that separates Adorno’s conception of mimesis from Irigaray’s mimicry. Although he shares a utopian longing for transformed social relations, Adorno insists that the way to challenge the reification of the social order is to constantly push up against its contradictions and failures, by locating and trying to bring to expression undeveloped potentialities within the Enlightenment tradition itself. The way to overcome the tendency of rationality to ”swallow” its object is through rational thought itself. Philosophy ”must strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept.” [53] Within art, it is the constellation of mimesis and rationality together, which make up for the deficiencies of each. Irigaray, as we have seen, considers reason to be hopelessly corrupt, and so, rather than push against the existent, must escape to something beyond the existent. That Adorno’s aesthetics theory opposes this desire to escape to some position outside the given is evident in his essays in Notes to Literature. Throughout these works, he consistently argues that writing is to be understood to consist of both a mental component and material marks; it is both rational and libidinal. Furthermore, his project is to determine the critical relation between an artistic form and its social content. In Hölderlin’s poetry, Adorno sees a particularly strong example of the tension within language between its conceptual and mimetic/expressive element. Hölderlin, he argues, maintains a dialectic between form and content. His ”parataxis” represents a form whose organization is related to content in such a way that it makes the subject aware of its separation from the object. He criticizes traditional language through that language itself. In this effort, Adorno argues, Hölderlin explores the conditions for the possibility of a language that both expresses separation and holds it in suspense. [54] Adorno opposes this interpretation of Hölderlin’s poetry to that of Martin Heidegger, whom he considers to single out a metaphysical meaning to employ against idealism, while ignoring the dialectic between aesthetic form and content. [55]

It is significant, then, that in Ethics of Eros, Tina Chanter argues that ”Heidegger’s attempt to think Being in distinction from beings is parallelled by Irigaray’s attempt to think women in distinction from the traditional representation of them as other than men, or as not-men.” [56] For in her attempt to uncover the hidden ground of feminism - sexual difference - Irigaray repeats positions similar to those that Adorno opposes in Heidegger’s work. The feminine identity she describes, conceived as respecting women’s concrete materiality, actually remains an abstract form without any concrete content. Because all representations within the current social order are corrupted by phallocentrism, ”woman” can only be understood to be ”elsewhere” and her materiality can only be one that is mystical. Adorno’s critique of the ”jargon of authenticity” could, thus, equally apply to Irigaray: she ”wants to be immediately concrete without sliding into mere facticity.” Like Heidegger’s discourse on Being, Irigaray’s feminine divine ”speaks from a depth which would be profaned if it were called content.” [57] Rather than advocating a focus on particular concrete experiences and voices of women, Irigaray’s solution to the predicament women find themselves in is to celebrate a position in which ”Woman never speaks the same way. What she emits is flowing, fluctuating. Blurring." [58] Blurring is exactly what Irigaray engages in. The concrete embodiment for women that she seeks, instead, becomes an abstract vision for women’s ”becoming” (a good Heideggarian word). Becoming what? This, of course, cannot be voiced within the current Symbolic order. But this insistence that women’s identity and subjectivity lies ‘beyond’ society distracts theory’s focus away from the differences between women, and such issues of race and class. Irigaray’s quest for a discursive space or ”envelope” is not unlike Heidegger’s search for an existential ”home” for Being, and, thus, like Heidegger’s disinterest in social analysis, her work shuns social theory. When the choice suggested to women is presented as being between the ”inherently corrupt” Enlightenment or the pure alterity of women's otherness, there is no space left from which to analyse daily concrete struggles, or for social analysis. Origin of the oppression of woman is located in pre-discursive reality, but the current socio-economic forces that shape daily life remain unexamined. Irigaray does not deny these issues are important, and in fact claims that ”modifying the economic system of exchanges” is ”equally indispensable” as are changes in language, art, and social relations; [59] but she fails to explore this interconnection between the socio-economic and the cultural order at any level deeper than this general statement, and her defence against the objection that ”we are not fed by fire and flames” is merely the rhetorical response, ”neither are we by fetishes and gazes.” [60]

Without rooting subjectivity in the contingencies of history - without analysing language and cultural in its dialectical relation to historical reality, and by locating transgressive action solely in discursive practice, Irigaray’s theory remains largely an internalized aesthetic response to women’s oppression. [61] Perhaps her mimicry might shock some people enough to momentarily ”jam the machinery” of phallocentrism; yet capitalism has proven to quite capable of quickly absorbing ”transgressive” representations and turning them into advertising images - a dilemma Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory wrestles with. Without analysing this reality, Irigaray should heed Adorno’s warning that once the ”ego posits itself as higher than the world,” it inevitably ”becomes subjected to the world precisely because of this.” [62]

Perhaps it may seem an extreme position to label Irigaray’s feminine identity abstract inwardness. Yet, when examining her conception of intersubjective relations, it becomes clear that her argument continues to remain abstract; for it is not through verbal communication that two ”ontologically” different subjects come together in a relationship free from domination. Instead, the privileged access to "knowledge" becomes touch. Only through erotic encounter can Irigaray imagine peaceful relations between two different "others." At this point, Irigaray's conception of the divine merges with her "ethics of sexual difference." What this merger amounts to, however, is a blurring of boundaries that ignores, rather than respects, difference. Irigaray describes interactions without domination as being accomplished by mutual passage through porous boundaries, which permits differences to merge together in the mediated space of love. This link for "uniting or reuniting masculine and feminine must be horizontal and vertical, terrestrial and heavenly." Each must be present in the mediation, or it fails. Irigaray uses a variety of images to describe this mediation, all of which are more or less equivalent. One of her favourite mediators is the angel, who represents the unmediated communication of differences. These creatures bring together spirit and body, divine and human, and "transgress all enclosures." They represent a sexuality "that has never been incarnated," but would allow "man and woman...[to] inhabit the same place." [63] In a similar fashion, Irigaray describes love as "a loss of boundaries," or "shared space," which does not result in a fusion of the two sexes, but a mutual crossing and intermingling. At other times, Irigaray returns to female morphology to describe the meeting of difference as "thinking through the mucous." Whatever image is preferred, the problem is the same. Irigaray's concept of mediation results in what Gillian Rose calls a production of a "holy middle." For Rose, a "holy middle" is a product of the reintroduction of revelation into philosophy by postmodern theory. The "postmodern turn," she argues, dissolves divisions of difference (sacred/secular, knowledge/faith, nature/freedom) by presenting the dilemma of modernity as a choice between total domination or total bliss. By ignoring the "broken middle," the place between a society's highest ideals and its worst failures, ”postmodernism becomes submodern.” Irigaray risks creating a ”holy middle” when she presents reason as hopelessly corrupt, and sensuality and nature as uniquely liberating. Furthermore, women’s new sexual identity and subjectivity emerges, not out of concrete historical action, but from mystical connection to the beyond, the dark abyss, and through their particular relation to the ”lack. This effectively separates historical reality from the space of women’s becoming, as resistance is offered in a realm one that is beyond the current order of being. As Rose argues against a similar position in the philosophy of Emanuel Levinas, ”these promises produce a holy sociology.” Ethics becomes discredited by being exalted ”beyond the way of the world, replacing the broken with the holy middle.” The result: ”we collude in the diremptions we intend to sublate.” [64]

While some of Irigaray’s writing evokes powerful and inspiring images of mutual relations of love between men and women, as a feminist theory of ethics her work remains too abstract and mystical to achieve its desired intent. Marsha Hewitt argues, ”Ethics has less to do with creating discursive space than with establishing a discursive relationship.”[65] But, rather than present a theory or model for affirming the subjectivity of ”others,” that can imaginably apply to social life, Irigaray insists that just relations are impossible unless it is recognized that the body of the other possesses a completely different ”ontological status.” [66] One cannot assume to know anything about the other, and can only approach its alterity with mystical awe and wonder. How can one establish a relationship in such a model? Susan Kozel responds to this strict binary division by asking whether it is possible ”that an equal balance of selfhood is what is needed, not a reification of the categories of Self and Other”? [67] How can human beings be expected to nurture respect and appreciation for difference among each other, if it is considered impermissible to try to see the world from the other’s standpoint? Faced with the question ”can we ever really get to know the other?”, postcolonial theorist Asha Varadharajan replies: ”try.” [68] This is what Adorno’s philosophy attempts to achieve. His approach to the relationship between subject and object tries to expand, not simply exceed, the boundaries of the subject’s knowledge of the other - to recognize that the object is also a subject. Although he insists subject and object be recognized as ”mutually mediated,” and grants ”primacy to the object” in order to rend the veil that the subject has cloaked it in, [69] he also insists that ”it is not the purpose of critical thought to place the object on the royal throne once occupied by the subject. On that throne the object would be nothing but an idol. The purpose of critical thought is to abolish the hierarchy.” [70]

When Irigaray approaches woman’s otherness and ”lack,” however, this is what she risks doing. Women’s identity, without any concreteness or specificity, becomes an abstract principle of devotion. In her critique of the tendency to make ”otherness” function as ”saviour” in deconstructive rhetoric, Varadharajan warns that when ”the other remains stubbornly enigmatic,” it is ”incapable of genuine participation in or resistance to the encounter initiated by the self.” [71] Irigaray elicits the alterity of woman’s otherness without exploring the concrete social relations that produce it; and, rather than envision her project as the process of women’s coming into their own voice, she instead urges women to remain in the darkness and cracks within phallocentrism. But an unquestioned valorization of the otherness of the oppressed risks ignoring the conditions that produce the oppression. Furthermore, the mere fact of oppression does not guarantee women the privileged access to knowledge that Irigaray seems to claim. The unfortunate unintended result of the ”ethics of sexual difference” is that the Irigarayan woman’s ”lack” becomes an ”hypostasizing [of] the concept of nonconceptuality.” [72] The implications of this canonization of otherness should not go unnoticed. Even within her own texts, the image that continually resurfaces in the background of the ”icon” that is woman’s self-love [73] is the image of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Beginning in Speculum, Irigaray states that at least this one man, ”the most female of men,” has understood women; and that ”in his crucifixion he opens up a path of redemption to her in her fallen state.” Of course, Irigaray in no way intends this to suggest the traditional theological doctrine of atonement, yet even this metaphorical association she makes between women’s ”salvation” from phallocentrism and the suffering Christ carries with it weighty and suggestive baggage. Irigaray repeatedly draws a parallel between Christ’s wounds and women’s morphology: ”in the body of the son of Man there reappears, in the form of a wound, the place, that, in women, is naturally open.” [74] His sores are ”holy” for women, for they can see themselves ”in this fanthomless wound.” In the ”glorious slit” she has ”found her home.” [75] Women’s two sets of lips (one horizontal, the other vertical) are in the image of the cross, and women are described as transfigured into mediators for the divine. [76] Woman ”incarnates the divine” in her radical openness, ”accomplishing the will of an Other.” Of course, Irigaray is not advocating that women ”imitate” or become the ”crucified one” by following the example of Jesus’ life. Nor does she want to repeat the idea that there is only one incarnation. But, she hopes that a rebirth of the divine will occur among and between women, and in the fecunidty of sexual difference. And so women, in their shared ”lack” with Christ, ”await the god, remain ready and open to prepare a way for his coming.... a new era in history.” Should sexual difference truly be affirmed, the resulting transformation of society would be ”a new Pentecost,” a ”Parousia,” a ”second coming.” [77]

This is metaphorical language, to be sure, but the question that needs to be posed back to Irigaray is whether her mimicry of traditional Christian mystical language actually amounts to a miming of the crucifixion? What values does it lead her to advocate for women? As they await the ”new parousia,” women are to be ”free for risk,” ”renounce their own interests,” and to ”abandon all calculation; ” for only thus ”can the divine still come to us.” [78] That this is the discourse of the early Christian martyrs does not seem to disturb her. In the essay ”La Mystérique,” Irigaray draws from the spirituality of the 13th century mystic Marguerite Porete, advocating, as Porete did, that in the abolition of all power, and through the unleashing of erotic desire, the social order would be transformed. Even while acknowledging the fact that Porete was burned at the stake because of her ”openess”, Irigaray does not pause and consider whether perhaps more than mystical vision and ”risk” is required to challenge the oppression of patriarchal society. Instead, she carries on her mime of Christ’s passion. [79] In her interpretation of Irigaray’s work, Kathryn Stockton argues that the emphasis within poststructuralist femimism on particularity, limit, and finitude resembles the Christian discourse on humility, and that, like Christians before their god, feminist theory has moved to a place where subjects are called upon to give up claims of self-mastery and admit that they are not in charge of their lives. She argues that re-emerging within feminist theory is a form of the Christian doctrine of felix culpa (”the happy fall”), in which humanity’s failings are celebrated for making possible a greater good - the need for Christ’s appearance. [80] Her enthusiasm for drawing connections between Christian discourse and Irigaray’s work is not diminished, even when Stockton pauses to note the following:: When Irigaray, attempting to undermine capitalist notions of property..., stresses lack/loss/spacing/ ‘God’/escape, she repeats the Christian values of dispossession and deferral. These Christian values, so familiar to us now, have been made powerfully to support, in some countries, in certain periods, capitalist dynamics.... Does Irigaray, then, when she counsels nurturing lack between bodies... unwittingly reinforce economies that have endlessly deferred the pleasure of only some of their constituents? [81]

Stockton does not examine her question any further, and seems reassured that this is not the case simply because it explicitly goes against the intentions of Irigaray’s work. This latter point is not in question, but, as this paper has shown, despite Irigaray’s powerfully poetic language and her desire to end the oppression of women in patriarchal society, she leaves women’s subjectivity without adequate tools to challenge their marginalization. In her theory of mimicry, she develops such a sharp divisions between reason/mimicry and nature/spirit, that rational self-critique becomes impossible, and thus women’s mimicry risks becoming mere affirmation of the ruling order and advertsing for the culture industry. Futhermore, her theory of intersubjectivity is one that develops without an adequate notion of mediation, and thus fashions ”holy middles” guarded by divine cherubs, rather than discoursive relationships nutured by mutual respect and recognition. Is this vision enough to help bring women together in acts of solidarity and resistance? Irigaray’s mimétism carries with it a high risk of being reduced to a mime of the crucifixion, by which I mean an affirmation of values that encourage inward mystical experience and self denial rather than the development of an autonomous and politically engaged subjectivity. Without the conceptual tools contained within the traditions of the Enlightenment, and without material social analysis of the historical and economic roots of oppression, advocating ”otherness” as the salvific escape from the dialectic of enlightenment leaves feminist theory with little option but to join Heidegger and Irigaray in stating ”Only a god can save us now.”

[1] Irigaray, Luce, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke & Gillian C. Gill. (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1993 [first French edition, 1984] ), 5.

[2] Irigaray, ”The Question of the Other,” Yale French Studies #87 (1995), 11.

[3] Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985

[1974] ), 133.

[4] Irigaray, Speculum, 89, n. 92.

[5] Ibid., 135.

[6] Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, with Carolyn Burke. (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1985 [1977] ), 78.

[7] Ibid., 25, 33.

[8] Braidotti, Rosi,”Of Bugs and Women: Irigaray and Deleuze on the Becoming of Women,” Engaging With

Irigaray,Carolyn Burke, et.al. (NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), 122.

[9] Ibid., 76.

[10] S peculum, 142.

[11] For greater discussion of the Platonic notion of mimesis and the relation of Irigaray’s work to it, see

Diamond Elin, Unmasking Mimesis. (London/NY: Routledge, 1997).

[12] Adorno, Theodor W. & Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming. (NY:

Continuum, 1993 [1944] , 187. As the Cumming translation misses this point by using ”imitation”, however, I follow the translation suggested by Michael Cahn: ”Subversive Mimesis: Theodor W. Adorno and the Modern Impasse of Critique,” Mimesis and Contemporary Theory, vol. 1, ed. Mihai Spariosu. (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1984), 31. See his footnote #44 for a discussion of anschmiegen.

[13] Adorno, Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 9.

[14] Adorno, ”A Portrait of Walter Benjamin,” Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber & Sherry Weber. (Cambridge: MIT

Press), 233.

[15] Benjamin, Walter, ”On the Mimetic Faculty,” quoted in Taussig, Michael, Mimesis and Alterity.

(London/NY: Routledge, 1993), 19.

[16] Speculum, 340, 191, 204-206.

[17] An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 74, 151, 181.

[18] Irigaray, Luce, ”He Risks Who Risks Life Itself,” The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford. (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1991), 215.

[19] This Sex Which is Not One, 25-28.

[20] Dialectic of Enlightenment, xi.

[21] Ibid., 54.

[22] Ibid., 9, 16.

[23] Dialectic of Enlightenment, 187.

[24] Schultz, Karla L., Mimesis on the Move. (Berne/NY: Peter Lang, 1990), 97, 26.

[25] See a similar point made in Jay, Martin, ”Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe,”

Semblance of Subjectivity, eds. Tom Huhn & Lambert Zuidervaart. (Cambridge” MIT Press, 1997), 33. Joel Whitebook’s assertion that ”Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis is that only the preservation of inner nature could prevent the whole self-vitiating dialectic of enlightenment from unfolding;” and that this represents an ”idealization of first nature,” mistakenly interprets, I believe, the implications of Dialectic of Enlightenment. While certain passages could be read as suggesting an irretrievable divide between reason and nature, the thrust of Adorno’s argument is to ”strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept.” ( Negative Dialectics, 15, emphasis added). Thus, Dialectic of Enlightenment , rather than suggesting that the only escape from barbarism is a preservation of ”inner nature...in an unmediated manner” (Whitebook, Joel, Perversion and Utopia. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 149-150), insists that ”Enlightenment which is in possession of itself and coming to power can break the bounds of enlightenment (208).

[26] Adorno, Theodor W., Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1997), 54.

[27] Ibid., 118.

[28] Ibid., 71-72. This is not to suggest by any means that the treatment of women by Adorno and Horkheimer

is unproblematic. For further discussion of the understanding of women in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, see Hewitt, Marsha, Critical Theory of Religion: A Feminist Analysis. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), also Wilke, Sabine & Schlipphacke, Heidi, ”Construction of a Gendered Subject: A Feminist Reading of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” The Semblance of Subjectivity, eds. Tom Huhn & Lambert Zuidervaart. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997), 287-308.

[29] Dialectic of Enlightenment, xvi.

[30] Benhabib, Seyla, Situating the Self. (NY:Routledge, 1992), 110. For further elaboration on this same point,

see Marsha Hewitt’s essay ”The Eclipse of Subjectivity and the Idealization of the ‘Other’,” Journal of Dharma XXII.3 (1997), 325-332.

[31] An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 35, 89. emphasis in original.

[32] This Sex Which is Not One, 76. emphasis in original.

[33] Berry, Philippa, ”The Burning Glass: Paradoxes of Feminist Revelation in Speculum,” Engaging With

Irigaray, 236.

[34] Schor, Naomi, ”This Essentialism Which is Not One,” Engaging With Irigaray,” 67.

[35] Derrida, Jaques, ”Woman in the Beehive,” quoted in Chanter, Tina, Ethics of Eros. (NY:Routledge, 1995),

241.

[36] Whitford, Margaret, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, 127-128.

[37] Irigaray, ”Divine Women,” Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill. (NY: Columbia University Press,

1993 [1987] ), 61-62. emphasis in original.

[38] Ibid., 67.

[39] Speculum, 192.

[40] Moi, Tori, Sexual/Textual Politics. (London/NY: Methuen & Co, 1985), 142.

[41] Schor, ”This Essentialism Which is Not One,” 64. It is interesting to observe that the three feminist artists

mentioned at the outset of this paper have similarly been charged with essentialism and for simplistically associating women’s identity with the ”cycles of nature.” In response, one of the artists, Candice Breitz, responds by comparing her efforts to reclaim representations of the female body with the trend within Rap Music to ”reclaim” the word ”Nigger” from the Ku-Klux-Klan, and use it as a source of subversive identity. ( Süddeutsche Zeitung, Nr. 195, 26 Aug (1998), 15). Such a comparison highlights, I believe, the failure to locate the context of the ”reclaiming” act in question. The use of ”Nigger” by the ”Lost Poets” in the late 1960's, for example, has a noticeably different political thrust to it than it does in the more commercially motivated trend in ”Gansta Rap.” Perhaps this judgement could be accused of being a matter of ”taste,” but it does bring up the issue of the tendency for many supposedly subversive symbols and message to become themselves commodities and images for the advertising industry. This is an issue that ”Appropriation Art,” and Irigaray do not seem to address.

[42] Stockton, Kathryn Bond, God Between Their Lips. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 13-16.

emphasis added

[43] Ibid., 192-195.

[44] Stockton, God Between Their Lips, 31-32, 28.

[45] Aesthetic Theory, 8.

[46] Schultz, Mimesis on the Move, 116, 123, 130.

[47] Aesthetic Theory, 133.

[48] Karl Markus, for example, accuses Adorno’s aesthetics of representing a ”mimesis onto the riot-squad,” in

an allusion to the occasion he called the police into the university to regain control during a student protest. Quoted in Cahn, ”Subversive Mimesis,” 51.

[49] Weed, Elizabeth, ”The Question of Style,” Engaging With Irigaray, 101. Gail M. Swab argues for the

dynamic political potential of Irigaray’s ”dialogic” style, which recognizes her ”unavoidable position” within patriarchy, while succeeding to ”rearticulate intentions other than the normative;” in ”Irigarayan Dialogism: Play and Powerplay,” Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, ed. Dale M. Bauer & Susan Jaret McKinstry. (SUNY Press:1991), 57-72.

[50] Grosz, Elizabeth, Sexual Subversions. (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 132-139.

[51] Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, 118.

[52] Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. (London:Verso, 1974 [1951] ), 60. See Joel Whitbook’s

discussion of this topic in Perversion and Utopia, 151-152. Grosz, Sexual Subversion, 136.

[53] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 15.

[54] Adorno, Theodor W., ”Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” Notes to Literature, vol. 2., trans. Shierry

Weber Nicholsen (NY: Columbia University Press, 1992). Schultz, Mimesis on the Move, 107-108.

[55] Jay, Martin, ”Mimesis and Mimetology,” 36-38.

[56] Chanter, Ethics of Eros, 167.

[57] Adorno, Theodor W. The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski & Frederic Will. (Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 1973 [1964] ), 93. In ”The Jargon of Authenticity: Adorno and Feminist Essentialism,” Shane Phelan also uses Adorno’s critique of Heidegger in a similar fashion, although the focus of the argument is directed against Mary Daly.

[58] This Sex Which is Not One, 112.

[59] Irigaray, ”Women, the Sacred, Money,” Sexes and Genealogies,”82.

[60] Speculum, 146.

[61] Stockton argues that Irigaray’s ”materialism” surpasses that of Karl Marx. For, Irigaray ”elaborately

mystifies the female body, using blatantly mystical terms to bolster it against mystifications that are far more alienating than her own,” while Marx remain focused on a desired knowledge of ”matter on its own terms,” prior being mystified through commodification. (God Between Their Lips, 28, 60-66). In her mimicry of Marx in ”Women on the Market,” and ”Commodities among Themselves,” in This Sex, Irigaray seeks another form of exchange, one that allows for desire between women, in which gain is supplanted by pleasurable loss. In this approach, exchange between women is seen as endless - without fusion or conquest, possession. In Stockton’s words, the dynamism of capitalism, gets ”repeated and redirected as an endless approach headed towards infinite space... pursued by those who pleasure themselves through a lack.” (66). In this description, concerns about Irigaray’s lack of social analysis is only augmented. As I will argue below, this emphasis on lack and ”pleasurable loss” bears an affinity to the Christian discourse on self-denial and sacrifice, which not only fits well into the traditional values pressed onto women, but also serves to reinforce the very capitalist system of exchange that Irigaray and Stockton wish to oppose.

[62] The Jargon of Authenticity, 73.

[63] An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 16-18.

[64] Rose, Gillian, The Broken Middle. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 284, 261, 267.

[65] Hewitt, ”Eclipse of Subjectivity,” 342.

[66] An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 157.

[67] Kozel, Susan, ”The Diabolical Strategy of Mimesis,” Hypatia, vol.11, no.3 (Summer 1996), 124.

[68] Varadharajan, Asha, Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak. (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1995), 15.

[69] Adorno, Theodor W., ”Subject and Object,” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader,” ed. Andrew Arato &

Eike Gehardt. (NY: Continuum Press, 1982), 497-511.

[70] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 181.

[71] Exotic Parodies, 24-26.

[72] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 136.

[73] An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 70.

[74] Marine Lover of Phratric Nietzche, 166.

[75] Speculum, 199-200.

[76] An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 18, 129.

[77] An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 129, 110, 147, 148.

[78] ”He Risks Who Risks Life Itself,” 213, 216, 218.

[79] Speculum, 198-199.

[80] God Between Their Lips, 10-11. A remarkable comparison, that suggests an implcation Stockton surely

has not considered: she intends to suggest that the ”failure” of positive constructions of women’s identity can be ”invested in for the future,” in which ”new bodies and selves” can be discovered. But what could also be understood as implied to represent the eqivalent of ”Adam’s sin” in such a view is: patriarchy. Thus, the suggestion implied by Stockton’s analogy is that the oppressive experiences of women in the current social order serves a greater good: the ”appearance” of women’s ”true” being in the future. In The Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno states, ”the weaker the individual becomes, from a societal perspective, the less can he become calmly aware of his own impotence. He has to puff himself up into selfness” (164).

[81] God Between Their Lips, 54.