Luce Irigaray

Luce Irigaray (born in Blaton, Belgium, in 1930) is a philosopher, linguist and psychoanalyst of Belgian birth who became a French citizen. She is regarded as one of the founders of French difference feminism. Her importance lies in moving the debate about women onto the terrain of language and psychoanalytic theory, rather than confining it to demands for the same rights as men.

She studied philosophy at the University of Louvain and later moved to Paris, where she trained in psychology and psychopathology. She worked in scientific research in Belgium and France. In the 1960s she attended the seminars of Jacques Lacan and joined the Freudian School of Paris. Her second doctoral thesis, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), criticised Freud's and Lacan's views of female sexuality with sharp irony. The book broke her ties with that circle and cost her her teaching post at the University of Vincennes.

In that work, Irigaray argues that much of Western thought, from Plato to Hegel, has defined woman as the negation of man: a lack, an absence. Lacan had used the mirror to explain how the ego forms; Irigaray proposes instead the speculum, an instrument that lets us see woman in her own reality, with a rich and multiple sexuality. From this comes her claim that dominant language is phallocentric, and that a symbolic order is needed which recognises sexual difference without reducing it to an equality modelled on the male. Her critique of Simone de Beauvoir moves in the same direction.

Later work turned towards the relationship between men and women, with proposals for an ethics of sexual difference and new forms of love for a democratic community. Her ideas have shaped French and Italian feminist movements, though she has also been criticised, mostly by those who see her as an essentialist.