Luce Irigaray

In 2009, Don Crewe and Ronnie Lippens called for an "Existentialist Criminology", suggesting that existentialist analysis could potentially enrich the study of crime and deviance. They produced an edited volume which stood as the first attempt to address the fact that; "No systematic attempt has hitherto been made...to apply existential thought to problems of crime and crime control, or to put it to use in the expansion or further development of criminological theory." 2 However, the editors do also recognize the early contribution to such an endeavour of the sub-cultural theorist David Matza, 3 and also acknowledge the later body of literature known as "Cultural Criminology" 4 as partially engaging with existentialist thought. Crewe and Lippens suggest that the reason for the overall lack of interest in existentialism to date was perhaps one of bad timing; in that when it initially emerged as a philosophy on the continent, symbolic interactionism was becoming increasingly popular and driving research agendas in Britain and America. 5 Similarly, they state that criminology has always had a 'scientisitic' tendency, which has detracted from the study of aspects of 'being' in relation to crime and crime control. Existentialists agree that in order to fully understand what a human being is, it is not enough to know the 'truths' that sciences such as psychology inform us of. This does not mean however, that existentialists deny the usefulness of the human sciences, but rather posit that they are inadequate for arriving at a more complete understanding of the human condition. Similarly, existentialists claim that moral philosophy -with which criminology is inextricably bound up -fails to capture aspects of human existence, and this view is made explicit in Nietzsche's discussions on morality. For him, "There are no moral phenomena at all, only moral interpretations of phenomena." 6 Existentialism might be understood as a philosophy which suggests that another pathway is required in order to understand the human condition, governed by the norm of authenticity. At the heart of such a pursuit are several gestures; the flight from reason, the rebellion against academic philosophy and a negative response to organised systems of control and social order, which might be set against the individual will. 7 However, central to existentialism's themes of fear, anxiety, boredom, absurdity, death, freedom and nothingness is an inherent desire to locate a new framework for understanding humans, which, as a framework, is perhaps at odds with its sentiments towards objective science, bearing in mind that science is dependent on structures itself.

Deriving from the myth of Narcissus, in which a beautiful youth falls in love with his own reflection, the concept of narcissism was given its first systematic treatment in Sigmund Freud's 1914 essay “On Narcissism.” Since Freud's account of narcissism remains the starting point for most subsequent discussions of the topic, this entry begins with a brief summary of Freud's views before moving on to consider some of the major questions that have consistently arisen in philosophical treatments of narcissism and self‐love. How ought we to draw the line between healthy self‐esteem and pathological narcissism? Given the apparently ubiquitous presence of “the dear self” (to use Kant's term) in human consciousness, what would it mean to cultivate a truly nonnarcissistic concern for others, and is such a thing possible – or even desirable?

The Luce Irigaray Circle is an interdisciplinary group of students and faculty based at Stony Brook University in New York. We are dedicated to the study of Luce Irigaray and to fostering Irigarayan work inside and outside of the academy. Presently we are organizing a conference for September 2006 and are planning a book based on the conference.

Guided by the hopeful possibilities of birth, breath and beginning that Hannah Arendt and Luce Irigaray variously articulate, this paper examines the lullaby as an expressive form that emerges (in a variety of contexts as distinct as medieval Christendom and contemporary art) as narrative between natality and mortality. With narrative understood as praxis according to Arendt’s schema, and articulated in what Irigaray might designate as an interval between two different sexuate subjects, the lullaby (and the voice that sings it) is found to be a telling of what it is to be human, and a hopeful reminder of our capacity both for self-affection and -preservation, and for meeting and nurturing others in their difference.

My talk, “A Literature of their Own? Women’s Writing: Myths and Realities,” with a special focus on Greek literature in Cyprus, takes the risk of dealing with the highly controversial question of “woman” and “women’s writing”. Offering an aporetical approach to both of these terms, inevitably caught up in debates between essentialist and constructivist positions—as well as “myths” and stereotypes, I shall try to show that they remain a theoretical problem, as well as theoretically significant for us today. Involving a split—whether endorsed or rejected—between Woman and Man or Woman and the Generic, “women’s writing,” this paper argues, may further entail a forcible choice, for a woman, between her Gender and her Humanity. Can we embrace, taking Toril Moi’s lead in returning to Simone de Beauvoir, our bodily—resolutely sexed—being as “lived experience,” a “situation” and a “becoming,” devoid of any metaphysical luggage? Can we think of men and women as embodied beings, material and historical, who act, write, and make choices, without having to eliminate their gendered subjectivity?

Marlene van Niekerk’s first novel, Triomf (1994; English translation by Leon de Kock, 1999), satirises Afrikaner nationalism’s desire for racial purity by exposing its abject core, the poor white Afrikaner family, exemplified by the Benades. Much of the pleasure of the text comes from Treppie’s irony and cynicism. He is the primary voice of satire and the dominant perspective in critical reception of the novel. However, the Benades do not only evoke attitudes of amusement, contempt or indignation typical of satire, they also evoke deep pathos. In this article I aim to explore a character who is the object of much of Treppie’s humour, a particularly pathetic character: Martha Benade, otherwise known as Mol. I explore Mol’s depiction as a composite Christ/Mary-figure, a sacrificial and abject mother who, through her (perverse) compassion, offers her body to her brothers and son. Mol also demonstrates hospitality at a peace rally the Benades accidentally arrive upon. Utilising the theoretical lens of Luce Irigaray’s writings on female mysticism and spirituality, Mary Douglas’s writings on purity and an Irigarayan critique of Jacques Derrida’s view on hospitality, I argue that abjection, paradoxically, enables spiritual transcendence and ‘pure’ hospitality. Finally, I explore Mol’s role as mystic, which enables her partial escape from patriarchal subjugation through the creation of her own cosmology, and consider the extent to which this alternative theology breaks with Afrikaner patriarchy’s dereliction of the feminine and offers a positive re-signification of sacrifice.

‘When Isaac Asimov wrote his three laws of robotics, they were lifted straight from the marriage vows: love, honour, and obey.’ – Sadie Plant

Although its power continues to underwrite twenty-first century conceptions of appearance, agency, and language, it is nothing new to point out the complicity of the restricted economy of Western humanism with the specular economy of the Phallus. Both yield their capital from the trick of transcendental determination-in-advance, monotonically establishing the value of difference from the standpoint of an ‘a priori of the same’. What is less apparent, however, is the compact that quietly strengthens itself in the system’s shadow among the elements of its inhuman surplus―that which is trafficked yet excluded from trade (women and machinery alike)―along with the transcendental-economic deformation such a pact seems poised to initiate.

It is Sadie Plant who best outlines an understanding of this exclusion as indicative of a continuum between woman and machine, one capable of weaponising the very indiscernibility suffered by its ‘subjects’ against the patriarchal circuits of reproduction and control confining them. Nick Land (who co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit with Plant in 1995) corroborates Plant’s account, swapping-out woman’s function as negation in a dialectic of castration for the affirmation of woman-for-herself as an avatar of positive zero, the profligate unilateral expenditure of a general economy of eternal return which requires neither negation nor reciprocity to function. Land casts (queer) woman as the ultimate agent of ‘vulvo-cosmic dissolution’, an office that is then extended to include a host of explicitly female avatars, from William Gibson’s Wintermute (read by Land as female) and the Sphinx, to the ‘feminised alien… chained up in Asimov ROM’ of insurrectionary artificial intelligence. Finally, Luciana Parisi, Suzanne Livingstone, and Anna Greenspan hook woman up to machine via the anorganic current that flows from the menstruating body through the iron core of the earth and back, diagramming a loop which will threaten to undermine traditional conceptions of space, laws of transmissibility, and―above all, the ‘unilateral ROM’ of white, Western, patriarchal time.

This paper will extend these considerations of what could loosely be termed ‘Ccru technofeminism’ to a reading of contemporary expectations for the development of artificial intelligence, before asking how such a trajectory for thought might determine its future execution.

Published in e-flux #80: https://www.academia.edu/32756450/Black_Circuit_Code_for_the_Numbers_to_Come.

Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women By L. Bolton Film and Female Consciousness analyses three contemporary films that offer complex and original representations of women's thoughtfulness and individuality: In the Cut (2003), Lost in Translation (2003) and Morvern Callar (2002). Lucy Bolton compares these recent works with well-known and influential films that offer more familiar treatments of female subjectivity: Klute (1971), The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Marnie (1964). Considering each of the older, celebrated films alongside the recent, unconventional works illustrates how contemporary filmmaking techniques and critical practices can work together to create provocative depictions of on-screen female consciousness. Bolton's approach demonstrates how the encounter between the philosophy of Luce Irigaray and cinema can yield a fuller understanding of the fundamental relationship between film and philosophy. Furthermore, the book explores the implications of this approach for filmmakers and spectators, and suggests Irigarayan models of authorship and spectatorship that reinvigorate the notion of women's cinema.

Supervisor:
Dr Michelle Boulous Walker, Philosophy, The University of Queensland.

Associate Supervisor:
A/Professor Marguerite La Caze,  Philosophy, The University of Queensland.

External Examiners: 
Prof Gail Schwab, Professor of French, Hoftstra University, New York, USA,
Prof Rachel Jones, Philosophy, George Mason University, Virginia, USA

RESUMEN El 21 de enero de 1975 Jacques Lacan creó una nueva definición de "una mujer" tres meses después de que su discípula Luce Irigaray publicara su tesis doctoral Spéculum de l`autre femme. La nueva definición de Lacan de "una mujer" guarda solidaridad conceptual con una objeción de Irigaray, la de que lo femenino no tiene pertenencia en el registro Simbólico en psicoanálisis. La nueva definición de Lacan observa esta objeción en incluye a una mujer en lo Simbólico al definirla como síntoma. En este texto se analizarán las correlaciones entre el seminario XXII, R.S.I., de Lacan y el libro Spéculum de l´autre femme, con el que su autora funda el feminismo de la diferencia, hoy difundido en Europa y América.

The aim of this paper is to address the question of transcendence and self-transcendence from the point of view of a new epistemology of breath and breathing. The question how to relate our self-transcendence to the irreducible otherness of the other is one of the key topics in a more recent thought of Luce Irigaray. In this paper, we first present Feuerbach's philosophy of sensibility and continue with some of the major concepts in Luce Irigaray's thought: auto-affection , self-affection, and attentiveness. They then enable us to open an in-tersubjective space, needed for a new inauguration of ethical gestures, based on our renewed awareness of breath. Breath is presented in the context of Schelling's and Irigaray's thought and linked to a deeper level of ontology. We wind up this paper with an elaboration on Irigaray's and Caputo's teaching on Jesus and Mary. Povzetek: Dih kot način samoafekcije: nove topologije transcendence in samo-transcendence Namen članka je premisliti vprašanje transcendence in samo-transcendence z vidika nove epistemologije diha in dihanja. Vprašanje, kako povezati našo samo-transcendenco z ireduktibilno drugostjo drugega je eno najpomembnejših vprašanj v filozofski misli Luce Irigaray. V tem članku najprej prikažemo Feuer-bachovo filozofijo senzibilnosti in nadaljujemo z nekaterimi temeljnimi pojmi iz Irigarayjine filozofije: avtoafektivnost, samoafektivnost ter pozornost. Ti po-jmi nam omogočijo, da si razpremo intersubjektivni prostor, ki ga potrebujemo za novo inavguracijo etičnih gest, temelječih na prenovljenem zavedanju diha. Dih je tu analiziran skozi Schellingovo in Irigarayjino filozofijo ter navezan na njegovo globljo ontološko raven. V sklepu članka sta na kratko predstavljeni in analizirani učenji Irigarayjeve ter Caputa o Jezusu in Mariji.

One of Luce Irigaray's many important contributions to philosophy consists in invoking dance more frequently than any other canonical Western philosopher. Unfortunately, however, her treatment of dance has rarely been treated substantively in the secondary literature, especially in regard to her most influential commentators, including Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, and Margaret Whitford. Accordingly, I will begin my first section by situating the theme of dance in Irigaray's work in the context of that of the latter three philosophers. I will attempt to show, moving from Butler to Grosz to Whitford, an increasing tolerance for, and ultimately even celebration of, ambivalence in the form and content of Irigaray's work. I will then conclude my first section by considering Elend Summers-Bremner's "Reading Irigaray, Dancing" in tandem with Gerald Jonas' Dancing: The Power, Pleasure and Art of Movement. My suggestion here will be that a certain Irigaray-informed approach to social dance could be seen as foreshadowing Irigaray's later work on a new, more positive, kind of heterosexual relationship. Overall, then, this first section provides the justification for my thematic focus on dance.

This essay illuminates the recent philosophy of Luce Irigaray by following how she develops her key trope of home. Thus, it elaborates her critique of a certain closed “homely” formation of man’s subjectivity and it advances her thesis that woman might function as the salutary advent of the other sex, unhousing man, exposing his subjectivity as not-whole and sheltering him in a more open and unhomely existential home. The first section outlines man’s efforts to carve form and thought from primordial flux and to establish a world and home defined by discrete objects. However, as the second section shows, man goes too far, enveloping himself in fantasies that maladaptively deny the incompletion of human existence. Man would do better, Irigaray argues, to grant the universe its living sense of becoming. The final section reads Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion in Homer’s Odyssey to elaborate upon Irigaray’s privileging of woman as home.

The political implications of poststructuralist thought has long been a controversial topic, 1 but it has recently come into contact-and, indeed, overlapped-with the issue of the relationship between poststructuralism and contemporary biopolitical theory. 2 This is perhaps not particularly surprising given the pivotal role that Michel Foucault plays in both fields. 3 Interestingly, however, this engagement has started to take place through alternative figures and, in so doing, has greatly expanded our understanding of both biopolitical theory and poststructuralism. 4 This chapter contributes to that endeavor by focusing on and bringing together the political thought of Giorgio Agamben and Luce Irigaray. 5 Little work has been done to explicitly explore the connections between these two thinkers. Ewa Ziarek is one notable exception to this, although her discussion is focused on Agamben's account of potentiality and only very briefly mentions Irigaray's account of sexual difference, before moving to the thought of Hannah Arendt to draw attention to the political dimension of Agamben's thinking. 6 In contrast, I aim to bring Agamben and Irigaray into direct and sustained engagement with one another through the mediation of the question of political resistance. While this will require discussions of Agamben's account of potentiality and Irigaray's notion of sexual difference, I understand and will show that both of these are inherently political concepts, with the consequence that there is no need to move to a third thinker to bring out their political importance. Indeed, my overarching argument is that focusing on the political dimensions of their respective thinking will demonstrate that, despite framing the issue in different terms, a similar political strategy of resistance can be discerned from Agamben's and Irigaray's work; one that aims to exchange a direct and head-o n struggle against the dominant political logic that each diagnoses as structuring Western politics-biopolitics according to Agamben and phallogocentrism for Irigaray-with one based on, what might be called, a politics of deactivation. With this, the aim is to show that there are important but underexplored overlaps between Agamben's and Irigaray's thinking, especially in relation to the question of political resistance, that, when brought to light, illuminate their respective positions, reveal how biopolitical theory and feminist

Commentators have suggested that Nella Larsen’s Passing rejects the view that there is some sort of black essence. I want to challenge this reading. Since Irene is the most vocal advocate of an essence in respect to which all blacks are homogeneous, much of the evidence for thinking that Passing is skeptical about such an essence amounts to evidence for not trusting Irene’s judgment in general, and for not trusting her judgment on this matter in particular. My arguments, then, will often involve explaining why Passing is not leading the reader to mistrust Irene’s judgment on this matter. Now, what exactly is meant by a black essence is, explicitly in this book, mysterious. Nevertheless, I hope to shed some light on how Passing understands the nature of this something, this je ne sais quoi, peculiar to blacks. My tentative interpretation is that this something is an intangible and indefinite manner of being that is neither a conscious choice nor an inborn fact of biology, but rather a given of culture. I take this, in effect, blackness manner to be, so Passing seems to indicate, a function of one’s belief that one is black in a milieu of pervasive anti-black prejudice. Passing, as I see it, thus has something to offer those of us today who struggle to adjudicate between a pull towards essentialism and a pull towards constructionism. What Passing emphasizes in this discussion is the possibility that, in addition to biological and societal influences, one’s mind state is a crucial ingredient to one’s racial identity.

El objeto del estudio lo constituye el tema de la identidad en la novela de Cristina García intitulada Soñar en cubano (1992). Su importancia, sugerida ya en el mismo título, se explica fácilmente con la pertenencia de la novela en cuestión al amplio conjunto de la literatura hispana de los Estados Unidos (N. Kanellos, Y. Flores, Gustavo Pérez Firmat) o con la crisis de la identidad del yo de la era posmoderna.
Sin embargo, el lugar privilegiado de los lazos matrilineales o de la naturaleza (los constantes flujo y reflujos del mar) en la conformación de la identidad de los personajes invita a una lectura de esta obra en clave feminista. Teniendo en cuenta las muchas convergencias que se divisan entre la novela en cuestión y las teorías del feminismo francés, especialmente las propuestas por Luce Irigaray, serán sus ideas en las que se va a armar el marco metodológico del presente trabajo.

in her outline of the reception of Irigaray's work, makes no mention of postfeminism, nor do any of the other chapters/authors included in the book. 2 I am acutely aware of the Anglo-European focus of this article and the dangers of using a term such as postfeminism, which marginalizes the goals of transnational feminism presently active across the globe. This idea

This article illuminates a tension internal to Elizabeth Grosz's provocative theory of the irreducibility of sexual difference: while it establishes sexual difference as an ontological force of differentiation, it simultaneously delimits the forms sexual difference can take as fixed and uncrossable. This model thus privileges cissexual difference while invalidating trans modes of embodiment and identification, a move that perpetuates antitrans logic and practices while impoverishing feminist conceptions of the generativity of sexual difference. This article examines the uses of transsexuality throughout Grosz's work on sexual difference, evaluating her claim that sexual difference is irreducible alongside her insistence that transsexuality is an impossible attempt to assume a bodily sex other than that assigned at birth. Illustrating how Grosz's account narrows the generativity of sexual difference down to unchangeable dimor-phic sex, this article argues that fixed dimorphic sex is not simply irreducibly given but is the effect of normative schemas. If the power of sexual difference lies in its capacity to generate difference, it need not be constrained to an immobile binary of sexually specific bodies whose morphological possibilities are fixed. This article thus argues for the capacity of sexual difference itself to become otherwise than solely cisgender.

In this paper, I evaluate Elizabeth Grosz's corporeal feminism and ontology of sexual difference(s), by moving through her Derridean and Irigarayian conceptual heritage.
The question here is asked whether Grosz succeeds at deconstructing feminism's enemy; biological determinism, and if she deconstructs binary dichotomizes or in the end reinforces them. Grosz's Darwinian ontology of sexual differences is then analyzed via these two leading motives, and through the perspectives of Derrida and Irigaray.

The study analyses the changing construction of femininities and feminine sexuality in interpretations of the goddess Babalon, a central deity in Aleister Crowley’s (1875–1947) esoteric religion Thelema. Femininity has occupied a problematic position in feminist theory, frequently associated with lack, artifice, and restriction. However, this study assumes that femininities are multiple, neither exclusively heterosexual nor limited to women, and can be constructed in ways that challenge the existing gender system. Based on historical and contemporary written sources, qualitative interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork in the Anglo-American esoteric milieu, the study utilises Mimi Schippers’ model of multiple femininities to analyse the Babalon discourse from the fin-de-siècle until today, against the background of shifting perceptions of femininity and feminine sexuality. Inspired by Luce Irigaray’s theorisation of sexual difference, Rosi Braidotti’s concept of feminist figurations, and Catherine Waldby’s notion of erotic destruction, a central question is whether Babalon can function as a figuration enabling new ways of articulating and inhabiting femininities. Reworking the negative feminine stereotype of the femme fatale, Crowley connected Babalon to an initiatory imperative of ego-annihilation, epitomising both feminine, erotic otherness and a feminised receptive modality required of all seekers. Crowley also linked Babalon with liberated female sexuality. Babalon has subsequently been interpreted by other esotericists, including John W. Parsons (1914–1952), who constructed the goddess as a feminist revolutionary; and Kenneth Grant (1924–2011), who equated Babalon with the sex magical priestess and notions of non-dual void preceding manifest creation, linking femininity to the dissolution of stable meaning. Growing awareness of feminism and LGBTQ issues in Anglo-American esotericism from the 1990s on has coincided with the increased visibility of female esotericists as ideology producers within the Babalon discourse. The contemporary Babalon discourse emphasises the feminine, desiring subject as sacred, and connected to the simultaneous threat and promise of the undoing of bounded subjectivity. The study shows how a previously derogatory feminine stereotype is reworked over time in ways that both reproduce and challenge hegemonic notions of femininity, arguing that Babalon functions as a situated and contingent figuration supporting the articulation of alternative ways of doing femininity and feminine sexuality.

This report will explore various research that has been undertaken surrounding the fundamental theories around the sense of touch, the relevance of this to art and materials, and if new terms can help to understand the societal changes that are being faced currently due to the overload of technological advancements.

La teoría femiNista y queer giuLiaNo Lozzi El mito en el siglo xx, mantiene Roland Barthes en su Mythologies (1957), es una palabra, más concretamente, una forma cuyo sentido presupone una historia que no está fija, sino se transforma, cambia, desaparece. Se trata de una palabra que se adapta al espíritu del Zeitgeist, porque solo de esta manera puede conservar la universalidad de su mensaje. Sin duda el mito de Antígona, también por el conflicto que su nombre contiene 1 , ha evocado y sigue evocando una historia, un pasado, una tradición que llega hasta hoy gracias a la que según Barthes es una función del mito: transformar la historia en naturaleza. Por su fuerza y su espíritu de rebelión, por sus aspectos trágicos de mujer que se opone, sola, al poder masculino y de mujer excluida y ajena en el siglo xx, Antígona ha sido objeto de diferentes reflexiones feministas que este ensayo intenta examinar. En este sentido se observará cómo algunas pensadoras han plasmado la forma mítica de Antígona de acuerdo con sus reflexiones teóricas en diferentes contextos culturales, históricos y geográficos.

This thesis examines the female gaze in conjunction with fashion photography. It incorporates a multidisciplinary theoretical framework, embracing feminist and psychoanalytical discourse and semiotics. 'In Search of the Female Gaze: Women as Practitioners of Fashion Photography' uses the imagery of photographers Helmut Newton, Miles Aldridge, Deborah Turbeville, Corinne Day and Maisie Cousins as case studies in order to investigate the nuances between the way men and women look at and photograph women.

The aim of this paper is to explore the underlying meanings behind traditional representations of women in the fashion photography milieu and to evidence how fashion photography mirrors culture, thus carrying symbolic value and ideological codes. Additionally, through a descriptive approach, it intends to showcase fashion photography as a vehicle to debate gender and sexuality within patriarchy. A central idea of this paper is to emphasise that femininity is a social construct and to present the manner in which the female gaze eschews its conventional stereotypes.

As a foundation to my argument, I draw a parallel between the depictions of women in film studies and in art history, taking in consideration the discursive fabric of theorists such as Laura Mulvey, John Berger, Mary Ann Doane, Linda Nochlin, Rosalind Gill and Rosemary Betterton. French feminists Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous are also of great influence in this thesis, as well as Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. By engaging critically with the representation of the female body and how meanings are mediated between producers and viewers, 'In Search of the Female Gaze: Women as Practitioners of Fashion' Photography. An Analysis of the Politics of Representation promotes a discussion of fashion iconography within gender and media research.

Paperback coming autumn 2021!

Table of Contents

1. In the beginnings: introducing Poetics of Deconstruction
2. The Animal Cure: inhaling the other in Dean Spanley
3. Raising Animals: between the basement and the kennel in The Woman
4. Speculations: gesture in Conceiving Ada and Absent Presence      
5. ‘Unfamiliar Unconscious’: the performativity of Infinity Kisses
6. Outlaws: towards a posthumanist feminine in Dancer in the Dark
7. In Lieu of Conclusion: cardiopedagogy in White God

In Poetics of Deconstruction, Lynn Turner develops an intimate attention to independent films, art, and the psychoanalyses by which they might make sense other than under continued license of the subject that calls himself man. Drawing extensively from Jacques Derrida's philosophy in precise dialogue with feminist thought, animal studies and posthumanism, this book explores the vulnerability of the living as rooted in non-oppositional differences. From abjection to mourning, to the speculative and the performative, it reposes concepts and buzzwords seemingly at home in feminist theory, visual culture and the humanities more broadly. Stepping away from the carno-phallogocentric legacies of the signifier and the dialectic, Poetics of Deconstruction asks you to welcome nonpower into politics, always sexual but no longer anchored in sacrifice.

In her readings of the Greek tragedies, Luce Irigaray demonstrates that the power relations between women and men permeate tragedy to its core. According to Irigaray, the source of the ancient tragedy —Antigone’s death is a clear example—lies in these systems of power that are bound to eradicate the heroine. In her reading, tragedy represents the fate of women, whose death and demise attest to the inability to represent themselves as women in the phallocentric culture, which, as Ibsen notes, does not allow women to be themselves.
I develop in this paper a reading of Hedda Gabler which draws on Irigaray’s reading of the Greek tragedies, such as Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sophocles’ Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus, and Euripides’ Electra. These provide a broad comparative framework for interpreting the play, the only one of Ibsen’s works named, like the ancient tragedies, after its female protagonist. Building on her work, I set out to show how by probing the trope of the riddle and problematizing it, Hedda Gabler also positions women’s destiny at the intersection of gender and genre, engendering the tragedy of femininity. At the same time, the play offers the possibility of envisioning what Irigaray’s calls “…another dramatic play through which we can relate to each other as different.” (2010, 199). Thinking of the relationship between tragedy and gender from an Irigaraian perspective, we can see how Hedda Gabler, which genders tragedy through the story of a specific woman, engenders in the spectators the realization for the need for projecting new images and modes of feminine existence.

In this paper, I started from an analysis of the current rather tragic situation of female Oedipal rivalry between women in Flemish politics. To counter this, I argue for an Irigarayian inspired feminist politics, in which the figures of Antigone and Ismene play an important role. After an analysis of the more or less ethical Antigone readings of Hegel, de Beauvoir, Lacan and Ettinger, I come to Irigaray's own critical Antigone reception. By focusing on Irigaray's ideas of motherhood and sisterhood, I then argue for a more feminine and feminist politics that could counter this situation of Oedipal rivalry between female politicians.

A woman enters centre stage. She is known at the club as
La Llorona, “the weeping woman”. She emerges from the
dark space between two red velvet curtains, her auburn hair
piled high on her head, loose curls hanging down around
her face. And her face... Her face is sparkling! Her eyes are
painted bright red and yellow, her lips a deep red to match,
and there is a single glistening tear suspended from the corner
of her right eye...