Let's Spit On Heidegger
Luce Irigaray's ironic mimicry of Heidegger in the introductory essay, "Sexual Difference."
Luce Irigaray’s irreverence is what drew me to her writing. She takes on the biggest and baddest patriarchs and triturates them into memes. At the time I first encountered her writing, I was wrestling with my own favorite patriarch, Aristotle, so naturally, I appreciated her voice.
Irigaray begins “Sexual Difference” by mocking the most important thinker of her time, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger claims that the question of our age is the question of Being, “Why are there beings rather than nothing?” She writes:
“Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age. According to Heidegger, each age has one issue to think through, and one only. Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time, which could be our ‘salvation’1 if we thought it through.”
She pays him homage, and in the same gesture highlights his insistence that there be one “and one only.” This is indicative of the problem, an inability to think beyond the one to difference. The question of our age is how to think difference, and for Irigaray, that begins with sexual difference. We have to get to get to at least two, woman and man, and we can’t do that as long as the concept of “woman” is but the negative underside of man — man is rational, woman emotional, likewise transcendence vs. immanence, subject vs. object, etc. You are probably already familiar with these dichotomies — they run deep and are as old as our Western cultures.2
