from Hypatia Volume 17, Number 4The Other as Another Other
Karen Green
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De Beauvoir and Irigaray are archetypes of two opposed feminisms: egalitarian feminism and radical feminism of difference. Yet a filiation exists between de Beauvoir's claim, that women is Other, and Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman. This paper explores the relationship between de Beauvoir's and Irigaray's notion of otherness. It argues that Irigaray deforms de Beauvoir's categories, and that de Beauvoir provides a more coherent prospect for the development of an authentic feminine subjectivity.
1. THE STANDARD ACCOUNT OF DE BEAUVOIR AND IRIGARAYSince the 1980s a standard history of twentieth-century feminist thought has developed, at least within Australia, that goes something like this: until the 1970s, feminism embraced a philosophy of equality, the aim of which was to abolish the difference between the sexes. During the 1970s a new, more radical feminism arose that saw the universal human as a male in disguise, and saw that, like assimilation, the demand for equality amounted to a call for genocide. This new feminism extolled the difference between the sexes. In this history, Simone de Beauvoir belongs to the first category, Luce Irigaray to the second.
In a version of the story told by Elizabeth Grosz (1990), the transformation from egalitarian to radical feminism also involves a new account of the relationship between feminism and philosophy. Egalitarian feminists aspire to women's equal inclusion within philosophy and develop already existing philosophical systems so as to include women. Radical feminists see that there is no space for women's inclusion within most philosophical systems and so are "prepared to question and possibly reject the underlying assumptions and values of philosophy." In particular, radical feminists challenge "philosophy's orientation around oneness, unity, or identity--one truth, one method, one reality, one logic, and so on." (162, 166).1 Whatever the inadequacies of this account as a general framework for understanding the various thinkers lumped together by Grosz, there is certainly a measure of truth in this story, and it fits in well with Irigaray's own account of her relationship to de Beauvoir. It is also central to the reading of Irigaray offered by Joseph Goux (Irigaray 1991; Goux 1994). Nevertheless, here I hope to show that the relationship between de Beauvoir and Irigaray is more complex than this story suggests, and that they have more in common than the account acknowledges. Moreover, I will argue that Irigaray deforms de Beauvoir's categories, and in the end it is de Beauvoir who is able to provide us with the more coherent prospect for the development of a feminine subjectivity.
In her short piece "Equal or Different" (1991) Irigaray emphasizes the differences between de Beauvoir and herself. First she mentions the fact that she, Irigaray, was trained in psychoanalysis, and claims that psychoanalysis is a theory that de Beauvoir and Sartre had always resisted. This places her within a philosophical tradition in which "psychoanalysis has a place as a means for understanding the development of consciousness and of history, particularly with regard to their sexual determinations." (Irigaray 1991, 31; translation modified). Secondly, she suggests that the demand for equality is utopian, and expresses the fear that to attempt to suppress sexual difference would be to invite a more radical genocide than any known in history (1991, 32). By implication, de Beauvoir was for neutrality and against difference, and Irigaray says that despite the need to carry on the practical work towards social justice, which de Beauvoir began, her fundamental egalitarianism should be avoided.
There certainly are places where de Beauvoir sounds as though she is advocating the kind of assimilation against which Irigaray warns. For instance, when she says, "A world where men and women would be equal is easy to visualise . . . women reared and trained exactly like men . . . to work under the same conditions" (de Beauvior 1997, 733). But de Beauvoir is also critical of women who try to be men, and there is much in Irigaray that is already to be found in de Beauvoir. Irigaray's story verges on a matricide of the kind against which she herself has warned. There are continuities as well as discontinuities between de Beauvoir and Irigaray. Evidence for this comes from the very paper that announces their difference. There, Irigaray relates that she sent Speculum to de Beauvoir. One can only speculate on her reasons, but no doubt she hoped that de Beauvoir would endorse this development of one of her de Beauvoir's central ideas: the claim that woman is Other. De Beauvoir did not respond, which Irigaray admits made her quite sad (1991, 31). The daughter (or little sister) did not get the recognition that she desired. The title of Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a) already announces a debt to de Beauvoir. It was de Beauvoir who first claimed that the clue to woman's situation is that she is man's Other. It was she who said that it is man who is the subject, the absolute, woman the Other (de Beauvoir 1997, 16). The implications of this motif are developed at great length by Irigaray (Irigaray 1985a, 133–46; Irigaray 1996, 61–64). As Tina Chanter observes, Irigaray takes up "the task of thinking woman as other" (1995, 78). Yet, I will argue, this idea undergoes a transformation in Irigaray's work that renders it quite different to de Beauvoir's. This raises a problem for Irigaray, for the justifiability of de Beauvoir's claim that woman is Other is closely associated with certain assumptions that Irigaray is ultimately unwilling to accept. In order to demonstrate this, this paper will trace the continuities and discontinuities that relate Irigaray's thinking to de Beauvoir's. We will begin with the Other as articulated by de Beauvoir.
2. THE OTHER IN DE BEAUVOIRThere has been considerable debate in the last couple of decades concerning the extent of de Beauvoir's influence on Jean-Paul Sartre and in particular the origins of the concept of the Other. There are dissenting voices, but many feminist scholars are converging toward the view that this is a site of de Beauvoir's originality. It was she who first showed an interest in our relations with others, and the way in which subjectivity can be deformed by the attitudes of others (Simons 1999, 185–243). So, rather than having simply have been a follower of Sartre's philosophy, de Beauvoir may have initiated at least one central aspect of that system.2 This may seem to cast doubt on the theme that I developed in a 1999 paper, which is that one will not properly understand de Beauvoir's claim that woman is Other unless one reads it as an application of the account of concrete relations with others to be found in Being and Nothingness (1993). But in fact the evidence now available strengthens the case for seeing Sartre's text as a good source for de Beauvoir's views. For it now appears that Sartre's account of concrete relations with others was stimulated by his reading a draft of de Beauvoir's She Came to Stay (1995). De Beauvoir also read and commented on Sartre's text. So while there may be some differences in the way in which they develop and contextualize the discussion of relationships with others, there is every reason to believe that de Beauvoir agreed with the account of concrete relations between subjects in bad faith that Sartre laid out in Being and Nothingness.
It is important to note the focus of Sartre's discussion. He was interested in describing concrete relations as they exist between subjects in bad faith; he did not attempt to explain how bad faith might be escaped, or how authentic reciprocal relations might be achieved. As has been noted, de Beauvoir said more on this subject at this early period than Sartre did, and this has been taken to mark a difference between them (Kruks 1992). But all this shows is that they concentrated on two different aspects of the account of relations with others. As de Beauvoir says, "In Being and Nothingness reciprocity was not [Sartre's] subject. But that doesn't mean that he didn't believe that reciprocity was the best way after all to live out human relationships" (Simons 1999, 57). So, there is every reason to take Being and Nothingness as a good source for de Beauvoir's understanding of our relations with others and to expect that, just as Sartre developed that account in order to explain the oppression of the Jews, de Beauvoir was likewise applying it when she developed her famous description of the oppression of women.
When one returns to Being and Nothingness in order to understand what it means to be other, an important point that stands out is that Sartre's system contains three irreducible ontological moments: being in-itself, being for-itself and being for-others. There has been a tendency, and it is one to which I myself have at times succumbed, to notice only Sartre's distinction between being in-itself and being for-itself, and to then equate this distinction with that denoted by de Beauvoir's terms "immanence" and "transcendence." This then raises a conundrum, for how could a woman who is clearly conscious, and so ambiguously both in-itself and for-itself like a man, be reduced to a mere in-itself? The conundrum has led Sonia Kruks, for instance, to argue that despite her explicit pronouncements, de Beauvoir was not adhering to the philosophy of Being and Nothingness when she wrote The Second Sex. But a simpler solution is to notice that something has been left out in the account of Sartre's ontology. The first parts of Being and Nothingness deal with the intentional structure of consciousness, being for-itself, and its relation to the meaningless contingency of being in-itself, the objects of consciousness. They establish the transcendence of consciousnessin the sense that consciousness itself is not an object of consciousness, nor a subjective idea that exists in consciousness, but something other that can only be specified via its absolute difference from any of the objects of which it is conscious. The self is nothing. There is no noumenal self, no transcendental ego, only a relation of intentionality, one of the relata of which is nothing (1993, xxi–xliii). Sartre then goes on to deal with bad faith, and argues that it is just because we conscious beings have the contradictory characteristics of both being and non-being that we are capable of bad faith (1993, 47–70).
Early on, Sartre had thought that by reducing the subject to nothingness he had solved the problem of solipsism. But in Being and Nothingness he admits that no solution to this problem is made available by his "no subject" account, for we experience others as objects, and could gain no evidence from their status as objects (things in-themselves) that they are conscious (1993, 235). It is at this point that considerations concerning our relations with others enter his text, as a solution to the problem of solipsism. We have an immediate ontological apprehension of others in the experience of being looked at, which reduces us to an object for another. Our concrete relations with others are structured by the fact that our being for-others is initially experienced as being an object for another.
So there are in fact two self/other relations in Being and Nothingness: the relationship between being for-itself and being in-itself, and the relationship between being for-itself and others who are not mere objects, but who reveal themselves as conscious subjects through the look. Sartre describes two fundamental attitudes that those in bad faith adopt when faced with the objectifying look of the Other. The first attitude is that which is involved in love, language, and masochism. It involves an attempt to incorporate the transcendence of the Other. The one who is looked at accepts their object status and relies on the transcendent other as a ground of value and meaning. The second attitude is involved in indifference, desire, sadism, and hate, and involves transcending the other's transcendence (1993, 361–412). In Being and Nothingness, both of these attitudes involve forms of bad faith. By adopting the attitude of love, the lover chooses to believe in a source of value outside the self in the transcendent other who loves them, disguising from themself the fact that it is they themself who has chosen this individual's love as the ground of their being. By adopting the attitude of hate, the anti-Semite sets themself up as a transcendent source of good, opposed to an objective evil, disguising from themself that this evaluation rests on no objective reality outside the self. In general, individuals relate in one or other of these attitudes, and vacillate from one to another. But individuals can be fixed by their membership in a class or group in one or other attitude (1993, 415–23). In particular, Sartre describes the situation of the Jew as one in which the anti-Semite, by taking up an attitude of hate toward the Jew, forces the Jew to experience themself as objectively Jewish and creates a situation of oppression (Sartre 1948).
If we now return to de Beauvoir, we can see that rather than equating her distinction between transcendence and immanence with the opposition between being for-itself and being in-itself, we will make more sense of what she says if we think of it as a distinction between two kinds of subjectivity corresponding to Sartre's second and first fundamental attitudes to the other. Transcendence involves objectifying the other and asserting one's own subjectivity; immanence involves accepting objectification and attempting to rely on an exterior transcendence for justification. In the section of The Second Sex called "Justifications" de Beauvoir describes the narcissist, the woman in love, and the mystic. These are all forms of falling into immanence in which the subject experiences herself in relation to an Other. As de Beauvoir explains, "Either woman puts herself into relation with an unreality: her double [narcissism], or God [mysticism]; or she creates an unreal relation with a real being [love]" (de Beauvoir 1997, 687). In none of these cases can woman escape her subjectivity.
De Beauvoir's concept of immanence is somewhat confusing, and deserves an extended discussion, but it is closely related to being locked in a state of subjectivity. She says of the infant, "The world is at first represented in the newborn infant only by immanent sensations; he is still immersed in the bosom of the Whole" (1997, 296). In introducing the narcissist she explains that "woman, not being able to fulfil herself through projects and objectives, is forced to find her reality in the immanence of her person," and she goes on to suggest that "many women sullenly confine their interests merely to their egos and conflate them so greatly as to confound them with Everything" (641). Earlier she had claimed, "It is the existence of other men that tears each man out of his immanence" (171). This is highly reminiscent of Sartre's claim that it is the look of the Other that rescues us from solipsism. Immanence, as de Beauvoir describes it, has much in common with solipsism: it involves a conflation of the self with the world of experienced things. It is a form of "being" rather than "existing" in which one treats oneself as an object in the world rather than recognizing that as a consciousness one is a transcendent liberty that can act on and shape reality. The fall into immanence is a fall into a certain form of subjectivity often mediated by the adoption of Sartre's first attitude to others. Taking this attitude, the subject identifies with the object that they are for the other consciousness, and so treats themself as a mere object of consciousness.
There is, however, a difference between de Beauvoir's treatment of transcendence and immanence, and Sartre's discussion of the two fundamental attitudes to others that might be thought to undermine their assimilation. Sartre treats both fundamental attitudes equally as forms of bad faith. De Beauvoir treats the transition from immanence to transcendence as a progress. Here she appears to be closer to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) than to Sartre. Whereas for Sartre the second attitude--that of indifference, desire, sadism and hate--is clearly no advance on the first attitude, de Beauvoir urges women to achieve transcendence. But surely she is wrong if she thinks that the attitude that has been typically adopted by the oppressor is an advance on that typically adopted by the oppressed. This intuition lies behind the criticisms of those who have objected that de Beauvoir is urging women to adopt masculine values. Yet there is a certain logic behind de Beauvoir's assumption, for de Beauvoir adopts from Hegel the idea that it is only by challenging those who have set themselves up as subjects that the oppressed can impose a situation of reciprocity in which each transcendent subject can recognize the transcendent consciousness of the other (Hegel 1977, 111–19). She is not urging women to become masters, but only to assert their transcendence to the extent necessary to achieve a full reciprocity between transcendent selves. In some ways her position would have been clearer if she had emphasized with Sartre that the second, objectifying, attitude is as much a form of bad faith as is the first, but that it may be a necessary stage on the path to an authentic transcendence which involves reciprocity.
3. IRIGARAY'S OTHERI have argued that we will better understand the account of women's situation that is offered in The Second Sex if we understand it as a version of the account of concrete relations with others to be found in Being and Nothingness, albeit with a Hegelian twist. The Hegelian twist involves seeing the transition from the form of subjectivity characterized as immanence to that characterized as transcendence as a progress. It also envisages the possibility of a conversion from bad faith to authenticity that would result in a reciprocity conceived of as an ambiguous vacillation between transcendence/immanence: a recognition that one is "for-itself/in-itself."
The most obvious echo of de Beauvoir's schema in Irigaray is the proposition that man is the subject, woman the other. Irigaray suggests that she was using the method of inversion, when, in Speculum, she meditated on women as "the other of the Same." She says, "I was the other of/for man, I attempted to define the objective alterity of myself for myself as belonging to the female gender" (Irigaray 1996, 63). This method is parasitic on the proposition that de Beauvoir has established, but it already invests it with a certain significance. To invert the duality in the simplest sense would be for a woman to make man her Other. If man's transcendence and subjectivity involves objectification of woman, the most obvious reversal would be to objectify man. This inversion is carried out by Mary Daly (1978), whose writing shares some superficial similarities with Irigaray's, but this is not Irigaray's inversion. Rather, it seems that Irigaray tries to speak from a place that is not, or at least, from a place that doesn't exist from the point of view of man. This is the point of view of the Other. A speculum is a gynecological instrument for examining the inside of the vagina, but "speculum" can also mean mirror. So Speculum is a first attempt to deal with female identity when it is accepted that this is the identity of an Other. But if one's identity has been to be the other of the same, it is unclear what the inversion can bring. In "The Looking Glass, from the Other Side," Alice says, "You've heard them dividing me up, in their own best interests. So either I don't have any 'self' or else I have a multitude of 'selves' appropriated by them, for them, according to their needs or desires" (Irigaray 1985b, 17). Because she accepts that woman is Other, she seems, as Drucilla Cornell and Judith Butler have complained, to invest too much in the patriarchal discourse which has defined women this way (Butler and Cornell 1998). To illustrate this I will first explore the continuity, which is also a place of discontinuity, between de Beauvoir's text and Irigaray's in relation to Sigmund Freud on female sexuality. For it is striking that, on an initial reading, almost the entire critique of Freud's account of female sexuality, developed in the section of Speculum called "Blind Spot of an old Dream of Symmetry" echoes de Beauvoir's earlier critique. Next I will explore the discontinuity which is introduced by using the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss to fill out the content of the claim that woman is Other.
Although Irigaray hypothesizes that de Beauvoir and Sartre had no interest in psychoanalysis, and this was one reason, as she speculated, for de Beauvoir's lack of response to Speculum, when one turns to The Second Sex, one is struck by the positive attitude towards psychoanalysis that is initially adopted by de Beauvoir. She suggests that the fact that psychoanalysis deals with "the body as lived in by the subject" is a tremendous advance over a biological point of view, but she warns, "It is not nature that defines woman; it is she who defines herself by dealing with nature on her own account in her emotional life" (1997, 69). There clearly is a place in her writing for a psychoanalytic account of the lived body and of the emotional attitudes that women adopt. Indeed, in her account of childhood she draws heavily on the observations of psychoanalysts. She is interested in a description of woman's emotional life within the constraints of a situation where she finds herself treated as the Other, which attempts to draw out the ontological meaning of these emotional attitudes.
Her critique of Freud's own account of the "destiny of woman" is that it is clear that he simply adapted it, with slight modifications, from his account of the destiny of man. This is a point that Irigaray will echo at great length in Speculum. According to Freud, the little girl is a little man; the libido is male. De Beauvoir objects to the assumption that the girl will feel that she is a mutilated man. Irigaray goes rather further, psychoanalyzing Freud, and suggesting that the theory of penis envy is a projection of Freud's need to have the worth of the penis recognized (1985a, 51). De Beauvoir also suggests that the positive value accorded to the penis rescues the boy from any regret that he might feel at not being baby or a girl (1997, 299). Irigaray wonders why "penis envy," rather than envy for the womb, or even for the lack of both sexes, is assumed (1985a, 52). Both note and question the lack of a female libido. But their responses differ in a manner that can be accounted for in terms of the transition from existentialism to structuralism.
Overlaying de Beauvoir's criticisms of Freud's specific account of female sexuality is a rejection of the determinism and universalism of Freud's account. For while de Beauvoir does not want to deny Maurice Merleau-Ponty's assertion that "The body is generality," which she suggests echoes Freud's "Anatomy is destiny," she reads the similarity in physical embodiment, and the similar significance likely to be accorded to sexed embodiment as culturally and individually variable. In particular, she asserts that a woman "has the power to choose between the assertion of her transcendence and her alienation as object" (1997, 82). Psychoanalysis, because it is deterministic, can only offer inauthentic ways of being. Indeed, she claims that in it, "Woman is shown to us enticed by two modes of alienation. Evidently to play at being a man will be for her a source of frustration; but to play at being a woman is also a delusion: to be a woman would mean to be the object, the Other--and the Other nevertheless remains subject in the midst of her resignation" (1997, 82–83). So while de Beauvoir is prepared to use the data of psychoanalysis in order to describe the avenues of inauthentic flight open to women, and while she finds psychoanalysis an excellent example of the way in which man has been equated with the human, while woman is female, she cannot accept its fundamental propositions, and finds no great difficulty in imagining a female subject who freely assumes her existence without denying her bodily reality. Although woman finds herself in a situation dominated by men's imaginary, she need not succumb to the parameters of this imaginary (although it would be bad faith to deny its existence). To be transcendent would be to construct her own imaginary knowing that it is grounded in nothing other than her commitment to this as a way of being.
Irigaray, like the majority of de Beauvoir's interpreters, tends to read the relationship between man who is subject, woman who is other, through the relationship between being for-itself and being in-itself. In doing this she takes a clue from de Beauvoir and develops it at much greater length. While writing The Second Sex, de Beauvoir had access to a draft of Lévi-Strauss's Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969). She seems at this stage not to have been aware of the deep divide that existed between Lévi-Strauss's structuralism and existentialism, and she illustrates the way in which groups set themselves up as the One only by setting up some Other with a quotation from Lévi-Strauss. She quotes him as saying, "Passage from the state of Nature to the state of Culture is marked by man's ability to view biological relations as a series of contrasts; duality, alternation, opposition, and symmetry, whether under definite or vague forms, constitute not so much phenomena to be explained as fundamental and immediately given data of social reality" (1997, 17). Showing little understanding of structuralism, she then goes on to say that these phenomena would be incomprehensible if society was based on solidarity and friendship, but that they become clear "if, following Hegel, we find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards every other consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed." (1997, 17) This would be unacceptable to a structuralist because, according to Ferdinand de Saussure (1974) and other structuralists whose work informs Lévi-Strauss's text, the conscious subject is a function of language. From the point of view of structuralism, one cannot "explain" the dualistic structure inherent in systems of signs, or the universal grammar of the incest prohibition, via the fundamental hostility between consciousnesses, because consciousness structures the world dualistically in virtue of universal features of the systems of signs which are necessary for consciousness. But de Beauvoir fails to appreciate this.
De Beauvoir refers to Lévi-Strauss again in her account of woman's history. She accepts his proposition that marriage has never been a contract between women and men; the fundamental structure of kinship is, rather, a relationship of exchange between men (1997, 103). In Irigaray's reading of the proposition that woman is Other it is Lévi-Strauss and structuralism that dominate. This has two outcomes. Irigaray clearly rejects neither unconscious determinations nor Freud's universalism. Freud is himself "a prisoner of a certain economy of the logos." So although he defines sexual difference in terms of a relationship to the male, this definition cannot simply be rejected as an ungrounded masculine imaginary; he describes "an actual state of affairs" (Irigaray 1985b, 70–72). The state of affairs is the reality of the symbolic in a culture that historically has always been a hommo-sexual economy (Irigaray plays on the homophony of homme and homo to produce the neologism "hommo-sexual"). It is Lévi-Strauss who first outlined the fact that the transition from nature to culture coincides with an incest taboo, identified with the circulation of women as objects of exchange among men. Women in this culture are commodities and the "use, consumption, and circulation of their sexualised bodies underwrite the organization and reproduction of the social order, in which they have never taken part as 'subjects'" (Irigaray 1985b, 84).
When one comes to criticize patriarchal discourse from within a society dominated by men, one is faced with various dilemmas. Women cannot dismantle the raft of representation all at once. To use Otto Neurath's image, we need to rebuild the raft of theory while staying afloat (Quine 1960, 3). We have to decide which planks to jettison, and which are worth keeping for the time being. Lévi-Strauss's theories suffer from the same inadequacy as Freud's. They take men to be cultural subjects, women to be mere objects or inheritors of culture. Yet, in at least some cultures, those that are matrilineal and matrilocal, the exchange of kin is as much an exchange of men among women as an exchange of women among men. Even the patrilocal exchange of women can be interpreted as an exchange of women by women. Often a mother sends her daughter away to live with her husband and his mother. Success as a wife, in many patriarchal societies, is equivalent to success as a daughter-in-law. It is at least worth raising the question of whether women are mere commodities in these exchanges. Certainly they do not experience themselves as such.
In engaging in the process of theoretical reconstruction one cannot but adopt the attitude of a subject when one argues for a particular representation and adopts a theory without indubitable evidence, and in the light of the consequences that flow from its adoption. That it recognizes this is the strength of existentialism over structuralism. The strength of structuralism over existentialism, by contrast, is that it guards against the excessive optimism of existentialism that may seem to overlook the constraints imposed on subjectivity by the concepts and values inherent in a historically and culturally located tradition. But structuralism's weakness is that it makes it inexplicable how the subjects of oppression can challenge and change those concepts.
De Beauvoir's claim that woman is other only makes sense within a broadly existentialist and Hegelian theory. Here the conscious subject objectifies and is objectified by the Other. In some social situations one of these relationships dominates. The American black finds herself in a situation where the representations of her being offered by the society are those of the white majority. Sartre had argued that similarly it is the anti-Semite who creates the Jew (1948, 120). Since there is no self, according to existentialism, apart from the cultural identities that humans choose to play, this leaves the oppressed without any authentic identity. Such an identity is always in the future, under construction as the self enters into the responsibilities of transcendence. As we saw, the words that Irigaray puts into Alice's mouth capture this lack of an authentic self very well. But a severe limitation of de Beauvoir's account of woman's situation is that little guidance is offered as to where to begin the work of transcendence that will not seem to amount to bad faith. And Irigaray's adoption of structuralist assumptions impels her to conclude that an authentic feminine subjectivity cannot be articulated within the patriarchal discourse that has constructed us. Because of this, despite its limitations, de Beauvoir's account has a consistency that Irigaray's development of it lacks. Being objectified, and being the Other of one who sets themself up as a subject never can, from an existentialist point of view, rob one of one's subject status. Indeed, it is surely the very dissonance between one's consciousness of oneself as an autonomous subject and the evaluation of the self offered by the oppressor that leads to revolt. The mirror that men hold up to women is so distorted that, from Christine de Pizan onwards, those women who have looked into it have rejected its fabrication and lies (de Pizan 1983). If we are to explain the possibility, indeed, the actuality of this revolt we have to acknowledge that the female subject always already exists. But this possibility is denied when woman's object status is equated with the being of a commodity who has no language adequate to express her desire.
If we read de Beauvoir through Lévi-Strauss, as Irigaray does, it appears that women are not even conscious. Irigaray says as much. Women are not conscious of the schism that they are subjected to by an economy of masculine desire. "Socially, they are 'objects' for and among men and furthermore they cannot do anything but mimic a 'language' that they have not produced; naturally, they remain amorphous, suffering from drives without any possible representatives or representations" (Irigaray 1985b, 188–89). If this were the case, from what position could we experience the injustice of our situation? Moreover, how could society have come about if Lévi-Strauss is correct? What is the origin of woman's status as Other? It cannot now emerge, as it did for de Beauvoir, out of a fundamental conflict between consciousnesses, for here there is no conflict. Man takes offers and exchanges a yielding and unconscious ground. Just as Freud's account of the origin of society in the murder of the father of the primal horde by his sons assumed the social responses it was designed to explain, so Lévi-Strauss's origin of exogamy as the exchange of women among men assumes the cultural structures for which it is intended to account. A man has no daughters unless he has a wife. He has no sisters unless he has a mother. The original dyad is the mother and child. It is in relation to the mother that the brother and sister are kin. In order for a brother to exchange his sister, the mother must already maintain some long-term relationship with her children.
Sociobiologists disagree as to how culture evolved, but from their point of view kinship arrangements must offer some evolutionary advantage. A system of marriage and exchange transfers resources from men to children. Theoretically such a transfer could be initiated if a mother was able to dominate her sons, and make them transfer some of their produce to their sisters, but it is not clear that a man who devoted his time to protecting and providing for his sister's children would do as well genetically as would another who devoted his time to having intercourse with as many women as possible. If his sister's children have a father who is not related to him, they will not be as closely related to him as his own children would be, and there are evolutionary risks in incest. If, however, mothers can arrange an exchange of sons, ensuring that their daughters are only sexually available to males who are prepared to contribute to the feeding of offspring, they can directly enhance the survival of their grandchildren. Jared Diamond argues that female menopause is a distinctive feature of human sexuality, and one that can be explained if we consider the contribution that an old woman can make to the survival of her grandchildren (Diamond 1997, 111–33). One way in which women may have contributed to this survival is by ensuring that there is an exchange among families that results in every sexually active man making an economic contribution to some of his kin. This is not to say that Lévi-Strauss is wrong to see in kinship patterns an exchange of women, but the very same pattern looked at from the reverse side is also an exchange of men. Moreover the "exchange" of women depends on an already established ownership that makes no sense unless there is already an identification of brother and sister mediated by the mother.
Irigaray, through her account of the commodification of women, is able to link the arrival of a feminine subject to the collapse of all systems of property, commodification, and exchange (Irigaray 1985b, 170–97). But women are no more innocent of competition, acquisitiveness, and exchange than are men. Shell necklaces, baskets, pots, and cloth are women's artifacts that underpin the most primitive economic exchanges. Women have a history as subjects and producers of commodities, as well as a history of being commodified. As is the case for Negro slaves, our commodification does not destroy our subjectivity, though those who commodify us do attempt to hamper its development and expression. If we were completely alienated from all forms of self-representation, we would not even be able to reflect on our commodification. So, I conclude that the structuralist appropriation of de Beauvoir's claim that woman is Other ultimately undercuts the plausibility of the claim. If women were Other in the sense that Irigaray claims, completely cut off from any subjectivity or possibility of representing the self, woman could not even represent to herself her own commodification. Nor could she articulate the dissonance between her being-for-others and the demands of her own subjectivity. But without this dissonance feminism would never arise.
4. RECONCILING EQUALITY AND DIFFERENCESo, far from Irigaray having replaced an egalitarian feminism with a new feminism of difference, that is capable of questioning philosophy's investments, it seems fairer to say that she has developed one strand of de Beauvoir's thought, but in a direction that ultimately robs the strand of any cogency. Both de Beauvoir and Irigaray jettison some planks of the philosophical craft, while relying on others to keep them afloat. But Irigaray's boat of mirrors hardly sails. A woman-to-woman sociability requires that among ourselves we establish a respectful intercourse within which we reconcile the demands of self and other. Unless we are already in some sense subjects, this is impossible. If we are already subjects we are not merely commodities who cannot speak, and can only mimic patriarchal discourse. Rather, de Beauvoir's philosophy of ambiguity, according to which we are embodied subjects who largely depend on others for a knowledge of what we are as objects, provides a more coherent basis for a woman-to-woman sociability than does Irigaray's philosophy, which appears to make the feminine subject incapable of articulating her desire in rational language. For de Beauvoir, equality with men in the transcendent project of creating history, forming culture, and shaping values need in no way imply a loss of bodily, emotional and sexual difference. It is only when her philosophy of ambiguity is misread as a doctrine that privileges consciousness over embodiment that it can be read as a prescription for sameness. No doubt Irigaray is right that culture must change for the female subject to find herself in culture. Yet it is only from the perspective of de Beauvoir's more nuanced account of our otherness that one can really comprehend how women can embark on the project of reconfiguring culture so as to adequately represent the different embodiments of its various subjects.
Notes
1. Outside Australia one finds a somewhat different characterisation. Alison Jag-gar divides Grosz's "egaliatarian feminists" into liberals and Marxists, and de Beauvoir is not discussed, but put into a special category of existentialist feminists. Here too Irigaray appears fleetingly as a radical feminist (Jaggar 1983, 98). When one looks at the work of Rosemary Tong one finds de Beauvoir again on her own as an existentialist, while Irigaray is placed with Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva as a postmodern feminist (Tong 1992, 195–229). In a paper first published in 1995, Margaret Simons argued that in fact the roots of radical feminism are to be found in de Beauvoir's thought. One might take the present paper as extending this observation by demonstrating that the roots of Irigaray's thought also are to be found in de Beauvoir (Simons 1999, 145–65).
2. Margaret Simons was the first to develop this hypothesis, and in an interview, de Beauvoir agrees that "this problem of the consciousness of the other, this was my problem" (Simons 1999, 10). Kate and Edward Fulbrook have developed the theme in Fulbrook and Fulbrook 1993, 122–27.
References
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