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Part of the book: Luce Irigaray and the Question of the Divine

Alison Martin

MHRA Texts and Dissertations 53

Maney Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association

ContemporaryFrenchPhilosophyTheologyopen

Abstract.  Irigaray believes that women need ideals which are divine for their own well-being and in order to bring about a new era of sexual difference. This means that the female divine is a fundamental pillar in her attempt to construct a system beyond patriarchy since the argument she makes to support it structurally corresponds to her argument that women need a subjectivity and an identity of their own. Yet it is the notion of the divine which is pivotal for Irigaray since she deploys it for its philosophical association with the absolute, as that which constitutues a pre-requisite to subjectivity and upholds the female imaginary and its modalities. Hence she certainly envisages the female divine as the mainstay of the feminine, and may even privilege it in her model of sexual difference.

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