A ‘Fleshy Metaphysics’: Irigaray and Battersby on Female Subjectivity

Abstract

In The Phenomenal Woman (1998), Christine Battersby purports to rethink subjectivity by shifting the focus to embodied female selves, particularly where the female body is understood in its capacity for birthing. Thus, like Irigaray, Battersby aims to reconceptualize subjectivity in terms of the fluid and heterogeneous nature of female body experience. However, Battersby is critical of Irigaray in several respects. First, she claims that Irigaray fails to move beyond the Lacanian framework which underpins her thought. Second, she suggests that Irigaray's evocation of a ‘feminine imaginary’ is utopian and sentimentalized. Finally, she invites caution at what she considers as Irigaray's downplaying of women artists’ and writers’ contributions to our understanding of birth and motherhood. This article revisits two of Luce Irigaray's most incisive challenges to traditional philosophical conceptions of subjectivity and embodiment: first, her idea of a ‘placental economy’ and, second, the ‘prenatal sojourn’ in ‘The Invisible of the Flesh’ (2004)—her response to Merleau-Ponty's ‘The Intertwining—The Chiasm’ (1968). Laura Green argues that Battersby and Irigaray coalesce around the idea of a ‘fleshy embodiment’ which is mediated by both nature and culture, and which prefigures the female body as a generative site of difference. Moreover, she reads Irigaray in light of Battersby's call for a specifically female subjectivity which evokes the ‘fleshiness’ of female embodiment. Battersby's interest in art complements Irigaray's own project by extending the ‘symbolic’ to encompass women's creative and reproductive potentialities. Green argues, however, that Battersby is too quick to reject Irigaray on the basis of her Lacanian/Heideggerian reading of western philosophy. On the contrary, it is suggested that Irigaray's early thought provides a comprehensive framework for describing the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’, one that implies layers of interdependence and respect for difference, but which also resists ‘sentimentalizing’ and abstracting the ‘other’.

Keywords:

• subjectivity
• embodiment
• pregnancy
• difference
• placental economy
• flesh
• self
• other

Notes

¹Battersby prefers ‘female’ to ‘feminine’ because, as Young comments in response, ‘the feminine is more hostage to hegemonic forces’ (Young 2005: 6). To emphasize the ‘female’ rather than the ‘feminine’ is also to emphasize the female body, which ‘bleeds with the potentiality of new selves’ (Battersby 1998: 17; 2006: 296).

²Battersby claims that Irigaray's reading is ‘homogenous’ and ‘too monolithic’ (Battersby 1998: 101; 2006: 291). In a similar fashion to Heidegger, Irigaray (2004) argues that the question of sexual difference has been ‘buried’ or forgotten in western culture. However, I believe that it is equally important not to read Irigaray monolithically, as Battersby tends to.

³I detect a ‘shift’ in Irigaray's position around the time of Sexes and Genealogies (English translation 1993). For extended discussion, see Stone (2009).

⁴For a discussion of the role of the placenta in Irigaray, see Schwab (1994).

⁵Irigaray's term ‘specularization’ describes the ‘splitting’ of the subject into conscious and unconscious elements at the mirror stage (see Irigaray 2002). The term is also used several times in Speculum (Irigaray 1985).

⁶‘Masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are merely signifiers which denote a speaking position in relation to the transcendental signifier of the phallus (see Lacan 2006: 575–84).

⁷Battersby describes, at length, the problems with Kant's doctrine of the self in the first Critique (see Battersby 1998: 61–81).

⁸See Kristeva's (1986) development of the ‘semiotic’.

⁹Battersby discusses Helen Chadwick's piece One Flesh (1985), in which a placenta hangs uncannily over the heads of a mother and infant, in a peculiar ‘biological trinity’ (Battersby 2006: 304). One is reminded of Irigaray's (1991) discussion of the placenta as ‘objet –’.

¹⁰Grosz adopts a similar position, arguing that phallocentrism makes it currently impossible to ‘think’ sexual difference. Accordingly, feminism is the project of ‘bringing into being that which did not exist’ (Grosz 2005: 129).

¹¹Battersby suggests that Chadwick is a successful example of what Irigaray's early thought calls for: the object of a female subjectivity experiencing and identifying itself (Battersby 2006: 307; cf. Irigaray 1985: 135).

¹²Merleau-Ponty discusses the ‘sexual schema’ of body comportment (Merleau-Ponty 2006: 178–201). For critique, see Butler (1989), Grosz (1994) and Young (2005).

¹³In botany, ‘invagination’ describes the process of the ‘turning inside out’ or ‘folding back in’ of something on itself to form a pouch.

¹⁴I owe several of these insights to useful analyses by Grosz (1994) and Kozel (1996).