19 Facts About Luce Irigaray

Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examines the uses and misuses of language in relation to women.

Luce Irigaray employs three different modes in her investigations into the nature of gender, language, and identity: the analytic, the essayistic, and the lyrical poetic.

Luce Irigaray received a bachelor's degree from the University of Louvain in 1954, a master's degree from the same university in 1956, and taught at a high school in Brussels from 1956 to 1959.

Luce Irigaray received a specialist diploma in Psychopathology from the school in 1962.

Luce Irigaray completed a PhD in linguistics in 1968 from the University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis.

Luce Irigaray was expelled from this school in 1974, after the publication of her second doctoral thesis, Speculum of the Other Woman, which received much criticism from both the Lacanian and Freudian schools of psychoanalysis.

Luce Irigaray held a research post at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique since 1964, where she is a Director of Research in Philosophy.

In Speculum, Luce Irigaray engages in close analyses of phallocentrism in Western philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, analyzing texts by Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant.

For example, Luce Irigaray argues that the phallic economy places women alongside signs and currency, since all forms of exchange are conducted exclusively between men.

Luce Irigaray argues that our entire society is predicated on this exchange of women.

Luce Irigaray further uses additional Marxist foundations to argue that women are in demand due to their perceived shortage and as a result, males seek "to have them all," or seek a surplus like the excess of commodity buying power, capital, that capitalists seek constantly.

Some of Luce Irigaray's books written in her lyrical mode are imaginary dialogues with significant contributors to Western philosophy, such as Nietzsche and Heidegger.

However, Luce Irigaray writes a significant body of work on Hegel, Descartes, Plato, Aristotle and Levinas, Spinoza, as well as Merleau-Ponty.

Luce Irigaray continued to conduct empirical studies about language in a variety of settings, researching the differences between the way men and women speak.

Luce Irigaray concluded that there are gendered language patterns that denote dominance in men and subjectivity in women.

Luce Irigaray's vision is not for gender neutrality but for a world in which male and female exist as two equally recognized yet distinct identities.

Since 1990, Luce Irigaray's work has turned increasingly toward women and men together.

Luce Irigaray concludes that Western culture is unethical due to gender discrimination.

Luce Irigaray is active in a feminist movement in Italy, but she refused to belong to any one movement because she does not like the competitive dynamic between the feminist movements.