(1932—) French feminist theorist. Born in Belgium, Irigaray took her Master’s degree in philosophy followed by a doctorate in linguistics. While she was writing her first doctorate, she taught at the University of Paris Vincennes (from 1970—4). Her second doctorate, Speculum de l’autre femme (1974), translated as Speculum of the Other Woman (1985), which inaugurated a radical break with Lacan, led to her dismissal from Vincennes. Since 1980 Irigaray has been at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. In interviews, which rarely dwell on the personal, Irigaray describes her work as having gone through three distinct phases: first, she set out to critique the way the western subject was formed in the image of the white male and viewed the entire world through that lens; then she began to think about the ways and means by which a specifically female subjectivity might be articulated; and, finally, but still ongoing, she started to think about new models for relations between the sexes not built on the idea of domination and submission. In the first phase, Irigaray mobilized deconstruction reading strategies to expose the narrow way in which the subject is conceived. Mindful of the fact that it is impossible---at least from a deconstructive perspective---to create a position that is completely pure, which is to say uncontaminated by the phallogocentrism she wants to escape, Irigaray advocates a strategic essentialism of the feminine. In the second phase, Irigaray used body morphology as a rhetorical weapon against anatomy, aiming to reconceive the body (particularly the female body) as a positivity rather than a lack. It was in this phase that she famously proposed the image of the lips (by which she means both the mouth and the labia) as a sex which is neither singular nor plural (see Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un (1977), translated as This Sex Which is Not One (1985)). She has been accused of biological essentialism for this move, but such a criticism misses the point that what is at stake is the elaboration of a female imaginary (in Lacan’s sense) that does not reduce the female sex to either a weaker version of the phallus (the clitoris) or that which completes the phallus (the vagina). The third, ongoing phase, has been marked by an attempt to mobilize the polymorphically perverse body of the pre-oedipal subject (to use Freud, Sigmund’s famous description) in order to think about the inherently destabilizing Other to the white male standard around which western subjectivity is conceived. Irigaray does not conceive the pre-oedipal in a nostalgic fashion, but sees it rather as the constant potential of all subjects. Involved, too, is the rethinking of the relation between mother and daughter (which is also central to relativism’s work). Beyond this, drawing on the work of Levinas, Emmanuel, Irigaray has attempted to construct an ethics of sexual difference. Not forgetting her training in linguistics, in J’aime à toi (1992), translated as I love to you (1996), Irigaray locates the root of the problem posed by ethics in language itself and shows the way various languages subordinate women in their very structure. In her more recent work, such as Democracy Begins between Two (2000), Irigaray has (in collaboration with the Commission for Equal Opportunities for the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna) tried to give her ethical thinking a practical twist. Irigaray is a prolific writer, with a sometimes difficult or elusive style, who engages the western philosophical canon in a debate about the place for and of women in thought, politics, and indeed love. Further Reading: R. Jones Irigaray (2011).