Take that Siggy

One is never supposed to define something by what it is not. Luce Irigaray takes Freud to task for just this maneuver. For Freud woman is always what is not male. She is haunted by the absence of the penis and the desire to be what she is not; man, whole, the power to reproduce. Irigaray points out that these are psychologically and scientifically inaccurate assumptions. Perhaps, she wonders, the female is linked with the unconscious.
But Freud’s theory is not a blindness of Freud as such, but a problem with the notion of theory itself. He inherits a discourse and ideology which he does not question. The philosophical structure of western ontology is designed to “reduce all others to the economy of the Same.” (my emphasis)  From a phallocentric discourse what could be more other that the feminine. For Irigaray it is a vain endeavor to express the feminine in the terms of prevailing discourse. Any attempt using the language of sameness is doomed to render the female as a potential male, or to again assert the female as that which is not male. To create a truly feminine discourse, the grammar of discourse must be called into question. There must also be a focus on what it does not say. Feminine discourse is not to form a theory of the feminine, but  “jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of suspending its pretensions to the production of truth and meaning that are excessively univocal.” The essential move is not to rewrite Freud, but to recognize how Freud and others are inscribed by a discourse which is always already a male structure designed to repress the feminine as inherently other and necessarily only the negative value of the not male.