A European Initiative: Irigaray, Marx, and Citizenship

ALISON MARTIN

This article presents Irigaray as a philosopher committed to sociopolitical change by discussing her political thought and her engagement with the European Parliament. It traces her recent work with the ex-Communist Party in Italy back to her early critique of Marx and her subsequent attraction to Hegels civil definition of the person. The failure of her European Parliament initiative suggests that her thinking is in advance of its possible realization.

From her first publications in the early 1970s, Luce Irigaray has signalled her distance from the thought of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and it may be said that subsequent political events in Eastern Europe have not conspired to render this position in need of further justification. She has also maintained a distance from sociological thought in general; she is critical of it for its apparent objectivism and for its lack of interest in the question of developing interiority (Irigaray 1987, 436).1 It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that some of her most incisive critics have been sociologists in the Marxian tradition, among them Monique Plaza (1978), who berates Irigaray for analyses steeped in the discourse of Western philosophy that have not examined the social conditions of actual women in history. Irigarays work falls within the category of French thought that would never directly deny this history; but somewhat in the guise of a politician who prefers to displace rather than answer questions, turns instead to issues of language, representation, and subjectivity that make history a particular kind of discourse. Yet her work does not fit the faceless inheritance of poststructuralism as Jrgen Habermas characterized it. Indeed, she is perhaps better characterized as a fellow traveler on the Marxian-Hegelian path of historical development, and
Hypatia vol. 19, no. 3 (Summer 2004) by Alison Martin

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her political affinities lie very much on the European socialist left. The aims of her writings are to further the development of humanity in a direction that ends exploitation and brings about a culture of justice for everyone by means of a peaceful revolution. Although this is viewed as inimical to the capitalist system, the dialectic of a possible transition is articulated in Hegelian terms in her most recent texts (Irigaray 1993b, 1996, 2000). Hence the politics of recognition and questions of the civil definition of the person and citizenship have become important considerations in Irigarays work. To this end, she has worked with the Democratic Left in Italy and put forward a proposal to the European Parliament for a definition of European citizenship structured around the concept of sexual difference. Whether or not one accepts her philosophy of sexual difference, it is clear that Irigarays thought forms part of a political movement that is unfolding in places on the European continent. However, as we shall see below, the failure of the European parliament initiative reveals that the idea of sexual difference is one in bud and that it is still too early to know whether it will blossom. The Problem with Marx and Engels Irigarays problem with Marx and Engels can be seen as a problem of recognition, broadly conceived. Her explicit engagement with their writings is restricted to the early stage of her work when she was concerned to establish a critique of patriarchy. Although she later promised a text devoted to Marx which, along with her texts on Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, would have completed her explorations of the elemental, this text has never appeared (Irigaray 1981, 43).2 The writings on Marx are therefore limited to some brief analyses in Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a) and to two essays in This Sex Which Is Not One (1985b), which are nevertheless significant because they demonstrate Irigarays analysis of the inner mechanism of patriarchy. Irigaray was thus writing on Marx in the early 1970s, at a time when debates within feminism were focused on ascertaining the main cause of womens oppression: patriarchy or capitalism. It was also a moment in French thought when syntheses of Marxism and psychoanalysis were prevalent, whether via Nietzsche in the case of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1972) and JeanFranois Lyotard (1974), or via G.W.F. Hegel in the case of Jean-Joseph Goux (1973). As a thinker trained in psychoanalysis, Irigaray psychoanalyzed Marx, which was her practice with other major Western thinkers. But she was equally influenced by the sedimentation of Hegelianism in twentieth-century French thought, and her contribution to the feminist debate of capitalism versus patriarchy was to insist upon a dialectical analysis of the two socioeconomic systems (1985b, 82). It is clear, however, that as systems they are not considered as external to the subject but as structural forms of exchange that inhere in the

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very constitution of the subject; exchange is always a matter for the subject constituted by it. Although Irigaray shares with Marx a notion of the subject as produced by a system of exchange, her emphasis is upon the material subject formed by symbolic exchange in psychic and bodily processes rather than upon the subject as the product of a given means of production. It is the potential subject-subject relation that is primary for Irigaray, and she views the subjectobject relation as a form of masculine thinking. Her argument is that in patriarchy the masculine subject has failed to recognize the feminine other in the form of woman, and has set himself up as single universal being who defines a feminine other as his other, an other who belongs to him (Irigaray 1985a). From her very earliest writings, then, Irigarays work is a form of phenomenology in the broadest sense. But rather than take the subject to be neutral, Irigaray identifies it as masculine and finds herself, as a feminine being, in the position of the thing itself, the object, the other that appears to appear to the subject of philosophy. Her book, Speculum (1985a), is an attempt on the part of someone who appears to man as his otherwomanto find a voice not as his other but as an other on her own terms. Unlike the early Simone de Beauvoir, who argued in The Second Sex (1954) that the problem of womens otherness could be overcome by their self-assertion as subject, Irigaray problematizes the cultural processes in which such a dialectic of recognition can occur. If the very modalities of culture are both historically and structurally masculine, how can a woman come to representation as a subject in that culture except as masculine? Hence Irigarays now controversial technique of mimicry, an experimental form of articulation that mimes what has appeared as feminine to men in order to allow the possibility for another form of femininity (the other of the other) to emerge. This was but an initial technique, an experience of speaking (as a) woman that Irigaray went on to develop in other ways (1985b, 76). Her essay on Capital (1970), Women on the Market (Irigaray 1985b), is a classic instance of Irigarays mimicry, not to say mockery. It perhaps deliberately taunts the earnest Marxist who believes that the serious issues are ones of economy proper and that other exchanges, of desire and recognition and of the subjects desire for recognition, are somewhat frivolous, rather nonmaterial matters. Yet Irigarays intention is entirely serious, for she attempts to demonstrate that the question of gender is intrinsic to economic exchange and that all forms of economy that claim to be beyond gender employ, in fact, the illusion of a masculine universal. This is what Irigaray describes as a hom(m)o-sexuel, or a masculine homosexual economy, one in which all exchange is an issue of mens desire to exchange with (and hence be recognized by) other men (1985b, 171). The semblance of the public vindication of heterosexuality is a necessary sham for this economy because it enables the question of libidinal investment to be ostensibly located outside of the economy proper in the feminine realm

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of sex and nature (1985b, 193). If women function as the natural depositories of mens desire and that desire can be kept in its proper place, men can be seen to be economically active in a neutral manner, beyond body and desire. Liberal economies thus presuppose the public appearance of men to one another in a fashion that foregrounds their sex only to deny it: only men are able to undertake rational and fair exchange because paradoxically they are the only sex whose particular sex (and desire) can be discounted because they operate at the level of the universal. Hence the desire for exchange between men and the impossibility of women entering the exchange market on their own terms (1985b, 175). In spite of Marxs (1970) critique of the reification of the subject in exchange relations, Irigaray argues that his emphasis upon the labor theory of value equally masks a more fundamental problem of the sex of matter. Although, like Heidegger, Irigaray does not philosophize by rejection or acceptance, she aligns Marx and Engels with the patriarchal philosophical tradition because of the break they have made with what she terms material contiguity, in their case by construing materiality as nothing other than the product of a social labor process (Irigaray 1985b, 73). Thus for her, Marxs notion of the social depends upon a productivist model of economy in which bodies make value out of neutral matter. While Marx (1970) recognized the body of laborers in the production of value, the value produced by that labor still retains a dichotomous and ultimately metaphysical hierarchy between material and value, given its assumption of neutral bodies acting upon neutral matter to produce a universal labor value. Behind this universalist analysis Irigaray discerns an underlying sexual scheme that belongs to male-female cultural relations. She cites Marxs admiration for Aristotle in order to highlight the latters attribution of femininity to matter and masculinity to form (Irigaray 1985b, 174): having disinvested himself of sex and his own matter, nature and matter are then taken to be formed by man as his own product (1985b, 174). She is therefore able to argue that actual women have historically functioned as matter in the social structure, so if they appear at all it is only to appear in the forms attributed to them by men (1985a, 18). That is why, attempting to speak as a woman, she cannot to be taken seriously. If Marxs ironic textual asides in Capital (1970) referring to commodities as women and how to take them are meant for titillation, Irigaray analyses them as jokes that belie another repressed economy, one embarrassed by the presence of a woman because women function as commodities (1985b, 17576). Hence the mimicry. There is a sense of missed opportunity in Irigarays comments on Marx and Engels. She acknowledges that, unlike many other Western thinkers, they do initially recognize the exploitation of women. Thus she cites Engelss (1971) claim that the very first class oppression occurs within monogamous marriage

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as that between a man and a woman, because the labor-power of women constitutes the first property (Irigaray 1985b, 82). However, instead of developing that insight in their work, Marx and Engels tend to relegate this primary exploitation to an initial phase of history and thereby relegate it to a mythical origin, leaving the question of this exploitation behind in their analyses, too. For Irigaray, patriarchal exploitation is both historically and structurally primary, and she situates patriarchy as the positive first term of her dialectic between capitalism and patriarchy (1985b). This is supported by her analysis of appropriation, in that she views capitalism as a mode of appropriation that exploits or reduces matter to certain restricted properties and the proper, which is a version of Heideggers (1980) argument that metaphysical idealism reduces Being to what beings are in a way that restricts the broader question and reduces differences to the same (here, of capital accumulation). But Irigaray adjusts Heideggers question of Being and being into a question of two subjects, and in her analysis it is the masculine being who reduces Being to a being (object) and then renders this an immutable divinity (a masculine other Being), refusing to recognize the other feminine being. The god of capitalism is thus a masculine universal general equivalent, symbolized by the name-of-the-father, which represents the singular metaphysical universal ideal of men who are but earthly instantiations of the divine form they can never be (Irigaray 1985b, 173). Irigaray therefore agrees with Marx that men are split and alienated, but for her they have maintained their impossible ideal by a more profound exploitation, one that projects onto women the unwanted function of being matter and body so that the masculine subject can represent himself as transcendent: he who produces himself in his own image (1985b, 190). Like many leftist intellectuals, then, Irigaray is neither blind nor indifferent to the question of exploitation. The critique of Marxism arose after a half century or so of Stalinism and State socialism in the east, with pressure at certain moments from the French Communist Party to support that anticapitalist other. The critique does not rule out the question, however, and in many respects Irigarays writing assumes a context with a history of Marxism and its concerns for justice and ending exploitation, such that somewhat apolitical readings of her work are more likely to arise in places with no significant socialist or communist cultural inheritance. That said, her analysis positions capitalist exploitation as but another manifestation of the patriarchal drive to appropriation, and she states that the status of women within different modes of production has varied very little (1985a, 121). She comes to the same conclusion as Beauvoir did in The Second Sex when she argued against Engelss claim that women form a class (Beauvoir 1954; Irigaray 1985b). This is in part because women are not an exclusively historical categorythey are defined by their biology. However, as phenomenologists neither Beauvoir nor Irigaray assumes a causal

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relationship between biology and culture, the assumption that constitutes the lowest common denominator of the now exhausted debate over essentialism. The interpretation of the body is crucial for both, with perhaps Irigaray placing more emphasis on the body and Beauvoir on interpretation. Interpreting the body in Marxian language, Irigaray does not view women as a class because they do not enter into an exchange with another class in relation to the ownership of the means of production: They are the body matter of the means of production and exchange. As mothers they are use-value, and as virgins and prostitutes they are exchange value (Irigaray 1985a).3 Against this profound exploitation, Irigaray wishes women to be valued as women and to receive symbolic recognition as feminine subjects so that all forms of alienation may be addressed. That is why she believes sexual difference to be the issue of our time (Irigaray 1993a, 5), not because other differences are unimportant or do not take precedence in certain situations, but because her analysis leads her to conclude that it is the failure to recognize sexual difference as the primary and universal difference that has led to an appropriating disregard for all forms of difference. Citizenship as Recognition of the Other Irigarays writings on citizenship coincide with a generalized renewal of interest in the question of the civil realm and citizenship that arose in the wake of the fall of Eastern European socialism and the perceived or actual sterility of democracy in the West. Following Marxs analysis in On the Jewish Question (1972), radicals had tended to view the question of citizenship as a liberal bourgeois diversion from the real issues of socioeconomic inequality. This position was always most convincing to those who at least had a place in society, who could enter the socioeconomic arena as a material and symbolic birthright. The dual pressures of growing international mobility and inequality have meant that displaced persons and migrations are on the increase, leading to acute problems for those who have no place and for whom the romance of nomadic life is truly unsettling because they have no entitlement, nowhere to return to. Without doubt the turn to citizenship (including Irigarays) has limitations, but provided it is disengaged from a property qualification it at least signifies the very right to be-there in the first place. While Irigarays proposals for a European citizenship attempt to take into account the changing sociopolitical conditions in Europe, they are based on her analysis that since the inauguration of patriarchy women have never been attributed a symbolic place in society that recognizes them as subjects. The recent acquisition of citizenship rights for women within European states has given them access to a place alongside men in public, but they have yet to be defined as citizens qua women. It is therefore to a sexed definition of

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citizenship that Irigaray turns, one that she believes will offer to all people a sense of identity in a world of fluid and uncertain boundaries. The appeal of citizenship for Irigaray lies in Hegels argument that for a person to be they require civil definition as a form of recognition (1942, 50). Following the earlier critique of patriarchy, her published work in the 1990s focuses upon reworking a dialectic of recognition between two sexed subjects. Like Hegel, she does not envisage this as an idealistic process but an actual one, and in her case that is because the subject is always sexual and materially embodied. She accepts the notion that the universal is within me, but in order to overcome the abstraction-compulsion inherent in the universal she proposes two universals: the masculine and the feminine (1996, 4348). This is a paradoxical notion of the universal that simultaneously affirms a universalism in the form of a sexed, embodied subject and denies the claims of the universal to be universal because of its singularity. Hence she is critical of Hegels model of recognition for its assumption of a singular subject, or in other terms for its assumption of an identity that begins (at least in rational thought) as a unified concept, whether always already mediated or whether unmediated (Irigaray 1996, 37). The same that contains its otherness within itself forms that otherness on its own terms, according to Irigaray; hence it is not an otherness and it is certainly not an absolute otherness. To become and develop on the basis of one requires the tension of a negative that must wrench the one from its immediate wholeness and thereby be destructive in its denial of the whole, so that the labor of becoming necessitates a form of historical violence (Irigaray 1997). Rendering violence and history synonymous in this way is undesirable for a philosopher such as Irigaray who is committed both to the idea of historical development and to peaceful evolution (Irigaray 1996, 3). Irigarays objection to Hegels dialectic does not lead her to support the argument that it denies an otherness given in the very existence of concrete human others, for those many others have, in her view, generally been identified as the many instances of one actual form of being: the masculine one. Rather, she insists that absolute otherness always already exists in the form of the two genders, and the negative could create without destruction if it were recognized as the space between them. Instead of belonging to being as a moment that drives the process of its own assimilation through knowledge, Irigarays negative is a boundary not to be infringed, a space between to evoke the wonder and mystery of the other who can never be known as such (1997, 63). No longer, then, would it be a question of becoming what you are not but rather one of becoming what you are in the recognition of what you are not and by returning to a sexed identity without overcoming the other sex. Irigaray develops such a dialectical model of two sexed others in various ways in her writing. This is in part necessitated by the fact that as in Hegels philosophy the model is pervasive: it exists at different moments at all levels.

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Hence she believes that the dynamic of the relationship between an individual man and woman could embody the dynamic that might exist at the civil level between male and female citizens; indeed, it is its actualization (1996, 51). She insists that this has nothing to do with issues of sexual choice, but is, rather, bound to the potential of an objective identity that does not deny the sexed materiality of the subject (1997, 6465).4 Nevertheless, Irigaray makes love the motor of her dialectic at all levels. Love appears to be defined as an attraction in all senses of the word between men and women that should allow the other to come to be but that leaves them to themselves without attempting to possess them (Irigaray 1996). The dynamic of love is often articulated by Irigaray as a movement of appearance and withdrawal somewhat akin to the movement of Being in late Heidegger (1975), and it assumes an increasing importance in her work as it progresses (Irigaray 2003). Affirming the importance and validity of love forms part of her concern to explore how relations between two sexed others could take place to bring about a certain felicity for them both. In To Be Two (1997), for example, she pursues a phenomenology of perception and of the caress and asks how each sex can appear to the other according to its own modalities without violating the space of the other and her/his possibility of appearance and withdrawal. Speaking of love in this way inevitably brings an idealized element to Irigarays projections, not merely because of the seeming impossibility of overcoming the acrimony (not to mention conflict) that already exists in public relationships but also because of the passion such emotional forms of commitment unleash. Nevertheless, at the individual level Irigaray believes that unless each person in her sexed embodiment improves her immediate relationships with others and with herself by both recognizing the other sex and developing her own interiority, all attempts at social and political reform will fail. Change is, therefore, within the scope of everyone, but it requires the impetus and support of sociopolitical processes and institutions if it is to come about. Irigaray does not present recourse to juridical processes as the sole means of overcoming exploitation, but insists that it is necessary if women are to obtain the rights necessary to them as women (1993b, 82). Rather than subscribe to the skepticism regarding the pragmatic value of legalistic reforms held by many feminists and radicals, she supports the argument that civil rights can protect individuals from the power of the State (Irigaray 2000, 133).5 She thus advocates a notion of the active citizen, one that significantly differs from the notion put forward by the British Conservative Party in the early 1990s whereby morally responsible members of society were called upon to engage in charitable acts toward the less fortunate (Plant 1991, 50). Rather, for Irigaray the active citizen is the one who is actualized and comes to be in processes of social and civil engagement with others (2000, 23). This leads to a kind of freedom not unlike the one theorized by Hannah Arendt (1977): the freedom to be oneself made

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possible by the presence of others in a democracy based more on participation than on representation. Irigaray rejects the political use of compassion in favor of a discourse of rights and responsibilities in which everyone enjoys equivalent treatment in their difference and equivalent responsibilities as adults.6 The tone of Irigarays writing on political change is undoubtedly utopian, but in that she follows a long line of respectable revolutionaries, including Marx. She envisages another social order not to provide a blueprint but to offer a key to opening up other possibilities for being human. This as a necessary and important task for Irigaray because of the dystopia she sees on the horizon of emerging historical trends. In addition to her ongoing concerns with the ecological crisis, she is also concerned with what she identifies as the dangers of the increased mobility and fragmentation that have arisen as a counterpart to globalization (Irigaray 2000, 6). Jean-Joseph Goux (1994) relates the process of globalization to the reign of the ultramodern, in which the modern, universal terms of underwritten exchange have developed into a regime of generalized equivalence, a systematic play of a commutative economy that has no guarantee and representation (1994, 188). He argues that this technology of the ultramodern, untrammelled by any boundary, is but an intensification of modernitys masculine-neutral universal as analyzed by Irigaray, one that does nothing for individuals return to themselves. With regard to citizenship and the European Union, Irigaray thus argues that it is the fear of dislocation and loss of identity in entering an ever larger supranational community that is fueling the return of nationalism and of identities based on the apparently natural categories such as race, age, and sex (2000, 4958). But rather than deny the validity of these natural categories because they are socially constructed, she raises the issue of how societies organize the passage from the natural realm to the civil realm, arguing that it should be undertaken in a different way. Given that the family has traditionally constituted the depository of the natural, Irigaray draws in the question of family structure as an area of social relations undergoing transformation that also needs to be reformulated in civil law. The patriarchal family has been the space of use-value, of natural reproduction and domestic production that has served the interests of its head, the male citizen who leaves behind this private life in his public exchange. Unlike Arendt in this instance, Irigaray does not lend support to such a private/public distinction that ostensibly leaves the natural to one space (a feminine space according to feminist analysis) and gives freedom to the other. Apart from the exploitation of the feminine this entails, it supports the tribal domain to which a defensive return is possible when freedom is threatened or found threatening (Irigaray 2000, 52). Irigaray wishes to redistribute the natural and to cultivate it so that it is no longer simply a matter of a natural function but something to be respected as a different culture. Rather than deposit the natural in the feminine, her

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argument is that each sex represents a different nature and culture. There is, therefore, a projected continuity between nature and culture in the two domains of masculine and feminine that would replace the hierarchical split between masculine culture and feminine nature. Hence Irigaray can advocate a definition of the family based on individual men and women perceived as sexed individuals in the first instance (2000, 97). She wishes to see the unity of the family as a singular entity replaced by a perception of it as an entity made up of at least two individuals, in which recognition of the other sex would occur as respect for the others culture and nature. The presence of women as symbolically recognized individuals in the public sphere would, Irigaray argues, enable that respect to be transferred into the civil realm that would itself be made up of masculine and feminine individuals. In that way, she envisages a continuity between public and private and between nature and culture at all levels. Instead of a world of free men who nourish their freedom by a necessary but invisible natural function, she wishes to see a civic space made up of men and women who share natural and cultural responsibilities and undertake them in their own ways. Women and men identify themselves as such in the first instance and return to themselves as women and men, leaving individuals free to make other choices (such as religious ones) without the need for a defensive group identity (2000, 52). The case for sexed citizenship is thus made by Irigaray on the basis of the primacy of sexual difference, one tied to the materiality of persons as sexed individuals, because for her sexual difference represents the paradigm of difference. While this may appear to be another hierarchy of difference, that could not be further from Irigarays intentions. She truly believes that the problem of recognizing and accepting other forms of difference will ensue from the political recognition of sexual difference. Her more recent theorization of citizenship is thus as motivated by concerns over the political significance of racial, religious, or cultural differences as it is by the historical exploitation of women as a group. She thus attempts to situate the agenda of womens rights in a context that recognizes the importance of other differences (Irigaray 2000, 14). However, the process of recognizing sexual difference through a sexed citizenship is put forward as the political action that can bring about the acceptance of many forms of difference because she believes that an education in recognizing the other sex is one that can bring about a profound sensitivity to difference in exchange. She argues that if differences in race, age, class, competence, or of any other kind appear to be greater than sexual difference, it is because we are too close to the other: maintaining a distance from and recognition of the sexed other is the most difficult task (2000, 6).7 The stakes and aims of Irigarays political project are clearly idealistic and ambitious. It is difficult to envisage how the fact of sexual difference can be represented in political institutions in a universalist fashion without revealing

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particular cultural traditions perception of gender. Her philosophy of sexual difference does not call for a worldwide uniformity in the culture of sexual differencequite the oppositebut the process of making rights and laws appropriate to women and men raises the problem of how to define and represent them in a manner that does not rule out those cultural differences. But in assuming at least the validity of the claim of sexual difference, this question is still a long way from dominant political thinking on gender in European legal institutions, which, to the extent that difference is an issue, seem bound to the ideal of equality. The European Initiative At a time when many in the West were still attempting to come to terms with the idea of a philosophy of sexual difference, Irigaray was already working with members of the Italian Democratic Left for the establishment of a European citizenship incorporating the principle of sexual difference. In 1994, in association with Renzo Imbeni, an Italian MEP and Mayor of Bologna, she put forward a proposal for sexed citizenship to the European Parliament. Imbenis proposals were not carried through in the form he wished, but nevertheless this project for a sexed civil code and citizenship highlights how sexual difference can be pursued as a political ideal. Irigarays affection for Italy as a place and culture is evident in various places throughout her work. In Democracy Begins Between Two she cites Antonio Gramsci and Enrico Berlinguer and talks approvingly of the distinctive tradition of Italian communism with its emphasis on human dignity, thought, and poetry (2000, 2). At the invitation of local council leaders she has acted as advisor to the Commission for Equal Opportunities in the region of EmiliaRomagna, assisting in the promotion of training in citizenship. This included work with children of all ages in schools, and she has subsequently published a collection of their drawings dealing with relations between girls and boys. Her involvement with Imbeni dates from 1989, when they came together at a charged public meeting during his mayoral election campaign to discuss the creation of a European citizenship. The significance of that encounter in Bologna for Irigaray is discussed in the introduction to I Love to You (1996), a book dedicated to Imbeni. There and in Democracy Begins Between Two (2000) she portrays their joint efforts towards the formulation of a European civil code as an enactment of the process of sexual difference as well as a means of working for the attainment of its juridical recognition. Working toward a political goal in conjunction with the other sex is important for Irigarays ideal of the potential of the dynamics of sexual difference, when that dynamic is not repressively denied or oppressively hierarchical. She sees it as the actualization of sexual difference.

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Not surprisingly, therefore, she finds it significant that Italy has patron saints or guardians of both sexes: Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Sienna (2000, 40). Although Irigaray is advocating institutional reform, then, she is also aiming to change the nature of the political process. The liberal ideal of abstract, rational, and just principle represented by a single leader is replaced by the embodied couple in her politics. With this focus on the couple, Irigarays proposals risk assimilation to a premodern, monarchical order in which king and queen embody the divine principle on earth, the body of the king symbolically upholding the social order that risks literal disintegration on his death. However, such a risk of assimilation is endemic to her project of sexual difference, which is sometimes equated with a reaffirmation of patriarchys hierarchical institution of sexual difference. In Irigarays political initiative, the couple is intended to embody and not merely represent the values of each sex in a way that sustains democracy because of the persistent claim of the other who represents the limits of one persons reason. The existence of two subjects can only be recognized and sustained by a dialogue between them, and it is the necessity of otherness and dialogue that Irigaray cites as the very premise of democracy. In her affirmation of democracy, then, Irigaray gives precedence to the person. Instead of respect for possession or property, her democratic principle rests on the respect of other individuals; she argues that each person is entitled to the status of full citizenship by birth (1996, 53). Her proposal for a sexed citizenship is thus based specifically on a right of persons over a right of property, and she argues that the rights and duties of each sex need to be subject to a written civil code (2000, 57). While the very concept of a civil code is somewhat alien to the British political tradition in which subjects have acquired rights in a piecemeal fashion, Irigarays reference point here is the French Civil Code, which dates back to 1804 and the Napoleonic era.8 Women were defined as wife and mother by this Code, and married women were deprived of any legal rights and responsibilities. The rights of male citizens were largely defined in relation to property ownership. As Dorothy Stetson (1987) argues, the extensive reforms to French family law undertaken between 1965 and 1975 have significantly undermined the patriarchal assumptions of the Code in favor of equality, although these were notoriously late compared with many other European countries. The problem with such reforms, as Irigaray sees it, is that they rest on a definition of the citizen as masculine/neuter and whose rights concern issues of property, and therefore they cannot deal with issues specific to sexed persons. Irigaray argues the negative consequences of this by pointing to the fact that certain acts of violence against women, such as rape, are taken to be a crime against the individual rather than an offense against civil society as a whole,

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so that in each case the offended party is an individual woman who must prove the offense rather than appeal to a positive principle of nonviolation upheld by the collectivity (1993b, 87).9 In other instances, such as in the case of pregnancy, specific issues of womens condition appear as an inconvenient aberration to a general norm rather than issues to be provided for in the way society is organized. Irigaray thus desires rights for women that are based on the positive definition of women as women and not as a general, neuter citizen. As far back as 1988 she put forward suggestions for the basic rights of women that include the right to human dignity and the right to human identity, incorporating rights to virginity and to motherhood (1993b, 86). With these suggestions, Irigaray is not intending to monopolize the debate as to what is most appropriate for women. Rather, she intends to initiate a process as to what might be applicable once the principle of sexed rights has been established. In elaborating on these suggestions, however, it readily becomes apparent how controversial such rights could become, with the language of specific rights open to interpretation. For Irigaray, the right to human dignity for women entails the cessation of the commercial exploitation of their bodies in advertising, and preventing the exploitation of motherhood by the state or religious bodies (1993b, 86). With the call for the need for human identity for women she is drawing upon her analysis of their use as body-matter, and to call for a right to virginity and motherhood as a result leaves her open to the claim that she is reinforcing the patriarchal use of the female body. However, by the right of virginity she means something quite general in the sense of a fidelity to the self, and something quite specific in the sense of a girls right to control her own physical integrity against the commercial and social exploitation of her virginity by the family, the state, and religious bodies (Irigaray 1996, 87). Similarly, the right to motherhood is a matter of womens right to choose whether or not they wish to become mothers in the face of a civil recognition that womens bodies make them potentially mothers (1996, 87). This is certainly not an attempt by Irigaray to define women as mothers, but is instead motivated by the limitations of the call for a right to abortion, which in her view is another restrictive, after-the-effect measure that positions womens condition as a negative aberration to the norm of the singular individual. As a right it is thus easily revoked, and in many European countries it is only granted on a case-by-case basis. For Irigaray, a right to maternity is a recognition of civil womens right to choose whether or not they become mothers, a choice that situates them beyond a natural function (2000, 44). Following from this, Irigaray makes further proposals relating to the need for working hours that respect the bodies and lives of sexed individuals, and the need for laws to regulate the specific rights of fathers and mothers (1993b, 87; 2000, 45).

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It was the combination of her association with the former Italian Communist Party and the provisions of the 1993 Maastricht Treaty that provided Irigaray with the opportunity for a concrete political intervention regarding sexed citizenship. The Treaty made provision for citizenship of the European Union, and Renzo Imbeni was given the task of putting forward a report on European citizenship by the Commission for Civil Liberties and Internal Affairs. Having engaged with Irigaray on the issue of citizenship during his election campaign, Imbeni invited her to work with him. They were both appointed to the Planning Group of the European Parliamentary Commission and Irigaray was invited to put forward a Draft Code of Citizenship (Irigaray 2000, 6972). This Draft, signed by Irigaray and Imbeni, was circulated to Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), elected representatives in member states national parliaments, and various interested organizations, groups, and individuals. It sets out the case for a citizenship of the European Union in straightforward terms nevertheless indebted to Irigarays philosophical argument as outlined here. It attempts to take into account particular sociopolitical phenomena such as the problems of cultural differences, the need to restructure the family, the need to address the rights of young people and the two sexes, and the problems of variations in different national codes within the Union and their divergence from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It calls for transformations to address these issues in a way that returns responsibility to male and female citizens by stressing their responsibilities to themselves and others over and above the right to possess (even the body). There is, of course, a stress on the need for rights appropriate to women and thereby for a recognition of the existence of male and female citizens. Imbenis Report on Citizenship of the Union, reprinted in full as an appendix to Democracy Begins Between Two (Irigaray 2000), reiterates many of the concerns of the draft worked on by Irigaray. It stresses the importance of positive civil recognition of individuals beyond economic factors narrowly conceived: The rights of citizens are to be defined in positive terms and no longer only through the protection of economic or civil interests effected by the codes. The citizen of the Union is not only an economic subject, and thus the totality of his being is to be represented in positive right in such a way as to favour the structuring of social relations based on the reciprocal recognition of individuals. (Irigaray 2000, 209) With the recognition of civil individuals as its principle, it is nevertheless a broad-based document, dealing with issues of parity in employment, health, the environment, and education, as well as setting out the right to develop different

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cultural traditions. It affirms the unity of the Union by calling not only for the free circulation of people within Europe but also for the rights to vote and to stand for public office in other member states. Significantly, however, it affirms the need to recognize and respect the difference between men and women as the foundation of democracy within the union: Our societies have become multi-ethnic, multicultural, multireligious, phenomena which drive in the direction of the creation of rules enabling coexistence not only on the basis of definition in the negative of ones own and the others freedom (the non-interference in ones personal sphere of the other) but in a positive sense, reinforcing the civil identity of individuals as such. Thus even cultural plurality poses anew the problem of individual freedom and points to the need for respect for difference between women and men as the foundation of a democratic union between citizens, nations and cultures. The creation of a wider and, above all, juridically recognised sphere of subjectivity based on new positive norms is necessary. This has, as its consequence and premise, an extensive redefinition of the man-woman relationship. (Irigaray 2000, 210) The Report was not approved by the European Parliament at the vote in January 1994. This was for a number of reasonsnot all of them theoretical or political. Some related to the pragmatics of democratic politics, such as the absence of supporters in the chamber and the lack of time given to understanding it by potential supporters. A number of right-wing amendments to the Report were proposed and passed, so that finally Imbeni actually asked for a vote against his own Report, which by that point he found unacceptable. It is clear, however, from the account that Irigaray (2000) gives of official responses to Imbenis Report that, where it had been considered, the insistence upon the need to recognize difference between men and women proved a particular stumbling block to its acceptance. The Commission for Womens Rights replaced the idea of respect for the difference between men and women with that of respect for individual choices. In place of Irigarays democracy of difference and positive rights, they called for equal opportunity and nondiscrimination, focusing more on social rights than on civil ones. Equality in the sphere of employment was emphasized as the important factor in gaining autonomy, rather than considering issues of womens work in the broader context of their lives as women. Although these issues of equality and economic autonomy have been on the feminist agenda since the 1960s, for Irigaray they represent a negative identity for women, focusing on what they lack in relation to the male world. Her analysis, that because women have been defined as different to men by patriarchy there is no reason to deny their difference, is evidently either not

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understood or viewed as potentially dangerous by many parliamentary women because reinforcing the idea of their difference to men is seen to endorse the idea of their inferiority. As a consequence of her engagement with the procedures of the European Parliament, Irigaray questions the grounds on which women sit on commissions that represent women, in the sense that unless they do represent womens interests the qualification must be purely biological, a regressive move indeed in her view (2000, 83). However, defining womens interests remains a political issue, one that even the acceptance of the need for positive rights for women would leave open to debate. The difference between Irigarays understanding of womens rights and those of others in certain institutions reveals the extent to which her philosophy of sexual difference detracts from the current political mainstream. Irigarays analysis of patriarchy as the appropriation of feminine being to and for a pseudo-universal masculine being is one that points her in the direction of the need for a symbolic recognition of the civil rights of women, particularly in relation to their sexed bodies. The liberal aim of equality has always stressed the irrelevance of the difference of bodies before the law, and socialists have generally given precedence to socioeconomic rights as the way to meaningful freedom. It is most probable that Irigarays political project will require the support of these constituencies if it is to continue and develop successfully. That support seems unlikely unless Irigarays philosophical argument gains more general understanding across Europe; hence her political initiative is perhaps in advance of its own time.

Notes
1. In a pamphlet published in 1990, Une attention au souffle dans la vie, la pense, lamour, Irigaray writes: In patriarchal traditions it is held desirable and feasible that the life of an individual and the collectivity be ordered beyond the natural milieu. The body, which is referred to as a microcosm, is thus cut off from the universein turn referred to as a macrocosm. The body is tied to sociological rules and rhythms that are estranged from its sensibility and vital perceptions, such as day and night, the seasons, and vegetable growth. This means that the experience of light, noise, music, fragrances and even natural tastes cease to be cultivated as human qualities. Rather than being trained to spiritually develop its perceptions, the body is detached from the sensible for the sake of a more abstract, speculative, socio-logical culture (1990, 5, my translation). 2. The book promised would have been on Marx and fire. 3. For a more detailed analysis of Irigarays engagement with Marx see my work, Luce Irigaray and the Question of the Divine (2000). 4. For a critical discussion of the potential heterosexism of Irigarays sexed couple that can found a community, see Jagose 1994 and Deutscher 2002.

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5. Her argument here contrasts with that of certain Italian feminists such as Adriana Cavarero influenced by her work. Cavarero (1995) shares Habermass concern with the juridification of the life-world, and argues for a female space, home, which is free from state intervention and separate from public life. 6. Although Irigaray argues that one should be a citizen from birth and she is concerned with the status of young people, particularly in relation to the discrepancies that exist between the age of civil majority and the legal age of marriage, for example, she does not really address the question of the rights and responsibilities of girls and boys as potential citizens. 7. Irigaray takes these arguments further in Between East and West (2002), where she discusses how a culture of sexual difference would facilitate improved structural relations between different races and traditions. Unfortunately, I was not able to incorporate consideration of that text in this article. However, for a critical discussion of the shortcomings of Irigarays argument see Deutschers article (2003). 8. In her account of the debate on Imbenis Report on Citizenship of the Union, Irigaray notes that a British MEP wanted to know what a civil code is (2000, 92). 9. The question of the rape of men is subject to some taboo (arguably because men tend to deny their bodily existence and its attendant vulnerabilities), but one could envisage more prosecutions if men also had a positive right to nonviolation, hence drawing on a pre-established civil recognition of the fact of the rape of men. This would not necessarily equate the violation of men with the violation of women, but it would certainly foreground the issue of mens bodies and the abuses of them.

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