DC: I agree, but I think she [Irigaray] does this where she is not willing to challenge the divide of the human race into two sexes. The state both expresses and reinforces the truth of how we should be actualized in our sexual identities, male/female. The law so conceived inevitably closes the domain of other sexual possibilities. Judith has beautifully argued in The Psychic Life of Power that this foreclosure is achieved only at enormous psychic cost.
The forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of “sex,” and this identification takes place through a repudiation which produces a domain of abjection, a repudiation without which the subject cannot emerge. This is a repudiation which creates the “valence of abjection,” and its status for the subject as a threatening specter. Further, the materialization of given sex will centrally concern the regulation of identificatory practices such that the identification with the abjection of sex will be persistently disavowed.
[…] JB: That’s a different question. There are a number of different ways of tracing it in Irigaray’s work. But it’s clear to me that sexual difference does not denote a simple opposition, a binary opposition. What it denotes is something like the relationship of a presumed masculine symbolic order to what it must exclude and how that same presumed masculine order requires this excluded feminine to augment and reproduce itself. And I think that what she’s given us is a quite brilliant rendition of a certain economy in which there are not two sexes: there is the sex that is one and then the feminine which is necessary for the reproduction of that masculinity but is always figured as its outside.That has been an enormously influential way of thinking. I think that there are a number questions that are raised by it, and one of them is, Is this symbolic order that we are talking about primarily or paradigmatically masculine?
P Cheah: What you have just described, i.e. sexual difference as the negative but constitutive of substratum phallogocentrism, the early Irigaray Speculum and This Sex Which Is Not One. Is the same notion of sexual difference still operative after An Ethics of Sexual Difference? It seems to me that there, Irigaray’s idea of sexual difference changes dramatically, and it is formulated as a generative interval that exists between the two sexes. She calls sexual difference a sensible transcendental. This reformulation partly is grounded in a rereading of Heidegger in which the copula of Being, that which gives Being, is rewritten as the fecundity of the couple. She argues that this interval should be affirmed as a source for the ethical transfiguration cultural and sociopolitical life. Sexual difference would then be the dimension of the new as such.
JB: What happened is that a certain heterosexual notion of ethical exchange emerged in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Clearly there is a presumptive heterosexuality in all that reading,which allows us to go back and see some of that really aggressive early reading as part of a certain heterosexual trauma well. “Commodities among Themselves” was never truly convincing to me as a lesbian text in any case — imagining that abundance where there would be no pain associated with pleasure. [Laughs.] No, that has never been lesbianism.That’s to put lesbianism in the permanently unrealizable. So that was not, I think, a friendly text. But the intense overt heterosexuality of An Ethics of Sexual Difference and indeed of the sexuate rights discourse, which is all about mom and motherhood not at all about postfamily arrangements alternative family arrangements, not only brought to the fore a kind of presumptive heterosexuality, but actually made heterosexuality into the privileged locus of ethics, as if heterosexual relations, because they putatively crossed this alterity, which is the alterity of sexual difference, were somehow more ethical, more other-directed, narcissistic than anything else. It was, in some sense, compelling men out of what she used to call their hom(m)osexualite into this encounter with alterity, where that alterity would in fact be the feminine, and what would emerge from that exchange would be a certain kind of heterosexual love which would come to capture the domain of the ethical.