Page 125 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Links Anti-essentialism, author, deconstruction, dialogic, différance, postmodernism,
poststructuralism

102 Irigaray, Luce (1932– ) Irigaray was born and educated in Belgium though she has
spent a considerable period of her working life in France. She engages in
philosophy, linguistics and psychoanalysis to explore the operations of patriarchy
and the exclusions of women. For Irigaray, woman is outside the specular (visual)
economy of the Oedipal moment and thus outside of representation (that is, of the
symbolic order) so that ‘woman’ is not an essence per se but rather that which is
excluded. Irigaray proceeds by way of deconstructing Western philosophy which
she critiques for its exclusions while ‘miming’ the discourse of philosophy; that is,
she talks its language but in ways that question the capacity of philosophy to
ground its own claims. Her style varies from the lyrical and poetic to the political
and didactic.
• Associated concepts Différance, écriture feminine, Oedipus complex, Other,
patriarchy, phallocentric, sex, subjectivity.
• Tradition(s) Feminism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis.
• Reading Irigaray, L. (1985) This Sex Which Is Not One (trans. C. Porter and C.
Burke). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Irony It is pertinent to note that the increased popularity of the concept of irony is
coterminous with the decline of the certainties of Marxism, science, progress and
other grand narratives of modernity. In other words, cultural theory is moving away
from a sense of surety in its foundations towards awareness of its own contingency.
In that sense, irony refers to a reflexive understanding of the contingency or lack
of foundations of one’s own values and culture. This mode of thinking, both in
cultural theory and in everyday life, is said by a number of writers to be a feature
of the postmodern condition.
Speaking philosophically, the foremost proponent of the concept of irony in
social and cultural theory is Richard Rorty. For Rorty, recognition of the
contingency of language leads us to irony where the concept means holding to
beliefs and attitudes that one knows are contingent and could be otherwise, that is,
they have no universal foundations. This condition directs us to ask about what
kind of a person we want to be (for no transcendental truth and no transcendental
God can answer this question for us) and how we should relate to fellow human
beings – how shall we treat others?
For Rorty, these are pragmatic questions requiring political-value responses and
not metaphysical or epistemological issues. Rorty goes on to argue that we do not
require certain and universal foundations in order to pursue a pragmatic
improvement of the human condition. Rather, we do so on the basis of the values
of ‘our’ own tradition even though we are aware that our values are not the only
defendable ones. In this sense, irony underpins social, cultural and political
pluralism for it cuts away the idea that ‘we’ and only we know how to proceed for
the best.
In more everyday usage, the concept of irony can refer to the self-knowledge that