The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine

The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminin is a psychoanalitical aproach on gender binaries. Irrigaray argument in this book is that there is a gendered bias in language. Her philosophy originates in Freud’s Phallocentric system that supposes many binary oppositions. In this system she sees the superiority of male centered discourse and she argues that the philosophic discourse is a male-dominated thinking where women can only copy masculine language. In other words she can not express or function in a male centered framework and as long as she borrows ideas from a masculine logocentric discourse she will remain a derivation and consequently she does not see any common ground between the theoretical male system and the feminine style of writing. A first phase in the feminine constructed profile is that of mimesis. But mimesis means here a way to appropriate a different discourse where the woman would transgress from the realm of subordination to the one of affirmation. Her discourse wants to break masculine language by opposing material and physical allusions to masculine abstract speculation. This way of writing creates the allusion to an incomprehensible rest that’s to be understood as the invisible of her own readers (mostly female). In the freudian phallogocentric model the privileged sexuality is based on the visible where the woman is seen as the result of a castration and the woman desire to act and think according to a masculine paradigm is a form of castration denial and this makes her neurotic. Irrigaray argues the freudian approach and talks about female pleasure as the place of a new construction the “ek-stasy in the transcendental”. If there is difference between female desire and female pleasure, this is something that should not be looked for in the visible, where female desire is the image of a lack nor within the discourse where she is seen as a deficient masculine or a negative image of the subject, but rather in a newly constructed language where style would be able to form a disjunction. In this style what maters is a new opposition visible/tactile.