To return to matter requires that we return to matter as a sign which in its redoublings and contradictions enacts an inchoate drama of sexual difference.[1]
-Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter
Judith Butler's serious and largely appreciative engagement with Luce Irigaray in Bodies that Matter can be easily lost among poststructuralist critics and students of feminist and gender studies well into the current century. Secondary readings of feminist texts remain encoded with expectations of a catfight between “cultural” and “poststructuralist” feminists now forty years old or more.
Such expectations about the Chora chapter of Butler's Bodies that Matter flatten the stylistic ambiguities available in the rhetorical redoubling of mimesis that Butler performs in an Iragarayan style, undertaking as does Irigaray, an experiment in irony. Mimesis is at least two things, only one of which involves irony as a potential reversal -- in contrast to a simple contradiction as in the case of sarcasm, irony in the French style is something closer to a twist (whatever critics of Alanis Morissette have claimed). The other part of mimesis is adoption of another's style or point of view in order to flatten an opponent from the inside.
But any decent mimeticist knows that the influence goes both ways, and in real time; a critic's opinion is likely to shift or even switch halfway into the forest. The truth of French feminists' rhetoric is the journey into and out of it, the activity of the writer reproducible in the activity of a reader. This is all facilitated by an earlier generation's reading/writing project in which the limits of French philosophical cannon were clear and assumed. That an American should try it is unexpected, perhaps. I will not attempt it today because Butler's engagement with Luce Irigaray's mimetic reading of Plato is already a triple inducing vertigo for all its worth. With what seems to be largely an appreciative style, requiring I will admit something of an Escheresque squint, Judith Butler engages Irigaray as an entry into the Platonic chora in order to untangle the triple knot of matter, sex, and difference.
Butler plunges in after Irigaray who is already in the belly of the beastly posits and remnants, the marginality at the core of "Western" philosophy, the impossibly non-consequential origin story of Plato's gendered non-genderable chora and its function in the generation of copies, of forms, and of things. Approaching a middle section, Bulter can be read performing in lock step with Irigaray's engagement with Plato, sometimes with and sometimes at Plato. Another layer out Butler writes somewhere between mimesis and critique, sometimes pointing at and sometimes with Irigaray's argument of and with Plato. Finally Butler pulls out of the frame and steps into a more stylistically direct mode to (seem to) evaluate Irigaray’s strategy of mimesis for its strengths and weaknesses, clarifying first at then with.
As to weaknesses, Butler acknowledges Irigaray’s tendency to “mime the grandiosity of the philosophical errors that she underscores,” but then follows suit, self-describing an intentionally risky overreading that may “replicate a speculative excess” present in the Platonic text itself.[2]
As to strengths, Butler performs a first person interpretation of the mimetic strategy and response:
Irigaray’s response to this exclusion of the feminine from the economy of representation is effectively to say, Fine I don’t want to be in your economy anyway, and I’ll show you what this unintelligible receptacle can do to your system. I will not be a poor copy in your system, but I will resemble you nevertheless by miming the textual passages through which you construct your system and showing that what cannot enter it is already inside it (as its necessary outside), and I will mime and repeat the gestures of your operation until this emergence of the outside within the system calls into question its systematic closure and its pretension to be self-grounding.[3]
Butler summarizes the Irigarayan critique of Plato as such:
“The problem is not that the feminine is made to stand for matter or for universality; rather the feminine is cast outside the form/matter and universal/particular binarisms. She will be neither the one nor the other, but the permanent and unchangeable condition of both—what can be construed as a nonthematizable materiality.”[4]
Butler's critique of heterosex as autogenetic is essentially Irigaray's logic--behind the plea for sexual difference. Thus they agree on a critique of Plato's chora whereby a phallic form of reproduction must penetrate but does not precisely impregnate, and instead reproduces itself as only the same without the contribution of female reproductive agency. This is what Butler and Irigaray read as the autogenesis of compulsory heterosex.
Plato’s inscription is doubly violent, first as penetration then as erasure; ours is treble when we force a feminist fight.
Butler underestimates, in my view, the apophatic potential that Irigaray is calling forth from the outside of linguistic representation--the exilic potentialities of phallic erasure--when Butler asks,
“How is this assignation of a feminine ‘outside’ possible within language? And is it not the case that there is within any discourse and thus within Irigaray’s as well, a set of constitutive exclusions that are inevitably produced by the circumscription of the feminine as that which monopolizes the sphere of exclusion?”[5]
These exclusions are where Butler’s ultimate critique of Irigaray lies: in the monopolization, the sheer identification of the feminine with alterity as opposed to the multiple racial, sexed, animal others. True that.
Butler’s otherwise dispute with an externality to language connects to her critique of Kristeva’s identification of chora with the maternal body, and what Butler perceives as the difference between Irigaray and Kristeva—that Irigaray’s mimesis is not an alternative ontology based in or identified as the maternal body, but rather occupies and redeploys paternal language. Elsewhere I dispute a sheer identification of the Kristevan chora with the maternal body (it's about the baby), but this doesn’t directly disrupt a familiar narrative of feminism’s presumed split into discourses of cataphatic essentialist sex versus apophatic poststructuralist gender. In gender theory classrooms, the exemplars of an evolutionary split within feminism are often Butler and Irigaray. But for Butler and for readers of Butler and Irigaray, whatever difference there is between a method of mimetic alterity and performative multiplicity, it isn't aligned with stuff and no sense.
[1] Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), 49.
[2] Ibid., 36.
[3] Ibid., 45.
[4] Ibid., 42.
[5] Ibid.