Deconstructing Belief: Irigaray and the Philosophy of Religion

Author(s): Amy Hollywood

Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 78, No. 2 (Apr., 1998), pp. 230-245
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1205941
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Deconstructing Belief: Irigaray and the

Philosophy of Religion
Amy Hollywood / Dartmouth College

The rose has no why; it blossoms without reason,

Forgetful of itself, oblivious to our vision.
(ANGELUS SILESIUS)

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy

of being No-one's sleep under so many

lids.

(RAINER MARIA RILKE)

An important issue in traditional western philosophy of religion (particularly within the Anglo-American tradition) is whether and under what
conditions belief is or is not justified. Philosophers of religion usually
identify the object of belief as the god of western monotheistic religions
or at least a philosophical variant of that god (raising all sorts of issues
about the viability of such generalized constructs). The abstractness of
this and other standard topics in the philosophy of religion may seem to
belie the demand for or possibility of feminist analyses like those made
by theologians and historians of religion.1 The feminist philosophers who
have demonstrated that ontology, ethics, and epistemology affect and are
affected by issues of sexual difference have, for the most part, been uninterested in religion.
One important exception is the philosopher, linguist, and psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray. While the philosophical and psychoanalytic presuppositions of her work distance it from the mainstream of Anglo-American
philosophy of religion, Irigaray's critical appropriations of psychoanalysis
and Derridean reading practices are crucial to her analysis and challenge
' In addition to proofs for and against the existence of god and more general discussions
of the justification of belief, textbooks usually contain sections on the nature and attributes
of the divine, the problem of evil, the meaning and truth value of religious language and
of religious experience.
? 1998 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-4189/98/7802-0003$02.00

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Deconstructing Belief
of the masculinist underpinnings of western religious thought, underpinnings that remain implicit in many contemporary philosophies of religion
(and in psychoanalysis and Derridean readings themselves, making her
work self-subverting in important ways). Irigaray's critique, moreover, of-

fers constructive insights into the ways in which a feminist philosophy of

religion might problematize belief and its object without simply negating
the divine.2

Irigaray is a notoriously difficult, elusive, and allusive thinker, however,

so that unpacking the meaning and ramifications of her discussions of

belief and its object is an arduous and risky venture. I will take the challenge by focusing on one central text, the 1980 paper entitled "Belief
Itself," which Irigaray presented at a conference dedicated to the work of
Jacques Derrida. Here she juxtaposes a clinical episode revelatory of the
nature of one (unnamed) woman's belief with central passages in Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Jacques Derrida's reading

of that text in The Postcard's "To Speculate-on Freud." Like Derrida,

moreover, Irigaray implicates Martin Heidegger and through him Rainer
Maria Rilke in her reading, creating an interweaving of multiple textual
references.3 Here I want to cut through these layers of allusion to uncover
Irigaray's account of the sexing, not only of the object of belief, but also

2 Central texts on religion can be found in the following: Luce Irigaray Speculum of the
Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (1974; translation, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1985), Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), J'aime a toi: Esquisse d'une felicite dans la histoire (Paris: Grasset, 1992), An

Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1993),Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New

York: Routledge, 1993), and Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell
University Press, 1993). A number of commentators and critics have touched on the religious dimensions of Irigaray's thought. See Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French
Feminists (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), "Irigaray and the Divine," in Transfigurations: Theology and the French Feminists, ed. Maggie Kim, Susan St. Ville, and Susan Simonaitis (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), pp. 199-214; Margeret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine

(New York: Routledge, 1991); Serene Jones, "This God Which Is Not One: Irigaray and

Barth on the Divine," in Kim et al., eds., pp. 109-41, "Divining Women: Irigaray and Feminist Theologies," Yale French Studies 87 (1995): 42-67; Kathryn Bond Stockton, " 'God' between Their Lips: Desire between Women in Irigaray and Eliot," Novel 25 (1993): 348-59,
"Bodies and God: Poststructuralist Feminists Return to the Fold of Spiritual Materialism,"
boundary 2 19 (1993): 113-49; Amy Hollywood, "Beauvoir, Irigaray, and the Mystical," Hy-

patia 9 (1994): 158-85; and Philippa Berry, "The Burning Glass: Paradoxes of Feminist
Revelation in Speculum," in Engaging with Irigaray, ed. Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and
Margaret Whitford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 229-46.

3 Luce Irigaray, "Belief Itself" (paper presented at a 1980 conference "Les fins de

l'homme," in honor of Jacques Derrida, August 1980, Cerisy-la-Salle). Sigmund Freud, Be-

yond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961).The intertextuality of "Belief Itself," like that of "To Speculate-on Freud," is mimetic, as Derrida suggests
when he shows how the interweaving of thread and spool in little Ernst's game is mimed by
Freud's writing practice. See Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond,

trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

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The Journal of Religion

its subject, what Irigaray calls "the male cultural subject in its philosophic
and religious dimensions."4 According to Irigaray, little Ernst's game of
fort-da enacts and demonstrates the structure of belief as experienced by
the "normative" subject. As I hope to show, Irigaray argues that the constitution of normative subjectivity depends on the association of the body
with the mother and femininity and an always incomplete and ambivalent
mastering, concealment, or denial of the mother('s body). Normative subjectivity, then, is (normatively) masculine (hence my use of male pronouns
in the following account), white, and economically privileged, although
Irigaray focuses only on the issue of sexual difference, creating one of the
central problems I have with her work.5 Here I will delimit her claims in
ways she does not.

First, however, a preliminary clarification and justification of my project may be in order. A number of feminist philosophers have undertaken
what might be broadly characterized as psychoanalytic accounts of the
subject of western epistemology, usually with reference to a particular
figure or group of texts within the western philosophical tradition (most
notably Susan Bordo, Jacqueline Zita, and Naomi Scheman on Rene Des-

cartes and Evelyn Fox Keller on Plato and Francis Bacon).6 These accounts have been criticized by other feminist philosophers like Margaret
Atherton for being ahistorical and hence flattening the heterogeneity of
western philosophical traditions.7 In addition Atherton challenges the
tendency to identify certain methodologies or modes of reasoning as masculine or feminine; the arguments of Bordo and Genevieve Lloyd to this
effect, Atherton claims, are unnuanced and unsupported by the historical

4 Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, p. 30.

5 Despite claims that Irigaray's emphasis on sexual difference is unproblematic, I believe

that she is in continual danger of eliding the intertwining of race, ethnic, class, and sexual
difference. It is this problem I seek to rectify in my version of Irigaray's account of subjectivity. A detailed argument about whether Irigaray's own text warrants this more complex
reading will have to wait for another paper. For the defense of Irigaray against charges of
"essentialism," see esp. Tina Chanter, An Ethics ofEros: Irigaray and the Philosophers (New York:

Routledge, 1993).

6 See Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1987); Jacqueline Zita, "Transsexualized Origins: Reflections
on Descartes' Meditations," Genders 5 (1989): 86-105; Naomi Scheman, Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Evelyn Fox
Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985).

7 The first claim against Bordo is that she takes what is distinctive about Descartes and

associates it with larger cultural tendencies. The second involves the gendering of specific
forms of thought. See Margaret Atherton, "Cartesian Reason and Gendered Reason," in A
Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, ed. Louise M. Antony and Char-

lotte Witt (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993), pp. 19-27.

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Deconstructing Belief
evidence.8 On the one hand, some women took Descartes's methodological assertions as support for their own claims to rationality. On the other,
the contrast within Descartes's text is not between male and female modes

of reasoning but between that of the philosopher and the hypothetical

"man on the street." This kind of ahistoricism and gender dualism, it can
be argued, is a direct result of the psychoanalytic models used by Bordo,
Lloyd, and others.
I am committed to recognizing and uncovering historical difference(s)
and hence have great sympathy with Atherton's aims.9 However, I do not
think that she demonstrates the unimportance or impossibility either of
gender analysis or psychoanalytic interpretive tools in the interpretation
of modern philosophical texts. Atherton, I think, makes too much of the

fact that a few exceptional women (Mary Astell and Damaris Masham
are discussed) were able to use Cartesian style reasoning for their own
purposes; moreover, Atherton bypasses the cogent evidence that such seventeenth-century feminist projects were fraught with ambivalence (both
internally and externally).'1 Atherton downplays the ambivalence and
ambiguities of her sources, just as she faults Bordo and Lloyd for doing;
although Atherton recognizes the multiple styles of reasoning found in
early modern texts, she ignores the ways in which sexual difference affects the relationship of different subjects to these modes of reasoning.
The question for both the historian and the philosopher is how the normative subject(s) of western philosophical discourse has (have) been constructed and whether that subject has (these subjects have) been constructed in ways that are exclusionary with regard to sexual, class, race,
and other differences."

I do not want to argue that only men or that all men speak as normative

rational subjects. But there is a great deal of evidence that the normative

subject within most western philosophical and religious discourses is

identified as "masculine" (and white, free, and middle or upper class).
While the claim is often made that this subject is "universal," in fact,

8 Bordo contests this reading of her work. Although she argues for the gendered nature
of modern rationality, she claims not simply to have associated that reason with masculinity.
See Susan Bordo, Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1997), pp. 203-4.

9 I have argued against the too-easy application of psychoanalytic accounts of gender
difference to the medieval European context. See Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife:

Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, Ind.: University

of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 196-201.

0 Joan Scott has recently demonstrated this ambivalence in the feminist discourses of

modern France. See Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights

of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

" This formulation is indebted to Naomi Scheman's description of her own project. See
Scheman, p. 7.

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The Journal of Religion

certain differences bear the weight of alterity while others remain unmarked. Being a woman, then, automatically puts one in a problematic
(although not impossible) relationship to rationality. Despite the enormous variations within western philosophical accounts of the subject and
reason, normatively there is a strong tendency to deny epistemic value to
differences (of sex, race, class, sexuality), which are therefore epistemically suppressed and must be suppressed by the subject if she is to gain
epistemic authority. Insofar as women (and other persons marked by difference) bear the cultural burden of marked sexual (or other) difference,
this status is more difficult for them to attain.'2

A properly delimited and historicized account of psychoanalysis can, I

believe, help us to account for the ways in which normative subjectivity
arises as gendered, despite claims to the contrary. Jacques Lacan offers
one such an account, and his linguistic reading of Freud's texts also helps
resolve the apparent gap between psychological explanations and social
phenomenon (although I will not defend these claims here).'3 Such de-

limitation and historicization are also implicit in the best of objectrelations theories and of feminist readings of epistemology that make use
of them (i.e., Keller and Scheman). Basically, the argument is made that
while the substantive claims of psychoanalytic theory are not universal,
they do accurately reflect the psychical development of human beings (or
at least boys, there being so much "darkness" around girls within psychoanalysis and questions about whether there is a normative femininity) as
normatively construed and pursued within a certain historical time and
place. As Scheman argues: "Freudian psychoanalytic theory, to take the
best known example, is, I would argue, most helpfully understood as an
account of certain culturally normative projects of self-constitution and
of the neuroses that are the characteristic residue of unresolved aspects
of those projects." 14

A similar historicization enables Irigaray both to deploy and critique

central aspects of Freudian and Lacanian theory in her reading of what

12 Martha Nussbaum has recently taken feminist challenges to traditional norms of west-

ern rationality as challenging rationality itself, but she makes an illegitimate move from
strictly logical necessity (critiqued, according to Nussbaum, by Ruth Ginzberg) to the much
broader conceptions of rationality she herself (like many of the contributors to the Antony

and Witt volume) espouses. The challenges made by Scheman, Keller, and others against

the universal claims of rationality, construed in this broader sense, are neither admitted nor
responded to by Nussbaum. They are, moreover, implicitly dismissed when she claims that
Atherton spends too much time responding to Bordo and Lloyd. While implicitly associating knowledge with power (i.e., knowledge gives power), Nussbaum refuses to take seriously

the more negative aspects of their conjunction. See Martha Nussbaum, "Review of A Mind

of One's Own," New York Review of Books 41 (October 20, 1994): 59-63.
13 Thanks to Matthew Bagger for reminding me of this problem and its importance.
14 Scheman, p. 8.

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Deconstructing Belief
she calls the male cultural subject of religion and philosophy (I would say
masculine and take care to delimit further) and her attempt to envision
other modes of being (although Irigaray may not be historicist enough).'5
Psychoanalysis, I think, can be useful in explaining the ramifications of
sexual differences within modern thought when its explanatory power is
combined with a hermeneutic flexibility that allows us to account for the
ambiguities, ambivalences, and multiplicities of normative modern subjectivity. It is less clear that it can generate explanations of the interplay of

sexual difference and other differences constitutive of the subject, although I think it may be able to do so.16

The constitution of one version of the modern epistemological subject

in Descartes occurs together with the reformulation of the relationship
between reason and faith. As we like to tell introductory philosophy of
religion classes, while the medieval Christian theologian, no matter how
philosophically inclined, subordinates attempts to prove the existence of
God to faith ("faith seeking understanding"), Descartes's methodological
program of radical doubt gives priority to the demonstration of the self's

existence. The ontological question, moreover, is subordinated to the

epistemological, in that Descartes is seeking certainty for his claim that
the self exists. This insures that for the mainstream of the philosophical
traditions affected by Descartes's mode of questioning (despite all of the
methodological and substantive disagreements among them), epistemological issues will take primacy within philosophical accounts of religion

and belief.

This initially takes the form of arguments for and against the existence
of God, ontological questions whose continued undecidability, however,
leads to the redirection of philosophical attention to the issue of whether
or not belief can be justified (by the proofs, or failing that, some other
means). The central texts in Irigaray's analysis, Freud's Beyond the Pleasure

'5 Although, like Bordo and others, Irigaray flattens the diversity of that tradition, I am

not convinced this is a necessary result of her methodology. I do, however, have other
doubts about the defensibility of psychoanalytic claims. The problem is that the central
claims of psychoanalysis with regard to the unconscious and sexuality are derived, in large
part, from clinical work under conditions problematized by any reading of the case studies,
particularly "Dora." In philosophical terms, the nonfalsifiability of Freud's assertions casts
doubts on his entire project. Yet Freud's concepts seem to have enormous explanatory potential with regard to Freud's other most prominent analysand-himself. So it may be possible to argue that psychoanalysis is an accurate account of the (white, western European)
male unconscious and subjectivity while the "dark continent" of women and others remains

unfathomed/unfathomable on his terms.

16 It is important to remember that insofar as ideologies are dualistic and hierarchical,

where you are in that division will effect your relationship to the dominate discourse.

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The Journal of Religion

Principle and Derrida's "To Speculate-on Freud," seem, on first sight, to
have little to do with the question of belief, particularly religious belief.
They are concerned, however, with the scientific status of psychoanalysis,
the nature of Freud's speculative hypothesis surrounding the repetition
compulsion, and the related issue of priority. Priority is important for
Freud in distinguishing his work from philosophy (mere speculation),
while at the same time his own implicit claims to unique priority problematize any claims psychoanalysis might make to conform to the model
of natural science. Priority is also at issue between Derrida and Irigaray
and within Irigaray's reading of psychoanalysis.'7 The theme compulsively repeats itself. Derrida somewhat obsessively reflects on the meaning
and implication of a Matthew Paris print in which Plato is shown standing
behind a seated Socrates, who is writing. Derrida wants to know why
Plato is behind Socrates and what that implies about philosophical priority. Irigaray asks why it is an issue of "fathers" and "sons" at all. Where,
she asks, are the mothers? This is her question to psychoanalysis as well,
leading to her focus on the pre-Oedipal realm where the child's relationship to the mother is primary.
Irigaray's reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle focuses on its most fa-

mous episode, Freud's account of which stands in tension, as Derrida

shows, with the stated intentions of the text itself. The story of the game

played by Ernst, Freud's grandson, is introduced as an example of the

compulsion to repeat. The repetition compulsion, Freud argues, necessitates the hypothesis that something lies beyond the pleasure principle
(what Derrida calls the "PP"), namely the death drive (which is not in
opposition to the PP but its "master"). Freud presents the example and
then undermines its own validity as an example, arguing that Ernst's
making his toys "gone" (fort) and his game with the wooden reel and
string (fort and da) can be explained by the pleasure principle. Ernst is
able to take mastery of a situation-the absence of his mother Sophie-

" The mimicking of Irigaray's title, Speculum of the Other Woman (n. 2 above), in the title

of Derrida's 1980 essay on Freud, "To Speculate-on Freud," suggests Derrida's awareness
of Irigaray's text and marks his reading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle as indebted

to and in response to Irigaray's critique of Freud in Speculum. This makes "Belief Itself,"
first presented at a conference around Derrida's work, Irigaray's response in an ongoing

conversation around Freud, women, and priority. Whereas in Speculum Irigaray moves from
Freud to Plato, with the mainstream of the western philosophical tradition coming in between, Derrida claims to move "from Socrates to Freud and beyond," thereby asserting his
priority and futurity. Whereas Irigaray insistently asks the question of the pre-Oedipal, the
imaginary, and the mother as the (erased) victim of a primal sacrifice, Derrida insists that
speculation is not simply reappropriation and that there is a beyond of sexuality (and hence

sexual difference). See Derrida, The Post Card (n. 3 above), pp. 322, 402-3. Freud, Derrida,
and Irigaray all, moreover, suggest religion's priority to philosophy. Much more should be
said about these textual interweavings, interlocutions, and their significance.

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Deconstructing Belief
over which he has no overt control.'8 Ernst is also, according to Freud,
able to revenge himself against the mother whose absence causes him
pain. In both cases, Freud interpretes Ernst's action as identifying his
mother with his toys and then reenacting his experiences with her in a

field he can control.19

Irigaray juxtaposes this story and scene of writing with another scene
emanating from a very different place. She speaks from that "still dark,
oneiric experience" that she has as a woman and an analyst. The claim is
strong, for Irigaray suggests in the opening lines of the essay that as a
woman and an analyst she has access to the realm of the primary processes in which the drives have not yet been fully bound or cathected;
hence the "looseness" of what she will present to her audience. Like Freud
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Irigaray ties the economic understanding
of the drives to the articulation of time and space; her presentation will
be loose and primary, both deliberately in order to offer the primary pro-

cesses to view but also for "lack of time," since time comes into being for
the subject through the binding or chaining up of the free energy of the
drives. From the place of the ego, the secondary processes, and bound
energy, Irigaray suggests, certain stories or messages cannot be heard or
understood, namely that of Ernst's and Freud's mother/daughter, "Sophie, the Sunday daughter."

Is the woman, Irigaray asks, "bound and chained in and under the
secondary processes? A 'poste-restante' or P.O. Box where messages for
unknown persons with no fixed address are held, undeliverable by the
usual, already coded, telecommanded, circuits."'0 Within "Belief Itself,"
Irigaray shows the reception of one woman's message by another and
attempts to decode it in terms that will clarify why male analysts cannot
hear or understand it.2l The message is odd. A woman analysand tells
her: "At the point in the mass when they, the (spiritual) father and son,
are reciting together the ritual words of the consecration, saying, 'This is
"s The assumed near-constant availability of the mother to the child within this account
further underlines its cultural specificity, although it should be pointed out that it is an ideal

that has permeated modern western culture, even in those times and places where eco-

nomic and other constraints make its practice impossible.

" As Derrida points out, Freud himself, by constantly circling around the repetition compulsion, explaining it in terms of pleasure and then refusing these explanations, himself
enacts the scene of writing as one of repetition.
20 Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies (n. 2 above), p. 25. Again, the illusion is to Derrida's The
Post Card, in which woman seems to be the (non)recipient of the "Envoie." Implicit refer-

ences are also being made to Lacan's claim that there is no sexual relation. See Jacques
Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, trans. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton,

1982).
21 Usually? never? under current cultural and psychical configurations? It is not clear
how strong a claim Irigaray is making here (especially in relation to Lacan, who would say
it is possible, although perhaps not likely, for a man to hear).

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The Journal of Religion

my body, this is my blood,' I bleed" (pp. 25-26). The relationship between
the three is ambiguous, even more so than those between Ernst, Freud,
and Sophie in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. For Irigaray, the mother/
daughter/wife's bleeding body knots together the questions of embodiment, belief, and sexual difference and demonstrates what is at stake for

Freud and Derrida beyond the pleasure principle. Where Freud posits a
drive toward death, Irigaray argues, lies the mother's body and the child's
ambivalent relationship to her and to it.22
The bleeding woman does not "believe" the doctrines of the Catholic
church, Irigaray tells us, although she is not "alien to that aspect of the
divine which finds an impoverished form and fulfillment in their celebrations-a divine that comes as blood flowing over and above" (p. 26). Here
Irigaray first introduces the split between the divine object of (a certain
kind of) belief and some other conception of the sacred that may be "unbound" or "released" from it. In a move that will no doubt be troubling
to many philosophers of religion, she claims that belief "makes us forget
the real" (p. 26), thereby suggesting that belief stands in opposition to the
real. Her use of the term "real" must be read against its Freudian (the
reality principle) and Lacanian usages, but it is also clearly tied to factuality, to what is or is not the case. She seems to begin her analysis of belief,

then, by saying that it is by definition false. While this might seem to be

begging the question, I will suggest it is an attempt to change the question
and its terms (to suggest the inadequacy of the idea of the divine as the
"object" of perception, belief, or anything else).
Irigaray, then, suggests that belief is by definition dependent on concealment: "Once this is exposed, there is no need to believe, at least as
adherence is usually understood. But truth, any truth throughout the
centuries, assumes a belief that undermines it and that seduces and

numbs anyone who believes. Does not the fact that this belief asserts and
unveils itself in the form of religious myths, dogmas, figures, or rites show

us that metaphysics keeps watch over the crypt of faith?" (p. 27). As Irigaray argues throughout the essay, truth lies in communication and me-

diation. The "demons" that thwart this to and fro movement between

persons, that reify communicated and communicating truths into the

truth that is to be unreflectively accepted, are, curiously, allied with belief

(just as they are associated with the repetition compulsion by Freud).

Theology (the popular theology of the Roman Catholic church lies behind Irigaray's generalizations here) and metaphysics join together in
their attempt to hide that which founds the "monocratic, patriarchal
truth ... its order, its word, its logic" (p. 27)-the concealment and im22 Thus for Freud the mother is associated with the death drive. Irigaray hopes to show
one way in which this association might be deconstructed.

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Deconstructing Belief
plicit sacrifice of the mother('s body). The constitution of the normative
subject of western philosophy and theology, then, whose elucidation is
the necessary preliminary to any account of sexual difference, is dependent on an act of faith (in the absent mother's presence), which is itself an

act both of mastery (the child hold's the string) and concealment (he
makes the toy absent in order to control its return).
The woman's story and Ernst's come together here, for they both tell,
from different sides, what occurs and what is at stake in that constituting

act. Whereas Lacanian psychoanalysis (another hopeless generalization,

given the changes in Lacan's thought) posits the mirror stage (the moment when the subject sees itself, experienced as fluid and fragmented,
as whole, unified, and yet other in-not the mother but its mirror image)
as the pivotal moment in the constitution of the subject preceding the
Oedipal Complex (for Lacan interpreted as the entrance into language),
Irigaray looks to the realm prior to either of these moments. Before Ernst
learns to play "gone" with his own image in the mirror, he plays gone
with his toys and, symbolically, with his mother. But just as in her earlier
work, Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray demonstrates the association
of woman with the mirror that serves as the reflective surface in which
man constitutes his identity, so in her reading of Beyond the Pleasure Prin-

ciple she highlights an element brought to the fore neither by Freud nor
Derrida. The veil (of the bed onto which Ernst throws his reel) stands
between Ernst and his toys/his mother, allowing him to master their/her
presence and absence. Although censored by the father (of psychoanalysis-the PP or grandfather, Freud), the veil is the necessary stage set for

the game of presence and absence, concealedness and unconcealedness

enacted by Ernst.23

Here the paradoxical relationship between belief and mastery is made

apparent, for in fact, as Irigaray remarks, the reel is not the mother. "This

darling little boy believes that coming into the world or going out of it
can be made into a game in this way. He believes it because it is not the
truth. This is an event that can never be controlled or planned, obeying
a necessity that can never be so easily played with. Except by killing,
and fasting to death.... At the moment when he believes he is best able

to master her appearance-disappearance, he is most slave to belief"

(p. 31).24 Through the game he comes to believe not only in himself and

23 Irigaray here brings in language from Heidegger, also deployed by Derrida throughout

The Post Card.

24 There is the suggestion here that despite the dangers of Ernst's game, it marks a sublimation of destructive impulses that would lead to the murder of the mother or the suicide
of the son. Belief, then, saves the mother/'s body in her literality, but always at her expense
as an active agent within the symbolic.

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The Journal of Religion

his power but also in his mother and the fact that, despite apparent absence, she is there.
Irigaray's analysis must be read again against its Lacanian background.
For Irigaray, following Lacan, when the move is made into the mirror
stage (the necessary preliminary to entrance into language), this Other in
whom the subject believes becomes a reflection of himself, and the male
god is born. Presumably, the little girl sees her own reflection in the mirror, yet what she sees is in the image of that which must be denied. The
little boy, on the other hand, is affirmed within male-dominate systems,
where "the phallus" (i.e., that which represents masculinity as the locus
of meaning and power) is given ascendency as the transcendental signifier and the name/no of the father serves to unify and constitute the sub-

ject (although always as lacking before the power of the phallus, of the
father, and of God). Yet against Lacan, Irigaray insists, the relationship
between the divine Father and the believing son is not a quest for the
phallus (or at least not merely or initially) but rather for the "first crypt,

a first and longed for dwelling" (p. 32). In dephallicizing the pre-Oedipal

mother, Irigaray demonstrates what Lacan has already asserted-the

contingency of the association of the phallus and masculinity with mastery. The mother may be all-powerful (p. 34), but (despite the myth of
the phallic mother) power is not necessarily phallic. (The significance of
this move for the daughter will be alluded to briefly below.)

There are two steps to Irigaray's deconstruction of Ernst's and his

grandfather's belief. The string of his toy reel is not the first cord, the
hollow thread of the umbilical cord through which the gift of life is first
given to the child by the mother('s body). Moreover, the mother('s body)
cannot be simply equated with the first dwelling, for this is to conflate
the mother with her body, to deny her independent and transcendent
subjectivity and thereby to preclude the possibility of any relationship
with her (other than as an object). This is the mistaken road, it would
seem, taken by patriarchal thought and religion, with dire consequences
for women.25 As Irigaray argues, with implicit reference to Heidegger, the

attempt to reconstruct the first dwelling is impossible, for the placental

veil that stands between the child and the mother from the beginning has
been destroyed and cannot be reconstructed. Irigaray extends Derrida's
critique of the nostalgia implicit in Heidegger's evocation of the primal
dwelling (and thus also responds to Derrida's implicit charge that Irigaray
herself in reinscribing sexual difference at the (non)origin of subjectivity
evinces a nostalgic desire for return to the maternal womb): "To have
access to her-to woman-would come after the nostalgia for this return
25 I follow Irigaray here in her use of the term "patriarchal," although I find its universal-

izing application problematic.

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Deconstructing Belief
to her, for that move back into the lost paradise where she shelters him
and feeds him with and through her/their container. To have access to
her demands another threshold than the one where she always stands
behind the veil. The veil has served the life they once shared and can

never be repeated" (p. 34). The subject attempts to recreate the first
dwelling and the primal veil or placenta that must remain intact if that
dwelling is to be reconstituted. Not the desire for the father's power but,
rather, for this primal home leads him to conflate the destroyed veil or
placenta with the mirror in which he sees himself whole and intact. His

own illusory wholeness, then, replaces and conceals the mother. Conversely, when he sees the mother he does not recognize her as other but
as his own lost wholeness. For real difference to be recognized, the conditions for a face-to-face encounter must be met.

The son can relate to the mother only through the strings (of the string

and reel) and veils (of the bed) that divide space into horizontal and vertical relations. The possibility of a face-to-face encounter is lost, and the
mother is thus "lost at the poste restante, never arrives at the destination,
never comes face to face with him" (p. 34). The only way they can communicate is through a scar or wound: "He opens the wound in her womb so
that he can close up his navel, his heart, or his mouth over the wound
left by her absence, her disappearance from him" (p. 34). The placenta
is both his and hers, pointing to the ambivalence of their identy(ies), neither yet fully two nor clearly one (i.e., before birth). For the child, then,
the mother's absence is experienced as a wound or gap in his own being.
His desire to heal that wound, to suture that gap, leads him to conflate
the mother with her womb, thereby denying her independent subjectivity. The child's desire to heal his own fractured body and his inability to

accept the openness and fluidity of embodied existence, leads him to

equate femininity and bodiliness and therefore claim mastery and transcendence as his own. Although Irigaray downplays the role of the phallus, it is only in the face of this ideal of (masculine) totality and unity that

the normatively defined subject struggles toward wholeness and mastery.

The ideal denies openness, fluidity, and partiality.26
In "Belief Itself," however, Irigaray is more concerned with suggesting
the way in which other possibilities, other futures, and other articulations
of sexual difference and the space between persons necessary to communication might be possible. This is effected through Irigaray's transposition of the veil from Ernst's bed and the placenta to angels, who "have

26 As Irigaray argues elsewhere, the constitution of the subject and its relation to a male
Other then becomes dependent on the primordial concealment and sacrifice of the mother's
independent subjectivity, a sacrifice simultaneously revealed and concealed within (Catholic) Christianity by the sacrifice of the son. See Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, pp. 9-21.

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The Journal of Religion

been misunderstood, forgotten, as the nature of that first veil, except in
the work of poets, perhaps, and in religious iconography" (p. 35). Evoking Rilke and Heidegger's reading of Rilke in "What Are Poets For?" Irigaray suggests that the angel communicates from that place beyond the
veil (beyond the pleasure principle and its implication in the desire for
mastery over death and for death itself). Paradoxically it is the seemingly
transparent, disembodied, and sexless angel who foreshadows the possibility of a communication between two bodies in the face-to-face encounter. Before exploring this possibility, Irigaray offers warning reflections
on the story of little Ernst and the traditional Catholic account of the
annunciation, in which the angel works for the male subject and the male
God. In both cases, woman is relegated to the status of a supporting struc-

ture on or through whom the presence of the divine is represented

(pp. 37-38). Yet the terror of the angel lies in its power to evoke the
sacrifice of the mother on which this inscription of male subjectivity and
divinity depends.
Angels, Irigaray claims, can only truly serve their mediating and salvific

function if there are two or more, coming not only from God to Mary
but also from Mary to God. To thwart hierarchical relations, the vertical
relationship must run in at least two directions. The ambiguity of the
Virgin Mary lies here, for despite the overt dogma, "when the angel goes
toward her, might he not actually be coming from her? Hasn't the angel
taken off from her, flown away from her? Skin and membrane that can
hardly be perceived, almost transparent whiteness, almost undecipherable mediation, which is always at work in every operation of language
and representation, ensuring that the lowest hearth and highest heaven
are linked, that first dwelling place in her, from which he makes and remakes his bed, and works out the transcendence of the Lord" (pp. 38-

39). By "angelicizing" Mary, Irigaray suggests that the divine can be

brought to earth. Mary is made transcendent with the Father and the
Son, and they become embodied, leading to "a new conception of flesh"
and a self-transcending embodiment. Rather than serving as the fleshy
surface onto which male transcendence is inscribed, mothers/women
might then become free subjects in a face-to-face encounter.
Irigaray goes on to discuss the devils who block just this kind of communication, insisting on the repetition of the same and thereby evoking
the "demonic" force of the repetition compulsion discussed by Freud in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (p. 29). But the angel, according to Irigaray,
has priority (contra Freud and Derrida), offering the hope for difference
and a future: "Otherwise, the whole stage is taken over by the devil, the
devils, who turn everything upside down to make the leap and make us
leap into dark, hidden, sulfurous beyond. Unless the whole thing goes
suddenly up in flames?" (p. 41). While the devil blocks movement and
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Deconstructing Belief
change, however, Irigaray suggests that giving into the demonic completely may be the move that sets the whole system of repetitions and
denial in flames. She is not clear about how passing through the demonic
might allow "an essential difference to befall us" (p. 41), although it could
be, as Derrida would argue, that repetition is never really of the same
and hence contains difference already within it. The leap, then, would be
the attempt to push that difference to the fore, thereby giving voice to
the other.

The significance of all of this for philosophy of religion is suggested by

Irigaray's warning against the domestication of the angel. A reference to
the dangers of the western ideology of woman as the angel in the house,
domestication also refers to attempts to take the angelic literally: "They
can light up our sight and all our senses but only if we note the moment
when they pass by, hear their word and fulfill it, without seeking to show,

demonstrate, prove, argue about their coming, their speaking, or appearance" (p. 43). We are asked not to "believe" in angels, who are not literally
there in the shape of apprehendable entities, but to take the risk that they

symbolize the possibility of relations between beings who share in both

immanence and transcendence. The attempt to master absence (the concealment or transcendence of the other) gives rise to the objectification
and ultimately denial of the (m)other('s transcendence). She is rendered
voiceless (in the first move of the fort-da) and then effaced (in the mirror

stage) so that the son might see himself in his own image.
Irigaray again reverts to an analysis of Roman Catholic ritual to augment her point, arguing that the Eucharistic sacrifice masks that of the
mother and the other woman, the woman as lover, on which it rests. This
is the "truth" of the analysand's bleeding body. Who, Irigaray asks, is this
father who demands that sexuality, sexual difference, and the flesh be
abolished? Irigaray continues her questioning, asking whether this marks
the real meaning of religion or, rather, "the crypt of an order set up by
one sex that claims to write the rules of truth at the price of life? Henceforth, are the sons not obliged to play weird games of fort-da between
mothers who are by some extraordinary turn virgins and fathers who are
mysteriously absent? How are the spirit and mind to be woven of the
threads of remoteness, belief, paralysis, denial, and negation of life?"
(p. 47). Only badly, Irigaray suggests, although the possibilities of another
economy and other forms of relation (and with them other conceptions
of religion) emerge from the chaos of the old. "But there are still flowers,"

she writes, in an indirect allusion to the story of Demeter, who is willing

to sacrifice herself for her daughter, although not unto death. In the image of the rose Irigaray again evokes the possibility of "a risk that risks
life itself" (p. 50) without embracing death.
Here Irigaray mimes Heidegger's language in "What Are Poets For?"
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The Journal of Religion

making explicit the role of breath and the air in a movement of immanental transcendence suggested by the image of the rose that lives without a why. Breath gives life, yet it cannot be seen. It is the concealed

but still material source of a human transcendence that is horizontal and

nonhierarchical, a movement out toward the other rather than of mas-

tery over her. The silent, moving source of existence, the air, requires w
take the risk of opening ourselves to the other if we are to experience
presence within language. Rather than attempting to master and deny

the other's absence/transcendence, experienced as a gap or wound in

one's being, the poets trust in language as the means of human communication: "Beyond go one to the other those who give up their own will.
Beneath every speech made, every word spoken, every point articulated,
every rhythm beaten out, they are drawn out into the mystery of a wor
that seeks incarnation. While trusting beyond measure in that which
gives flesh to speech: air, breath, song, they reciprocally receive and give
something that is still crazy, and are thereby reborn by giving each othe
the gift of forgotten inspirations, buried beneath logic and beneath all
existing languages" (p. 52). In the heavily allusive final pages of the essay,
Irigaray suggests that this requires forgoing traditional belief and embracing risk. By renouncing the protection of god (and of "that age-old
citadel of man-being"), the poets from the future and of the future discover "the trace of vanished gods" (pp. 52-53):27 "These prophets know
that if anything divine is still to come our way it will be won by abandon-

ing all control, all language, and all sense already produced, it is through
risk, only risk, leading no one knows where, announcing who knows wha
future, secretly commemorating who knows what past. No project here.
Only this refusal to refuse what has been perceived, whatever distress o
wretchedness may come of it" (p. 53). Is this to risk too much?28 Who is
required to undertake this risk?29 Is Irigaray's hyperbolic (and mystic)
speech necessary in order to free thought from its dogmatic reifications
I will leave these questions open, but I would like to suggest their significance for the question of belief. Irigaray argues that the constitution

27 The futurity of Irigaray's prophets suggests her desire for a "first, last word" in the
debates about priority underlying the interchange between Freud, Derrida, and Irigaray.
For Irigaray, Derrida's concern with priority seems to be at the expense of any really new

future.

28 The Heideggeran heritage of the text only heightens the danger one might hear in
Irigaray's lines. Although I suspect she would argue Heidegger fell short in his risk-taking
rather than because of it, this only opens the question rather than resolving it.
29 Here I will repeat the suggestion that, just as belief and its objects have different implications (and perhaps even different structures) for differently positioned peoples, so also
might the call for risk. Irigaray is describing the normative subject, who is not only male-

as she explicitly argues-but also white, western, heterosexual, and economically privileged.

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Deconstructing Belief
of the normative subject of religion and philosophy depends on the mastery and silencing of the mother('s body) and, hence, the denial of real
differences between the sexes and between subjects. Following Lacan, she
insists that, within western discourse, sexual difference has never really

been articulated--rather, the woman is only the empty mirror onto

which masculine subjectivity projects itself or the blank page onto which
he inscribes his being. (This seems to be a problematic claim for the primacy of sexual difference that will have to be interrogated in Irigaray's
work-and can, I think, be subverted.) Women have and do, of course,
speak and write from the place of that normative subjectivity-but that is
to speak from the side of the masculine.30 Men and women both sacrifice
recognition of embodiment in order to speak from that site, but while the

centrality of the phallus, in Lacanian parlance, silently affirms the male

body and male power (despite the repeated claim that the phallus is not

the penis-i.e., that the male God is not really a man), women within
male-dominate systems stand in more problematic relations to power, to
language, and to the divine. God, as the Father and the source and locus
of meaning, is the object of a belief first articulated in the attempt to
master the mother's absence. The dismantling of the subject as master,
then, implies a concommitant deconstruction of the object of belief.
Here Irigaray's project may be joined with those of the apophatic mystical traditions that, to paraphrase Meister Eckhart, pray god to free them

from god.3' In a manner not unlike Irigaray, Meister Eckhart argues that

god cannot be seen the way one sees a cow, nor can god's presence be
controlled by prayers, petitions, fasts, and masses. Rather, god is both
absolutely immanent to all things and absolutely transcendent insofar as
s/he is immanent. This dialectic of immanence and transcendence implies
the denial of reification with regard to the divine, the radical equality of
all beings, and the centrality of the relations between them to divine life.
Irigaray, in her attempt to articulate another conception of the divine as
both immanent and transcendent implicitly allies herself with apophatic
mysticism and suggests its contemporary relevance for questions of subjectivity and belief.32

30 The image of the rose is, then, read in terms of the two lips and the specificity of
women's bodies. Also, the fact of women's ability to accede (although with difficulty) to the
symbolic may explain the nature of many women's dogmatic adherence to the father's religion and God the Father.
31 Irigaray indirectly (and perhaps unknowingly) alludes to Meister Eckhart and through

him Marguerite Porete and Beatrice of Nazareth when she talks about the need to live
without a why. The language most likely comes to her from Heidegger.
32 On Irigaray's discussion of mysticism in Speculum of the Other Woman, see Hollywood,
"Beauvoir, Irigaray, and the Mystical" (n. 2 above).

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