SOURCE: Schutte, Ofelia. “Irigaray on the Problem of Subjectivity.¹” Hypatia 6, no. 2 (summer 1991): 64-76.

In the following essay, Schutte analyzes the critique of female identity formation in Speculum of the Other Woman, examining Irigaray's claims of phallocentric biases in psychoanalysis.

“My sex is removed, at least as the property of a subject, from the predicative mechanism that assures discursive coherence,” states Luce Irigaray in defense of her unconventional critique of the logic of identity and the subject undertaken in her study Speculum of the Other Woman.² Her defiance of the “master discourse” of philosophy and the attempt at subverting the logical order of coherence upon which such a discourse is grounded place the activity of feminist philosophizing in a difficult predicament with respect to the interpretation of this work. Insofar as philosophy relies on a notion of coherence rejected as phallocratic by Irigaray, it would seem that, if she...