SOURCE: Quick, James Robert. “Pronom ‘She’: Luce Irigaray's Fluid Dynamics.” Philosophy Today 36, no. 3 (fall 1992): 199-209.

In the following essay, Quick analyzes Irigaray's philosophical construction of female subjectivity, emphasizing the “fluidity” of femininity.

The Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris (Vincennes) demands Luce Irigaray's submission to a question: “What do you propose to do in your teaching?”¹ Without confining the fluid discourse within which she stages her responses—for they are not one—this essay will chart the flow of Irigaray's articulation of a “Subject” with and without the strictures of philosophy. On this “subject” Irigaray has much to teach philosophy, certainly beyond the confines of our modern Cartesian subjectivity (whether held philosophically or, more ephemeral, held within the solidity of a common-sense construct), and, as well, beyond the simplistic declaration of the death of the subject or its radical reinscription as a feminine subject over against...