MUCOUS, MONSTERS AND ANGELS:

IRIGARAY AND ZULAWSKI’S POSSESSION

Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University)

 

 

This article will offer an analysis of Andrej Zulawski’s Possession (1981) with the work of Luce Irigaray to suggest female desire both is and can create monsters. Through the parabolic configuration and ultimate collapse of the transcendental mystical with the carnal, mucosal monsters can be understood as angels enveloping and unfurling configurations of pleasure beyond phallologocentrism. Extending this exploration I will suggests spectatorship as mucosal, and the screen as angelic-monstrous, which through shifting from signifying to mystifying, forms with the spectator a mucosal ethical relation. Irigaray states: “Perhaps the visible needs the tangible but this need is not reciprocal.”[1] She directs us away from the visible as the phallic apprehensible through demarcation of form as solid, subjectivity as rigid and recognition or repudiation as objectifying dialectic distance toward mucous as feminine carnal interaction.

Historically, monsters have been the objects of knowledge, of analysis, and of study. The reason to study monsters is to know the unknowable by forcing the monster into phallologocentric structures and hence control that which proves social structures are arbitrary. Essentially monsters are able to emerge as perceptible as failures or aberrant versions of the dominant, or they are rendered unregistering. Women have long been the objects of monster studies, of scientific, psychoanalytic and philosophical treatises. The uterus is now available synthetically while men rage against women who abort. Women do not own their monstrosity; it emerges through an isomorphic logic of science on one side and the religious right on the other. “As for [women’s] own history,” writes Irigaray,

we must reexamine it thoroughly to understand why this sexual difference has not had a chance to flourish, either on an empirical or transcendental level, that is, why it has failed to acquire an ethics, aesthetics, logic or religion of its own.[2]

In cinema studies, numbers of film theorists have highlighted the two tendencies in film to either align the woman with the monster or have her abducted and coveted by it. Both demand being saved by the hero to restore her place in phallic regimes, which is of course no place except subsidiary to, but less than, the male. Most importantly, the desire to know the monster alleviates its threat and wonder. If women’s sexuality is monstrous for its failure to be equivalent, then should women’s sexuality be thought it would be thought with difference not constituted as a heterocentric discourse of lack and phallus but of an undifferentiated monstrous merging; monstrous only because it collapses binary machines and liberates desire through becoming-more-than-one without subsuming difference. Women’s sexuality may be monstrous but here the monstrous lover is that which catalyses thought, pleasure and fluid mystic carnality. In this sense, for the purpose of this article, monstrous acts of pleasure can be understood through Irigaray as angelic openings, and monsters as angels. Monstrous sex is neither reproductive in the actual or the performative virtual sense and is not located in one spatial configuration. No dialect exists, so creation is necessary; production over reproduction. It has no genesis or expiation but is fluid spatially and temporally. Nothing lacks, so no fulfillment is required.

The consequences of such non-fulfillment of the sexual act remain […] to take only the most beautiful example […] let us consider the angels. These messengers are never immobile nor do they ever dwell in one single place. As mediators of what has not yet taken place […] these angels therefore open up the closed nature of the world, identity, action, history.[3]

Female morphology is constituted through qualities of the monster — multiple, ambiguous, openings without lack, folds without hierarchy. Female sexual organs refuse to be singular or nomenclatured — they are more than one but less than the one of the phallus. The most influential example of this expression of female corporeality as a carnal morphology of difference comes with Irigaray’s model of the two lips. If the two lips, always touching and touched, never alone but never subsumed by the other, the same but entirely unique, configure a model of anti-phallic excess and pleasure, then the matter of connectivity is the mucous. “The mucous, in fact, is experienced from within. In the prenatal and loving night known by both sexes. But it is far more important in setting up the intimacy of bodily perception and its threshold for women.”[4] Here body is threshold and nothing more than perception, as Irigaray’s is a temporal configuration, thus the morphology of the two lips is not a structure but a metamorphic infinitesimal plane, and the mucous the consistency of that plane. Beginning on a material and tactically simple level, woman’s sexual fluid as mucosal is a monstrosity — it is not delineated, not well defined and not present, only at the time of orgasm. Women’s desire, like the monster itself, is literally, slimy. Monsters are not particular taxonomical teratologies. They are, rather, aberrations — the multiple, the metamorphic, the hybrid, the in-between, that which is without genealogy or genesis and whose destiny is unpredictable. They are both germinal and excessive, not yet formed and teeming with over-formed incomprehensible elements. How can we affirm female difference without essentialising woman? How can we affirm female sexuality independent of complementing or fitting in with male sexuality? Is female sexuality a teratological enquiry? This is the ultimate and unanswerable question of Zulawski’s Possession. Possession is the story of Anna (Isabelle Adjani) whose sexuality is suffocated by her husband Mark (Sam Neil), with whom she has a little boy. She also suffers a forced freedom by her lover Heinrich (Heinz Bennett) who says to her “I can take you because I am free.” His words indicate that unless she submits to infidelity and on-tap sexuality she is not free. This kind of rhetorical faux liberation is reminiscent of the sexual “revolution” which freed men from having to use manipulative seduction techniques and account for insemination. As a result of Anna being bookended by the machinations of oppression as either refusal or pressure, she becomes “pregnant” and, in a Parisian metro tunnel, howlingly gives “birth” to a messy viscosity of blood and white fluid. In excess of form, the liquefied state of this “phenomenon” that Anna produces is blood; white fluid which could be seminal, pus, sap, a fluid integral to a non-human monstrosity, and a sticky slick of undifferentiated mucosity. Irigaray offers “the flesh of the rose petal. Sensation of the mucous regenerated […] somewhere between blood, sap and the not yet of efflorescence.”[5] The rose petal’s resonance with female genitalia is clear in its multi-labial form where each petal is divisible and indivisible from the next and the presenting and beneath planes are singular expressions. The petals are membranes of within and without and their shiny appearance belies their subtly furred texture. Any relation with it is inherently inflective and enveloping. Anna puts this amorphous fluid mass in a rented flat and slowly this mass develops through larval stages from blob to vegetal (florescent?) entity, to tentacled creature, and eventually it ends up as the double of her husband. However, stating this is its final form is misguided as the film ends before the double Mark’s next form can be gleaned. At its early stage, Anna is involved with a formless form, a liquid elemental with which her carnal unions could only constitute an enveloping, a bi-invagination rather than phallo-penetration. Anna’s female sexual slime literally evolves into another form of person, a double but with nothing in common with the primary male. Here Zulawski extends the satisfaction women get from animals and other non-human lovers in innumerable monster movies, such the various King Kongs and Beauty and the Beasts. The monster is far more liberating for Anna than her phalloanthropomorphic options.

In fact, the grisly glimpses of Rambaldi’s hippogriff aren’t nearly as upsetting as the ravenous pas de deux of the protagonists, who come close to simply sinking their canines into each other’s throats.[6]

While Atkinson’s description of the monster as hippogriff seems unimaginative, his emphasis on the antagonistic nature of one sexuality being consumed by another seen in the human-human sexual encounters in Possession is crucial. Like Anna’s seething, foaming lover, women’s sexuality is undefined, amorphous, unreliable, mobile, and pliable. This is not necessarily what women’s pleasure is, but it describes the way it is yet to be conceived. “Already constructed theoretical language does not speak of the mucous. The mucous remains a remainder, producer of delirium, of dereliction, of wounds, sometimes of exhaustion.”[7] Because women’s desire is this in-between it shares much with the great icon of the in-between, the anomaly, the monster. In this film the unbound desire of a woman literally externalizes and becomes a monster. The monster is the object of adoration and aberration. To human sexuality Anna’s response seems to suggest “if you don’t want to partner me as monster, I’ll make my own partner.” In referencing Irigaray’s crucial confirmation of woman’s relations of pleasure as it could be understood in this article as a relation with monsters, and woman as themselves monsters, Boothroyd affirms “a key role of the Lips in Irigaray's account is their figuring of the (female) sexuate relation to self.”[8]

The monster evokes fascination and disgust. In the film, Anna shows disgust, not at self, but at the rigidity of phallocentric male sexual paradigms. Those who uphold these paradigms show disgust at the monster lover she has created. Monsters are not spectacles to be observed and exiled or rectified. Monsters given a spatial genesis and destination as outside, but whose protean-temporal aspects and indeed any specificity or singularity whatsoever was repudiated. Fascination produces wonder which is desire as aversion and disgust as irresistible. Monsters, unlike sticky mucous but not mucosal aliens (such as those of The Thing [1982] or the Alien films [1979, 1986, 1992, 1997]), do not exist in space but within a very concrete world of being apprehended by the third. Teras refers not to the monster but to its verb-affect. They are not unto themselves and thus not self-authorized. Authority, authorial intent and authorization are only present from the desire of the third. Where Anna and the creature create a two-within-as-one, the spectator is the third that may take their relation, the image and the screen itself as events of desire which are mucosal, a relation of opening to infinity, not distance, objectivity and othering. Thus ethical monsters must be the third that refuses to speak or know but which opens to the voluminous absence of both discourse and molar perception of the monster as thing (or too much thing, or nothing) which is liminal relation itself, no longer two forms but one enveloping matter. Irigaray sees woman’s ethics precisely as this: “The woman’s ethics, which is an opening of and to another threshold.”[9]

Anna’s creation explores the relationship between a feminine, fluid sexuality and modern monsters — hybrids, animal, vegetal and molecular unnatural participations, devolved subjectivity, techno and viral-selves. The face of Anna is subjugated to being Marian, mother, lover, but cinematically it refuses the fetishistic Eurydice face which allows woman to be known through the atrophy the phallic gaze causes with its phantasy of revelation and consumption. Irigaray sees the woman’s face as a form of germinal illumination, light without form reflecting the mucosal plane:

The beloved woman’s face […] is full of what cannot be said but is not nothing — thanks to the already and the not yet. A taking shape of matter that precedes any articulation in language. Like vegetative growth, animal anticipation, a sculptor’s roughcast. An aesthetic matrix that has not yet produced results but is recognised as a prerequisite to the completion of all gestures.[10]

The in-between-ness of these bodies, Anna’s, the monster’s, their relation as an in-between-ness, and especially in-between-ness in gender and finitude, creates an open space, a pure potentiality of feminine desire. “The mucous refers to an in-between medium. And because it is in-between the mucous remains (associated with the) unfinished, the in-finite.”[11] Like women, monsters are what they evoke, and like demons thus are evoked. Numerous films show us the identity of the be-between as threateningly monstrous — the witch child, both woman and girl, both naïve and too knowing, and the vampire woman. Vampires splice animal-human-fog. Vampires pose threats as they are the seducing rather than repellant monster. They offer an unfurled potentiality for alternate desire, so many women find them enigmatic and their own vampirism is both carnal and carnivorous. Their misalignment of blood resonates with Possession’s use of blood abjection. Where Don’t Look Now (1973) misidentifies what red symbolizes, resulting in death, Possession uses Anna’s productive, creative, abortive blood to flood and wash away signifying symbolic systems, showing the female and desire itself as fluid.

Anna goes crazy as a natural progression from her mimetic sexuality, a strict sexuality which is made to conform to and complement and be controlled by male desire in which she is simply a cog. Possession shows what happens when heterosexual women are unable to express sexuality through their difference from rather than annexation to male. Possession shows the conundrum of woman as reflection of Mark’s male narcissism/ego/infantile need, and disgust at female sexuality and female lack of sexual interest. Her other option, Heinrich, is a new age false assimilation of another but a no less restrictive paradigm. Inevitably both force themselves upon her whether in the name of ownership (Mark) or freedom (Heinrich) claims. Mark is neither adult nor child. Their own child is in a permanent state of crisis — he runs around making ambulance sounds, Mark calls Anna mummy in reference to both of them. Anna is both Mark’s mummy and lover, the monster both Anna’s child and lover. So the mother/whore double is actually simultaneously the contraction of the sexuality of two into one, yet not morally defined. “You are mucus and always double, before any speculation.”[12] Female sexuality in phallocentrism is speculative as reflective — two women, the double of Anna, the mysteriously arrived schoolteacher/virgin also played by Adjani, Helen (in white) and the virgin mother dressed in blue, Anna. One key aspect of female sexuality’s subjugation to the male is the shift of female sexuality to that of maternity. In a perverse turn of the virgin-mother barren-whore paradigm, Possession shows that the mother has failed because she is not a whore. In the scene where she kneels before the crucifixion in Church, Anna’s pleasure staring up at Christ is pleasure in god as unseen/unseeable pleasure, the sexual mystery, sexuality as mystery or volitional idea from the woman herself. Anna masturbates while looking at Christ’s bleeding forehead. Anna cuts her throat because she is choking on traditional sexuality; she minces meat, less castrative than opening up the mucosal wound. Mark makes multiple wounds in his arm; vulvic symbols but also a giving up of dominance for autoeroticism or non-traditional eroticism. Anna says to him “doesn’t hurt does it?” meaning castration does not hurt; rather it opens up desire to new paradigms of flesh and desire. Irigaray’s morphology of the lips offers openings through closing and pressing. She states angels create openings. Anna is constituted by opened flesh, she expresses vulvic sexual stigmata and so shows openings form multi-faceted folds and closings open out flesh potential. Nothing is empty nor full, nothing concealed nor revealed, and the wound creates rather than slaughters. Anna passes through the various stages which oppression elicits. She is hysterical, she is violent toward herself, she abandons her son, she shows psychosomatic symptoms and finally because nothing works she physically externalises her desire and it exits her body as a result of frustration. It is the opposite of neurotic expiation or cathexis, it is creation. Anna’s is not an expulsion of hysteria or repressed desire; it is an act of generative love.

Blood as feminine in the film is menstrual because repudiative of maternity and simultaneously not signifying death. The presence of ambiguous and arbitrary blood in the film spans the blood of sacrifice, woman dying for the sins of man — dying as sexual pun but more importantly female sexuality sacrificed for the primacy of the male. Anna vomits white when she kills and when she miscarries. She vomits out the symbol of male sexual satisfaction but she is also vomiting milk, vomiting out the subsumation of her sexuality through being a mother. She vomits blood with the white fluid — merging the sacred viscosity of semen with the sanguinity of menses as an indicator of women’s sexuality without fertility. This recalls the vampire. Anna is doubled as mother and wife but antithetical to Mary and Mary Magdalene. When she is in her blue Virgin Mary dress it is usually unbuttoned, but here she is reluctant to be touched in a traditional way. When she is sexualized her form of desire, perhaps like Magdalene’s desire for Christ, is neither necessarily sexual nor non-sexual but exists along another line altogether. The ecclesiastic theme asks questions, such as what is faith and what is chance? Faith is the belief in something one cannot believe in logically. Faith is belief in the unseeable and unknowable but nonetheless that which affects reality adamantly. Faith in female roles is the faith of which Anna speaks. She must choose between faith in her plight as a mother and a wife, faith that this role will fulfill her, directly mirroring the faith in Christianity which demands the same. Or chance. Chance is the becoming to faith’s being. Faith is in the word without speaker, thus acquiescence without mediation or mucosal relation.

The contrast between the saying and the said as the disjunction between jouissance and being, drive and signifier […] another figuration of the sensible transcendental, bringing together the antithetical figures of the angel and the mucous […] as a marker of jouissance ethical saying would be a passage between the anarchic diachrony of the past that has never been present and the infinite future of becoming.[13]

Faith adheres to tradition without knowing why, accepting without questioning. Chance is accepting pure unbound possibility, questioning met with cacophony. Anna is forced to choose between faith in heterosexuality or chance of something else through unbinding desire. Faith is phallic sexuality, chance is monster sex, sex in transit, nomadic sex. Anna’s monster is her lover, but it is never itself a “thing,” it keeps changing, transforming. Its mucosal expression says much with the opening of its labial seduction, mouth, amorphous genitals which traverse its entire form, but nothing is said. Anna does not care, it is chance which offers her a lover that will never set down a sexual narrative. Carnal mucosity in Irigaray makes this monster angelic.

The angel is what passes through the envelope or envelopes from one end to the other, postponing every deadline, revising every decision, undoing the very idea of repetition […]. They are not unconnected with sex […] it is as if the angel were the figural version of a sexual being not yet incarnate.[14]

Anna says “I have seen half of god’s face here. The other half is you.” Like the two Maries, the film offers up continuous doubles. But the second double is not the alternative to the first. The second is the repudiation of the paradigms which allow the first to exist. Unbound Anna is not virgin, not whore, not frigid, not hysterical, she is precisely this, the not of all these things but not able to be defined positively or fixed. The second Mark which the tentacled lover becomes is never expressed; he escapes at the film’s conclusion. Like the double, he escapes definition, we never know what he is, all we know is what he is not, which is the original Mark. “You are mucus and always double, before any speculation.”[15] He is the creature without a genealogy in traditional sexual paradigms. He has no sexual memory, nor tradition, nor even humanity. Like a real monster, he is a creature without parents. But there is a third Anna. And the third is the holy innocent, the truly sacred figure. Anna’s third persona is neither chance nor faith. Mark’s is the child, neither fake nor real, neither adult nor child. Anna’s self-made lover shifts through many metamorphoses. The most interesting is the male body, with which she has sex in a relatively “normal” missionary way. But the head of the monster at this time is formed of many tentacles. The tentacles as multiple phallic symbols but more than this is the multiple projectiles do not have their functions pre-signified. We see her having sex with the thing and we hear she has had sex with it way before it had a body or head. Which leads to the question “what does she do with it?” What is this sexuality? More correctly we ask “what is (the) becoming of these two/union/proliferation?” It is emphatically sexual but entirely extricated from any hetero or even perverse paradigms. She is happy. It is like female sexuality itself, unformed, incomplete, unpredictable but nonetheless desirable for what it can do that is not laid out in pre-established sexual acts or paradigms. It is an actual materialization of female desire as not repressed but that which has never been allowed to be acknowledged outside masculine paradigms at all. Like female sexuality, the creature is sticky, amorphous, and monstrous. And it continues to develop without quickening; unformed, unbound, and unstoppable. Unleashed female sexuality is not symbolically but actively and materially monstrous. The flesh as fold itself is a fluid inflection, blurring and mucosal. This resists the risk in creating yet another binary from the mechanics of fluids versus solids. Mucosal describes the fluids emergent of and from the vulva which connects the vulva’s folds with itself and blurs demarcations of externality. The prevalence of the visual, the solid, the demarcated, the relegated, the known, the phantasy of objectivity, even the question itself ablate and atrophy fluidity, connectivity, accountable subjectivity, thought, the multi-sensorial and speech which is not through the language of the same/one. In the fold, alterity is encountered within the self, through the other, and the other encounters the self in ways the self cannot autonomously express. Each element has aspects which are present to self and not present to self but to the other, and, simultaneously apprehends aspects of the other not present to itself.

The breakdown between subject and object, other and same, is desire, according to Irigaray “which cannot be equated with that of the masculine world, as a result of the way it lives in mucous.”[16] So the relation between the fascinated and the event-monster constitutes a mucosal life. Monstrous desire is the driving force of the ways in which subjectivity unfolds and refolds, shifting paradigms and self as metamorphic, always and in spite of itself launching upon new becomings. The politico-ethical moment of sexual difference for itself comes when the self seeks to fold with the unlike or inappropriate. Mucosal folding is stickier, the folding becomes a gluing, and the texture of the element dissipates into shared luminal skin. Dialectic desire maintains distance and therefore subject and object do not involute, reducing the unfold-refold potential of the subject. The creature is evolved because it is devolved, away from two genders to both more than one and less than one, both part of Anna and entirely different to Anna. Anna says that the creature is like an insect, that insects are not gendered. It looks like a squid, also a non-gendered cephalopod as cephalopods do not have sex intimately. A female cephalopod reproduces through her head; here the female produces her sexuality from her head as a cerebral carnal corporeality, the “logic” of difference. There are symbolic resonances between the monster and female sexuality — it is leaky, unbound, revolting, unpredictable, dangerous, fascinating, multiple, a world of interest, potential and threat to existing sexual narratives. But also the threat of interkingdoms or meshed worlds themselves is raised. The skin, the texture and the threat of monsters are constituted as scaly, slimy, infective, bacterial, blood-sucking and ultimately it is the choice of the spectator as to whether they will enter into creative relations with these monsters or reify traditional lines of dominance by slaughtering the monster. Unlike many interpretations of compassion, monstrous desire does not allow other things to exist because of what they are but that they are — no equivalence, no seriality, structure or proportionality, it is perception of imperceptible presence. The grace toward monsters as that which negotiates thresholds of female/male and non-human opens to possibility without dialectic encounter — accidental, inevitable or volitional. Women are not “things” but continuity. Planes affect and synthesise with each other based on inflective folding and refolding. Our monstrous desire for cinema forms the final, greatest and most gracious of monstrous love hybrid pleasures.

Anna creates and explores her mucosal monster beyond a love object toward becoming an angel of passage. She, like we, sees it only in half light, but it is always enough in that it is tactile and viscous, teasing and exploiting the viscosity of the eye as seeing beyond its capacities of recognition, making the visual a protean fleshly matter without form and the “image” as the screen itself a mucosal skein. Just as Irigaray associates the mucosal with angels and Anna’s monster is an angel, so we can think the screen as a form of angelic mediator, passing us within and through a mucosal screen. Lorraine emphasises Irigaray’s are “angels of passage”[17] and in relation to the eye shutting off to see with the body, flesh and touch Vasseleu suggests “The blink maintains the eye as mucous as a latency which, while not of the visible, resuscitates the eye as a body passage.”[18] We blink at the incoherent screen, not to believe our eyes posits an option toward a revolutionary turn to belief without recognition, or blindness to connectivity with the event of the image where the dialectic compulsion of distance and the phallic eye against the smooth screen is maintained. “From beyond,” writes Irigaray “the angel returns with inaudible or unheard of words in the here and now. Like an inscription written in invisible ink on a fragment of the body, skin, membrane, veil, colourless and unreadable until it interacts with the right substance, the matching body.”[19] Anna in her monster lover and we, with(in) the screen, trail the unreadable text-ured flesh of unrepresentable but no less perceptible mucosal fold. The image is without form, colour, script, until we become angelic with it or allow the angelic mucosal rapture to take us away, not toward a register which privileges flesh or touch (as Irigaray has been criticised for doing), but which collapses with us only when we have opened our spectatorial selves as porous matter we do not recognise. Irigaray attempts to collapse touch as antagonistic to, a feminine version of, or even an independent sense from, touch.[20] This is not to suggest that the invisible is revealed, that there will come a moment of transcendental recognition through resonance and relation as identification. In her reading of Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray warns against any exploration of invisibility as the perceivable event beyond recognition risking, in a phallic specular mechanisation, “wanting to appropriate the invisible.”[21] For each image, each frame and flicker the spectatorial self adapts to the specificity and molecular intensity of the image, and we are neither independent from nor dependent on its content to register meaning and/as pleasure. The image, like mucous itself, is not a visible plane but a sticky blurred envelopment, and each inflection of the envelope opening out and folding in creates a new plane of relation of spectatorial pleasure. We are not differentiated from image or screen. Thus we can no longer know what parts are us, what parts the image and hence we no longer know who we are or what it represents or reflects in a scopto-phallic regime. We see the image through a mucosal filter, seeing in a mucosal way that refuses demarcation and apprehension and most importantly, relation through opposition, “a look that is too close to make use of a certain perspective, of discrimination, distance or mastery.” [22] Mucosal spectatorship, the angelic image, the screen as passage, offer an ethics of difference which exploits the pleasures of cinema art as they allow us to succumb and gift ourselves to the experience of the image without sight and the self without subject. Just as Anna gifts herself to the monster she has created without submission or domination but with mucosal love, so we create the image with us as mucosal spectatorial pleasure.

Nor will I ever see the mucous, that most intimate interior of my flesh, neither the touch of the outside of the skin of my fingers, nor the perception of the inside of these same fingers, but another threshold of the passage from outside to inside, from inside to outside, between inside and outside, between outside and inside.[23]

 

 

NOTES 

[1] Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 135.

[2] Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” trans. Sèan Hand, in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (London: Blackwell, 1992), 173.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 93.

[5] Ibid., 166.

[6] Michael Atkinson, “Blunt Force Trauma: Andrej Zulawski,” in Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood, ed. Michael Atkinson (Albany: State University of New York, 2008), 84.

[7] Irigaray, To Speak Is Never Neutral, trans. Gail Schwab (London: Athlone, 2002), 244.

[8] David Boothroyd, “Labial Feminism: Body Against Body with Luce Irigaray,” Parallax 3 (1996): 73.

[9] Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 212.

[10] Ibid., 211.

[11] Anne-Claire Mulder, Divine Flesh, Embodied Word: Incarnation as a Hermeneutical Key to a Feminist Theologian's Reading of Luce Irigaray’s Work (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 239.

[12] Irigaray, Elemental Passions, trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still (New York: Routledge, 1992), 66.

[13] Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 171.

[14] Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” 173.

[15] Irigaray, Elemental Passions, 66.

[16] Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 109.

[17] Tamsin Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 227.

[18] Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty (London: Routledge, 1998), 70.

[19] Irigaray, Sex and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 36.

[20] Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 157.

[21] Ibid., 153.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., 142.