Irigaray’s Figures of Home and the Malformation of Male Subjectivity

This essay illuminates the recent philosophy of Luce Irigaray by following how she develops her key trope of home. Thus, it elaborates her critique of a certain closed “homely” formation of man’s subjectivity and advances her thesis that woman might function as the salutary advent of the other sex, unhousing man, exposing his subjectivity as not-whole, and sheltering him in a more open and unhomely existential home. The first section outlines man’s efforts to carve form and thought from primordial flux and to establish a world and home defined by discrete objects. As the second section shows, however, man goes too far, enveloping himself in fantasies that maladaptively deny the incompletion of human existence. Man would do better, Irigaray argues, to grant the universe its living sense of becoming. The final section reads Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion in Homer’s Odyssey to elaborate upon Irigaray’s privileging of woman as home.