Speculum of the Other Woman

Irigaray's doctoral thesis, a critique of how Western philosophy and psychoanalysis have imagined woman. Its title plays on the speculum as both a curved mirror and a medical instrument for looking inside the body. The book has three parts. The first is a close reading of Freud's lecture on femininity, showing how his account of girls' development is built on a male model, so that woman appears only as lack, an imperfect copy of man. The long middle section moves through texts from Plato and Plotinus to Descartes, Kant and Hegel, as well as women mystics, arguing that the philosophical subject has always been implicitly masculine and has used woman as the mirror against which it defines itself. The last part rereads Plato's allegory of the cave as a story about the maternal origin it covers up. Irigaray writes in a mimicking, layered style. Some critics charge her with essentialism; others defend her as a strategic reader of the tradition.

It is a founding text of French feminist philosophy and shows, through close reading, how ideas of reason and the self in canonical texts depend on silencing the feminine.