Editing Luce Irigaray (section)

==Major works==

=== ''Speculum of the Other Woman (Speculum de l'autre femme)'' ===
Her first major book, ''Speculum of the Other Woman,'' based on her second dissertation, was published in 1974. In ''Speculum,'' Irigaray engages in close analyses of phallocentrism in Western philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, analyzing texts by Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant. The book's most cited essay, "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream," critiques Freud's lecture on femininity.

=== ''This Sex Which is Not One'' (''Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un'') ===
In 1977, Irigaray published ''This Sex Which is Not One'' ({{lang|fr|Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un}}) which was subsequently translated into English with that title and published in 1985, along with ''Speculum''. In addition to more commentary on psychoanalysis, including discussions of Lacan's work, ''This Sex Which is Not One'' also comments on political economy, drawing on structuralist writers such as [[Claude Lévi-Strauss|Lévi-Strauss]]. For example, Irigaray argues that the phallic economy places women alongside signs and currency, since all forms of exchange are conducted exclusively between men.<ref name="Market" />

==== "Women on the Market" ====
in "Women on the Market" (Chapter Eight of ''This Sex Which is Not One)'', Irigaray draws upon [[Karl Marx]]'s [[Marxian economics|theory of capital and commodities]] to claim that women are exchanged between men in the same way as any other commodity is. She argues that our entire society is predicated on this exchange of women.  Her exchange value is determined by society, while her use value is her natural qualities. Thus, a woman’s self is divided between her use and exchange values, and she is only desired for the exchange value. This system creates three types of women: the mother, who is all use value; the virgin, who is all exchange value; and the prostitute, who embodies both use and exchange value.<ref name="Market">{{cite book | last1=Irigaray |first1=L. |orig-date=published elsewhere in 1985 | chapter=Women on the Market  | editor-last1 = Rivkin | editor-first1 = J. | editor-last2 = Ryan | editor-first2 = M. | title = Literary theory, an anthology | publisher = Blackwell | location = Malden, Mass | year = 1998 | pages = 799–811 | isbn = 9780631200291 }}</ref>

She further uses additional Marxist foundations to argue that women are in demand due to their perceived shortage and as a result, males seek "to have them all," or seek a surplus like the excess of commodity buying power, capital, that capitalists seek constantly. Irigaray speculates thus that perhaps, "the way women are used matters less than their number." In this further analogy of women "on the market," understood through Marxist terms, Irigaray points out that women, like commodities, are moved between men based on their exchange value rather than just their use value, and the desire will always be surplus – making women almost seem like capital, in this case, to be accumulated. "As commodities, women are thus two things at once: utilitarian objects and bearers of value."<ref name="Market" />

=== ''Elemental Passions'' ===
Luce Irigaray's ''Elemental Passions'' (1982) could be read as a response to [[Maurice Merleau-Ponty|Merleau‐Ponty]]'s article “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in ''The Visible and the Invisible''. Like Merleau‐Ponty, Irigaray describes corporeal intertwining or vision and touch. Counteracting the narcissistic strain in Merleau‐Ponty's chiasm, she assumes that sexual difference must precede the intertwining. The subject is marked by the [[alterity]] or the “more than one” and encoded as a historically contingent gendered conflict.<ref name=":1" />