Early on in Luce Irigaray’s work, in This Sex Which Is Not One, she summarized her attitude toward psychoanalysis by stating that it was not a matter of abandoning it as misogynist or hopelessly phallocentric, but of “implementing its still inoperative potential” (Irigaray1985 [1977], 72). In the three decades since, have her writings offered articulations of such implementations? Do we have, in works from An Ethics of Sexual Difference to, say, Being Two, a vision of what another psychoanalytic thought would be, one that might begin from an Irigarayan understanding of sexual difference as necessary to, indeed constitutive of, any ethics? Can psychoanalysis listen productively to philosophical work on sexual difference? Has it? Is there, in short, a psychoanalysis yet to come (already happening?) for Irigaray’s thought of sexual difference?
