Throughout the history of philosophy and feminist theory, the subject has been viewed as being asexuate. Whether figured as the thinking “I” of metaphysics, disembodied and characterized by its nonsensuous and neutered nature, or more recently as the deconstructed “subject”, overdetermined by power-laden discourses, the subject has been consistently understood as sexuately neutral. This asexuate subjectivity has been presumed to condition any and all our sexuate experiences or identifications, and so sexuation has been consistently positioned “downstream” of the subject as one of its many constructions, whether the subject is conceived as a collection of innate ideal capacities given by God or nature, or as an empty form resulting from relational matrices that precede it. 

My thesis claims that Irigaray’s oeuvre conversely considers the subject to be fundamentally sexuate, where sexuation precedes and conditions subjectivity. This claim is antinomic to the philosophical tradition: whilst philosophy of the subject has proceeded from the axiom that the subject is the condition of the sexuate, for Irigaray, sexuation predetermines the subject. Through this inversion, Irigaray’s theory of the sexuation of the subject compels philosophy to radically confront and revise the basic premises of not only metaphysics, but those of the post-metaphysical deconstructivist traditions as well, all of them maintaining that subjectivity precedes and conditions sexuation. My thesis follows Irigaray’s project relating to the reversal of the priority of the subject over sexuation, and I argue that key misunderstandings regarding her work arise from the difficulty in perceiving this shift of perspective. 

Irigaray’s way of conceiving of the sexuate far exceeds the traditional concepts of sex and gender. As there is no subject who is not embodied, and there is no body which is not naturally sexuate, for Irigaray the subject is always necessarily sexuate. In Irigaray’s writing, sexuation qua sexuate difference and the sensitive mediations concerning the sexuate body represents a fundamental effect and condition of physical but also spiritual human life. As such, any thinking I, as a locus of agency or forces in the person, or any set of cognitive capacities that are taken to be independent of sexuate impact amount to theoretical abstractions that neglect to acknowledge sexuation as an irreducible determination of our being. 

Though Irigaray’s logic has been seen as essentialist by some feminist theoreticians, I argue that her way of conceiving the subject as sexuate questions the foundational parameters of essentialism. Indeed, to claim that the subject is always already sexuate is to claim that the subject is always physically determined in a particular way and that at least two different subjects exist who cannot be subjected to a single ideal of subjectivity. By considering sexuation to be original, Irigaray inaugurates a different way of conceiving of and modeling the human being,  one wherein attributes that define the human species can never be unique and the same for all. 

My thesis also examines Irigaray’s thought in relation to Anglophone feminist theoretical approaches to the subject and the problem of essentialism which entail a very different kind of difference from the one proposed by Irigaray’s theory of the sexuate subject. Since the mid 1980s feminist theory has largely adopted relational and deconstructive accounts of the subject from the poststructuralist tradition, where the apparently self-same subject of essentialist humanism is theorized to be an effect of a constitutive multiplicity that constructs the subject from without. Thereby the subject is understood not in terms of an innate set of capacities which comprise the locus of agency and identity, but this apparent foundation of the person is rather claimed to be an effect of multiple forces of subjection located outside the subject. This notion of the subject is crucial for Judith Butler, for whom the subject amounts to an intersectional composite of multiple vectors of power iteratively produced and performatively naturalised. Butler’s performatively constituted subject is engaged in a continuous process of negotiating a contingent gender identity, which can only be realized in relation to historical and cultural discourses. 

Yet I argue that from an Irigarayan perspective, this notion of constitutive difference as multiplicity stays within the logic of the old privilege of the  One. While Irigaray’s “sexuate difference” foregrounds a difference of/between at least two naturally different living beings, Butler’s “gender” returns feminist theory back to an economy of the One, to a unitary field in which power relations that constitute gendered subjects play out. From this perspective, Butler’s subjectivity, even though it is considered to be irreducibly multiple, is conceived according to a single model that establishes the place of the convergence of multiple forces that produce a particular way of becoming gendered. All subjects are to be understood in this way for Butler. In Butler’s account, there is no basic difference between subjects—the presumed essentialism is merely replaced with a lack of foundation due to an irreducible multiplicity, and the shaping of/by difference through which the subject is determined turns out to be no difference at all. Whilst Butler’s subject remains a singular subject of gender, Irigaray’s subject is always structured by at least two, defined by the existence of a sexuate difference that itself determines subjectivity without its possible cancellation by the subject. 

From an Irigarayan perspective, both the essentialist and deconstructionist models of the subject share an epistemology in which sameness is taken to constitute, in the last instance, differences of and between living beings. It is this kind of subjective constitution that, for Irigaray, is a crucial error and has significant consequences for cultural development and its aptitude for cultivating and caring for human and nonhuman life. The manner in which we figure the relations between the sexuate body and the thinking, speaking and acting “subject” conditions how difference as such is perceived and, therefore, has a decisive impact on the way we use and value difference regarding nature – a skill whose effects have a decisive impact on our personal and collective future. My thesis argues that in asserting that sexuation precedes subjectivity, Irigaray suggests a radically new mode of establishing an epistemological, ontological and ethical framework that preserves the material and sensuous conditions of life. And, far from merely naturalizing contingent social forces, Irigaray’s conception of the subject as sexuate favors a way of being that safeguards the condition of possible subjective freedom—care of material belonging and the world.