School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    The Secret Object of Sacrifice after Luce Irigaray
    Birch, Eva ( 2019)
    This thesis studies the concept of “new sacrifice” in the work of Luce Irigaray. According to Irigaray, the patriarchal order is founded on the masculine subject’s hidden sacrifice of the woman-object—the secret object of sacrifice. She proposes that the emergence of a new sacrificial order requires the formation of a new sociality and economy, one which sacrifices the patriarchal order and in turn allows for the cultivation of the feminine. Critics argue that Irigaray’s vision is utopian and that she does not clarify the way in which a new sacrificial—theorists also use the word “nonsacrificial,” however for this thesis I use Irigaray’s own phrase “new sacrifice”—order may emerge. I argue that Irigaray’s account of a new sacrificial process of becoming occurs through a mystical encounter with abjection, where the object becomes (a new kind of) subject. To support this argument I turn to Kristeva’s theory of abjection, and Moten’s theory of Blackness in the preliminary chapters of this thesis. The differences and similarities between the work of these theorists and that of Irigaray allow me to identify a latency in Irigaray’s work in regard to the secret object of sacrifice, its transformation, and the emergence of a new sacrificial order. After comparing philosophical texts, I apply the theory I have developed to literature and film texts.