 As Butler points out, Luce Irigaray (1985) complicates matters further. Here Irigaray’s reference is de Beauvoir’s claim that a woman “is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other” (1953, 13). De Beauvoir insists that there is no time in history in which women were not the Other: men are always the One and women are always the Other. Moreover, as the Other, they live only in relation to the One and have no free human existence or subjectivity on their own. They occupy space in a man’s world only as relative and inessential aspects of it. Yet Irigaray explains that if women are the Other to men they cannot be defined independently of a definition of men. To define women as the Other of men is to articulate their identity within a vocabulary that takes men as its norm. But if they cannot be defined independently of men, how are they be Other from them? If women can be articulated only within a male-normed language, then language cannot get at their otherness at all. They are always, instead, part of a language system expressing the One. The “exclusion” of women, Irigaray writes, “is internal to an order from which nothing escapes: the order of (man’s) discourse. To the objection that this discourse is perhaps not all there is, the response will be that it is women who are ‘not-all’” (1985, 88). Julia Kristeva agrees. “A woman cannot be,” she writes. “It is something which does not even belong in the order of being” (1981, 137). If women disappear into various nodes of intersectionality in the analytic tradition, in the continental they cannot be thought in the first place. 