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Irigaray's Erotic Ontology
Hillary L. Chute
Rutgers University
Kinny8@hotmail.com
(c) 2004 Hillary L. Chute.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to
Community. New York: Columbia UP, 2002.
1. Many contemporary feminist thinkers reject the
accusation, most forcefully leveled by Monique Plaza in 1978,
that Luce Irigaray's theories of the feminine are naturalist.
Irigaray's conception of "the feminine" is hardly biological,
but rather an "interrogative mood," writes Meaghan Morris,
coming to her defense in 1978; Morris imagined the iconoclastic
philosopher lingering in a doorway, an ironic "recalcitrant
outsider at the festival of feminine specificity" (64).
Irigaray's lasting radical concepts, including the "two lips,"
which posits a feminist economy of knowledge production--chains
of speaking in which no one ever speaks the final word--have
invigorated feminist philosophy in both esoteric and popular
milieus, as the resurgence of Irigaray's reputation in academia
in the 1990s and her influence on the grassroots theorizing of
the recent Riot Girl movement confirm. A special issue of
Diacritics in 1998, with titles like "Toward a Radical Female
Imaginary: Temporality and Embodiment in Irigaray's Ethics" and
"Women on the Global Market: Irigaray and the Democratic
State," attests to the fact that Irigaray, once unfortunately
unfashionable among U.S. feminists, still provokes and compels
some thirty years after she transformed the feminist critical
landscape with her second doctoral thesis, which became one of
her most important books, The Speculum of the Other Woman.
2. In one of the most inspiring grapplings with Irigaray's
work, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction,
and the Law (1991; 1999), Drucilla Cornell rejects any notion
that Irigaray's "feminine" can be mapped onto femaleness, or
even that it describes something that exists in reality.
Rather, Cornell explains, the feminine is "a kind of radical
otherness to any conception of the real."[1] Cornell
persuasively describes Irigaray's category of the "feminine" as
a space of the prospective, a conditional tense that
inaugurates a certain future within language and within
intelligibility. The fears in U.S. feminist academic circles
(much less acute abroad) of what was seen as Irigaray's
essentialism now tell us more about the exigencies of backlash
provoked by poststructuralism than about the real nature of
Irigaray's work. For, again to quote Morris, in fact "Luce
Irigaray is very far from confusing the anatomical and the
social, but works with a deadly deliberation on the point (the
site and the purpose) of the confusion of anatomical and
cultural" (64).
3. Now that the polemic of essentialism versus
constructionism no longer dominates feminist scholarship,
contemporary critics like Cornell and others have begun to
engage Irigaray on her own terms. In her new work, Between East
and West, Irigaray continues to do what she's always done:
interrogate the binaries of Western metaphysics, question what
passes as normative rationality, insist on sexual difference as
the impetus for the ethical apprehension of the Other. But here
she also moves beyond the "feminine" as a critical space of
possibility, to talk about actual breathing, stretching,
orgasmic female bodies.
4. In this addition to Columbia University Press's "European
Perspectives" series, Irigaray's tone is open, appraising--
lacking the charged, tricky edge of "loyalty and aggression,"
to use Judith Butler's phrase, that characterizes her early,
furious outfoxings of Plato and Freud (19). Here she dispatches
the Pope with two words--"nave paganism"--and takes a mere
snip at deconstruction, identifying its practitioner's
virtuosity with a too "secular manner of know-how" and hence
with Western man's domination of nature: "does not the
technical cleverness of the deconstructor risk accelerating,
without possible check or alternative, a process that appears
henceforth almost inevitable?" (5). In Between East and West,
Irigaray has herself abandoned some of this "technical
cleverness" and with it too the anger that fueled her first
dizzying displays of critical prowess. Here, Irigaray is once
more focused intently on what Morris admiringly identified as
writing the "elsewhere." Like Cornell, her American colleague
in philosophy, Irigaray is "dreaming of the new"--what she
calls "human becoming"--but her dominant mood is one of sadness
for an entire civilization gone astray: "we are to have become
at best objects of study. Like the whole living world,
destroyed little by little by the exploration-exploitation of
what it is instead of cultivating what it could become" (85,
vii).
5. Searching for a different way to "constitute the mental,"
Irigaray diagnoses our current condition as breathing badly: we
are "bathing in a sort of socio-cultural placenta" of exhaled,
already-used air (74). Yet when it comes down to it, Irigaray
is not simply employing a pretty metaphor. Literal breathing
is, she believes, a way out of the potential pitfalls of the
"linguistic turn":
We Westerners believe that the essential part of culture
resides in words, in texts, or perhaps in works of art, and
that physical exercise should help us to dedicate ourselves to
this essential. For the masters of the East, the body itself
can become spirit through the cultivation of breathing. Without
doubt, at the origin of our tradition--for Aristotle, for
example, and still more for Empedocles--the soul still seems
related to the breath, to air. But the link between the two was
then forgotten, particularly in philosophy. The soul, or what
takes its place, has become the effect of conceptualizations
and of representations and not the result of a practice of
breathing. (7)
6. To cultivate the kind of consciousness needed to be aware
of breathing--and different, gendered modes of breathing--would
constitute a re-education of the body, a spiritualization of
the body in the present tense that Western metaphysical
tradition, with its emphasis on divine, inaccessible
transcendence, has occluded. In the Western framework, the
possibility of the very "divine" character of sexual difference
itself falls by the wayside. This metaphysics, Irigaray argues,
has sacrificed the pleasures of the spiritualized, individuated
body by focusing on the fruits of reproductive intelligence,
both literal and figurative: "man essentially wants to
reproduce [...] [He] gives birth to imaginary children.
Philosophy and religion are two of them," she quips (26).
7. Irigaray turns to the traditions of India to present a
model of a different kind of plenitude, one radically different
from Schopenhauer's schema of the "genius of the species," in
which "love between lovers represents nothing but an
irresistible reproductive attraction. [...] as individuals, the
lovers do not exist. [...]. They are differentiated only by the
hierarchy of natural functions" (25). India, Irigaray muses,
has a philosophy of sexual difference with no separation of
theory and practice, where the continuity between microcosm
(the body) and macrocosm (the universe) ensures an ethic of
caring about "the maintenance of the life of the universe and
[...] body as cosmic nature" (31).
8. Where is Irigaray going with all this? One of her primary
targets is the too-abstract nature of Western culture.
Attention to the body demands a practice and a framework of
intention, the goal being an "accomplished" and "connected"
interiority (the Hindus, she writes, worship individuation as
body, as self, but not as ego--unlike the egological
Schopenhauer). Our reigning ethos is too speculative,
sociological, she wagers; it has run away from--but needs
desperately to return to--consideration and cultivation of
sensory perceptions.
9. Irigaray takes this moment, before bemoaning the fact
that "the majority of animals have erotic displays that we no
longer even have," to interject an intriguing, if brief,
narrative of her own (ontological and psychoanalytic)
education:
It has often been said to me that I should have conquered my
body, that I should have subjected it to spirit. The
development of spirit was presented to me in the form of
philosophical or religious texts, of abstract imperatives, of
(an) absent God(s), at best of politeness and love. But why
could love not come about in the respect and cultivation of
my/our bodies? It seems to me this dimension of human
development is indispensable. (61)
10. This brings us to the aspect of the book that stands out
the most: its powerful obsession with Eros. This direction in
Irigaray's work has always distinguished her enterprise and is
perhaps responsible for the renewed respectful attention to
even her earliest theorizations of the body. Irigaray's most
fervent argument here is for the creative--but not necessarily
procreative--integrity of what she memorably names "carnal
sharing." Irigaray goes further here in specifying the
parameters and contours of "the carnal" than do other feminist
theorists. Cornell, for instance, advocates but never actually
details a "carnal ethics" in Beyond Accommodation (in which the
concept is her shorthand for taking the body, and the Other,
seriously).
11. Irigaray's focus on the carnal emphasizes that carnal
union can be a privileged place of individuation, an engaged
practice even more rigorous than the renunciation of the flesh.
The body, then, is the "very site" where the spiritual gets
built. To put it baldly, "men and women have something besides
children to engender" (64). This is not merely what Fredric
Jameson terms Molly Bloom's sensual, affirmative "vitalist
ideology," but rather "an evolved, transmuted, transfigured
corporeal" (63). Here sexual difference, manifest in the
physical union of bodies, provides a fabric for a type of
transcendence that Irigaray theorizes as productively
"horizontal," in contradistinction to the genealogical
transcendence outlined by Schopenhauer.
12. Sexual energy is often sinfully paralyzed in regimes of
knowledge--even leftist or feminist ones--and it is equally
stagnant under postmodernity's "technical chains" and
multiplicity of information that theorists like Jameson and
David Harvey analyze. Irigaray exhorts the postmodern subject
to revolt against all that produces obeisance ("abandon the
clarity of judgement!" she demands), even obeisant patterns of
breathing (116). "The flesh," then, can become both spirit and
"soul" (conceived as a force animating the body), thanks to the
conscious physical machinations of the body. Irigaray sees the
body registering shades of non-compliance to metaphysical
strictures and thought patterns. A new sexuality invested with
mystery works against the idea that sex is a base "corporeal
particularity," yet Irigaray desires an erotic ontology of
sexual difference whose foundations are not solely in the
abstract. Here Irigaray's focus is on the bridge that real
bodies create--not on the theoretical "elsewhere" in language
that the "feminine" once seemed to powerfully indicate
(escaping the tyranny of logos, in fact, is a recurring theme).
13. Unfortunately, however, unlike in her earlier work, here
Irigaray's rhetoric--while grand and even gorgeous--often slips
into the "vive la difference" or even the "opposites attract"
approach that for years feminists have understandably been
writing past: "what attracts men and women to each other,
beyond the simple corporeal difference, is a difference of
subjectivity" (84). It is further disconcerting, then, when she
also declares, "love, including carnal love, becomes the
construction of a new human identity through that basic unit of
community: the relation between man and woman" (117, emphasis
mine). She also proposes legislation to "protect [...] the
difference between subjects, particularly the difference of
gender" (102).[2] Irigaray's stubborn insistence on restricting
her purview to the male-female dyad is unwarranted, even
willfully ignorant. That she bypasses consideration of same-sex
"unions," spiritual or physical or legal, even in her chapter
devoted to mixite, the "mixing" up of the normative family as a
principle for refounding community, is a central weakness of
this text. While she speaks of multiracial and, more broadly,
of "multicultural" and mixed-religion couples, and of family
"mutations" as a factor of progress, never does she so much as
mention a gay family or how, on a basic theoretical level,
carnal sharing between people of the same sex might challenge
or transvalue her ethic of sexual difference, the dialectic
between two gendered consciousnesses that she views as a
bedrock of culture. Her conceptualization of a solution to the
dilemma of subjectivity and community--that "being I" and
"being we" become instead simply "beings-in-relation" (yet with
"I" and "you" still individuated, singular)--is seductive, but
her strong emphasis on the relation between the genders as "the
privileged place for the creation of horizontal relations"
leaves much unanswered. Carnal love, Irigaray strongly suggests
(and her prose, dotted with metaphors of openings, elevations,
and ladders, affirms) is vaginal sex.
14. Generalizations about men and women abound; Irigaray
flies in the face of poststructuralist doxa. Sometimes this is
refreshing, an invocation of political common sense, as when
she snaps, "the corporeal and spiritual experience of woman is
singular, and what she can teach of it to her daughter and to
her son is not the same. To efface this contribution of the
transmission of culture is to falsify its truth and value"
(59). But when Irigaray issues such proclamations as, "woman
also remains in greater harmony with the cosmos" and ascribes--
much like Carol Gilligan did in her seminal, roundly criticized
A Different Voice (1982)--a relational ontology to woman, one
begins to suspect that she is idealizing: "woman has, from her
birth, an almost spontaneous taste for relational life" (85,
87). The list of woman's attributes goes on along these lines,
though Irigaray is careful, in drawing in part on Eastern
feminine traditions for inspiration, to make clear that she is
not invoking the maternal; in fact, as she states rather
frankly, "the role of woman as lover is in some ways superior
and more inclusive compared with that of the mother" (89).
15. Yet in Irigaray's most recent schema, what is finally
most frustrating about her fascinating and provocative vision
of mental, spiritual, and physical erotic production is that
women bear the burden of educating men. Ethics, Irigaray points
out, differ for men and women; but while Gilligan, and Seyla
Benhabib most notably after her, aimed to revise the
dichotomies structuring this perceived enculturated difference,
Irigaray seems only to substitute the physical for the numinous
with the idea of the "spiritual virginity of woman," a quality
that helps man discover relational life. Hence, women must
teach men to breathe not only for the sake of male survival,
but also to cultivate men's interior vitality (88). The thought
that woman must spiritually give birth to already-adult men is
unappealing, to say the least; yet woman must also "initiate"
and "safeguard" the process of education (130). To put it
simply, compared to men, women have a markedly spiritual role
in furthering humanity. Irigaray's rallying call is as follows:
The task is great, yet passionate and beautiful. It is
indispensable for the liberation of women themselves and, more
generally, for a culture of life and love. It requires
patience, perseverance, faithfulness to self and to the other.
Women are often lacking these virtues today. But why not
acquire them? (91)
To use Irigaray's own language (from her description of Brahma,
the Indian god), women's genius is not to know everything, but
to be capable of one more question.
16. Resolutely diagnosing Western civilization and seeing
that we are, at best, as Irigaray puts it, sometimes good
patriarchs or good matriarchs, Irigaray posits the goal of
establishing a global civil community--and especially an as-
yet-unrealized civil identity in the feminine. It is not enough
to criticize patriarchy, she correctly observes. Women need to
be aware of themselves as women, letting go of fundamentally
conservative models of substantive equality and pursuing an
ethics of carnality that surpasses instinct, the urge to
procreate, in favor of a disciplined and rewarding "becoming
without an end" (99). Irigaray calmly offers options for this
"new epoch of History," affirming her hopeful belief in
"tranquil world revolution" (145).
17. Irigaray's argument and the strategy for civil identity
that she describes are both deeply compelling and deeply
flawed. What is viable here is Irigaray's evaluation of the
erotic as a political foundation for subjectivity and the
social. Serious and vital, Irigaray's critical attention to the
erotic--not just as "philosophy," but as the sensible--
skillfully connects Eros with ethical community-building and
carries much power. Her ongoing and adamant focus on the
erotic--ongoing since she unforgettably announced that women's
desire "upsets the linearity of a project, undermines the goal-
object of desire, diffuses the polarization toward a single
pleasure, [and] disconcerts fidelity to a single discourse" in
"This Sex Which is Not One"--remains Irigaray's outstanding
achievement (27). The major--and riveting--contribution of
Between East and West is that her relational ontology is
specifically premised on an expansive erotic ontology, and this
locus allows Irigaray to make her most provocative statements.
Her privileging of individuated sexual "becoming" between
lovers over motherhood in the chapter "The Family Begins With
Two," for instance, is still indubitably radical. For many in
the academy and in spaces of activism alike (and this is
especially the case for the new generation of young feminists),
Irigaray remains the most moving and articulate theorist of the
body's relation to the horizon of the political.
18. Ultimately, however, much of what Irigaray outlines in
this new work is problematic. She is, as she has always been,
frustrating. This is part of her continuing appeal, her bid for
us to engage. "The path of such accomplishment of the flesh
does not correspond to a solipsistic dream of Luce Irigaray,
nor to a fin-de-sirealized by humanity," she reminds us (115).
It is not the commanding, exalted language, threaded with hope,
that is objectionable. It is rather that Irigaray, in focusing
solely on the generative force of sexual alliances between men
and women, boldly ignores myriad portions of this resurgent
"humanity" and the question of how they fit into her plan for
the future. Irigaray consistently writes of "the union of two
lovers, man and woman, free with respect to genealogy"; of how
"between these two subjects, man and woman, there takes place
[...] a spiritual generation, a culture foreign to a unique
objective and a unique absolute" (63, 100). She notes--and
casually dismisses--other possibilities, as when she writes of
her hope for a refigured concept of the familial: "a family is
born when two persons, most generally a man and a woman, decide
to live together" (105, emphasis mine).
19. Hence this brilliant and difficult philosopher ends an
essentially fascinating text with what feels like voluntary
obliquity. The stubbornness of this narrow vision is all the
more confounding because Irigaray's proposals--her championing
of the nonreproductive family, for instance, and her order for
women to "pass from [...] imposed natural identity"--would seem
to lend themselves to a more inclusive theory of sexuality
(112). In this disappointing adoption, late in her career, of
what strikes me as an inadequate (and yet surely self-aware)
romance of gender, Irigaray is not alone: fellow French
feminist Julia Kristeva's Revolt, She Said (also published in
2002) smacks of the same. As interviewer Phillipe Petit remarks
to Kristeva in this book, "what is difficult to understand with
you is the type of place you reserve for men and women
in heterosexual couples" (93).[3] The force of Irigaray's
argument would only be strengthened by a discussion of carnal
sharing outside of the male-female dyad. If she further
addressed the modes of love and union that her gender-charged
"sexual difference in the feminine" does not furnish, her model
would be even more relevant.
Department of English
Rutgers University
Kinny8@hotmail.com
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Notes
1. See Cheah and Grosz for Cornell's retrospective elaboration
of her views of "the feminine" in Beyond Accommodation. The
"imaginary domain" is the concept Cornell now prefers in place
of the Irigarayan feminine.
2. The content of this proposed legislation isn't surprising,
given the fact that Irigaray has addressed certain questions of
"sexuate rights" to the UN, for example, as Elizabeth Grosz
points out, and has touched on this in recent work. See Pheng
and Grosz.
3. Kristeva's response to Petit is vague, describing the
"endemic and deep" feminine melancholia that is the result of
woman's relationship to the social order and indicating that
"[balancing] out this strangeness" requires economic
independence, as well as psychic and existential reassurance in
which "husbands and lovers try to offset the Bovary blues that
affect most of us." Unlike Irigaray, Kristeva here posits the
primary role of the child: for woman, "it's the child who is
the real presence and becomes her permanent analyst." Like
Irigaray, Kristeva believes that "women hold the key to the
species on the condition that they share it with men" (94).
Works Cited
Cheah, Pheng, and Elizabeth Grosz. "The Future of Sexual
Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla
Cornell." Diacritics 28.1 (1998): 19-42.
Irigaray, Luce. "This Sex Which Is Not One." This Sex Which Is
Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1985.
Kristeva, Julia. Revolt, She Said. Trans. Brian O'Keeffe. New
York: Semiotext(e), 2002.
Morris, Meaghan. "The Pirate's Fiancee: Feminists and
Philosophers, or maybe tonight it'll happen." The Pirate's
Fiancee: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism. London: Verso, 1988.
Plaza, Monique. "'Phallomorphic Power' and the Psychology of
'Woman.'" Ideology and Consciousness 4 (1978): 4-36.
