Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)

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Burn the Panopticon: Irigaray's Ethics, Difference, Poetics / Simone Roberts

PROLOGUE: The following essay has a purpose more than a thesis. This essay explains the central tenets of Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference through an understanding her work as that of a "symbolist philosopher." Symbolist poetry and French Feminist philosophy like Irigaray's have several qualities in common. One is that the literal level of language is not where the action is. A reader must think associatively on many levels at once in order to gather and interpret the several indirect messages sent by a particular image or metaphor. Another is an acquired comfort with paradox. Paradoxes lie at the heart of Irigaray's ethics; hers is most strenuously a both-and logic: both the body and mind must be honored, both men and women must honored; both the physical world and the spiritual world… The kicker is that while each of these terms retains its own identity and characteristics, they are also meshed in important ways. The spiritual world is (in, part of, manifests through) the sensible or physical world. This seems like a paradox, and if it is, it is not one that we are to resolve in favor of one term or the other. Irigaray's philosophy of the sexes and her ethics are both heavily influenced by Tantric philosophies, in which paradoxes are taken as a sign of truth. A symbolist, quasi-deconstructive sort of truth, granted. An additional aspect of Irigaray's thought is that she is often discussing her ideas on several levels simultaneously: at the level of the gendered person her and himself; at the level of gender as a cultural phenomena with a history; at the level of culture as a set of aesthetic and philosophical products; and at the level society as a set of laws and practices. Only a condensed or symbolist style could accomplish such a multi-leveled discussion with any elegance. This essay teases out each of those levels of meaning at work in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. It also argues that an ethics of difference, and a poetics to support it, are needed in order to move the course of history in a more fruitful and fecund direction.

Section by section, this essay examines and explores the key terms and principles of Irigaray's ethics. Those terms are: Diotiman relation, place, envelope, mucous, sensible transcendental, angel, wonder, and poet. Simultaneously, the essay builds from those terms toward a culminating explanation of Irigaray's theory of the poetic subject (the poet, but also the voice speaking in a poem) that may stand as the basis for a more general aesthetics of sexual difference. The poetic subject is a kind of ideal subjectivity, or sense of selfhood and attitude toward the world. If Irigaray's call for a culture of sexual difference (a culture and society that honor men and women in their specific characters and in relation to each other on all levels) is to be fully answered, then an aesthetics to accompany, explore, and support that culture will have to grow up with it.

The ultimate purpose of this essay is to propose the beginning of such an aesthetic by describing the ideal subjectivity, the kind of self and attitude that humans will need in order move into the adventure of a new way of living. The argument at the beginning of the essay that Humanists of all stripes need to move from the critical to the creative in our thinking is just the opening gambit in that adventure.

Stylistically, this essay asks some patience of the reader. The thinking I do here takes place in a series of related paradoxes (those terms listed in the previous paragraph), and writing inside of a paradox does not lend itself to journalistic clarity. The style is lyrical and philosophical; moreover, it is close to the style of some post-structural thinkers. One of the frustrating qualities of those thinkers (Kristeva, Derrida, Irigaray) is that their style is often performative: they do in their style what they are discussing in the content of their ideas. The lyrical-philosophical style of this essay, then, is the stylistic correlate of the paradoxes I am both explaining and using in the essay. I have tried to flush out and clarify as many of the really knotty moments as possible. For the remaining failures, I can only ask a reader's patience and forgiveness. Each section of the essay is headed up by its own short prologue connecting the sections to the purpose of the essay and to each other so that the reader may come and go at her or his leisure in the reading.

SOME NEOLOGISMS: Most of the terminology in this essay derives from Irigaray's work, from the history of ideas she engages, or from literary studies and critical theory. However, I have created a few that seem to resonate with Irigaray's ethics and that play with some of those terms. "Subject-self" is a play on the Lacanian subject, the subject of the linguistic and psychoanalytic turns, which is a kind of crippled monad, mired in discourse. In my thinking, discourse is one mode of our existence and world, but not the whole thing. There is a Real out there, and it begins in our bodies, and extends to the physical substance of the universe and spirit itself – it's all made of the same stuff. The subject-self is a term created to remind readers that without selves (minds and bodies) there are no subjects. "Other-subject," in a similar vein, is a term meant to point up the other's subjectivity, that the other too is a self, endowed with agency and reason and body and spirit, not an object on a par with other commodities. "For-me" and "For-you" are terms that describe the traditional subject's view of the world and the other as existing "for-me" and more or less as an object for my use. They are both plays on Hegel's "for-itself" or "in-itself" describing Spirit's modes of relation to the world.

1. Opening Gestures

Separation does not exclude relation, nor vice versa. It is only as something strange, forbidden, as something free, that the other is revealed as an other. And to love him genuinely is to love him in his otherness and in that freedom by which he escapes. Love is then renunciation of all possession, of all confusion.

-- Simone De Beauvoir,
The Ethics of Ambiguity

<1> The customary gesture in academic work is progress by critique (or attack,) forward motion by negative gestures, discovery of short-comings in the works of other academics. This critical method is essential to refining accuracy in our perceptions and interpretations. Since the explosion of structuralist and post-structuralist theories on the scene of American academe, our central business has been the questioning and criticism of nearly all the assumptions and blind-spots of our Enlightenment-Humanist traditions to date. That work has been and still is necessary because such deep assumptions are difficult to dislodge in the actual culture. In the cooler afterglow of the PoMo Big Bang, however, I believe that another gesture is necessary. That gesture should be a compliment to critical and questioning efforts -- a creative gesture. These creative gestures should be informed by the critical mode, work in tandem with it, but should build on the revolutionary and liberating strengths to be found in those theories, in our several cultures, in people. We need a new Renaissance.

<2> We in the Humanities have, in recent years, witnessed turns toward ethics and the emotions as subjects of feminist and other academic inquiries. That impulse has also been at work in the wider culture, in the legal, theological, economic and political arenas – something is emerging now. The economic theories of Lloyd J. Dumas and legal pedagogical theory of Peter Gabel are two examples [1]. Linda Hutcheon, in the Winter 2003 issue of Common Knowledge, calls for a more cooperative scholarship than the Humanist disciplines have witnessed of late, arguing that perhaps "the creative and integrative" could become "part of the 'critical' in critical thinking, replacing demolition and enmity as key elements" (46-7). Agreeing with the journal's editor Jeffrey Perl that "Knocking our heads together seems an unobvious route to enlightenment," she reminds us that one of the laudable lessons of postmodernity is the possibility of a "'climate of positive copresence'" and the advantages of both/and logic (47). "True intellectual debate," she reminds, "is not a matter of protecting vested interests and must involve better than search and destroy missions" (46). I work "under the influence" of Irigaray's theories of sexual difference and mutual fecundation --one manifestation of this cooperative, imaginative, creatively critical trend – so this essay will work in tandem with Irigaray's own work and that of others. Combat, if it belongs anywhere, belongs in a context other than a discussion of a theorist whose work is to further enlighten humanity to its own promise.

<3> Irigaray's work on ethics and love is one of the strong and compelling syntheses of these new turns toward ethics and emotions as objects of study in the Humanities. Controversial as Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference and work on love have been for feminists and non-feminists alike, I seek here to make one of those creative gestures, to build on her theories in order to provide something she has called for: a new principle for poetics. This new poetics requires a subjective and intersubjective shift, a reprioritization one might say, that implies and opens up an under-explored cultural and historical vista, and a new philosophy of poetry.

<4> In The Labyrinth of Solitude , Octavio Paz states part of the historical problem from which we might emerge:

Women are imprisoned in the image masculine society has imposed on them: therefore, if they attempt a free choice it must be a kind of jailbreak. Lovers say that "love has transformed her, it has made her a different person." And they are right. Love changes a woman completely. If she dares to love, if she dares to be herself, she has to destroy the image in which the world has imprisoned her. (198)

Love is the medium in which one becomes authentic, unencumbered by the playacting of roles. The feminine subject-self is/has been covered over with a plethora of projections unknown for/to herself. Love is freedom, but also dangerous, hard w-o-r-k. She must dare to be herself, and that dare, that venture, destabilizes the other subject, the masculine subject, on several levels. One of them is the tradition of venerating the Beloved, the tradition of the troubadour and the chaste, perfect, unattainable woman-object that extends on, in one case, to the romantic, but destructive, adoration of Sacher Masohc's Venus in Furs. Another is well described, if in the heights of abstraction, by Lévinas where in carnal contact with the beloved destroys his subjectivity, his ethical significance, and reveals her to be "childlike, condemned to animality, and disturbingly silent," or in Lévinas's terms, "ultramaterial" (Walsh para. 5) [2]. In patriarchy, the jail woman finds herself in, regardless of the formula, the one thing she cannot be is herself -- or even human, really. This jail is harmful to masculine subjects as well – as much to the privileged as to the subjugated though differently. For one, he cannot maintain his customary manner when she becomes herself, when he makes contact with her carnality and his own, never mind contact with her divinity and his own. In the polarized world of unidirectional subjectivity, the other is a negative destabilizing force in the subject's relation with itself, its present, and its future. The situation, the prison, the Panopticon, might be figured this way:

Figure 1

The "you" doesn't do much, and what it does tends to irritate the I by disrupting plans it thinks should flow smoothly from its will into reality. When the "you" is only ambiguously an object, like another person, trouble arises that tends to resolve itself in disaster because that "you" has no life of its own in the perceptions of the I. The "you" is merely a for-me. The Diotiman relation Irigaray develops shows how such destabilization can be fundamental to intersubjectivity, which would have to run in at least two directions. Unidirectional subjects cannot break intersubjective or interpersonal relations out of jail because they refuse what the Diotiman and Tantric models allow: integration of multiplicity and reciprocity. Those modes are the blowtorch that melt bars.

<5> In Irigaray's ethics, concerned with kinds of subjectivity and being human, this integration leads neither to the old model of the subject as totalized, rational, self-contained (which never existed), nor to a simple placing of different subjects or aspects of self next to each other in a school lunch room and expecting them to "just get along" (which never happens). Taking love and fecundity as the basis and goal of ethics, Irigaray's transvaluation of subjectivity and being human is far subtler and more demanding than merely trading punches across a sexual battlefield or an ethnic partition.

2. Diotiman Relation

PROLOGUE: In this section, I explore Irigaray's understanding of intersubjectivity, of how two subjects or selves relate to each other and to the world at large. Irigaray builds on the (abandoned) thinking of Diotima in Plato's Symposium where in Diotima explains the paradoxical nature of love to Socrates, a man who never met a paradox he liked. Love, and with it our subjective relations to each other, it turns out, is both a way of being with each other and the goal of being with each other. It is a kind of daemon, Diotima argues, an earthly and heavenly spirit or force, and can only exist in the communicative space between two complete and independent subjects or selves. This space is what Irigaray calls "the interval," and allows interrelation of two subject and selves. The interval and these relations are the base, if we can call a process a base, on which ethics stands, or in which the ethics happens.

<6> Irigaray argues for a culture and society in which a fuller, richer, more divine form of love and interaction would be possible, in which women and men would be possible as themselves. This love, in its Diotiman and Tantric forms, supports her entire ethics. In "Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato, Symposium, 'Diotima's Speech,'" Irigaray describes Diotima's dialectic:

It is love that both leads the way and is the path. A mediator par excellence [3].

At the risk of offending the practice of respect for the Gods, she also asserts that Eros is neither beautiful nor good. This leads her interlocutor to suppose immediately that Eros is ugly and bad, as he is incapable of grasping the existence or the in-stance [standing in oneself] of that which stands between, that which makes possible the passage between ignorance and knowledge….

[Between] knowledge and reality, there is an intermediary that allows for the encounter and the transmutation or transvaluation between the two. Diotima's dialectic is in at least four terms: the here, the two poles of the encounter, and the beyond – but a beyond that never abolishes the here. And so on, indefinitely. The mediator is never abolished in an infallible knowledge. Everything is always in movement, in a state of becoming. And the mediator of all this is, among other things, or exemplarily, love. Never fulfilled, always becoming. (An Ethics 21)

The usual dialectic is basically unidirectional. The other is other in part because she/it has no relation to time acknowledged by the masculine subject and its culture. The other is an animal to be domesticated; or, if recognized as an equal, considered a "hostile freedom" (Levinas' term). On the other hand, in a dialectic of four terms that accounts for the physical, temporal, and eternal dimensions of being, the process must not stop at the advantage of one of the terms: subject or other. There are, in fact, two subjects, each Other to each other. A rough diagram of this quadripartite dialectic might be:

Figure 2

Love is the "intermediary between pairs of opposites: poverty/plenty, ignorance/wisdom, ugliness/beauty," men and women, me and you (of the same gender), spirit and flesh. Each of the arrows and fields of intention they indicate is love that "leads the way and is the path" (21). When Irigaray calls for new ways of thinking and moving in the world, she calls for a total cultural shift away from control as domination. This more properly dialogic relation refuses any one term's rights or being over any other term's rights or being – it operates in what Irigaray calls a chiasmus, or double loop, and double syntax and double desire.

<7> Diotima is not the only source of this intersubjectivity. Indian Tantrism has a role here as well. Like many of the yogic systems, Tantra balances opposites, but it focuses specifically on balancing the masculine and feminine, flesh and spirit. Tantra takes as axiomatic the principle that humans embody divine being, and that their sexual union is the most direct manner by which to balance those universal forces. Tantra rejects neither flesh nor spirit, masculine nor feminine, but seeks instead to harmonize them (both figuratively and literally). Irigaray's finest summary of this dynamic is in her phrases "the word becoming flesh," and the "sensible transcendental," and "being two" [4]. From the example of Diotima's discourse and the philosophy of Tantrism, Irigaray develops a theory of dynamic intersubjectivity that grounds itself on two genders (not one and its abject opposite). A culture that honors such balance requires a poetics in accord with this new being two. The pathological (im)balance between the masculine and the feminine in patriarchal or masculinist culture must shift in order for an ethics of sexual difference to begin to manifest. The changes need to occur at both the personal-subjective and the cultural-social levels. The Tantric system subtending Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference provides a rich set of metaphors for intersubjectivity that function as one possible guide for the development of "new" intersubjective relations, new ethics, and a new poetics in which to develop and express them [5]. There is no creative risk to be had without both of us becoming in a fuller and more intentional way.

<8> The multi-tiered image of the Tantric masculine and feminine self, combined with a Diotiman dialectic, offers a not-new metaphor for masculine and feminine subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In Tantra, as in an ethics of sexual difference, the key elements, and main action, take place in between the subjects as acts of exchange: of breath, or words, or caresses. The trick of ethics, of course, is to leave that interval intact [6]. The Diotiman relation cannot exist without two free subjects who participate in both being and doing, are both in motion, both in relation to their own bodies, their own genealogies and divinities, their own futures, and their own transcendences. At the level of selves this requires, as Irigaray has written, that each woman must take on her struggle right where she is, in her social context, her life and relationships. The moves required for her and by her cannot be dictated at the level of theory, but only articulated at the level of her practice, her living. The same is true for men. At the level of culture, Irigaray intends no global project, no drive to a single utopia. The changes Irigaray would seek socially would have to be "organically" and voluntarily integrated into cultures by men and women of those cultures and on their own terms. There is, after all, more than one "way" to be an American, or a Baptist, or a feminist, or a Muslim. Men need this sense of depth and location as well: their genealogies will need rethinking in relation to these developing partners. Subjects in such a relation would be involved in a complete transvaluation of sexual difference. This relation is not one with a (selfish) tautological goal, however. As with touch, there should be as little (selfish) calculation in the relation as possible. The relation should be like a matrix of project-lives moving in time. The Diotiman relation sides with the language of multiplicity and accident, with a "messier" understanding of progress. This is not to say that one engages life haphazardly, or engages one's other-subject with no intentions at all. It means that one engages both in a posture of cooperation, of flexibility, of being prepared to be surprised, criticized, questioned, challenged, and well met: one practices wonder.

3. Symbolist Philosopher

PROLOGUE: In this section, we pause to explain the qualities of symbolist poetics through the example of Mallarmé's work, to show how Irigaray's style and method share deeply in those qualities. This section also hints at the poetics to be discussed later in the essay, which is developed from Irigaray's re-writing of Heidegger's "What Are Poets For?" In that essay, Heidegger offers his engagement with Rilke. Mallarmé and Rilke are the symbolist poets par excellence.

<9> Every revolution has its philosophers and poets. Irigaray is conscious of her work as part of a revolution, as perhaps inciting it. Even as a revolutionary, she is the inheritor of a tradition to which she is faithful, in this case the Symbolist tradition in Europe. Her writing partakes of both philosophical and symbolic rhetorics and methods, so understanding a number of symbolic images, as such, in Irigaray's work can shed light on the texture of a Diotiman relation between subjects, on the not-quite middle voiced aspects of an ethical subjectivity, on wonder, as well as on the sorts of poetics an ethics of sexual difference and an acceptance of a sensible transcendental might imply. They all have one common denominator: in some way they are all symbols of limninality, of mid-ness, of approach, of a kind of ambiguity, but never possession or "knowledge."

<10> In a Diotiman relation of practiced wonder, which eschews any desire on the part of one subject to override the desire of the other-subject, there should be no closure to the creative tension between two subjects pursuing one's own and the other's transcendence. This is why Diotima figures love, Eros, as a daemon, a go between, an inhabitant of and figure for the interval, for that which we limn. Love corresponds to angels, the agents of both the love of self and the love of the other-subject in Irigaray's ethics. Not literal angels, but angels as correlate figures for interval, mucous, touch, and the sensible transcendental, they figure the matrix of contemplative action between and within. If one of the principles of an ethics of sexual difference is to leave the other-subject "subjective, still free," then the principle action of ethical relation is that of limning, of remaining on one's side of relation and approaching the other-subject without intentions to define, confine, control, or subjugate that other-subject in one's own image or for one's own purposes. Limning allows depth to become and to be revealed by each subject-self in its own rhythm.

<11> Take the (in)famous "lips" as an example of the layers, often paradoxical layers, which let symbols of the mouth and vulva function on numerous levels simultaneously. The lips figure a complex sexuality, communication between women, the founding metaphor of a feminine-female imaginary, a symbolic system in which two is better than one (an argument with Lacan), a paradoxical metaphor and metonymy, and simply themselves in a very bodily way. I call words like "the lips" anchors; Heidegger calls them "basic words" in his discussion of Rilke. Some of Rilke's words are angel, tree, and open. They recur in numerous contexts, form nets of corresponding meanings, and take on metaphysical symbolic weight. Rilke, Heidegger argues in "What Are Poets For?," is doing philosophy in poetry. Irigaray, I claim, is using specifically Symbolist poetic methods to open philosophy to the question of sexual difference. Symbolism intends to urge the poet and the reader out of the world they know and into a completely new one of their creation. Rilke's unsayable depends on that cooperation and risk-venture from both parties.

<12> Irigaray's work for sexual difference has been called an attempt to write what is unthought. In some strands of poetry this is the goal as well, and one of the ways to indicate the unthought or the unsayable has been the use of correspondences. Anna Balakian describes the development of Symbolism in The Symbolist Movement, beginning with Baudelaire's poetics. In his (occasional) use of "indirect statement," which would later become the dominant Symbolist mode, Baudelaire exploited the "evocative power of words, the ability to confer to words themselves the power of imagery"(49). In the poetics of the next generation, words sometimes "serve as veritable objects through the multiple sensations they evoke, just as objects imply varying images, according to the eye and the memory of one who perceives them," such that "the poem becomes an enigma." The poem relies on "the multiple meanings, or indeterminacy, contained in words and objects [to make up] the mystery and the mood of the poem," allowing the "message to remain as ambiguous as it is succinct" (49). These values -- ambiguity, indirection, and multiplicity of meaning, the word as both sign and object at once -- are not those typically accepted by philosophical and critical discourse because they traditionally aim for clarity and transparency of language above all. The "trouble" is that in the thought of Irigaray and her contemporaries, these values have migrated from poetry to fiction and finally to philosophical discourse [7].

<13> In Mallarmé's poetics, the word as sign-object attains a new level in that for Mallarmé the word is also akin to a musical note, it has the kind of being of a note in that what it is on the page -- solid and permanent sign -- is not what it is in the air -- a wavering, impermanent impression which fades to be replaced in the flow of impressions. "Image," in Mallarmé's poetics, "is superimposed on image, transposed from one level to another, as from one key to another; there is a rising and an ebbing, and silences, like musical rests" [8]. Mallarmé, like Irigaray, wants the reader aware of this double status. As with music, and as with vatic poetry in general, here is longing which "measures for each reader in terms of his own private target and the distances" between her and her other-subject (Balakian 86). Where the Symbolist poetic made the vatic mode textual and musical, Irigaray makes it textual and bodily. Another approach to this style is to say that words in the symbolist mode are like bodies in Tantric practice and philosophy. They are understood and engaged as symbolic (of the gods) and ontological (as a thing) simultaneously. One of Mallarmé's "basic words," the swan, Balakian describes as ranging in meaning and affect from purity, to virginity, to emptiness, to sterility, as well as "all the nuances of the beautiful but cold void!" (104). And it is, also, "just" a swan, frozen in the ice. Eventually all things flying are brought into symbolist poetics and come to represent "emissaries between two worlds," like angels (105). In her postscript, Balakian argues that more than constructing absences, the symbolist poetic "explores worlds of the in-between, what Rilke called "Zwischenräume der Zeit" [9]. Rilke's Orpheus, she argues, is a figure for this in-between as well, "neither of this world nor of the underworld" but an emissary between them (202). In the symbols of Symbolist poetics, the objects to which words conventionally refer, the words themselves as objects, and the affective layers of the words set in play by the associative work of reading, all this allows what Paz calls "the greatest miracle, . . . that unity is attained without impairing identity" (Paz Conjunctions 8). This is also the goal of Irigaray's ethics that Tantra teaches. Irigaray's categories of the interval and the sensible transcendental, like her description of love and wonder, show how correspondence might be attained without threatening identity or integrity for one or both of the terms.

<14> To read a symbolist poem, or to read Irigaray, or Derrida, or …, to read such world shattering and jail breaking work, is to learn to read all over again. By engaging in such an opening up and confounding of the boundaries between philosophical and poetic discourses, Irigaray not only continues to operate in a paradoxical "feminine" both-and logic, but also opens room for me to move from that question to the possibility of a poetics and a mode of reading that could foster the becoming of sexual difference.

<15>In what follows, I will explicate and comment on some of Irigaray's anchor words. Together these basic words make up the spinal column of Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference, and offer the possibility of a new poetic subject [10].

4. Erotic Angels

PROLOGUE: This section offers a brief overview of the role Tantric philosophy plays in Irigaray's ethics, and expounds on the symbol of the angel as both heavenly and earthly being, an interval dweller. This short explication of the angel is a prelude to the next section on the integration and interaction of mind and body, heavenly and earthly (transcendent and sensible), and of the two "opposites" that can enact this integration: man and woman. Here, the essay also hints at the ideal of subjectivity, the poet, as an archetype that men and women can access in order to enter more respectful and fruitful personal and cultural interactions.

<16> One lesson of Tantra-as-trope and of the Diotiman relation is that "desire occupies or designates the place of the interval," a place that expands, contracts, increases and decreases in time and space; it is not a box with sides and one set of dimensions (Irigaray An Ethics 9). The interval between two subjects who take each other as subject-selves protects the possibility of double-desire which establishes a "chiasmus or a double loop in which each can go toward the other and come back to itself" (9). The interval creates and assumes the establishment in history of a "double pole of attraction and support" of both masculine and feminine subjectivities which would ensure "the separation that articulates every encounter and makes possible speech, promises, alliances" (9). As Irigaray argues in Between East and West, the masculine and men need to regain their connection to the natural and the body, while the feminine and women need to attain contact with the cultural and symbolic so that exchanges between them become more fully possible (85, 89-90). Angels are Irigaray's symbol for this double desire, this Eros; they are agents, go-betweens. The spiritual overtones are intended. Angels are transcendent with regard to humans in the traditional mythologies; they represent our limitations as earthly creatures, and they represent the better angels of our human nature. They mediate between God and humans, between masculine and feminine: "The link uniting or reuniting the masculine and the feminine must be horizontal and vertical, terrestrial and heavenly." As Irigaray writes of them, angels:

would circulate as mediators of that which has not yet happened …. Endlessly reopening the enclosure of the universe, of universes, of identities, the unfoldings of actions, of history.

The angel is that which unceasingly passes through the envelope(s) or container(s), . . . reworking every deadline, changing every decision, thwarting all repetition. Angels destroy the monstrous, …; they come to herald the arrival of a new morning.

These swift . . . messengers, who transgress all enclosures in their speed, tell of a passage between the envelope of God and that of the world as micro- or macrocosm. They proclaim that such a journey can be made by the body of man, and above all by the body of woman . . . .

A sexual or carnal ethics would require that both angel and body be found together. This is a world that must be constructed or reconstructed. A genesis of love between the sexes has yet to come about in all dimensions, from the most intimate to the most political. (An Ethics 15)

Angels symbolize the energy exchanged in Tantric sexual meditation, exchanged through caress and breath, being carnal and divine, cultural and natural, symbolic and ontological. They can be read as immanent and ubiquitous as air, or water, or food, or mucous, or eggs, or sperm, or all those substances that pass through the porous envelope of the human body which has no closure except in phantasy. It is no accident that the post-structural, deconstructive, postmodern aesthetic that informs Irigaray's ethics sides with Carole Maso's resistance to closure, favoring of disjunction, the view of closure as a prison or a monster, so unlike lived life as it is. Angels represent the attitude and action of the Diotiman relation, which is to actively relate and create exchanges between "two poles," be they men and women, self and other-subject, me and you of either and any gender, night and day, reason and emotion. In their relation to the image-symbol of the mucous and to Eros, angels symbolize the structure of an ethics of sexual difference, an always open, somewhat porous relation. In their confounding of deadlines, they disallow or de-prioritize goal-oriented relations in which the other-subject is understood as a use-object, as merely some source of pleasure for the self in a recapitulation of a master-slave relation [11]. These are relations of liminality, of limitation, of respect, and of commingling, of questioning, of spurring on. If angels can really be understood as destroying the monstrous, the dam which prevents a revolution or a transvaluation of values, then this ethics can be understood as seeking to overturn a monster: a set of cultural prejudices and blind-spots, the old stereotypes and discriminations that have simply lived beyond their time. If there is a world to be constructed on such a transvaluation, a world that might have a chance to become genuinely non-sexist and non-patriarchal, sexist men and women will have to give up those comfortable prejudices and the "rewards" that accompany them.

<17> If angels symbolize anything, they symbolize transcendence. Traditionally, transcendence only works in one direction: up. Irigaray's transcendence, however, does not imply going only up. It implies going out, over, across, toward, through, but also down so that bodies incarnate divinity. There is no up without the other-subject -- in a spiral of relation between subject-selves. Angels symbolize the divine and carnal mode of relation through the interval between. The values implied in "between" and in "wonder" are values on a human scale, concerned with human being, interested in human concern for humans. Angels as symbol, then, are bound up in a web of other "basic words" Irigaray uses, all of them pointing out one or another mode of interrelation.

5. Sensible Transcendental

PROLOGUE: This part of the essay explores or limns the several levels of meaning bound up in Irigaray's concept of the sensible transcendental. Basically, that phrase refers to the Eastern premise that the spiritual is found in the physical, that this world is not only a fallen version of paradise, but also the only world in which spirit is at work. The Hindu greeting of "namaste," for example, can loosely be translated to mean "I honor the god in you." Tantra teaches that human bodies are the vehicles (mediators) and the embodiments of masculine and feminine aspects of spirit; thus, Irigaray's idea of a carnal ethics, embodied, transcendent and sensible at once.

<18> The structure of Irigaray's ethics is one of balance and integration from the most elemental levels of caress and mucous to the most abstract levels of place and interval. None is figured as purely physical or purely abstract. All are figured as participating in and having implications for the physical, the imaginary-symbolic, the linguistic, the social and the political elements of life: symbols. Given the symbolic web Irigaray has constructed of place, interval, angels, Eros, mucous, caress, love and wonder, it is not surprising to find that all of these modes-terms-categories participate in each other while expressing or housing different aspects of self and intersubjective experience. They also all figure the abstraction "the sensible transcendental," or the human condition of in-carnating the divine, our being a locus in which the transcendent finds its presence in the immanent, the symbolic in the real. From the heights of angles, then, I move to the intermediate and most abstract of Irigaray's anchor words before descending into bodies and what they can do with each other.

<19> The most thorough critical treatment of the sensible transcendental can be found in Margaret Whitford's Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. Over the course of several chapters and approaching the concept from Irigaray's concerns with divinity, with returning through the masculine imaginary, with language as langue and parole, Whitford elaborates the sensible transcendental within her philosophic and psychoanalytic perspective. While my own focus is more concerned with the mystical, poetic and ethical sources and implications of Irigaray's work, Whitford's elaboration affords me an excellent partner with whom to build from Irigaray's ethics to a poetics supportive of sexed subjects.

<20> Whitford begins with a provisional definition. The sensible transcendental is a "vital intermediary milieu, a perpetual journey [marche], a perpetual transvaluation, a permanent becoming, the immanent efflorescence of the divine" (47). Whitford understands Irigaray's definition to mean, at the most general level, "all the conditions of women's collective access to subjectivity," and "the symbolic order in its possibilities of and for transformation:"

in other words, language as a field of enunciation, process, response, and becoming, but a field in which there are two poles of enunciation, so that the "I" may be "male" or "female", and so may the "you", so that the speaker may change positions, exchange with the other sex; it follows too that the divine other must also potentially be of the female sex . . . .

What is needed for women, then, is a habitation that does not contain or imprison them; instead of an invisible prison which keeps them captive, a habitation in which they can grow is the condition of becoming, and of becoming divine . . . . (47)

Language is part of that invisible prison, along with the law. So long as the "I" is tacitly understood as only masculine, male subjects cannot place themselves in the venture with the other because the female will remain at home/ in prison from which she never leaves [12]. Once female subjects begin to build themselves a habitation, a home, a place and envelope, both she and he will automatically be in a condition of risk and jailbreak. Touching and gazing will go both ways. He can no longer use her as ground: she can no longer hide from her selfhood behind him or in his fantasy of her. The "I" and the "you" are part of the envelope and place, part of the structure of a subject. To be each fully participating subjects, he and she have to able to switch places, or share characteristics intersubjectively in both the private and cultural interval between and surrounding them. He and she would have to become themselves. Recognizing the specific divinity, or the specificity of each gender in positive terms means risk:

The blood and flesh of the phantasied mother/woman, which sustains the language and house of men, must find its own symbolic expression in language, thus becoming the other pole of cultural discourse, and allowing two-way predication (the "double syntax"). (47)

Double syntax and two-way predication mean two things: (one) with it women could attain to a subjectivity of their own, and (two) that the female subject would look at men as well, that is that men would also become predicates, as well as the subjects they are accustomed to being. They would be defined in exchanges with female subjects as a positively valued other-subject. Simply, we cannot stop masculine subjectivity from existing while women develop their own symbolic order; the two will have to enter into dialogue from the beginning:

The sensible transcendental, then, is the flesh made word (in an audacious reversal of the New Testament), but not in a simple predicative sense . . . . So the dynamics of enunciation are here given primacy over language which simply conveys information or truth . . . . (47-8)

Whitford does not emphasize this aspect of Irigaray as much I do, but the flesh made word is a recognition of the spiritual in the carnal, the basic principle in Tantra that humans are embodiments of a sexed divine which subtends Irigaray's project as a whole -- calling for a transvaluation of Western culture. The sensible transcendental is best aligned with the mucous and the caress as modes of ethical relation. As she gives enunciation primacy over language, Whitford recognizes that ethics, like Tantra and other yogas, is a practice. It is not some static perfected thing, a jail, but life, an on-going exploration, journey and process of reinforcement in the self. One does not become perfect, one is perfect only in becoming, which means never being perfect. The compassionate and ethical intention and result of action matters, not that the action was perfectly executed. In terms of social contracts, the mucous and caress are modes which remind us that becoming, even as a gender in history, is not a process that finishes. The ethical relation in difference, including differences among women, insists that the relation be conscious and always renegotiable:

In the concept of the sensible transcendental, Irigaray is positing that the oppositions might come into relation -- the mother and father, the Sensible and the Intelligible, the immediate and the transcendent, the material and the ideal -- in imaginary and symbolic processes, that is that each sex might be able to assume its own divisions, into its own negativity, its own death . . . . [The] deconstruction of metaphysical oppositions is only part of the story for women, and corresponds only to the negative moment. What is needed is a framework which "allows access to life and to death to two" . . . , and this has to be a construction, the construction of an identity which allows each sex its own life and its own mobility. (122)

That construction requires the creative gestures many adventurous Diotiman or Irigarian thinkers, like Hutcheon and Perl, hunger for. Love, in other words, as Irigaray understands it:

may be the becoming which appropriates the other for itself by consuming it, introjecting it into itself, until the other disappears. Or love may be the motor of becoming which allows each its own growth. For the latter, each one must keep its body autonomous. Neither should be the source of the other. Two lives should embrace and fertilized each other, without the other being a preconceived goal for either.

There is a sense in which this love can be said to be divine; it has features of the sensible transcendental: it is embodied and it allows for growth and becoming, not immobilizing either lover in his/her own growth [making them a beloved]. (qtd. in Whitford 61)

This kind of love is unlikely. It is natural, but also must be created by us. It requires that we consider the body not only as a thing of nature and matter, but also a place of cultural and spiritual creation. Without a reckoning of one's own place, the interval between oneself and one's other-subject, without men and women who have their own genealogies and subjectivities, Fusion, codependency, projection tend to happen because one or another partner in a relationship is not anchored in their singularity and therefore not free to risk. They seek their other-subject as the angel, and refuse or ignore the Eros that exists for them as well. Not only must each keep its body autonomous, each must keep its self autonomous in interdependence and community. Otherwise, one or the other will reify, incarcerate the other-subject as an object of veneration, or of need, or of abjection, and sometimes a mélange of the three. Eros and angels represent the sensible transcendental in that they are already a relation of opposites, as well as models for how subject-selves might relate (to) their opposites.

The "immanent ecstasy" is another formulation of the "sensible transcendental"; it is both transcendent . . . and immanent . . . . The one does not exclude or incorporate the other; transcendence is represented by the "flesh of the other", but each has an other, so each is transcendent and transcended, each is flesh. (167)

Nicely balanced, this human situation is not automatic. Socrates eventually bends Diotima's understanding of Eros back to a unidirectional and univocal one with closure and enclosure as its habitual gestures. Tantra can be, and has been practiced in sexist and abusive ways, though these ways are not consistent with the precepts of that path [13]. Mucous can be just some textures of goo the body produces. Caresses can become choke holds. The interval can be ignored. The sensible transcendental can be rejected. Women and men can deny each other freedom, even with the force of one or another religious doctrine behind them. The sensible transcendental and all of its symbol-modes are choices. The get out of jail free card can be burned. The sensible transcendental is a challenge to the very foundations of culture and life as we have understood it under patriarchal socio-cultural organization. Choice presides here -- thus ethics of sexual difference, not a system for sexual difference. Each person who chooses to engage in the establishing of a world that recognizes more than one ground, which is not the same as no ground at all, would make choices, daily, forever [14].

At the same time, each is immanent or present: crossing the boundary of the skin "into the mucous membranes of the body," entering a "fluid universe" where the divine is not "foreign to the flesh." The universe of the mucous is fluid: the stable universe of "truth" becomes unstable. (Whitford 167)

Unstable, un-grounded and non-foundational -- from the point of view of a unified truth, history, subject-self with only one gender, this is the case. Such instability is not, however, an apocalypse of meaning or history. Such instability, or risk, is a constantly underlying prerequisite for a possible beginning -- for any motion, or thought, or love at all.

<21> Instability is risk and venture and the possibility of a culture of life. Irigaray's phrase, "a future that is not a repetition of the past" is this instability. The world of two is not simply liquid and therefore related to being swallowed up or drowned yet again in the abyss of the feminine-for-masculine. The world of difference offers a chance for life because only subject-selves prepared to accept the risk can enter that fluid dynamic of creation with any possible safety.

Each is a "subject" in love; each is transcendent to the other (each is divine for the other); each can confront the other-subject with admiration [wonder] . . . . Love, the mediator, is a "shared outpouring" … a "shared space", a "shared breath", bridging the space between two persons, two sexes; it does not use the body of the other for its jouissance; each is irreducible to the other or to the child. The loss of boundaries does not lead to a fusion in which one or the other disappears, but to a mutual crossing about boundaries which is creative, and yet where identity is not swallowed up. (167)

That "loss of boundaries" in wonder, or in the mediating milieu of love, requires two people: not one and a half, not one and its tool. Not only must the one not use the body of the other-subject, the one must not use the subjection of the other-subject's subjectivity for his or her own jouissance or growth. The "loss of boundaries" Irigaray discusses is the "going through the other to return to the self," and that going through requires offering of self as well as seeking balance with the other-subject. Angels represent this double loop on the spiritual dimension; Eros the balancing of opposites in love; place and interval represent the subjective, economic and political, dimensions; mucous the sexual, creative, reproductive dimension as well as the maternal-feminine; and the caress the sexual and creative dimensions of exchange between personal lovers.

<22> The poet figures into Irigaray's project as he and/or she who can live ventured in this risk between them, of which they are both stewards of themselves. To live ventured is to accustom oneself to paradox. The other-subject's freedom is the condition of my own. I am both subject and predicate of the exchange between us. The sensible transcendental is the medium and the goal. Difference is the medium and the goal. Union can only be made from two separate things. The past resides in the present as does the future. In order to be safe, to become fecund, one must put oneself at risk. Death is one limit on human being, and so is the other-subject a limit, but one in life. Not all limits, not all negation is destruction. The body and spirit are companions. These are not easy paradoxes to accept. Yet, they are not unheard of, not inconceivable.

<23> Irigaray calls for poets, I think, to help demonstrate how to think in and inhabit paradoxes. The poets she calls for have been and are, though perhaps without any strong awareness, writing ventured poems that can teach inhabitation of the sort of risk and balance a culture of sexual difference always already is and requires. Though they do not overtly take sexual difference as their theme, I believe there is a line of ventured poets who write various modes of vatic or oracular poetry that begins (more or less) with Hölderlin, descends though Mallarmé and several of his Modern inheritors to poets such as Yves Bonnefoy and Jorie Graham [15].

6. Sticky Stuff

PROLOGUE: Here, several closely related terms in Irigaray's ethics get explored in relation to each other. In addition to a continuing discussion of the interval, we now connect with the terms mucous, place, and envelope. Briefly, mucous is a physical correlate for the interval. Literally, the mucous is the various liquids of the body, but for Irigaray, specifically the sexual liquids. They serve physically to facilitate sexual union, the 'communication' of sperm and egg, as well as the loving act itself. Metaphorically, mucous is also the interval, and its purpose is not only to allow abstract and physical communication, but to protect the envelopes of each subject. The envelope can be though of as a body's skin, the layer of the body that separates us from the external world, but also as the "skin" of each person's or gender's identity and individuality. Now, the hard paradoxical work comes in. Irigaray treats the body as body, but also symbolically as a manifestation of abstract concepts. The skin of the human body is continuous from outside to inside. In a loose way, the skin of our faces continues to become the lining of our mouths and throats; and also to become the walls of the vagina, the lining of the urethra. The outside and in the inside are related, not the same, but related. In this logic, location and place become indeterminate. The envelope (skin) is not perfect and impenetrable, but really quite permeable. Our human vulnerability to each other is related to this permeability. Because the envelope is imperfect, and the exact "territory" of the self or subject is always in question, the mucous and the interval are spaces and facilitators of exchange that have to be respected in order for two subjects or selves to really exist culturally or personally. Irigaray's emphasis is on the feminine side of the gender dyad here because historically the Subject and its culture have been constructed by and in the image of men and their experience of their bodies. Not surprisingly, at this point, the poet is a subject who both understands and acts according to respect for difference.

<24> The interval between subject-selves and other-subjects (or objects) is complex. It reconceptualizes both space and time in what Irigaray has called "a double loop." Thus far I have used the word "interval" in a simple fashion, generally to mean a space between two poles of a pair, or the space of exchange and wonder. The interval also resides in "the mucous" which, being bodily, does not carry the sense of great spaces; but like the interval is a sign for exchange, respect of distance and difference even at the closest range, and for the integrity of subject-selves (though most obviously of women as subject-selves). The mucous is Irigaray's carnal and corporeal symbol of the sensible transcendental, the interval. The body is the seat of the self, and so of the divine.

<25> Place, as Irigaray explicates from Plato, is very much like a container, an envelope. It must move with its contents from one place (position) to another, must expand and contract to fit its contents, and must not be identical with its contents:

When separated from place, the thing feels an attraction to place as a condition of existence . . . . I shall affirm that the masculine is attracted to the maternal-feminine as place [womb, first home]. But what place does the masculine offer to attract the feminine? His soul? His relation to the divine? . . . For the masculine has to constitute itself as a vessel to receive and welcome. And the masculine's morphology, existence, and essence do not really fit it for such an architecture of place . . . If any meeting is to be possible between man and woman, each must be a place, appropriate to and for the other, and toward which he or she may move. (An Ethics 39-40)

Woman is in part already a place, ontologically, due to her morphology, for the child, and the penis. The womb is literally an un-closed container. Her vagina and womb, her yoni, are also (among other things) a place for man, or his lingam, but how is it that woman can be a place for herself, man a place for her as well as himself (which he is assumed to already be), and how can they relate (43)?

<26> On the literal level, one's skin marks one's place and envelope; but, woman's skin, more obviously or ontologically than man's, continues inside her to form the womb which does not close her off. Men's bodies are no more closed off than women's, but the openness of men's bodies is less "essential," because less obvious, to their subjectivity than women's. The imaginary is complex in this way: visibly, women are less closed, which masculinist thought and culture has taken as a sign of incompletion. For the masculine, woman is not closed off like a category, but that analogy fails because men also are not closed off in their bodies -- though in their case, it is easier to repress or deny this fact. The imaginary's relationship to the body is direct, but troubled by the values assigned to bodies in the symbolic, while both aspects of the subject shape its experience. Woman also has containers inside containers: she is the outside of the womb, which is the outside of the placenta and mucous membranes that create a place for the child, which is inside of those as well as inside its own skin, all of which is more or less a continuous part of the woman's skin until the placenta breaks and the umbilical cord is cut. Place is a particular problem, symbolically, for women because our "porousness" has us interpreted, in the masculine symbolic, as a place and conduit for men's progeny. We are left with the question of how to become a place for ourselves as well.

<27> Place has a simultaneously discursive and subjective meaning for Irigaray:

Unless each of us returns to his or her place to find his or her cause again, and then returns toward the other place, the place of the other. Which would mean that, at each phase, there were two places interdetermining each other, fitted one in the other. Two motors of place? Two causes of place? And their coming together. Two pulses and their transformations. Of one, of the other, and their interdeterminations. At least two. . . .

If so, place would mold itself from the one to the other, from the inside to the outside, from the outside to the inside. Place would twist and turn on itself. By passing through the other? Between past and future, endlessly? (An Ethics 40-1)

For place to mold itself in this way, it must be thought in terms of the shape of the womb, the maternal-feminine: the paradox of place is that it is a container, and a gap, and contains other containers. In place there are places and intervals between them. Place can turn on itself in a chiasmus or double loop by "passing through the other" and between past and future. In this way man can make himself a place for woman. He can become a welcoming, not just a pursuing, a different kind of venture for him. He must experience and balance in himself the feminine residing in him, as she must the masculine in her. She can become a grounding for herself, not just a ground for him. A different kind of venture for her. As in Tantra, the effort would be to preserve and perfect one's sexed expression of the divine and natural, but also to balance with one's other-subject who is ontologically over there and symbolically within. The movement "to his or her place to find his or her cause again" is a retreat from the other-subject to the self, to maintain one's own integrity or for-self, in order to be able to move toward and through the other-subject again. Or, to make room for the divine. Place and the envelope, then, symbolize not only the physical integrity of the body, but alsothe subjective integrity of the self. Subject-selves have an ethical obligation not only to allow the other-subject her or his personal integrity and difference, but also to maintain, protect, and rejuvenate his or her own. Their "interdetermination" is nothing like appropriation for one or other-subject's purposes, nor like a surgical invasion, but is a negotiation, a mutual limiting and opening, a way of listening:

The interval approaches zero when skins come into contact. It goes beyond zero when a passage occurs to the mucous. Or a transgression of touch through the skin. Given that the problem of desire is to suppress the interval without suppressing the other. Since desire can eat up place, either by regressing into the other on the intrauterine model or annihilating the existence of the other in one way or another. If desire is to subsist, a double place is necessary, a double envelope. (48)

The interval, like angels, expresses the need for separation, for integrity. Understanding intimacy is impossible without the interval and place, as action becomes one-sided: I am either touching or touched instead of both. Touch is transgression, contact happens on the skin, and the effect goes all the way in. The interval also figures the between into which love or the divine may be invited, or offered. "The dissociation," Irigaray writes, "of love and desire would" in the case of the interval's maintenance, "have little meaning" (50-1). Desire would lose its sense of "take" or "use" for oneself, and love would lose its sense of passivity and imbalance. Desire in the interval would not be desire from lack, or a desire to appropriate, assimilate, shape one's other-subject into a place for oneself. This negative desire, which springs from our correct sense of being alone and vulnerable in the world, would need to be balanced by letting the other-subject be. Such a desire would spring more from wonder. Desire from lack keeps accounts, wants to be sure of getting its share. Desire from wonder has no need for these lists and tallies. In an ethics of sexual difference, the obligation to be generous with each other is profound and primary. To participate, one must realize that there is world enough. Eros is the child of Lack, and of Plenty. Patriarchy forgets the Plenty of Eros's genealogy: in patriarchy all desire is thought as lack, want – not as generosity, extra.

<28> Beyond the closest range of the interval, the intimacy of skin and of touch, there is the (im)penetrable bodily stuff of the mucous. A liquid, mucous is a decidedly feminine metaphor for relation, as liquids give way to or surround, but cannot be severed by objects introduced to them. Like the interval, liquid in the instance of the mucous is potentially everywhere in her, around him, around her. What penetrates mucous is only mucous: mixtures of saliva, of the sperm of the ejaculate with vaginal mucous confound the delineation of a masculine or a feminine liquid. Mucous symbolizes both singular integrity protected by the slimmest interval, and the possibility of intimacy in the interval is demonstrated in the most physical way. It also symbolizes ethical relation at the sheer level and mode of carnality. Where the interval may not serve, perhaps mucous will serve as a guiding metaphor of protection of the two that allows mingling, facilitates touch as pleasure. Due to its close symbolic and ontic attachment to the body, mucous does not require theory to "think it through," but requires and signifies the actions of persons. Mucous facilitates the life actions of breathing, eating, eliminating waste, kissing, conceiving, gestation, and giving birth: "The mucous, in fact, is experienced from within, in the prenatal and loving night known by both sexes. But it is far more important in setting up the intimacy of bodily perception and its threshold for women" (109). As part of men and women, and as part of both of their experiences of safety, mucous represents the carnal chiasmus of Diotiman relations, but also the possibility of alliance between and differentiation among women such that they do not fuse in a crippling co-dependency, or cut each other off in favor of competition for men. Mucous represents the mode of relation in which wonder is possible because it represents "a quest for a way into or out of the self and the other, for a meeting with the other who is never situated or expected" (111).

<29> In addition to symbolizing the carnal mode of the between, the mucous symbolizes the possibility of a social and symbolic realm for women, and thus is closely tied to a "peaceful revolution" and to "female genealogies." In each pole of a Diotiman relation there must be a relation in verticality: of men with their fathers, their divine, their history or future, and of women with their mothers, their divine, their history or future. Whether men choose to accept it or not, and regardless of the troubled relations of individual men with their fathers, the social symbolic provides them with a genealogy, a connection and continuity with the past and the future through their fathers and sons, the stories of their sex's exploits and accomplishments in history. This is not so for women; though we are well along in the excavation, the shared cultural symbolic does not support our genealogies as it does men's. Women, in the social symbolic of men, exist in isolated confinement, either as The One, or as one of many, as infinite in herself or as instance of her gender for men. Women, in short, have no culturally supported ethical relation to themselves or each other, and therefore not with men either. As Irigaray explains in "Love of Same, Love of Other:"

. . . the world of women must successfully create an ethical order and establish the conditions necessary for women's action [16]. This world of female ethics would continue to have two vertical and horizontal dimensions:

-- daughter-to-mother, mother-to-daughter;

-- among women, or among "sisters."

In some way, the vertical dimension is always being taken away from female becoming. The bond between mother and daughter, daughter and mother, has to be broken ["has"] for the daughter to become a woman. Female genealogy has to be suppressed, on behalf of the son-Father relationship, and the idealization of the father and husband as patriarchs. But without a vertical dimension (since verticality has always been confused with erection), a loving ethical order cannot take place among women . . . . [Women] need both of these dimensions . . . if they are to act ethically, either to achieve an in-itself for-itself, a move out of the plant life into the animal, or to organize their "animal" territoriality into a "state" or people with its own symbols, laws and gods. (An Ethics 108-9)

Women need place, integrity, our own version of the same in history and to project into the future. This projection cannot be achieved through a handful of women in cultural isolation from women as a group, nor through a symbolic that does not correspond to our real, to our imaginary. Never in an ethics of sexual difference, never in Tantra, is the self-subject conceived as isolated from larger symbolic, social or economic systems because for women:

this horizon has still to be built, women cannot remain merely a horizontality, ground for the male erection [we cannot remain a for-him]. Women must construct a world in all its and their dimensions. A universe not merely for the other [men], as they have been asked to do in the past: as keepers of home and children, mother, in the name of the property, the laws, the rights, and obligation's of the[men's] state. (109)

Women cannot remain only being for-men and make a world for ourselves which would reflect us, sustain us -- a female and feminine Same. Such a world would have its own laws and customs, as various as men's, and would co-exist with men's world, would interact with it, balance and be balanced by it. Mucous represents revolution: fundamental changes at the level of society and culture, of the individual self, of male and female relations, of relations among women. In other words, these relations cannot be described only in the analytical discourse available to us in and preferred by masculinist culture. And, certainly cannot be abandoned there. There is a hint of intuition, of establishing a new world not only through words and legislation, but through practice and action.

7. Caress

PROLOGUE: In response to the permeability of the envelope (as body and as mind or identity), Irigaray develops the caress as a positive ethical category. While Lévinas associates the caress with a fall into the carnal far away from any ethical or spiritual being, Irigaray posits an understanding of touch in the context of sensible transcendental. We are beings of flesh and spirit. To her mind, spirit can be manifest in us through our flesh. Tantric or Vajryana Buddhism teaches that the transcendent spirit is manifest in the flesh, in matter, and that all aspects of immanent being. The caress, therefore, is a symbol for all the gestures between us, from speech and art and poetry, to science and politics and cultural representations of the genders. We may choose to encounter each other as instances of transcendence, or as objects. All of this we say "touches" us, and it does. The caress can be a mode to taking possession, of rejection and abjection, or it can be a way of making love and spirit for each other. Irigaray chooses the latter.

<30> Many stories tell us that our singularity and awareness of it is a punishment for defying gods, or making them jealous, and that singularity is alienation from nature, from self, and a state of sin. Being human is a tragic sort of thing to do, of course. Consciousness is not easy, and Edenic nostalgia is always dangerous. If these mythic pronouncements represent some nostalgia for the womb, as I am told they do, then what good is this idyllic "memory" that seeks each time to recreate the womb as fascist police state? This usually unnamed and unexamined nostalgia -- for the easy life, back in the day when the other was home and food and no effort was required -- leads to abuse and control, to punishing that which exceeds the self, or does not suit the powers that be. Separation -- that we are not identical, men and women, you and I, me and the natural world around me -- is a source of "tragedy." We interpret the vulnerability and pain of our singularity to be special to us individually, and so we set up resentments. Misogyny, for instance, is only the most ubiquitous style of ressentiment. What we find difficult to know is that this pain is not special to us, to me. From that egotism arise most of our motives to damage other-subjects. However, our singularity is also the only source of the pleasure we can create between us, the possibility of respect or peace or creativity: it allows us to touch each other, to get the mucous moving.

<31> Rethinking and remaking the world in an ethical mode will not, at least not a first, change much of this situation. I do good, and I do harm. Existing is like that. Even on the level of personal intersubjective relations, an ethics of sexual difference will not take away pain, suffering, and damage that two people can do to each other, or that the world can do to them. There is no utopia here. Damage is always a possible choice of action. Evil is always a choice on the board. But, while the risk and singularity of human being must be accepted in order for this ethics to begin to flourish, this ethics also insists that we can do less damage to each other, that we must honor both our singularity and our connectedness, and that "we" must mean at least two different people, sexes of people, peoples, I and my other-subject: worlds in exchange.

<32> Mucous and the sense of touch have everything to do with the possibility of such worlds and kinds of exchange. The mode of Diotiman relation figured in terms of touch and mucous is the caress, a mode that would seem so fundamental a part of the imaginary that it, like sexual difference, gets covered over. Sight takes pride of place in Western constructions of experience and in the philosophies that theorize it. There is an illusion that in the sense of sight one is without body, that in sight there is no touching, everything is at a safe, separate, singular distance and touching can be reserved for manipulating the objects of sight. This illusion idealizes the human subject as pure mind. We can't see our own eyes, or face, not from the inside. We don't feel anything with our eyes; they seem purely transparent windows (unless something goes wrong with them). The trouble with this illusion, beyond its foundational role in masculinist values, is that sight also works by touch, by contact. Light touches objects, bounces off of them, and touches our eyes, our retinas that touch optic nerves, which eventually touch our brains, in which neurotransmitters touch cells in order to "render" images for us to "see." Like turtles, touch goes all the way down. Like the figure of the womb as a "shape" of feminine discourse, touch is one of Irigaray's "deconstructions" of the metaphors in masculinist philosophy and culture. If sight is linked to reason, and reason to masculinity, a culture of sexual difference would recognize touch as linked to more than just the body and the feminine. One reason Irigaray privileges the body in her writing is that the real body is what humans are -- we cannot (yet?) experience ourselves otherwise. Given the current theories of the unconscious and the imaginary, it would be a good idea to examine more closely our being-(in)-our-bodies and how that means with some wonder instead of metaphysical condemnation.

<33> Touch is both a sense and the medium of the other senses, even sight and speech. Like love or mucous, touch both is itself and is a passage for other modes of self – sight and thought, for instance. An interesting, and fecund, route is to understand that touch, like the feminine, is buried in idealism, solipsism, the gaze of the masculine. Touch puts a subject-self in contact with an other-subject who touches back; it also puts the one and the other-subject at each other's mercy. Touch, in a Diotiman relation, represents the mode of relation with the most immediate possibility of fecundation and of harm. It is the crux, the test case, of Irigaraian ethics. Without touch, Eros, intervals, place, envelope, identity and difference, mucous, even sight, they have no common ground. The other senses would, literally, not relate; meaning and self really would disintegrate without the facility of contact, of touch.

<34> In "The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 'Phenomenology of Eros'," Irigaray completes her lectures on an ethics of sexual difference by opening understanding to touch, and at the same time returning to her first theme of Eros. Structurally the book performs an ethical subject position by returning to its own source-theme while discussing the theme of reaching toward an other-subject. Figuratively, this chapter returns to the place, the womb:

On the horizon of a story is found what was in the beginning: his naïve or native sense of touch, in which the subject does not yet exist. Submerged in pathos [emotion] or aisthesis [moral judgement]: astonishment, wonder, and sometimes terror before that which surrounds it.

Eros prior to any eros defined or framed as such. The sensual pleasure of birth into a world where the look itself remains tactile -- open to the light. Still carnal. Voluptuous without knowing it. Always at the beginning and not based on the origin of a subject that sees, grows old, and dies of losing touch with the enthusiasm and innocence of a perpetual beginning. A subject already "fixed." Not "free as the wind." A subject that already knows its objects and controls its relations with the world and with others. Already closed to any initiation. Already solipsistic. In charge of a world it enjoys only through possession. With no communion and childlike acceptance of that which is given. A consumer who consumes what he produces without wonder at that which offers itself to him before any finished product occurs. (An Ethics 185)

Consider this first gesture of return to place as a parable. In the beginning of each human consciousness was the womb. In it, a future subject was submerged for a time, wondrous or afraid of its surroundings. Oceanic, the self was submerged in Eros (love, mediation, exchange) prior to any concept of eros as lust. Irigaray deliberately elides the first paragraph and the second. Eros is double in its reading here, both love and the mucous fluids of the womb which submerge and support a fetus. Eros, recall, is the child of Lack and of Plenty, a both/and embodied. As mucous, Eros is a first experience of death and the medium of life. Then birth, but no language yet, no determinations, no separation between sight and touch for instance. The sense that leads us to abstraction is still carnal, tactile, even voluptuous. The self is "always at the beginning," always in wonder, and sometimes terror before a world other to it. Before (and after) becoming a subject, on the models offered in the masculinist/patriarchal symbolic, this volupté is possible. Once the subject makes vision abstract, desire as a sign of lack only or what it sees into things-for-it; however, the subject begins to die of a lack of touch, a lack of comfort of the carnal, and certainly seems to lose the sense of touch as an "innocent" process without a hidden or selfish agenda. The masculinist subject has lost the sense of desire as plenty, as voluptuous virtue.

<35> This is Irigaray's story of the fall. The subject, masculine, makes-tells itself in the symbolic to become controller, producer, consumer. Touch is not for being initiated into the divinely carnal fecundity of the other-subject or object "which is given," but for manipulation, for making products, making sentences, making sons. There is no relation "before any finished product occurs;" no ethical in which the relation is the goal and not some by-product of the relation. The degree of alienation and control the masculine Same prescribes for itself is impossible to attain [17]. That lack, the reactionary nostalgia for the womb, or for the simplicity and wonder of childhood, or the sense of lacking in comparison to others, is dangerous to both the masculine subject and everything subjected to its power because for that subject-in-lack, working outside ethics and outside of a relationship with nature and the other-subject, the only way to recreate Eden after the fall is to destroy through control, to reshape everything in the image of the Subject's lack. To complete the parable -- the only other option, at present in the masculine imaginary, is to dissolve into the abyssal flood of nature, the feminine, non-control, death. This choice is false [18]. Eros, the god, is a balance of body and mind, an onto-symbolic mediator:

Sensual pleasure can reopen and reverse this conception and construction of the world. It can return to the evanescence of subject and object. To the lifting of all schemas by which the other is defined . . . . Eros can arrive at that innocence which has never taken place with the other as other. At the nonregressive in-finity of empathy with the other. (An Ethics 185-6)

Sensual pleasure has a condition attached -- empathy. The erotic is lust (ontological) guided by art (symbolic), a skill of the body, a cultural phenomenon. This is a pleasure of gazes, of touches, of skin and its conductions, of the mixtures of mucous that is as much for the other-subject and with him or her as it is for the self. Vaporous, they are delicate, indefinable, and chimerical. With the intention of protecting that evanescence in the interval, with empathy, Eros's liminality and indeterminacy can enter onto the scene, and prevent nostalgic lack of affinity for the other-subject's susceptibility to damage, to being torn from their place or used as the ground for the self-subject. The ethical construction of the world would have men and women resplendent in their natural, cultural, spiritual selves.

<36> Irigaray describes the ethical caress as one that "binds and unbinds two others in a flesh that is still and always untouched by mastery," and that "contemplates and adorns" nakedness "does not seek to dominate a hostile freedom," so that it "affirms otherness while protecting it," and keeps to a life "always open to what happens" (An Ethics 186, 188). The caress is a form of venture. It requires wonder, freedom, respect, exchange. The caress is ethical because it is a nourishment no other thing can compensate (187). And, it can also be the mechanism of domination, of control, of mastery, of damage. At each instance of a caress, this choice is present: that the caress may become a blow.

<37> Sensuality can go wrong according to the agency and will available to each participant. The lover can debase the beloved, "reduce her to less than nothing if [his] gaze is seduced by an image," or if "he leaves her like a dead body," or encloses her in "some sepulchre of images," in "some project that denies her dynamism" (192, 194). The lover is not solely responsible for this burial; masculinist culture encourages both sexes to this unethical relation. The caress symbolizes the most immediate ethical situation: the most immediate relation to the other. If a male lover "loses himself in the depths of the beloved . . . [both] of them are lost, each in the other, on the wrong side . . . of transcendence" (196). She is dressed in a "garment" an image or idea of her that ignores her self, "that first and foremost paralyzes [her] movement. Protecting it . . . but thus shielded, how does one live? For the woman who is so protected, what future remains?" (196). The beloved cannot venture herself in a caress that dresses her in day-glo corset only for-him.

<37> The beloved woman must, however, cooperate in this unethical caress; she may "renounce her responsibility as a lover," and simply surrender to being seduction-object-for-him:

She divests herself of her own will to love in order to become what is required of his exercise of will. Which assigns her to the place of nonwilling in his ethics. Her fall into the identity of the beloved one cancels out any real giving of self and makes her into a thing, or something other than the woman she needs to be. . . . She quits the locus of all responsibility, her own ethical site . . . .

If she comes back to herself, to herself within herself, to him within herself, she may feel responsible for another parousia. (199)

The ethical caress makes possible une amante's arrival, revelation, the revelation of a couple, the parousia of a culture founded on the couple as lovers. Such a caress requires that men and the masculine develop their capacity to be a place of welcoming for women and the feminine [19]. This caress requires that she have for herself, and that she maintains a place (including its relations to genealogy and mucous), and an interval between herself and her lover's will, her relation to Eros, angels, divinity:

She may need to create, engender, give birth to the mystery she bears -- prior to any conception of the child. No longer standing in the shadow of the one who draws on the mystery [unethical male lover], taking charge -- she herself -- of brining it to light . . . .

Generating the dwelling, her site, with the male lover . . . . The lover would assist her in this parturition, provided he does not simply send her back to the depths [which he can, in a second]. . . . The one for the other, already known and still unknown. The one for the other, mediators of a secret, a force, and an order that also touches on the divine.

Occasionally going their separate ways, meeting again, linking up again, in order not to lose their attentiveness to what transcends their already actual becoming. Listening to what has never taken place or found its place yet, to what calls to be born. (199-200)

If she gives up or refuses to claim her responsibility her agency as lover, woman, women, then both lovers/sexes/genders lose their future. He denies the future by quashing that agency and denying or overemphasizing that responsibility on her part. Taking up that responsibility, by both the man-lover and the woman-lover, ensures venture and future:

To give back to the other the possible site of his [or her] identity, of his [or her] intimacy: a second birth that returns one to innocence . . . . In which he re-entrusts me [woman-lover] to a genesis that is still foreign to what has already taken place . . . .

This caress would begin at a distance . . . . Without paralysis or violence, the lovers would beckon to each other, at first from far away. A salutation . . . pointing out the space of love that has not yet been made profane. The entrance into the dwelling, or the temple, where each would invite the other, and themselves, to come in, also into the divine . . . .

This union does not ignore sensual pleasure; it sounds out its most plummeting and soaring dimensions. Not divided into elements that belong to different domains, the lovers meet as a world that each reassembles and both resemble. (207)

The caress, like the other symbol-modes in Irigaray's ethics, includes and relies on the others; and like the other symbol-modes, it also alludes to or influences the personal and the cultural symbolic simultaneously. Intended to propel lovers beyond some false choice between "autistic transcendence" or some "wallowing abyss," the caress is the most active, and therefore, a crucial mode of ethical relation (210). It embodies, gives body to, all the others and the possibility of experiencing the rewards of ethical relation. It is a yoga, a practice.

<39> Taken, caressed as beloved object, male or female, the other is "abandoned on the threshold of the nuptials [so that] [t]here is no union"(203). The beloved is rendered "profane" and "non-signifying" and on the side of the feminine (Lévinas 257). He or she is a thing (An Ethics 199). The ethical caress, however, in its "evanescence" :

. . . . opens on a future that differs from an approach to the other's skin here and now. Stopping at this point risks relegating the beloved to the realm of animality once the movement of seduction, of penetration beyond anything visible, has passed. (188-9)

The caress does not approach the other-subject as a "hostile freedom," a competitor. In the caress there is more than lover (male) and beloved (female), but an amant and an amante, a male-lover and a female-lover as well as an aimé or beloved-man, and an aimée or beloved-woman -- each has a double articulation. Because their caress does not stop at the skin and seduction, because it is not driven by sight, she and he needn't think of her as an abyss simply because he "disappears in there." In the ethical caress, the inside and the outside both literally and figuratively or spiritually are touched. The ethical caress is the symbol for the most explicitly sexual and subjective level of ethical relation.

<40> L'aimé or l'aimée, there is no self there, no other-subject mate or match. However, for Irigaray, the caress and its fecundity represent the chance to live "that more intimate dwelling," a "more secret consummation," through "a mucous shelter that extends from . . . the most subterranean to the most celestial," and a "circulation from the one to the other-subject that would happen in lovemaking" (188). Each gender and lover would seek to protect each other from easily assumed and prescribed roles, from becoming a thing, from doing prison labor for the other-subject. Each is responsible not only for their own freedom, but that of the other as well. Such an ethical exchange requires two agents, a male and female lover, both active and both responsible for their own modesty (which Lévinas assigns only to the beloved woman), for their own actions of respect toward each other:

Eros can arrive at that innocence which has never taken place with the other as other . . . . At that appetite of all the senses which is irreducible to any obligatory consumption or consummation . . . . Which will always remain on the threshold, even after entering into the house. Which will remain a dwelling, preceding and following the habitation of any dwelling.

This gesture, which is always and still preliminary to and in all nuptials, which weds without consum(at)ing, which prefects while abiding by the outline [skin, place] of the other, this gesture may be called: the touch of the caress. (186)

8. What Are Subjects For?

PROLOGUE: Here, I discuss Irigaray's ambivalent relationship with Heidegger's definition of the poet. On the one hand, she wants to preserve the poet as a ventured subject — tending toward the world and the other. On the other hand, she rejects Heidegger's view that that world exists for the poet, as the poet's object, possession. This aspect of the poet's subjectivity must be rejected in order for an ethics of sexual difference to find its poetic, a poetic in which the world and other is not for-the-poet but for-itself and with-the-poet across the interval.

<41> Heidegger has written that the poet is he who risks life itself. One who risks the way of usual life in the name of adventure into the unknown. The poet puts herself or himself in relation to the interval on the way to the other-subject. The poet is both l'ammant and l'ammante, both the male and female lover – an archetype. Bodily, spiritually, loving of abstract angels and real mucous equally, the poet lives in such a way that he or she does not fall into thing-hood, nor imprison the other there. Somewhere in a correspondence between Heidegger's poet in "What Are Poets For" and Irigaray's essays "He Who Risks Life Itself," "Love of Self" and "Love of Same, Love of Other" I suspect a description can be found of the subject-selves who can live in the wonder of the paradoxical symbols a poetics of sexual difference draws forth from us, and for us, and between us.

<42> Wonder is an interesting condition. Those who have been astounded by a vista, a sunset,a birth, ablizzard, or who have witnessed a live performance of the Hallelujah Chorus or a Mahler symphony, who have fallen in love, or who have felt the stillness deep in meditation or prayer, these people have experienced wonder for at least a little while. The trouble is that this state of mind and self is fleeting and not self-sustaining.

<43> Wonder is a state that can be extended to the levels and common activities in life, like the stillness of meditation and the advice to right thinking and right action in the Buddhist traditions, or the testimony of the faithful that God is always loving them. But, wonder does not require any sort of religious faith; rather, it requires a redirecting of attitudes. An ethics of sexual difference does not accept extreme postmodern understandings of the subject: fractured, multiple, schizoid, an amalgam of voided organs, a product or commodity, a set of masks beneath which there can be found only other masks with other agendas. There is, to be sure, a kindness in Derrida's phrase "respecting the other's difference in himself," an allowance for accident, mistake, misprision. But the extreme postmodern subject stands in irony with regard to itself and its others [20]. Irony is ethically neutral, while respect is ethically charged. The Diotiman (or Tantric) subject-self approaches the other-subject expecting surprises, errors, shifts of texture, need, expression, but does not take that as a sign that no one's home. Even the differences are aspects of a whole – an accountable and culpable whole. Meditative practices have as their goal to bring one into a more and more sustainable condition of wonder and respect for this complexity. Wonder can be deepened from a fleeting state of mind to condition of self. And no, one need not actually be a poet to do so. The poet is a symbol for a kind of subjective practice in which one moves and practices with intention toward a sustained attitude of wonder and respect, a posture toward the self and the other-subject. The poet is an archetype of potential. Henry Miller (no paragon of ethics in matters sexual) understood this potential when he wrote, "We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separate and self-hypnotized, but individual and related," and, "That is the deepest meaning of the word 'human,' that we are a link, a bridge, a promise" (337, 339).

<44> Any long-time practitioner of Hatha yoga, Sufism, Tantra, Zen meditation or any physical and mystical practice will report that this readjustment of self takes a long time and is very difficult. Think of the difficulty of keeping New Year's Resolutions or most promises people make to themselves. As I elaborate practice in this project, it is a personal, private, public, cultural and political undertaking. "Practice" is a lovely word, allowing as it does for increase of skill and consistency, but also for failure, set back. Practice reinforces itself. In the meditative sense of the word, practice requires curiosity, humility, patience. It is an exploration of possibility, not a rigid application of known or assumed techniques or conclusions. There is no new world if we cling to and rest on all of our old comforts, habits, and prejudices. We have to change everything; beginning with our own hearts and our posture toward each other and ourselves. Such work, can only be done from something like bliss, from having extra to give out; one cannot even be kind without resentment if one works from a deficit of energy. Poets have that extra, the Plenty of Eros's parentage, and some practice at sustaining wonder.

<45> Heidegger describes the poet as "ventured," "unprotected," but not "abandoned," as always inhabiting a gamble that could "turn out one way or [an]other" (Heidegger 102-3). This is what one might call "the human condition," but the poet, as paragon subject, makes her or himself aware of this condition, actively engages it. The poet "ventures itself:"

What is ventured is thus [carefree] . . . secure, safe. What is ventured can follow the venture, follow it into the unprotectedness of the ventured, only if it rests securely in the venture. The unprotectedness of what is ventured not only does not exclude, it necessarily includes, its being secure in its ground. . . .

This is why Rilke calls it [the ground] "the unheard-of center" (Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 28). It is the ground as the "medium" [interval] that holds one being to another in mediation and gathers everything in the play of the venture . . . . (104-5)

One is safe as ventured in the venture to the degree that one places oneself consciously in it, at risk, "secure in [one's] ground" which is very little ground at all. So, one is safe to the degree one has enough faith in oneself to grant the other-subject's freedom. The unheard-of center that mediates between beings cannot be bedrock. If it were, it could mediate nothing; it could only support or bury. The fluid indeterminacy of the interval (for all the "danger" it represents to the masculine symbolic and subject) is the very stuff of which relations are made. In Heidegger, this "unheard of center" and "ground" is death, the end-limit to the subject-self's being and becoming.

<46> Irigaray's point of critique against Heidegger is that for all his understanding of risk, his understanding of the poet still takes death as the only limit on the subject-self. For Irigaray, the other gender, the other-subject is the more vivacious limit on self, a limit capable of contributing to the self-subject's own becoming. The unheard of center is very like the interval between lovers who participate in that center by creating it, entering it, and sharing energy through it: like air and water, the more feminine elements. Where Heidegger takes death to be the unheard of center and abyss, Irigaray places life and relations to living beings. In accordance with her Buddhist and Tantric assumptions, death is a given and nothing to worry much over. The suffering produced by knowledge of our mortality and the preciousness it accords human life is a reason to engage each other in wonder, respect and reciprocity. In accordance with her feminist assumptions, where Heidegger's conceptual universe is populated by (one) man while women remain "out there" with the natural world and dim creatures, Irigaray places women and men, their subjectivities, genealogies and the interrelations between them at the center of her philosophical and cultural project [21]. Such an indeterminate center focuses the two subjects attention on living here, with each other, and less on their own solitary destinies and demises. The venture, like wonder, is a situation that is both the goal and the path [22]. To venture is to go out, but that very going out, like an exhalation or a caress, is also a return to the self. There is, in short, nothing to lose in risking life itself. The risk only becomes ethical when it "concerns every being inasmuch as it is a being;" that is, to the degree that the poet recognizes and acts according to the condition that one is only as free to be ventured as the other-subject is free (Heidegger 103). One's freedom is the condition that allows one to be ventured; that is, to transcend sensibly or access the transcendental in the sensible. Interestingly, Heidegger's description of transcendence sounds more like the sensate transcendence in a Diotiman relation than like the usual "up, up, up and away" sort of transcendence: "But this surpassing, this transcending does not go up and over into something else; it comes up to its own self and back into the nature of its truth. Being itself traverses this going over and is itself its dimension"(An Ethics 131). The transcendence of the venture "confuses the opposition between immanence and transcendence" and is an "accessible transcendental that remains alive" (An Ethics 33, 27). The sensible transcendental is, as Tina Chanter calls it in Ethics of Eros, "nothing if not paradoxical" (180) [23]. It is paradoxical due to the "ubiquitous" mind/body split in idealist Western thought in which the body is a beastly impediment to the transcendence of the soul-mind, mired in immanence and associated with women and the unruly feminine. The sensible transcendental insists therefore on embodiment. As in Tantra and Diotiman relation, the self is both body and spirit, moving horizontally in space, forward and backward in time, and vertically in "spirit" or relation to the universe or what Rilke calls "The Open"(Heidegger 130). In a nicely deconstructive move, Irigaray insists on the "path between heaven and earth" in such a way that the self and body are always participating in both places and is itself the path between them (qtd. in Chanter 180). In a condition of venturedness and wonder, the hierarchy of man over woman would be replaced with a relation between them mediated by the path that is the goal.

<47> But Irigaray and Heidegger part ways. As much as Irigaray draws on various male philosophers, she is never wholly uncritical of them or the masculinist symbolic they construct and propagate. As Chanter points out, there is a "more than fleeting resemblance between the way in which Irigaray articulates the question of sexual difference and the procedure that Heidegger employs in posing the question of the meaning of Being" (127). Just as Heidegger goes back through metaphysics in order to expose the covering over of Being by philosophical discourse ; so does Irigaray go to expose the covering over of sexual difference, but she includes Heidegger as a member of the "conspiracy," the cover up of sexual difference [24]. The schism between Heidegger and Irigaray begins with statements like these:

That man goes with the venture, even more than does plant or beast, could mean first that man is admitted into the Open with even less restraint than are those other beings . . . . Man places before [in front of] himself the world as the whole of everything objective, and be places himself before [in priority] the world. Man sets up the world toward himself, and delivers Nature over to himself. (Heidegger 109-10)

Man, in short, is a subject-agent who makes the world a thing for himself, covered up in the rhetoric of the Open, and Nature. Man finds himself frustrated (often, in history, violently so) to discover that nature and woman are vital, striving, and divert his trajectories with their own.

<48> In "He Who Risks Life Itself," Irigaray offers a six page summary and critique of "What Are Poets For?" the rhetoric of which functions as both a lyrical call to poets and a scathing retort to Heidegger that exposes what he leaves covered. It is as if there it is, one more time, this man who seems willing to question everything leaves intact and "sacredly" undisturbed the assumptions and rhetoric about women and the feminine. Irigaray's challenge and disappointment in this essay are palpable.

<49> One the one hand, it seems that Heidegger's description of the poet has provided a nearly perfect description of the subject-selves capable of ethical love and relation. Irigaray's mimesis seems fairly friendly here:

He who risks life itself. In excess of it, scarcely, by a breath; a breath which, if it is held, saves through song. Prophet of pure forces that call for and refuse shelter. Does not all that already exists paralyse respiration . . . ? [25]

On the one hand (A), here is the poet who risks the venture of being, who gives him/herself only the protection of a held breath, that one link to life and safety in order that the poet may save through song, contact and bring home, like an angel, the pure forces. On the other hand (B), here is the poet who abandons Nature in the name of pure forces only, in the name of mind only, paralyzing respiration, and who leaves the other-subject abjectly behind [26].

And who goes not into the abyss can only repeat and restate the paths already opened up that erase the traces of gods who have fled. Alone, always alone, the poet runs the risk of venturing outside the world and of folding back its openness to touch the bottom of the bottomless . . . . Saying yes to what calls him beyond the horizon . . . . Present everywhere, but invisible, granting life to all and to everything, on pain of death.

A: The poet braves the unknown, the abyss, plumbing the bottom of the vast, the mystery of mysteries, the absolute, toward the abstract other. Alone and brave, as subjects would need to be to live in an ethical relation. There is no shelter in which one or the other subject sets all the terms of engagement, no shelter of control. Forget the Panopticon. It's already on fire. Here is jailbreak. Each subject-self has to remain on his or her, his or his, her or her side and respect the interval and the difference between I and the other-subject. B: "Alone" is also a turn. The poet goes alone, with no partner, no equal balancing other-subject, that other-subject is buried in "open," "abyss," "bottomless" and grants life to them, but does not meet the poet as alive on her own accord. Both an object to explore and a space to enter invited or no, these figures keep the poet solipsistic and safe from real dialogue and exchange with a living other-subject by immobilizing what "would still like to traverse this preoccupied atmosphere," the air, the abstract, the interval, and other-subject who shares them. The poet's limit is bottomless, or infinite – but never the transcendent limit of the living encounter with another person:

Let into the air in the future of what has not yet appeared. Bringing into play the danger of a new flowering devoid of protection. Unsheltered. Outside any abode. Unveiled? Advancing into danger without any answer already granted to his trust. No betrothal, no abandonment here.

A: Irigaray's theme of a "future which does not simply repeat the past," of a future which is wholly different in its tone, organization and procedure seems to be the poet's direction in being ventured. Moving into that "danger," negotiating such a future would be difficult, full of new problems without any guaranteed answers seems the kind of understanding and curiosity required by Irigaray's ethics. B: At the same time, the poet seems only capable of this risk absent of betrothal or risk of abandonment by the other-subject. The poet can only take this risk, life itself, ventured over against objects he has made-interpreted for himself (or herself, too, since there's just the one model of subjectivity). The poet will not grant a venture between him/herself and an other subject-self. This subject has no love. It turns out that at our stage in history, all here is narcissism, the poet in love with his own perception of a Nature which, being a thing, and for-him, cannot determine its own ventures tangential to or against his own. Nature is but his mirror. A nice but dangerous fantasy, given that we inhabit the planet at her leave.

<50> Just as "what opens up does not stop in any direction" and just as this lonely venture is a "total risk," so it is with loving, ethical relations in difference – as opposed to relation of the same with the other-same [27]. The poet winds up, for all the good example that could be set here:

Protected by risk itself. Insensibly, invisibly sheltered in its being. In its own heart? Not yet open to the other, save to the other of the same? [These are both sincere and rhetorical questions.]

Trembling at the coming of what is promised. Of that other breath that is born unto them [poets] when all already-known resonances have died away. Beyond everything that has already been attained . . . . Whose breath subtly impregnates the air, like a vibration perceived by those lost in love. Their senses awake, they boldly go forward by ways where others see only shadows and hell.

B: The poet remains closed off from the air, from the interval and relation to a living other-subject in difference. A: At the same time, the poet could, if her or his attention were redirected in "true" risk toward the infinite mystery of the living other-subject, begin to see her or him, begin to let her or him be and become, beyond all the already-known resonances, the assumptions about their being and their relations. To do so would set them on a venture, not simply beyond the horizon or out to the sacred ether, but between them into a region of venture and risk that has the character of hell, so unfamiliar and incalculable would it be. Or heaven:

And so, those who renounce their own will [power over] go towards one another. Calling on one another beneath all saying [dire] already said, all words already uttered, all speech [parole] already exchanged, all rhythms already hammered out. They draw one another into the mystery of a word [verbe] seeking to be made flesh.

This sounds mystical because it is, in part. The liminal is usually that way. A: The breath and Tantra are in play again, insisting on the corporeality of spirit, on the words being made flesh, flesh sacred as word. B: That mysticism is also as simple as Rilke's desire to see things in their specificity. When one looks at an other-subject in his or her deep, specific, and unique nature, one moves beyond established rhythms and the already-known into the mystery of that specific other-subject. One loves, breaks out of jail, breaks out of the "usual" and risks becoming a danger to the "as usual." This is wonder, the being-here Buddhists insist on. As subject-selves, this attention is our ethical duty to each other in difference.

<51> The question remains, however: if we are in a historical period in and before which sexual difference has never been considered directly and consciously, if Irigaray's desire for humans is that we attain an ethics of sexual difference for which we have few sufficient models (other than possibly the Tantric), then how is the project to be undertaken? The first part of the answer to this seems to be that courage and courtesy of imagination are the minimum requirements. What, after all, is the imagination for in destitute times?

9. Wonder-Lust

We are always much stronger than we think.

--- Hélène Cixous, "First Days"

PROLOGUE: At last, we arrive at a "conclusion," one that opens on a future instead of closing on the past. Wonder is a faculty of the mind, lust one of the body. In an ethics and poetics of difference honors, promotes, embraces and is curious about the differences between wonder and lust, the mind and the body, thought and pleasure. These "opposites" must be made to harmonize, to resonate with each other. The subject-self represented by the ideal subjectivity of the poet has burned the Panopticon within. She or he works to eliminate the paranoid watcher, the jailer, who sees the other as only a "hostile freedom" or as only an object of use. This section of the essay describes that subjectivity, its Diotiman relation with itself and the other-subject. At last, here the argument is completed that this mode of subjectivity and selfhood is the key to a future of mutual fecundity, of mutual and healthy expansion of self and spirit in a future history other than the bloody and bilious past.

<52> What these ventured subject-selves need in themselves is a rebirth of wonder, self-reliance, and courtesy. People seem, these days, a little sick from experience, callused. Not that this condition is really our fault. Very few people are trained to remain open to possibility, to seek action, to remain compassionate while protecting themselves from scarring in the face of one global, national, local or private atrocity after another. It is a very difficult balance, and a disaffected kind of withdrawal seems the most common response to it all. But that ironic apathy will not do. Wonder may be the way out.

<53> I connect wonder to subjectivity and selfhood, and to ethics and poetics, partly because Irigaray does so implicitly. But more so because, on the view of poetics I want to develop, it seems to me that (for all their reputation as impractical visionaries, scoundrels, revolutionaries and liars, or terribly selfish for spending all that time alone -- which protects them so that they may venture freely, encounter the other really) poets know how to do something that a world of sexual difference would have to foster a talent for: they know how to see and experience, to be struck by what they see and what touches them, and how to make a response to that experience because they know they can and will persist with it.

<54> They have, in short, a talent for wonder. In Descartes' French, wonder is a translation of l'admiration, which carries the sense of astonished marveling before something extraordinary, of joy in the beautiful and the immense, enthusiasm, enchantment. It is the emotion which corresponds to the sublime.

<55> In the essay "Wonder: A Reading of Descartes, 'The Passions of the Soul'"Irigaray elucidates wonder as the fundamental attitude necessary for ethics between the sexes. It is the essential ingredient in the subject-selves of sexual difference:

Wonder is the motivating force behind mobility in all its dimensions [27]. From its most vegetative to its most sublime functions, the living being has need of wonder to move. Things must be good, beautiful, and desirable for all the senses and meaning, the sense that brings them together . . . . [One must] find a vital speed, a growth speed that is compatible with [one's] senses and meanings, . . . to leave an interval between [oneself] and the other-subject, to look toward, to contemplate -- to wonder. Wonder being an action that is both active and passive. The ground or inner secret of genesis, of creation? (An Ethics 73) [28]

Wonder is to be understood as a motivator of all levels of self from metabolism to the need to create great works. It corresponds loosely to the Tantric-Hindu-Buddhist idea of prana, breath, or the all-animating life force, uniquely expressed in each individual but common to all living things. In order for wonder to be consciously available (in order to align oneself with it) a subject-self would need to find the mind-body's particular rate of motion in all things.

<56> Finding this pace is a matter of caring for one's self, creating an envelope that affords one inner contemplation, a place to minister to the self, that keeps the world and its definitions a little at bay in order to meet it and the other-subject with one's freedom ready to hand. Wonder requires an interval, difference; that which we appropriate to ourselves cannot participate in wonder as it is reduced to the same of the subject as an object for-me. Wonder is an action both active and passive, and subjects-in-wonder regard both themselves and the other-subject, and living as in a state of contemplative action and fecund becoming. That is, they are willing to recognize that the other-subject "can look at us," that exchange happens:

It is important for us to be able to wonder at him or her even if he or she is looking at us . . . . This first passion is indispensable not only to life but also or still to the creation of an ethics . . . . This other, male or female, should surprise us again and again, appear to us as new, very different from what we knew or what we thought he or she should be . . . . Wonder goes beyond that which is suitable for us. The other never suits us simply. We would in some way have reduced the other to ourselves if he or she suited us completely. An excess [29] resists . . . . Wonder is a mourning of the self as an autarchic entity; whether this mourning is triumphant or melancholy. Wonder must be the advent or the event of the other. (74-5)

Emotionally wonder is a complex position: happily or unhappily knocked out of the center of things, a subject-self experiences surprise, which can be pleasant or unpleasant. Importantly, the other-subject has a responsibility to be surprising, that is to continue to become, to change; but equally the subject-self has the same obligation, and the additional obligation of seeking to be surprised by, to pay attention to the other-subject. Un-suited by the other-subject, a subject-self finds itself always a little bit in unfamiliar territory, ventured:

Wonder is not an enveloping. It corresponds . . . to space-time before and after that which can delimit, go round, encircle. It constitutes an opening prior to and following that which surrounds, enlaces. It is the passion of that which is already born and not yet enveloped in love. Of that which is touched and moves toward and within the attraction, without nostalgia for the first dwelling. Outside of repetition . . . . The passion that inaugurates love and art. And thought . . . . A birth into transcendence, that of the other-subject, still in the world of the senses ("sensible"), still physical and carnal, and already spiritual. Is it the place of incidence and junction of body and spirit, which has been covered over again and again, hardened through repetitions that hamper growth and flourishing? This would be possible only when we are faithful to the perpetual newness of the self, the other, the world. Wonder would be the passion of the encounter between the most material and the most metaphysical, of their possible conception and fecundation one by the other. (81-2)

An envelope is a container, a limit, like one's experience. Wonder is not an enveloping because it is an attitude we can have, the possible tenor of the interval between subjects. It does not exist without our effort and changes to boredom or disdain easily. Boredom and disdain are a kind of grasping, of dismissing the other's envelope and singularity, of making the other-subject an object for-me, because these feelings rest on the assumption that we or I know all there is to know about you. Consistent with her thought on fluids and the maternal-feminine, Irigaray's "categories" operate more like "modes;" there are qualitative differences between love and wonder or angel and mucous, but these qualities also overlap from mode to mode. Wonder originates in, but is not contained by love because it is the basis and result of love. Its actions are the caress and listening, simultaneously active and passive. It is attraction, but only for the ventured who have no nostalgia for the first dwelling (home, the familiar, the womb), who have no desire to reify the other-subject in one state of being, or one place for their own sake. Being outside of repetition, wonder is also outside of certainty, of comfort; wonder exhorts us to never take anything for granted [30].

<57>To side with wonder or with an ethics of sexual difference is to side with creativity, art, love, and with poets and women: all of which are suspect from the point of view of masculinist society, which is primarily interested in order and predictability, the traditions and conventions of behavior as they stand. Difference, creativity, love, poetry – they all are and require wonder, are all jailbreaks. Even with all their courtesy and care, they are jailbreaks still. Thinking and living in a way that accepts one condition (wonder) as both already and not yet in another condition (love), and as refusing nostalgia in favor of being-ventured potentially puts all conventions at risk. The more avant-garde strains of art and love are inaugurated by wonder, by that which thwarts repetition of the Same.

<58>The space-time before and after limits, categories, knowledge: wonder corresponds to and motivates one in the interval between oneself and the other-subject. It is a sort of "beginner's mind," learned but open. "A birth into transcendence, that of the other" and still in the realm of the senses, of the body, and spiritual at the same time, is a transcendence for and which requires two. It requires physical, imaginative, and discursive exchange between the "most material (earth, body) and the most metaphysical (soul, heaven)." As a mode of juncture for body and spirit, wonder (and love in wonder) refuses any guilt for the fact of being alive and vital. Instead of guilt, wonder insists on vitality, on growth and flourishing, on the "fecundation one by the other."

<59>Wonder, and the ethics or poetics of self that attend it are not, however, cures for all ills; though, it is my hope that sexual difference might provide a basis from which to address many forms of damage more effectively than society has so far managed. This damage is embedded in society and culture as their foundations, their conventions, such as the misrepresentations and erasure of sexual difference. Upsetting such conventions and foundations carries with it some costs. One cost would be repression of those who or that which take the ventured in or toward wonder because wonder threatens nearly all present fictions of how to be, how to conduct business, how to be in relations of all kinds because the fictions that need inventing and affirming in order to live an ethics of sexual difference require more than a little subversion of the old stories, the Same and its hegemony. Another cost would be confusion because such upset in the process of redefining culture continually presents new problems and negotiations. Such an elevation and the corresponding symbolic representation of women and their genealogies and bodies would, in fact, constitute the next earth shaking paradigm shift, so fundamental a change would this be, so complete a revolution of the religion, aesthetics, the state, the law, the economy, the family, the self would this be. Without it there is little possibility of the two of sexual difference in ethics coming to be. We need the ventured subject-selves with their attentions set on themselves, each other, as the other side of the horizon. In an environment of sexual ethics and wonder, however, this future would not simply be the past over again but would have a different structure from the past. Ventured, it would require acting in good faith in order to avoid disaster.

Works Cited

Balakian, Anna. The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal. New York: New York University Press, 1977.

Chanter, Tina. Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Heidegger, Martin. "What Are Poets For?" Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

Hutcheon, Linda. "Rhetoric and Competition." Common Knowledge 9.1 (Winter 2003): 42-57.

Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.

---. Between East and West: From Singularity to Community. Trans. Stephen Pluháceck. European Perspectives. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

---. "He Who Risks Life Itself." The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. New York: Blackwell, 1991. 213-18.

Johnson , Alan . The Gender Knot : Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy. Philadelphia, PA : Temple University Press , 1997 .

Miller, Henry. Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion. New York: Grove, 1965.

Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. Trans. Helen Lane . New York: Harvest , 1987 .

Walsh, Lisa. "Between Maternity and Paternity: Figuring Ethical Subjectivity." Differences 12.1 (2001): 79-111.

Whitford, Margaret. Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. New York: Routledge, 1991.

References

Anand, Margot. The Art of Everyday Ecstasy: The Seven Tantric Keys for Bringing Passion, Spirit , and Joy into Every Part of Your Life. New York : Broadway Books , 1998.

Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Trans. Brian Singer. Eds. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press, 1996.

Cixous, Hélène. The Book of Promethea. Trans. Betsy Wing. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.

Dumas, Lloyd. "Economics and Alternative Security: Toward a Peacekeeping International Economy." Alternative Security: Living without Nuclear Deterrence. Ed. Burns H. Weston. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990. 137-175.

Frost , Gavin and Yvonne Frost . Tantric Yoga : The Royal Path to Raising Kundalini Power. York Beach , ME : 1989.

Gabel, Peter. "Spirituality and Law." Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society. (March/April 2003). 14 July 2003. http://tikkun.org/magazine/index.cfm/action/tikkun/issue/tik0303/article/030313a.html.

Irigaray, Luce . An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press , 1993 .

---. Elemental Passions. Trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still. New York: Routledge, 1992.

---. The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger. Trans. Mary Beth Mader. Austin, Texas: The University of Texas Press, 1999.

---. I Love to You: Sketch for a Possible Felicity in History. Trans. Alison Martin. New York: Routledge, 1996.

---. Sexes and Genealogies. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

---. To Be Two. Trans. Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F. Cocito-Monoc. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Perl, Jeffrey. The Tradition of Return: The Implicit History of Modern Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Shaw , Miranda . Passionate Enlightenment : Women in Tantric Buddhism. Princeton : Princeton University Press , 1994 .

Temple, Michael, ed. Meetings with Mallarmé in Contemporary French Culture. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1998.

Endnotes

[1] See Lloyd Dumas's "Economics and Alternative Security: Toward a Peacekeeping International Economy" in Alternative Security and Peter Gabel's "Spirituality and Law" in Tikkun. [^]

[2] Lisa Walsh's summary of the feminine in Lévinas builds on Irigaray's in the final chapter of An Ethics of Sexual Difference. See "Between Maternity and Paternity: Figuring Ethical Subjectivity." [^]

[3] Mediators are also figured as angels, or cherubim in Irigaray's work. Angels are creatures both flesh and spirit, temporal and eternal. Similarly, Eros in Diotima's speech. Love then, is both an angel that might move between persons and is the very path or possibility of that exchange. This angel-path is also very closely linked to the interval and its function as a 'between' for both subjects, and will be explained further on. [^]

[4] No useful comment on the relation of Irigaray's ethics to Indian Tantra can possibly be contained in this article and still leave room for a discussion of the poetics her work calls for. For a helpful discussion of Tantra in an ethics of sexual difference, see my dissertation. [^]

[5] In the study of psychology the term for what I call intersubjectivity is "co-subjectivity" that refers to the project of relationship as a shared one with goals and conditions amenable to the growth and development of all parties involved. I prefer the term intersubjectivity, however, because it preserves a greater separation of the two subjects and implies that their individual projects of becoming may not always be in perfect or even near alignment. The relationship of love in this ethics requires that being two leave room for projects of being one, in so far as an individual self-subject's, or an entire gender's, project does not result in damage either to the other-subject or to the dynamic between them. [^]

[6]I can invite you, and I might invite you. You cannot insist on coming in or over. If you do, my subjectivity, my freedom, my correspondence to my gender are all erased, and then you and I are both enslaved -- just as it would be if I were to insist on holding, grasping, moving or molding you. My freedom and your freedom rely on each other. Once I impose on you, or you on me, you and I are both less human for it. [^]

[7]See especially Jeffrey Perl on Henry James in The Tradition of Return, and Michael Temple's Meetings with Mallarmé in Contemporary French Culture. Interestingly Temple does not trace Irigaray's "meeting with" Mallarmé in his book, but I grant that his influence on her is less direct than it is on Derrida for instance, who actually wrote an essay on Mallarmé. Irigaray never mentions his name, nor the name of any other Symbolist. I contend nonetheless that Symbolism has had a far more dominant influence on French thought, in its form at least, than many readers of French thought have noticed until recently. [^]

[8]Photocopy A Throw of the Dice. Lay it out on the floor. It's a musical score. [^]

[9] C. F. MacIntyre's translation of the phrase is "time's interstices," but Zwischenräum also carries the sense of "interval" and "space." [^]

[10] Whitford discusses some of the same words in Luce Irigaray, and is careful to point out, as I would like to reiterate, that Irigaray is not so much offering a theory in An Ethics, as she is trying to put the unthought into words, to "stir the imagination," (159) and to evoke responses, wonder, change. [^]

[11]And as for intimacy. The deadline: the orgasm. Demarcation, a mania for classification and performance divides intimacy up into conversation, foreplay, intercourse, orgasm, "afterglow," and believes that these are stages in a linear sort of progression aimed at some kind of proof, or return to a degree zero of tension, or a child. Men and women do this. The relationship, in any form, can be hemmed in by ulterior motives, motives underneath and extraneous to enjoyment, pleasure, mutual fecundation, double transcendence, wonder. I mean no accusation here. Only to say that this is usual, common, encouraged, and a shame. Sex therapists everywhere, inside the boundaries of my culture and without grandiose revolutionary intentions, encourage lovers toward "non-goal oriented sexuality," and audiences on television suck in their breath with surprise. As if this one little thing might be too much to conceive. I grieve this situation of merely normal misery. [^]

[12] One should allude to Penelope here, not Martha Stewart. Or, maybe Martha too. [^]

[13] Shaw's recent reevaluation of Tantrism and women's role in it shows the Tantric sutras to insist on the divinity and autonomy of women, as well as on the requirement that men worship their yogini as a goddess. See "Women in Tantric Circle," and "Women in Tantric History." [^]

[14] Alan Johnson explains that "systems often work in ways that don't reflect the experience and motivations of the people who participate in them" (81). He offers one example of the power of culture's paths of least resistance this way:

Most managers probably know in their hearts that the practice of routinely discarding people in the name of profit and expedience is hurtful and unfair. This is why they feel so bad about being the ones to carry it out, and protect their feelings by inventing euphemisms such as "downsizing" and "outplacement." And yet they participate in a system that produces these cruel results anyway, not because of cruel personalities or malice toward workers, but because a capitalist system makes this a path of least resistance and exacts real costs from those who stray from it. (80).

Operating in an imbalanced, sexist society offers paths of least resistance and exacts real costs for failing to follow them (succeeding at creating other paths), as Johnson goes on to explain. [^]

[15] Discussion of that tradition, however, is another project of mine. [^]

[16] It is no accident that Irigaray's lectures in An Ethics of Sexual Difference are concerned with the theme of mobility and motion in the passions. One of the book's primary concerns, in all the ways it is discussed, is agency. [^]

[17] Alan Johnson argues, in The Gender Knot , that: "Above all, patriarchal culture is about the core value of control and domination in almost every area of human existence. From the expression of emotion to economics to the natural environment, gaining and exercising control is a continuing goal of great importance. Because of this, the concept of power takes on a narrow definition in terms of "power over" -- the ability to control others, events, resources, or oneself in spite of resistance -- rather than alternatives such as the ability to cooperate with others, to give freely of oneself, or to feel and act in harmony with nature. To have power over and to be prepared to use it are defined culturally as good and desirable (and characteristically "masculine"), and to lack such power or to be reluctant to use it is seen as weak if not contemptible (and characteristically "feminine")" (85). [^]

[18] Bodies were awful once. For some peoples, and during some long stretches of history, bathing and hygiene were unheard of. Water was actually considered a danger to health, and it wasn't until the middle nineteenth century in Euro-American history that regular bathing was discovered to prevent a host of illnesses, infections, and to have the fringe benefit of making humans smell better. My great-grandfather, who was a front-line doctor in the War Between the States, wrote his medical thesis on the health benefits of regular bathing.

Imagine a human body after a year or two without a bath.

No wonder people had sex with their clothes on, wore all those layers, were fascinated with the idea of pure mind. No wonder the mind/body split became a major trope in philosophy -- we, Euro-Americans at least, used to be disgusting. In civilizations where bathing has a longer and more venerable history, that hatred of the body (which is not the same thing as misogyny, but which doesn't help matters) does not begin to take hold until the church starts sending its unwashed missionaries to "save the heathen." Tantra and Sufism take hold in countries where bathing is a regular event, sometimes several times a day, even a holy obligation. Tantra insists on an almost maniacal degree of cleanliness. The body is holy, a literal temple, and you don't let crud build up on or inside a temple. [^]

[19] Irigaray comes closest to explaining this gesture from men in Elemental Passions, and is an aspect of her ethics I plan to develop in another essay. [^]

[20]Baudrillard's Seduction, and Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity are excellent examples of this posture with regard to self and other. [^]

[21] She notes that his walk in the woods to the clearing of being is a walk he takes alone. This isolation, the preference for it, is a motif in Irigaray's critique of Heidegger in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger. [^]

[22] Some will find this entirely too fuzzy and mystical a paradox, but there's really no way around it. Irigaray, Tantra, and Heidegger's Rilke all have something in common with Derridian deconstruction (also sometimes marked off as mystical) which is that none of them let us get out of paradoxes. A way can't be a goal, but it is, and yet they are separate. The way to the goal of giving joy to another-subject is precisely to give joy to another-subject. [^]

[23] Chanter offers an excellent analysis of the Heidegger-Irigaray relation in "Irigaray, Heidegger and the Greeks," in Ethics of Eros. Whitford also has excellent commentary on this pair, from a more psychoanalytical perspective, in Luce Irigaray. I make little use of their work here because my direction vectors off from their concerns to a description of being in wonder and what that means for action and writing, that is, for subjectivity and selfhood. [^]

[24] Please bear in mind that I will be working with David Macey's translation of this essay in The Irigaray Reader, as I am more familiar with it than with the more recent translation by Mary Beth Mader of The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, of which this essay is the closing chapter. [^]

I break with the traditional rules for block quotes in this section of the essay in order to make it easier to follow Irigaray's text and my double reading of it.

[25] Tantra, on the other hand, insists on breath as that which balances these concerns of the self. [^]

[26] I will not focus on Irigaray's relation to Descartes at this time, as my goal is not to describe the dynamics of that relation but to summarize and explain her category "wonder" and its place in my development of a poetics akin to an ethics of sexual difference. [^]

[27] Irigaray's term for the other taken only on the subject's terms, as for-the subject. [^]

[28] Mobility is of concern to Irigaray because for her The Passions of the Soul is an examination "of the role of movement in the passions" (An Ethics, 72). Movement is, for my purposes, connected to both agency, in the sense of moving oneself in the world, and to intersubjectivity, in the sense of movement in the interval being intersubjectivity's basic mode. [^]

[29] Irigaray uses "man" where I am using the more generic, "one." This covering over of sexual difference, and Irigaray's mimesis in this essay serve only to allow me to think about wonder as available to masculine and feminine subjects: it seems to me essential to both of their possible development. [^]

[30] In other translations, this excess is rendered as "remainder." [^]

[31] We hear this advice all the time from the various gurus, don't we? Don't you? Don't take your partner, child, job, joy, life, self, for granted. And I know that I usually think -- sure, of course. This is the lesson of death, of illness, of car accidents. It is a lesson that seems to require a daily reminder in order to keep to. The trouble is that it requires, as does being in and of wonder, continual effort. In the case of people especially, most of us want to think that we "know" our parents, our lovers, our children. This phrase means, usually, that we are so familiar with them that they cannot surprise us. This also means that they cannot be new to us; that we take them for granted, even if we consider them special or beloved. But, people, like any vital thing, are always new: there are new cells in the body everyday; the color and degree of a spouse's lust or depression will change day to day; the way a baby walks will change. Wonder is in part a willingness to be surprised, to leave lots of room for the "remainder" in the other-subject that makes their growth possible, to pay attention to the subtle, the quiet, as well as the big, the grandiose. How else do the Buddha or poets look at flowers and see there something no one else ever saw? Wonder requires sustained effort. It requires reminding yourself that the person who went to sleep last night, and the person who woke up this morning are different, if only a little, from each other. Wonder requires responsiveness, going both ways between self and other-subject, and generosity, and compassion, and the willingness to be awed -- not the demand, the willingness. Such relation is possible "only when we are faithful to the perpetual newness of the self, the other, the world." If the religious stories are true, it would seem that wonder always has made these demands. Much is against people in this effort; not just a history that buries sexual difference, but the onslaught of the "new" in the media, combined with the dead repetition of most work, or the "naturally" conservative nature of a society which resists fundamental revolutions, are against us in this effort. In the second and third worlds, the barriers are far stronger, wider, and deeper. In the U. S., where wonder currently has a better chance given material and cultural advantages, such practice, widely adopted and applied, would – far more than any airliner-cum-missile -- change everything. -- Hopefully not too quickly.

Burn the Panopticon: Irigaray's Ethics, Difference, Poetics / Simone Roberts

1. Opening Gestures 2. Diotiman Relation 3. Symbolist Philosopher 4. Erotic Angels 5. Sensible Transendental 6. Sticky Stuff

7. Caress 8. What Are Subjects For? 9. Wonder-Lust Endnotes Bibliography

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