Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)
Return to Contents »
Caress / Roberts
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)
Burn the Panopticon: Irigaray's Ethics, Difference, Poetics / Simone Roberts
ISSN: 1547-4348. All material contained within this site is copyrighted by the identified author. If no author is identified in relation to content, that content is © Reconstruction, 2002-2016.