Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)

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Diotiman Relation / Simone Roberts

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.

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 Printer-friendly Version

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