Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)

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Endnotes / Simone Roberts

[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 Printer-friendly Version

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