Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)
Return to Contents »
Erotic Angels / Simone Roberts
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.
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 |
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.