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