Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)

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Opening Gestures / Simone Roberts

Separation does not exclude relation, nor vice versa. It is only as something strange, forbidden, as something free, that the other is revealed as an other. And to love him genuinely is to love him in his otherness and in that freedom by which he escapes. Love is then renunciation of all possession, of all confusion.

-- Simone De Beauvoir,
The Ethics of Ambiguity

<1> The customary gesture in academic work is progress by critique (or attack,) forward motion by negative gestures, discovery of short-comings in the works of other academics. This critical method is essential to refining accuracy in our perceptions and interpretations. Since the explosion of structuralist and post-structuralist theories on the scene of American academe, our central business has been the questioning and criticism of nearly all the assumptions and blind-spots of our Enlightenment-Humanist traditions to date. That work has been and still is necessary because such deep assumptions are difficult to dislodge in the actual culture. In the cooler afterglow of the PoMo Big Bang, however, I believe that another gesture is necessary. That gesture should be a compliment to critical and questioning efforts -- a creative gesture. These creative gestures should be informed by the critical mode, work in tandem with it, but should build on the revolutionary and liberating strengths to be found in those theories, in our several cultures, in people. We need a new Renaissance.

<2> We in the Humanities have, in recent years, witnessed turns toward ethics and the emotions as subjects of feminist and other academic inquiries. That impulse has also been at work in the wider culture, in the legal, theological, economic and political arenas – something is emerging now. The economic theories of Lloyd J. Dumas and legal pedagogical theory of Peter Gabel are two examples [1]. Linda Hutcheon, in the Winter 2003 issue of Common Knowledge, calls for a more cooperative scholarship than the Humanist disciplines have witnessed of late, arguing that perhaps "the creative and integrative" could become "part of the 'critical' in critical thinking, replacing demolition and enmity as key elements" (46-7). Agreeing with the journal's editor Jeffrey Perl that "Knocking our heads together seems an unobvious route to enlightenment," she reminds us that one of the laudable lessons of postmodernity is the possibility of a "'climate of positive copresence'" and the advantages of both/and logic (47). "True intellectual debate," she reminds, "is not a matter of protecting vested interests and must involve better than search and destroy missions" (46). I work "under the influence" of Irigaray's theories of sexual difference and mutual fecundation --one manifestation of this cooperative, imaginative, creatively critical trend – so this essay will work in tandem with Irigaray's own work and that of others. Combat, if it belongs anywhere, belongs in a context other than a discussion of a theorist whose work is to further enlighten humanity to its own promise.

<3> Irigaray's work on ethics and love is one of the strong and compelling syntheses of these new turns toward ethics and emotions as objects of study in the Humanities. Controversial as Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference and work on love have been for feminists and non-feminists alike, I seek here to make one of those creative gestures, to build on her theories in order to provide something she has called for: a new principle for poetics. This new poetics requires a subjective and intersubjective shift, a reprioritization one might say, that implies and opens up an under-explored cultural and historical vista, and a new philosophy of poetry.

<4> In The Labyrinth of Solitude , Octavio Paz states part of the historical problem from which we might emerge:

Women are imprisoned in the image masculine society has imposed on them: therefore, if they attempt a free choice it must be a kind of jailbreak. Lovers say that "love has transformed her, it has made her a different person." And they are right. Love changes a woman completely. If she dares to love, if she dares to be herself, she has to destroy the image in which the world has imprisoned her. (198)

Love is the medium in which one becomes authentic, unencumbered by the playacting of roles. The feminine subject-self is/has been covered over with a plethora of projections unknown for/to herself. Love is freedom, but also dangerous, hard w-o-r-k. She must dare to be herself, and that dare, that venture, destabilizes the other subject, the masculine subject, on several levels. One of them is the tradition of venerating the Beloved, the tradition of the troubadour and the chaste, perfect, unattainable woman-object that extends on, in one case, to the romantic, but destructive, adoration of Sacher Masohc's Venus in Furs. Another is well described, if in the heights of abstraction, by Lévinas where in carnal contact with the beloved destroys his subjectivity, his ethical significance, and reveals her to be "childlike, condemned to animality, and disturbingly silent," or in Lévinas's terms, "ultramaterial" (Walsh para. 5) [2]. In patriarchy, the jail woman finds herself in, regardless of the formula, the one thing she cannot be is herself -- or even human, really. This jail is harmful to masculine subjects as well – as much to the privileged as to the subjugated though differently. For one, he cannot maintain his customary manner when she becomes herself, when he makes contact with her carnality and his own, never mind contact with her divinity and his own. In the polarized world of unidirectional subjectivity, the other is a negative destabilizing force in the subject's relation with itself, its present, and its future. The situation, the prison, the Panopticon, might be figured this way:

Figure 1

The "you" doesn't do much, and what it does tends to irritate the I by disrupting plans it thinks should flow smoothly from its will into reality. When the "you" is only ambiguously an object, like another person, trouble arises that tends to resolve itself in disaster because that "you" has no life of its own in the perceptions of the I. The "you" is merely a for-me. The Diotiman relation Irigaray develops shows how such destabilization can be fundamental to intersubjectivity, which would have to run in at least two directions. Unidirectional subjects cannot break intersubjective or interpersonal relations out of jail because they refuse what the Diotiman and Tantric models allow: integration of multiplicity and reciprocity. Those modes are the blowtorch that melt bars.

<5> In Irigaray's ethics, concerned with kinds of subjectivity and being human, this integration leads neither to the old model of the subject as totalized, rational, self-contained (which never existed), nor to a simple placing of different subjects or aspects of self next to each other in a school lunch room and expecting them to "just get along" (which never happens). Taking love and fecundity as the basis and goal of ethics, Irigaray's transvaluation of subjectivity and being human is far subtler and more demanding than merely trading punches across a sexual battlefield or an ethnic partition.

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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