Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)

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Sensible Transcendental / Simone Roberts

PROLOGUE: This part of the essay explores or limns the several levels of meaning bound up in Irigaray's concept of the sensible transcendental. Basically, that phrase refers to the Eastern premise that the spiritual is found in the physical, that this world is not only a fallen version of paradise, but also the only world in which spirit is at work. The Hindu greeting of "namaste," for example, can loosely be translated to mean "I honor the god in you." Tantra teaches that human bodies are the vehicles (mediators) and the embodiments of masculine and feminine aspects of spirit; thus, Irigaray's idea of a carnal ethics, embodied, transcendent and sensible at once.

<18> The structure of Irigaray's ethics is one of balance and integration from the most elemental levels of caress and mucous to the most abstract levels of place and interval. None is figured as purely physical or purely abstract. All are figured as participating in and having implications for the physical, the imaginary-symbolic, the linguistic, the social and the political elements of life: symbols. Given the symbolic web Irigaray has constructed of place, interval, angels, Eros, mucous, caress, love and wonder, it is not surprising to find that all of these modes-terms-categories participate in each other while expressing or housing different aspects of self and intersubjective experience. They also all figure the abstraction "the sensible transcendental," or the human condition of in-carnating the divine, our being a locus in which the transcendent finds its presence in the immanent, the symbolic in the real. From the heights of angles, then, I move to the intermediate and most abstract of Irigaray's anchor words before descending into bodies and what they can do with each other.

<19> The most thorough critical treatment of the sensible transcendental can be found in Margaret Whitford's Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. Over the course of several chapters and approaching the concept from Irigaray's concerns with divinity, with returning through the masculine imaginary, with language as langue and parole, Whitford elaborates the sensible transcendental within her philosophic and psychoanalytic perspective. While my own focus is more concerned with the mystical, poetic and ethical sources and implications of Irigaray's work, Whitford's elaboration affords me an excellent partner with whom to build from Irigaray's ethics to a poetics supportive of sexed subjects.

<20> Whitford begins with a provisional definition. The sensible transcendental is a "vital intermediary milieu, a perpetual journey [marche], a perpetual transvaluation, a permanent becoming, the immanent efflorescence of the divine" (47). Whitford understands Irigaray's definition to mean, at the most general level, "all the conditions of women's collective access to subjectivity," and "the symbolic order in its possibilities of and for transformation:"

in other words, language as a field of enunciation, process, response, and becoming, but a field in which there are two poles of enunciation, so that the "I" may be "male" or "female", and so may the "you", so that the speaker may change positions, exchange with the other sex; it follows too that the divine other must also potentially be of the female sex . . . .

What is needed for women, then, is a habitation that does not contain or imprison them; instead of an invisible prison which keeps them captive, a habitation in which they can grow is the condition of becoming, and of becoming divine . . . . (47)

Language is part of that invisible prison, along with the law. So long as the "I" is tacitly understood as only masculine, male subjects cannot place themselves in the venture with the other because the female will remain at home/ in prison from which she never leaves [12]. Once female subjects begin to build themselves a habitation, a home, a place and envelope, both she and he will automatically be in a condition of risk and jailbreak. Touching and gazing will go both ways. He can no longer use her as ground: she can no longer hide from her selfhood behind him or in his fantasy of her. The "I" and the "you" are part of the envelope and place, part of the structure of a subject. To be each fully participating subjects, he and she have to able to switch places, or share characteristics intersubjectively in both the private and cultural interval between and surrounding them. He and she would have to become themselves. Recognizing the specific divinity, or the specificity of each gender in positive terms means risk:

The blood and flesh of the phantasied mother/woman, which sustains the language and house of men, must find its own symbolic expression in language, thus becoming the other pole of cultural discourse, and allowing two-way predication (the "double syntax"). (47)

Double syntax and two-way predication mean two things: (one) with it women could attain to a subjectivity of their own, and (two) that the female subject would look at men as well, that is that men would also become predicates, as well as the subjects they are accustomed to being. They would be defined in exchanges with female subjects as a positively valued other-subject. Simply, we cannot stop masculine subjectivity from existing while women develop their own symbolic order; the two will have to enter into dialogue from the beginning:

The sensible transcendental, then, is the flesh made word (in an audacious reversal of the New Testament), but not in a simple predicative sense . . . . So the dynamics of enunciation are here given primacy over language which simply conveys information or truth . . . . (47-8)

Whitford does not emphasize this aspect of Irigaray as much I do, but the flesh made word is a recognition of the spiritual in the carnal, the basic principle in Tantra that humans are embodiments of a sexed divine which subtends Irigaray's project as a whole -- calling for a transvaluation of Western culture. The sensible transcendental is best aligned with the mucous and the caress as modes of ethical relation. As she gives enunciation primacy over language, Whitford recognizes that ethics, like Tantra and other yogas, is a practice. It is not some static perfected thing, a jail, but life, an on-going exploration, journey and process of reinforcement in the self. One does not become perfect, one is perfect only in becoming, which means never being perfect. The compassionate and ethical intention and result of action matters, not that the action was perfectly executed. In terms of social contracts, the mucous and caress are modes which remind us that becoming, even as a gender in history, is not a process that finishes. The ethical relation in difference, including differences among women, insists that the relation be conscious and always renegotiable:

In the concept of the sensible transcendental, Irigaray is positing that the oppositions might come into relation -- the mother and father, the Sensible and the Intelligible, the immediate and the transcendent, the material and the ideal -- in imaginary and symbolic processes, that is that each sex might be able to assume its own divisions, into its own negativity, its own death . . . . [The] deconstruction of metaphysical oppositions is only part of the story for women, and corresponds only to the negative moment. What is needed is a framework which "allows access to life and to death to two" . . . , and this has to be a construction, the construction of an identity which allows each sex its own life and its own mobility. (122)

That construction requires the creative gestures many adventurous Diotiman or Irigarian thinkers, like Hutcheon and Perl, hunger for. Love, in other words, as Irigaray understands it:

may be the becoming which appropriates the other for itself by consuming it, introjecting it into itself, until the other disappears. Or love may be the motor of becoming which allows each its own growth. For the latter, each one must keep its body autonomous. Neither should be the source of the other. Two lives should embrace and fertilized each other, without the other being a preconceived goal for either.

There is a sense in which this love can be said to be divine; it has features of the sensible transcendental: it is embodied and it allows for growth and becoming, not immobilizing either lover in his/her own growth [making them a beloved]. (qtd. in Whitford 61)

This kind of love is unlikely. It is natural, but also must be created by us. It requires that we consider the body not only as a thing of nature and matter, but also a place of cultural and spiritual creation. Without a reckoning of one's own place, the interval between oneself and one's other-subject, without men and women who have their own genealogies and subjectivities, Fusion, codependency, projection tend to happen because one or another partner in a relationship is not anchored in their singularity and therefore not free to risk. They seek their other-subject as the angel, and refuse or ignore the Eros that exists for them as well. Not only must each keep its body autonomous, each must keep its self autonomous in interdependence and community. Otherwise, one or the other will reify, incarcerate the other-subject as an object of veneration, or of need, or of abjection, and sometimes a mélange of the three. Eros and angels represent the sensible transcendental in that they are already a relation of opposites, as well as models for how subject-selves might relate (to) their opposites.

The "immanent ecstasy" is another formulation of the "sensible transcendental"; it is both transcendent . . . and immanent . . . . The one does not exclude or incorporate the other; transcendence is represented by the "flesh of the other", but each has an other, so each is transcendent and transcended, each is flesh. (167)

Nicely balanced, this human situation is not automatic. Socrates eventually bends Diotima's understanding of Eros back to a unidirectional and univocal one with closure and enclosure as its habitual gestures. Tantra can be, and has been practiced in sexist and abusive ways, though these ways are not consistent with the precepts of that path [13]. Mucous can be just some textures of goo the body produces. Caresses can become choke holds. The interval can be ignored. The sensible transcendental can be rejected. Women and men can deny each other freedom, even with the force of one or another religious doctrine behind them. The sensible transcendental and all of its symbol-modes are choices. The get out of jail free card can be burned. The sensible transcendental is a challenge to the very foundations of culture and life as we have understood it under patriarchal socio-cultural organization. Choice presides here -- thus ethics of sexual difference, not a system for sexual difference. Each person who chooses to engage in the establishing of a world that recognizes more than one ground, which is not the same as no ground at all, would make choices, daily, forever [14].

At the same time, each is immanent or present: crossing the boundary of the skin "into the mucous membranes of the body," entering a "fluid universe" where the divine is not "foreign to the flesh." The universe of the mucous is fluid: the stable universe of "truth" becomes unstable. (Whitford 167)

Unstable, un-grounded and non-foundational -- from the point of view of a unified truth, history, subject-self with only one gender, this is the case. Such instability is not, however, an apocalypse of meaning or history. Such instability, or risk, is a constantly underlying prerequisite for a possible beginning -- for any motion, or thought, or love at all.

<21> Instability is risk and venture and the possibility of a culture of life. Irigaray's phrase, "a future that is not a repetition of the past" is this instability. The world of two is not simply liquid and therefore related to being swallowed up or drowned yet again in the abyss of the feminine-for-masculine. The world of difference offers a chance for life because only subject-selves prepared to accept the risk can enter that fluid dynamic of creation with any possible safety.

Each is a "subject" in love; each is transcendent to the other (each is divine for the other); each can confront the other-subject with admiration [wonder] . . . . Love, the mediator, is a "shared outpouring" … a "shared space", a "shared breath", bridging the space between two persons, two sexes; it does not use the body of the other for its jouissance; each is irreducible to the other or to the child. The loss of boundaries does not lead to a fusion in which one or the other disappears, but to a mutual crossing about boundaries which is creative, and yet where identity is not swallowed up. (167)

That "loss of boundaries" in wonder, or in the mediating milieu of love, requires two people: not one and a half, not one and its tool. Not only must the one not use the body of the other-subject, the one must not use the subjection of the other-subject's subjectivity for his or her own jouissance or growth. The "loss of boundaries" Irigaray discusses is the "going through the other to return to the self," and that going through requires offering of self as well as seeking balance with the other-subject. Angels represent this double loop on the spiritual dimension; Eros the balancing of opposites in love; place and interval represent the subjective, economic and political, dimensions; mucous the sexual, creative, reproductive dimension as well as the maternal-feminine; and the caress the sexual and creative dimensions of exchange between personal lovers.

<22> The poet figures into Irigaray's project as he and/or she who can live ventured in this risk between them, of which they are both stewards of themselves. To live ventured is to accustom oneself to paradox. The other-subject's freedom is the condition of my own. I am both subject and predicate of the exchange between us. The sensible transcendental is the medium and the goal. Difference is the medium and the goal. Union can only be made from two separate things. The past resides in the present as does the future. In order to be safe, to become fecund, one must put oneself at risk. Death is one limit on human being, and so is the other-subject a limit, but one in life. Not all limits, not all negation is destruction. The body and spirit are companions. These are not easy paradoxes to accept. Yet, they are not unheard of, not inconceivable.

<23> Irigaray calls for poets, I think, to help demonstrate how to think in and inhabit paradoxes. The poets she calls for have been and are, though perhaps without any strong awareness, writing ventured poems that can teach inhabitation of the sort of risk and balance a culture of sexual difference always already is and requires. Though they do not overtly take sexual difference as their theme, I believe there is a line of ventured poets who write various modes of vatic or oracular poetry that begins (more or less) with Hölderlin, descends though Mallarmé and several of his Modern inheritors to poets such as Yves Bonnefoy and Jorie Graham [15].

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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