Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)

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Symbolist Philosopher / Simone Roberts

PROLOGUE: In this section, we pause to explain the qualities of symbolist poetics through the example of Mallarmé's work, to show how Irigaray's style and method share deeply in those qualities. This section also hints at the poetics to be discussed later in the essay, which is developed from Irigaray's re-writing of Heidegger's "What Are Poets For?" In that essay, Heidegger offers his engagement with Rilke. Mallarmé and Rilke are the symbolist poets par excellence.

<9> Every revolution has its philosophers and poets. Irigaray is conscious of her work as part of a revolution, as perhaps inciting it. Even as a revolutionary, she is the inheritor of a tradition to which she is faithful, in this case the Symbolist tradition in Europe. Her writing partakes of both philosophical and symbolic rhetorics and methods, so understanding a number of symbolic images, as such, in Irigaray's work can shed light on the texture of a Diotiman relation between subjects, on the not-quite middle voiced aspects of an ethical subjectivity, on wonder, as well as on the sorts of poetics an ethics of sexual difference and an acceptance of a sensible transcendental might imply. They all have one common denominator: in some way they are all symbols of limninality, of mid-ness, of approach, of a kind of ambiguity, but never possession or "knowledge."

<10> In a Diotiman relation of practiced wonder, which eschews any desire on the part of one subject to override the desire of the other-subject, there should be no closure to the creative tension between two subjects pursuing one's own and the other's transcendence. This is why Diotima figures love, Eros, as a daemon, a go between, an inhabitant of and figure for the interval, for that which we limn. Love corresponds to angels, the agents of both the love of self and the love of the other-subject in Irigaray's ethics. Not literal angels, but angels as correlate figures for interval, mucous, touch, and the sensible transcendental, they figure the matrix of contemplative action between and within. If one of the principles of an ethics of sexual difference is to leave the other-subject "subjective, still free," then the principle action of ethical relation is that of limning, of remaining on one's side of relation and approaching the other-subject without intentions to define, confine, control, or subjugate that other-subject in one's own image or for one's own purposes. Limning allows depth to become and to be revealed by each subject-self in its own rhythm.

<11> Take the (in)famous "lips" as an example of the layers, often paradoxical layers, which let symbols of the mouth and vulva function on numerous levels simultaneously. The lips figure a complex sexuality, communication between women, the founding metaphor of a feminine-female imaginary, a symbolic system in which two is better than one (an argument with Lacan), a paradoxical metaphor and metonymy, and simply themselves in a very bodily way. I call words like "the lips" anchors; Heidegger calls them "basic words" in his discussion of Rilke. Some of Rilke's words are angel, tree, and open. They recur in numerous contexts, form nets of corresponding meanings, and take on metaphysical symbolic weight. Rilke, Heidegger argues in "What Are Poets For?," is doing philosophy in poetry. Irigaray, I claim, is using specifically Symbolist poetic methods to open philosophy to the question of sexual difference. Symbolism intends to urge the poet and the reader out of the world they know and into a completely new one of their creation. Rilke's unsayable depends on that cooperation and risk-venture from both parties.

<12> Irigaray's work for sexual difference has been called an attempt to write what is unthought. In some strands of poetry this is the goal as well, and one of the ways to indicate the unthought or the unsayable has been the use of correspondences. Anna Balakian describes the development of Symbolism in The Symbolist Movement, beginning with Baudelaire's poetics. In his (occasional) use of "indirect statement," which would later become the dominant Symbolist mode, Baudelaire exploited the "evocative power of words, the ability to confer to words themselves the power of imagery"(49). In the poetics of the next generation, words sometimes "serve as veritable objects through the multiple sensations they evoke, just as objects imply varying images, according to the eye and the memory of one who perceives them," such that "the poem becomes an enigma." The poem relies on "the multiple meanings, or indeterminacy, contained in words and objects [to make up] the mystery and the mood of the poem," allowing the "message to remain as ambiguous as it is succinct" (49). These values -- ambiguity, indirection, and multiplicity of meaning, the word as both sign and object at once -- are not those typically accepted by philosophical and critical discourse because they traditionally aim for clarity and transparency of language above all. The "trouble" is that in the thought of Irigaray and her contemporaries, these values have migrated from poetry to fiction and finally to philosophical discourse [7].

<13> In Mallarmé's poetics, the word as sign-object attains a new level in that for Mallarmé the word is also akin to a musical note, it has the kind of being of a note in that what it is on the page -- solid and permanent sign -- is not what it is in the air -- a wavering, impermanent impression which fades to be replaced in the flow of impressions. "Image," in Mallarmé's poetics, "is superimposed on image, transposed from one level to another, as from one key to another; there is a rising and an ebbing, and silences, like musical rests" [8]. Mallarmé, like Irigaray, wants the reader aware of this double status. As with music, and as with vatic poetry in general, here is longing which "measures for each reader in terms of his own private target and the distances" between her and her other-subject (Balakian 86). Where the Symbolist poetic made the vatic mode textual and musical, Irigaray makes it textual and bodily. Another approach to this style is to say that words in the symbolist mode are like bodies in Tantric practice and philosophy. They are understood and engaged as symbolic (of the gods) and ontological (as a thing) simultaneously. One of Mallarmé's "basic words," the swan, Balakian describes as ranging in meaning and affect from purity, to virginity, to emptiness, to sterility, as well as "all the nuances of the beautiful but cold void!" (104). And it is, also, "just" a swan, frozen in the ice. Eventually all things flying are brought into symbolist poetics and come to represent "emissaries between two worlds," like angels (105). In her postscript, Balakian argues that more than constructing absences, the symbolist poetic "explores worlds of the in-between, what Rilke called "Zwischenräume der Zeit" [9]. Rilke's Orpheus, she argues, is a figure for this in-between as well, "neither of this world nor of the underworld" but an emissary between them (202). In the symbols of Symbolist poetics, the objects to which words conventionally refer, the words themselves as objects, and the affective layers of the words set in play by the associative work of reading, all this allows what Paz calls "the greatest miracle, . . . that unity is attained without impairing identity" (Paz Conjunctions 8). This is also the goal of Irigaray's ethics that Tantra teaches. Irigaray's categories of the interval and the sensible transcendental, like her description of love and wonder, show how correspondence might be attained without threatening identity or integrity for one or both of the terms.

<14> To read a symbolist poem, or to read Irigaray, or Derrida, or …, to read such world shattering and jail breaking work, is to learn to read all over again. By engaging in such an opening up and confounding of the boundaries between philosophical and poetic discourses, Irigaray not only continues to operate in a paradoxical "feminine" both-and logic, but also opens room for me to move from that question to the possibility of a poetics and a mode of reading that could foster the becoming of sexual difference.

<15>In what follows, I will explicate and comment on some of Irigaray's anchor words. Together these basic words make up the spinal column of Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference, and offer the possibility of a new poetic subject [10].

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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