Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)
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What Are Subjects For? / Simone Roberts
PROLOGUE: Here, I discuss Irigaray's ambivalent relationship with Heidegger's definition of the poet. On the one hand, she wants to preserve the poet as a ventured subject — tending toward the world and the other. On the other hand, she rejects Heidegger's view that that world exists for the poet, as the poet's object, possession. This aspect of the poet's subjectivity must be rejected in order for an ethics of sexual difference to find its poetic, a poetic in which the world and other is not for-the-poet but for-itself and with-the-poet across the interval.
<41> Heidegger has written that the poet is he who risks life itself. One who risks the way of usual life in the name of adventure into the unknown. The poet puts herself or himself in relation to the interval on the way to the other-subject. The poet is both l'ammant and l'ammante, both the male and female lover – an archetype. Bodily, spiritually, loving of abstract angels and real mucous equally, the poet lives in such a way that he or she does not fall into thing-hood, nor imprison the other there. Somewhere in a correspondence between Heidegger's poet in "What Are Poets For" and Irigaray's essays "He Who Risks Life Itself," "Love of Self" and "Love of Same, Love of Other" I suspect a description can be found of the subject-selves who can live in the wonder of the paradoxical symbols a poetics of sexual difference draws forth from us, and for us, and between us.
<42> Wonder is an interesting condition. Those who have been astounded by a vista, a sunset,a birth, ablizzard, or who have witnessed a live performance of the Hallelujah Chorus or a Mahler symphony, who have fallen in love, or who have felt the stillness deep in meditation or prayer, these people have experienced wonder for at least a little while. The trouble is that this state of mind and self is fleeting and not self-sustaining.
<43> Wonder is a state that can be extended to the levels and common activities in life, like the stillness of meditation and the advice to right thinking and right action in the Buddhist traditions, or the testimony of the faithful that God is always loving them. But, wonder does not require any sort of religious faith; rather, it requires a redirecting of attitudes. An ethics of sexual difference does not accept extreme postmodern understandings of the subject: fractured, multiple, schizoid, an amalgam of voided organs, a product or commodity, a set of masks beneath which there can be found only other masks with other agendas. There is, to be sure, a kindness in Derrida's phrase "respecting the other's difference in himself," an allowance for accident, mistake, misprision. But the extreme postmodern subject stands in irony with regard to itself and its others [20]. Irony is ethically neutral, while respect is ethically charged. The Diotiman (or Tantric) subject-self approaches the other-subject expecting surprises, errors, shifts of texture, need, expression, but does not take that as a sign that no one's home. Even the differences are aspects of a whole – an accountable and culpable whole. Meditative practices have as their goal to bring one into a more and more sustainable condition of wonder and respect for this complexity. Wonder can be deepened from a fleeting state of mind to condition of self. And no, one need not actually be a poet to do so. The poet is a symbol for a kind of subjective practice in which one moves and practices with intention toward a sustained attitude of wonder and respect, a posture toward the self and the other-subject. The poet is an archetype of potential. Henry Miller (no paragon of ethics in matters sexual) understood this potential when he wrote, "We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separate and self-hypnotized, but individual and related," and, "That is the deepest meaning of the word 'human,' that we are a link, a bridge, a promise" (337, 339).
<44> Any long-time practitioner of Hatha yoga, Sufism, Tantra, Zen meditation or any physical and mystical practice will report that this readjustment of self takes a long time and is very difficult. Think of the difficulty of keeping New Year's Resolutions or most promises people make to themselves. As I elaborate practice in this project, it is a personal, private, public, cultural and political undertaking. "Practice" is a lovely word, allowing as it does for increase of skill and consistency, but also for failure, set back. Practice reinforces itself. In the meditative sense of the word, practice requires curiosity, humility, patience. It is an exploration of possibility, not a rigid application of known or assumed techniques or conclusions. There is no new world if we cling to and rest on all of our old comforts, habits, and prejudices. We have to change everything; beginning with our own hearts and our posture toward each other and ourselves. Such work, can only be done from something like bliss, from having extra to give out; one cannot even be kind without resentment if one works from a deficit of energy. Poets have that extra, the Plenty of Eros's parentage, and some practice at sustaining wonder.
<45> Heidegger describes the poet as "ventured," "unprotected," but not "abandoned," as always inhabiting a gamble that could "turn out one way or [an]other" (Heidegger 102-3). This is what one might call "the human condition," but the poet, as paragon subject, makes her or himself aware of this condition, actively engages it. The poet "ventures itself:"
What is ventured is thus [carefree] . . . secure, safe. What is ventured can follow the venture, follow it into the unprotectedness of the ventured, only if it rests securely in the venture. The unprotectedness of what is ventured not only does not exclude, it necessarily includes, its being secure in its ground. . . .
This is why Rilke calls it [the ground] "the unheard-of center" (Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 28). It is the ground as the "medium" [interval] that holds one being to another in mediation and gathers everything in the play of the venture . . . . (104-5)
One is safe as ventured in the venture to the degree that one places oneself consciously in it, at risk, "secure in [one's] ground" which is very little ground at all. So, one is safe to the degree one has enough faith in oneself to grant the other-subject's freedom. The unheard-of center that mediates between beings cannot be bedrock. If it were, it could mediate nothing; it could only support or bury. The fluid indeterminacy of the interval (for all the "danger" it represents to the masculine symbolic and subject) is the very stuff of which relations are made. In Heidegger, this "unheard of center" and "ground" is death, the end-limit to the subject-self's being and becoming.
<46> Irigaray's point of critique against Heidegger is that for all his understanding of risk, his understanding of the poet still takes death as the only limit on the subject-self. For Irigaray, the other gender, the other-subject is the more vivacious limit on self, a limit capable of contributing to the self-subject's own becoming. The unheard of center is very like the interval between lovers who participate in that center by creating it, entering it, and sharing energy through it: like air and water, the more feminine elements. Where Heidegger takes death to be the unheard of center and abyss, Irigaray places life and relations to living beings. In accordance with her Buddhist and Tantric assumptions, death is a given and nothing to worry much over. The suffering produced by knowledge of our mortality and the preciousness it accords human life is a reason to engage each other in wonder, respect and reciprocity. In accordance with her feminist assumptions, where Heidegger's conceptual universe is populated by (one) man while women remain "out there" with the natural world and dim creatures, Irigaray places women and men, their subjectivities, genealogies and the interrelations between them at the center of her philosophical and cultural project [21]. Such an indeterminate center focuses the two subjects attention on living here, with each other, and less on their own solitary destinies and demises. The venture, like wonder, is a situation that is both the goal and the path [22]. To venture is to go out, but that very going out, like an exhalation or a caress, is also a return to the self. There is, in short, nothing to lose in risking life itself. The risk only becomes ethical when it "concerns every being inasmuch as it is a being;" that is, to the degree that the poet recognizes and acts according to the condition that one is only as free to be ventured as the other-subject is free (Heidegger 103). One's freedom is the condition that allows one to be ventured; that is, to transcend sensibly or access the transcendental in the sensible. Interestingly, Heidegger's description of transcendence sounds more like the sensate transcendence in a Diotiman relation than like the usual "up, up, up and away" sort of transcendence: "But this surpassing, this transcending does not go up and over into something else; it comes up to its own self and back into the nature of its truth. Being itself traverses this going over and is itself its dimension"(An Ethics 131). The transcendence of the venture "confuses the opposition between immanence and transcendence" and is an "accessible transcendental that remains alive" (An Ethics 33, 27). The sensible transcendental is, as Tina Chanter calls it in Ethics of Eros, "nothing if not paradoxical" (180) [23]. It is paradoxical due to the "ubiquitous" mind/body split in idealist Western thought in which the body is a beastly impediment to the transcendence of the soul-mind, mired in immanence and associated with women and the unruly feminine. The sensible transcendental insists therefore on embodiment. As in Tantra and Diotiman relation, the self is both body and spirit, moving horizontally in space, forward and backward in time, and vertically in "spirit" or relation to the universe or what Rilke calls "The Open"(Heidegger 130). In a nicely deconstructive move, Irigaray insists on the "path between heaven and earth" in such a way that the self and body are always participating in both places and is itself the path between them (qtd. in Chanter 180). In a condition of venturedness and wonder, the hierarchy of man over woman would be replaced with a relation between them mediated by the path that is the goal.
<47> But Irigaray and Heidegger part ways. As much as Irigaray draws on various male philosophers, she is never wholly uncritical of them or the masculinist symbolic they construct and propagate. As Chanter points out, there is a "more than fleeting resemblance between the way in which Irigaray articulates the question of sexual difference and the procedure that Heidegger employs in posing the question of the meaning of Being" (127). Just as Heidegger goes back through metaphysics in order to expose the covering over of Being by philosophical discourse ; so does Irigaray go to expose the covering over of sexual difference, but she includes Heidegger as a member of the "conspiracy," the cover up of sexual difference [24]. The schism between Heidegger and Irigaray begins with statements like these:
That man goes with the venture, even more than does plant or beast, could mean first that man is admitted into the Open with even less restraint than are those other beings . . . . Man places before [in front of] himself the world as the whole of everything objective, and be places himself before [in priority] the world. Man sets up the world toward himself, and delivers Nature over to himself. (Heidegger 109-10)
Man, in short, is a subject-agent who makes the world a thing for himself, covered up in the rhetoric of the Open, and Nature. Man finds himself frustrated (often, in history, violently so) to discover that nature and woman are vital, striving, and divert his trajectories with their own.
<48> In "He Who Risks Life Itself," Irigaray offers a six page summary and critique of "What Are Poets For?" the rhetoric of which functions as both a lyrical call to poets and a scathing retort to Heidegger that exposes what he leaves covered. It is as if there it is, one more time, this man who seems willing to question everything leaves intact and "sacredly" undisturbed the assumptions and rhetoric about women and the feminine. Irigaray's challenge and disappointment in this essay are palpable.
<49> One the one hand, it seems that Heidegger's description of the poet has provided a nearly perfect description of the subject-selves capable of ethical love and relation. Irigaray's mimesis seems fairly friendly here:
He who risks life itself. In excess of it, scarcely, by a breath; a breath which, if it is held, saves through song. Prophet of pure forces that call for and refuse shelter. Does not all that already exists paralyse respiration . . . ? [25]
On the one hand (A), here is the poet who risks the venture of being, who gives him/herself only the protection of a held breath, that one link to life and safety in order that the poet may save through song, contact and bring home, like an angel, the pure forces. On the other hand (B), here is the poet who abandons Nature in the name of pure forces only, in the name of mind only, paralyzing respiration, and who leaves the other-subject abjectly behind [26].
And who goes not into the abyss can only repeat and restate the paths already opened up that erase the traces of gods who have fled. Alone, always alone, the poet runs the risk of venturing outside the world and of folding back its openness to touch the bottom of the bottomless . . . . Saying yes to what calls him beyond the horizon . . . . Present everywhere, but invisible, granting life to all and to everything, on pain of death.
A: The poet braves the unknown, the abyss, plumbing the bottom of the vast, the mystery of mysteries, the absolute, toward the abstract other. Alone and brave, as subjects would need to be to live in an ethical relation. There is no shelter in which one or the other subject sets all the terms of engagement, no shelter of control. Forget the Panopticon. It's already on fire. Here is jailbreak. Each subject-self has to remain on his or her, his or his, her or her side and respect the interval and the difference between I and the other-subject. B: "Alone" is also a turn. The poet goes alone, with no partner, no equal balancing other-subject, that other-subject is buried in "open," "abyss," "bottomless" and grants life to them, but does not meet the poet as alive on her own accord. Both an object to explore and a space to enter invited or no, these figures keep the poet solipsistic and safe from real dialogue and exchange with a living other-subject by immobilizing what "would still like to traverse this preoccupied atmosphere," the air, the abstract, the interval, and other-subject who shares them. The poet's limit is bottomless, or infinite – but never the transcendent limit of the living encounter with another person:
Let into the air in the future of what has not yet appeared. Bringing into play the danger of a new flowering devoid of protection. Unsheltered. Outside any abode. Unveiled? Advancing into danger without any answer already granted to his trust. No betrothal, no abandonment here.
A: Irigaray's theme of a "future which does not simply repeat the past," of a future which is wholly different in its tone, organization and procedure seems to be the poet's direction in being ventured. Moving into that "danger," negotiating such a future would be difficult, full of new problems without any guaranteed answers seems the kind of understanding and curiosity required by Irigaray's ethics. B: At the same time, the poet seems only capable of this risk absent of betrothal or risk of abandonment by the other-subject. The poet can only take this risk, life itself, ventured over against objects he has made-interpreted for himself (or herself, too, since there's just the one model of subjectivity). The poet will not grant a venture between him/herself and an other subject-self. This subject has no love. It turns out that at our stage in history, all here is narcissism, the poet in love with his own perception of a Nature which, being a thing, and for-him, cannot determine its own ventures tangential to or against his own. Nature is but his mirror. A nice but dangerous fantasy, given that we inhabit the planet at her leave.
<50> Just as "what opens up does not stop in any direction" and just as this lonely venture is a "total risk," so it is with loving, ethical relations in difference – as opposed to relation of the same with the other-same [27]. The poet winds up, for all the good example that could be set here:
Protected by risk itself. Insensibly, invisibly sheltered in its being. In its own heart? Not yet open to the other, save to the other of the same? [These are both sincere and rhetorical questions.]
Trembling at the coming of what is promised. Of that other breath that is born unto them [poets] when all already-known resonances have died away. Beyond everything that has already been attained . . . . Whose breath subtly impregnates the air, like a vibration perceived by those lost in love. Their senses awake, they boldly go forward by ways where others see only shadows and hell.
B: The poet remains closed off from the air, from the interval and relation to a living other-subject in difference. A: At the same time, the poet could, if her or his attention were redirected in "true" risk toward the infinite mystery of the living other-subject, begin to see her or him, begin to let her or him be and become, beyond all the already-known resonances, the assumptions about their being and their relations. To do so would set them on a venture, not simply beyond the horizon or out to the sacred ether, but between them into a region of venture and risk that has the character of hell, so unfamiliar and incalculable would it be. Or heaven:
And so, those who renounce their own will [power over] go towards one another. Calling on one another beneath all saying [dire] already said, all words already uttered, all speech [parole] already exchanged, all rhythms already hammered out. They draw one another into the mystery of a word [verbe] seeking to be made flesh.
This sounds mystical because it is, in part. The liminal is usually that way. A: The breath and Tantra are in play again, insisting on the corporeality of spirit, on the words being made flesh, flesh sacred as word. B: That mysticism is also as simple as Rilke's desire to see things in their specificity. When one looks at an other-subject in his or her deep, specific, and unique nature, one moves beyond established rhythms and the already-known into the mystery of that specific other-subject. One loves, breaks out of jail, breaks out of the "usual" and risks becoming a danger to the "as usual." This is wonder, the being-here Buddhists insist on. As subject-selves, this attention is our ethical duty to each other in difference.
<51> The question remains, however: if we are in a historical period in and before which sexual difference has never been considered directly and consciously, if Irigaray's desire for humans is that we attain an ethics of sexual difference for which we have few sufficient models (other than possibly the Tantric), then how is the project to be undertaken? The first part of the answer to this seems to be that courage and courtesy of imagination are the minimum requirements. What, after all, is the imagination for in destitute times?
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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