Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)

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Wonder-Lust / Simone Roberts

We are always much stronger than we think.

--- Hélène Cixous, "First Days"

PROLOGUE: At last, we arrive at a "conclusion," one that opens on a future instead of closing on the past. Wonder is a faculty of the mind, lust one of the body. In an ethics and poetics of difference honors, promotes, embraces and is curious about the differences between wonder and lust, the mind and the body, thought and pleasure. These "opposites" must be made to harmonize, to resonate with each other. The subject-self represented by the ideal subjectivity of the poet has burned the Panopticon within. She or he works to eliminate the paranoid watcher, the jailer, who sees the other as only a "hostile freedom" or as only an object of use. This section of the essay describes that subjectivity, its Diotiman relation with itself and the other-subject. At last, here the argument is completed that this mode of subjectivity and selfhood is the key to a future of mutual fecundity, of mutual and healthy expansion of self and spirit in a future history other than the bloody and bilious past.

<52> What these ventured subject-selves need in themselves is a rebirth of wonder, self-reliance, and courtesy. People seem, these days, a little sick from experience, callused. Not that this condition is really our fault. Very few people are trained to remain open to possibility, to seek action, to remain compassionate while protecting themselves from scarring in the face of one global, national, local or private atrocity after another. It is a very difficult balance, and a disaffected kind of withdrawal seems the most common response to it all. But that ironic apathy will not do. Wonder may be the way out.

<53> I connect wonder to subjectivity and selfhood, and to ethics and poetics, partly because Irigaray does so implicitly. But more so because, on the view of poetics I want to develop, it seems to me that (for all their reputation as impractical visionaries, scoundrels, revolutionaries and liars, or terribly selfish for spending all that time alone -- which protects them so that they may venture freely, encounter the other really) poets know how to do something that a world of sexual difference would have to foster a talent for: they know how to see and experience, to be struck by what they see and what touches them, and how to make a response to that experience because they know they can and will persist with it.

<54> They have, in short, a talent for wonder. In Descartes' French, wonder is a translation of l'admiration, which carries the sense of astonished marveling before something extraordinary, of joy in the beautiful and the immense, enthusiasm, enchantment. It is the emotion which corresponds to the sublime.

<55> In the essay "Wonder: A Reading of Descartes, 'The Passions of the Soul'"Irigaray elucidates wonder as the fundamental attitude necessary for ethics between the sexes. It is the essential ingredient in the subject-selves of sexual difference:

Wonder is the motivating force behind mobility in all its dimensions [27]. From its most vegetative to its most sublime functions, the living being has need of wonder to move. Things must be good, beautiful, and desirable for all the senses and meaning, the sense that brings them together . . . . [One must] find a vital speed, a growth speed that is compatible with [one's] senses and meanings, . . . to leave an interval between [oneself] and the other-subject, to look toward, to contemplate -- to wonder. Wonder being an action that is both active and passive. The ground or inner secret of genesis, of creation? (An Ethics 73) [28]

Wonder is to be understood as a motivator of all levels of self from metabolism to the need to create great works. It corresponds loosely to the Tantric-Hindu-Buddhist idea of prana, breath, or the all-animating life force, uniquely expressed in each individual but common to all living things. In order for wonder to be consciously available (in order to align oneself with it) a subject-self would need to find the mind-body's particular rate of motion in all things.

<56> Finding this pace is a matter of caring for one's self, creating an envelope that affords one inner contemplation, a place to minister to the self, that keeps the world and its definitions a little at bay in order to meet it and the other-subject with one's freedom ready to hand. Wonder requires an interval, difference; that which we appropriate to ourselves cannot participate in wonder as it is reduced to the same of the subject as an object for-me. Wonder is an action both active and passive, and subjects-in-wonder regard both themselves and the other-subject, and living as in a state of contemplative action and fecund becoming. That is, they are willing to recognize that the other-subject "can look at us," that exchange happens:

It is important for us to be able to wonder at him or her even if he or she is looking at us . . . . This first passion is indispensable not only to life but also or still to the creation of an ethics . . . . This other, male or female, should surprise us again and again, appear to us as new, very different from what we knew or what we thought he or she should be . . . . Wonder goes beyond that which is suitable for us. The other never suits us simply. We would in some way have reduced the other to ourselves if he or she suited us completely. An excess [29] resists . . . . Wonder is a mourning of the self as an autarchic entity; whether this mourning is triumphant or melancholy. Wonder must be the advent or the event of the other. (74-5)

Emotionally wonder is a complex position: happily or unhappily knocked out of the center of things, a subject-self experiences surprise, which can be pleasant or unpleasant. Importantly, the other-subject has a responsibility to be surprising, that is to continue to become, to change; but equally the subject-self has the same obligation, and the additional obligation of seeking to be surprised by, to pay attention to the other-subject. Un-suited by the other-subject, a subject-self finds itself always a little bit in unfamiliar territory, ventured:

Wonder is not an enveloping. It corresponds . . . to space-time before and after that which can delimit, go round, encircle. It constitutes an opening prior to and following that which surrounds, enlaces. It is the passion of that which is already born and not yet enveloped in love. Of that which is touched and moves toward and within the attraction, without nostalgia for the first dwelling. Outside of repetition . . . . The passion that inaugurates love and art. And thought . . . . A birth into transcendence, that of the other-subject, still in the world of the senses ("sensible"), still physical and carnal, and already spiritual. Is it the place of incidence and junction of body and spirit, which has been covered over again and again, hardened through repetitions that hamper growth and flourishing? This would be possible only when we are faithful to the perpetual newness of the self, the other, the world. Wonder would be the passion of the encounter between the most material and the most metaphysical, of their possible conception and fecundation one by the other. (81-2)

An envelope is a container, a limit, like one's experience. Wonder is not an enveloping because it is an attitude we can have, the possible tenor of the interval between subjects. It does not exist without our effort and changes to boredom or disdain easily. Boredom and disdain are a kind of grasping, of dismissing the other's envelope and singularity, of making the other-subject an object for-me, because these feelings rest on the assumption that we or I know all there is to know about you. Consistent with her thought on fluids and the maternal-feminine, Irigaray's "categories" operate more like "modes;" there are qualitative differences between love and wonder or angel and mucous, but these qualities also overlap from mode to mode. Wonder originates in, but is not contained by love because it is the basis and result of love. Its actions are the caress and listening, simultaneously active and passive. It is attraction, but only for the ventured who have no nostalgia for the first dwelling (home, the familiar, the womb), who have no desire to reify the other-subject in one state of being, or one place for their own sake. Being outside of repetition, wonder is also outside of certainty, of comfort; wonder exhorts us to never take anything for granted [30].

<57>To side with wonder or with an ethics of sexual difference is to side with creativity, art, love, and with poets and women: all of which are suspect from the point of view of masculinist society, which is primarily interested in order and predictability, the traditions and conventions of behavior as they stand. Difference, creativity, love, poetry – they all are and require wonder, are all jailbreaks. Even with all their courtesy and care, they are jailbreaks still. Thinking and living in a way that accepts one condition (wonder) as both already and not yet in another condition (love), and as refusing nostalgia in favor of being-ventured potentially puts all conventions at risk. The more avant-garde strains of art and love are inaugurated by wonder, by that which thwarts repetition of the Same.

<58>The space-time before and after limits, categories, knowledge: wonder corresponds to and motivates one in the interval between oneself and the other-subject. It is a sort of "beginner's mind," learned but open. "A birth into transcendence, that of the other" and still in the realm of the senses, of the body, and spiritual at the same time, is a transcendence for and which requires two. It requires physical, imaginative, and discursive exchange between the "most material (earth, body) and the most metaphysical (soul, heaven)." As a mode of juncture for body and spirit, wonder (and love in wonder) refuses any guilt for the fact of being alive and vital. Instead of guilt, wonder insists on vitality, on growth and flourishing, on the "fecundation one by the other."

<59>Wonder, and the ethics or poetics of self that attend it are not, however, cures for all ills; though, it is my hope that sexual difference might provide a basis from which to address many forms of damage more effectively than society has so far managed. This damage is embedded in society and culture as their foundations, their conventions, such as the misrepresentations and erasure of sexual difference. Upsetting such conventions and foundations carries with it some costs. One cost would be repression of those who or that which take the ventured in or toward wonder because wonder threatens nearly all present fictions of how to be, how to conduct business, how to be in relations of all kinds because the fictions that need inventing and affirming in order to live an ethics of sexual difference require more than a little subversion of the old stories, the Same and its hegemony. Another cost would be confusion because such upset in the process of redefining culture continually presents new problems and negotiations. Such an elevation and the corresponding symbolic representation of women and their genealogies and bodies would, in fact, constitute the next earth shaking paradigm shift, so fundamental a change would this be, so complete a revolution of the religion, aesthetics, the state, the law, the economy, the family, the self would this be. Without it there is little possibility of the two of sexual difference in ethics coming to be. We need the ventured subject-selves with their attentions set on themselves, each other, as the other side of the horizon. In an environment of sexual ethics and wonder, however, this future would not simply be the past over again but would have a different structure from the past. Ventured, it would require acting in good faith in order to avoid disaster.

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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