The essay I'll be talking about is called "Sexual Difference."
It begins: "Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age. According to Heidegger, each age has one issue to think through, and one only. Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time, which could be our 'salvation' if we thought it through."
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher who claimed that the question of his age is: "Why are there beings rather than nothing?" That is the question of Being. Irigaray is taking a page from Heidegger's book and also crediting him — but she is also using his own approach a little bit against him, as we'll see. She puts "salvation" in quotes, and I'm not too sure why, except that salvation is a religious term and is probably pretty laden. She means it in a non-religious way.
So then the question becomes: what is this question of sexual difference according to her? And before she tells us what that is, she's also going to tell us what it isn't. I think. So let me continue reading.
"But whether I turn to philosophy, to science or to religion, I find this underlying issue still cries out in vain for our attention."
That's quite an image, right? "Cries out in vain for our attention."
"Think of it as an approach that would allow us to check the many forms that destruction takes in our world, to counteract a nihilism that merely affirms the reversal or the repetitive proliferation of status quo values. Whether you call them the consumer society, the circularity of discourse, the more or less cancerous diseases of our age, the unreliability of words, the end of philosophy, religious despair or regression to religiosity, scientific or technical imperialism — technical imperialism that fails to consider the living subject."
"Technical imperialism" is an interesting term here, given this was written in 1993, and given our current situation with tech bro culture. So there's this wide array of problems that we face, and underneath all these problems — or as the source of these problems — we find a common root in the question of sexual difference. They also find a common root in the failure to consider the living subject. So those two things go hand in hand. The question of sexual difference points to the failure to consider the living subject.
Continuing to read:
"Sexual difference would constitute the horizon of worlds more fecund than any known to date, at least in the West, and without reducing fecundity to the reproduction of bodies and flesh."
This is a pretty big claim — that considering this question would open up a much more fecund world. That term is coming from Levinas. And not just reproduction, but creativity — a proliferation of a creative surplus economy, rather than the limiting zero-sum game that we seem to be playing. Continuing:
"For loving partners, this would be a fecundity of birth and regeneration, but also the production of a new age of thought, art, poetry and language, the creation of a new poetics."
So there is that proliferation of creativity — a new age of explosive creativity. A new Enlightenment is how I'm kind of imagining that.
Continuing to read:
"Both in theory and in practice, everything resists the discovery and affirmation of such an advent or event. In theory, philosophy wants to be literature or rhetoric, wishing either to break with ontology or to regress to the ontological, using the same ground and the same framework as 'first philosophy,' working towards its disintegration, but without proposing any other goals that might assure new foundations and new works."
So this is a little bit of a jibe at theory and philosophy that dodges its responsibility and wants to become more literary, more rhetorical. I think this is pointing at the linguistic turn — which, to my mind, is Derrida, but it's much broader than that as well. The leveling down of philosophical questions to linguistic questions, to literature, to rhetoric on the one hand. And on the other hand there is this regress to the ontological — Heidegger, the question of Being, metaphysics of presence. That's the other pole that philosophy is being pushed toward. And neither of these, she says, proposes any goals that might assure new foundations and new works — a new age of politics.
Continuing to read:
"In politics, some overtures have been made to the world of women, but these overtures remain partial and local. Some concessions have been made by those in power, but no new values have been established. Rarely have these measures been thought through and affirmed by women themselves, who consistently remain at the level of critical demands."
So there's a sense in which the political movement for women — feminism — remains at the level of making critical demands and doesn't get to the point of creating new values. And what would that look like? It would look like a woman-centered world, or the possibility of a world in which women's issues are framed and represented through women's experience. You may think that that is happening, but her claim is that it's not. That's an argument and something to look further into.
Continuing to read:
"Has a worldwide erosion of the gains won in women's struggles occurred because of the failure to lay foundations different from those on which the world of men is constructed?"
Continuing to read:
"Psychoanalytic theory and therapy — the scenes of sexuality as such — are a long way from having effected their revolution."
So psychoanalytic theory and therapy has failed. Continuing:
"And with few exceptions, sexual practice today is often divided between two parallel worlds, the world of men and the world of women. A non-traditional, fecund encounter between the sexes barely exists. It does not voice its demands publicly, except through certain kinds of silence and polemics."
Irigaray wrote a book called I Love to You, in which she really focuses on this relationship between men and women and the failure of love between them, if you're interested in reading more about that. But basically she believes that the encounter doesn't actually happen. There is this division between the world of men and the world of women, and the encounter that should occur — that is fecund and that yields a world of wonder — is precluded. It is not happening, basically.
Continuing to read:
"A revolution in thought and ethics is needed if the work of sexual difference is to take place."
A revolution in thought and ethics — and that is what she's hoping to kick off. Continuing:
"We need to reinterpret everything concerning the relations between the subject and discourse, the subject and the world, the subject and the cosmic, the microcosmic and the macrocosmic — everything, beginning with the way in which the subject has always been written in the masculine form as 'man,' even when it claimed to be universal or neutral, despite the fact that 'man,' at least in French, rather than being neutral, is sexed."
So the beginning point of everything is the fabrication of the subject as masculine, as man, and the pretension that this is a universal or neutral subject. Continuing:
"Man has been the subject of discourse, whether in theory, morality, or politics, and the gender of God, the guardian of every subject and every discourse, is always masculine and paternal in the West."
I'm not sure I'd agree with that entirely, but we'll flag it. Continuing:
"To women are left the so-called minor arts: cooking, knitting, embroidery and sewing, and in exceptional cases, poetry, painting and music."
You can see the class difference in that division — cooking, knitting, and embroidery being associated with women's labor in the domestic realm, and poetry, painting, and music being open to women of the upper classes. Continuing:
"Whatever their importance, these arts do not currently make the rules, at least not overtly. Of course, we are witnessing a certain reversal of values; manual labor and art are being revalued. But the relation of these arts to sexual difference is never really thought through and properly apportioned. At best, it is related to the class struggle."
"In order to make it possible to think through and live this difference, we must reconsider the whole problematic of space and time."
Wham. Okay, so this is where she kind of starts her own account. Up to here she's been giving a resume of how she sees all these different sectors of society — philosophy and politics, the arts and crafts and labor — in which the question of sexual difference is overlooked, or falsified. What should be an encounter between men and women is blocked or distorted. But what does space and time have to do with that? This should come as a bit of a shock. It's dramatic. So: we must reconsider the whole problematic of space and time.
The question of sexual difference, as we will find out, is a metaphysical question — a question at the foundation of our reality. We'll learn more about that. Here she goes:
"In the beginning there was space and the creation of space, as is said in all theogonies. The gods, God, first creates space and time is there more or less in the service of space on the first day."
That is actually interesting, because a lot of 20th century continental European philosophy is obsessed with time and temporality, and there is a lot of work that's been done on that. There is surprisingly less work being done on space, at least until fairly recently. But it's true that in early metaphysical accounts, time is there, but more or less in the service of space. Space and time are not different things — they are different aspects of the same phenomena. But that's a big argument and I should probably put a pin in it.
Continuing to read:
"Now on the first days, the gods, God, make a world by separating the elements. This world is then peopled and a rhythm is established amongst its inhabitants. God would be time itself, lavishing or exteriorizing itself in its actions in space, in places."
So this is a common overview of the story across many creation narratives. Continuing:
"Philosophy then confirms the genealogy of the task of the gods or God. Time becomes the interiority of the subject itself and space its exteriority. This problematic is developed by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason."
So when the philosophical subject is invented, time is associated with its subjectivity — because it's the interior. It's associated with the consciousness of the subject, the subject's sense of himself. I'm using "himself" in a gendered way, not a universal way. And space is supposed to be the world — the exterior that the subject moves through. The subject uses space to go on the hero's adventure of transformation: going away from home, having things happen, and then returning as a transformed subject. This is the hero's story.
It's interesting for us to think that the subject was invented — but this is very much the case. If we look at the Greeks and at Western philosophy more broadly, we often project subjectivity onto our readings, but if you start to attend to that, you realize that there is no subject in the way that we conceive it, and that what it means to be an individual is different. An encounter with the ancient texts of the Western tradition will show you the invented nature of the story we tell about our realities.
Continuing to read:
"The subject, master of time, becomes the axis of the world's ordering, with something beyond the moment — an eternity, God. He effects the passage between time and space."
So the masculine subject becomes the master of time and orders the world according to eternal principles — principles associated with the divine.
She then asks: would this simply be inverted in sexual difference? Is it that the feminine is experienced as space — often with connotations of abyss and night — while God is space and light, and the masculine is experienced as time? I think the answer she's building toward is no. But we'll see.
Continuing to read:
"The transition to a new age requires a change in our perception and conception of space-time, the inhabiting of places, and of containers or envelopes of identity. It assumes and entails an evolution or transformation of forms, of the relations of matter and form and the interval between."
She's definitely pointing here to Aristotle's conception of space and its relationship to matter — the trilogy of the constitution of place: matter, form, interval, or power, act, intermediary.
Each age inscribes a limit to this tripartite configuration. And the next place she's going to go is to desire: desire occupies or designates the place of the interval. I think this is a good place to stop for today.
The big takeaway from today's reading is that Irigaray is saying that the question of our age is the question of sexual difference, and that asking that question is going to lead us to rethink the relation between space and time — specifically, to think about the production of the subject as temporality and interiority, with exteriority as space and matter and woman. The terms align in a gendered way.
And again, on the question of what feminism has to do with metaphysics: Irigaray sent some of her work to Beauvoir, and I think Beauvoir kind of snubbed her — didn't acknowledge her in the way that Irigaray had expected. So Irigaray has a certain relationship to feminism as a political movement and to Beauvoir's work that I think is interesting. But she's going to want to assert that unless the feminist movement develops a kind of metaphysical proposition — a way of seeing reality that comes from women's experiences — feminism will always be a reactionary political movement. I'm not taking her side on this; I'm just saying that both Beauvoir and Irigaray had a troubled relationship with feminism in France, and the history of that relationship between theory and practice is very particular.
And that is today's segment on Irigaray and the metaphysics of sexual difference.