"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. 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."
First, let’s gather the work we have done previously: Irigaray brings us to her question of sexual difference through her critique of Heidegger: where Heidegger critiques Aristotle for failing to consider the subject in his study of beings, Irigaray will tell us that Heidegger fails to consider the living subject. Heidegger’s question of being resolves into the question of sexual difference. “Why are there beings rather than nothing?” turns into ‘Why are there (at least) two kinds of subjects and sexual/sexuate difference?” If we can reach these two, a field of difference opens up.
Fecundity is a term Irigaray borrows from Levinas to describe not only the creation of new beings in reproduction, but the harkening of a new era of creativity that would follow an authentic encounter between the two. She expands on fecundity and her reading of Levinas in the closing essay of The Ethics, entitled “The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, ‘Phenomenology of Eros’.” I hope to get to a reading of that piece in this series. But here, she brings him into her text to suggest a kind of erotics of thought. It’s as if she is coupling with Levinas, to birth the question of sexual difference and of the living subject.
Irigaray’s assumption of the heterosexual couple as the linchpin of our cultures can be taken as descriptive rather than descriptive. In order to get to an understanding of difference (and we might want to rename this multiplicity or diversity) we have to go through the couple, where our understanding of generation is rooted. Generation, creativity, fecundity, that is what we are trying to get at by focusing on the couple.
Some have criticized Irigaray on this point, calling her work heterosexist and essentialist Irigaray herself doesn’t shy away from this critique, and in fact embraces the idea that what she calls sexual difference (sexuate difference and the heterosexual couple) is taken as the original and originary difference in her accounts. But I think that we can take this assumption as conditioned by the discourse on which we are operating, one that is heterosexist and makes any other starting point impossible, for now. The heterosexual couple is emblematic not only for her, but in our Western cultures, it is the understanding from which we must start — on a generous reading of what Irigaray is up to. Still, my focus is on destabilizing the male-needs-centered heterosexual imperative, and we should be on guard against replicating its dominance. Sometimes Irigaray helps us with this (for example, in “Fluid Mechanics”), and other times we must read Irigaray against herself.
“the production of a new age of thought, art, poetry, and language…”
She is making a pretty big promise here, that her question opens up a much more creative world, a new enlightenment for human kind. We could imagine the invention of new forms of expression, a re-grounding of multiple shared worlds and of truth. A proliferation of a creative surplus economy, rather than the limiting zero-sum game that we seem to be playing. Instead of attempting to raise a new world from destruction, she suggests we can harness our erotic creativity to being in an authentic new paradigm.
A new era of creativity in thought, arts, and a moving forward of humanity as a whole, that is what she believes would be the outcome, where we really able to think difference.++1++ Poetics and poetry, terms that refer us to the later Heidegger, again she tips her hat at Heidegger. In his later years, Heidegger turns away from systematic thought and towards poetry and language, particularly enamoured of Hölderlin’s romanticism. Heidegger’s favorite poet is perfectly situated at the end of the European revival of Greek thought and the emergence of the Modern and the technocratic devastation to follow. It feels like we are at a similar turn of events.
Though we may be too early to say with certainty, we may have reached the limits of technological thinking. I know that it feels like the opposite, like we are in the dawn of the era of machine and algorithmic dominance. It may look more like the continuation of “scientistic” and technological, thing-oriented thinking, and there is no doubt that the powerful want to bring in technological rule and a post-human world. But from where I am sitting, the rejection of technological thinking, which Heidegger describes and criticizes, is underway. We must remember that machines don’t give a damn, and don’t care enough to try to dominate us; it is the humans hiding behind and powering the machines, like small men behind big curtains, that want to dominate. Command and control is a weakness built into masculinity, born of his own fear of his own human vulnerability.
“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 toward its disintegration but without proposing any other goals that might assure new foundations and new work.”
We will be able to go a little faster now, as we go through two rhetorical spaces in which the question has failed to materialize: theory and practice. Philosophy is the chief example of theory here, and what we have seen in this space is a linguistic turn, with meaning being reduced to language and language games — in other words, to literature or rhetoric. In doing so, philosophers turn away from the fundamental questions of ontology and metaphysics; or else philosophers regress into a navel-gazing mode of ontologizing (inventing a word here that should exist), going further down some familiar rabbit holes. In other word, there is nothing new that could emerge, no new thought or creativity. What we see instead is the repetition of the old in a myriad of ways that seem novel, but are not. Philosophy is in its Hollywood stage, churning out sequel after remake, and too bankrupt and lacking in courage to found something truly new.
In the realm of practice, namely politics, we are fairing no better:
“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 consequently remain at the level of critical demands.”
In the world of politics, a feminism remains at the level of making critical demands. Women have only “taken what their given” and gains seem impermanent. In the US-American context, we haven’t passed the equal rights amendment to the constitution, which left Roe v Wade and rights to bodily autonomy vulnerable in the ways we have seen unfold these past few years. This means that the gains we made in the last two generations are rooted mostly in the living memory of those of use lucky enough to have been here in the few years when women enjoyed some recognition. Personally, I am acutely aware that my educated, child-free-by-choice life would have not been easy even a generation ago. I know that I am not supposed to exist, that I wasn’t supposed to survive. (I am the daughter of a matriarchal Taino peoples who were thought to be eradicated, but in fact were not.) Sometimes I fear for future generations of girls and women. That is why I am here now, passing on what I have been so fortunate to learn and experience, to keep our realities alive with possibilities.
"They'll only give you what you're taking, but lately I've been unfulfilled. They say I'll probably blow it off someday, I probably will." -- Concrete Blonde performs "Probably Will": https://youtu.be/NRIvn_6ofh8
Feminist activists did a lot. We created journals and magazines, academic departments, a network of feminist bookstores that operated as community hubs, banks and micro-loans to help women economically because access to banks and credit was a issue, domestic violence shelter systems, and more. But what happened when we went to institutionalize these practices? Much of it has been absorbed into a mainstream fundamentally antithetical to valuing girls and women, stripped of feminist values, defanged so-to-speak.
A good question here is what are feminist values? Irigaray’s book is called An Ethics, so she will spend the entirety of said book trying to establish the grounds on which these values can be rooted. But from where we are sitting today, a feminist ethics of care is coalescing as a contender. Many of us are working on care, and on developing relational models for subjectivity. I believe the work Irigaray has done speaks to women’s desire to create new ways and practices for being present in this world. We urgently need to invent the ways for standing in our heterogeneity and reimagining humanity as manyfold.
“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? Psychoanalytic theory and therapy, the scenes of sexuality as such, are a long way from having effected their revolution. And with a few exceptions, sexual practice today is often divided between two parallel worlds: the world of men and the world of women. A nontraditional, fecund encounter between the sexes barely exists. It does not voice its demands publicly, except through certain kinds of silence and polemics.”
Already in the 1980’s, Irigaray is writing about an erosion of the gains women made in the previous decade — the backlash was immediate. Here she turns to sexual practices (and the psychoanalytic theory that seeks to unravel this), and finds that an authentic encounter between men and women “barely exists.” Which is not nothing — she doesn’t say that it doesn’t exist at all, and I find it interesting that she believes it can exist at all. Speaking specifically to the sexual lives of men and women, there is a chasm between what women and men desire, how they fail to love one another. Oscillating between a simmering silence and the war between the sexes. We learn more about what a “nontraditional, fecund encounter between the sexes” might be like in the essay on Levinas…
At this point, things get a little cringe for me, and perhaps for you. In order to combat the rising bile, I like to imagine that “man” and “woman” are more like social positions that can be occupied by anyone or even anything. Clearly, Irigaray thinks that physical reproduction is the minimum and starting point, but it is the erotics that she is after, the push and pull between two whose differences are irreducible. For her, desire has the power to blow past our restraints, but this is assuming desire cannot be commandeered, as we know it can be…
In a move taken from One Thousand and One Nights++2++, I will leave you with the next paragraph so you can get started thinking about this. If you are participating in Megan Burke’s slow read of Beauvoir’s *The Second Sex*, this paragraph will feel familiar:
“A revolution in thought and ethics is needed if the work of sexual difference is to take place. We need to reinterpret every- thing concerning the relations between the subject and dis- course, 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.”
What say you?
MEDIA: SUBSTACK LIVE
See where this essay began: Working in Public on Irigaray's Sexual Difference -- Live with Mona Mona
++1++ There are a number of thinkers at this time thinking about difference, and Derrida in particular stands out with his deconstructive approach and différance. The projects are not unrelated... Difference, diversity, multiplicity, plurality, the many, a survey of the many terms we use to mean many-fold and the many nuances, could be very interesting!
++2++ One Thousand and One Nights (Arabic: Alf Layla wa-Layla), also commonly known in English as Arabian Nights. In it, the new queen Scheherazade survives by telling the king a gripping story each night and stopping at dawn on a cliffhanger, so he must keep her alive to hear the ending. 1,001 stories later, he finally abandons his plan to execute her.
Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, Cornell University Press, 1993. (Published in French in 1984 as Éthique de la différence sexuelle.)
---. “The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, ‘Phenomenology of Eros.’” An Ethics of Sexual Difference, translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, Cornell University Press, 1993, pp. 185–217.
---. “Fluid Mechanics.” This Sex Which Is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter, Cornell University Press, 1985.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne University Press, 1969.
de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage Books, 2011.
Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper & Row, 1971.