I Love to You

Sketch of A Possible Felicity in History

Luce Irigaray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317959243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

In this book, one of the foremost contemporary scholars in the fields of feminist thought and linguistics, explores the possibility of a new liberating language and hence a new relationship between the sexes. In I Love to You, Luce Irigaray moves from the critique of patriarchy to an exploration of the ground for a possible inter-subjectivity between the two sexes. Continuing her rejection of demands for equality, Irigaray poses the question: how can we move to a new era of sexual difference in which women and men establish lasting relations with one another without reducing the other to the status of object?

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Introducing: Love Between Us

Marx defined the origin of man’s exploitation of man as man’s exploitation of woman and asserted that the most basic human exploitation lies in the division of labor between man and woman. Why didn’t he devote his life to solving the problem of this exploitation? He perceived the root of all evil but he did not treat it as such. Why not? The reason, to some extent, lies in Hegel’s writings, especially in those sections where he deals with love, Hegel being the only Western philosopher to have approached the question of love as labor.

It is, therefore, entirely appropriate for a woman philosopher to start speaking of love. It results from the need to think and practice what Marxist theory and practice have thus far ignored, giving rise to merely piecemeal economic and cultural developments which can no longer satisfy us. To cite just three examples or symptoms of these: the fate of the earth as a natural resource, problems to do with women’s liberation, and the world-wide cultural crisis as exemplified by the student revolts that have arisen, and re-arisen in France and elsewhere since ′68. What is more, it is from this same crucible of cultural revolution that various struggles—students, feminists of difference, ecological movements—have erupted and re-erupted in our countries. Their concerns live on, concerns often suppressed by powers blind to their objectives or by militants who barely understand the profundity and radical nature of what is at stake in these struggles. For it is not a matter of changing this or that within a horizon already defined as human culture. It is a question of changing the horizon itself—of understanding that our interpretation of human identity is both theoretically and practically wrong.

Analyzing the relations between men and women can help us to change this situation. If we fail to question what cries out to be radically questioned, we lapse or relapse into an infinite number of secondary ethical tasks, as Hegel wrote when discussing the failing that has marred our whole culture.¹ That failing concerns the lack of ethical relations between the sexes. And those countless ethical tasks, which multiply in proportion to the complexity of our civilizations, do not accomplish the oeuvre to be carried out: to remove the exploitation that exists between the sexes so as to allow humanity to continue developing its History.

So I will return to Hegel to explain the reasons for this exploitation and to suggest how the situation might be remedied.

At several points in his oeuvre, and at several moments in his life, Hegel reflects on the question of love between the sexes which, notably, he analyzes as labor. How does Hegel define love between men and women? He defines it as it is still often practiced in our time, but also as it is defined by monotheistic, patriarchal religions, or, ostensibly at the other extreme, by theories of sexuality, like the Freudian one. He defines it, on the whole, as we still find ourselves accustomed and obliged to experience it, in private and in public. He defines it as it exists within patriarchal cultures, without managing to resolve the problem of the lack of spirit and ethics he observes. He also defines it in terms of his method. Which means that in order to overcome what he terms natural immediacy within the family Hegel turns to pairs of opposites. Hence he is forced to define man and woman as opposites and not as different. But isn’t this just how male and female genders are still usually interpreted?

Man and woman are thus in opposition to one another in the labor of love, according to Hegel. This labor is analyzed within the family they form as a couple (of opposites). Beyond the family context, Hegel shows little concern for granting each gender its own identity, particularly a legal one, even though he states that the status of the human person depends upon his or her recognition by civil law. From his perspective, then, sexed law should pertain only to the family. There would be no sexed identity for the citizen.

This is still the case for us. There are still no civil rights proper to women and to men.² This is particularly true for women, since existing law is better suited to men than women inasmuch as men have been the model for citizenship for centuries, the adult female citizen being poorly defined by rights to equality that do not meet her needs. Strictly speaking, there is still no civil law in our era that makes human persons of men and women. As sexed persons, they remain in natural immediacy. And this means that real persons still have no rights, since there are only men and women; there are no neuter individuals. The rights of these abstract citizens are, to varying degrees, modeled upon or derived from religious rights and duties, in particular patriarchal ones. Hence the difficulty of distinguishing between these two domains. We do not as yet have civil law pertaining to real persons, concerning first of all women and men. For want of such laws, our sexuality lapses into a barbarity worse at times than that of animal society.

How then, for Hegel, are relations between woman and man organized within the family?³ The woman is wife and mother. But, for her, this role is a function of an abstract duty. So she is not this woman, irreducible in her singularity, wife of this man, who is himself also irreducible, any more than she is this mother of this child or these children. She is only attributed that singularity from the perspective of the man, for whom she remains bound to natural immediacy. As far as she is concerned, she is a wife and mother inasmuch as these roles represent a task vis-à-vis the universal which she discharges by renouncing her singular desires.

Love, as Hegel writes of it, is therefore not possible on the part of the woman, because it is a labor of the universal, in the sense that she has to love man and child without loving this man or this child. She must love man and child as generic representatives of the human species dominated by the male gender. She must love them as those who are able to realize the infinity of humankind (unconsciously assimilated to the masculine), at the expense of her own gender and her own relationship to infinity. In other words, a woman’s love is defined as familial and civil duty. She has no right to singular love nor to love for herself. She is thus unable to love but is to be subjugated to love and reproduction. She has to be sacrificed and to sacrifice herself to this task, at the same time disappearing as this or that woman who is alive at the present time. And she must disappear as desire, too, unless it is abstract: the desire to be wife and mother. This self-effacement in a family-related role is her civil task. For the man, on the other hand, a woman’s love represents the repose a citizen needs in the singularity of the home. He has to love this woman considered as singular nature, provided she stays bound to that singularity and provided he may pass over into it while remaining faithful to his relation to the universal.

For woman, therefore, the universal comes down to practical labor within the horizon of the universal delimited by man. Deprived of a relationship to the singularity of love, woman is also deprived of the possibility of a universal for herself. Love, for her, amounts to a duty—not a right—establishing her role within humankind where she appears as man’s servant.

As for man, he yields to the singularity of love as a regression to natural immediacy. Love with a woman in his own home is rest, complementing his citizen’s labor. As a citizen he is expected to renounce his sexed singularity in order to realize a universal task in the service of the community. In the name of this alleged universality, he apparently has the right and duty to represent the entire human species in public life.

Love, for the man, is thus a permissible lapse into natural immediacy. His wife or some other woman is duty bound to grant him this regression given the arduous labor of the universal for which he is responsible on the outside. Yet she also has to send him back to this task, to distance him from herself, to ceaselessly engender him as artisan of the universal spirit. Redemption for the man’s fall into singularity lies in his ensuing capacity to resume his labor as a citizen, in the child, whose conception prevents the man from possessing his jouissance as his own, as well as in the accumulation of possessions (ostensibly jointly owned by both sexes), possessions that represent the for-itself of the union between man and woman in the family. The ultimate aim of love for the couple is, basically, the accumulation of family capital. For this reason, the family appears to be a privileged locus for constituting property.

Evidently, the self-renunciation in love demanded of woman is connected to man’s loss of identity as a citizen. The woman is forced to comply with the lack of forms and norms of a male desire that may very well be defined against incest, against the other who is non-possessable in her singularity—the mother—but is not named as male desire, except when theorized as willing enslavement to death.

In fact, for centuries in the West marriage as an institution has bound women to a universal duty for the sake of the development of man’s spirit in the community, and bound men to a regression to the natural to ensure that the interests of the State are served in other respects. Real marriages do not exist to the extent that two legally-defined sexed persons do not exist. Both are enslaved to the State, to religion, to the accumulation of property. What’s more, this absence of two in the couple forces the intervention of other limits deriving from the labor of the negative on man’s terms: death as the rallying place of sensible desires, the real or symbolic dissolution of the citizen in the community, and enslavement to property or capital.

This division of tasks between home and the public realm could not be sustained without depriving woman of a relationship to the singular in love and of the singularity necessary for her relationship to the universal. The home—the couple or family—should be a locus for the singular and universal for both sexes, as should the life of a citizen as well. This means that the order of cultural identity, not only natural identity, must exist within the couple, the family, and the State. Without a cultural identity suited to the natural identity of each sex, nature and the universal are parted, like heaven and earth; with an infinite distance between them, they marry no more. This division of tasks between heaven and earth, suffering and labor here below, recompense and felicity in the beyond, begins at a period in our culture that is described in mythology and inscribed into philosophy and theology (and also separated, from that time on, which is not the case, for instance, in most traditions of the Far East).

Such a conception of the world is actually totally foreign to that of other cultures in which the body is spiritualized as body and the earth as earth, the celestial being the manifestation of our degree of spirituality here and now. I am thinking of certain traditions of yoga that I know something of, cultures where the body is cultivated as body, not only just in that muscular-athletic competitive-aggressive way we know only too well and which is not at all beneficial to us. In these traditions, the body is cultivated to become both more spiritual and more carnal at the same time. A range of movements and nutritional practices, attentive-ness to breath in respiration, respect for the rhythms of day and night, for the seasons and years as the calendar of the flesh, for the world and for History, the training of the senses for accurate, rewarding and concentrated perception—all these gradually bring the body to rebirth, to give birth to itself, carnally and spiritually, at each moment of every day. The body is thus no longer simply a body engendered by my parents; it is also the one I give back to myself. Likewise, immortality is no longer reserved for the beyond and the conditions for it cease to be determined by one who is other to me. Each woman and man acquires immortality by respecting life and its spiritualization. The universal—if this word can still be used here—consists in the fulfillment of life and not in submission to death as Hegel would have it. By training the senses in concentration we can integrate multiplicity and remedy the fragmentation associated with singularity and the distraction of desiring all that is perceived, encountered, or produced. There is no question, then, of renouncing the sensible, of sacrificing it to the universal, but rather it is cultivated to the point where it becomes spiritual energy. And so the Buddha’s gazing at the flower is not an inattentive or predatory gaze, nor the decline of the speculative into flesh. It is both material and spiritual contemplation, furnishing thought with an already sublimated energy.

This contemplation is also a training in finding pleasure while respecting what does not belong to me. Indeed, Buddha contemplates the flower without picking it. He gazes at what is other to him without uprooting it. Moreover, what he is gazing at is not just anything—it is a flower, which perhaps offers us the best object for meditation upon the appropriateness of form to matter.

Buddha’s gazing at the flower might provide us with a model. So might the flower. Between us, we can train ourselves to be both contemplative regard and the beauty appropriate to our matter, the spiritual and carnal fulfillment of the forms of our body. Pursuing this simultaneously natural and spiritual meditation of a great Eastern sage, I’d say that a flower usually has a pleasant scent. It sways with the wind, without rigidity. It also evolves within itself; it grows, blossoms, grows back. Some of them, those I find most engaging, open with the rising sun and close up with the evening. There are flowers for every season. The most hardy among them, those least cultivated by man, come forth while preserving their roots; they are constantly moving between the appearance of their forms and the earth’s resources. They survive bad weather and winters. These are the ones, perhaps, that might best serve us as a spiritual model.

Of course we are spirit, we have been told. But what is spirit if not the means for matter to emerge and endure in its proper form, its proper forms? What is spirit if it forces the body to comply with an abstract model that is unsuited to it? That spirit is already dead. An illusory ecstasy in the beyond. The capitalization of life in the hands of a few who demand this sacrifice of the majority. More especially, the capitalization of the living by a male culture which, in giving itself death as its sole horizon, oppresses the female.

Thus the master-slave dialectic occurs between the sexes, forcing woman to engender life to comply with the exigencies of a universal linked to death. This also forces woman to mother her children so as to subject them to the condition of being citizens abstracted from their singularity, severed from their unique identity, arising from their genealogical and historical conception and birth, adults or adolescents who are subsequently exposed to the risk of actual death for the sake of the polis or to a spiritual death for the sake of culture.

This is how woman herself becomes an agent of ambivalence in love, contrary to her singular desire. Raised for love, familiar with this inter-subjective dimension from the fact of having been born the daughter of a woman, she finds herself obliged to sacrifice this love, except as an abstract labor of jouissance, of having children, of motherhood. Where she was expecting to realize her identity, she finds only self-sacrifice. If a man is always able to find another woman, another singularity, to work towards accumulating property for the family or the community, to return to his citizenship, the woman is left with nothing other than the obligation to make herself available for intercourse, to suffer childbirth, to mother her children and her husband. Even the love between mother and daughter is forbidden in the sense that it reminds the daughter, the woman, of the singularity of the female gender she has to renounce, except as an abstract duty imposed upon her by a culture that is not hers and inappropriate for her. The girl’s only reason for being is to become a wife and mother. In this respect, her mother represents this abstract role for her, as she does for the mother. They are two functionaries of the universal, a universal inappropriate to their singular nature, so forever foreign to one another. The daughter is the child of the universal in her mother.

With this erasure within the universal, or this sacrifice to the spirit, of the relationship between mother and daughter, there occurs the most extreme loss of human singularity. Humanity unconsciously persists in its crime, this abduction of the one from the other as a member of the female gender, without mourning its loss. We know from myth that it can bring about the sterility of the earth. By unraveling the enigma of our decadence, we might learn that it can entail the end of the human species sacrificed to an abstract universal: absolute spirit.

So how can we get way from such an abstract duty, from the sacrifice of sexed identity to a universal defined by man with death as its master, for want of having known how to let life flourish as the universal? How can we discover for ourselves, between ourselves, the singularity and universality of love as the natural and spiritual realization of human identity? It will come from the evolution, the revolution in the relations between man and woman, first and foremost in the couple, and before any question of the family. The changes to be made in mother-daughter relationships are connected to this transformation of relations between the two genders of the human species, requiring the transition to a culture which is not reducible to a single gender, nor reducible to a sexed dimension that is simply genealogical, and thus to patriarchy or matriarchy.

In concrete terms, this means that each woman will no longer love her lover as Man (in general), nor will each man love his lover as a woman (who can be replaced by another). The task of making the transition from the singular to the universal thus remains for each person in his or her own unique singularity, and especially for each sex in the both singular and universal relationship it maintains with itself and with the other sex. Each woman will, therefore, be for herself woman in the process of becoming, the model for herself as a woman and for the man whom she needs, just as he needs her, to ensure the transition from nature to culture. In other words, being born a woman requires a culture particular to this sex and this gender, which it is important for the woman to realize without renouncing her natural identity. She should not comply with a model of identity imposed upon her by anyone, neither her parents, her lover, her children, the State, religion or culture in general. That does not mean she can lapse into capriciousness, dispersion, the multiplicity of her desires, or a loss of identity. She should, quite the contrary, gather h...