To Speak is Never Neutral

Luce Irigaray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351538923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Feminist philosopher, linguist, and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray is renowned for her analyses of language, studies that can be precise and poetic at the same time. In this volume of her work on language, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, she is concerned with developing a model that can reveal those unconscious or pre-conscious structures that determine speech. A key element of her method is the comparison of spoken and written language, through which she teases out the sexual and social configurations of speech.

I Introduction

Irigaray Luce

Rereading these texts affected me, and several comments, or ideas, came to mind. In particular, I felt irritated and amused by the language of science. I have for several years been confronting the reality of scientific requirements, those norms or criteria of a so-called rigorous process. I stand before them as if I had to answer to them, to submit to being judged. A kind of tribunal of discourse, deciding what good thinking, good exposition, and valid truth and research are. Supposedly, they are impossible outside of already existing scientific and epistemological frameworks. Off the beaten path, there is only poetry, politics, and demagogic fantasy.

These value judgments — ‘positive’ indicates the framework of true theory; ‘negative’ indicates language that does not live up to it - are always stuck in norms of platonic truth. In other words, they remain embedded in an ideology that has never been thought through. This idealism, and its ideological consequences, require the ascendancy, or the authority, of a sentence or formula of the type: one says that x is equal to, greater than, or less than y. That is nothing more than an encoding of the world from which subjectivity is removed, and which is subordinated, under cover of the universal, to one single subject, or to several subjects. No feelings apparently ... A language divested of all pathos, absolutely neutral and detached, is transmitted by someone to someone else, who has no acknowledged origin or source either. This language is supposedly a translator, or a perfect translation, an adequate copy of the universe, and today, of the subject as well. The formula, its mechanics, and its machinery are supposedly enough. No more creation of life. Everything has already been realized in sterile duplications. The subject has become a machine, with no becoming - finished.

Hence my anger and my laughter! Such is the danger we face today. This is also what makes certain discourses successful — or unsuccessful — some complicit with the general mechanics, but somehow beyond time -without past, present or future - and some with an anarchy, or a demago-guery, lacking rigor and logic, flip sides of the others. The most rigorous discourses supposedly correspond to the defensive destiny of humanity: mimicking nature as closely as possible? The most exact science is supposed to be simultaneously atemporal and chameleonesque, versatile enough to change color in order to blend into the background. At the end of an era, the most highly elaborated aspect of culture seems to turn back into the most elementary. What we lack is the creation, the affirmation, that says: I live.

This affirmation is sought — perhaps — in the esthetically variable graph-isms of science and of art. They meet up in fabrications that claim to be detached, closer to the world than to their producers. They’re supposedly faithful to reality, and can only be interpreted obliquely, in surfeit. As always? All that can be told about the subject would be its itinerary, its directions, its profiles, and its colors? Numbers are supposedly better vehicles than language, which is either too subjectively invested, or not enough. Formulas, figures, painting ... and religion. Non-numeric scientific discourse claims to be neutral, a duplicate of reality, untainted by emotion.

This science is not without naivety, especially when it claims to be a science of the subject, as in psychology, sociology, psychoanalysis, or linguistics. However, it is difficult to comprehend its imperatives, except as pretensions to a childish type of objectivity: a moral code of ‘good conduct,’ political economy of the truth. Neutral language supposedly could and should be spoken by everyone. Which is obviously impossible ...

But science does not say ‘I,’ or ‘you,’ or ‘we.’ Science stays out of that polemic, forbids it. Science’s subject is ‘one.’ Who is this one? Are its verbs already substantives, already officially recognized and consecrated acts? We find the only acceptable verbs in enunciations already transformed into exchangeable objects without pathos. Except the pathos of reason, perhaps? An irreversible reason? A universal one?

This science which claims to be the most scientific, or the only scientific, science, is scientific only in the ethical absence of the subject. It can only make claims to non-encroachment by the subject because it is deployed in a world already constructed through and through. Already subjectivized? But we’re not supposed to know that. This kind of science leaves no room for the unexpected, or for chance. All that’s left are the views and perspectives on the world of a subject who no longer even lives there.

Why would a subject not say: I feel thus, I see such and such a thing, I want or I can do this, I affirm that? It’s supposed to be a question of time? Of a control over research? But this control no longer recognizes itself as such, and claims to be the truth.

‘I’ is sometimes truer than ‘one’ or than ‘it.’ Truer because it admits its source. And when science moves very quickly, the transmutation of T into ‘one’ may make no sense. Except perhaps as an unavowed imperialism.

So all of this bowing down before ‘one’ and ‘it’ irritated me, and made me laugh, because I was supposed to bow down as well. It is not proper to say T in certain research, certain publications. And deciding to say T earned me bad grades in science. Which means that science is a question of style ... A type of discourse. An unavowed technique, which cannot distinguish itself from the so-called truth.

If I eliminate the ‘ones’ and the ‘its,’ those impersonal forms of proper scientific tone, I am often forced to use the passive voice, in order to admit to my feelings, to say that I am not an absolute subject, not pure action. I do not simply control; I am also controlled.

And my formation as subject results from the impact of other bodies, of matter that is foreign to me. In refusing the imperialism of the ‘I’ that is the paradigm of all speaking subjects, or of a neuter ‘one,’ or an impersonal ‘it,’ I acknowledge the ways in which I have been affected. Not always how I have been affected, but in which ways. No more undifferentiated, substitutable, universal subject. In changing, metamorphosing, and anamorphosing, does the subject not wonder about the resistance, or the insistence, of its own existence? Of its own body? Because either all of one’s energy is reducible to scientific organization, and can be defined and regimented according to the norms and the tools of science, or certain dimensions, notably affective ones, and certain limits, notably bodily ones, are in conflict with that control.

In becoming, in accepting that it becomes, the subject must take into account its form and its sex. It cannot claim to be a universal without form. It has, and is, an incarnate form. It creates a morphology, and is one. The relation between the two is its story, with its projects, its generations, its loops, and its repetitions.

Up until now the form-giving subject has always been male. And this structure has, unbeknownst to itself, clearly given form to culture, and to the history of ideas. They are not neuter.

We end up with this paradox: scientific studies prove the sexuality of the cortex, while science maintains that discourse is neuter. Such is the naivety of a subject that never interrogates itself, never looks back toward its constitution, never questions its contradictions. We learn that the left and right sides of the brain are not the same in men as in women, but that, nevertheless, the two sexes speak the same language, and that no other language could possibly exist. By what grace, or what necessity, is it possible to speak the same language without having the same brain? With what do we speak? Is the brain simply a center for processing information already encoded elsewhere? Where? With no traces of its coming into being? And this processing is then imagined, directed, or marked, by which sex?

Living beings, insofar as they are alive, are a becoming. They produce form. No becoming is morphologically undifferentiated, even if its source is chaotic. And the problem of sexual difference weighs in heavily, no doubt, on the side of the primary matter of nature, but also on the side of language. Do we still have something to say? Do we still have meaning to produce?

The female remains within an amorphous maternal matrix, source of creation, of procreation, as yet unformed, however, as subject of the autonomous word. The coming, or the subjective anastrophe (rather than the catastrophe), of the female has not yet taken place. And her movements often remain stuck in mimetic tendencies: whether it’s a defensive or an offensive strategy, the female behaves like the other, the one, the unique. As of yet, she neither affirms nor develops her own forms. She lacks some kind of birth, or some kind of growth, between the within of an intention and the without of a thing created by the other, a passage from within to without, from without to within, whose threshold remains the prerogative of the subject that has always been. The female has not yet created her language, her word, her style. He, she, they [feminine case], I, are supposedly still the reservoir of the meaning, and the madness, of discourse.

How does the subject come back to itself after having exiled itself within a discourse? That is the question of any era. More pertinent to ours, perhaps? Language having become the language of technology, where the automaton is master, it is not always easy for the human subject to recognize its own path through the imperatives and circuits of machines. Has it lost space and time? There is a rupture between our own language, the language we program ourselves, and the one that comes back to us. Notably, when the information is transmitted to and through a certain number of mechanisms in different parts of the universe, in various sectors of society, in various languages, etc.

The thread has been cut, lost, propagates itself along electric, electronic, atmospheric, magnetic circuits. The sky, the earth ... Where are we coming from? To whom are we speaking? How do we manage not to get lost in all this? Outside the most generalized processes, the subject is cut loose, wanders adrift, goes astray. ...

Why does it go on refusing any contra-diction, any face-to-face with the other sex? As yet unheard-of fecundity of and within sexual difference. The generation of a new culture that desire and the death drives would seek to postpone.

The analysis of language is a precious source of information and of foresight. It is also an effective aid for someone who knows how to use it: a word is as good as a chemical. But it has its toxins as well ... A discourse can poison, surround, close off, and imprison, or it can liberate, cure, nourish and fecundate. It is rarely neutral. Even if certain practices strive for neutrality in language, it is always just a goal, or a tangent, and never reached; it is always to be constructed. An ethics of neutrality can only be developed very slowly, and through rigorous analysis of discourse, and discourses.

This book is a questioning of the language of science, and an investigation into the sexualization of language, and the relation between the two.

It is also research into deviations, idiolects, neocodes, neoformations, and anomalous structures, in their relations to the most common, the most readily received, code. The strategy, tactics, and theory of enunciation can often be broached only through deviant practices. Unless one were able to find a subject who had happened upon a perfect distance with respect to its language, a metalanguage without dogmas or superimposed schemata? But that is virtually impossible. In order to theorize enunciation, we would need discussion among at least two or three interlocutors. And that never happens. Everyone chooses his or her own ideal perspective, makes the law in his or her own domain, hires assistants, and claims to have the first word, or the last. ... Or builds a house closed off to the other, to others.

Two sexually differentiated subjects would be one possible solution. However, this proposal is still dismissed as limited in scope, not really pertinent. Nevertheless, it could be the angle, the summit and the base from which we could protect language against the reign of a binarism which allows the subject to do nothing more than manipulate or weigh data, using divisions, oppositions, and contradictions that exhaust our reserves without creating anything new. Driven by already existing meanings, particles of significations. Oscillations or polemics of survival that do not engender new forms of life.

Discourse hardens up and closes off. In the subject itself. It loses its fluidity of communication, stiffens into pathological forms - pathogens that require the invention of strategies of observation, and of therapies for and through language. Psychoanalysis is perhaps the most astonishing of these: the most stratified experimental theater for the enunciation and for the pragmatics of language, revealing their impasses, their illnesses, their economic crises, their auto-logical circles, etc. This setting for the interpretation of language is not widely recognized as such. It is, nevertheless, unique as a scientific possibility. However, it depends on the aptitude of the subject for self-criticism and self-analysis vis-à-vis its most subtle and resistant determinations. This task is the task of the clinician and his or her patients, without witnesses guaranteeing some truth foreign to the scene. The tool is the speaking subject and his or her relation to the word.

I had sought to group these texts by theme, purpose, or goal. However, respect for chronological order seemed more interesting in its simplicity. Of course, requests or requirements on the part of the journals or institutions that inspired the research or meditation do interfere with this chronology. But, even if only to show the evolution of a style in the translation of thought, it is meaningful to leave the texts in the order of their writing. One reads in this the perplexity of the exposition of the work: complex, complicated, dependent at times on influences or subordinations, on the scientific oversimplifications required by publishing, or on a style that will sometimes be called literary or poetic, and which is often nothing more than the discovery of a mode of affirmation. All philosophers and thinkers are poets in the peaceful exposition of their message. But the strange economy of reason dictates that this style not be recognized, or that it remain unappreciated, until after the death of the writer. Who salutes the poet ... in Aristotle, in Hegel, in Einstein?

A decisive contribution to the history of culture is signed in the text or the formula - the writing of a thought or of an equation cannot be separated from its expression. The existence of any creative work denies the opposition philosophy and science v. literature. Creation is writing just as much as it is a practice of objectivity, truth, or thought. It is both. Commentators and metalinguists believe that it is possible to dissociate, to differentiate, the two. For the one who creates, however, this opposition has no meaning, other than an artificial and paralyzing one.

How else can we understand the current effervescence centered around literature? And around writing as such? And how then can we understand the repeated claims by numerous scientists that science cannot be expressed poetically?

We are dealing with at least two phenomena: the interpretation of a story that is being read after the fact; and a period of transition where new meaning has not yet been discovered. The subject of science, or of the episteme, is dragged down, or swallowed up, by repetitions and formulas, by graphisms in which it does not recognize itself, but which control it. Too lucid or not yet lucid enough to create. Able to get to the bottom of certain things and not others? Affirming itself in maintaining the past order, and in repressing future discovery and research. This is domination by those who do not create.

There remains the still veiled horizon, which needs other instruments of translation. To go back to, or to finally turn to, T? The sexed I. As yet unexplored discourse, especially in the sciences which refuse to confine themselves to metalanguage ... It is extremely difficult, for anyone who does not affirm herself or himself as a sexed subject, not to remain blindly within the confines and the commentaries of the language, or the languages, of the other, especially the other sex. If science refuses the subject the right to affirm its sex, is the discourse it prescribes not confined to a generally neuter metalanguage, amputated of an important objective dimension?

The truth the subject believes about the world is still just a double of his or her own obscured, unrecognized truth. Without knowing it, she or he tells her or his own story, affirming as universal a truth that remains partial. No one, man or woman, inhabits his or her space in the postulation of norms valuable for all. Everyone, woman or man, has to negotiate varying degrees of freedom or confinement. Everything ends up being out of focus - discourse, words and gestures, whether taken together or apart. What is needed is an ethics for those who would build and inhabit their own territory, their own world, and who respect the other’s, particularly the other sex’s.

Strange days ... Where our truth is sought in the animal or in other domains. Science is interested in the homes and languages of animals, in vegetables and in minerals ... more than in human beings? Humans supposedly need an economy for life and one for speech, but no ethical link between the two realities.

II Linguistic and Specular Communication

Genetic Models and Pathological Models

Irigaray Luce

The reciprocal integration of the body and of language, origin of the imaginary, decenters man¹ in relation to himself, and marks the beginning of his wanderings. The ineluctable corollary of this is the impossibility of the return to the body as the secure place of his identity to himself. All he is is mediated by the word, and his trace can be found only in the word of the other.

In lived experience, the primary imaginary can be detected in the primordial phantasms forming the deep structures of human behaviors. The phantasm is the original specification of the imaginary in the submissive, passive mode, witness to the contingency of the coming into being of the subject - <I> - pierced by the world and by language from the beginning. Too closely defined, the phantasm changes into chains. Chance then becomes necessity, and possibility is reduced to linear reality. It is up to the word of the other to unleash what has been bound up. Retracing certain pathways, it reactivates all of their intersections, except when it acts as a boundary of immutable lines.

This word is sometimes the analyst’s, but can also be the lover’s, or the poet’s. They all share the goal of getting back as close as possible to the initial integration of the body and of lang...