Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray

Language, Origin, Art, Love

Gail M. Schwab

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781438477824, 9781438477817
• eBook ISBN: 9781438477831
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

A broad exploration of Irigaray's philosophy of life and living.

Featuring a highly accessible essay from Irigaray herself, this volume explores her philosophy of life and living. Life-thinking, an important contemporary trend in philosophy and in women's and gender studies, stands in contrast to philosophy's traditional grounding in death, exemplified in the work of philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Schopenhauer. The contributors to Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray consider Irigaray's criticisms of the traditional Western philosophy of death, including its either-or dualisms and binary logic, as well as some of Irigaray's "solutions" for cultivating life. The book is comprehensive in its analyses of Irigaray's relationship to classical and contemporary philosophers, writers, and artists, and produces extremely fruitful intersections between Irigaray and figures as diverse as Homer and Plato; Alexis Wright, the First-Nations novelist of Australia; and twentieth-century French philosophers like Sartre, Badiou, Deleuze, and Guattari. It also develops Irigaray's relationship to the arts, with essays on theater, poetry, architecture, sculpture, and film.

PART I

THINKING LIFE WITH LUCE IRIGARAY

Introduction

Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray: Language, Origin, Art, Love

GAIL M. SCHWAB

In the first chapter of Between East and West: From Singularity to Community (2002), in a critique of what she considers Schopenhauer’s (mis)reading and (mis)representation of Indian philosophy and spirituality, Irigaray writes that “philosophy is a matter of death,” and she goes on to quote Schopenhauer: “Death is the real inspiring genius or Musagetes of philosophy, and for this reason Socrates defined philosophy as thanatou mélétè (preparation for death; Plato, Phaedo, 81a). Indeed, without death there would hardly have been any philosophizing” (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation cited in Between East and West 23). Irigaray further notes: “A philosopher living and thinking life is a priori suspect in our philosophical culture” (ibid.). Nevertheless, she will forcefully declare in the introduction to Between East and West: “I love life, and I have searched for solutions in order to defend it, to cultivate it” (4), and ask: “How to go against the current? To stop the exploitation, in particular through a simple inventory, of the human and of his or her environment? How to return to where death has taken place because of the cessation of becoming, mistaking what we are? How to renew a cultivation of life, and recover our energy, the path of our growth?” (viii). Many thinkers and theorists are currently pursuing answers to these questions.

The contributors to Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray, the latest in a series of volumes resulting from ten conferences of the Luce Irigaray Circle, which took place between 2006 and 2019, attempt to address these questions and to “think life” through the multifarious strands of Irigaray’s philosophy, including, of course, the foundational strand of sexuate difference, and to show how the possibility of life in sexuate difference, far from freezing up into a rigidly codified binary of “two sexes,” might blossom rather into a living continuum of ever-evolving change(s) and difference(s) in language, culture, art, spirit, nature, human relations, and politics. The philosophy of Man, of the Universal and the One, as Schopenhauer understood (without understanding), is rooted, grounded, in death. However, as Mary C. Rawlinson, feminist philosopher of life and Irigaray Circle co-founder, has written in her 2016 book, Just Life: Bioethics and the Future of Sexual Difference, “Man has had his day” (13). It is time to move on, to try something different—to try difference. Life is never One, as Irigaray frequently reminds us; in fact, life is always at least two, and always generating the diverse and the multiple. The chapters that follow Irigaray’s both explore and illustrate what it might mean to think life in all of the above-mentioned domains, and in others besides.

Origin, Maternity, and Relationality

Part 1: “Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray,” in addition to this introduction to the entire volume, includes an essay by Irigaray, “How Could We Achieve Women’s Liberation?,” presented via video link at the third conference of the Luce Irigaray Circle in the Fall of 2008. Irigaray began her brief but densely rich remarks by questioning the discouraging failure of twentieth-century women’s movements to have achieved women’s “evolution” at either the personal or the collective level—beyond, that is, a certain undeniable economic and social progress, both the importance of which and the limits of which Irigaray went on to acknowledge. Urging women to take control of their own liberation and to cultivate freedom for themselves and for their own becoming, “How Could We Achieve Women’s Liberation?” ranges over many of the themes that have formed the foundation of Irigaray’s major works and thought—themes that are integral to her life-centered philosophy. Particularly important in Irigaray’s essay is the problem of the noncompetitive and nonconflictual, but also nondependent and nonfusional, ethical relation to the other, a relation defined by respect for limits and by the creation of the “threshold,” or the “interval,” a space-between that allows two human beings to cultivate and maintain their own subjectivity while creating a living relation between them. This has been a particularly rich area of exploration in Irigaray scholarship, as we shall see in many of the chapters that follow, which include a piece by Rebecca Hill, whose book on the interval has been highly influential (see Hill 2012).

Relationality could be said to constitute the main thrust of works like The Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993), To Be Two (2001), I Love to You (1996), Sharing the World (2008), and Teaching (2008). More specifically in the area of ethical relations, “How Could We Achieve Women’s Liberation?” has some interesting things to say about desire and sexuality—ideas that look back to, and substantially develop, Irigaray’s call for the cultivation of desire in, for example, “Spiritual Tasks for Our Age” in Key Writings (2004, 171–85), where she emphasized the connection between sexuality and spirituality; in “How Could We Achieve Women’s Liberation?,” she underlines the link between sexuality and freedom:

Sexuality is, in a way, unnecessary with respect to our own life. As such, sexuality is also the place where the question of our human freedom is most critical. Sexuality can lead us to stay at or fall back into the mere elementary or material level of our instincts, or it can help us to overcome our native human belonging towards aiming at spirituality. Sexuality is the part of our body of which the function is almost only relational. […] Sexuality attracts us beyond ourselves, and provides us with energy for this going beyond. (33)

Several of the chapters that follow develop the themes of love, eroticism, and sexuality—concepts/experiences that are obviously of central importance to the problem of “thinking life.”

Another Irigarayan theme in the area of relationality that appears in “How Could We Achieve Women’s Liberation?” concerns the urgent need to “return to our birth, with its bodily and contextual dimensions—that is, to our natural origin and identity” (27), and to acknowledge our debt to the mother and recognize our birth as the originary truth, not only of our own life, but as that of all of civilization. The relation to the mother is one of the pillars of Irigarayan ethics, and she has written about it extensively, in essays like “Body against Body: In Relation to the Mother,” “Belief Itself” (Sexes and Genealogies 1987, 7–21, 23–53); “When the Gods Are Born” (Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche 1991, 121–90); “The Forgotten Mystery of Female Ancestry” (Thinking the Difference 1994, 89–112); “On the Maternal Order” (Je Tu Nous 1993, 37–44); and “Spiritual Tasks for Our Age,” to name only a few examples. In “How Could We Achieve Women’s Liberation?,” Irigaray reaffirms that the way to women’s liberation does not follow the male path of “emergence from the natural origin that is generally confused with the maternal body and world,” in order to enter “a culture in the masculine” (26); such a trajectory is not only unsuitable to female subjectivity, but also actively “opposes it” (ibid.), as Irigaray writes. We shall see that the rethinking of the relation to and the debt owed the mother—conceptual problems that, like sexuality and love, are indispensable to thinking life—figure as prominent themes in many of the chapters in this volume. This is also a fruitful area of current research in Irigaray studies, as philosophers like Rachel Jones and Fanny Söderbäck, for example, continue to develop Irigaray’s thinking on the maternal relation, natality, and placental ethics (see Jones 2011, 2012, 2013; Söderbäck 2016).

Of course, Irigaray continues, woman “has a natural origin that she has to consider and cultivate, but she herself is also a natural origin” (28), and “she has to preserve the transcendence of the one to whom she gives birth as being another human with an origin different from hers. This requires the ability to distance herself from the work of her own body” (29). Being an origin goes beyond procreation, however, as “each woman, independently of giving birth to a child, is a place from which an origin can and must spring. This presupposes a certain way of dealing with life, with breathing, with energy, with language” (29). A woman, while acknowledging her maternal debt and cultivating a spiritual and ethical relation to the mother, must also take responsibility for and forge her own origin as a free human being, creating her self, her own spirit, and a language or medium appropriate both to express that self and to reach out to others. In some of her most recent work, Irigaray develops this concern for “being an origin” far beyond the concept of “women’s liberation” into an ontology of human becoming and urges us to give birth—through breathing, through the assumption of sexuate difference, and through appropriate relations to others—to an entirely new humanity (see, for example, To Be Born 2017). Irigaray’s emphasis on the becoming of the species has inspired the thought of Elizabeth Grosz, whose work on the ontology of sexual difference is foundational to current feminist thought on evolution, change, transformation, and becoming, or on “becoming undone,” to use Grosz’s term (See Grosz 2011, 2013, and 2016), and Grosz’s work in this area has influenced many contemporary thinkers and writers, including Rebecca Hill, Rachel Jones, Cheryl Lynch-Lawler, Kristin Sampson, Peg Rawes, Ellen Mortensen, and myself, to name only a handful of those who read her.

Logic, Language, Art

Regarding the need to transform language as a medium, Irigaray has been questioning, studying, and analyzing language across the entire breadth of her oeuvre, in addition to (re)creating it (revitalizing it—that is, reinfusing it with life) herself in the highly original style of her writing, where she seeks, as she writes in “How Could We Achieve Women’s Liberation?,” “to think while being faithful to myself as a woman and not to submit myself to a culture that [is] not appropriate to me” (30). She began her own research and writing with sociolinguistic studies in Le Langage des Déments (1973) and with the essays in To Speak Is Never Neutral (2002), carried on with this work in her major essay “Représentation et auto-affection du féminin” in her edited collection Sexes et genres à travers les langues (1990, 31–82), and used the data and the insights she had acquired in her social-scientific studies to create important syntheses in several of the essays in I Love to You and in her pedagogical investigations with Italian schoolchildren in Le Partage de la parole (2001, partially published in Key Writings as “Towards a Sharing of Speech” [77–94]). Language and linguistics constitute one of the five principal themes of Key Writings, and, perhaps unexpectedly, language is also what is at stake in the Way of Love, whose title seems to promise something quite different, but whose execution demonstrates that finding the way of love requires a new language. The rethinking and remaking of language make up a vein of scholarship that has been central in my own work on Irigaray over the years (see Schwab 1998, 1998, 2016).

“How Could We Achieve Women’s Liberation?” calls for a commitment to creative exploration enabling women to connect to our own subjectivity and energy, to express difference and plurality rather than oneness and sameness, and to enter into communication with (the) other(s). It is incumbent upon us to develop new language(s), new logic(s), and new cultural forms; in an interesting comment that she (regrettably) does not pursue any further, Irigaray proposes that we move beyond our long preoccupation with the difference between metaphor and metonymy, and, instead, consider “another way of expressing the real that perhaps has to do with diaphor” (31), a type of metaphorical expression emphasizing, not similarities but rather differences (diaphora), creating the possibility of something new, leading “to a greater potential for living, growing, coexisting, and sharing with the whole of the real” (ibid.).

Irigaray writes in “How Could We Achieve Women’s Liberation?” that western logic and culture have used words

to duplicate the real and construct a world parallel to the living world. This constructed world is in a way finished, closed, just as a chessboard is limited, and the words—that is, the pieces that move on the chessboard—are also limited and defined, as is the case for their movements. There is no longer life in such a world but only a representation of the living world that aims to put it at man’s disposal. (30–31)

The binary oppositions structuring language and thought in our Western tradition have transformed the “living real into dead realities” (32) cut off from nature. In the contemporary moment, the chess board has become a violent video game, where the “pieces”—more obviously representations of humans than the kings, queens, knights, bishops, and so on on a chess board, but no more alive—would seem to enjoy more freedom of movement and choice than their chess counterparts, but whose movements take place only in the representation of space, and whose choices are exercised only in the representation of freedom—the “choices” lying invariably between the “freedom” to overpower and to kill or the “freedom” to be overpowered and killed. Death is in either case the goal and the result. Many of the chapters in this book take up Irigaray’s critique of death-dealing Western either-or binary logic and seek to find another path, or paths, rather—multidirectional, winding, intertwining paths of expression and becoming—of life and lives.

Nature

Finally, in Irigaray’s essay, we also take note of her expressions of concern about the state of our planet and her ongoing involvement in ecological and environmental issues, which first became explicit in her well-known, now-classic piece inspired as a response to the disaster at Chernobyl, “A Chance for Life” (Thinking the Difference 1–35), where she demonstrates her passionate advocacy for a nonexploitative, nonextractive relation to nature and the earth, and for a respectful relation to all that lives. As we begin to consider the ways that “our culture has damaged and endangered our planet” and come to recognize that “we have to rethink our behavior with respect to nature” (“How Could We Achieve Women’s Liberation?” 27), we move beyond the human-centered concerns of relationality and self-expression and communication and begin to attend to life in the nonhuman, including animal and vegetal life, and the life of the earth itself—its water, soil, rock, air, and climate—that is, all of organic and inorganic nature, all that sustains all that sustains us; we move from human life to Life. (I would mention in this context the collection of essays edited by Peg Rawes, Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature, and Subjectivity [2013], that deals with the ecology and the economy of the built and natural environments, as well as with human subjectivity and a politics of community and care. For further development of these issues by Irigaray, see In the Beginning She Was [2013] and Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives, written with Michael Marder [2016].)

Life in and through Nature, Desire, Freedom, and Love

In Part II: “Life in and through Nature, Desire, Freedom, and Love,” several of the contributors, in particular Rebecca Hill, Cheryl Lynch-Lawler, Kristin Sampson, Erla Karlsdottir and Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, and Ellen Mortensen seek new ways of thinking that would open up “chessboard logic” in support of a fluid vitality. Cheryl Lynch-Lawler, Erla Karlsdottir and Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, and Kristin Sampson re-examine some of the traditional binaries of Western thought—that is, nature-culture, male-female, mind-body, reason-emotion, sense perception-cognition, and life-death—and Rebecca Hill broadens the dialogue they establish with contemporary and classical Western thinkers to include philosophers and artists of the First Nations peoples of Australia. Ellen Mortensen, Fanny Söderbäck, Louise Burchill, Phyllis H. Kaminski, and I then shift the focus of thinking life onto problems of relationality and of life with (the) other(s), and consider the cultivation of love and desir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray
• Part II Life In and Through Nature, Desire, Freedom, and Love
• Part III Revitalizing History, Philosophy, Pedagogy, and the Arts
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover