Building a New World

Luce Irigaray, Michael Marder

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137453013
• eBook ISBN: 9781137453020
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

With an original introduction by Luce Irigaray, and original texts from her students and collaborators, this book imagines the outlines of a more just, ecologically attuned world that flourishes on the basis of sexuate difference.

Part I
Philosophy: Birth or Rebirth through Cultivating Nature and Sexuate Intersubjectivity

1

A Philosophy Faithful to Happiness

Lucia Del Gatto

To breathe:

An extreme poverty

Becomes beatitude,

Renouncing all

But not life,

Of the body,

Of the soul.

Nothing

Apart from this happiness

That grows,

Flowers,

Blooms.

(Luce Irigaray, Everyday Prayers, 23 June, p. 140)

The Western world is going through a dramatic crisis. It is beset with numerous difficulties, the most alarming of which is perhaps a widespread inhibition of our faculty for still transforming what we meet with. Increasingly, the media and our individual experiences reveal a shortage of our capacity to modify the conditions of our existence in accordance with our longing for happiness.

The prevailing trend in contemporary philosophy reflects this paralysis: the criticism of traditional thinking, due to an unavoidable examination of our conscience after evil burst into history in the extreme form of totalitarian atrocities, might engulf reason itself in nihilistic insanity. In order to pass from mere deconstruction to a new elaboration, it is first necessary to become aware of a crucial contradiction. If we criticize the Western tradition of thinking with the help of its own arguments, we will escape neither the impasses deriving from a self-referential withdrawal into ourselves, nor the fatal outcomes of the material and cultural artefacts that can be attributed to the artificial neuter subjectivity which produced them. If we want to keep open the space left free by criticism so that it can be invested with the prospects of human accomplishment, we must discover a rationality based on a subjectivity which is really different. On this point, Luce Irigaray’s thinking is particularly fruitful, as it is born both from a listening to the denied identity of women – giving voice to their experience, their viewpoint and their world – and from a fundamental trust in life and its capacity for happiness.

The aim of this chapter is, first of all, to delineate the main measures and directions of caring about reason given by Luce Irigaray’s notion of sexuate difference as a key to think; second, to highlight the renewed role played by the logos, in the perspective of a dialogic language that considers sexuate difference as a core of our irreducible natural belonging; and then, to focus on the ethical potentialities of her most recent theoretical elaboration, as a precious resource in taking up responsibly the challenges we face in our time and our space.

Seeds of happiness: new perspectives for philosophy

Luce Irigaray has made a generative contribution of new pathways not only to philosophy, but also to the anthropological wisdom of Western culture and, more generally, of all cultures. Her contribution must be recognized as the following points:

1. she has opened up a particular way of reading and developing psychoanalysis;
2. she has allowed us to read the history of Western philosophy in a more critical way – for example, with her analysis of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas;
3. she has offered a new interpretation of the Greek myths and the founding genealogies of Western culture;
4. she has foreshadowed a new horizon for politics and democracy;
5. she has outlined an alternative syntax, rethinking the relationship between I, identity, difference and duality;
6. she has shed new light on the positive potentialities of dialogue, of sharing and of generating a common world, which does not cancel out differences;
7. she has reconsidered spirituality and religious experience;
8. she has restored dignity to love, showing that it is a way of being and a fundamental human dynamic;
9. she has thought through the relationship between culture and nature, the questions of energy and breath, in a new manner.

This chapter does not focus on compiling a homogeneous synthesis of the aforementioned elements, but attempts to put them into perspective to show how a positive and vital turning point in thinking emerges from them, instead of a rhetorical and abstract universalism. As we will see, this is demonstrated by Luce Irigaray’s ability to reformulate the relationship between culture and nature in order to open up the pathway of a philosophy faithful to happiness.

This interpretation must be contextualized, clarifying from the start the fact that the notion of happiness that inspires Irigaray’s work is not treated as a universal of sense, which would render it impervious to developments of an individual or collective history. It concerns a philosophical stance, an unwillingness to take refuge in the fortress of abstraction. With rigour and passion, Irigaray questions the concrete demand for sense that renders us thinking and feeling human beings: an interrogation that has been largely removed from a tradition that has basically considered itself to be rationalistic. This culture has betrayed our being, reducing it to a mere universal neuter, an abstract res cogitans, at the same time dividing us up into an intelligible part and a sensible one. This has led to a pollution of thinking, a pollution of feeling and a pollution of acting. Irigaray suggests that philosophy should work at a more global level, inviting thinkers not to renounce their anchorage to life in all its concrete depth. Experience teaches us that divisions produce pain and that happiness is connected with aiming at harmony. We have thus to overcome the divisions that result from the opposition between culture and nature that acts throughout the history of Western philosophy. In fact, this has mostly effected itself as a conceptual translation of the real through mental exercises and to the construction of a formal knowledge, so much so that ‘the wisdom of which these technicians of the logos are enamoured is sometimes a knowing how to die, but seldom the apprenticeship to a knowing how to live’ (Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, p. 3).

The duality of the sexuate difference is central to a philosophy that wants to progress beyond the dichotomy of an abstract logic, in order to reach a form of wisdom that is faithful to the need for harmony that lies at the heart of life. To understand in what sense this provides us with a perspective capable of regaining a continuity ‘between the head and the feet’ (ibid.), we should perhaps examine the semantic roots of happiness. In fact, as Heidegger points out, in his analysis about the meaning of

, at any time an original relationship within the language can emerge, and we need to investigate what is dead in the morphological forms, which we too naively refer to as mere mechanisms (see Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, pp. 56–74). He raises a crucial question that could be interpreted in this manner: what sort of abstraction is at stake in the linguistic forms that we use when we allude to our own being? The Latin equivalent of ‘happiness’ is felicitas, which belongs to the semantic field of words like fecundus and femina. According to the etymology given by Émile Benveniste, these words ‘have in common this radical fe – that corresponds to the Greek the – whose primary sense is “fecundity, prosperity”’(Émile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, p. 189; my translation). The verb

(‘I produce’, ‘I generate’, ‘I blossom’) contains both a generative meaning and a reference to the natural dimension. In this manner, we can recover the original relationship between logos (‘reason’, ‘word’) and physis (‘growing being’). If logos cuts itself off from physis, it leads to a vanishing of the opportunity to develop our being in line with the etymological sense of happiness.

Irigaray’s philosophy takes on the difficult task of bringing the primary meaning of happiness back to centre-stage, helping us to free our being from the abstraction of conceptual grids that do not account for the richness of life. This centrality demands a return to the starting point of the philosophical pathway, if we are to follow an alternative way in thinking (see Luce Irigaray, ‘The Return’, in Luce Irigaray: Teaching, pp. 219–30): a new alliance between culture and nature. From the very beginning, Western philosophers had a dominating attitude towards nature, so that in our present vocabulary we are still accustomed to considering culture and nature as opposites; because of this, ‘we oscillate between an abstraction without anchorage in our own nature and a regression to animality’(Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, p. 96). It is necessary

that philosophy joins together, more than it has done in the West, the body, the heart and the mind. That it not be founded on contempt for nature. That it not resort to a logic that formalizes the real by removing it from concrete experience. That it be less a normative science of truth than the search for measures that help in living better: with oneself, with others, with the world. (Irigaray, The Way of Love, p. 2).

As Karen Burke notes, ‘Luce Irigaray’s phrase, “la culture de la nature”, is a phrase in French that can be translated as both “the cultivation of nature” and “the culture of nature”’ (Karen I. Burke, ‘Masculine and Feminine Approaches to Nature’, in Luce Irigaray: Teaching, p. 195). In fact, ‘culture’ derives from the Latin verb colere (‘to cultivate’), while ‘nature’ derives from nascor (‘to be born’, ‘to start’, ‘to begin’): grammatically, the word natura coincides with the future participle of a middle voice,¹ a periphrastic form which means a process that contains in the present the possibility of a real future. Only that of which maturation we take care of can come to birth, and Irigaray proposes restoring a relationship between logos and physis according to a non-hierarchical dialectic, in order not to prevent the blossoming of the human, but instead of freeing its generative potentialities. Developing the notion of fecundity implied in the instance of felicitas asks us to start from the acknowledgement of the fact that ‘between human being and nature, another proximity can reveal itself and work itself out with sexual difference as the mediation’ (Irigaray, Between East and West, p. 18). In this context, the etymological connection between felicitas and femina could refer not only to the biological prerogative of a woman, but to the contribution she can make to a shared generation, to a cohabitation in a world that is respectful of difference and also thanks to her confidence in nature which she has to become aware of and elaborate.

The universal of life is thus not neuter but must be said in a dual manner. When it is fixed in dichotomies and abstract surrogates, its reality becomes betrayed. Constructive thinking requires us to become conscious of our own being in order to recognize the otherness of the other; we have to cultivate our specific, irreducibly sexuate nature through a culture that promotes the capacity for gestation of the global dimension of the self, of the other, of the world and of the relations between them.

Irigaray’s philosophy maintains that longing for harmony is capable of healing divisions without cancelling out differences, favouring a relational and dialogic rationality that can replace the prevailing trend which is dichotomous and dominating. Starting from a sexuate incarnation, in order to think the unthought of the difference, constitutes a necessary step towards the recovery of thinking, of feeling and of acting from the dichotomies that paralyze them, a step which is possible in virtue of the faithfulness of the philosophical gesture to the concrete question of sense preserved in the initial meaning of happiness.

Logos and language for the blossoming of dialogue

First of all, such a language requires a radical questioning of the nature of the logos itself. Indeed, one of the tasks philosophy has to take on is to recover and actualize the primary etymology of logos in its original double meaning: rationality and word.

In our tradition, logos has mainly operated and been understood as the capability of human beings to dominate anything that is external to the consciousness of the subject, whether it is an object or another subject. This is due to a prevailing economy of consciousness based on representation as the privileged method through which the binomial subject–object acts (see Luce Irigaray, ‘Pour une logique de l’intersubjectivité dans la difference’, Hegel Jahrbuch 2007, pp. 325–9).

Nowadays, it is more and more evident that the object is refractory to this kind of projection: there is a large part of reality that cannot be explained by scientific approaches. This is even more valid for other subjects: they cannot be treated as objects of our studies or as objects that have to be integrated in our own cultural and political views, so that their otherness is irremediably lost. We need to find new words for a rationality capable of escaping the dichotomy of subject–object, and this requires our logos to become aware of the potentialities inscribed in our bodily belonging.

Although we are accustomed to considering logos as a power of producing dichotomies by dividing reality into two parts – resulting from the initial division between subject and object – we ought to consider the initial meaning of the Greek verb

, from which the word ‘logos’ derives. Originally, this verb indicated the act of ‘gathering’, ‘connecting’, ‘collecting’, which is precisely the opposite of dividing. Because of this, logos appears at first to be extraneous to the dominating logic to which it seems to correspond, at least virtually from the Platonic philosophy. Heidegger can help us in restoring the capacity of logos to recognize and express living beings instead of splitting them up by substituting them with conceptual and abstract surrogates. In fact, he interprets logos as a fundamental and founding word of Ancient thought (see ‘Grundwort des frühen Denkens’, Holzwege, p. 352) that can be expressed in German as die Versammlung, a word which, in English, would allude to a sort of ‘gathering’. This status does not imply a static isolation of the self, the extreme consequence of which would be an epistemological autism; nor does it refer to a mere projection onto the exteriority in order to get it back to fulfil an empty interiority, but it is near to the process that Irigaray calls ‘self-affection’. It consists in a cultivation of ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Part I Philosophy: Birth or Rebirth through Cultivating Nature and Sexuate Intersubjectivity
• Part II Theology and Spirituality: Reading Sacred Texts and Traditions with a Feminine Belief
• Part III Art: Paths of Women towards Embodying Themselves
• Part IV Politics: Building a New World Instead of Dwelling on Terrorism
• Part V Contributions of Luce Irigaray
• Index