Breathing with Luce Irigaray

Lenart Skof, Emily A. Holmes

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781441115485
• eBook ISBN: 9781441126603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

Contributors to this volume consider the implications of 'the Age of Breath': a spiritual shift in human awareness to the needs of the other figured through breathing. Awareness of the breath allows us to attend to our bodies and the bodies of others, to animals, nature, other cultures, oppressed minorities, and the other of sexual difference. As a way to connect body and spirit, self and other, nature and culture, and East and West, breathing emerges as the significant theological and philosophical gesture of our time.
Philosophy has too often cut off metaphysical thought from this living, breathing world with its animal and female bodies, just as religious traditions have repressed the breathing flesh in favour of calcified word. The re-introduction of breath into philosophy and theology draws our awareness back to the body, to respect for the other, and to nature, making awareness of the breath essential for an embodied ethics of difference in our globalized, ecological age. These themes are addressed by an international team of scholars, including Luce Irigaray.

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Towards Breathing with Luce Irigaray

Lenart Škof & Emily A. Holmes (eds.)

The many and varied writings of Luce Irigaray suggest that the task of philosophy is to awaken humanity to a new ethical constellation, in which our cultures recognize difference, and to new ethical spaces through which our attention to the other can be cultivated and transformed. As she describes this task in her essay on ‘The Age of Breath’ (2004b, pp. 165–70), this awakening of humanity is closely related to the breath of life we each receive and share with one another. But, in Irigaray’s words, for this awakening, nous devons passer à une autre économie de la conscience (Irigaray 2007b, pp. 325–9) – and this means that another temporality of life also is needed, one in which the ongoing becoming of subjects in their many differences is not subordinated to any idealized form or fixed representation. The spiritual task of our age is therefore intrinsically related to current debates about the subject, the recognition of difference and practical (inter)subjectivity. The ethical task of our age is theological, philosophical and intercultural in its nature, but foremost, it is, according to Irigaray, the age of the Spirit in which ethical awareness and embodied touch are reunited with reference to the divine. The aim of this collection of essays is to pay tribute to Luce Irigaray’s work through critical engagement and, as it were, through dialogically breathing with her thought and personality to open the horizon of this becoming. While previous generations of interpreters of Irigaray have related her work to the wider fields of feminist theory and philosophy and, at times, struggled with aspects of her thought in relation to serious concerns about essentialism, heteronormativity and orientalism, in this book, we present a new generation of Irigaray scholarship that breathes with her writings in order to contribute to larger contemporary conversations about the ethics of difference, peace, sustainability, feminism, spirituality and intercultural encounter.

To breathe is to be alive and to exchange air with the living world around us – plants, animals and other humans. ‘Breath’, as William James observed, was ever the original of ‘spirit’. But philosophy has too often cut off metaphysical thought from this living, breathing world with its animal and female bodies, just as religious traditions have repressed the breathing flesh in favour of calcified word. The re-introduction of breath into philosophy and theology draws our awareness back to the body, to respect for the other and to nature, making awareness of the breath essential for an embodied ethics of difference in our globalized, ecological age. In this book, these themes are addressed through 14 essays, including an original essay from Luce Irigaray, contributed by an international collection of scholars.

Irigaray has characterized her work in three stages, and although to some degree these overlap, it is possible to identify a clear line of development in her work.¹ Throughout all the stages, the breath, breathing and air appear as thematic elements. The first stage opens the question of difference by uncovering the Western theoretical bias toward sameness through deconstructive readings of philosophy and psychoanalysis. Irigaray here uses strategies of mimesis, rhetorically identifying with the ‘feminine’ in male-authored texts, in order to demonstrate how it exceeds masculine discourse, and thereby opens a space for the possibility of female subjectivity.² The second stage turns directly to envisioning the conditions for female subjectivity, that is, the conditions for the emergence of a female speaking subject in language, culture, politics and religion through the acknowledgement of sexual difference.³ This stage, more constructive than the first, has invited concerns regarding essentialism, universalism and utopianism.⁴ To many feminist critics, Irigaray introduces an idealized and romanticized, if not downright conservative, vision of ‘woman’ as having a distinct essence that is both grounded in the specificity of the female body, and yet, seemingly more spiritual than man.⁵ Irigaray’s concrete efforts to envision women’s full subjectivity in practical terms through sexuate rights, maternal genealogy, sociality among women and a divine in the image of women have provoked lively and important debates.

In perhaps the most sympathetic reading, Irigaray’s writings can be viewed as opening a space for women’s subjectivity by reconnecting nature with spirit and culture, but without determining the content of that subjectivity, that is, what it means to be ‘woman’, which is always shaped by complex and intersecting particularities of race, class, sexuality, religion and so on. If Irigaray relatively easily escapes her critics’ early charges of biological essentialism, which largely resulted from a misreading of her work in, at the time, an empirically-oriented Anglo-American feminism,⁶ her claim of the primacy of sexual difference over other differences presents a more difficult challenge to feminist theory. Primary focus on sexual difference not only reinforces heteronormativity; it also appears to dismiss other differences as superficial and ignores the intersection of multiple differences (such as race, class, sexuality, ability) in the constitution of women’s subjectivity.⁷ Amy Hollywood, for instance, argues that ‘Irigaray’s claim to the primacy of sexual difference, by effacing the multiple differences of bodies and subjects, is fetishistic in ways that risk dangerous exclusions. Moreover, the very claim that we cannot think the body without thinking sexual difference leads Irigaray to evade the specificity of bodies and of history that, ostensibly, she wishes to embrace’ (Hollywood 2002, p. 185). This particular debate over the place and meaning of sexual difference in Irigaray’s work continues.

In the third, most recent, stage of her writings, Irigaray turns her attention explicitly to the heterosexual couple in order to establish an ethical relationship between the sexes that acknowledges the difference between them, through what she calls an ontology and culture of being-two.⁸ In this perspective, sexual difference provides the negative or limit for each gender as well as the possibility of embodied transcendence, a sensible transcendental, through ethical love and divine becoming. Focus on the couple has provoked criticisms not only of continued gender essentialism but of an increasing heterosexual privilege within Irigaray’s work, and a perhaps surprising reluctance (in the context of Irigaray’s earlier deconstructive writings) to interrogate the binary pair of the couple.⁹ Others, however, identify the feminist value of her work for both lesbians and heterosexual women and the necessity of critically and ethically reimagining both heterosexuality and heterosociality to the benefit of all women (and men).¹⁰ Recognizing the history and value of these (ongoing) debates for the interpretation of Irigaray’s work, this collection focuses attention on the philosophical significance of the breath as a new and suggestive entry point into the contested terrain of sexual difference, the body, nature and the feminine.

Breathing with Irigaray analyses the theme of the breath in Irigaray’s work in order to relate this topic to wider ethical contemporary concerns. The breath, breathing and air have been important themes in Irigaray’s writings ever since The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (originally in French in 1983) and An Ethics of Sexual Difference (originally in French in 1984; for the English Edition, we refer to Continuum 2004c, p. 108f.), works which point to Le temps du souffle (later translated as The Age of the Breath) in 1999, and on to Irigaray’s later books, such as Between East and West (2002a, originally in French in 1999), The Way of Love (2002b) and Sharing the World (2008c). Breathing also appears in Irigaray’s more recent writings (including her latest books, Il mistero di Maria (2010) and Una nuova cultura dell’energia (2011), neither yet translated into English), with respect to cosmological and ethical elaborations on the future of intersubjective relations. Breathing is closely connected to what Irigaray describes as a future task of philosophy as early as An Ethics of Sexual Difference – ‘We need to reinterpret everything concerning the relations between the subject and discourse, the subject and the world, the subject and the cosmic, the microcosmic and macrocosmic’ (Irigaray 2004c, p. 8). The aim of our collection is therefore to trace this theme of breath(ing) through her writings in order to contribute to contemporary scholarship on Irigaray and the wider fields of feminist theory, the ethics of difference and the philosophy of intersubjectivity. Collectively, our contributors sketch out this future ideal, when human beings in their many differences meet in ethical gestures, grounded in the awareness of breathing that links body with spirit, flesh with word, nature with culture, the subject with the cosmos, human beings with plants and animals and one another.

In order to open the horizon of this volume, we offer a dialogical prologue using three examples or points of departure we take as inspiration for a fruitful engagement with Luce Irigaray’s thought – philosophical, intercultural and theological.

Breathing philosophically

There are few instances in Western philosophy that can serve as a testimony or a genuine effort to breathe with the other, and in particular, the feminine other. For this reason, we would first like to put Irigaray in dialogue with perhaps the only male philosopher from the history of Western philosophy who was truly devoted to the path she proposes – Ludwig Feuerbach. In his works,¹¹ he expounded in an unprecedented way a possibility for a new theory both of intersubjectivity as well as human religiosity, or, better, spirituality and ultimately, an ethics of love. His philosophy offers us an example of a philosophico-ethical opening towards the world of the other (the body and the self), of nature and even nonhuman animals. Feuerbach is a philosopher who can be (with Fichte and Hegel) justly designated as one of the most important early representatives of a theory of intersubjectivity, including the question of sexual difference within philosophy. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach writes:

Personality, individuality, consciousness, without Nature, is nothing; or, which is the same thing, an empty, unsubstantial abstraction. But Nature, as has been shown and is obvious, is nothing without corporeality . . . But a body does not exist without flesh and blood. Flesh and blood is life, and life alone is corporeal reality. But flesh and blood is nothing without the oxygen of sexual distinction [orig. Geschlechtsdifferenz]. The distinction of sex is not superficial, or limited to certain parts of the body; it is an essential one: it penetrates bones and marrow. The substance of man is manhood; that of woman, womanhood. (Feuerbach 1989, pp. 91–2)

This reduction of all of the essential features of human personality to sexual difference is astounding as an ontological claim. It is also problematic from a feminist perspective, given the narrow ideological associations of ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’. Much depends on how those concepts are articulated and defined. However, for Feuerbach, these claims are strongly underpinned with his dialectics of intersubjectivity, which gives prominence to our sensitivity and sensuality and does not support any straightforward essentialist readings. For Feuerbach, sexual difference always already operates within a given dialectical relation between two persons, based on a feeling of dependence being also present in us as the foundation of religion (i.e., das Abhängigkeitsgefühl).¹² Now, when reflecting upon language as a mediator between two beings, Feuerbach refers to ‘air’:

Language is nothing but the realization of the species, the mediation of the ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ . . . The word’s element is ‘air’, the most spiritual and universal medium of life. (Feuerbach in: Wartofsky 1977, p. 182)

With that intuition attested in his thought, we find a starting point for a possible reconstruction in philosophy – in the form of a radical shift away from Cartesian or Hegelian legacy. The spirit of his philosophy of the future, as he named it, is thus closely related to what Irigaray proposes in her writings. For the new epoch to emerge, Feuerbach proposed a radical turn towards the new culture of love, grounded on his theory of intersubjectivity. In-der-Welt-Sein, for Feuerbach, means to dwell within the body and to communicate through touch with our sensitivity, literally with our skin (‘Soviel Sinne – soviel Poren, soviel Blößen. Der Leib ist nichts als das poröse Ich’) (Feuerbach 1975, p. 138) – the new notion of intersubjectivity departs precisely from our sensitivity rather than from rationality. For him, our spiritual essence resides in the heart, which is more (stereotypically) allied with the woman. The task of philosophy is no longer to cling to some transcendental being separated from humanity, but on the c...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Towards Breathing with Luce Irigaray
• Part 1 Spiritual Breathing
• Part 2 Intercultural Breathing
• Part 3 Natural Breathing
• Part 4 Contextual Breathing
• Part 5 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index