Becoming Two in Love

Kierkegaard, Irigaray, and the Ethics of Sexual Difference

De Vries

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621898009
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book draws Soren Kierkegaard and Luce Irigaray into conversation on the nature and ethics of sexual difference. While these two initially seem like doubtful dialogue partners, the conversation between them yields a rich and compelling account of intersubjectivity between man and woman--an account that moves beyond the limited and tired debate over egalitarianism vs. complementarianism. Through engagement with Irigaray and Kierkegaard, this book develops a constructive, theological ethics of sexual difference that focuses on an epistemological and subjective gap that sets man and woman at a decisive distance from each other. They are a mystery to each other. Yet it is also an ethical framework that allows woman and man to encounter one another in ways that respect the independence, subjectivity, and becoming of each. Above all, this is a theological ethics of sexual difference that centers on Jesus Christ, who is defined as the middle term in every relationship and whose love command defines the encounter between man and woman in difference.

part one

Irigaray and Love’s Possibility

1

The Negative

Toward a Culture of Sexual Difference

Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won’t accept her as is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.1

—D. H. Lawrence, Assorted Articles

Luce Irigaray has developed an ethics of sexual difference that we have described in our introduction as compelling and promising, and what follows here is an attempt to confirm that these initial impressions are warranted.2 Right at the outset of our engagement with Irigaray’s writings, however, a fundamental question arises since the reader is at times left with the impression that Irigaray has spun her ethical vision out of thin air. That is, it is not immediately apparent that she has established an adequate foundation upon which to construct her ethics of sexual difference. Of course, if it turns out that Irigaray either has not, or cannot establish such a foundation—cannot provide a theory of sexual different to support her ethics—then her ethical framework must finally collapse under its own weight. And so the question that must preoccupy us at the outset, and in advance of the development of any theological ethics of sexual difference, concerns the nature and adequacy of the foundation upon which Irigaray’s ethical framework is constructed.

In exploring these theoretical foundations, we will begin by considering Irigaray’s new elaboration of “the negative.” The negative, traditionally associated with the dialectical thought and method of Hegel, is reformulated and put to work by Irigaray in such a way that it becomes central and vital to her philosophy and ethics of sexual difference. Indeed, Irigaray argues that her new elaboration of the negative might open a new era of human becoming.3 In tracing the outlines of a foundation for Irigaray’s ethics, then, we cannot fail to consider what she takes to be the cornerstone of her whole philosophy and ethics.

Having dug into Irigaray’s account of the negative it will become evident that while this concept is vital to (understanding) her thought, it does not by itself suffice as a foundation for her ethics of sexual difference. Thus we must push deeper, posing the following rather straightforward question: What is the difference between man and woman? Or, perhaps: On what basis do we insist on a difference between man and woman? While these questions do not admit of a straightforward answer, from the perspective of Irigaray’s writings, we will begin to answer them by considering two over-lapping “Irigarayan” accounts of the difference between man and woman.

Having gone as far as we can with Irigaray in positing a foundation for her ethics of sexual difference, we will turn finally in this chapter to an initial consideration of her ethical thought. This will lead, naturally enough, to a fuller examination of the ethics of sexual difference in subsequent chapters.

The Negative: Recovering Nature

In The Way of Love Irigaray introduces her discussion of the negative as follows: “If the negative in speculative dialectic had for its function to reduce difference by integrating it into a more accomplished level of the Absolute, here it has the role of safeguarding difference.”4 If the negative in the Hegelian dialectic is a moment in which the opposition between two terms is overcome in a synthetic move, Irigaray’s negative represents a refusal of that synthesis. Rather than defining the two terms of the dialectic in terms of an opposition that can be sublated in a more universal concept or pattern of life, Irigaray will insist on the persistence and preservation of difference. The negative, then, is a way of conceptualizing the gap or interval that persists between the two terms of the dialectic—woman and man—and a way of articulating Irigaray’s insistence that the difference between these two terms prevents a movement beyond two to one. Accordingly, Irigaray insists that there are two universals. There are two terms that endure, neither of which can be sublated in favor of the universal. The human, here, is two and not one, and the negative is a theoretical conceptualization which guarantees that neither man nor woman will be construed as “the human”—also, that “the human” will not be construed as an abstract identity in which both man and woman can be said to “participate” in some way. Irigaray’s new elaboration is nothing less than a refusal of the Hegelian negative, of the Hegelian insistence on a movement beyond two to one.

To highlight, briefly, the ethical implications of this account of the negative, Irigaray’s new elaboration of the negative implies that man and woman must each acknowledge that they are only half of the human. As Irigaray puts it, “difference demands . . . the relinquishing of the whole.” 5 This means, more to the point, that man, who has traditionally been identified as “the human,” and as representative of the whole, must relinquish the claim that he is or can represent the whole. That woman and man each represent only half of the human also implies that woman may rightfully accede to full subjectivity. Irigaray warns: “not accepting and respecting this permanent duality between the two human subjects, the feminine one and the masculine one, amounts to preventing one of the two—historically the feminine—from attaining its own Being, and thus from taking charge of the becoming of what it already is and of the world to which it belongs, including as made up of other humans, similar or different.”6 As should already be apparent, this reformulation of the negative is expected to bear the weight of nothing less than a new human culture, a human becoming as two. While Western culture has always functioned according to the phallocentric logic of the one, according to which woman has been defined in relation to man and has been prevented from acceding to her own identity and subjectivity, Irigaray advances an account of the negative that insists on the twoness of the human and on the necessity that both woman and man accede to a subjectivity and identity particular to them as sexuate beings.

With this sketch of Irigaray’s reformulated negative in mind, we move toward a fuller elaboration by identifying several criticisms Irigaray brings against the Hegel’s definition of man and woman (and their relationship) in terms of dialectical logic.7 Irigaray’s criticism of Hegel is threefold. In the first instance she suggests that the Hegelian negative entails a dramatic devaluing of the natural; second, she insists that Hegel’s account of the negative leaves woman in a state of natural immediacy; and third, she argues that Hegel’s insistence on the unity of the couple in the child reflects a failure to spiritualize the relationship between man and woman.

Irigaray argues that the Hegelian negative entails a devaluing of the natural in favor of the cultural/spiritual and “is still the mastery of consciousness (historically male), over nature . . .”8 In the Western tradition and in Hegel’s thought, the natural is overcome and sublated in the work of spirit, in the development of culture. As Cheah and Grosz put it: “Hegel defines spirit as the process of rational-purposive work or the labor of the concept, understood as a movement of negation. For Hegel, nature is finite, immediate, and devoid of universal life. However, rational consciousness can invest nature with universal life by negating what is immediate in nature. It does this by imbuing brute matter with rational-purposive form. Spiritual work is . . . the activity by which the rational subject negate...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Irigaray and Love’s Possibility
• Chapter 1: The Negative
• Chapter 2: Mind the Gap
• Part 2: Kierkegaard and Love’s Promise
• Chapter 3: Søren Kierkegaard
• Chapter 4: Judge William
• Part 3: Between Irigaray and Kierkegaard
• Chapter 5: Sexual Difference
• Chapter 6: Intersubjectivity
• Chapter 7: Communication
• Bibliography