Life, death and (inter)subjectivity: realism and recognition in continental feminism

I begin with the assumption that a philosophically significant tension exists today in feminist philosophy of religion between those subjects who seek to become divine and those who seek their identity in mutual recognition. My critical engagement with the ambiguous assertions of Luce Irigaray seeks to demonstrate, on the one hand, that a woman needs to recognize her own identity but, on the other hand, that each subject whether male or female must struggle in relation to the other in order to maintain realism about life and death. No one can avoid the recognition that we are each given life but each of us also dies. In addition, I raise a more general, philosophical problem for analytic philosophers who attempt to read Continental philosophy of religion: how should philosophers interpret deliberately ambiguous assertions? For example, what does Irigaray mean in asserting, ‘Divinity is what we need to become free, autonomous, sovereign’? To find an answer, I turn to the distinctively French readings of the Hegelian struggle for recognition which have preoccupied Continental philosophers especially since the first half of the last century. I explore the struggle for mutual recognition between women and men who must face the reality of life and death in order to avoid the projection of their fear of mortality onto the other sex. This includes a critical look at Irigaray’s account of subjectivity and divinity. I turn to the French philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff in order to shift the focus from divinity to intersubjectivity. I conclude that taking seriously the struggle for mutual recognition between subjects forces contemporary philosophers of religion to be realist in their living and dying. With this in mind, the lesson from the Continent for philosophy of religion is that we must not stop yearning for recognition. Indeed, we must even risk our autonomy/divinity in seeking to recognize intersubjectivity.     

Exceeding Hegel and Lacan: Different Fields of Pleasure within Foucault and Irigaray

Anglo-American embodiments of poststructuralist and French feminism often align themselves with the texts of either Michel Foucault or Luce Irigaray. lnterrogating this alleged distance between Foucault and Irigaray, I show how it reinscrihes the phallic field of concepts and categories within feminist discourses. Framing both Foucault and Irigaray as exceeding]acques Lacan's metamorphosis of G.W.F. Hegel's Concept, I suggest that engaging their styles might yield richer tools for articulating the differences within our different lives.     

Wonder,Mystery, and Meaning

Abstract

This paper explores the connection between wonder and meaning, in particular ‘the meaning of life’, a connection that, despite strong intrinsic connections between wonder and the (philosophical) search for meaning has not yet received any sustained attention. Does wonder ‘merely’ inspire our search for meaning, or does it also point the way towards meaning? In exploring this question I first engage with Hannah Arendt, then examine the suggestion (by Josef Pieper and Rachel Carson, among others) that the meaning wonder points us to lies in connecting us with the mystery of existence. Can there be meaning in mystery, or is wonder––as a state of being lost for words in the face of mystery––rather antithetical to meaning? This discussion leads to the idea, emphasized in recent writing on wonder, that wonder (also) depends on the meaning we ascribe to things. In the final section I discuss wonder as a potential source of meaning in life, then return to the question whether it can also point towards a deeper meaning of life. I conclude that no purely rational justification can be given for this view, but that this need not detract from the importance of wonder in our lives.     

Caught between cultures: cultural norms in Jungian psychodynamic process

Abstract: In our increasingly mobile world, more of us are caught between cultures rather than in one culture. We straddle different ethnic, racial, political, geographical, and religious groups, forced into awareness of the precarious nature of our self‐definition, involuntarily gazing at the constructed nature of our cultural norms, unable to avoid reckoning with the choices of which collective to honour. The impossibility of separating individual from collective is foundational to work as Jungian practitioners, but a paradox of individuation is becoming free of the control of collective norms while simultaneously living within those very norms. In such a conflict it becomes easy to overlook the fact that when the norms we have incorporated into ourselves are from cultures vastly different from the one in which we live, the cacophony can be overwhelming. In this paper, I will draw from postmodern theorists such as Derrida, Foucault and Irigaray in an effort to re‐imagine the role of culture in psychodynamic process. The case of a Muslim Iranian man working with a Christian American woman analyst will be used to explore the complexity of a multitude of cultural norms present in the consulting room.     

Sexuate difference, ontological difference: Between Irigaray and Heidegger

Animating Luce Irigaray’s oeuvre are two indissociable projects: the disruption of Western metaphysics and the thinking of sexual difference. The intersection of these two projects implies that any attempt to think through the meaning and significance of Irigaray’s notoriously fraught invocation of sexual difference must take seriously the way in which this invocation is itself always already inflected by her disruptive gesture. In this paper, I will attempt to elucidate one moment of this intersection by focusing on her critical engagement with Heidegger. In L’oubli de l’air, Irigaray criticizes Heidegger’s interpretation of the principle of identity as instantiating the same neglect of sexual difference that has been inscribed throughout the history of Western metaphysics. Moreover, Irigaray identifies the vestigial traces of this metaphysical legacy in Heidegger’s commitments to phenomenology. My claim, however, is that if we turn to Derrida’s second Geschlecht essay in order to mediate between Irigaray and Heidegger, the coimplicative nature of their projects comes into focus: on one hand, Derrida identifies within Heidegger’s work an incipient articulation of the very notion of sexuate difference that, on Irigaray’s reading, Heidegger’s work requires but nonetheless elides; on the other hand, Derrida’s rereading of Heidegger’s phenomenological commitments corroborates the philosophical significance of Irigaray’s intervention by recontextualizing the parameters that delimit her invocation of sexuate difference.     

The Role of Darwin in Elizabeth Grosz's Deleuzian Feminist Theory: Sexual Difference,Ontology, and Intervention

In this article on Elizabeth Grosz's philosophy and its implications for discussions about feminist theory, I first suggest that Charles Darwin plays a particular role in Grosz's recent ontological thought. This role is to provide help in joining together two incompatible sources in her work: Gilles Deleuze's monistic ontology of a constant flow of new differentiations, on the one hand, and Luce Irigaray's thought of sexual difference as the primary ontological difference, on the other. I argue that Grosz's intellectual project has developed into a grand general theory of change in which both Darwin and Irigaray are turned into ontologists in a Deleuzian vein. I then point out that Grosz's ontology also includes a political aspect, which manifests in the fact that Grosz redescribes Darwin through interpreting him primarily as a theorist of “event” and the unexpected. However, through an analysis of the discussion on Grosz between Luciana Parisi and Jami Weinstein, I speculate whether Grosz's ambition to provide a total and complete explanation of change encourages the tone of feminist discussion toward one of explanation rather than intervention.     

The Diabolical Strategy of Mimesis: Luce Irigaray's Reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty

In this essay I explore the dynamic between Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as it unfolds in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993). Irigaray's strategy of mimesis is a powerful feminist tool, both philosophically and politically. Regarding textual engagement as analogous for relations between self and other beyond the text, I deliver a cautionary message: mimetic strategy is powerful but runs the risk of silencing the voice of the other.     

Dancing Contact Improvisation with Luce Irigaray: Intra‐Action and Elemental Passions

This article takes as its point of departure Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions, in which a woman‐speaker tries to make her lover and the discipline of philosophy understand that she is not how they have imagined her to be; that she is not at all but that she keeps becoming through perpetual movement. The article investigates Irigaray's investment in a form of materialist difference feminism that offers conceptual links to the posthumanist work of Karen Barad's agential realism, especially her theorization of intra‐action. The link between Irigaray and Barad is established via a diffractive reading that incorporates the dance/movement research practice of Contact Improvisation. Although expressed through written language, Elemental Passions creates the impression of the woman‐speaker dancing, of encountering herself, her environment, and her lover through moved and moving contact, searching for a practice of moving‐together, feeling‐with, and feeling‐between that can be experienced in an improvised dance duet. Exploring how touch and the sharing of weight in Contact Improvisation challenges boundaries and establishes ever‐changing configurations and entanglements between dancers, the article proposes that Irigaray's woman‐speaker envisions herself as a posthuman/ist woman and that improvised dancing offers a practice of intra‐action through which she can encounter the world in her becoming.     

Love,That Indispensable Supplement: Irigaray and Kant on Love and Respect

Is love essential to ethical life, or merely a supplement? In Kant's view, respect and love, as duties, are in tension with each other because love involves drawing closer and respect involves drawing away. By contrast, Irigaray says that love and respect do not conflict because love as passion must also involve distancing and we have a responsibility to love. I argue that love, understood as passion and based on respect, is essential to ethics.     

It's a Wonderful Life: Reflections on Wittgenstein's Last Words

On his deathbed, Wittgenstein is reported to have said, upon hearing that his friends were coming for a visit, “Tell them I've had a wonderful life.” Malcolm found this puzzling, given that Wittgenstein seemed to be fiercely unhappy. I find my way into these words against the backdrop of the Hollywood film It's a Wonderful Life and Wittgenstein's famous remark, to wit, “Man has to awaken to wonder . . . Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.” Along the way I discuss Plato's praise of wonder, Nietzsche's attack on science, and Kierkegaard's remark about finding the sublime in the pedestrian. I conclude that Wittgenstein did have a wonderful life insofar as he was fully awake to wonder, what I call the wonder of our words.     

Reclamation from Absence? Luce Irigaray and Women in the History of Philosophy

Luce Irigaray's work does not present an obvious resource for projects seeking to reclaim women in the history of philosophy. Indeed, many authors introduce their reclamation project with an argument against conceptions, attributed to Irigaray or “French feminists” more generally, that the feminine is the excluded other of discourse. These authors claim that if the feminine is the excluded other of discourse, then we must conclude that even if women have written philosophy they have not given voice to feminine subjectivity; therefore, reclamation is a futile project. In this essay, I argue against such conclusions. Rather, I argue, Irigaray's work requires that philosophy be transformed through the reclamation of women's writing. She gives us a method of reclamation for the most difficult cases: those in which we have no record of women's writing. Irigaray offers this method through an engagement with the character of Diotima in Plato's Symposium. The method Irigaray demonstrates is reclamation as love.     

WONDER SUSTAINED: A REPLY TO CRITICS

A set of science‐inspired cosmic narratives referred to as the Epic of Evolution and the Universe Story or, collectively, the new cosmology, proposes to bring humans closer to nature by placing us into the broader narrative of the cosmos. This article responds to commentary and critique on my book Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World, which critically examines these science‐based cosmic narratives and their particular and problematic modes and objects of wonder. Themes include the relationship of wonder to science and ethical engagement; the question of whether wonder, grounded in everyday sensory experience, can scale up to the level of global environmental problems; the relevance of wonder to nonideal environments and negative affects like fear or grief; and the importance of humanistic and religious studies scholarship for critiquing grand narratives of science, among other themes. I also respond to claims that my book misdiagnoses and distorts the work of the new cosmology and its claims to wonder.     

Irigaray and Hölderlin on the relation between nature and culture

This paper explores the compatibility of Luce Irigaray's recent insistence on the need to revalue nature, and to recognise culture's natural roots, with her earlier advocacy of social transformation towards a culture of sexual difference. Prima facie, there is tension between Irigaray's political imperatives, for if culture really is continuous with nature, this implies that our existing, non-sexuate, culture is naturally grounded and unchallengeable. To dissolve this tension, Irigaray must conceive culture as having self-transformative agency without positioning culture as active vis-à-vis an inert and passive nature. I argue that Irigaray achieves this by conceiving culture to arise from a division internal to nature. She derives this idea from Hölderlin, who claims that nature originally divides itself into subjects and objects, and from Heidegger, who maintains that nature inflicts an originary violence upon itself. Critically reworking Hölderlin and Heidegger, Irigaray argues that male nature tends to turn against itself to generate an anti-natural, ecologically destructive, culture. She argues, however, that this tendency can be redirected and alleviated by the very cultural resources which male nature generates in dividing itself. Irigaray thus develops a unique way to advocate social change while recognising nature's profound impact and influence upon culture.     

Donna Haraway's Cyborg Touching (Up/On) Luce Irigaray's Ethics and the Interval Between: Poethics as Embodied Writing

In this article, I argue that Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg needs to be reassessed and extricated from the many misunderstandings that surround it. First, I suggest that we consider her cyborg as an ethical concept. I propose that her cyborg can be productively placed within the ethical framework developed by Luce Irigaray, especially in relationship to her concept of the “interval between.” Second, I consider how Haraway's “cyborg writing” can be understood as embodied ethical writing, that is, as a contemporary écriture feminine. I believe that this cyborgian “writing the body” offers us a way of both creating and understanding texts that think through ethics, bodies, aesthetics, and politics together as part of a vital and relevant contemporary feminist ethics of embodiment. I employ the term “poethics” as a useful way to describe such a practice.     

Wittgenstein and Irigaray: Gender and Philosophy in a Language (Game) of Difference

Drawing Wittgenstein's and Irigaray's philosophies into conversation might help resolve certain misunderstandings that have so far hampered both the reception of Irigaray's work and the development of feminist praxis in general. A Wittgensteinian reading of Irigaray can furnish an anti-essentialist conception of “woman” that retains the theoretical and political specificity feminism requires while dispelling charges that Irigaray's attempt to delineate a “feminine” language is either groundlessly Utopian or entails a biological essentialism.     

The Wonder and Spirit of Phenomenology and Theology: Rubenstein and Derrida on Heidegger's Formal Distinction of Philosophy from Theology

While Heidegger's earlier phenomenological writings inform much contemporary discourse in the continental philosophy of religion, his 1927 essay on ‘Phenomenology and Theology’ offers a largely uncontested distinction between philosophy and theology on the basis of their possibilities as sciences following ontological difference. This paper reconsiders Heidegger's distinction by invoking spirit and wonder, concepts Jacques Derrida and Mary‐Jane Rubenstein have more recently emphasized as central to thought that is open to that which ruptures metaphysical schemas. I contend Heidegger's use of ontological difference as a formal distinction between philosophy and theology distances us from the wonder, spirit, and truth (alētheia) that undoes the binaries behind which we take shelter. However, I temper this critique with the recognition that Heidegger, Derrida, and Rubenstein equally recognize an inescapable repetition of metaphysical thinking in the philosophy of religion.     

“Love of same,love of other”

The positions in feminist theory and theology tend to be polarized between so‐called essentialists and constructionists. Yet, despite apparent anthropological dissension, both parties try to substantiate political and ecclesiastical claims through definitions: what is sexual difference, what is gender, what is a woman, what is she not. For the purpose of mending how we usually approach these questions, I claim instead that the most important theological issue in the realities of males and females is not that their bodies “work” differently, nor that their social positions usually are different and “mean” differently in different cultures, but that they take part in the constitution, recreation and representation of different human subject positions of which there are everywhere and always at least two. My tentative arguments are developed from engaging with the Swiss theologian Karl Barth and the French philosopher Luce Irigaray.     

Irigaray and the Sacrifice of the Sacrifice of Woman

One of the problems with a superficial reading of “Belief Itself” and “Women, the Sacred, Money” is that Irigaray is too easily understood as merely saying that woman is the hidden victim of sacrifice and that one is called to reveal this hidden victim. While this is an important aspect of Irigaray's work, a more radical interpretation is opened up when it is read alongside the work of Lacan and ?i?ek. Irigaray's work disturbs the traditional discourses on revelation, sacrifice, and woman on one level while at the same time reinforcing their most extreme ramifications.     

Irigaray and Lyotard: Birth,Infancy, and Metaphysics

This paper examines the ways in which Luce Irigaray and Jean‐François Lyotard critique western metaphysics by drawing on notions of birth and infancy. It shows how both thinkers position birth as an event of beginning that can be reaffirmed in every act of initiation and recommencement. Irigaray's reading of Diotima's speech from Plato's Symposium is positioned as a key text for this project alongside a number of essays by Lyotard in which he explores the potency of infancy as the condition of philosophy itself. Despite this potency, however, Lyotard suggests that metaphysics is haunted by a melancholia that is inseparable from the limits of thought. I argue that Irigaray is able both to explain why western metaphysics is constitutively melancholic and to offer a shift in perspective that means we are not inevitably condemned to melancholia. The paper concludes that while Lyotard's account of infancy challenges the terms of western metaphysics from within, Irigaray's reassessment of our beginnings in birth offers the possibility of an alternative metaphysical horizon.