In Approaching Abjection Kristeva reimagined the abject as an element of subjective formation and reformation and as a discursive device within psychoanalytic and other theories of subjectivity. In From Filth to Defilement it seems that this project is extended into another perspective, that of the social function of abjection. The determination of what is filth will be immediately connected to the determination of what is sacred and this epistemology will facilitate the rituals of defilement, such as sacrifice, that society establishes for its maintenance. The essay treats this topic within the domains of psychoanalysis and anthropology.
Kristeva begins with Freud's thoughts on the totem and taboo, indicating the two primary taboos are incest (presumably with the mother) and murder (of the father). Kristeva suggests that this incest dread is a mother phobia.
-What does Kristeva mean by this connection? What is the fear that motivates this prohibition?
The Sacred is a two-sided formation. One side is a defensive and socializing aspect, murder and guilt. The other side demonstrates fear and undifferentiation, an identity that is more primordial than the separation of subject from object.
Kristeva does make clear that she is not interested in the social production of the incest taboo, but in what subjective alterations it suggests in the confrontation with the feminine, and with "the way in which societies code themselves in order to accompany as far as possible the speaking subject on that journey"(250) .
So what is the feminine that is being confronted? Kristeva states that the feminine is not a timeless essence but rather a nameless other. The confrontation with this other will take place from the foundation of the paternal function.
Kristeva uses Freud to characterize the taboo as not merely sacred and consecrated but also dangerous and forbidden; and, as a prohibition it concerns in large part matters that are enjoyable. Kristeva will seek explanation for the imperative of the taboo in the condition of primary narcissism which is hostile and unlimited.
This primary narcissism makes the distinction between inside and outside unclear, this nondistinction is unnamable thus aligned with the feminine. It is here that the question of pleasure and pain takes importance. The distinction between these two will introduce language and found the separation between inside and outside.
In the following sentence Kristeva makes a compelling and complicated claim. "If the murder of the father is that historical event constituting the social code as such, that is, symbolic exchange and the exchange of women, its equivalent on the level of the subjective history of each individual is therefore the advent of language"(252).
-What is Kristeva suggesting here? What is the parallel between the establishment of a social code that facilitates the exchange of symbols and women and the establishment of language in the individual subject?
Kristeva, again reading through Freud, will recall his proposition that the beginning of libidinal drives in childhood are not directed towards an object. Autoerotism is the stage at which object-choice is fixed. The condition of narcissism is said to require an ego, but not an outside object.
Kristeva will find two consequences to this narcissistic structure: first, the ego will be unstable without differentiating itself from an other; and second, the topology of this narcissism will affirm the generative position of the mother-child dyad.
-How does Kristeva arrive at these consequences?
-What kind of valuation does Kristeva offer for this primary narcissism? Is it a good option?
Kristeva, now reading Levi-Strauss makes a crucial claim on page 254: "If it be true, as Claude Levi-Strauss has demonstated, that the prohibition of incest has the logical import of founding, by means of that very prohibition, the discreteness of interchangeable units, this establishing social order and the symbolic, I shall maintain that such a logical operation is carried out owing to a subjective benefit derived from it on the level of libidinal economy".
-An excellent question to pose is what is this libidinal economic benefit that is so instrumental to social order?
Kristeva will suggest that rituals of defilement effectively address a threat that is implicit in the sacred epistemology they operate within. She will engage this epistemology in regard to the place of the maternal and the threats that are invested in it.
From Levi-Strauss to Bataille, Kristeva will here grab another effective consideration on this topic. Bataille linked abjection to the lack of capacity to exclude. Thus we may understand that societies codes threats they cannot abolish as abject and establish practices of defilement to confront these apparent threats. Again, it is the mother that Kristeva wishes to consider in relation to these ideas.
Kristeva next takes up the work of Mary Douglas in anthropology to explicate the process by which filth becomes defilement and founds the sacred.
-Kristeva will here call upon the domain of language to indicate the manner in which anthropologists have connected the symbolic to the universal. (257)
-what are the conequences of this linkage?
By page 258, Kristeva's investigation has led her to suggest of abjection that it "...is coextensive with social and symbolic order, on the individual as well as on the collective level". And later, "But abjection assumes specific shapes and different codings according to the various 'symbolic system'".
-What is the logic of prohibition that Kristeva describes on this page?
How is filth defined on pages 258 and 259 and what are dangers that filth presents to the subject?
How does Kristeva locate maternal authority in the two coded abjections, excrement and menstrual blood? (260-1). Further, how does locating maternal presence in these abjections lead to the repression of maternal authority for the establishment of the social order?
Finally, in the last section, what is the relationship between defilement and borderings?
-Anderson
Friday, February 23, 2007
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Cixous: Excerpts
NEWLY BORN WOMAN
(Sorties –First Passage) In this passage, Cixous writes about the dual oppositions that exist within philosophical and literary traditions. She points to the marriage between the father and the son, and that in this symbolic, the mother disappears. The connection between logocentrism and phallocentrism subordinate the woman/feminine to the “masculine structure that passed itself off as eternal-neutral” (39). However, if the story could be re-told in a different way, the foundations of this structure might begin to crumble.
(Sorties –Second Passage) Cixous describes two forms of bisexuality: 1) bisexuality as a fantasy of unity (in order to avoid castration) and 2) a bisexuality in which every subject “sets up his or her erotic universe” (41). Whereas the first kind depicts a certain “monosexuality”, the second kind opens up the possibility for multiplication. Cixous moves on the question of writing, and that “writing is woman’s” (42). It is a process during which the other comes through the body, an exchange with the other, and that women can do this because they can access the other within. Men, on the other hand, cannot so easily do this because their other is the feminine, something they must not allow to come forward because of the fear of homosexuality. Cixous also associates the masculine with a (selfish) giving that wants something in return, whereas women give without wanting anything in return (altruism).
LA – THE (FEMININE)
(First Passage) As dreamer, linguist, artist of love, the woman writer sings, crosses boundaries, lives in the abysses, laughs, shows, connects –writes in ways male writers don’t.
(Second Passage) A woman fears being alone –she needs a source to sustain herself. The journey to a source exhausts woman, and she finds herself at the end, when a god appears just as she is about to encounter herself and distracts her soul.
(Third Passage) This passage describes a woman giving birth and raises issues about the inside and outside, and nakedness. She almost wants to rid herself of the (necrophiliac) son, and commands him, “outside!” “Above all we must rid ourselves of the dead, gods and men who play the mother.” (66) Thus birthing becomes a metaphor for purging.
EXTREME FIDELITY
Here, Cixous makes the distinction between biological sex and gender. She insists that gender is not necessarily linked to anatomy, “one can find these economies in no matter which individual” (132). Cixous uses two monumental stories (The Original Sin and The Quest for the Holy Grail) to make connections between the (indefinable) law and the (prohibited) inside, and how women are closer (or have more access) to the inside/receptivity because of cultural schemas.
THREE STEPS
(First Passage) “These complexities are not yet audible.” (199) In this passage, Cixous argues both that sexual difference is complex, and that only through writing will we be able to get through the “cutting each other’s throats” part of sexual difference.
(Second Passage) The need to break the “construction we are” (201). Also, again, the importance of writing: but writing while walking. The process is important, “Walking through the self toward the dark.” (203)
(Third Passage) Again, going to the deep part of oneself, “It is deep in my body, further down, behind thought.” (204) Fear prevents us from going there in the writing process.
Questions:
1) How do these excerpts relate to an overall project of Cixous? Is there an overall argument you think she makes, and if so, what it is?
2) Why does Cixous choose to write in the ways she does? For example, in “La”, she writes in a different style than in the second passage from “Sorties”. How does this affect her argument?
3) Does Cixous make a good argument for the separation of sex and gender?
4) Why is writing, and the process of writing, so important for the feminist project?
(Sorties –First Passage) In this passage, Cixous writes about the dual oppositions that exist within philosophical and literary traditions. She points to the marriage between the father and the son, and that in this symbolic, the mother disappears. The connection between logocentrism and phallocentrism subordinate the woman/feminine to the “masculine structure that passed itself off as eternal-neutral” (39). However, if the story could be re-told in a different way, the foundations of this structure might begin to crumble.
(Sorties –Second Passage) Cixous describes two forms of bisexuality: 1) bisexuality as a fantasy of unity (in order to avoid castration) and 2) a bisexuality in which every subject “sets up his or her erotic universe” (41). Whereas the first kind depicts a certain “monosexuality”, the second kind opens up the possibility for multiplication. Cixous moves on the question of writing, and that “writing is woman’s” (42). It is a process during which the other comes through the body, an exchange with the other, and that women can do this because they can access the other within. Men, on the other hand, cannot so easily do this because their other is the feminine, something they must not allow to come forward because of the fear of homosexuality. Cixous also associates the masculine with a (selfish) giving that wants something in return, whereas women give without wanting anything in return (altruism).
LA – THE (FEMININE)
(First Passage) As dreamer, linguist, artist of love, the woman writer sings, crosses boundaries, lives in the abysses, laughs, shows, connects –writes in ways male writers don’t.
(Second Passage) A woman fears being alone –she needs a source to sustain herself. The journey to a source exhausts woman, and she finds herself at the end, when a god appears just as she is about to encounter herself and distracts her soul.
(Third Passage) This passage describes a woman giving birth and raises issues about the inside and outside, and nakedness. She almost wants to rid herself of the (necrophiliac) son, and commands him, “outside!” “Above all we must rid ourselves of the dead, gods and men who play the mother.” (66) Thus birthing becomes a metaphor for purging.
EXTREME FIDELITY
Here, Cixous makes the distinction between biological sex and gender. She insists that gender is not necessarily linked to anatomy, “one can find these economies in no matter which individual” (132). Cixous uses two monumental stories (The Original Sin and The Quest for the Holy Grail) to make connections between the (indefinable) law and the (prohibited) inside, and how women are closer (or have more access) to the inside/receptivity because of cultural schemas.
THREE STEPS
(First Passage) “These complexities are not yet audible.” (199) In this passage, Cixous argues both that sexual difference is complex, and that only through writing will we be able to get through the “cutting each other’s throats” part of sexual difference.
(Second Passage) The need to break the “construction we are” (201). Also, again, the importance of writing: but writing while walking. The process is important, “Walking through the self toward the dark.” (203)
(Third Passage) Again, going to the deep part of oneself, “It is deep in my body, further down, behind thought.” (204) Fear prevents us from going there in the writing process.
Questions:
1) How do these excerpts relate to an overall project of Cixous? Is there an overall argument you think she makes, and if so, what it is?
2) Why does Cixous choose to write in the ways she does? For example, in “La”, she writes in a different style than in the second passage from “Sorties”. How does this affect her argument?
3) Does Cixous make a good argument for the separation of sex and gender?
4) Why is writing, and the process of writing, so important for the feminist project?
Friday, February 16, 2007
Women's Time
On “New maladies of the Soul”
Women’s Time
I wasn't sure how best to relay a summery and questions of Kristeva's essay. What I am presenting here is a mix of notes, ideas, introjections, and questions. I hope that any part of this is helpful.
Kristeva in this essay seems to be trying to understand woman’s history as the history of women involved in feminism for the past century. Through inquiry into time. Find a middle ground with which to talk to people-
How the feminist movement has inherited a notion of time but how it is in the process of being altered.
In this essay, Kristeva attempts to distinguish three types of feminism in regards to time. The first “wave” of feminism attempted to localize women within a kind of linear time or history previously available only to masculine subjects. While this kind of feminism made several important moves ( suffrage, professional equality, etc), she disagrees with its attempts to universalize or essentialize what women’s time actually means. She sees it’s disregard for motherhood as particularly problematic. Rather, she sees its rejection of cyclical (maternal) time as a kind of ignorance to the particularities of women in their singularities.
Grounds her argument in Baudrillard-in the end of the gold standard, and so the dominance of the role of the symbolic order to maintain cohesion and exclude change from the unity; it is a type of public sphere in which difference amounts to dystopia. Unlike the territorial demarcations that once defined a nation giving its cohesion a definite inside and outside, the type of universalism that Kristeva is arguing from universalizes through language displacing the demarcation, making it a problem of subjectivity.
Universalism was limited by the universalism of the nation.
Second phase- It went through its modernism in that it concentrated less on the symptoms of a system of representation that seems bent on exclusion and more effects of subjectivity, primarily the way in woman come into their subjectivities through language and psychology. Kristeva mimics the second generations style by confounding the movement of feminism with the change in individual woman (255).
The next section of the essay seeks to draw out the ground on which the phase for a third type of feminism of involving the popular multiplicity which emerges in juxtaposition to the concentration of a trans-movement. At this point in the essay, she teeters dangerously close to asserting a structuralist notion of the movement and the they of superstructure.
Now that we are dealing with the symbolic, we travel through Lacan and then Freud to understand our position as subjects invested in/with language to the symbolic.
-She argues that the phallic is the complete/”full meaning” of the symbolic. That it is the central referent seems to reinstate us before the end of the gold standard. Perhaps she is referencing Derrida’s phallogocentrism in which all meaning is derived from a masculine notion of an origin that proliferates all other meaning.
She asks, “what is our place in the social contract” given membership through castration or sex sacrifice?
What she seems to be getting at is the problem of the limits of the symbolic. The points at which the imaginary is not only a compromise but a sacrifice.
More subjective women/women who express themselves through terms which re more subjective? The new group then is countering the symbolic contract which asks us to sacrifice the realness of the paticularity of encounters in the world with our bodies.
In contesting this social order, Kristeva fears that a new division emerges dividing the sexes. Here by sexes it seems she means both women who derive their womanhood from the phallus and woman who are trying to articulate woman on different terms. She asks, “what occurs when they reject power but create an analogous society?
There is the vapid illusion of change when a woman is installed in a position of the same power filling it with the right parts.
There is the possibility that a movement might emerge in which power is conserved but the terms used in describe it-man-woman are revered.
“Like all societies, the counter society bases itself upon the expulsion of an already excluded element. The scapegoat deemed responsible for evil thus keeps it away from the established community which is therefore exonerated of any responsibility for it.”
She works out that in light of this possible division between what it seems she wants to term radicalism and the rest, she writes, “Although we can only offer a partial adherence o Freud’s belief that the desire to have a child is the desire to have a penis, and is thus a placement for phallic and symbolic power, we still must pay close attention to what today’s women have to say about this experience.” This seems to allow a continuation to the sacrificial order and an opening up to the elements of maternity utilized in the sacrificial to be commuted to a radical politics. She goes on to say that the possibility of exonerating the figure of the maternal comes in affirming the creative act of learning how to love differently. It seems this, “on the other hand” that Kristeva retains the symbolic order that she tried to parse in the making of the distinction of types of motherhood. Learning to love as mother, is this not the only type of love relegated to women through the realm of the symbolic?
-dan
Women’s Time
I wasn't sure how best to relay a summery and questions of Kristeva's essay. What I am presenting here is a mix of notes, ideas, introjections, and questions. I hope that any part of this is helpful.
Kristeva in this essay seems to be trying to understand woman’s history as the history of women involved in feminism for the past century. Through inquiry into time. Find a middle ground with which to talk to people-
How the feminist movement has inherited a notion of time but how it is in the process of being altered.
In this essay, Kristeva attempts to distinguish three types of feminism in regards to time. The first “wave” of feminism attempted to localize women within a kind of linear time or history previously available only to masculine subjects. While this kind of feminism made several important moves ( suffrage, professional equality, etc), she disagrees with its attempts to universalize or essentialize what women’s time actually means. She sees it’s disregard for motherhood as particularly problematic. Rather, she sees its rejection of cyclical (maternal) time as a kind of ignorance to the particularities of women in their singularities.
Grounds her argument in Baudrillard-in the end of the gold standard, and so the dominance of the role of the symbolic order to maintain cohesion and exclude change from the unity; it is a type of public sphere in which difference amounts to dystopia. Unlike the territorial demarcations that once defined a nation giving its cohesion a definite inside and outside, the type of universalism that Kristeva is arguing from universalizes through language displacing the demarcation, making it a problem of subjectivity.
Universalism was limited by the universalism of the nation.
Second phase- It went through its modernism in that it concentrated less on the symptoms of a system of representation that seems bent on exclusion and more effects of subjectivity, primarily the way in woman come into their subjectivities through language and psychology. Kristeva mimics the second generations style by confounding the movement of feminism with the change in individual woman (255).
The next section of the essay seeks to draw out the ground on which the phase for a third type of feminism of involving the popular multiplicity which emerges in juxtaposition to the concentration of a trans-movement. At this point in the essay, she teeters dangerously close to asserting a structuralist notion of the movement and the they of superstructure.
Now that we are dealing with the symbolic, we travel through Lacan and then Freud to understand our position as subjects invested in/with language to the symbolic.
-She argues that the phallic is the complete/”full meaning” of the symbolic. That it is the central referent seems to reinstate us before the end of the gold standard. Perhaps she is referencing Derrida’s phallogocentrism in which all meaning is derived from a masculine notion of an origin that proliferates all other meaning.
She asks, “what is our place in the social contract” given membership through castration or sex sacrifice?
What she seems to be getting at is the problem of the limits of the symbolic. The points at which the imaginary is not only a compromise but a sacrifice.
More subjective women/women who express themselves through terms which re more subjective? The new group then is countering the symbolic contract which asks us to sacrifice the realness of the paticularity of encounters in the world with our bodies.
In contesting this social order, Kristeva fears that a new division emerges dividing the sexes. Here by sexes it seems she means both women who derive their womanhood from the phallus and woman who are trying to articulate woman on different terms. She asks, “what occurs when they reject power but create an analogous society?
There is the vapid illusion of change when a woman is installed in a position of the same power filling it with the right parts.
There is the possibility that a movement might emerge in which power is conserved but the terms used in describe it-man-woman are revered.
“Like all societies, the counter society bases itself upon the expulsion of an already excluded element. The scapegoat deemed responsible for evil thus keeps it away from the established community which is therefore exonerated of any responsibility for it.”
She works out that in light of this possible division between what it seems she wants to term radicalism and the rest, she writes, “Although we can only offer a partial adherence o Freud’s belief that the desire to have a child is the desire to have a penis, and is thus a placement for phallic and symbolic power, we still must pay close attention to what today’s women have to say about this experience.” This seems to allow a continuation to the sacrificial order and an opening up to the elements of maternity utilized in the sacrificial to be commuted to a radical politics. She goes on to say that the possibility of exonerating the figure of the maternal comes in affirming the creative act of learning how to love differently. It seems this, “on the other hand” that Kristeva retains the symbolic order that she tried to parse in the making of the distinction of types of motherhood. Learning to love as mother, is this not the only type of love relegated to women through the realm of the symbolic?
-dan
Summary of "Approaching Abjection" by Kristeva
There is a great deal going on in this essay, so I will attempt to describe the general project and some of its most compelling points. It must be emphasized that this essay is presented in a 'mobile' fashion, it passes through a number of conceptual view points briefly though incisively. That said, there seems to be a consistent project taking place. Kristeva's essay appears to simultaneously interrogate and re-figure the concept of the abject within the realm of psychoanalysis and its philosophical underpinnings. As mentioned, the abject is the pivotal concept, and Kristeva offers a number of perspectives on it. In attempting to understand this concept for myself, I made a rough sketch of its characteristics:
-the abject is a violent revolt of being that repulses desire.
-the abject is neither object nor subject. This seems like a crucial point. Later Kristeva suggests that the object puts one in search of meaning and the abject collapses meaning. This statement is also posed in psychoanalytic terms: "to each ego its object, to each superego its abject" (230).
-the abject can not be the thing that an ego makes its end, it involves the subject psychically.
-Kristeva goes on to consider the protection that comes with repugnance; she indicates retching, vomiting, loathing, gagging, spasm as modes of being that impel one away from what she describes as defilement, sewage.
-She affirms this sense of movement by suggesting that these modes may be instances of becoming other by expelling myself; a movement that means death. The pieces of the self that are wasted in its very movement suffer a kind of death.
-This places the I at the border of its conditions of living. And these conditions of living are not merely the bodily processes but also the psychological. As Kristeva states: "It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order, what does not respect borders, positions, rules" (232).
-In this way she identifies crimes as an example for exposing the fragility of the law.
-Here Kristeva makes a major point: The subjective experience culminates in the abjection of its own self as it understands that all its objects are founded on a constitutive loss.
-therefore, all abjection recognizes foundational want.
-this experience precedes the being/object dichotomy; before there is the field of signifying objects that constitute the territory of the subject, there is abjection.
-Kristeva then introduces the concept of the deject: the deject is the one by whom the abject exists. Kristeva describes this figure as a kind of transient.
-The deject's space is not homogenous or totalizable but rather divisible.
-its movement is described spatially as alternately straying and situating, and temporally as alternately veiled infinity and bursting revelation.
-Kristeva is trying to describe a subjectivity for which experience is heterogeneous. This brings the abject again into focus as part of this subject's being is constituted of the Other who has dwelt within as an alter ego. This Other as alter exists within the subject, it is identified as other through loathing, through repulsion, through a pushing away.
-Kristeva will again assert the primacy of this concept by locating it in the primal repression, one that is constitutive of subjectivities and therefore precedes any later forms of repression.
-In the later phases of the essay Kristeva will locate the place of the abject in a variety of other disciplines and thinkers. It is from this perspective that she identifies a formative capacity to the abject in the domain of religion and continues her critique of psychoanalysis, extending it to its philosophical roots in Plato. Kant and Hegel are also indicated, particularly in their displacement of the abject as defilement into marriage and from there sadness.
-In concluding, it seems that Kristeva is suggesting a libidinal, poetic, and unsettling approach and cohabitation with the abject, with that foundational loss and want that mobilizes in that it repulses.
-Anderson
-the abject is a violent revolt of being that repulses desire.
-the abject is neither object nor subject. This seems like a crucial point. Later Kristeva suggests that the object puts one in search of meaning and the abject collapses meaning. This statement is also posed in psychoanalytic terms: "to each ego its object, to each superego its abject" (230).
-the abject can not be the thing that an ego makes its end, it involves the subject psychically.
-Kristeva goes on to consider the protection that comes with repugnance; she indicates retching, vomiting, loathing, gagging, spasm as modes of being that impel one away from what she describes as defilement, sewage.
-She affirms this sense of movement by suggesting that these modes may be instances of becoming other by expelling myself; a movement that means death. The pieces of the self that are wasted in its very movement suffer a kind of death.
-This places the I at the border of its conditions of living. And these conditions of living are not merely the bodily processes but also the psychological. As Kristeva states: "It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order, what does not respect borders, positions, rules" (232).
-In this way she identifies crimes as an example for exposing the fragility of the law.
-Here Kristeva makes a major point: The subjective experience culminates in the abjection of its own self as it understands that all its objects are founded on a constitutive loss.
-therefore, all abjection recognizes foundational want.
-this experience precedes the being/object dichotomy; before there is the field of signifying objects that constitute the territory of the subject, there is abjection.
-Kristeva then introduces the concept of the deject: the deject is the one by whom the abject exists. Kristeva describes this figure as a kind of transient.
-The deject's space is not homogenous or totalizable but rather divisible.
-its movement is described spatially as alternately straying and situating, and temporally as alternately veiled infinity and bursting revelation.
-Kristeva is trying to describe a subjectivity for which experience is heterogeneous. This brings the abject again into focus as part of this subject's being is constituted of the Other who has dwelt within as an alter ego. This Other as alter exists within the subject, it is identified as other through loathing, through repulsion, through a pushing away.
-Kristeva will again assert the primacy of this concept by locating it in the primal repression, one that is constitutive of subjectivities and therefore precedes any later forms of repression.
-In the later phases of the essay Kristeva will locate the place of the abject in a variety of other disciplines and thinkers. It is from this perspective that she identifies a formative capacity to the abject in the domain of religion and continues her critique of psychoanalysis, extending it to its philosophical roots in Plato. Kant and Hegel are also indicated, particularly in their displacement of the abject as defilement into marriage and from there sadness.
-In concluding, it seems that Kristeva is suggesting a libidinal, poetic, and unsettling approach and cohabitation with the abject, with that foundational loss and want that mobilizes in that it repulses.
-Anderson
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Post for "The Wedding Between the Body and Language"
“The Wedding Between the Body and Language”
Luce Irigaray, Key Writings.
Male philosophers, specifically Satre, see the body as ‘facticity’, that is as a present objective reality. It is tangible and one can point to it. Irigaray evokes her logic that we have discussed in class, that the other, including the body of the other, is not solid fact/facticity but rather consciousness of-itself, for-itself and of the world. In the logic of the body as facticity there is a need to own, possess or appropriate the other body that exclusively pertains to subject/object relationships. Contrarily, in the new world of inter-subjectivity it is imperative to understand the other in the language of transcendence.
Realizing inter-subjectivity demands that we understand the relationship, bodily or otherwise, between I-me and I-you in privileged space time. There is the “you who are not and will never be me or mine,” (p.14) interacting with “the love that I share with you, my body is animated by the wanting to be with you or to you,” (p.22) and the transcendence, the understanding that there is the I-you that lies beyond what I can understand in terms of knowing. In other words, transcendence means that I-me can never appropriate, possess or “have” the other, you. (See p. 14) In language, adding ‘to’ in the phrase “I love to you” creates a space of alliance, a common ground of mutually understood transcendence. It allows the other to not be an object, irreducible to a factual thing; the object of my love.
In critiquing Merleau-Ponty who considers sexuality as ambiguity and indeterminacy, Irigaray raises a crucial omission to his theory, perception. The metaphor of Buddha looking at the flower illustrates that we can learn to perceive and understanding perception is the path to realizing inter-subjectivity. I can see myself as I-me and you as I-you and the link between exterior and interior of interactions in the world and with the other.
Irigaray’s critique on the culture of dichotomous logic leads into the new philosophy of the caress. In seeing sensation was divided between pleasure/pain, hot/cold, active/passive we exile the body from its organization as a whole. This starts the tradition of marking the feminine as passive and the masculine as active. Jetting from this, sensibility is lost in the culture lacking both subjectivity and objectivity. Irigaray’s caress is an awakening to intersubjectivity, to a touching between us which is neither passive nor active, it is an awakening of gestures. The caress is a type of touch experiencing other based in specific mutual understandings and motivations of I-me and I-you and “I love to you.” On a last note, caress allows us to re-imagine virginity as the state of being grounded and whole within oneself verses after the act of being sexed by a phallus the feminine is forever incomplete as herself without the phallus.
Referring to page 14, Irigaray states that, “in so far as you are an incarnation that cannot be appropriates by me, lest I should suffer the alienation of my freedom,” is she implying that if I-me fives up my freedom it can know the I-you?
What is the expanded meaning, in masculine/feminine Irigaray terms behind the quick mention that violence is specifically a subject/object relationship? (p. 20 it’s a short little line, but very interesting.)
Monday, February 12, 2007
Welcome!
Hello Class,
This blog is super easy to use. If you get a little confused on how to access it or post, email me at rmgavaga@mtholyoke.edu.
I would like to request everyone use the title and label section to help keep us straight on who did the initial post on what article and who is just responding!
Tag, you're all it!
Beck
This blog is super easy to use. If you get a little confused on how to access it or post, email me at rmgavaga@mtholyoke.edu.
I would like to request everyone use the title and label section to help keep us straight on who did the initial post on what article and who is just responding!
Tag, you're all it!
Beck
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