“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.)
