Ripped from A Poetics of Being Two

Ok, you lot are not sending submissions, so I'll just post some odd bits of my poetics book as I cut and reject them. They will be out of context, naturally. The Irigaray I refer to here is I Love to You: A Sketch for a Possible Felicity in History. The Hegel should be obvious.


The For-Later, Review and Extension

The human being appears at his most worthy when… he appears to be at once spirit and a particular individual.

Building worlds is not enough for the mind that reaches more deeply, yet a loving heart is ample for the spirit that constantly strives.

Novalis, Philosophical Writings


The mode of living, of becoming that Irigaray seeks to inaugurate is not encouraged now. In spite of the work done by various kinds of progressive and humanitarian movements, I don’t think that the culture of the West, and definitely not the U. S., has not moved into a new mode of being. Sexual and civil rights revolutions have had a tremendous impact in U.S. culture, but there is still tremendous pressure to limit the potential of the human being, both man and woman and of all races and creeds, for the sake of a smoothly running and familiar state-economy. The “utilitarian” state of affairs, Irigaray argues, should not continue, though it may. If the family is the basis of the state, the site of its possibility and continuity, as Hegel and many other philosophers have noted, then changes in the relations between men and women, the couple, and therefore between each of them and their child will imply and require changes in the shape, content, and function of the state. Hence, when one goes to the mountain to talk to Hegel, one does not go alone. Even Zarathustra had an eagle, a serpent and a lion with him on his mountain (with Hegel). Irigaray brought a host of divinities with her. In I love to You, she begins by summarizing Hegel’s description of love, or our culture’s failing as she interprets it:

How does Hegel define love between men and women? He defines it as it is still often practiced in our time, but also as it is defined by monotheistic, patriarchal religion, or ostensibly at the other extreme, by theories of sexuality, like the Freudian one. He defines it, on the whole, as we still experience it, in private and in public ... without managing to resolve the problem of the lack of spirit and ethics he observes. He also defines it in terms of his method. Which means that in order to overcome what he terms natural immediacy within the family Hegel turns to pairs of opposites. Hence he is forced to define man and woman as opposites and not as different.

This is still the case for us. There are still no civil rights proper to women and men ... ; there is still no civil law in our era that makes human persons of men and women ... . For want of such laws, our sexuality lapses into barbarity worse at times than that of animal society ... .

The woman is wife and mother. But, for her, this role is a function of abstract duty. So she is not this woman, irreducible in her singularity, wife of this man, who is himself irreducible, any more than she is mother of this child or these children. She is only attributed that singularity from the perspective of the man, for whom she remains bound to natural immediacy. As far as she is concerned, she is a wife and mother in as much as these roles represent a task vis-à-vis the universal which she discharges by renouncing her singular desires.

Love, as Hegel writes of it, is therefore not possible on the part of the woman... . She has no right to singular love nor to love for herself. She is thus unable to love but is to be subjugated to love and reproduction ... . Love, for her, amounts to a duty—not a right—establishing her role within humankind where she appears as man’s servant. (20-22)

This is Paz’s vitiation, Lacan’s formulation of feminine lack, Freud’s conundrum, dearth out of which the Romantics wished to love their way to plenitude. Reason left to its own devices, leaves us in this morass that turns love and desire against us. Irigaray asks, tantrically, in her ethics that we risk our way out.We must interpret and go beyond this order in that it represents alienation from the human for both sexes and for humanity as a whole, alienation leading the human species to its loss. For love seems to remain a natural affliction, its only possible redemption being the spiritual authoritarianism of a community dominated by a patriarchal father. Of love, we know only the singularity of sensible desire bereft of a for-itself, the torments of attraction for the other, the weight of sinfulness and the price we pay for our redemption. We know about the loneliness of desire, the desperation of rejection or of wanting the impossible, the pathological derangements of the drives, the destitution of parting. We know, too, the passionate resurgence of desire for someone, a singular desire for the one feeling it but an inexpre­ssible, ultimately irrational desire, with no language for the one who inspires it and thus an aspiration dev­oid of any possible reciprocity except for the annihilating reciprocity this kind of mentality produces. We also know the shame of desire, its engulfment in the loss of identity, its chaos, its dr­ug of disillusioned tomorrows. We still know nothing of the salvation love brings, individual and collective salvation. (IL 29, emphasis mine)

The horrible paradox of a goal and a torment, of a trick set up long ago as this annihilating reciprocity. We are out here, we humans, in historically lucky countries, making up the world for the first time, confused, timid, unsupported, or relatively undominated by church, state, codified spiritual tradition, and still there are many who would quash such cultural and social change: out of fear, out of resentment, out of tradition. I’m thinking of the religious right specifically, and people who assume that their lifestyle is applicable to everyone, or who remain within traditional roles out of simple comfort. At least the religious right practices some kind of critical engagement with their lives and the culture around them, even if the results of that critical activity are anathema to my sensibilities or desires for people. We have a serious conversation to have about what makes for human flourishing, once we get over the culture wars. There is nothing at all secure that precludes a return to the family Hegel was describing, nothing at all that stops the pendulum except our will and creativity and vigilance.

In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the family expresses the ethical sphere in natural immediacy, that is unconsciously, but is “an ethical entity,” that is consciously ethical, “only so far as it is not the natural relationship of its members” (268). The family’s relationships cannot simply be given by the accidents of blood or affection, for there is no consciousness there:

the ethical connection between the members of the Family is not that of feeling, or the relationship of love. It seems, then, that the ethical principle must be placed in the relation of the individual member of the Family to the whole Family as the Substance, so that the End and content of what he does and actually is, is solely the Family. (269)

Irigaray’s shift is precisely that it is in the relationship of love that the ethical relationship takes place. Love is, for her, as much or more a choice than an accident of mood or proximity. Love is both an accident of fate, and a fate that one must choose, as Paz puts it. The relations of the family members differ greatly from a system in which the family member (he) is both the whole of the family and sacrifices himself completely to it without maintaining his envelope, his separateness. Inside the family, he is not substantial, not real, for “it is only as a citizen that he is actual and substantial, the individual, so far as he is not a citizen but belongs to the Family, is only an unreal impotent shadow,” just a father, not even a lover, and not a man (270). Man’s being does not take place in the Family in Hegel’s ethics. He does not exist there, and he may still in our culture not find of his being or sense of self there. The activity of the family does not center on man’s activity as a citizen or an employee, and Hegel sees no reason therefore for man to integrate himself into the family as much other than a sacrifice that is the whole of the family. The family is far too much a feminine cultural space for that. This love is so far from ethics that:

the relationship of husband to wife is in the first the one in which one consciousness immediately recognizes itself in another, and in which there is knowledge of this mutual recognition. Because this self-recognition is a natural and not an ethical one, it is only a representation, an image of Spirit, not actually Spirit itself... . This relationship therefore has its actual existence not in itself but in the child—an “other”, whose coming into existence is the relationship, and is also that in which the relationship itself gradually passes away. (Hegel 273)

If this is the case, what blindness is it that convinces the husband and wife in love to have children? Is the child the only real embodied instance of their love, and the death of it? When people live unconsciously, automatically and passively, allowing the work and the child and the demands of the state to railroad them along, I can see how this would happen. Since for Hegel the basis of this thrust is the nation, I can see why the state would want it this way (273). Love, especially a love that is conscious and ethical, that determines its own course, makes the state nervous because it does not always play by the state’s rules or into its hands.

The purpose of the family is the child, the other of the man who is the family. The wife, the woman, and love have no valuable role to play in Hegel’s family or Hegel’s ethics. A woman’s only valued ethical (conscious) role is her reverent duty toward her brother—a relationship in which her (sexual) desire can play no role. So that’s very tidy. In the relationships of the ethical family:

It is not a question of this particular husband, this particular child, [note the mom-wife and sister are missing], but simply of husband and children generally; the relationships of the woman are based not on feeling [the only basis left if she attains to only natural immediacy] but on the universal... . [In] her vocation as an individual and in her pleasure, her interest is centered on the universal and remains alien to the particularity of desire; whereas the husband ... , since he possesses as a citizen the self-conscious power of universality, he thereby acquires the right of desire and, at the same time preserves his freedom in regard to it. (Hegel 274-5)

That is, love for one’s husband or child as specific people is not the operant here, but service and reverence on the principle of the specific [or not] woman’s duty to Husband and Child as universals—as ideas. The flights of what would soon be the Romantic experience of love run against the ethical for Hegel, as rash, unconscious flights of all kinds do. The Romantics would go searching for earthly relations, horizontal ones that were not prejudged battles. The co-existence of the body and the soul, of the carnal and the spiritual, a sensible transcendental was part of their project. Hegel, on the other hand, prefers that vertical axis of his universal. The particular, embodied lover is so confounding to that universal that she and he are simply ruled out. The tension between them, between love and ethics (duty), is one that still tears at the bonds humans try to form as husband and wife and as fathers and mothers and children. There seems to be no resolution, except in the neutered relationship between brother and sister where “her duty to him is the highest,” and “the brother is the member of the Family in whom its [the family’s] Spirit becomes an individuality” (Hegel 275). The son/brother, after all, carries the family name while the daughter/sister is to be absorbed into another family, to become a wife, not a lover, and to foster the individuality of some other family. Do we not, still, everyday thanks to the daytime talk shows, hear stories of husbands who cannot see their wives as appropriate sexual partners after the birth of children, or of wives who cannot picture themselves as lovers once they have children? Or, stories of women who put off their weddings once they discover that conversations with family and friends shift entirely from her interests, career, talents, dreams to talk of the wedding plans and how many children she will have and china patterns—she disappears as an individual, becomes a wife-function. Should she resist that disappearance into the service of the universal, she is labeled or often labels herself as selfish, as unwomanly.  How many parents are lost from their connection to each other by the all consuming focus on the child as substitute for their love between each other? How many episodes of Oprah have aired these dilemmas, or of The Jerry Springer Show have exploited this story and its pain for the edification of the viewing public? The flush, burn, rumble and rush of love-lust, the hunger, by definition realization of need, of emptiness, of the desire that springs from lack (and what do you or I have to offer from that condition?) comes smack against the ethical, the duty, of family, the lover, the obligation to give of oneself. The love of Romantic poems and romantic movies seems to get stuck on the side of life before marriage, as if the lack of boundary or envelope that form of love embodies is somehow dangerous. It is. It is as out of balance as the family of duty-only in Hegel. It is out of balance when compared to ethical love as Irigaray defines it. My, or your, purpose in love is not to lose myself in or to complete myself at the expense of the other, borrowing their identity or life. My, or your, purpose in love is to continue becoming on my own path and to encourage your becoming on your path, and to find a way that those two paths travel together. In the current therapist’s lingo: co-dependency is to be replaced with interdependency. Trouble is that one must first be independent in order to be interdependent.

Against Hegel’s description of our culture’s paralyzed, impoverished, and monstrous ideology of love, Irigaray brings the other language of Tantra; wherein, love is exchange in a “non-oppositional dialectic” which precludes the assimilation of woman by man, “[He] recognizes the other as what he or she already is and gives him or her the right or chance to exist” (IL 3, 9).  Love that is ethical is conscious, purposeful, attentive—a project, not an accident. In it the lovers have a relationship outside their relationship to the child, and each a relationship to the universal (or divine) outside their relationship to each other. If that the child, boy or girl, owes the parents nothing, neither accomplishment nor dutiful marriage in the name of family, she and he can live to be just himself or herself having “stolen” nothing from the parents’ love for each other as lovers. The other (woman-sister) is not the for-me of the self-subject (husband-brother). Everyone has the right or chance to exist.