I taught seminars on Irigaray’s The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1983) from 2016 to 2020, each time following seminars on Heidegger’s “Language”, “The Thing” and “The Origin of the Work of Art”, in a course on twentieth-century literary theory initially required for admission to English Honours. During the 2020 COVID-19 lock-out, averse to videoconferencing, I chose to conduct instead of classroom discussions an online written discussion lasting the entire semester, to which I asked students to contribute at least two critical reflections on Irigay, each of between 100 and 250 words. To prompt the discussion, I wrote two commentaries on selected chapters of Irigaray’s book, and then joined the discussion by writing three compendious commentaries on students’ contributions to it. I quote from the English translation of Irigaray’s book by Mary Beth Mader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).

Commentary on Chapters 2, 5, and 6 of The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger

These remarks are not a general introduction to Irigaray, which many other sources reliably offer. Rather, they outline my own views of these chapters, concentrating on the passages in them that I find most intriguing or challenging. Your own views of these chapters will not be mine, and Irigaray hardly invites unanimity, which she believes mistakes the plurality of truth.

Irigaray laments, near the end of Chapter 6, that “the thinker [Heidegger], whose care it is to recollect the initial loss [of our intuition of the truth of our being] in our history, perpetuates the unthought in man’s relation to his body” (102). This is the keynote of her reading of Heidegger. But is she correct? I suspect not. Irigaray alleges that Heidegger excludes all physical, physiological, biotic and biological considerations from his account of our primary and immediate intuition of the nature of our human being. I suggest instead that he takes them into account no less thoroughly than she, but in a radically different way, heeding theories of physics and biology contrary to hers.

As phenomenologists, both Heidegger and Irigaray consider not only empirical phenomena, including physical and bodily phenomena, to understand their phenomenality as such, but also whatever prior explanations, especially scientific explanations, other thinkers have advanced about them. Irigaray regards as especially suggestive two scientific theories that scientists no longer endorse: the physics of the universal ether and the biology of preformationism, specifically ovism. Heidegger regards as no less suggestive two contrary scientific theories that scientists currently do endorse: the physics of the cosmic vacuum and the biology of epigenesis.

For Irigaray, physical phenomena such as amniotic fluid, oxygen-transmitting blood (and, for that matter, chlorophyll and plant sap), the earth’s water cycle, and the earth’s atmosphere suggest the unbroken, unbreakable, and indeed unlimited continuity of all beings, the being of each an event or occasion in which all other beings meet with it as they impart to it and draw from it their shared substance and movement. For Irigaray, likewise, bodily phenomena such as conception, gestation, parturition, lactation, caregiving and sexual desire suggest the unbroken, unbreakable, and indeed unlimited continuity of all human beings, the being of each an event or occasion in which all other human beings meet with it as they impart to it and draw from it their common humanity, kindred embodiment, and evolving spirit.

On the contrary, for Heidegger, physical phenomena such as atomism, the cosmic vacuum, and the quantum vacuum suggest the discreteness, discontinuity, and difference of each being from all other beings. For Heidegger, likewise, bodily phenomena such as the immunological singularity of each human being, the body’s characteristic physical integrity and autonomy, every person first becoming aware of its being years after birth, and the ease with which elective affinities can eclipse inherited ones suggest the finitude, discreteness, discontinuity and difference of each human being from all other human beings.

For Heidegger, finitude, nothingness, negation and death are positive, productive and necessary aspects of being, whereas for Irigaray they are part of “his” remorseless, denaturing and dehumanising war against being as she conceives it. He regards being as autogenic and autotelic, whereas she regards it as allogenic and allotelic. He believes that we receive the mortality-transcending capacities of our being immediately from the language, art, thought and statehood of the historical people of whom we are a member, whereas she believes that we receive such capacities immediately through the bodies that bear or join ours and those that ours bear or join, including the body of the earth as well as the body of every human being, whose substantial being he allegedly reduces to so much stuff that he might shape as he wishes, the stuff of himself as much as the stuff of his fellows and the stuff of the earth. For Irigaray, “he” is Heidegger, masculine and patriarchal action and reason, and the human world as he and they denature it, whereas “she” would be Irigaray only if she and the feminine, matriarchal and feminist world that beckons her could repossess their own bodies, being and language, which he has taken from them.

According to Irigaray, “he” both destroys “her” thought and language and incorporates it into “his” by means of two dialectical processes, as false and falsifying as she regards all dialectical thought: assimilation and participation; and erection and ejaculation.

First, we can see the dialectic of assimilation and participation at work in a poem by Carolyn M. Rodgers, “It Is Deep (don’t never forget the bridge you crossed over on)” (1969). It is ever so much deeper than the poet suspects. To Irigaray’s way of thinking, the poet completely mistakes her relation to her mother, even and especially at the end when she believes she has at long last discharged in full the debt she owes her, but also earlier when the poet insists that her mother is out of her depth when she enters her daughter’s world, which she defines by way of her mother’s remoteness from it.

But, according to Irigaray, the poet’s mother has never disappeared from her daughter’s life, and never ceased playing as central a role in it as she did when forming her daughter-to-be in her womb, although her daughter, hoodwinked by “his” thinking, epitomised by “the poster of the / grand le-roi (al) cat on the wall” that her mother “did not / recognize” (referring to Rodgers’ fellow poet LeRoi Jones as the leonine head of the pride of poets to which she has decided she belongs), has expunged her mother from it and then conceded that she might reappear in it as a beloved servant and essential prop.

The umbilical cord first dwindles to a very uncertain telephone connection that the mother rather than the daughter rushes to reconnect and is then piously commemorated as a bridge, like one of Ruskin’s sublime sentinels of endurance in Modern Painters and, like most New York City bridges, connecting one island borough with another. Likewise, the bounty and power of the mother’s body, especially the placenta, supposedly discarded and superseded, have surreptitiously been denatured and reshaped into the very stuff of the world. The city’s emergency services, public utilities, banks and markets, and the daughter’s apartment, kitchen and refrigerator are what she and everyone else have made of her mother, the basic material substance and serviceability of their world, to which the living body of her mother has been reduced, no longer recognisable as the being with whom one’s closest relation subsists without diminution or intermission. Into this world leached from her mother’s being, the poet readmits her mother as a party, an autonomous participant, to play a role that she may take up or not, in this or that communal drama such as those mentioned: communism, unionism, and Black nationalism. I would contend that this is precisely how “he” in “his” language treats “her” being by means of assimilation and participation as Irigaray describes them (Chapter 2, 39ff; Chapter 5, 81ff).

The dialectic of assimilation and participation denatures our nature and the world’s long before we come of age (as we say), having begun to do so long before we are born and certainly during infancy. A painting by Pablo Picasso, First Steps (1943; Yale University Art Gallery), reveals how. Already, in this painting, the child’s body, angular and tense with effort, bursts with energy it draws from its mother, whom it treats as a battery, a reliable source of power, and as a garage, a shelter to which it can return between trips towards an autonomy that imagines it can eventually serve as its own battery and garage. The mother sags like a balloon losing air (as the child’s face fills with it) and stoops as much to fit within the frame of the painting and the view of the painter as to steady the child. She is the arch (or portico, 34) through which others walk, the framework (or Gestell, 33) by which they orient themselves. Her left hand releases and gives up the child’s left hand; her right clasps and retains its right, this final interlacing of fingers the focus of her gaze, the threshold of yet another phase of their joint being that both mistakenly sense as attenuating and finally severing it, persuaded thus by “his” thought and language, beyond which they can hardly think or speak. The umbilical cord lapses to a handshake, we suppose.

Next, we can see the dialectic of erection and ejaculation at work in a poem by Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar”, from Harmonium (1923). For the poet, the world is a “slovenly wilderness” only of use when it ceases to be itself, or rather, nothing until he makes something of it. The jar’s power, serving its owner, to order and shape conquers nature’s proclivity merely to burgeon and bewilder, if we take “wilderness” to mean a wildered as well as wild state, with the poetic imagination a kind of Cartesian engineering, fixing everything in its axes and circles like a massive magnet or seismic shock. Those who once lived in the slovenly wilderness without denaturing or renaturing it must disappear into it, their being reduced to a place name that their conqueror graciously condescends to adopt as a sign of cultural assimilation and supersession. We should understand that, in the early twentieth century, Tennessee was among the poorest states of the United States, a decade or so before the vast engineering projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority transformed it along the lines that the poet envisages. The poet’s erection of his apotropaic token and its shaping so much rude stuff into surrounding ground by the ejaculation of its “dominion everywhere” closely resemble Irigaray’s account of the effect of the architectonic, technocratic power of “his” thought and language on “her” being (90f).

I am led to review my conjecture that Heidegger’s notion of the nearness and remoteness of things and persons depends on metonymy and prosopopoeia as the fundamental events of thought and language. From Irigaray’s point of view, they may rather be the indices, either vestiges or harbingers, of yet more intimate relations within and among things and persons that we can now understand and express only in such attenuated rhetoric forms.

Commentary on Chapters 7, 9, and 10 of The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger

In these three chapters Irigaray meditates on several more phenomena to pursue her investigation into “his” language and thought, and her work towards (re)(dis)covering “her” language and thought, which “his” has always and everywhere consigned to an oblivion of which both “he” and “she” are oblivious, the “unknown unknown” truth of their joint interbeing.

To the three phenomena that exemplify in Chapters 2, 5 and 6 the phenomenality of “his” language and thought – the bridge; the portico; and the erection – Irigaray in these later chapters adds another three – the voyage; the blinkered, segregating look; and the agricultural exploitation of the earth. To the two phenomena that could exemplify in the earlier chapters the phenomenality of “her” language and thought, were they ever to appear – the circumambient fluid medium or ether that sustains embodied beings (especially air, water and blood); and the unbroken continuities of reproductive animal biology (fertilisation, gestation, parturition, lactation, sexual attraction, and copulation, not all of them mentioned) – Irigaray in these later chapters adds – the dawn (remotest origin; reawakening; and the patient and uncoercive gaze); and the rose (the natural and indeed vegetable unfolding, flowering, and volatilising of beings). The essential phenomenological task is to tease from each phenomenon the fundamental phenomenality that makes them and all such phenomena possible or not, including these six phenomena of “his” making and four phenomena of “her” elusion of that making.

Irigaray saturates herself with Heidegger’s language in the hope that she may thereby discover, from the faintest and minutest traces in it, that her language has saturated his from the beginning without his being aware or wishing or allowing himself to be aware of it. This manner of reading resembles to a degree that of Michel de Certeau and Guy Debord but certainly not that of Georges Poulet, whose insistence on the distinctness of his being from another’s exemplifies the very disaster from which Irigaray hopes we may one day recover despite its as yet unbroken and unbreakable hold on us.

Chapter 7

Irigaray contends in her meditation on the voyage that we so misunderstand the otherness of others that our reaching out to them can be no more than a detour, a roundabout way back to ourselves. As Stephen Dedalus surmises in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses, “We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.” Even when most “faithful to the faraway” (114) we misconceive the other by our very ascription of faraway-ness to her. We reduce the sea, the medium of our reaching out, to a void or inconvenience or danger, thinking of ourselves only as sailors, rarely as seafarers (the Flying Dutchman), more rarely as sea-creatures (swimmers; mermen and mermaids), more rarely yet as waves and currents of the sea itself. We distinguish ourselves from the circumambient and bodily media that sustain us. Any expectation of enjoying such fluid being we either defer until after death (as in Milton’s dream of angelic sexual union, Paradise Lost 8.615–29), as against Lucretius’ frustration with the body as a barrier (De Rerum Natura, 4.1101–20, translated by Dryden, “Lucretius, The Fourth Book”, 67–92), or relegate to mystical and ecstatic experience that extinguishes the self. The voyage is simply a ferry or a punt, a simple transformation of the bridge, which for Irigaray is equivalent to projecting an umbilical cord from oneself hoping to discover the world as if it were one’s own detached placenta, a parody of “her” forgotten gift to “him” of “his” being.

Please read the poem by Constantine Cavafy titled “Ithaka” (1911), translated from the poet’s Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (1972), to determine if and how it exemplifies or contradicts Irigaray’s phenomenological description of the voyage.

Next, Irigaray contends in her meditation on the dawn that whereas “his” seeing is like lightning, gashing the darkness in search of what appears frozen in time and space (or in a sequence of instants by a strobe light or frames of a film reel), “her” seeing is smeared over a broader continuum of space and time so that she sees the (e)merging and (un)becoming of beings with each other, when all are equivocally distinct and yet indistinct in the dusk before sunrise, which is when we sense, through a kind of seeing indistinguishable from touching, the “ever-ajar” interbeing of everything (110). This may suggest the medium or state of being that Plato describes in Timaeus 51e–53d as the χώρα, chôra or khôra, receptacle, which also attracts the attention of Julia Kristeva, in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974).

Please read the poem by Emily Brontë [Ellis Bell], “Stars” (1846), to determine if and how it exemplifies or contradicts Irigaray’s phenomenological description of “her” way of seeing as opposed to “his”.

Chapter 9

Irigaray contends that agricultural practice is congruent with “his” linguistic practice, in that both subdue “her” along with the body and being of the earth, to his ends, clearing a portion of their being as if it were a blank page, scarring it with his plough and pen, sowing it with his seed and inscribing it with his significance, reducing it to so much property and produce that he designs and owns. Some early Greek inscriptions are βουστροφηδόν, boustrophedon, ox-turning, with alternate lines written in reverse. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windhover” offers a vivid instance of this congruence, especially revealing in its disavowed sadomasochism:

Irigaray characterises the “clearing” that “his” permanent settlement and agricultural and linguistic practice entail as confinement to a framework that does not allow “him” to think beyond it, that closes off from him most of the world, which is not (yet) his, constrained by the rule of what we might call his own Académie ontologique. Irigaray’s implication seems twofold: first, that nomadic human beings who live by hunting and gathering are not “guilty” of destroying “her” being and have not separated themselves from the bodily being common to all animals; and second, that linguistic frameworks constrain us much as Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf hypothesise. Donald Davidson, among others, disputes that they do so in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973–1974): 5–20.

In “his” language “she” can neither speak nor be heard or taken seriously. In what literary texts among those you have read does such non-communication figure prominently? In which of them do silent, silenced, or unheeded characters loom as large as those who silence, ignore or disparage them? Are there few or many such texts, and how easily can we recognise them given that we (may) have only “his” language with which to speak and think or refrain from speaking or thinking about them? Need we look for evidence of Irigaray’s thesis chiefly in experimental and avant-garde literary texts or do the most traditional and unremarkable texts attest it? Are there any literary texts at all that do not? For example, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer (1841) is as obviously the tale of Judith Hutter’s eclipse as of Natty Bumppo’s apotheosis.

Next, Irigaray contends that the rose in its flowering “without a why” is congruent with what would be “her” language could she speak it, evoking a sensuous carnality of speech and thought inimical to the machinery of reason and exploitation that marks “his”. Doubtless by design, Irigaray’s thesis is not only provocative but also preposterous. To speak as a rose flowers, we must set aside what we know, speaking “his” language, to be the case, that any rose we so encounter “is” the product of the most concerted and sustained floriculture that we can conceive. But Irigaray thereby sets us a grand challenge, to realise, in what would be “her” language, that we have not created the rose but have recreated ourselves so that we might be the fit recipients of the rose’s gift of itself to us as it has over the time of its emergence infused the bounty of its evolving being into us to render us capable of speaking of its being along with it. Irigaray’s counterpointing of “her” floricultural speech against “his” agricultural writing begs the question of the relation of speech and writing in general, thereby laying itself open to Jacques Derrida’s critique of this difference, as explained especially in Of Grammatology (1967). Irigaray then beguilingly characterises our dreams as the sole field, in the clearing of our being not so completely ruled by “his” language, in which “her” language can still flower though not flourish, like a weed. Her flowering speech also entails the transformation of the senses, so anaesthetised and set at odds by “his” language and thought to have forgotten their primordial synaesthetic community. Think of William Blake’s question in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793):

Irigaray might add a sixth sense, proprioception, as much the culprit as vision in “his” Cartesian excision of both from their fellow senses to distinguish the mind from the body.

Chapter 10

I call attention only to the essential project sketched in this chapter. Irigaray describes the way in which “she” might read what “he” has written:

She thereby hopes “To re-open the horizon, to shake the ground, to unhinge thought” (157). But what would unhinging thought and opening language back up at a great depth look and sound like? How would we recognise such unhinging, such deep mining or extreme caving? What literary texts and hermeneutics pursue these projects, and might they be pursued without an author’s knowing or intending them, or might they even be pursued only thus? For instance, do we look for such a project in Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1909) rather than in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) or Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book (1002)?

First Compendium of Comments on Discussion Contributions

Many thanks to those of you who have so far posted contributions to our discussion of Irigaray, all of them truly thoughtful and judicious. I hope those of you yet to post a contribution take heart from these initial ones and post your own contributions when you can. Every single contribution helps everyone. I will respond to some contributions singly and to others as a group and will defer commenting on others until more of you post contributions about similar topics.

I’m most intrigued that Cavafy’s poem has so far attracted more comments than Brontë’s. In their reflections on Cavafy’s poem, Kaitlyn, Charlotte, Yasmina and Sophia each come to a different conclusion about its compatibility with Irigaray’s parable of the sea voyage. Kaitlyn emphasises Odysseus’s self-involvement (let’s give Cavafy’s voyager Homer’s name for him), Charlotte emphasises Penelope’s disappearance (a striking departure from Homer’s story), Yasmina likewise emphasises the purging of all female personae from Odysseus’ adventure, and Sophia emphasises how equivocal Cavafy’s acknowledgement of others and otherness seems. The poet warns the would-be Odysseus to expel the monsters within him lest they haunt and disable him on the voyage. As they are all insuperably violent male beings, could Cavafy be warning Odysseus to abjure masculinity and virility as traits that thwart intimate and productive relations with others? Could he also be doubting the standard (masculine) account of character formation or Bildung, first announced by Wilhelm von Humboldt, in which one’s personal growth entails the realisation of one’s own inherent potential, rather than others’ gracious gifts of powers one cannot presume to derive from oneself? If so, he would be questioning the mode of character development that dominates the modern European novel’s account of its autonomous (male) protagonist. The poet certainly seems to absorb Penelope into Odysseus’ dwelling-place, confirming Irigaray’s thesis about the absorption of the feminine into the natural and the concomitant reduction of her being to a kind of amorphous stuff. But I suspect that the poet is even more radically opposed to Irigaray’s way of thinking, hinting that Ithaka is Odysseus’ grave, his death, and that his death, not his birth, gives him his being and gives his being its meaning, its truth. If that’s so, then one’s home only comes into being at the end of one’s life, before which one can have no home. It isn’t that one’s life and death are of one’s own devising, but that everything and everyone whom one meets, all going well, give one gifts that portend Death’s final gift and whose worth depends on how they prepare one for Death. Heidegger believes Death is the central truth of human being, whereas Irigaray emphatically disagrees. As Wallace Stevens remarks in his poem “Sunday Morning”, “Death is the mother of beauty”. Stevens’ poem is worth reading in its entirety. I’ll say more about Cavafy’s poem after more of you post your reflections on it.

Irigaray’s strictures about “his” conception of the sea voyage surely apply to the classical epics that depict it, Homer’s Odyssey, Apollonius’ Argonautica, and Virgil’s Aeneid (perhaps especially Virgil’s treatment of Queen Dido), and to their modern progeny such as Luís Vaz de Camões’ Lusiads and S.T. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. But do they apply to another maritime literary tradition that celebrates the abandonment of one’s patriarchal responsibilities and the ecstasy of one’s own shipwreck? I’m thinking of two poems by Stéphane Mallarmé and their English analogues: “Brise Marine” (Sea Breeze) and Alfred Tennyson’s “Ulysses”; and “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard” (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance) and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Wreck of the Deutschland”. “Un coup de dés” certainly appears to have inspired the last (twelfth) chapter of Irigaray’s The Forgetting of Air, the chapter beyond the six assigned for class that might prove the most rewarding to read. Of other modern voyages modelled on Homer, Ezra Pound’s Cantos certainly fall foul of Irigaray’s strictures, but James Joyce’s Ulysses may elude them and even reconceive language along “her” lines, if somewhat equivocally so.

In her reflections on Brontë’s poem, Isabella argues persuasively that the sun’s rule of the day epitomises patriarchal power. Note the series of hymeneal membranes, eyelid, pillow, door and curtain that the sun tries forcibly to tear open in an unforgiving assault on the poet, which will be unsuccessful only because the sun will soon enough set, and the poet has absorbed just enough strength from the stars to resist it until it does. But I’m not so sure the moon is involved, because the sun’s singularity is opposed to the stars’ indiscriminate multiplicity, which is not reducible to one or oneness, thus akin to the manifold being of the feminine-maternal as Irigaray envisages it. I’ll say more about Brontë’s poem after more of you post your reflections on it.

Ruby’s reflections on Irigaray’s affinity with Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen 16, no.3 (1975): 6–18, available online, prompts me to think about films in which “his” lightning-like isolation of one thing from another is eluded, attenuated or subverted. What of imageless films such as Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), or films that use softly focused, diaphanous or superimposed images? What of representational paintings such as J.M.W. Turner’s landscapes at dawn or dusk or in fog or storm, and non-representational paintings by Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin and Helen Frankenthaler of glowing and shimmering manifold washes of colour? I’ll link Alexandra’s reflections on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Ruby’s on film. The episode in Conrad’s novella that verges closest to Irigaray’s sense of the crepuscular quality of the truth of being and (non)individuation is Marlow’s stepping ashore at the Company’s station and strolling into the shade of a forested ravine (in Chapter 1). Both Gayatri Spivak and Hélène Cixous, among others, associate the patriarchal with the colonial gaze and regard women as colonised subjects. See Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa”, trans. Keith and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no.4 (1976): 875–93, at 877–8, 884–5.

Maddy’s reflections on matters that we can sense but not speak or think about clearly or at all strongly suggest that Irigaray may be indebted to the Romantic doctrine of ineffability, most famously formulated by Friedrich Schlegel in his essay “On Incomprehensibility” (1800).

Fiona’s reflections on Maria Cimitile’s article, which appears in the bibliography I’ve given you, about the horrifying silencing of the female voice and denaturing naturalisation of the female body, if I can put it paradoxically, reminds me of the most farcical episode in Joyce’s Ulysses, “The Oxen of the Sun”, in which a group of male doctors and medical students raucously converse in a hospital meeting room, their conversation drifting through dozens of historical English prose styles, while a woman, in protracted labour in the obstetric ward, contributes nothing to the conversation, even from a distance. Among the men, only Leopold Bloom listens for the woman’s voice above the men’s noise. The noisy “gestation” of the English language almost wholly stifles and muffles the Irish woman’s creative, labouring cries, almost exactly as Irigaray explains.

Second Compendium of Comments on Discussion Contributions

Some of you, Isabella, Alexandra, Sophia and Anthony, ponder Irigaray’s apparent, alleged, or patent essentialism, and her ideas of nature, the nature of human beings and of the world. I’d say that for Irigaray, essentialism is an instance of appropriation and social constructionism an instance of participation, neither of them escaping the prison of dialectical thinking in general, or dialectical thinking about gender in particular as a dialectical difference. For Irigaray, the idea of nature itself is an attenuation of “her” being into a question of the serviceability or recalcitrance of things as they are. Isabella considers “the why of the rose”, which Irigaray explains as a denaturing of it in “his” non-specific scientific-technical reasoning about it, but which may be otherwise in “her” tongue, perhaps considering a particular rose’s realisation and potentiation of all roses hitherto and prospectively related to it, the ontology of the rose’s rose-ness, whether or not like Gertrude Stein’s epigram. Alexandra quotes Alison Stone on the apparently “pre-given and determinant qualities of the feminine” (I hope Stone means “determinate”) in Irigaray, but I’d say that it’s precisely the givenness and determination of the feminine against which Irigaray protests, suspicious of anything that is already given and determined, and wanting to apply to it a solvent to render it less certain a given, and less fixedly determined. Sophia mentions Judith Butler’s aversion to Irigaray’s thinking in this regard, which we are about to encounter. But I wonder if Butler examines with due care the phenomenal, ontological dimensions of Irigaray’s notion of “her” being, instead focusing solely on the social, psychological and empirical predicament of women. Anthony looks carefully at the phenomenality of air and of the human voice, and I’d describe Irigaray’s treatment of them not so much as an abstraction as a substantialisation, more rather than less palpable and immediate. Anthony’s point makes me think of the element common to all fluids Irigaray considers, oxygen, the fuel that all known living things burn to become what they are, including both plants and animals. How would Irigaray regard the Gaia Hypothesis, and how regard the great preponderance of plant life in the earth’s biomass, whatever she might say about the scientific terms I am using to describe them?

Now that we have encountered Lacan’s thinking about language, Irigaray’s may make more sense. I’d say that Irigaray attributes to Heidegger a theory of language that closely resembles Lacan’s, despite Heidegger’s pre-emptive and emphatic complaint that he thinks nothing remotely of the kind, a complaint to which Irigaray deafens herself. However that may be, Irigaray is at loggerheads with Lacan, for whom Heidegger appears to serve as her proxy. I’m not sure why this is so. Yusuf writes most intriguingly of Irigaray’s relation to Heidegger in almost psychoanalytic terms, and the stridency of her anti-Heideggerian rhetoric, her mistaking him for someone else, as if contesting another’s inheritance of Heidegger’s estate, is worth further reflection. Sarah notes a feature of Irigaray’s theory of “his” language that mirrors Lacan’s, that it is a system of symbolic domination that inflicts suffering on those who can never fit themselves to it, to which Sze Pui quite plausibly ascribes superhuman power and authority, though of an impersonal kind, as anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss would ascribe to social codes generally, an impersonal demand emanating from within each human subject as its definitive project of being among others, not unlike Althusser’s theory of interpellation internalised. Vince emphasises language’s power to bend us to its will, as if “it” is an agent rather than a medium of our or another human being’s agency. In the beginning is gender, which thereupon pervades all other differences. I relished the complementary contributions by Fiona and Marnie, one sensitive to the horror of “her” predicament, the other to its humour, together suggesting the macabre farce in which “she” is trapped. Soph approaches this farce by way of a comment on grammatical and natural gender in the English language, especially in its pronominal system. Proposals for gender-neutral pronouns in English appear as early as the eighteenth century, if not earlier.

If I may speculate further about “her” ontological predicament in a world such as Lacan envisages, in the mirror stage she may be not so much a virtual being created by the concatenated reflections of others, but the medium of mirroring and reflecting, absorbed into his virtual being, hers thus doubly virtual. Likewise, his accession to the symbolic system to which he must submit himself in order to understand and shape himself, as he supposes, may be predicated on her absorption into the system rather than accession to it, she the symbolic medium through whom he conducts and construes his relations with his fellows.

Responding to Zaynab and Viki’s comments on Emily Brontë’s “Stars”, I’d say that the poet holds out no hope of reconciliation between “his” diurnal sovereignty and “her” nocturnal sovereignty, grimly hopeful of surviving the first, which rules her body and all other bodies, because the human body is mortal, whereas the human spirit is immortal, and will eventually be released from its daily bodily subjection to waking life, into an uninterrupted eternity of joy in the company of its fellow spirits. Brontë is unapologetically a visionary poet, setting no store by actuality, and feels closer to her dead mother and two dead sisters than to anyone else. For her, the “abyss” that Irigaray contends Heidegger dreads is where her true being flourishes. The sun is merely a local tyrant who rages whenever he wakes and forces all on earth to do likewise, in an inane clockwork puppet show, whereas the night sky, only temporarily obscured by the sun, never fails its denizens. Matters look hardly more hopeful for much or all of Wuthering Heights. The poet is shocked to discover her body is essentially a series of hymeneal barriers, unlike her spirit, which is unguardedly at one with all those whom she loves, none of them possessive or domineering in their interrelations. The poem attests to the social and sexual pressures brought to bear on the female body of a certain age, the demand to marry, manage a household, and produce children, a demand emanating from within almost as much as from without. I hear incredulity, outrage and agony throughout the poem. The simile of the “petrel on the sea” alludes to Matthew 14, to a storm at sea at night during which Peter, after whom the species of bird is named, petitions Jesus to empower him to walk over the water to him. Let’s suppose that Emily writes this poem to encourage her more diffident surviving sisters, Charlotte and Ann, not to go over to the other side, not the Dark Side but the Sunny Side.

Thinking some more about Cavafy’s “Ithaca”, I note we have as yet focused solely on the voyager. But isn’t the poem as much about the advisor addressing the voyager? Does the advisor give his advice as a gift for which he expects no reward? Does he imagine the voyager will discover that his advice awaits him on the voyage, in one of the “numerous Egyptian cities” in which the voyager will “fill [him]self with learning from the wise”? Does the advisor thrill with vicarious pleasure at the prospect of the voyager’s pleasure? Does the advisor dispense the advice we would expect from a father, an uncle, a teacher, or a besotted lover about to be left behind? Is the voyager Telemachus rather than Odysseus?

Third Compendium of Comments on Discussion Contributions

Emily Brontë’s “Stars” and Reproductive Destiny

Jess is not the only one among you to long for the moon in “Stars”, but Brontë refuses to exploit it in the hopeful manner Jess suggests because the fundamental distinction Brontë makes is between the complete equality of one star among many and the total subjection of bodies in the solar system, including the moon, to the sun. Planetary relations are exclusive, hierarchical and patriarchal, even among patriarchs, whereas interstellar relations are promiscuous, non-hierarchical and non-coercive, as astronomical discoveries at the time suggested. From the late 1840s, when Brontë wrote the poem, the first accurate measurements of distances between stars implied that the sun was indifferently one star among many, and the first plausible solutions to Heinrich Olbers’ Paradox (why is the night sky dark?), offered by Edgar Allan Poe among others, implied a strict limit to every star’s existence, it became ever easier to extricate oneself from the bonds of all kinds of heliocentric thinking, literal and figurative, notably those mentioned by Charley and Reagan. It isn’t so much that Brontë describes the elopement of illicit lovers as Reagan describes them, but that our current idea of sexual relations is so atrociously degraded and degrading that we can hardly imagine alternatives to them as sexual rather as visionary, following Milton’s sketch of them in Paradise Lost, as Corinne begins to explain in terms of exhilaration, comfort and bliss. Although Ziyan does not refer to this poem in her general comment on the patriarchal understanding of women’s reproductive destiny, she echoes exactly Brontë’s critique of it.

Cavafy’s “Ithaca” and Travel as Tragedy

I am less certain than Zoe and Tayla that Cavafy’s poem exemplifies Irigaray’s thesis of inviting the other’s otherness to infuse itself into one’s own being and thus to other it. Irigaray derides “him” for thinking of meeting the other merely as a “detour necessary for returning more securely to oneself”, as if in an episode of Channel Nine’s Travel Guides television series. Madeleine’s comments lead me to wonder how Virginia Woolf eludes the dialectic of assimilation-participation in her novels about the sea and voyaging, The Voyage Out, To The Lighthouse and The Waves. As an example of a journey that transforms a traveller more decisively than Odysseus’ journey may transform him in Cavafy’s poem, I suggest Thomas Hardy’s poem “When I Set Out for Lyonnesse”.

In his thought-provoking characterisation of tragedy as a voyage of discovery such as Irigaray conceives it, Vince wonders about the difference between the tragic hero and the tragic heroine, particularly Antigone, whose portrayal by Sophocles attracts the attention of Heidegger and Lacan as well as Anne Carson, as Vince notes. What exactly do Greek tragic heroines have in common, especially the half dozen or so in Euripides’ plays?

Picasso’s First Steps

The patently pathetic depiction of the mother or caregiver letting go the child as it first walks on its two feet alone, analysed scrupulously by Christie, Isabella and Alessandra, may indicate that Picasso means us to be quite shocked by it rather than ignore it, whether he thinks her melancholy plight universal and ineluctable or merely occasional and accidental. Picasso’s depiction of mother or caregiver is diametrically at odds with another celebrated painting of a child’s first steps, Jean-François Millet’s First Steps (c.1859–1866), chalk and pastel on paper (Cleveland Museum of Art), copied by Vincent Van Gogh, First Steps, After Millet (1890), oil on canvas (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City).

Millet and Van Gogh depict the newly automotive child shuttling from one parental garage to another, each of them equally energetic springs that bounce the child symmetrically between them, the mother in no sense the lesser or inferior of the two, except that the father has downed the tools of his (other) trade to join in whereas the mother’s trade is the production of the child to the point of testing its ground-worthiness. Perhaps, instead, we should compare Picasso’s depiction of the child’s mother to a depiction of the Virgin Mary in a pietà.

Carolyn Rodgers’ “It Is Deep” and Aesthetics

Tayla’s contention that a formal and aesthetic evaluation of poetry is at odds with a thematic and ideological evaluation of it is eminently arguable, but I think the reading I offered fundamentally formal and aesthetic. The poet’s aesthetic is precisely the obverse of her mother’s. The poet’s aesthetics involves irony (scare-quotes), identifying speech as belonging to particular people (verbatim quotations), cherishing role-models (her poster of LeRoi Jones), quickly and deftly sketching scenes (impressions) as they happen, and self-justification. The mother’s aesthetic involves connection, girdling, warm wind, self-forgetfulness, intuition rather than intellection, gift-giving, and unconcern about individuality. These are all formal and aesthetic dimensions of the spoken and performance arts, and the poem debates two contrary aesthetics, one close to Irigaray, another incompatible with her views. Madeleine’s comments on the poem’s language presuppose this and suggest that the poet’s mother is essentially the wind from the south and the gregarious labour it inspires, an atmospheric, chthonic and organic continuity from which the poet imagines she has detached herself even as she insists that she is its politically most astute representative.

The Open Expanse; Nature’s Physicality; the Being and Biology of Air

The “open expanse” about which Yusuf wonders is Heidegger’s notion, closely related to his notions of clearing, dwelling, “enowning” and caring, all of which Irigaray criticises as “his” ways of obliterating “her” being. Lucy considers caring, Marina and Corinne consider shelter, and Jess considers exploitation and ownership of the earth as a resource, all aspects of this territoriality for which Cheuk Yi coins the wonderful term “knotwork” to suggest how it cordons off one part of the world from all others. Heidegger’s thinking draws deeply on the many summers he spent in his hut writing in the Black Forest with its mosaic of agricultural clearings and forests through which he walked, the catalysts for all the agricultural and domestic notions to which Irigaray objects most strenuously in his philosophy.

For Irigaray, opening and clearing a space implies the destruction of whatever may already have subsisted in it; dwelling, including language-as-dwelling, implies a home for some rather than others; domestic economy renders whatever it excludes undomesticated and uneconomic; care renders whatever eludes it beyond caring: tout court, “her” being. Heidegger does not conceive of his own thought in this privative and restrictive way, but Irigaray certainly does, as do Luke’s astute comments about “speaking to one’s self … within [one’s] own territory” only.

For Heidegger, the open expanse is closely related to the idea of φύσις (physis / phusis) or nature as that which appears, exists and grows, stemming from the verb φύειν (phuein), to appear, to grow. Whereas Heidegger regards the human mind as an endowment of nature, Irigaray regards the mind as it now is as fundamentally severed from it. For Heidegger, things and world appear as they are in the mind’s clearing, in its clear mindedness. Anthony most felicitously identifies Irigaray’s parable of the rose as her clearest account of nature allegedly beyond his grasp, as Corinne does also. Irigaray claims that physicality as such is Heidegger’s blindspot, as Ziyan suggests in her emphasis on the “physical link” between human beings.

For Irigaray, being is not so much a matter of opening up or out and closing off or in but of interfusion without intermission: the physics of natural things and the biology of living things are fluid rather than solid. We are not stand-alone, discrete and contiguous beings, but interdependent, conjoint, continuous and fluid beings held to a certain shape for a certain time by the material flux that forms and re-forms us within the biosphere’s continuum of physical and biological exchanges. We are airy, watery and cloudy, as Hayley and Marnie note, not only metaphorically and ironically but also literally and actually. Chloe nicely characterises the (figurative) dynamic fluidity and (literal) fluid dynamics of Irigaray’s notion of being, whereas Sze Pui’s thoughts on the traditional biological understanding of the female body reveal how far Irigaray is from endorsing them. Perhaps responding to mid-twentieth-century research findings that almost every atom in the human body is replaced every year, Irigaray regards the body as a kind of standing wave given to generating other standing waves.

Although Irigaray contends that air is inapprehensible, as Katie carefully explains, it is in fact so vividly, immediately and continuously apprehensible that we simply overlook it. During the day the colour of the sky and during the night the twinkling of the stars are in truth the air’s visibility apprehended as translucency, unconscious acknowledgement that the air is the fluid lens through which we see everything. Of course, the air’s weight also bears upon us. I am as much taken by Zaynab’s reflection that philosophy has hardly begun to understand phenomena as obvious as air and the space it pervades as I am by Isabella’s reflection on “the almost-ness” and “vagueness” that continues to screen “her” from herself as much as from anyone.

Essentialism and Binarism: Confirmation or Critique?

Many of you, including Charley and Chloe, express disquiet about the biological essentialism you find in Irigaray’s thinking, which I attribute not to “her” but to “him” as she metabolises his binarism, dualism and essentialism through her alchemical and rhetorical retorts, as Marina suggests, citing Butler. “He” separates and dichotomises the male and the female, whereas she detects one always lodged non-dichotomously, cryptically and chimerically in the other, in line with Jacques Derrida’s idea of “chiasmic invagination”. Sophie sums this idea up nicely. For “him”, binarism means either/or, whereas for “her”, binarism is the finite code generating an infinity of sexual and gendered values, as a base-two numbering system generates all possible numbers no less reliably than a system with a higher base such as ten. The notions of opposite-sex, same-sex and trans-sex are governed by his binarism, as is the distinction between the unexceptional and the exceptional. I’d say that Irigaray is attempting to elude and transcend all such categories, about which some of you, including Bhavani and Rachael, remain puzzled, not without reason. Luke wonders what understanding would be like were such frameworks to fall away. Isabella suggests some kind of “multivocality”, whereas Christie cites Wittgenstein on the absolute limitation that language may place on all understanding.

His and Her Language

Cheuk Yi’s optimism that “language still has its potential” is not shared by Irigaray. After all, the world’s languages have all undergone immense change, but how much have they changed in relation to giving “her” her own authentic speech? Is Modern English much different from Middle English or Old English in this respect? Have the languages exclusively spoken by women even done so, such as Nüshu in China’s Hunan province? Have the literatures dominated by women writers done so, such as that of the Heian Court in Japan, including the astonishing work of the Lady Murasaki, the Lady Izumi, Sarashina and Sei Shōnagon? Marina’s examination of the characteristic absence of women from history as Herodotus and others conceive it and Hayley’s of their comparable absence from philosophy look like prima facie evidence supporting Irigaray’s case. Varsha deftly describes the way in which “his” language digests and forgets “her” nature to sustain itself as it were self-sustaining, transforming her omnipresence into an absence.

Works Discussed

Bibliography

Among the works I consulted, I found the following most helpful.