An essay in thought. why Irigaray now ?

At some point in my life, I earned a scholarship to study Modern European Philosophy at CRMEP 'The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy'. Even at the time I understood that I would have to search through the place of man, of God, of metaphysics to navigate a place or a non-place for myself or more generally for wo-man. However a third of the way through I felt that the only real way to go on this search was to abandon this fruitless project. You could say literally it was fruitless. It put me in poverty, under a grey sky, without music and without life. (This is how I felt) The institution was male-dominated and rather harsh. It was certainly not a space for exploration, atleast not for me.

In the 1960s, Irigaray started attending the psychoanalytic seminars of Jacques Lacan and joined the École Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris), directed by Lacan. She was expelled from this school in 1974, after the publication of her second doctoral thesis (doctorat d'État), Speculum of the Other Woman (Speculum: La fonction de la femme dans le discours philosophique, later retitled as Speculum: De l'autre femme), which received much criticism from both the Lacanian and Freudian schools of psychoanalysis. 

My connection to Irigaray had happened early, and maybe I thought I could do what she did, use the masters tools against them, unpick the frameworks, question philosophical certainties, deeplky emesh myself in the logic without crying too hard.

Later in her life after being ejected from the Lacanian school where she wrote her thesis, Irigaray wrote a book in collaboration and

Michael Marder. There she talks about life and air and nature.

La Chambre (Chantal Akerman 1972)

The transition to a new age requires a change in our perception and conception of space-time, the inhabiting of places, and of containers, or envelopes of identity. It assumes and entails an evolution or a transformation of forms, of the relations of matter and form and of the interval between: the trilogy of the constitution of An Ethics of Sexual Difference place. Each age inscribes a limit to this trinitary configuration: matter, form, interval, or power [puissance], act, intermediary interval. 

man and god(s), - man and man, - man and world, - man and woman.

In this possible nonsublimation of herself~ and by herself, woman always tends toward without any return to herself as the place where something positive can be elaborated. In terms of contemporary physics, it could be said that she remains on the side of the electron, with all that this implies for her, for man, for their encounter. 

Perhaps in order to take, one needs a fixed container or place? A soul? Or a spirit? Mourning nothing is the most difficult. Mourning the self in the other is almost impossible. I search for myself, as if I had been assimilated into maleness. I ought to reconstitute myself on the basis of a disassimilation. . . .

Woman ought to be able to find herself, among other things, through the images of herself already deposited in history and the conditions of production of the work of man, and not on the basis of his work, his genealogy.

The relationship between envelope and things constitutes one of the aporias, or the aporia, of Aristotelianism and of the philosophical systems derived from it. 

In our terminologies, which derive from this economy of thought but are impregnated with a psychologism unaware of its sources, it is said, for example, that the woman-mother is castrating. Which means that, since her status as envelope and as thing(s) has not been interpreted, she remains inseparable from the work or act of man, notably insofar as he defines her and creates his identity with her as his starting point or, correlatively, with this determination of her being. 

If after all this, she is still alive, she continuously undoes his work-distinguishing herself from both the envelope and the thing, ceaselessly creating there some interval, play, something in motion and un-limited which disturbs his perspective, his world, and his/its limits. But, because he fails to leave her a subjective life, and to be on occasion her place and her thing in an intersubjective dynamic, man remains within a master-slave dialectic. 

The slave, ultimately, of a God on whom he bestows the characteristics of an absolute master. Secretly or obscurely, a slave to the power of the maternal-feminine which he diminishes or destroys. The maternal-feminine remains the place separated from "its" own place, deprived of "its" place. She is or ceaselessly becomes the place of the other who cannot separate himself from it. 

 Without her knowing or willing it, she is then threatening because of what she lacks: a "proper" place. She would have to re-envelop herself with herself, and do so at least twice: as a woman and as a mother. Which would presuppose a change in the whole economy of space-time. 

In the meantime, this ethical question comes into play in matters of nudity and perversity. Woman must be nude because she is not situated, does not situate herself in her place. Her clothes, her makeup, and her jewels are the things with which she tries to create her container(s), her envelope(s). She cannot make use of the envelope that she is, and must create artificial ones. 

Freud's statement that woman is identified with orality is meaningful, but it still exiles her from her most archaic and constituent site. No doubt orality is an especially significant measure for her: morphologically, she has two mouths and two pairs of lips. But she can act on this morphology or make something of it only if she preserves her relation to spatiality and to the fetal. Although she needs these dimensions to create a space for herself (as well as to maintain a receptive place for the other), they are traditionally taken from her to constitute man's nostalgia and everything that he constructs in memory of this first and ultimate dwelling place.

 An obscure commemoration .... Centuries will perhaps have been needed for man to interpret the meaning of his work(s): the endless construction of a number of substitutes for his prenatal home. From the depths of the earth to the highest skies? Again and again, taking from the feminine the tissue or texture of spatiality. In exchange-but it isn't a real one-he buys her a house, even shuts her up in it, places limits on her that are the opposite of the unlimited site in which he unwittingly situates her. He contains or envelops her with walls while enveloping himself and his things with her flesh. The nature of these envelopes is not the same: on the one hand, invisibly alive, but with barely perceivable limits; on the other, visibly limiting or sheltering, but at the risk of being prison-like or murderous if the threshold is not left open. 

Of course, the most extreme progression and regression goes under the name of God. I can only strive toward the absolute or regress to infinity under the guarantee of God's existence. This is what tradition has taught us, and its imperatives have not yet been overcome, since their destruction brings about terrible abandonments and pathological states, unless one has exceptionallove partners. And even then ... Unhappiness is sometimes all the more inescapable when it lacks the horizon of the divine, of the gods, of an opening onto a beyond, but also a limit that the other mayor may not penetrate. 

I go on a quest through an indefinite number of bodies, through nature, through God, for the body that once served as place for me, where I (malelfemale) was able to stay contained, enveloped. 2 Given that, as far as man is concerned, the issue is to separate the first and the last place. Which can lead to a double downshift: both of the relation to the unique mother and of the relation to the unique God. 

Can these two downshifts come together? Can the quest to infinity for the mother in women result in a quest for infinity in God? Or do the two quests intersect ceaselessly? With place indefinitely switching from the one to the other? Modifying itself moment by moment. Or even transmuting itself from one envelope to the other? 

I become for God the container, the envelope, the vessel, the place for which I quest? Nonetheless the split between first and last place has still to be resolved. 

As for woman, she is place. Does she have to locate herself in bigger and bigger places? But also to fmd, situate, in herself, the place that she is. If she is unable to constitute, within herself, the place that she is, she passes ceaselessly through the child in order to return to herself. She turns around an object in order to return to herself And this captures the other in her interiority. For this not to occur, she has to assume the passage between the infinitely large and the infinitely small. Given that, ultimately, those two places cannot really be delineated. Except perhaps as a grain of sand in the reasoning of man? Or as nest in her for her? Passage from one place to another, for her, remains the problem of place as such, always within the context of the mobility of her constitution. She is able to move within place as place. Within the availability of place. Given that her issue is how to trace the limits of place herself so as to be able to situate herself therein and welcome the other there. If she is to be able to contain, to envelop, she must have her own envelope. Not only her clothing and ornaments of seduction, but her skin. And her skin must contain a receptacle. She must lack - neither body, - nor extension within, - nor extension without, or she will plummet down and take the other with her. 

To sublimate is to change the form, but not the essence. Physically speaking, it means to transform solid to vapor; psychologically, it means changing the outlet, or means, of expression from something base and inappropriate to something more positive or acceptable.

Wonder is the motivating force behind mobility in all its dimensions. From its most vegetative to its most sublime functions, the living being has need of wonder to move. Things must be good, beautiful, and desirable for all the senses and meaning, the sense that brings them together. And, if one admits that one's senses are hierarchized (and in space-time), it matters for "man" to find a vital speed, a growth speed that is compatible with all his senses and meanings, and for him to know how to stop in order to rest, to leave an interval between himself and the other, to look toward, to contemplate-to wonder. Wonder being an action that is both active and passive. The ground or inner secret of genesis, of creation? The place of the union or the alliance of power and act. Perhaps man is at the end of his growth? Or thinks he is? Is he turning back on himself to complete a cycle, as do Nietzsche and Heidegger?

 woman would theoretically be the envelope (which she provides). But she would have no essence or existence, given that she is the potential for essence and existence: the available place. She would be cause for herself-and in a less contingent manner than man-if she enveloped herself, or reenveloped herself, in the envelope that she is able to "provide." The envelope that is part of her "attributes" and "affections" but which she cannot use as self cause. If she enveloped herself with what she provides, she could not but necessarily be conceived of as existing. Which, to an extent, is what happens: women's suffering arises also from the fact that man does not conceive that women do not exist. Men have such a great need that women should exist. If men are to be permitted to believe or imagine themselves as self-cause, they need to think that the envelope "belongs" to them. (Particularly following "the end of God" or "the death of God," insofar as God can be determined by an era of history in any way but through the limits to its thinking.) For men to establish this belonging-without the guarantee provided by God-it is imperative that that which provides the envelope should necessarily exist. Therefore the maternal-feminine exists necessarily as the cause of the l 1 ,I The Envelope self-cause of man. But not for herself. She has to exist but as an a priori condition (as Kant might say) for the space-time of the masculine subject. A cause that is never unveiled for fear that its identity might split apart and plummet down. She does not have to exist as woman because, as woman, her envelope is always slightly open (if man today thinks of himself as God, woman becomes, according to Meister Eckhart, an adverb or a quality of the word of God).