Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

104 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
p. 20). What has remained has until now been given to God, the neutral, or the child
(1984, p. 21). The interval is silenced in a deferred future, separated from the present
by a no-man’s land, or it is annihilated immediately. This is an interval which never
has been, but must be celebrated (1984, p. 21).
What must be discovered is why our sexual difference has been cheated of its
empirical and transcendental moment, why it has missed “its ethic, aesthetic, logic,
religion…its destiny” (1984, p. 21). Certainly, the separation of soul and body, the
sexual and the spiritual, the inside and the outside by a dualist oppositional culture
has contributed to this, Irigaray argues. Everything possible intervenes so that these
realities do not join, do not marry, and are devalued by a transcendental that has cut
off the sensible. The potential of generation must be welcomed within sexual
difference and within ethics, as in eastern religions which speak of “the vital,
aesthetic, religious fecundity of the sexual act. The two sexes giving to one another
the seed of life and eternity, the progress of the generation of one and of the other,
between one and another” (1984, p. 21).
Consummation is never accomplished, and the consequence of this, to mention
only the most beautiful is: the angel (1984, p. 22). “He” circulates, “destroys the
monstrous…announces the new morning, the new birth” (1984, p. 22). The angel is
a virgin body of light, a divine gesture. This destiny and work of love is God’s
destiny for the body. Gesture and not speech is their nature: angels communicate
between the envelopes of God and the body, promising another incarnation of the
body, messengers of an ethic like art (1984, p. 23). But the question Irigaray poses
is: “can the angel and the body find themselves together in the same place” (1984,
p. 23). Traditionally, theologians have responded negatively, while for Irigaray “a
sexual or carnal ethics demands that the angel and the body can find themselves
together” (1984, p. 23). Then a world can be created where man and woman can
meet and sometimes live in the same place (1984, p. 23).
Like the binary oppositions in the work of Lévi-Strauss, Irigaray has discovered in
the alliance of the masculine and the feminine, the elementary structure of erotic
ethics, a spiritual genealogy. Masculine and feminine must, like the mortal and the
divine, the earth and the sky, the horizontal and the vertical, be celebrated, but not
under the eye of God the Father, who stands guard at the doorways of the infinite
and absolute; His vigilance that has brought destruction (1984, pp. 23, 24). Irigaray
argues that only sexual difference can delimit this place. Through a rejection of
mirrored symmetry, each body, sex and flesh can inhabit this place and a new sexual
ethic be created. It is the feminine sex which holds the mystery to this new being and
becoming:
A recasting of immanence and transcendence, notably through this threshold
which is never considered as one: the female sex. Threshold of access to the
mucous. Beyond classical oppositions of love and hate, of absolute fluid and ice
—a threshold always half open. Threshold of lips, strangers to dichotomized
oppositions. Gathered one against the other, but with no suture possible. At
least real. And no assimilation of the world by them or through them without
reducing them abusively to an apparatus of consumption. They welcome,
shape the welcome but do not absorb or reduce or incorporate. A sort of door