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

LACAN AND IRIGARAY: ETHICAL LACK AND ETHICAL PRESENCE 105
of voluptuous pleasure Useless, except as that which designates a place: the
place itself of uselessness, at least usually. Serving neither conception nor
jouissance strictly. Mystery of feminine identity (1984, p. 24, italics in
original).
Like the cross, the archetype of Between, the feminine lips, two vertical, two
horizontal, permit going beyond limits without risking the abyss. Because of the
fertility of the porous, “each finds himself [sic] in that which cannot be said but
which makes the suppleness of the soil of life, and of language” (1984, p. 25) where
a communion subtly crosses the intimacy of the mucous. Where the alliance is not
symbolized by a child, but by the life or death that lovers give to one another.
Irigaray asks:
And if the divine is there as the mystery of that which animates this copula,
the is and to be in sexual difference, can the force of desire overcome the
avatars of genealogical destiny How would it accommodate that With what
power Remaining nevertheless incarnated. Between the idealistic fluidity of
the unborn body, unfaithful to its birth, and genetic determinism, how can we
find the measure of a love that will make us pass from the condition of mortals
to immortals Certain figures of gods become man, of God made man, and the
doubly-born, indicate one path of love (1984, p. 25).
As une grande amoureuse, Irigaray is part of the mystic tradition criticized by de
Beauvoir in The Second Sex. The feminine sex is an aporia, a mystery, a miracle
which is yet to come. The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost are in the shadows of
Irigaray’s mystery, as is Dionysus, the doubly-born one. This erotic symbolism of
the divine bypasses the procreativity of the body, and sees love as an angelic
dialectic. Love points the way to delirium, rapture, the way out of the cage of
heredity, the body, and history.
Irigaray’s rejection of procreation is again articulated in her essay on Plato’s
Symposium. Here she applauds Diotima’s lecture on love to Socrates, and
especially the “original” theory of the dialectic. According to Irigaray, Diotima’s
dialectic has at least four terms: the two poles of the here (the below), love (the
intermediary) is the pathway and the conductor, the mediator par excellence, to the
there: the above, the divine. “Never completed, always evolving” (1984/1989, p. 33),
love as mediation is never absorbed in a synthesis, but it permits a meeting, and a
transvaluation of two, which returns to a greater perfection in love. Diotima
“presents, uncovers, unveils the existence of a third that is always there and that
permits progression: from poverty to wealth, from ignorance to wisdom, from
mortality to immortality” (1984/1989, p. 32).
Irigaray makes central Diotima’s answer to the question of love’s existence: “This
action is engendering in beauty, with relations both to body and to soul…. The union
of a man and a woman is, in fact, a generation; this is a thing divine; in a living
creature that is mortal, it is an element of immortality, this fecundity and generation”
(1984/1989, p. 37). According to Irigaray, this pronouncement has never been
understood, and even Diotima disappoints Irigaray, as we shall see. But first, in