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

LACAN AND IRIGARAY: ETHICAL LACK AND ETHICAL PRESENCE 109
birth still in the future. Plunging me back into the maternal womb and, beyond
that, conception, awakening me to another—amorous—birth (1986,
pp. 232–233).
Irigaray argues that the female body has been lost somewhere between the mother
and the male lover in a territory that admires neither “the one who gave me my
body” nor “the one who gives it back to me in his amorous awakening” (1986,
p. 233). The caress leads to the mystery of the other through a “moment of ultimate
sympathy” and a return to “the deepest level of elemental flux, where birth is not yet
sealed up in identity” (1986, p. 234). This fluid consciousness is an opening, a
possibility, mystery, infinity and immortality. “Prior to any procreation, the lovers
bestow on each other— life. Love fecundates each of them in turn, through the
genesis of their immortality. Reborn each for the other, in the assumption and
absolution of a definitive conception” (1986, p. 235). Irigaray’s mystery is unlike the
fatality that is domination, sameness and the obliteration of difference.
The gesture of the caress opens a “future coming, which is not measured by the
transcendence of death but by the call to birth of the self and the other” (1986,
p. 232). And a son is born. But, “the son does not resolve the enigma of the most
irreducible otherness. Of course, he is not engendered without having had his place
in the crypt of the loved one’s womb. Where the lover falters, and whence he returns
without any possible recognition or vision of this terrain” (1986, p. 234–235). The
woman after lovemaking is “regenerated by having gone back, with him, beyond the
fixed, deadly due date of her birth Returned to the acceptance of her life by the
lover and accompanied on this side of, and beyond, a given day of reckoning” (1986,
p. 235). The male lover faces the Thing and rescues woman from the “crypt” of her
womb, that Same thing.
Irigaray agrees with Lacan that the unconscious is structured like a language. But
which one, she asks, the male or female language To give women their differently
sexed language is her project. It is a difference between an ethics of demonic lack
and death; and an ethics of angelic presence and rebirth. Lacan’s unconscious, das
Ding, his lack and language, are of death: “if henceforth there is nothing but lack, the
Other falters, and the signifier is that of his death” (Lacan: 1986, p. 227). Irigaray’s
language is the language of a redeeming, spiritual, heterosexual love, which rescues
woman from her body and her time, and delivers man from his space and woman’s
body. Men and women must help one another in finding a way out of the labyrinth
of mat(t)er.
The essence of Irigaray’s feminist critique is a rejection of the Same/One which is
masculine. But where is this difference that women’s two lips would speak (1985d)
What are women’s values in Irigaray’s work, or what would they be Are they only
alive in the new dawn, the new garden, once the heterosexual caress has inaugurated
the new epoch Cultural representation of a female genealogy is her political project
for women’s liberation, the heterosexual creation of the world is her ethics. This is
very much in contrast to Sarah Lucia Hoagland’s (1988) Lesbian Ethics, Toward
New Value. While working on her reading of Levinas (the subject also of this section
of Éthique de la différence sexuelle), Irigaray was interviewed by two Dutch
activists. She responded to some questions surrounding lesbian sexuality that had