Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

automatically the other within the frame of patriarchal culture, because a
relationship between men is also a patriarchal relationship in sameness and
likeness. The philosophy department was a paradigmatic example of this fact.
This means the others are variations of this sameness of self; whether it is a man
or woman – the relation is within the sameness of the self. 16
The creation of identity and subjectivity will be the key concept answering
these questions, which means that I will elaborate on the relationship
between the two subjects to understand dependency – to one and the other
– especially in light of making the other. So, in the meeting with the other we
discover ourselves. The other is the one who is not me; this division between
me and the other is crucial to the understanding of otherness. Xenophobia
is a confusion of limits between me and the other. The xenophobic person
is un able to see the other as other, but is concerned with creating the other
in his own image, to make the other identical with himself. This inability to
understand the other in terms of the others’ premises can lead to severe consequences,
with the main goal being to eradicate the other’s otherness or simply
the other. This is the unhappy ending of a comprehension of otherness in the
vein of sameness; on the other hand, to understand the other as radically other
to me, means to understand the other in her or his otherness. For Irigaray,
to open up and (re-)cognise the radical otherness of the other is a significant
ethical endeavour. The former demands from the other to be like me, if the
person wishes to share a communal space with me. This demand for likeness
and similarity in reality relates to an unreachable (and undesirable) position for
the other – the other will always be the other.
In present-day´s free-market economic society, however, women only exist
as the other to the man. This does not mean, for Irigaray, that “woman” was invented
by man, but rather that she, as the radical other, does not yet exist. The real other
to the man is not a part of our society. Woman has not yet become a woman. 17
One of the most salient points made by Irigaray is her determination
to rule out a certain way of thinking about the other as negativity. In the
relationship between the same and the other, we do not have one positive
and one negative (as in the traditional, patriarchal thinking about man and
woman), but rather two ‘positives’. The other cannot be understood as inferior
– as the exception to the norm.
16
Compare with Kierkegaard’s double-bound relationship in the self, which is first settled in the relation to the
other and god.
17
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, transl. by Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985)
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