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

The question becomes a question of recognising the limits to one’s
self. 18 This means that the other is not what is limiting us as such, but through
the other we recognise our own limitations. How to love the other without
cannibalising the other, or how to let the other be the other subject for one’s
self as a subject becomes the question for the first person (I/we).
By having a relation to the other that is not based on the appropriation
of the other, or on cannibalising the other by making it the same, but rather
on respecting the otherness of the other, we at the same time recognise limits
to ourselves. This limitation, however, must not be understood as a lack, as
something negative (as in Freudian castration). Rather, it is this very limitation
(which is sexual difference) that ensures a living relationship to the world.
When we appropriate the other, it is also a killing of the other. As Irigaray puts
it: “We want to have the entire world in our head, sometimes the entire world
in our heart. We do not see that this gesture transforms the life of the world
into something finished, dead, because the world thus loses its own life, a life
always foreign to us, exterior to us, other than us.” 19
The otherness of the other in contrast creates the mystery that makes
the appreciation of art, nature and beauty possible in the first place – and also
that which makes love possible. Irigaray suggests that we should break with
the idea of a univocal meaning (master signifier). The two lips are that which
is open and closed at the same time (l’entrouvert 20 ) – an example of elusive
borders. And the mucous (le muqueux) also suggests that which is not stable,
that which is neither totally fluid nor totally solid – that is, the non-fixed, nonerected.
21 This suggests a sort of neither-nor-position, where the feminine (as
understood through the female anatomy) is that which is neither completely
closed nor complete solid, neither completely open nor completely liquid. This
in-between-position is a central metaphor for Irigaray, which is understood
both as specifically feminine and as the salvation for both sexes. 22 This is sexual
difference and not the phallus as suggested by the Lacanian school.
The feminine opens up the possibility of a new masculine – which is
not one, but makes the two in relation with the feminine. This critique’s spearhead
strikes, on a more general level within Philosophy, the conflation in mo-
18
Cf. Lilian Munk Rösing, Kønnets katekismus, (Frederiksberg: Roskilde Universitetsforlag, 2005),: 35-36
19
Luce Irigaray, Between East and West - From Singularity to Community (New Delhi: New Age Books, 2002), 121-122
20
When it is meant in the context of the female morphology, it is always used as entrouvert, just enough open that it
is not closed – rather than Ouvert meaning open.
21
Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (London & New York: Continuum, 2004), 23-4
22
Ibid., 13
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