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

transgressing the difference of the genders the possibility of love between the
genders emerges.
The acceptance of this irreducible sexual difference is the ethical task.
Only in this way it is possible to retain the sense of wonder vis-à-vis the other.
Irigaray develops this through the concept of love. It is with love as our
common horizon that we are able to meet the other as the other. The understanding
of sexual difference as the limit and the creation of the subject makes
love between two possible.
It is the Irigarayan concept of love that I examine more deeply in the
next paragraph.
Love/Relationship
One of the concepts that Irigaray has elaborated on as a possible way towards a
future society is the concept of love. The philosophy of Irigaray is a philosophy
of love as philosophy’s etymological meaning: love for wisdom. As such, she
takes up a theme that has been central to philosophy since antiquity and one
of the major themes in Christian philosophy. But her philosophy is not only a
philosophy about love, philosophy for Irigaray is love, as philosophy. As such,
she stays within her theme – being a part of it herself – rather than analysing
it from the outside. This is very much in the line with Irigaray’s philosophical
approach in general – mimesis/mimicry. 37 Love as a subject for philosophy has
been rather neglected in the last hundred years – and not only in philosophy:
also psychoanalysis is curiously silent about the theme. So turning back to the
theme of love – and especially philosophy as love – is also a break with the
tradition of philosophy in Irigaray’s time.
The question for Irigaray becomes the following: How do we love the
other without absorbing the other into our possession, or how can the other
still be the other in a relationship of love? The Irigarayan notion of love is
intertwined with her political ideas/philosophy, since the notion of love is
contesting the notion of possession.
The notion of love is twofold as it is the right to be other and a subversive
concept. The theme of love will also contest language as a frame for univocal
meanings since it will show how love cannot be given in a static frame of
meaning. The language of love is an open-ended constituting of meaning.
37
This is also part of the gendered epistemology. To Irigaray, approaching a theme from outside, as a subject to an
object, is masculine, whereas being part of the theme yourself is feminine.
43