Building a New World. PDF
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Building a New World Palgrave Studies in Postmetaphysical Thought Series Editors: Michael Marder and Santiago Zabala This book series aims to respond to what remains of thinking and what remains to be thought after the ‘end of metaphysics’. How to proceed philosophically without the familiar support structures of metaphysical categories: Ideas, God, Spirit, Substance, Thing, or Subject? How to inherit the mixed legacies of these jaded philosophical keywords ‘after’ the depletion of all metaphysical possibili- ties? And what is the fate of thinking – philosophical and extra-philosophical – in the twenty-first century? Titles include: BEING SHAKEN: Ontology and the Event Michael Marder and Santiago Zabala (editors) Palgrave Studies in Postmetaphysical Thought Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–137–32873–1 (hardcover) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Building a New World Luce Irigaray: Teaching II Edited by Luce Irigaray National Centre for Scientifi c Research, Paris, France and Michael Marder IKERBASQUE Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain Selection and editorial matter © Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder 2015 Individual chapters © respective authors 2015 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-45301-3 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-49759-1 ISBN 978-1-137-45302-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137453020 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Contents Preface and Acknowledgements vii Notes on the Contributors xiii Part I P hilosophy: Birth or Rebirth through Cultivating Nature and Sexuate Intersubjectivity 1 A Philosophy Faithful to Happiness 3 Lucia Del Gatto 2 F inding/Founding Our Place: Thinking Luce Irigaray’s Ontology and Ethics of Sexuate Difference as a Relational Limit 15 Emma R. Jones 3 Becoming Two: This Existence Which Is Not One 31 Emily Anne Parker 4 Intersubjectivity and ren: A Cross-Cultural Encounter 44 Gu Keping 5 C ultivating Difference with Luce Irigaray’s Between East and West 58 Laura Roberts 6 E nabling Education: Rethinking the Teacher–Student Relationship through Luce Irigaray’s Ethics of Difference 77 Tomoka Toraiwa Part II T heology and Spirituality: Reading Sacred Texts and Traditions with a Feminine Belief 7 Maria Redux: Incarnational Readings of Sacred History 95 Abigail Rine 8 S ensible Transcendental: Recovering the Flesh and Spirit of Our Mother(s) 108 Zeena Elton 9 G odly Virtues: Ethical Implications of Our Conception of the Divine 126 Elizabeth Lee 10 Language and Love in an Age of Terror 141 Lisa Watrous v vi Contents Part III A rt: Paths of Women towards Embodying Themselves 11 T owards a Culture of the Feminine: The Phenomenon of the Princess-Ballerina in Western Culture 155 Caroline O’Brien 12 F rom Silence to Breath: An Irigarayan Study of the Representation of Motherhood in Modern Drama 167 Yan Liu 13 B eing Passive/Passive Being: Passivity as Self-Expression in Gothic Literature 182 Dana Wight 14 F emininity and Subversive Mimicry in Edward Albee’s Plays and Beyond 195 Mona Hoorvash Part IV P olitics: Building a New World Instead of Dwelling on Terrorism 15 T he Mimesis that Was Not One: Femininity as Camouflage in the Armed Struggle in West Germany 209 Katharina Karcher 16 E mbodying Terror: Reading Terrorism with Luce Irigaray 222 Liz Sage 17 B eing Two in the World: The Bridge Between Sexuate Difference and Cultural Difference in the Work of Luce Irigaray 237 Marita Ryan Part V Contributions of Luce Irigaray 18 Ethical Gestures Towards the Other 253 19 Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us 272 20 Remembering Humanity 284 Afterword – Cultivating Natural Belonging: Luce Irigaray’s Water Lily Michael Marder 297 Index 315 Prefaceand Acknowledgements Since 2003 I have held a one-week seminar with researchers doing their PhD on my work. This way, they have the opportunity to receive personal teaching from me and to exchange ideas, methods and experiences amongst themselves. The seminar has been hosted by the University of Nottingham during the first three years, and then, in suc- cessive years, by the University of Liverpool; Queen Mary University of London; Goodenough College, London; the University of Nottingham; the University of the West of England/the University of Bristol (as co-hosts); and the University of Bristol. The framework of the seminar is as follows: a group of, at most, 15 researchers stay one week on campus. The timetable includes a presen- tation by each of them on the aspect of their PhD which most focuses on my work, the discussion of this presentation by the group, my own comments and answers to the questions asked by each one, and also sessions devoted to an explanation of some keywords or topics chosen by the participants. Personal meetings with me are organized on the last day. The participants pay for their travel, but receive, at least in part, hospitality from the university. The language of the seminars is English. The researchers who participate in the seminar come from various regions of the world and belong to different cultures, traditions and fields of research. Apart from the fact that they are all doing their PhDs in relation to the thought of Luce Irigaray, they mostly gather together by chance. However, their interests and themes of research have generally something in common that reflects the current preoccupations of people around the world. Thus the concerns appearing in the first volume Luce Irigaray: Teaching (edited by Luce Irigaray with Mary Green, London and New York: Continuum, 2008), which gathered the contributions of the researchers in the first three years, are not the same as those that are manifested in this second volume, in which it is possible to note, beyond the presence of politics (notably with regard to terrorism), that many texts focus on constructing interrelations between sexes and genera- tions, but also between countries, cultures and traditions. If the critical aspect remains at work in almost all texts, it is more and more accom- panied with positive proposals at several levels: reading, behaviour, strategy, education, intercultural solutions, political alternatives, etc. vii viii Preface and Acknowledgements Perhaps we have reached a crucial phase in which young people feel the need to begin constructing a new world without stopping at criticizing. They undertake this task with intelligence, heart, open-mindedness and the desire for collaborating with one another. So much so that a seminar that assembles each year between ten and fifteen researchers proves to be a laboratory in which step by step a new world starts to be elaborated. In such a work, European researchers, but also researchers coming from China, Japan, Australia, Iran, Pakistan, South Africa and New Zealand, are involved, beginning with practising a mutual respect and hospitality during the week of the seminar. Another approach which is emerging is the significance of a return to and a cultivation of nature in order to found a new way of thinking. This requires going back to the beginning of the Western tradition and discovering how a certain use of language, especially as neutral and abstractly universal, has cut us off from our living roots and deprived us of growing with happiness thanks to dialogue and love, something that needs another ethics taking into account our global beings with their potential of sensitivity and sensuousness (see the chapter by Lucia Del Gatto). Human life cannot remain only at a natural level; and the most crucial gesture in order to pass from nature to humanity can happen thanks to our sexuate belonging; indeed, if sexuation inscribes forms in matter itself and is productive of forms, it also engenders an appropriate place for each, bringing forth relational limits that allow for coexist- ence between two differently sexuate subjects as the basis of an ethics concerning a human way to relate to one another while finding, in a relation that is respectful of difference, a source of becoming for each and of a fecund sharing (see Emma R. Jones). If that chapter started with Aristotle again, in order to question Western metaphysics, the next one approaches the issue of birth and becoming, starting from the work of Nietzsche, and grants a more crucial part to an artistic creativity than to a natural sexuate flowering; birth and becoming, then, refer to the con- quest of oneself as other, especially as a woman, beyond all the captures and raptures in a world built on sameness by a unique masculine subject, and to the elaboration of a shareable culture in which truth can no longer be separated from art and a bodily presence (see Emily Anne Parker). A return to nature is also a crucial element in order to compare Western and Eastern traditions. Western cultures generally intend to dominate nature and submit it to mind and supra-sensitive values, whereas Eastern cultures are based on respect for nature, and this explains why consid- eration for parents and ancestry represents the basis and the model of a virtuous relational life, which does not yet take into account Preface and Acknowledgements ix sexuate belonging as a crucial part of natural human identity, as is obvi- ous in the Confucian conception of ren; hence the interest in collaborat- ing on the cultivation of an intersubjectivity that cares about sexuate difference as a cross-cultural task (see Gu Keping). What can be Western suspicious reaction, notably in academic circles, regarding building bridges between East and West, this can nevertheless bring to both cul- tures elements in order to enter another epoch of human evolution; fur- thermore, these intercultural bridges can serve as a model towards the recognition of other cultural differences, all the more so since breathing and sexuate difference provide for a passage between nature and culture that is universal and can contribute towards the evolution of humanity at a world level (see Laura Roberts). All of this calls for changes in edu- cation, and it is not by chance that it is from the East that the proposal for promoting a return to the self comes, as well as the call for the rec- ognition of the otherness of the other as the way to develop the global being of students and make them capable of reaching an autonomy which does not prevent them from entering into dialogue with various others towards a continuous becoming; Western experts, for their part, rather reflect on the modifications of programmes of knowledge with- out considering sufficiently the p reservation of a particular nature and inner growing (see Tomoka Toraiwa). Reading sacred texts and traditions needs a capability to maintain a respectful distance regarding them in order not to lapse into a mere destructive criticism. Far from contenting themselves with such a stage, all the texts that are gathered together in Part II, which is devoted to a more religious aspect, show a will to open up new spiritual horizons, especially, but not only, for women. They bear witness to a desire to assert personal positions without either submission or rejection. Instead, the matter is of rereading the sacred texts, while paying more careful attention to the incarnation of the divine with regard to both the divine figures, especially the feminine ones, and the way in which a woman can contribute towards her own becoming divine; that is, of interpret- ing religious history in order to work towards its, and our, evolution here and now (see Abigail Rine). A text also questions the remnants of ancient feminine spiritual traditions to recover a path towards a spiritual sharing between daughter and mother and an interpretation of virginity that goes beyond its reduction to a mere bodily and natural aspect, and so makes possible a transcendental relation to the other without falling back into supra-sensitive ideals or idolatry (see Zeena Elton). Another way to open up one’s own spiritual path while escaping mere criticism is to make comparisons between theologians of different churches, what
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