Utopia: Call for a Now-Here Other
 Meaghan Roberts

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Ideology: Been There, Done That

The Poethic and Jorie Graham

Closure

Appendix

Richard Kearney, in his essay "Ethics and the Postmodern Imagination" shows that in the cultural paradigm of postmodernism, this phallic/ideological overdetermination has come to overdetermine the subject in relation to its own system of definitions and images such that these images "do not appear to derive from an identifiable human imagination" (39). Kearney urges that, in the wake of deconstruction and the onset of the "postmodern condition" in which the relation of men to their world has been emptied unto the play of simulacra, "we must insist on the possibility . . . of affirming some notion of properly human imagination. . . . A critical postmodern imagination which might . . . legitimately claim to be more human, paradoxically, than its humanist or onto-theological predecessors" (42-3). This more human imagination would say "here I/we stand:"

in the face of the postmodern logic of interminable deferment and infinite regress, of floating signifiers and vanishing signifieds, here and now I face an other who demands of me an ethical response. This call of the other to be heard, and to be respected for his/her otherness, is irreducible to the parodic play of empty imitations . . . : the ethical reality of the human right to exist as an other, the right to be recognized as a particular [subject] whose very otherness refuses to be reduced to an empty mimicry of sameness. (42-3)

In terms of the gendered subject-Other relation in Lacan, the feminine would no longer be the symbolically castrated mirror of the phallic subject, but a subject in her own right to refuse to be reduced to an empty mimicry of sameness. In this ideology two subjects approach each other through an ethical imagination. Kearney claims that the "first and most effective step in this direction is to begin to imagine the world as it could be otherwise . . . a poetics of the possible" (44). His is, in Ricoeur's definition, a utopic project, this new and ethical imagination where we affirm "a modality of creative activity capable of putting itself in question out of commitment to the otherness of the other" on the critical, poetical and hermeneutical levels in order to avoid some nostalgic return to--what (57)? Little could Kearney know in 1987 that Luce Irigaray had worked through such an ethical imagination in 1984 with regard to the genders/sexes in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (not translated into English until 1993).

Even more than in Kearney, in Irigaray we get a picture of listening hard, of living in relation to the other through one's own desire, instead of predicating one's desire on the imaginary condition of the Other. Irigaray develops this ethic critically and hermeneutically having assimilated her earlier work in her long running debate with Lacan. She proposes a mode of relations, or a dynamic of desire, between selves and others of both genders that allows agency and subjectivity for both and, I think, a postmodern ethic of relations for self to world through imagination and desire.

Irigaray's is an ethics of wonder which she adapts from Descartes. In this ethic, the subject or the same and the Other are irreducible to each other, their difference radical and dynamic. It is a dynamic, a kind of desire or tension, between man and woman, or subject and Other, same and other, in which "attraction, possession, consummation, disgust," appropriation and domination are replaced by a process in which one "beholds what it sees always as if for the first time, never taking hold of the other as its object. It does not try to seize, possess, or reduce this object, but leaves it subjective [grants that it is a subject], still free," to speak, write, act, define itself, go away, become another version of itself (Ethics 13). The Lacanian subject no longer predicates itself on the Other, but on the dynamic between itself and an Other subject. The argument behind this new formulation includes discussions both with and of (an interesting rhetorical move in itself) Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Merlot-Ponty and Levinas (all great representatives of the transcendental ego). If the legitimating discourse of ideology is philosophy, she's come to the right place. Her argument also attempts to work toward a logic of new spatial and temporal metaphors, and notions of self, which allow women subjectivity. It is one culmination of Irigaray's twenty year project. In Irigaray's ethic of wonder, there are two subjects, radically different from each other, they are in relation to and dependent on each other for their subjectivity and becoming (as she borrows becoming from Heidegger) because this is an inescapable condition. However, the ground on which each subject is predicated is no longer the Other, but the space and time between them and the process of relation they enter into: "creative activity capable of putting itself in question out of commitment to the otherness of the other." There is no fear of Lacanian or Freudian castration, consequently no penisneid, here, so there is no need for domination/appropriation/oppression because the interest is not in bolstering the identity of the subject. The interest is in exploring that identity reflexively, "contemplatively," in relation to an Other allowed to unfold itself at will, allowed to say, "I am not what you think I am, but look now, here, at this me," and a new phase in the dynamic begins, at least in theory, under the sign of respect instead of appropriation:

In a way, wonder and desire remain the spaces of freedom between the subject and the world. The substrate of predication? Of discourse? [Of subjective identity.] Which often reverts to itself rather than leave the intention and direction open to the other. Does speaking to the other, especially two-way predication, ever happen? Given our style of predication? In which the subject becomes the master of the world, of objects, of the other. In fact Descartes puts the predicate with the passions of the subject, whereby the object becomes no more than the result of the alchemy of the subject's passions [as in Lacan]. The attractive nature of the object is taken from it. . . .

Except in the experience of wonder? And perhaps in desire, which is already secondary for Descartes. Wonder being the moment of illumination--already and still contemplative--between the subject and the world.

"Wonder is a sudden surprise of the soul which causes it to apply itself to consider with attention the objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary. It is thus primarily caused by the impression we have in the brain which represents the object as rare, and as consequently worthy of much consideration; then afterwards by the movement of the spirits, which are disposed by this impression to tend with great force towards the part of the brain where it is, in order to fortify and conserve it there; as they are also disposed by it to pass thence into the muscles which serve to retain the organs of the senses in the same situation in which they are, so that it is still maintained by them, if it is by them that it has been formed" (Art. 70, 362).

Descartes situates his place of inscription in the brain. Is wonder determined by surprise, the suddenness of the impact of rare and extraordinary objects that come to inscribe themselves in a still untouched place in the brain? Which is tender and not yet hardened by past impressions [the enforced ideology of gender], themselves often troubled and incapable of being affected, imprinted, due to these repetitions. Wonder marks a new place, and the movement of the spirits tends toward this new place of inscription to strengthen and conserve it. . . . [Wonder] is the appetite for knowledge of who or what awakens our appetite. . . .

Wonder is not an enveloping [appropriation]. It corresponds to time, to space-time before and after that which can delimit, go round, encircle. It constitutes an opening prior to and following that which surrounds, enlaces. It is the passion of that which is already born and not yet reenveloped in love. Of that which is touched and moves toward and within attraction, without nostalgia for the first dwelling [womb, man's supposed innocence and wholeness of self]. Outside of repetition [of the death drive, of fear and of dominating modes of desire]. It is the passion of the first encounter. And of perpetual rebirth? An affect that would subsist among all forms or others irreducible to each other. That passion that inaugurates love and art. And thought. Is it the place of man's second birth? And of woman's? . . . This would be possible only when we are faithful to the perpetual newness of the self, the other, the world. (Ethics 76-82)

Her faithfulness "to the perceptual newness of the self, the other, the world," affords the "second birth," of subjects in an ethic of generosity and respect, of actively valuing otherness and its voices, its desires. The phallic subject and the feminine other become in this dynamic, both selves who needn't hunger for origin, envy the other, or fear castration, because the master-slave/lover-beloved dialectic in subjectivity and discourse (as defined by Lacan) no longer dominates the field of desire, or what Irigaray refers to as the "envelope" and the "interval."

Irigaray's ethic also begs revised notions of space-time, of interval, of time, for the self and the other. In her reading of Aristotle's Physics iv, uncovers the possibility of this other, utopic space-time. Her redefinition of the envelope, a metaphor developed from Aristotle's problems with the notion of place as place and from the actions of the womb, calls the envelope that which "neither forms a part of its contents nor is it bigger than the interval of extension of the body, but equal to it; for the extremities of things in contact are joined" (47). This notion of the envelope means that between any self and other there is an interval, a distance comprised of their field of desires through which each contemplates the other in its own becoming, shares in that becoming but does not claim that becoming as its own. The envelope is the limit of the distance, of the place, expandable to contain any interval, any amount of distance. The space which contains the self and the other is not so limited that one must predicate its subjectivity or its becoming on some oppressive/restrictive definition of the other. There is, in other words, enough; scarcity is not the economic principle here. What "occupies or designates the place of "interval" is desire:

Giving it a permanent definition would amount to suppressing it as desire. Desire demands a sense of attraction: a change in the interval, the displacement of the subject or of the object in their relations of nearness or distance.

The transition to new age comes at the same time as a change in the economy of desire. A new age signifies a different relation between:

-- man and god(s)
-- man and man
-- man and world
-- man and woman.

Our age, which is often thought to be one in which the problematic of desire has been brought forward, frequently theorizes this desire on the basis of some moment of tension, or a moment in history, where as desire ought to be thought of as a changing dynamic whose outlines can be described in the past, sometimes in the present, but never definitively predicted. (8; emphasis mine)

Of Aristotle, and Lacan's phallic signifier of subjectivity (a spectre implied when not addressed in Irigaray's work), Irigaray characterizes that ideology and moves beyond it this way:

As man re-creates woman from the outside, from inside-outside, he re-places himself outside, as an actor outside, a creator outside [estranged]. By actively putting himself outside [as transcendent ego or determining subject], he re-sculpts a body for himself. By using a tool? He reconstructs his own body as a result of engendering the other. By using his hand, his penis--which is not merely a tool of pleasure, but a truly useful tool of alliance, incarnation, creation.

Woman, insofar as she is a container, in never a closed one. Place is never closed. The boundaries touch against one another while still remaining open. . . .

An alchemist of the sexual and one who tries to keep the sexual away from repetition, degradation. Attempts to keep it and sublimate it. Between. In the interval of time, of times. Weaving the veil of time, the fabric of time, time with space, time in space. Between past and future, future and past, place in place. Invisible. Its vessel? Its container? The soul of the soul? . . .

Is there no part that destroys another? . . . How fitting if the two-way journeys from the one to the other became places for enveloping. If the portions of place traversed in order to move away and then back were to become space-times that mutually recovered and were not eliminated, annihilated, used up to provide fuel for other kinds of locomotion, or transformed into voids, separations, rather than bridges. Between the one and the other, there should be mutual enveloping in movement . . . for the one an the other move around within a whole. and often the one and the other destroy the place of the other, believing in this way to have the whole. . . .

The whole in fact does change place but moves in a circle. . . . And love between man and woman likewise, had it not been brutally cut in two [See Plato, Symposium]. They were cut apart, but endlessly each seeks the other to find the lost half and embrace once more. Unless the one or the other claims to be the whole [masculine subject of phallogocentric discourse] ? And constructs his world into a closed circle. Total? Closed off to the other. And convinced that there is no access to outside except by opening up a wound. Having no part in the construction of love, of beauty, or the world.

Could it be that anything that moves in a circle moves in relation to another? In two directions? With a place of attraction. A place of place. (Ethics 51-5)

This in two directions, the possibility of an ever changing dynamic of two-way predication and desire is what Irigaray is after on the intersubjective level of relation, as well as of the self's relation to world. It is the relation Kearney attempts without specific consideration of gender. His ethic is one in which the other is respected and heard in its otherness, where imagination is no longer a matter of determination, while Irigaray goes a further step to imagining the kind of space-time in which this relation of self to other may not only respect otherness, but also invite the self and the other to aid each other in their own journeys of becoming. There need be no closed circle of totality, of the inclusion of the same and the exclusion of difference.

The one values the other's differences is such a way that overdetermination becomes unnecessary in a "poetics of the possible": where by virtue of its attention to difference and possibility, continual difference in becoming, there is no closure or need to delimit territory, no need to subjugate. Neither the one nor the other is perceived as in a condition of lack, so both the one and the other have authority and power in their own becoming. Irigaray's space-time and ethic of wonder is a utopia in a full sense, a place of place that is unlocated, unlimited, expandable, and demands an ethic of respect; it is an attempt on the intersubjective level framed as the sexual/love relation to offer a cure for the pathology of ideology--no assumption about the other is made. The one remains contemplative, attentive, toward the other who/which is continually rare and extraordinary: no one has to hold still on pain of upsetting the precarious balance of the other subject. Theorizing the effects of such an ethic on the economic and political levels, much less practicing such an ethic, remains to be thought/done; but on the imaginary levels of the subject and discourse we now have a theory for this ethic, and in the work of some contemporary poets, a vision and a version of what this poethic may choose to look like.