Journal of Women’s of Intercultural Leadership
Vol. 2 2012
Saint Mary’s College
Center for Women’s Intercultural Leadership
Living Difference(s): Dialogue as Spiritual Practice
Phyllis Kaminski, Ph.D.
Professor of Religious Studies
Saint Mary’s College
Agreeing with philosopher Luce Irigaray that “[t]o pursue human becoming to its
divine fulfillment” is “the spiritual task most adapted to our age,” this essay
explores her approach to dialogue as a spiritual practice within that task. Drawing
on Irigaray’s most recent texts, two questions are posed to unfold the challenge
and risk involved in dialogue: (1) What does it take to become attentively present
to another? (2) Why is Irigaray’s dialectical approach to the relationship between
words and flesh presence necessary to dialogue as a transformative spiritual
practice? Such dialogue is necessarily personal and leads to social commitments,
but it is not sufficient to the transformation of our social, religious, and cultural
worlds.
"A dialogue always ought to take place between two people ... who question themselves in
order to guide one another on the path towards coming closer in respect for their
differences and transcendences. Who also question how they could create between them a
shareable world: a truth, an art, an ethics and a politics, which transcend each one but which
they could both share."
-Luce Irigaray, Conversations
Words touch, and conversations, words shared with another, have the power to transform,
to change minds and hearts and behaviors. Sustained dialogue for over two decades with the
work of Luce Irigaray and countless conversations with spiritual seekers young and old have
radically shaped my understanding of spiritual being and becoming.
Because I agree with Irigaray that "[t]o pursue human becoming to its divine fulfillment"
is "the spiritual task most adapted to our age" (Key Writings 186), in this essay I focus on
dialogue as opening possibilities within that spiritual task. Drawing on texts that embody and
reflect the dialogic quality of Luce Irigaray's philosophical project, particularly selections from
Conversations, Teaching, and Sharing the World, I will show that Irigaray's account of attentive
incarnational presence advances her goal of "being and sharing together with respect to all our
differences" (Teaching x). Though I am convinced that the kind of dialogue Irigaray proposes is
a necessary spiritual discipline, it is not sufficient to bring about the radical transformation of
consciousness or the "oeuvre of justice and culture" (I Love To You 14) that she desires.
After briefly describing Irigarayan dialogue, I will explore two questions in order to
unfold the complexities of Irigaray's understanding of difference and its relation to human
becoming. First, what is involved in becoming attentively present to an other? Second, why is the
dialectical relationship between words and flesh, so central to Irigaray, necessary to that
presence? These indispensable aspects of dialogue yield related spiritual practices that aim at
radical transformation of consciousness and lead to personal and social commitments beyond the
boundaries of a single culture or tradition.
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Irigarayan Dialogue
For Luce Irigaray dialogue is more than a conversation that shares information or social
niceties. A dialogue is an exchange of words between at least two people that requires their
bodied presence. It entails mutual self-expression, shared guidance, intentional creation, and a
space of welcome. Sharing in this way opens each to the other and can make a world of
difference.
As an expression of human becoming, dialogic exchange draws together levels of
discourse which may be philosophical, religious, psychoanalytic, linguistic, as well as literary.
Thus words matter, but dialogue involves a reciprocal relation that cannot be expressed in words
alone. Nor can it be determined solely by one's present self-awareness or worldview. In
multivalent ways, Irigarayan dialogue aims at opening and creating a threshold in which one can
attend to, accept, and welcome the other who is different. The exchange must involve a desire to
communicate one's whole self and a sharing of silence, words, and gestures.
Neither the presence nor the speaking required for dialogue can be fully understood apart
from Irigaray's commitment to sexuate difference and embodied desire. Both difference and
desire arise from and lead to transcendent human realities and both advance Irigaray's hope:
Not merely an individual becoming in a horizon already defined by a culture, a
language, a people. But a human becoming that calls into question what has
already happened to humanity, and that allows and clears the way for new
perspectives on Being, with new obligations and possibilities for human
blossoming. (Sharing the World 23)
Given the scope of Irigaray's ever-evolving thought and her use of traditional terms in
untraditional ways, I cannot address or explain all of the issues her project raises. However, to
readers unfamiliar with Irigaray, I will introduce what she means by sexuate difference and its
relation to desire. Then, by focusing on attentive presence to another and on the dialectical
relation between words and flesh, I will show that dialogue as an incarnational spiritual practice
contributes positively to the transformation of inter-religious and intercultural relations.
Difference and Desire
Luce Irigaray has long explored the cultivation of presence in difference. As Margaret
Whitford demonstrates, her position hinges on a fundamental bi-polarity, the dimorphism of the
sexes. Irigaray's texts are filled with paired terms (e.g. movement/rigidity, creation/destruction,
symbolic/imaginary) that are articulated to the sexual pair, masculine and feminine. Yet, there is
not a simple one-to-one correspondence. If the difference between male and female is considered
a "natural" given, the difference is also a cultural construction and as such must be constantly
reconstructed and recultivated. Irigaray shifts back and forth between her paired terms and
traditional dichotomous dualisms. In addition, Whitford shows how Irigaray's pairs relate in
multiple and complex ways to an underlying pair, life and death, in Freudian terms, eros and
thanatos (382). Irigaray's most recent texts build on these themes and complicate them even
more. She speculates that we should recognize and cultivate relations of sexual difference
because they will contribute to life-giving relations between those of different cultures, races,
and traditions. Thus, attentive presence to an other requires a profound reconsideration of
difference.
In her present work, Irigaray holds firmly to the connection that grounds the irreducible
universal of sexual difference. Human being and becoming still involve, as she says to Gillian
Howie, "a question of relational identity that precisely realizes the original connection between
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body and culture" (Conversations 77). That connection happens at birth and is always more than
physical. In her view, the basic original givens of one's gender (genre) in relation to the mother's
body "determine a psychic and cultural identity peculiar to each sex, whatever could be the
differences between a man and a woman” (Conversations 77). Moreover, if sexual difference is
a given, it is always read according to the social, cultural, and religious systems into which we
are born.
Irigaray rejects the assumption that nature and culture are separate. Instead she speaks of
la culture de la nature, and English translations must grapple with the dual meaning of the
French. Irigaray intends both cultivation and culture as she labors to move beyond dominant
constructions of social relations, relations with the environment, and relations with
transcendence. She sees any neutral or inclusive universal understanding of these terms arising
from western masculine subjectivity. The challenge is to transform both masculine and feminine
subjectivities in order to create the possibility of intersubjective relations that recognize
difference. That difference is objective and marked in the body, but it is more than physical and
it transcends the merely natural. Karen Burke aptly summarizes Irigaray's position: "She uses
'cultivation' to refer to our active and practical engagement with and development of the natural,
and 'culture' to indicate the result of collective processes of cultivation, and also a historical
stage. She proposes both the cultivation of life and a culture of life" (Teaching 195).
When Irigaray speaks of the cultivation of sexuate identities, she intends a difference that
includes the two sexes without reverting to the domination of one by the other. She continues to
call for the emergence of feminine subjectivity and for re-reading the way different cultures
organize relations between the sexes genealogically, civilly, and religiously. For all the advances
of technology and globalization, we do not all live in the same world. Irigaray hopes that men
and women in all their natural and cultural complexity come to recognize the other in all his or
her difference(s):
The other is no longer a sort of object towards which I at best practice tolerance,
hospitality, moral or religious duties and so on. The other now represents another
world with a specific organization and truth with whom I have to come to terms to
be faithful to humanity. (Conversations 132)
Sexuate difference, then, is natural and cultural. It shapes and is shaped by intimate relations and
social structures.
Thus, Irigarayan sexuate difference cannot be equated with traditional masculinefeminine differences or, for Catholics, with more recent papal versions of sexual
complementarity. Fidelity to one's gender, in Irigaray's philosophy "represents a destination to
the other more than it represents a biological destiny" (To Be Two 33). Her culture of life places
creative, not simply procreative, love at the center. Desire is always embodied and human sexual
desire is always already spiritual. Desire for the other transforms religious and cultural
expectations around procreation so that engendering a child cannot be separated from
engendering the natural and spiritual place into which she or he will be welcomed.
Irigaray's challenge to gendered being as it currently exists is that we recognize our limits
and welcome the mystery of human being in all its diversity. As early as I Love to You, Irigaray
spoke of the personal, social, and spiritual implications of difference:
It is respect for the other whom I will never be, who is transcendent to me and to
whom I am transcendent. Neither simple nature nor common spirit above nature,
this transcendence exists in the difference of body and culture that continues to
nourish our energy, its movement, its generation and its creation. (104)
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I suggest that Irigaray's understanding of desire to be and become with another furthers
theologian James Nelson's faith in the continuing incarnation of God in our bodies as instruments
of communion and words of love (Embodiment 35).
Becoming Attentively Present to an Other
Having sketched background necessary to understand Irigaray's larger project, I turn now
to my first question concerning dialogue. What is involved in becoming attentively present to
another?
For Irigaray, human movement toward divine fulfillment is possible only when both
women and men are "autonomous with respect to the mother and the father, to the lover, to the
child, to the others in general, women and men" (Key Writings 165). Drawing on Catholic
Christian language, Irigaray suggests that human becoming involves "a passage from nature to
grace," a passage that while relational must always begin within an individual subject: "Nobody
can accomplish this process in my place, for me" (165). I see her way of defining adult women
and men in terms of human becoming to divine fulfillment as calling for radical incarnational
presence. Human autonomy takes into account from the beginning "body and spirit or soul
without separating them" but enters "a really different culture based on the relation between two
subjects not subjected to one another" (Conversations 78). Like the spiritual virginity that will
give women an interiority and desire of their own, a culture of dialogue that fosters relations
between "two adults who are not two 'one(s)'" does not yet exist (Sharing the World 116). The
creation of such a culture requires practice and begins with at least two subjects who,
recognizing their difference(s), desire to communicate with each other.
As stated previously, if both relational identity and autonomy are necessary to dialogue,
desire to communicate builds openings, thresholds where bodied persons can meet, attend to,
accept, and welcome each other without losing themselves (Sharing 9). Each subject's attentive
presence to the other develops within dynamic relations embodied dialectically. However, the
Irigarayan dialectical method is not, like Hegel's, "at the service of the reassumption (Aufhebung)
of all singularity into an absolute objectivity to be shared by any subject" (Why Different 156;
Conversations 76). Irigaray's use of the dialectic always functions between at least two different
subjects to maintain their duality and the difference of their worlds. Her goal is to open "a path"
between differently bodied subjects in respect of their singularity.
Thus, sexuate subjectivity is "a real and concrete difference that is, as such, a universal
which cannot be overcome without abolishing the universal itself" (Conversations 76). In
spiritual language, Irigaray speaks of an "asceticism of the negative" (I Love to You 13). She
intends a life-long challenge that "maintains real and living the dialegomai between
subjectivities which, beyond appearing to self and to the other, must speak to one another in
order to be and to become self, in order to elaborate a culture resulting from the spiritual
fecundity of subjective differences" (Why Different 156-157).
The practice of dialogue, a sharing of words that can transform participants as well as the
worlds they share, requires bodied presence and in Christian terms, self-love and love of
neighbor. Participants must cultivate fidelity to incarnation according to their gender. In our
present economy of relations, the challenge of cultivating such presence, with its requirement of
self-affection and respect for the insuperable difference of the other, differs for men and women.
No matter how one copes with the difficulties in Irigaray's understanding of sexuate
subjectivities, the bottom line is that "self-affection" needs to be two, because the cultivation of
self-affection is "what allows for the preservation and becoming of attraction and desire between
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the two by saving the difference between the two" (Teaching 228). In dialogue with another, love
of self (self-affection) fosters the becoming of each one because the love goes back and forth.
In order to grow in this way, both men and women need to move beyond present cultural
horizons. Men learn a loving desire that respects the limits of their gender and that does not
appropriate the desires of others. Women develop their aptitudes to cultivate desires of their own
and to care for others without sacrificing themselves. This dynamic love of self and other in
dialogue affects energy, what Liz Grosz calls “the force of sexual difference” (Time Travels
168). Such an exchange, intensely pleasurable in the most intimate relations, supports and
sustains over time collaborative social projects that do not reduce the participants to groups of
ones and the recipients as "any bodies" in need (To Be Two 39). Dialogue participants are not
interchangeable nor are they simply determined by their worlds. The rich reality of presence,
each to the other, transforms all subjects who enter into creative communication.
A New Space for Listening and Meeting
Cultivation of self-affection and attentiveness to oneself and to an other call not only for
desire to meet the other but also willingness to risk discovering new paths to and with the other.
To think through the move forward, Irigaray draws on her professional practice as a
psychoanalyst and her personal practice of yoga to integrate the cultivation of silence, breathing,
and speech.
In the setting of psychoanalytic therapy, silence, space, and the asceticism of the
negative with its recognition of limits and embodied transcendence work together to foster
attentive presence to one's self and to the other. This setting gives Irigaray's requirement of
silence as a condition of dialogue its multivalent import. In classical analysis, the patient lies on a
couch in a supine position that deprives her of the power to produce normally directed/rational
speech (discours sensé). The analyst sits behind and is thus not visible to the patient. Given the
position of their respective bodies, they meet in a structure of dependence and power. I am not
sure how Irigaray actually conducts her practice, but I suspect that she respects the space
between analyst and analysand because it reframes the speaking subject. She has also moved
beyond the traditional role of the analyst. As she says to Michael Stone, the practice of yoga
reinforces her conviction that "a cure does not consist in finding appropriate words to interpret a
past thanks to a transference onto the psychoanalyst" (Conversations 51). If something healing
and transformative can be produced, it is because the speaker, a sexed subject, freely associates
in articulating both pain and desire. The listener, also an embodied sexed subject, takes in the
communication without reference to a "pre-scripted text" (Parler n'est jamais neutre 246; cited
in Hirsh 294). The point of the exchange is creative communication, the production of new
meaning.
Elizabeth Hirsh reminds us that Irigaray holds to Freud's prescription of analytic listening
as "evenly hovering attention" or "calm, quiet attentiveness" (292). In I Love to You, Irigaray
calls for that same inner stance on the part of those who would love, because attentive silence
creates a space where we learn to love "to" the other as other (116). I suggest that just as the
analyst's actively receptive attention frees energy for the analyzed to create a future different
from the past, the discipline of silence opens lovers to the possibility of hearing "something new,
as yet unknown ... the manifestation of an intention, of human and spiritual development" (I Love
to You 116). In the wider and varied context of dialogic encounters, silence is "the condition for a
possible respect for myself and for the other within our respective limits" (117). Participants who
enter into the silent space-time of listening discover that their already existing worlds are not
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complete and that future directions are not wholly determined by the past. This double dialectic
of listening and shared silence thus prepares a way for the "not-yet-coded," for "the revelation of
a truth that has yet to manifest itself" (117).
Irigaray draws on the incarnational dynamics of divine human becoming and the spiritual
dynamics of conscious breathing, both of which she reads as ways of engaging others in all their
difference(s) so together they can construct a shareable world (Sharing 136). She realizes that
the desire to create new horizons in this way entails hardship (Sharing 98). Double listening
involves bodied subjects who, in their manner of gathering and concentrating within themselves,
learn to perceive the invisible real in the other without leaving themselves. But the greater
challenge is to move beyond the contemplative moment to an exchange that aims at "a possible
coexistence between two worlds, two cultures, two truths, two places or spaces, two times"
(Teaching 236).
What might this mean concretely? Within any dialogue, the shared silence of attentive,
incarnational presence destabilizes approaches to difference as already fixed and determined.
Choosing silence enables women and those who are "other" in the present economy to stand in
the already existing world exceeding boundaries and definitions imposed on them. Their silent
presence says that the world is incomplete/unfinished, and their active receptivity to the
unknown connects the personal and social dimensions of their becoming. Choosing silence for
men and those in positions of power requires self-denial. Dominant subjects must recognize their
limits, the limits of their gendered position, and "renounce mastering the whole" (Sharing 6).
Each "subjectivity" then comes to "a source of words foreign to that in which it dwells -- thus not
a space opened by a language that is already shared, but a horizon which opens beyond its limits"
(Sharing 6). The practice of silence in dialogue thus grounds attentive presence for all involved
in ways that can foster freedom and empower resistance, both of which are necessary in any
attempt to create a future not determined by the past.
From her practice of yoga, Irigaray knows the spiritual power of silence embodied in a
living relationship with breathing and speaking: "There is no longer a question of dividing spirit
and body, the one having to lay down the law on the other, but of transforming a vital energy
into a spiritual energy at the service of breathing, of loving, of listening, of speaking, and of
thinking" (Conversations 80). In her conversation with Michael Stone, Luce Irigaray focuses on
the corporeal experience of the practitioner of yoga. As breathing becomes more subtle, it can
awaken diverse centers of energy and lead to the kind of experience that Irigaray describes as
having transformed her way of thinking. In response to Stone's question about the categories of
subject and object, she speaks of the transcendent mystery of the human other, re-affirming that
it is not suitable to speak of overcoming the categories of subject-object.i In her worldview, these
are not categories--but "diverse reals" (Conversations 41). If dialogue involves at least two who
recognize "real" difference(s), then in order to create a culture of dialogue, the question becomes
how to move beyond shared silence and breath, into a speaking in which the two subjects share
living words and unite their energies without losing themselves or destroying themselves or the
other.
The Risk of Dialogue: Living Bodies, Life-Giving Words
Not surprisingly, an Irigrayan response to that question involves doubles--not just a
double listening--to oneself and to the other--but also a double relationship with language, our
own and that of the other. Breathing, silent listening, and speaking with another remain carnal
even as they become more consciously spiritual. While earlier Irigaray analyzed the dynamic
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Living Difference(s)
interplay of words and bodies as a double dialectic within women and between women and men,
she now speaks of a double dialectic within each subject and a triple dialectic--created by them.
Sharing the World expresses Luce Irigaray's creative approach to "a being with the other that
does not amount to a sharing of the same in the Same" (17). What matters most from my
perspective is the risk inherent in this "between" space of listening to and speaking difference.
The results are not predictable.
In the present economy, dialogue often privileges the words of one subject. Irigaray
challenges us to risk moving beyond our present culture and language and worldview. Meeting
in dialogue involves entering into a new space, one which challenges us to remain faithful to
ourselves yet to move out of our habitual linguistic and cultural dwellings. We are constrained by
our own words, the language in which we dwell; we are also constrained by the words that the
other addresses to us, words which come from that person's relation to the world. That constraint
also stretches us. If the first word we have to offer to another is "our capacity and acceptance of
being silent," the next step is to "give an indication concerning [our] ability to relinquish the
meaning organized according to [our] signs and rules alone" (Sharing 18). This act of
renunciation involves both decision and acceptance as we move to the space of meeting, a space
that transcends us and yet also brings us to a deeper fidelity to our own incarnation and a graced
respect for the incarnate presence of the other.
If I mix philosophical, linguistic, and theological metaphors here, it is because I find
Irigaray often doing so in her approaches to dialegomai. I also find that the risks she has taken in
learning to speak and write in new languages not only create a new relationship to her own
mother tongue and her tradition but also invite those of us who dialogue with her to share in our
own dance of dialectical dialogue within, across, and beyond habitual boundaries. In this paper I
cannot examine the varied instances of human meeting that occur throughout Irigaray's texts. I
suggest, however, that we can respect her studies of gendered linguistic patterns, witness her
strained attempts to speak to those who exclude philosophy and politics in the feminine, enjoy
her expressions of intimate sexual encounters, share her concerns for the future of our world,
laugh freely at her playful irony, and critique all of these in our own way.
Let me offer two feminist theological insights into the relationship of body and word
within dialogue as a vital spiritual practice. First I note the way Irigaray's translation of logos
opens a transformative path within the Christian tradition. Second I will mention how her
dialectical approach to incarnation can create new modes of expression within and beyond
religious tradition(s).
In her conversation with Margaret Miles and Laine Harrington, Luce Irigaray sidesteps
their critical questions about feminist discourse and the Christian theological tradition. While I
wish there had been more self-questioning by Irigaray in that interchange, I find dialogic
possibilities in the way she responds to their questions about her uses of logos, Verbe, and
parole, in her essay on "The Redemption of Women." (Souffle 185-208; Key Writings 150-164).
Besides simply responding that she used the Jerusalem Bible's translation of Logos for John 1:14,
she indicates that she chose parole so that the living connection with the speaker not be lost in
translation. In her words, parole "expresses a present actualization of meaning of which the
speaker takes charge" in addressing someone (Conversations 93). Speaking renders the word
flesh, not discourse or logos. Furthermore, in speaking we use breath so that meaning remains a
living word in the "passing on of breathing itself" (Conversations 93).
In Irigaray's practice of dialogue (as linguist, analyst, and spiritual seeker), speaking
integrates meaning and life only within a context of intersubjective relations. To divorce words
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from their original embodied source may provide texts for interpretation, but not living words
shared among those who seek to build a world where human development is at the same time
spiritual becoming and where structures as well as individuals recognize and respect
difference(s). When words fail, Irigaray suggests "a manner of speaking which could be
accompanied by a nocturnal luminosity" (Sharing 20). We may need to communicate through
more tactile senses. In intimate settings tender loving touch is dialogic, allowing partners to
speak and hear what remains invisible and inarticulate. In social settings, sharing food and song
and laughter can move participants to deeper levels of communication. In all these situations the
aim is personal and structural transformation, but there is no guarantee of success.
The practice of dialogue by real people in real time frees what Irigaray calls "the benefic
power of a real parole" (Conversations 93). In religious worlds, the logos of doctrinal definitions
can often reign supreme. When the parameters of dialogue are set in advance and religious
authority exercises hegemonic power through its magisterial word rather the serving the living
words of its subjects, both divine and human becoming can be stifled. That is why in order to
think through incarnation dialectically and from below, I want to follow Emily Holmes and turn
to meditative writing as an incarnational practice within dialogue, "beginning with women's
bodies marked first by sexuate and also other differences" (Teaching 134). The solitary nature of
such writing can strengthen autonomy and intersubjective self-affection. It brings bodied
experience to words that can then be spoken in life-giving ways. Often used by women, nondiscursive genres, such as poetry, prayer, mystical writing, journaling, open language to new
expressions of incarnate love and transcendent desire.
What is true for texts that embody women's speaking (parler-femme) can hold
analogously for all those still considered "other" by dominant systems. Writing can bring to the
tables of dialogue the living words of those who otherwise would not be present. Writing our
memories after the enstasy/ecstasy of passionate sexual dialogue can help us savor the fleeting
joy and cherish even more future intercourse with our beloved. Writing after "mismeetings"ii or
painful encounters can help us move beyond our sense of failure and restore our courage to try
again. More often than not, we realize that we and the other did not fully meet. Or worse, we
failed to meet altogether. We may grieve the rejection, mourn the lack of reciprocity, or feel our
human limitations. Irigaray is right when she says that in dialogue we risk losing our dwelling
place, our comfort with the language of the same. When we fail, our world can fall apart. Where
the stakes are high, lives can be lost. In all cases what is destroyed is not only our single world,
but also the world we hoped to build and share with the other.
Dialogue across linguistic, ethnic, religious and cultural borders has not made Luce
Irigaray less "militant for the impossible" of sexual difference (I Love to You 10). It has raised
the stakes. In a dialogue with Florinda Trani, Irigaray asserted that sexual difference is "a reality
which constrains us to pursue the becoming of consciousness, that leads to a new stage of the
development of humanity. But without enacting this stage, the human as such does not exist"
(Cited by Michael Worton in “Afterword,” Teaching 242). Defined in this way, sexual difference
poses strong challenges to all concerned about human life in the world.
As a feminist theologian, I appreciate Irigaray's dialogic and dialectical approach to
incarnation as a way into the new stage of human being. She does not merely critique patriarchal
Christianity's Logos incarnate. She displaces its univocal meaning by inscribing the
irreducibility of difference in the incarnational process of becoming human (with all the messy
concreteness that human becoming entails). And questioning herself, Luce Irigaray moves into
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the unpredictable threshold that opens a place for the other and for a world different from that of
our tradition.
Commitment to the mystery of every human becoming convinces me that our thinking
through dialogue is a not a luxury in a world where too many men and women labor just to
survive. Those whom I may never know are not nameless somebodies. They have their own
questions and desires, which they bring to every encounter. Still dialogue alone is not enough.
The double and triple Irigarayan dialectic can help us gain agility as we cultivate embodied
intellectual, emotional, and sexual energy (with and not against others). Words can touch, and
conversations have the power to change minds and hearts and behaviors. But in order to
transform the horizons of our respective worlds, we need political action, the kind that Elizabeth
Grosz has begun to elaborate. Her "politics of imperceptibility" offers a philosophical approach
that reckons with forces beyond our control and brings together the affective and the material in
ways that promise social transformation (Time Travels 194). We also need the diverse efforts we
each bring to "the oeuvre of justice and culture," and to the riskiest of questions: Can we become
human enough to meet each other and build a world of difference?
Notes
Each of these terms has particular meanings for Luce Irigaray: "Transcendent... signifies that I
cannot understand nor even perceive an other in its totality. I can perhaps understand or perceive
some aspects but not the whole nor the origin or spring of the real I am meeting with”
(Conversations 40). Unlike ordinary usage in her culture, which she describes as dominated
by the masculine Western subject, who claims to define by himself subjective and objective
dimensions of the same "subjective world," she uses subjective "to talk about that which
belongs to the subject as such, a subject who is not always the same," and objective "to refer
to that which exists outside the subject and his, or her, intervention in a pre-given world"
(Conversations 41).
ii
Martin Buber coined the word "mismeeting" (Vergegnung) to designate the failure of a real
meeting (Begegnung) between men and/or women. See Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber's Life
and Work, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988, 5.
i
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Works Cited
Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2005. Print.
Hirsch, Elizabeth. "Back in Analysis: How to Do Things with Irigaray," in Carolyn Burke,
Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford, eds. Engaging with Irigaray. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994. 285-316. Print.
Irigaray, Luce. Parler n'est jamais neutre. Paris: Minuit, 1985. Print.
---. I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History. Translated by Karin Montin. New
York and London: Routledge, 1996 [1992]. Print.
---. Le Souffle des femmes: Luce Irigaray présente des crédos au féminine. Paris: l'Action
Catholique Générale Féminine, 1996. Print.
---. Essere Due (To Be Two). Bologna: Bollati Boringheri, 1994. Translated by Luce Irigaray into
French as Etre Deux, 2001. Translated from the Italian into English as To Be Two by
Monique Rhodes and Marco F. Cocito-Monoc. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print.
---, ed. with Sylvère Lotringer. Why different? A Culture of Two Subjects. Translated by Camille
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