Irigaray and the question of feminine mysticism
PhenomenologyPosted by jonatan Friday, December 28 2007 21:54:05Jonna Bornemark, Södertörn University-College
I will start with Irigaray's text ”Divine women”, but in contrast to Irigaray I want to point out an advantage in the female position.
In the third part I want to examine this strength as a radical alterity central within the self, for this purpose I will discuss some passages from Mechthild von Magdeburg and a paradox from Husserl.
In the fourth and last part I will discuss this radical alterity and body, radical alterity as incarnated. And finally return to Irigaray and how she could be read from this perspective.
1. Introduction
Let’s take our starting-point in the late Luce Irigaray’s vision of the future where both sexes has a relationship to the divine and therefore can understand the other sex as a truly radical other. This means that it is through a stabile and intimate relation to the vertical transcendence that the horizontal transcendence comes forth and shows itself as a true and real transcendence. Here I will discuss mainly the vertical transcendence and examine its function as a transcendence within the immanence of self-consciousness. In the inner of the breathing. I will therefore focus on what it means to talk, as Irigaray does, about “autonomous”, “remain within herself”, and “communicate and return home”. What is this home?
2. The text that is most fruitful for these purposes is ”Divine Women”. Irigaray identifies in this text the lack of goddesses as a problem within the western tradition. The woman who doesn’t have access to a female divinity only receives a negative identity. Defined as the negative opposite to the man and the male god, she is without a definition of her own. Her identity is constituted as the contrast that makes the male as “the good” and “the higher” possible, and she is therefore locked in an inferior and lower position. Irigaray uses Feuerbach when she claims that to create an independent sex we need a God that can guarantee the infinite. To make it possible for a women to become she needs a sex of her own as an essence and a horizon that gives her becoming a direction. She, who does not have a sex of her own, needs to establish a religion and a relationship of her own towards the divine to make an independent becoming possible which is not a negative contrast of the man and his God.
Irigaray puts it for example in the following way: Before we have a feminine divinity she can’t “establish her subjectivity or achieve a goal on her own.” Irigaray also puts it in the following way: “If she is to become woman, if she is to accomplish her female subjectivity, woman needs a god who is a figure for the perfection of her subjectivity.” She also says that: ”Divinity is what we need to become free, autonomous, sovereign. No human subjectivity, no human society has ever been established without the help of the divine.” She means that the human being has to imagine a God, an objective - subjective place or way through which the self can be formed. “If we are not to obey the other, we have to set a goal of our own, make our own law or laws”. She even goes as far as to say that we need to create the female as “a race on its own”.
Now we can question whether it really is the task of the feminine to establish a separate but parallel subjectivity? Which are the criteria that separates these two subjectivities, or as she says, races? What is the difference between her laws and his? If subjectivity is about creating an autonomous self, how does the male and female self differ from each other? Irigaray says that the female characteristics are her openness, her becoming instead of being and language as dialogue instead of an instrument to create distance and establish individuality. To create an autonomous self from these principles does not only seem complicated but it also seems to mean that the male principle of closedness finally would be placed above the female openness. Even if it were another kind of autonomy it would still mean to strive towards autonomy that always has to be characterised as striving towards closedness.
To make this a bit clearer I need to introduce a distinction between three difference levels within the sex-difference:
The ontological level, the other as pure difference that shows the own limitation. In the discussion about where this pure ontological difference should primarily be found both a vertical transcendence and a horizontal transcendence has been suggested.
The mythological level, where the female is described as the passive, open and dark negative of a male active, closed and light, or enlightening subjectivity. We can understand this level as arisen from the ontological level and the activity to define a steady subjectivity where the female always is that which is thrown out from the self in its quest to create an autonomous positive self. A consequence of this movement is though, as Irigaray points out, that the negative is necessary to create the positive image of the self.
The biological level is something totally different than the two levels above, this level can be understood as a symbolic given the ontological difference. We tend to give this level the highest reality but the difference that is seen can only be observed from a structure that sees differences in the first place. This level is also often understood as the body, but since I do not want to reduce the bodylines to that which can be seen from without I want to understand the body in different modes in all the levels. But I will get back to this later.
But the biological level is not totally uninteresting since our culture is given to us in different ways depending on our biological sex. We are always connected in different ways to the mythological level depending on our biological sex. As a woman I am connected to the mythological female. And the mythological female is connected to the ontologically other. But in as far as I as a biological women create a stabile subjectivity on my own, this subjectivity is male. And in as far as I understand myself in connection to other, I am female.
From this mythological perspective it is impossible for the female to create a race on its own and have a relation to a divinity that helps us become free, autonomous and sovereign. But I do not consider this a loss, instead I would like to propose that her relationship towards the divine as the other of a divine essence is the interesting relation to the divine today. Her relation towards the divine is the mystical relation, in contrast to the male relation that follows Feuerbach’s model of God as a dogmatically expressed essence for the subject to copy. Irigaray is getting close to this in “La Mysterique”, where mysticism is the female area and the place where categories as outside – inside, subject – object, are broken down. This is also the place to learn how the borders of the self is constituted, attacked and broken down.
So which is the female relation to the divine examined through female mystics? The position of the female mystic is exactly this position of non-identity. Other writers than Irigaray (for example Grace Jantzen) have described this position as problematic since “she”, defined as body, strives for union with the male God, defined as spirit. She needs to become something totally other to reach what she is striving for. The female mystic examines her subjectivity and does not find a being and a prescribed role to fulfil, but she finds something totally Other which she at the same time has an intimate relationship to, something, which is not a something, that is she more than she is herself.
If we today don’t want to create new essences but instead want to investigate a subjectivity that always moves on its own borders, this mystical, female experience is very rich. The task is then not to find new images to copy but to get rid of images. (Not to “avbilda”, but to “av-bilda”.)
3. The radically other within the self
To examine the relationship between the own, the female and the divine I will begin with leaving “the female mystical experience” as a universal and limit myself to Mechthild von Magdeburg, a German beguine from the 13:th century and I thereby also restrict myself to a Christian perspective. (I have an interest in Mechthild partly because she through Meister Eckhardt, who probably was very influenced by her, has an indirect influence on the German philosophy.)
To begin with, Mechthild’s God is the radical other, it is not a something, and it can’t be spelled out in its totality. But this apofatic starting point does not leave her all alone and without contact to God, (as it for an example has a tendency to do in Levinas), on the contrary this radically other is always with her:
His eyes in my eyes, Sin ógen in min ógen,
his heart in my heart, sin herze in min herze,
his soul in my soul, sine sele in min sele,
untiringly embracing. (II:4) umbevangen unverdrossen.
The radically other is not thrown out as an outside of subjectivity, it is central within herself, it is even the life in her subjectivity. Mechthild’s text is also marked by what I earlier mentioned as the female mystics abandonment of the self, that is, abandonment of the ego and the own will. It is exactly that which writes laws and forms individuality that is given up:
Herre, din wille geschehe, und nit der min,
wan ich min selbes nit enbin
mer in allen dingen din.
Lord, [may] your will happen and not mine,
because I am not my own,
but in all things only yours. (VII:63)
So, how can we understand this today? What is this divine that is another most central within Mechthild herself? To approach this question we need to ask what it is within the own that no longer is own. When Mechthild describes how she gives up her own will to live within the will of God we must remember that the will of God never is the will of someone else. It is not the law of the man that she submits to. God is instead that which is most unknown and most intimate, he is not a static understandable essence. (Mechthild’s relation to the male, worldly law is probably better shown in the way she lived her life, as a female head of a beguine-house in opposition towards the church and male norms.) We should instead understand this quotation as an expression for the will where it can no longer be connected to a “mine”, as exactly that point which we no longer are in control over. We can’t want something that we do not want, as soon as we want something other, this is what we want. This “own” that is called my own individuality is finally beyond all control of the will or individuality. The point with this argument is not to state that “I want what I want” but to focus upon the empty point “beyond” this will, a point where personal will springs forth, but that is empty in itself.
This central point in the own self as an empty point can also be formulated within a phenomenological horizon of understanding. According to Husserl a continual self is formed in time through self-reflection. The pure I is therefore according to Husserl possible to see, it is the same self that sees and is seen, sometimes it shows itself to itself and sometimes it does not. Even so, Husserl means that we need to separate the perceived self from the perceiving self even though they ultimately are the same. But there is an apparent paradox here, the perceiving I can as such never be objectified without at the same time create or re-establish a perceived I. Husserl wants to show that the I at the same time can be the eye that sees and the eye that is seen through an oscillation between the perceiving and the perceived I. He means that the two levels are one and the same, sometimes given and sometimes not given. He says that what changes is not the self but the experience.
Now, the question is what is it that is identical in this self? What has the perceived and the perceiving in common? Isn’t the change really an impossibility since the perceiver loses its identity as perceiver in the same moment as it becomes perceived? The perceiving point can never be seen. The blind spot is always there, no matter how many times the subject change perspective and turns itself into an object, there is always a transcendence within the pure I. I call this blind spot a transcendence since it exceeds what can be reached. It is a transcendence most central within immanence.
(With a slightly different terminology we can say that when the experiencing I tries to reach itself it always comes to late. The I it sees has become an I that is seen and is no longer the seeing I. The experiencing point can never be objectified without losing its character.)
I thereby think that Husserl failed in this attempt to solve this paradox. But this is not a loss for our purposes but a gain. The most central point of the self is thereby not an I that this I can be in control over, that we can grab hold of and make transparent to our self. The most central point of the self is instead the most foreign, in the meaning of the most elusive, what we per definition never can see. The own-will and the ego are vain attempts to try to catch our self and take control of it (which by Mechthild is characterised as hate, vanity and greed. Greed when we strive for what we can not have, vanity when we want to catch and make our self eternal, and hate when we understand ourselves in contrast to other and do not see the point that binds us together.). This ungraspable is at the same time what is closest to us, it is a life, my life, or rather a life that formulates a self, myself. The ungraspable in the I is that point where the self, as the most own, the own life, and God as the unreachable, transcendent, melts together.
4. We can understand this as the voice that speaks Mechthild. The transcendent that her self-consciousness can’t grasp, which is not her will. But the transcendent that still is most central within her. It is she but it is beyond the kind of knowledge that can be formulated between a subject and an object. It is thereby always already there and beyond will and control. This is a place within the self that can’t be formulated and which thereby makes a final definition of the self impossible. It is a place within herself that in its unknowability melts together with the transcendence that she defines as beyond her and maybe even with the unknowability of others. But there is no distinct border between the self and God, that is, self includes that part of the self that is beyond self-consciousness.
ich bin in dir und du bist in mir,
wir mògen nit naher sin,
wan wir zwòi sin in ein gevlossen
und sin in ein forme gegossen
Also son wir bliben eweklich unverdrossen. (III, 5)
I am in you and you are in me,
we could not be closer,
because we two are melt together in one,
and are cast in the same mould.
And we will stay forever indefatigable.
It is on this level of fusion that the body shows itself as something positive in contrast to the normally negative images of the body:
Wie hohe er wonet ob mir,
sin gotheit wirt mir niemer so túre,
ich músse ir ane underlas
allú minú gelide volbewinden;
so mag ich niemer erkúlen (II, 22)
So high he lives above me,
his divinity is never so alien to me,
that I don’t feel her all the time
in all my limbs;
so that I never am cold again
Die schrift dis buches ist gesehen, gehoret unde bevunden an allen lidern
Ich enkan noch mag nit schriben, ich sehe es mit den ogen miner sele und hore es mit den oren mines ewigen geistes und bevinde in allen liden mines lichamen die kraft des heiligen geistes. (IV, 13)
The content in this book is seen, heard and felt in all my limbs
I neither can nor want to write, if I don’t see the power of the Holy ghost with the eyes of my soul, hear it with the ears of my eternal spirit and feel it in all the limbs of my body.
She is not alone in her body but truly incarnates the divine. She accepts the divine within her own body and it speaks through her. Her experience of the body is here much closer to Husserl’s “Leib”, lived body, than to “Körper”, body as it is seen from without as a physical unity. The body as lived body has been examined by Michel Henry and he also points out that this body is not available to traditional knowledge between a subject and an object. This body is the closest at the same time as it is passive and receiving, and as such the base for activity and knowledge of self-consciousness, self-consciousness that also understands its own body as an object seen from without. It is only the distance that is created by self-consciousness that makes it possible to understand myself as an object and a self among other selves.
If we want to we can understand this double understanding of the human being in accordance with the mythological feminine and masculine, the second level of my distinction, the active self-consciousness that makes the body, as seen from without, possible and that creates distance that is a necessary condition for traditional knowledge which we often understand in connection to vision and light, this is the male principal. The lived body as the unnameable and therefore dark, strangely receiving passivity is the feminine principal. It is also the unknown, hidden God. Being a human being means to carry this double structure.
We can in the same way understand a distant, objectified God surrounded by a dogmatic and hierarchical priesthood which inner is a female divinity that can’t be caught in propositional language. But this is only a way to make the “dark side” visible, by throwing it into a dichotomy. It is more challenging to understand it outside such a male epistemology. Because neither is the total unknowability of the negative theology the path that is spoken by Mechthild and others. They are instead focused on how this unknowable is present within their bodies. How the unreachable and the reachable are intertwined in incarnation.
It is in connection with this incarnation that I can recover large parts of Irigaray’s thoughts. The breathing that connects the immanent lived body (Leib) and the outer body (Körper) as we live their interconnection. She whose virgin life is inside the lived body, incarnating the divine.
My main purpose with this paper has been to examine an alternative to the identification of the radically other as a distant God or another sex, and instead find the radically other within the centre of the self. The transcendence that is incarnated in the immanent self. I think this could be developed further in a closer reading of Irigaray. Maybe such a reading should be done from a reading of Irigaray’s earlier texts (even if she doesn’t discuss religion there), since she in these texts, to a higher extent, discusses the limits of subjectivity instead of, as in “Divine women”, look for a strong identity.
- Comments(0)http://thinklink.philosophy.se/#post9
