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modern subject is a sexual moral subject, to simply shatter that subject— and along with it, morality—is to ignore the first burden of a nonviolent practice: the acknowledgment of harms, including, most importantly, the constitutive exclusion or forgetting of the other.
Toward a Queer Feminist Ethics of Eros Let me begin, in this final section, with a return to Foucault’s question about sexual ethics: why have we made sexuality into a moral experience? Revisiting this question in light of the queer Irigarayan question are the lips a grave? I want to suggest that Irigaray and Foucault offer an ethics of eros that can help us to listen more attentively to the moral dissonance that has split feminists and queers. Such an ethics, significantly, hinges on the idea of erotic transformation we can find in both thinkers. The notion of transformation begins to alter, from within, the morality-based ethics that simultaneously binds and produces us as sexual subjects. Again, if code-based moralities are systems of normative values, what Foucault calls “ethics-oriented moralities” (UP 30) open possibilities for transformative desubjectivations from within. Thus, as Charles Scott argues, to ask the question of ethics in this retraversing, post-Nietzschean sense must mean to insist on “the noun”—the question—over and above its “prepositional object”—ethics.49 Such an insistence on the question pries ethics open, ever so slightly, to produce what Scott calls “an interruption in an ethos” (4). To ask the question of ethics from this perspective is to ask “how questioning can occur in a manner that puts into question the body of values that led to the questioning” (1). Both Irigaray and Foucault work strategically, from inside the modern episteme, to transform the conception of ethics as morality. As Irigaray says in Sharing the World: “traditional morality will be of little use to us here” (59). Foucault, even more strongly, calls morality “catastrophic.”50 Further, that catastrophe springs, for both Irigaray and Foucault, from the rational Western subject as morality’s ground. Both Irigaray and Foucault put into question the subject of truth: the ethical agent whose moral judgments presume epistemic certainty about the world. From this perspective, ethics in both Irigaray and Foucault can be explicitly linked to the question of the rational moral subject whose undoing is not only Bersani’s self-shattering project, but that of at least two generations
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of French postwar antihumanist thinkers. Just as Foucault’s first major book, History of Madness, develops a critique of Cartesian rational morality through unreason’s interrogation of the subject of truth, so too Irigaray’s first major book, Speculum, begins with the ethical question of the rational moral subject. As a question about the subject, this ethics is not unrelated to a certain thinking about alterity epitomized in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, a phenomenological thinker who is central to Irigaray’s work and especially her conception of ethics.51 For both Foucault and Irigaray, as for Levinas, subjectivity must be thought of as the interruption of the subject by an other; alterity precedes the subject and puts it into question through an always prior sociality. Further, as Tina Chanter demonstrates, Irigaray’s Levinasian approach to alterity produces the powerful concept of the “sensible transcendental” as “that which confuses the opposition between immanence and transcendence.”52 As Chanter shows, Irigaray’s sensible transcendental rethinks the Levinasian ethical system that subordinates what Levinas views as the less ethical alterity of eros—maternity, the duality of the couple, and fecundity—to the more ethical proximity of the face to face that Levinas links with universal morality. Because sexual difference consigns women to the subordinated immediacy of a world of immanence, with the sensible transcendental Irigaray seeks what Chanter calls an “intermediary middle ground” (EE 180) for ethics, the “path between heaven and earth” (Irigaray in EE 108). Chanter highlights Irigaray’s description, in her reading of Levinas, of an erotic tradition that bestows divinity on the masculine lover (l’amant) and throws the feminine beloved (l’aimée) into the abyss: “Irigaray repeatedly appeals to the transcendence of the lover, which is dependent upon the submergence of the loved one in a world without ethics” (EE 215). With the sensible transcendental, Irigaray reworks this conception of eros that subordinates the beloved for the procreative transcendence of the divine lover. In doing so, as Chanter points out, Irigaray both poses a challenge to the heterosexuality implicit in Levinas and, at the same time, draws on eros to give “new life to lovers” (EE 220).53 This Irigarayan conception of alterity as a nonprocreative, sensible transcendental ethics of eros not only has much to offer queer theory but can also be closely aligned with a Foucauldian erotic ethics of the other that links the act of loving to knowing.54 Importantly, like Irigaray and unlike Levinas, Foucault refuses a conception of alterity grounded solely in a transcendent principle of exteriority or divinity; Foucault’s specifically
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archival philosophical practice demonstrates a conception of alterity that demands an attention to the immanent realm of the concrete historical world. Foucault practices his erotic ethics as an ethopoietic confrontation with the otherness of “infamous lives” trapped in the archival dust of the past.55 In the space of the archive, Foucault practices an ars erotica where his position as the knowing subject—the lover (l’amant) or erastes—is transformed by the abyssal figure of the archival object—the beloved (l’aimée) or eromenos. In that encounter between knower and known, Foucault engages in an erotic, ethical listening that undoes the subject in his will to knowledge. As the site of that transformation, the archive becomes heterotopian: both there and not there, both real and not. Although Foucault differs from Irigaray in his explicit attention to the archival relation, the erotic ethical resonances they share are difficult to ignore. Irigaray’s reworking of the lover-beloved relation through the concept of the sensible transcendental is paralleled by a similar transformation in Foucault through an archival ars erotica. And if the figure of the beloved recalls a suicidal feminine, “legs high in the air,” self-shattering gay man, both Irigaray and Foucault would implicitly reject antisocial queer theory’s plunge into the abyss of a negative ethics. Foucault’s explicitly genealogical approach to the other would disallow the psychic ahistoricity of such abyssal conceptions of self-undoing: in his heterotopian histories of the present, the spatio-temporal particularities of lives in relation to others matter more than the frozen negativity of an antisocial death drive. Like Grosz’s description of the “strategic . . . relations [between] women” (344) that, in Irigaray, rework the space-time interval, Foucault’s “tactical” genealogies bring into play an “insurrection” of “desubjugated knowledges” that alters space and time.56 And while Irigaray is not, like Foucault, a thinker who finds her real-world material in the archives, she too refuses the paralyzing stasis of mythical beloveds trapped forever in the sexual underworld of the unconscious. As she puts it in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984), sexual difference is a question for our times.57 Within this frame for a historically situated, transcendent-immanent, insurrectional ethics of eros shared by Foucault and Irigaray, the possibility of a queer feminist ethics begins to come into view. In Irigaray’s concept of the sensible transcendental, we find, once again, the far-flung elasticity and snap back of sexual difference, this time in terms of an erotic ethics poised in the space between a wide-looping “radical otherness” (EE 173) and the constricting immanence of an abyssal femininity. As the Foucauldian transformation of erastes and eromenos makes clear,
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the relations of sexual difference Irigaray tends to describe as those between “man” and “woman” are also, in Foucault’s hands, the asymmetrical relations between subject and object, knower and known, within a modern episteme that defines subjectivity as both moral and sexual. In this sense, both Irigaray and Foucault offer an ethical approach to sexuality that, unlike the antisocial theorists, takes seriously the historically specific relationality of the social world and, at the same time, acknowledges the damage wrought by the normative codification of those relations. Viewed through this lens, Irigaray’s project appears not as a metaphysics, idealization, or essentialist ontology, as so many of her critics have argued, but rather as a historically situated project of ethical desubjectivation within the modern episteme of “man” as a sexual moral subject. The early critiques she and Foucault share of the rationalist morality on which modern psyche-logos is built make them allies in the undoing of modern subjectivity: just as Foucault narrates in History of Madness a story about Freud as the apotheosis of an objectifying Cartesian gaze, so too Irigaray in Speculum links Freud to Cartesian rationalism (S 27) and denounces the “so-called scientific objectivity” (S 14) of a psychoanalytic project that puts woman “under the microscope” (S 14) in a “greedy [quest] for scientific powers” (S 185), freezing the subject-object relation between knower and known. Foucault’s famous critique of the repressive hypothesis and the logic of the “closet” in the first volume of History of Sexuality might similarly be compared with Irigaray’s critique of the specular logic in Freud, which, through a theory of repression, produces femininity as a closetlike “black box” (S 20) to be opened and illuminated by reason. Finally, throughout their work both Foucault and Irigaray are driven by an antipathy to the Hegelian dialectic and its neat resolution of ethical and political opposition through sublation. Irigaray presents the feminine in her “function as the negative” (S 90) as “the power in reserve for the dialectical operations to come” (S 90) and accuses the dialectic of being “phallotropic” (S 52). Along similar lines, in the later interview with Grosz, she emphasizes the difference between a Hegelian dialectical negativity and her own use of the negative as a way “to maintain [the] irreducibility of the you with respect to the I” (C 127). Taken together, her critiques of these Hegelian dialectical operations almost exactly repeat Foucault’s diagnosis of the dialectical logic that drives reason and unreason to produce the modern sexual subject endowed with an internalized, unknowable negativity that Nietzsche calls conscience, or the soul, and that Freud calls the unconscious.
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To be sure, there are important differences between Irigaray and Foucault that remain to be explored. Not least of these is a deepening of the complex problem of subjectivity that forms the core of this book. Although, as I have argued, Irigaray’s dismantling of a monosubjective economy of the Same can be fruitfully compared with Foucauldian desubjectivation, what happens for both thinkers beyond the undoing of the monosubject is open to question. While, for example, Kaja Silverman sees Irigaray as a thinker “quite willing to relinquish subjectivity” (EE 176), Chanter disagrees: “Irigaray,” she argues, “is wary of the erosion of the subject” (EE 176). Nonetheless, if we take seriously Foucault’s view that the modern subject is a sexual subject, it is not clear which subject’s erosion Irigaray fears. If we agree that for both Foucault and Irigaray modern subjectivity means the sexed, asymmetrical subjection of assujettissement, surely Irigaray’s recent call for a relationality “without subjection” (C 160) is not unlike Foucault’s erotic testing of the self as a self-undoing that requires, paradoxically, both a return to the self and a self-release.58 As the ethical stakes of this book make clear, I believe not only that there is a place for Irigaray in queer theory but also, more broadly, that her alignment with Foucault opens up a place for an erotic queer feminist ethics. That place, no doubt, like the sensible transcendental, is paradoxical, discordant, and snagged: a nonexclusionary yet nonrelational, temporally unstable relation. It is not a utopian blueprint I offer, but a heterotopian willingness to be undone.
Coda: A Return Having worked on Foucault for a number of years, I thought I’d left behind my earlier attachment to Irigaray. It has taken me a long time to find a way to return to writing about her. When I stopped working on Irigaray fifteen years ago, I left her trapped, in my mind, in Speculum: in the role of a queer Freudian patient who had never quite learned how to live in the world. I assumed that “hysteria [was] all she [had] left” (S 71). I kept teaching Speculum, in what felt like my own hysterical relation to that dazzling, breathtaking beginning and its hint of an opening through those luscious, pleasurable lips. But I also worried, each time I taught her, that the opening was already closed, from the start. That her deconstruction of Western philosophy left her with nowhere to go.
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Perhaps my return to Irigaray here is still hysterical, but this time it has allowed me to pry open what had felt, for a long time, like an aporetic dead end. More than anyone, Irigaray has taught me that hysterical mimicry—language’s performative force—“is not under [our] control, though sometimes it seems that way” (S 72). Time has a way of changing us, especially in relation to what we’ve written. That is how, in my return to Irigaray, I’ve experienced a self-othering, temporal force that, however disorienting, unlocks aporias. As Foucault puts it, we don’t want to hear it, but “discourse is not life: its time is not your time.”59 In writing and rewriting this chapter, I have come to value this strange, temporally syncopated, interrupted relation to Irigaray. It is this self-othering strangeness that allows me to return to her now, in writing, in the Foucauldian play of an erotic ethics. For, while I have repeatedly insisted, over the years, that the later Irigaray is less radical than the early one, and while I still must admit to an aesthetic preference for her parodic mockery of classic philosophers over her sober constructions of a shared world without subjection, when Irigaray tells me that across the three phases of her work her “position did not change”—“I know this is asserted,” she says, “but it is a mistake” (C 124)—I have to hear, really hear, what she’s saying. Here, in this return, the erotic ethics I’ve been pushing pushes back on me. It opens a space for a different Irigaray and a different thinking-feeling. In this self-altering transformation, my known object, a feminist Irigaray, not only dispossesses me of the Irigaray I thought I knew but also dispossesses me of myself. She becomes the eromenos whose erotic difference draws me up short: she puts me and my knowing into question. Given my difficult love for her, I can only describe this transformation of my erastes by her eromenos as self-shattering, nonredemptive, and deliciously queer.
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