LUCE IRIGARAY'S TRANSVERSAL GEOPHILOSOPHY Hwa Yol Jung Moravian College 1200 Main Street Bethlehem, PA 18018 USA Email: hwayol@hotmail.com Fax: (USA) 610-624-7919 ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to show the importance of Luce Irigaray's corporeal feminism based on "sexual difference" or "the model of the two" and its relevance to geophilosophy or ecosophy. In her corporeal feminism, the feminine sense of touch overrides the masculine sense of sight. As the calendar of the feminine flesh syncopates with the rhythm of nature, her gynecological self becomes an exemplar of homo ecologicus. Here she seeks a transversal alliance with the East, with the Eastern body. In the end, Irigaray's corporeal feminism rekindles our contact with the whole earth, with its inhabitants large and small, human and nonhuman. LUCE IRIGARAY'S TRANSVERSAL GEOPHILOSOPHY If we keep on speaking the same language together, we're going to reproduce the same history. Luce Irigaray Luce Irigaray is one of the most important and influential French feminist philosophers. She contends that "sexual difference" is the issue of our time whose resolution is our philosophical "salvation." So sexual difference marks her philosophical distinction. As a matter of fact, she presents it as a paradigmatic "foundation for a new ontology, a new ethics, and a new politics." Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference is a revolt against and a subversion of what she calls "phallogocentrism" in which man is literally the measure of all things and woman does not exist as an ontologically distinct category. She speaks of "the model of the two" which is not unlike the ancient Chinese logic of yin and yang. It promotes dialogue: as she writes succinctly, "we must move on to the model of the two, a two which is not replication of the same, nor one large and the other small, but made up of two which are truly different. The paradigm of the two lies in sexual difference." The Enlightenment is the "malestream" identity of Western modernity. Its unbridled optimism is alleged to promote and crown humanity's progress based on the cultivation of pure and applied reason. Kant spelled out the motto of the Enlightenment in the clearest and simplest term: the autonomy of reason was meant to rescue and emancipate humanity perhaps more accurately European humanity from the dark cave of self-incurred immaturity. In so doing, he institutionalized the major agenda of European modernity whose rationality was never seriously questioned until the auspicious advent of postmodernism in Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida. While privileging and valorizing the autonomy and authority of reason for allegedly human progress and emancipation, European modernity unfortunately marginalizes, disenfranchises, and denigrates the (reason's) Other whether it be (1) body, (2) woman, (3) nature, or (4) non-West at the genuflected altar of the Enlightenment. Body, woman, nature, and non-West are not randomly isolated but four interconnected issues: most interestingly, it is no accident that the feminine gender is consigned to them, while their opposites mind, man, culture, and West are masculine or "malestream" categories. Irigaray's corporeal feminism signifies the fourfold liberation at once of body, woman, nature, and non-West which are the downcast products of the Enlightenment's reason. In brief, Irigaray's "‚criture f‚minine" represents a global transformation in our time. Irigaray's ‚criture celebrates the site of the body as jouissance (also spelled j'ouis sens). It may be summed up as a feminine "diatactics" to borrow Hayden White's term used in a different context in which the notion of difference and the sense of tactility are intertwined and complement each other. The sense of touch, which has been a perennially pariah sense in Western philosophy, is for Irigaray eminently feminine as opposed to sight which Kant regarded as a "rational sense." Difference does not signify separateness but affirms "a particular way of being connected to others." She contends that the preposition "to" in the expression "I love to you" (J'aime … toi) stands for (1) the spatial distance of difference and (2) the possibility of transcendence. The American feminist Carol Gilligan whose voice of feminine difference paved the way of the ethic of care, too, speaks of the way of "making connection in the face of difference." Irigaray herself argues for feminine difference as "a taste for intersubjectivity," that is, for contact. But for difference, sexual or otherwise, there would be no genuine intersubjectivity or relationship. Inter(dis)course social or sexual is first and foremost the compassionate "liaison of our bodies." It is, in short, intercorporeal. Above all, the model without (sexual) difference, that is, the politics of identity, has been historically masculine and hierarchical man on top and woman at bottom. It comes as no surprise that Irigaray is critical of what she calls "scoptophilia" which has dominated Western thought from the time of Plato to modern philosophy in and beyond Descartes whose cogito is in pursuit of "clear and distinct ideas." Indeed, Cartesian epistemocracy is indubitably disembodied, monological, and ocularcentric. It also incorporates the Baconian identity politics of knowledge and power when Descartes speaks of the possession and mastery of nature as inert materiel. Irigaray contends that the tyranny of sight is a peculiarly phallocentric, patriarchal, and metrophobic institution and objectifying scoptophilia underwrites uniquely a masculine logic. In the final analysis, the "participatory" sense of touch valorizes the feminine, whereas "spectatorial" vision glorifies the masculine. Most recently, Irigaray ventures to expand her philosophical "model of the two" to a dialogue "between East and West." She discovers an intercontinental connection to her corporeal feminine and is deeply drawn to a transversal alliance with the East, with the trangible thought and practice of India. India is the home of Hinduism where the body is not just a material reality but elevated to the status of spirituality, that is, where the body and the spirit form an interdependent unit. What the mind alone is to the masculine West, the body is to the feminine East. Irigaray's transversality forges the comparative and collateral way of promoting the fertilization of ideas which would produce hybridity by negotiating differences and facilitating the confluence of differences. What Eurocentric universality is to the non-West, phallogocentric monism is to Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference. In both Eurocentrism and phallogocentrism, what is particular, that is Eurocentric or malestream, is universalized, whereas what is non-Western or feminine always remains particular. In short, Eurocentrism and phallogocentrism violate Irigaray's logic of the two. In this connection, it is worth mentioning the recent fascinating study of women in Tantric Buddhism of yogini- tantra by Miranda Shaw entitled Passionate Enlightenment (1994). In the first place, Tantric Buddhism eulogizes the body or flesh as an "abode of bliss" by embracing sexual jouissance for liberation or enlightenment the fact of which has been so long ignored by the "malestream" scholarship of Western writers. In tracing feminine genealogy, Irigaray also embraces the virtue of Aphrodite who symbolizes for her the embodiment of philotes tenderness which combines carnal eros and spiritual agape. In the second place, it is a gynocentric view of Tantrism where women represent the idea of blissful intimacy as a path of enlightenment. In her Between East and West (2002) (Entre Orient et Occident, 1999), Irigaray discovers that the "corporeal geography" of Hinduism begins with the bodily phenomenon of breath as natality or the first sign of life. In Hinduism "vital breath" is transformed into "spiritual breath." She (pp. 116-17) writes with force and sensitivity: Nature . . . is no longer subdued but it is adapted, in its rhythms and necessities, to the path of its becoming, of its growth. . . . The caress becomes a means of growing together toward a human maturity that is not confused with an intellectual competence, with the possession of property among them the bodies of beloved and of the children nor with the domination of the world, beginning with the little world of the house, of the family. Love, including carnal love, becomes the construction of a new human identity through that basic unit of the community: the relation between man and woman. The ecological crisis points to the fact that we are out of touch with nature or the earth. The mission of geophilosophy is to take care of the earth by overcoming egocentrism in dealing with interhuman relationships on the one hand and anthropocentrism in dealing with interspecific relationships on the other. No doubt it is the prima philosophia of our time. What is geophilosophy? In their joint work What Is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze and F‚lix Guattari define the whole earth as the eminent domain of geophilosophy. The earth is not just one element among others but is that all-encompassing element which "brings all the elements in a single embrace." Geophilosophy is a philosophical inquiry into the nature of Being or, better, Interbeing as if the earth really matters. Thus it is preeminently ecological. In the context of geophilosophy, Irigaray's corporeal feminism is intrinsically ecosophic because, according to her, woman and nature have the same "calendar of the flesh." Jouissance, which is the Nirvana principle of corporeal feminism, is what makes the feminine flesh syncopate with the cyclical rhythm of nature. So the gynecological self with its accent on "earthcare" (Carolyn Merchant's term) is homo ecologicus par excellence. To sum up: Irigaray's transversal geophilosophy is fundamentally a new global paradigm based on corporeal ontology which is at once interhuman and interspecific. By way of it, we hope to get in touch with the earth again and to save the earth from becoming an uninhabitable place for its inhabitants.