Negativity, Unhappiness or Felicity: On Irigaray's Dialectical Culture of Sexual Difference

Catherine Malabou, Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

L'Esprit Crateur, Volume 52, Number 3, Fall 2012, pp. 11-25 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/esp.2012.0035

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/esp/summary/v052/52.3.malabou.html

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Negativity, Unhappiness or Felicity: On Irigarays Dialectical Culture of Sexual Difference

Catherine Malabou and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

N HER INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES of dialogues and interviews collected in the volume Conversations, Luce Irigaray stresses dialogue and collaboration as important ways of thinking in the culture of intersubjectivity. Through exposure to another, such dialogue implicates those who participate and subjects them to the questioning, or even the inversion, of their positions and identities: [T]he questions have a content concerning a truth both external and internal to each subject, a truth both objective and subjective.1 Evocative of her concept of relational, gendered subjectivity, such a dialogical inquiry, situated in but radically exceeding the hermeneutical tradition, is for Irigaray an important alternative to the subject/object structure of philosophical and scientific thought. It is perhaps still too rare that such a dialogical exchange takes place among women philosophers, questioning other womens thinking, in order to expand the limitations of philosophy as a discipline. Although Irigaray herself has favored speaking with the other in both the structural and conceptual organization of her work, in most cases the questions have been addressed to her regarding her thinking, as for example is the case in the genre of the interview. Women philosophers/feminist critics speaking with each other about Irigaray enact a different, yet equally important, structure of the intellectual community among women: an instance of I/you/, she/we, she/she reflected in the form of this essay. Yet since such relational questioning among women pertains to the history of philosophy (in our case, to the history of dialectical thought and its future), it necessarily occurs within the suppressed horizon of sexual difference. Thinking with the other puts into question the Hegelian triad of Man, God, Philosopher, which Catherine Malabou examines in The Future of Hegel.2 By fragmenting each of these terms, dialogical engagement among women allows us, as Irigaray puts it, to interrogate these terms as particularities, which suppress sexual difference, and the interrelations with others more generally, within the (masculine) universal. Given this emphasis on collaborative questioning with another and by another, we met at the University at Buffalo in April 2011 to examine Irigarays reading of the philosophy of Hegel, which is one of the main frame LEsprit Crateur, Vol. 52, No. 3 (2012), pp. 1125

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works of her political philosophy. For both of us it is a new departure: Catherine Malabou has worked on Hegel in her book The Future of Hegel in the context of her philosophy of plasticity, and on Irigaray in the context of deconstruction, notably in Changer de diffrance,3 but has not yet interrogated Irigarays own relationship to Hegel. Ewa Ziarek has worked on Irigarays ethics of sexual difference in the context of her theory of a feminist ethics of dissensus, but she focused primarily on Irigarays engagements with Lacan and Lvinas.4 So for both of us it is an opportunity to expand our previous interpretations of Irigaray and to think with each other.5 During our conversations, what emerged as the key problem in Irigarays work is the relationship between negativity and felicity in politics and history, as well as in personal life (in erotic relations, for example). In the first two parts of this essay, we study the way Irigaray critiques and re-elaborates the Hegelian concept of negativity as cultivation and becoming. It is from this perspective that she rethinks the relationships between nature and culture, gender and the polis. In the third part, we address Hegels abandonment of his early ideas of love and happiness as the motors of dialectics, and Irigarays return to these abandoned threads. As we argue, Hegel fails to think through the dialectical relations between felicity, negativity, and becoming, despite his provocative articulation of love as labor. If one did not understand Irigarays implicit critique of Hegels betrayal of his own thought, the concept of felicity would seem naive and deprived of any philosophical interest and tradition. Who would even dare to address felicity as a crucial problem of politics, including feminist politics, today? This seems to be an impossible task. But after all, Irigaray presents herself as a militant for the impossible, which is not to say a utopian. Rather [she] want[s] what is yet to be as the only possibility of a future.6 Does the relationship between felicity and negativity open such a future for a feminist theory of sexual difference and dialectic itself? The labor of the negative in Irigaray and Hegel EZ/CM: As a philosopher, Irigaray uses and reinterprets methods from different philosophical orientations, ranging from deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology to the Hegelian and Marxist dialectic in order to criticize immediacy and the fixity of binary oppositions, including the structural formulations of sexual difference. As she explains:
This radical turning over of an immediate point of view, including on the intellectual level, required nevertheless some dialectical articulations with the past and the future of the History in which I am situated. [...] Using phenomenology without dialectic would risk nevertheless a

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reconstruction of a solipsistic world, including a feminine world unconcerned with the masculine world. (Conversations 9-10)

Irigarays interest in Hegel has been ongoing, beginning with the section entitled The Eternal Irony of the Community in Speculum of the Other Woman.7 Yet instead of tracing different stages and moments of Irigarays interpretation of Hegel, we want to focus on her most sustained and creative engagement in her book I Love to You for two reasons. First, this text most explicitly articulates the political and the ethical framework of Irigarays negative dialectic of sexual difference. Second, it also interrogates the necessary relationship between negativity and happiness, which, instead of amounting to unhappiness, as the conventional understanding would have it, produces felicity. To address this unheard-of co-implication of negativity, felicity, and becoming, Irigaray confronts three interrelated philosophical tasks. The first task is to reinterpret the labor of the negative itself beyond the labor of death. The second task is to displace the labor of the negative and the labor of the neutral subject from the Man, God, Philosopher triad to the context of sexual difference. However, the labor of the negative vis--vis sexual difference cannot be limited to the sphere of the family or private life; on the contrary, it re-marks all the stages of the Hegelian dialectic: nature/culture, family/state, objective and absolute spirit. The last task is to rethink the relationship between negativity and felicity in order to propose a new framework for the political and ethical culture of difference. These three philosophical and political tasks provide conditions of possibility for a political ethics that refuses to sacrifice desire for death, power, or money (Love 33). Such a political ethics, understood as an ethics of a collective culture of sexual difference, provides the theoretical framework for Irigarays work on sexuate rights, language, religion, and ecology. The turn to the objective dialectic between negativity and felicity does not mean, however, that Irigaray abandons the fourfold (the Heideggerian resonance of the fourfold is deliberate) sexual relations proposed in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. This fourfold, let us recall, includes the spatial/temporal relations of the world; the relations between the earth and the divine (or sensible transcendental); the relations between women and women, including the love of the same among women understood as the genealogical mother/ daughter relation and the horizontal relations among women; and finally relations between men and women.8 Furthermore, the emphasis on negative mediation does not mean that the notion of sexual difference as an ontological event exceeding its ontic, historical articulations disappears (Irigaray, Ethics VOL. 52, NO. 3 13

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6). Rather, Irigarays engagement with dialectics is focused on a specific aspect of these fourfold relations, namely, on the objective mediation of sexual difference, that is, on the political and institutional articulations of sexuate rights, civil culture, and political community. In fact, gender (genre) means precisely such objectivecultural and politicalarticulations of sexual difference. Because Irigaray presents sexual difference as the defense of the negative and the impossible, we begin our discussion of felicity with her redefinition of Hegelian negativity (Love 9-10). Certainly, Irigaray is not the first philosopher to stress, as Penelope Deutscher puts it, the negative aspect of sexual difference as the impossible labor of the negative.9 The important though implicit interlocutor here is Lacan, specifically his emphasis on the antinomies of sexuation, which Joan Copjec interprets in the context of the Kantian antinomies.10 Both Lacans and Irigarays emphasis on the negative in sexual difference reveals the internal division and limitation of the sexed subject that is, they point to the limits of the symbolic positions rather than to an identification with a positive identity. Yet in contrast to other thinkers, Irigaray is the first philosopher to link the negativity of sexual difference with the political and the ethical meaning of felicity. CM: So the question is why this return to Hegel, what new ground is gained in this double move, namely, in the reinterpretation of sexual relations as the dialectical labor of the negative, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, in the redefinition of the negative as felicity, rather than death? How does this infelicitous return to Hegel enable Irigaray to propose the possibility of happiness as the horizon of interpersonal and cultural ethics? EZ/ CM: To answer this question let us begin with Irigarays critique of the main moments of the Hegelian elaboration of negativity as the labor of death and the destructive implications of such negativity for sexual difference. As readers of Hegel know all too well, death plays a determining role in the master/slave dialectic, that is, in the intersubjective dialectic of recognition and desire. Human desire for recognition by the other, the origin of self-consciousness, is intertwined, according to Hegel, with the struggle to death. The value of desire rests, therefore, not on its cultivation with the other, but on the willingness to sacrifice life for the sake of recognition. What Hegel calls in the Phenomenology the slavish consciousness is the subject afraid to risk its life for the sake of recognition. Thus, both master and slave are caught in the uncritical sacrificial logic. This logic is also at stake in the constitution of the value of labor since it is through labor that the slave overcomes his fear of death. Furthermore, death determines not only recognition, desire, and labor, 14 FALL 2012

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but also ethical community since the state uses the fear of death to overcome the fragmentation of economic interests in civil society. EZ: If the fear of death is still at work in the formation of ethical collectivity, does that mean that the slavish sacrificial logic is never overcome in the objective spirit? Is this preoccupation with death a bit too obsessive? Is this another irony of the community? EZ/CM: Death is also at work in the institution of the family. As Hegels interpretation of Antigone underscores, one of the crucial tasks of the family, and in particular of woman, is the spiritualization of death through burial rites. Even the labor of love in marriage is intertwined with death since the objective expression of that love, according to Hegel, is reproduction, which he interprets as the death of parents. Thus, although Irigaray credits Hegel for being the first philosopher who treated love as intersubjective labor rather than merely a feeling, she nonetheless concludes that the Hegelian dialectic excludes that labor and subordinates it uncritically to the power of death. Consequently, Freud was right in his diagnosis that Western culture is the culture of death, the pure expression of which is the superego.11 In contrast to Hegels sacrificial logic, Irigaray redefines sexual difference as the labor of limitation and cultivation. Such negativity does not produce synthetic unity, but on the contrary contests any sense of immediacy for example, the immediacy of the sexed bodyand emphasizes the incompleteness of nature, the subject, political community or the universal. As Irigaray puts it, The mine of the subject is always already marked by disappropriation. [] Being a man or a woman already means not being the whole of the subject or of the community or of spirit, as well as not being entirely ones self (Love 106). By negating all sense of immediacy and mediated unity, the Irigarayan negative enables the recognition of non-sublatable limits of nature, politics, and absolute spirit: [T]he function of the negative would be different. It would become the recognition of [...] limits (Love 56). By dramatizing, in Irigarays words, not being the whole of the subject or of the community, the disappropriating negativity of sexual difference undercuts all the imaginary constructions of unity and identity on subjective and political levels. By exposing the contradictions and incompleteness of historically constituted identities, this approach to sexual difference prevents the reification of existing gender and racial stereotypes into political or natural norms.12 CM: It is important to stress that such limits are not fixed but rather are dynamic. They imply the possibility of moving outside oneself, the possibility of creation and the passage of an in-between. In this sense, the dialectical VOL. 52, NO. 3 15

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negativity of sexual difference is a condition of cultivation and transformation, of a non-teleological becoming. EZ/CM: The notion of the limit continues, therefore, Irigarays previous work in An Ethics of Sexual Difference on the interval as the passage of becoming, as the dynamic spatio-temporal movement of desire and creativity (Ethics 106). By interpreting the disappropriating character of sexual difference in temporal terms as a possibility of becoming, and desire as the opening of freedom, Irigaray emphasizes the transformative effects of the negative, which submits the end of history projected by Hegel to the openness of future: [T]he world must not be sealed already, it must still be open, the future not determined by the past (Love 117). Yet the labor of the negative is intertwined not only with the possibility of becoming, but also with ethical respect for others in erotic and political relations. As an internal limitation and disappropriation of the gendered subject, sexual difference reveals the fact that it is not the hostile other that prevents the full constitution of identities, but the very condition of sexuate being: I am sexed implies I am not everything. [...] I am limited by myself (Love 51-52). By foregrounding the incompleteness of any identity, sexual difference negates either the aggressive projections of the negative onto the other or the reduction of the other to the complement of the subject. Such an ethical encounter with the Other is irreducible to the political structures of domination or to narcissistic complementarity. On the contrary, it implies taking the negative upon oneself for the sake of the others becoming. CM: The implicit Lvinasian undertones of Irigarays analysis of the ethical respect for the other are rather unmistakable, as if she were continuing her engagement with Lvinas explicitly staged in An Ethic of Sexual Difference. EZ: Yes, but in a way Irigaray reverses Lvinass (and Derridas) relation between ethics and politics. If Lvinas turns to an anarchic, non-thematizable ethical relation to the other in order to interrupt the history of war and totality, Irigaray contests the monological politics of totality and war in order to create a culture of difference in which a non-appropriative ethical encounter with the other would be both possible and impossible. Once again the notion of limitation and negativity is crucial: since it is not the other who limits my becoming and my freedom because I am always already limited by belonging to a gender, sexed body, and genealogy, such limitation cannot be overcome either by aggression directed to the other or by the narcissistic projections of love. Nor can it be sublated into a mirage of the Absolute: [N]either I nor you are everything, [...] each of us is limited, marked by the negative (Love 117). 16 FALL 2012

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EZ/CM: On the linguistic level, the non-symmetrical encounter with the other is expressed by a twist of grammar, that is, by the shift from a direct to an indirect object. In Irigarays neologism I love to you (Jaime toi) the preposition to [] marks the lack of reciprocity and complementarity. As she puts it, the preposition to [] is a barrier against alienating the others freedom in my subjectivity, my world, my language (Love 110). To is also a mark of silence that enables listening to the other, both to the erotic other and to what is not yet determined (Irigaray, Love 117). CM: Similarly the Hegelian desire for the others recognition is transformed into the desire of being with the other (Love 103-05). Such being and desiring with the other, who is irreducible to my intentionality, opens time and the world together, with, between (Love 111). If one can still use the term recognition here, then it is the recognition of irreducible difference that overcomes the master/slave dialectic. And the being toward death is transformed into being toward the other (you) (in German, zum). Nature/Culture dialectic and Irigarays politics of gender EZ/CM: The non-sacrificial negative requires a redefinition of the nature/culture dialectic in the context of the negativity of sexual difference (Love 35-42). For feminist readers of Irigaray, this is certainly the most problematic aspect of her work. Irigaray criticizes the static nature/culture split, which implicitly or explicitly situates subjectivity with one foot in nature and another in culture. In the context of feminist theory such a split manifests itself, for example, in the sex/gender distinction or is reproduced in the essentialism/social construction debates that provided the framework for the reception of Irigaray in the U.S. in the 1980s and 90s. What is at stake in Irigarays negative nature/culture dialectic is the question of whether it provides a natural foundation for the politics of gender (for example, in the natural sex), or whether, on the contrary, it contests any unmediated natural identity while locating an implicit negative in nature itself. In other words what is the status of the claim that the nature/culture dialectic already begins with the two, that it is impossible to sublate sexual division in nature into the organic unity of the genus? Is the negativity in nature only a potential to be unfolded/mediated by the cultural work of the negative: gender, language, law, and the symbolic articulation of difference? The related and far more difficult question is how can we understand the relationship between being born and becoming woman in the context of the transformative labor of the negative. What does it mean to be born? Hegel seems to be silent on this point. VOL. 52, NO. 3 17

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This issue raises the negation of natural immediacy and mediation. For Irigaray being born is a natural aspect of gender, but it is always already cultural to the extent that it conveys the feeling of not being everything. Being born has to be reconsidered not as immediate nature but as a retroactive intentionality and temporality, that is, a condition that I can assume only retrospectively, from the changing perspective of gendered, historical becoming (Love 39). How could we otherwise claim a free temporality for women? CM: And what is even more amazing is Irigarays notion of retroactive intentionality and passivity (Love 39). How can one be retroactively passive? By assuming retroactively a redistribution of passivity and activity? EZ: This retroactive redistribution of activity and passivity resonates with your notion of plasticity put forward in The Future of Hegel, where you define plasticity as a capacity both to receive and to give form, as a dynamic metamorphosis that nonetheless resists deformation (8-12). CM: Can we then understand being born not as a fixed determination that needs to be completely dissolved in culture but rather as an always already plastic condition, that is, as a constant movement of both giving form to oneself and receiving it from the other? EZ: Moving now in a different direction than Irigaray, can we say that such a plastic understanding of being born is open to transgender becomings and transformations? Such becomings might resonate with Gayle Salamons critique and extension of Irigaray towards the undecidability of genders: [G]enders that find no easy home within the binary system are still animated by difference. Sexual undecidability does not condemn the subject to placelessness, but rather locates difference at the heart of both subjectivity and relation.13 CM: Let us now move from the nature/culture dialectic to Irigarays politics of gender. What Irigaray retains from Hegel is the turn to the objective that is, political and institutionaldeterminations of gender. Objective here does not mean the rational objectivity of science, but rather the labor of the negative extending beyond individual subjects to political community. In Hegels Philosophy of Right the relation between the sexes is inscribed in the family/state dialectic: Man finds his destiny in the state, learning, struggle, labor, and law, whereas womans destiny remains in the family, in the affective unity of feeling and abstract duty.14 EZ/CM: Yes, Irigaray shifts the position of the feminine from the family to the state and argues for the creation of civil culture, first of all among women, and second between the feminine and masculine genders (Love 2122). Such a displacement from the private to the public not only stresses the 18 FALL 2012

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political constitution of the female gender but calls for an objective mediation for women and between the sexes (Love 67). Irigarays argument here allows us to complicate the feminist slogan that the personal is political. Irigaray argues that for the personal to become fully political, there needs to be mediation between subjectivity and objectivity in the form of discourse, law, political movements, and alternative communities of difference. What is at stake here is not only the critique of the exclusion of women and the destruction of female sociality, philosophy, and linguistics, but the creation of political collective subject positions for women treated as women rather than as private mothers, lovers, etc. (Love 44). EZ: Linguistically, such a dialectic is easier to express on the level of particulars, where we can have multiple relations between I/she I/he, she/she, she/he, he/he. On the level of collectivity, however, it is almost impossible to express mixed-gender sociality, since the plural shes (elles) is suppressed either by the neutral pronoun they in English or by the masculine pronoun ils in French (Love 67). Consequently what is at stake for Irigaray in her infamous emphasis on the two is not necessarily the heterosexual couple she/he, but the inscription of I/she, she/elles into collectivities of citizens, race, religion, class or ethnicity. In other words Irigaray splits the one/many opposition into twos, and subjects both terms to dialectical becoming. At least I would like to propose this as a productive interpretation of her work. CM: The inscription of the feminine into plurality and collectivity aims to overcome the division between universal men and empirical women. Such a gendered division between the universal and the particular is, according to Irigaray, the main source of infelicity in Western political culture. Happiness and felicity CM/EZ: The creation of a non-sacrificial political ethics reveals another aspect of the negative so frequently addressed in I Love to You, namely, its relation to happiness or felicity. In other words the overcoming of both destructive immediacy and the sacrificial labor of death in the subjective/ objective dialectic clears the ground for a new understanding of negativity as felicity. This negativity, according to Irigaray, has to be thought within the horizon of dialectical unfolding or blossoming. For this unfolding, Irigaray uses the metaphor of the flower and associates it with the Buddhist tradition by describing a scene in which the Buddha contemplates a flower. She writes that the Buddhas flower perhaps offers us the best object for meditation upon the appropriateness of form to matter (Love 24-25). But of course, given Irigarays intertextual play and mimicry, the metaphor of the flower also VOL. 52, NO. 3 19

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refers to the famous notion of blossoming in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit where Hegel uses the metaphor of the flower to reject the conventional thinking fixated on the antithesis of truth and falsity and on acceptance or rejection.15 Whereas Hegel presents this blossoming as both a conflict and an accomplishment, for Irigaray it appears as a peaceful unfolding, indeed as a peaceful revolution. Irigaray uses two words for happiness: happiness (bonheur) and felicity (flicit). According to the OED, in English, felicitous means happy, well chosen (as in a felicitous expression) or accomplished. Felicity can also refer to intense happiness or bliss. In general, felicity has a more spiritual meaning than happiness, and it is often used in Christianity to designate salvation or life after death. However, by replacing the references to Christianity with Buddhism, Irigaray interrogates the possibility of a terrestrial felicity in history (hence the books subtitle Sketch For a Felicity in History). Although felicity has a broader meaning than in the Hegelian dialectic, it nonetheless challenges the telos Hegel eventually assigns to spirituality. In his early text on Christianity, The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate, Hegel insisted on love as a kind of dialectical accomplishment. However, the main example of this accomplishment was Christs love.16 Later, in the Phenomenology, he abandons this idea, showing that dialectics is only the labor of the negative and is incapable of producing any kind of felicity other than the accomplishment of absolute knowledge. Negativity then can only mean suffering. When it is linked to felicity, it can only mean un-happiness and not cultivation. For Irigaray, however, felicity is linked with both thinking and love, personal and political culture. For any reader of Hegel, Irigarays implicit reference to Hegels philosophical metamorphosis becomes apparent. In I Love to You, Irigaray brings to light the secret move in Hegelian dialectical philosophy, namely, the demise of felicity and love as the motors of thought. Maybe that is why Hegel often appears to be the epitome of a solitary thinker. Thus from our reading of Irigaray the following questions emerge: If dialectics is the process of self-development and actualization of all possibilities, why does it fail to produce felicity and the accomplishment of relations between and among men and women? Can plasticity (understood as the movement of assuming and giving form) be a dialectical expression of this felicity, and if it is so, why did Hegel not present it that way? It is clear that for Irigaray felicity is not limited to private happiness, or to the private right to the pursuit of happiness, as the U.S. Declaration of Independence puts it, because it can be accomplished only in political culture. This culture and love [] remain to be built between women and men (Irigaray, 20 FALL 2012

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Love 10). Felicity is intertwined with the new alliance between the female and male genders to be created in the context of political democratic culture. Happiness is thus conceived of as the promise of a [political] future, as well as the future of thought, the future of dialectics itself (Love 11). Running throughout I Love to You, the question of happiness is both faithful to and disruptive of the main purpose of Irigarays project, since its philosophical elaboration and its relationship to the labor of the negative are sometimes implicit. Yet if we disregard these implicit references, felicity can appear naive, even un-philosophical. Historically, the tone of Irigarays text reminds us of the question posed by French utopian socialism: How can we be happy together?, where together means essentially men and women. Talking about happiness in such a direct and simple way has become rare in contemporary discourse and seems to lead us back to French political movements like Fourrierism and Saint-Simonian politics. Severed from dialectical negativity, happiness, often associated in the popular imaginary with wholeness or harmony, appears as an obsolete and anachronistic concept. How does Irigaray succeed in mobilizing this term as a crucial issue in political philosophy? Implicitly, Irigaray does so by going back to Hegel and his conception of love as labor. Explicitly, she declares:
Happiness must be built by us here and now on earth, where we live, a happiness comprising a carnal, sensible and spiritual dimension in the love between women and men, woman and man, which cannot be subordinated to reproduction, to the acquisition or accumulation of property, to a hypothetical human or divine authority. (Love 15)

Furthermore, the collective task of building happiness is linked not only to liberation from economic and political oppressions (as is the case in the Marxist and feminist traditions) but also to recovery from a loss of culture: Becoming happy implies liberating human subjectivity from the ignorance, oppression and the lack of culture that weighs so heavily upon this essential dimension of existence: sexual difference (Love 106). Why does Irigaray say that such a happiness is still to come and has never existed in history? Why is felicity linked with the creation of a culture of sexual difference? Here comes her first critique of Hegel: although he understands love as labor, this labor is based on inequality between the sexes. The woman is the one who has to be attached to man as a universal, while she herself remains only a particularity. If a woman wants to have a relationship to the universal, she has to renounce what she is, her singularity. In the labor of love, she is doomed to abstract duty. One can hardly imagine a felicitous outcome of such a gendered division in the labor of love. When the Marxist tradition VOL. 52, NO. 3 21

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speaks about the division of labor and its injustice, it hardly addresses the question of love because it treats love as a feeling and not as a specific kind of labor. As Irigaray observes, Marx defined the origin of mans exploitation of man as mans exploitation of woman and asserted that the most basic human exploitation lies in the division of labor between man and woman, but for him the division of work meant the relation between production and reproduction; it did not concern love (Love 19). For Irigaray, the inequality between the sexes has to be rethought not only in the context of exploitation in the family, but also in the context of the labor of love in politics. Another critique of Hegel takes the form of a phenomenology of the lived experience of unhappiness in love. In Western culture, love has remained a natural affliction [un malheur naturel] (Love 29). Just as in the unhappy consciousness in Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, the lover mistakenly seeks his reflection in another consciousness but fails to find it and is doomed to remain solitary:
Of love, we know only the singularity of sensible desire bereft of a for-itself, the torments of attraction for the other, the weight of sinfulness and the price we pay for our redemption. We know about the loneliness of desire, the desperation of rejection or of wanting the impossible, the pathological derangements of the drives, the destitution of parting [les drlictions de la sparation] [...] We also know the shame of desire, its engulfment in the loss of identity, its chaos, its drug of disillusioned tomorrows. (Love 29)

As this quote shows, love separated from language, culture, accomplishment, and creativity does not have a future. Because love is primarily linked with disillusionment and unhappy consciousness, [w]e still know nothing of the salvation love brings, individual and collective salvation (Love 29). Irigaray deliberately appropriates the notion of salvation in order to deconstruct its Christian as well as dialectical meanings, both of which are centered on the love of Christ and the father/son relationship. Instead, Irigaray emphasizes the terrestrial, immanent, and political meaning of love among women as well as among women and men. Another symptom of unhappiness is the restriction of felicity to genealogy: For centuries in our cultures felicity has been presented to us as, at best, genealogical (Love 29). Genealogy means here filiation and reproduction in the male family. From the Hegelian perspective, genealogy leads to sacrifice and sanctified desire, that is, to sublated desire, the deprivation of any fulfillment or the reduction of such a fulfillment to the procreation of a child and the accumulation of property (Love 30). In her critique of Hegel, Irigaray performs a double move. First, she wants to expand felicity and creation beyond 22 FALL 2012

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procreation and to link it with political culture. Second, once this political dimension is established, she wants to rethink what genealogy might mean, in particular, how to signify the erased female genealogy and the mother-daughter relationship. If we ask ourselves what in the end Irigaray retains from the Hegelian dialectical concepts, the answer appears to be love as labor and negativity as energy. We know that for Hegel, negativity is defined as energy, that is, as a movement transgressing boundaries and fixed determinations. It is the very model of dialectics. Irigaray keeps this definition of energyin fact, it is very important to stress the dialectical meaning of this termbut orients it differently. In the end, this energy should develop freely and should refuse sacrifice. Such energy carries us beyond ourselves, but not beyond sexual difference or difference in general. On the contrary, it moves us toward companionship and alliance with others. The reference to energy and the critique of Christian monotheism perhaps explains Irigarays brief allusions to Buddhism. First, the allusion to the Buddha gazing at the flower appears as a kind of preface to the whole discussion of felicity in history and perhaps reverses the Hegelian presentation of Christianity as a telos. In this sense, I Love to You anticipates Irigarays later works on Eastern and Western spiritualities, in particular on the spirituality of yoga.17 Second, the allusion to the Buddhist practice of the body is a way of making the movement of negativity more corporeal and inextricably linked with the sensible transcendental (Love 31). And finally, Irigarays critique of the male extraterrestrial, monotheistic god resonates with her analysis of the divine and the feminine. Conclusion In conclusion, we want to ask two questions. The first question is whether it is possible to enlarge Irigarays nature/culture dialectic beyond her ostensible dualism of two genders. Is it possible to extend it, for example, in the direction of transgender studies, as we have suggested earlier? Such a possibility would require a plastic notion of nature open to retrospective cultural and political elaborations, which would be lived without a psychic or political sense of deformation. In other words, transgender becoming may be thought of as a plastic transformation. The second question pertains to the project of rethinking the negative beyond death and linking it instead with felicity. Why have the concepts of negativity and happiness been so drastically severed? Why is the only possible linkage between negativity and felicity expressed as unhappiness rather VOL. 52, NO. 3 23

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than as a dialectical unfolding of history and culture? Why dont we have a political concept of happiness as a future expectation, and why should we be ashamed of having one? In light of these questions, it is interesting to note that Irigarays own elaboration of the negative is more philosophical and robust than her notion of felicity. In fact, felicity appears to be a subterranean notion, in search of itself, its own language, philosophical genealogy, and culture. But sometimes, what at first sight appears to be a weaker part of a book or an implicit point of analysis can become its most promising insight and a starting point for future work. I Love to You forces us to ask why felicity has sunk into this dimension of a naive, unthinking, and uncritical attitude. Is this severance of felicity and dialectical negativity nonsublatable, or is it still possible to work with it and to overcome it? And does such work indeed demand the inscription of the feminine shes/elles into political plurality and universality? Kingston University and State University of New York at Buffalo Notes
1. Luce Irigaray, Conversations (London: Continuum, 2008), xii. 2. Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, Lisabeth During, trans. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 20. 3. Catherine Malabou, Changer de diffrance: le fminin et la question philosophique (Paris: Galile, 2009), 20. 4. Ewa Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001), 151-82. 5. This thinking with is marked throughout this text by the uses of our initials in different sequences, which indicate the distributions of the voices. The initials that appear first indicate the author of the first draft, which is then taken as a point for departure for further collaborative re-vision and elaboration. 6. Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity in History, Alison Martin, trans. (New York: Routledge, 1996), 10. 7. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, Gillian C. Gill, trans. (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1985), 214-27. For an excellent interpretation of Irigarays relation to Hegel in the context of their respective readings of Antigone, see Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigiarays Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 82-120. 8. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, trans. (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1993), 8. 9. Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (Ithaca: Cornell U P, 2002), 107-20. 10. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 201-36. 11. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, James Strachey, ed., Joan Riviere, trans. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1960), 54-55. 12. As I have argued in An Ethics of Dissensus, the negativity and the disappropriating character of sexual difference is the most promising aspect of Irigarays work. 13. Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia U P, 2010), 144.

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14. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, T.M. Knox, trans. (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1967), 105-22. 15. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, A.V. Miller, trans. (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1977), 2. 16. G.W.F. Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate, Early Theological Writings, T.M. Knox, trans. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1948). 17. See Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, Stephen Pluhc ek, trans. (New York: Columbia U P, 2002).

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