Milieus and Sexual Difference

Abstract

Irigaray's critique of the phallocentric subject's implicit dependence on the maternal-feminine “outside” is compelling. Her postulation of nonhierarchical sexual difference gives the relational world of woman specificity and Irigaray brings the subject's worldview to earth as merely the relation of the male human to the world. But the focus of her transvaluation remains largely anthropocentric; and she maintains too many aspects of the privilege of the subject's sovereignty as proper to male subjectivity. I suggest that, we need to extend Irigaray and to think sexual difference beyond the human. Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson and Jakob Von Uexküll, I argue that we need to think life beyond the constitution of the organism as the continuous enmeshment of different milieus. Sexual difference is a force of differentiation that articulates relationships between organisms and organs as crucial aspects of many milieus that make up the Earth. Along with the sexually differentiated aspects of milieus, there are rhythms of difference constitutive of milieus that are not sexed. The first section of the essay describes Irigaray's conceptualization of sexual difference between humans. Then I turn to her engagement with the status of nonhuman animals in “Animal Compassion.” I suggest her approach in this essay is too anthropocentric and move to a discussion of Uexküll's thinking on milieus as a way to extend the concepts of difference and sexual difference into posthuman contexts. The essay concludes by reading Irigaray's concept of difference with Deleuze and Bergson.

Notes

¹Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. C. Burke and G.C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993, 10. Hereafter abbreviated as ESD. Luce Irigaray, Éthique de La Différence Sexuelle, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1984. Hereafter abbreviated EDS.

²Luce Irigaray, Sharing the World. Trans. L. Irigaray. London: Continuum, 2008, xi; hereafter abbreviated as STW.

³Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History, trans. A. Martin, New York: Routledge, 1996, 37. Hereafter abbreviated as ILTY.

⁴Irigaray describes the articulation of sexual difference as the accomplishment of «our humanity» in “Animal Compassion,” trans. M. Gaddis Rose in Animal Philosophy: Essential Reading in Continental Thought, ed. M. Calarco and P. Atterton, London: Continuum, 2004, 201. Hereafter abbreviated as AC.

⁵Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Hereafter abbreviated as BU. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution. trans. A Mitchell, New York: Dover, 1998. Hereafter abbreviated as CE. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987. Hereafter abbreviated as ATP. Jakob Von Uexküll, A Foray in the World of Animals and Humans, trans. J.D. O'Neill, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2010. Hereafter abbreviated as FWA.

⁶My argument here is closely aligned with Grosz's recent work in BU.

⁷See ESD, ILTY and STW.

⁸Irigaray, “The Question of the Other”, Yale French Studies 87 (1995): 12–3.

⁹See, for example, Irigaray, ESD, 51. While Irigaray's presentation of the experience of carnal contact is hetero-normative, she is making an important claim about the physical and morphological irreducibility of experiencing carnal contact through a vagina or experiencing carnal contact through a penis.

¹⁰Irigaray, “The Question of the Other”, Yale French Studies 87 (1995): 12–3.

¹¹Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. G.C. Gill, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, 16.

¹²Irigaray's socio-linguistic research on language use is conducted in Indo-European languages. Her data is insufficient for making universalizing claims about sexed tendencies in speaking styles among human women and men.

¹³L. Irigaray, see ILTY and “The Question of the Other”, Yale French Studies 87 (1995): 15–7.

¹⁴ Animal Philosophy: Essential Reading in Continental Thought, ed. M. Calarco and P. Atterton, London: Continuum, 2004, 17.

¹⁵J. Derrida Interview with J.L. Nancy “The Calculation of the Subject”, in Who Comes After the Subject? ed. E. Cadava, P. Connor, and J.L. Nancy, New York: Routledge, 1991, 105–6.

¹⁶I think Derrida's insistent emphasis on the attention his female cat gives to the sight of his naked body and, in particular, to his exposed genitals in “The Animal that Therefore I Am” is another instance of anthropmorphic projection. See Derrida, Animal Philosophy: Essential Reading in Continental Thought, ed. M. Calarco and P. Atterton, London: Continuum, 2004, 13–128.

¹⁷Brett Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, Albany: SUNY Press, 2008, 13. Hereafter abbreviated as OE. On Kant's influence on Uexküll's project, see OE, 12–4.

¹⁸Jakob Von Uexküll, “The New Concept of Umwelt: A Link between the Sciences and the Humanities', Semiotica 134-1/4 (2001): 111–23, 112. Hereafter abbreviated as NE.

¹⁹Jakob Von Uexküll, “An Introduction to Umwelt”, Semiotica 134–1/4, 107–10, 108. Hereafter abbreviated as Intro.

²⁰Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, New York: Zone, 2005, 28.

²¹For an influential example of this attitude to Irigaray, see Judith Butler and Drucilla's Cornell's remarks in Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell, with Pheng Cheah, and Elizabeth Grosz, “The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell”, Diacritics 28, no. 1 (1998): 19–42, 21–5.

²²Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy. Trans. H. Wildon Carr. New York: Henry Holt, 1920, 11–6.

²³On embryogenesis see Grosz, “Deleuze, Ruyer and Becoming-Brain: The Music of Life's Temporality”, Parrhesia 15 (2012): 1–13.