This Biosphere Which Is Not One: Towards Weird Essentialism

Abstract

This essay uses the thought of Luce Irigaray as a very powerful way to imagine what ecological beings such as meadows and whales are like. For reasons given yet implicit in Irigaray's work, it is possible to extend what she argues about woman to include any being whatsoever. In particular, it is shown that to exist is to defy the so-called law of noncontradiction. Various paradoxes demonstrate that in order to care for beings that we consider to be ecological, such as meadows, we had better relax our adherence to this “law.” Ecological beings are, like Irigaray's woman, not one and not two. They cannot be thought as constantly, presently themselves, or as decomposable into other beings – not without violence. A side effect of the argument is that we can now use Irigaray to think a multiplicity of sexualities and gender identities.

Notes

¹Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. C. Porter and C. Burke, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 23. Hereafter TS.

²Plato, Phaedrus, trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. J.M. Cooper, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997, 457–556.

³Carla Lonzi, Let's Spit on Hegel, trans. V. Newman. First published in Italian, 1970, 13, available at secunda.tumblr.com, accessed March 4, 2013. Also in P. Bono and S. Kemp, ed., Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, 40–59.

⁴Chantal Chawaf, Untitled, in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, E. Marks and I. de Courtivron, ed. and intro, New York: Schocken, 1981, 177.

⁵Jacques Derrida, Hospitality, trans. B. Stocker with F. Matlock, Angelaki 5.3 (December, 2000), 3–18. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010, 14–5, 17–9, 38–50.

⁶Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1965, 84–5.

⁷ TS, 30.

⁸ TS, 29.

⁹ TS, 26.

¹⁰ TS, 76.

¹¹Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984, 381–90, 419–41.

¹²I am very grateful to Emily Parker for suggesting this line of thought to me.

¹³ TS, 74.

¹⁴ TS,75.

¹⁵Aaron D. O' Connell et al., “Quantum Ground State and Single Phonon Control of a Mechanical Ground Resonator”, Nature 464 (March 17, 2010): 697–703.

¹⁶Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G.C. Gill, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 164.

¹⁷ TS, 31. This statement is similar to Derrida's assertions that autoaffection and heteroaffection are intertwined.

¹⁸ TS, 24.