Irigaray's Ecological Phenomenology: Towards an Elemental Materialism

Abstract

This article provides an interpretation of the ecophenomenological dimension of Luce Irigaray's work. It shows that Irigaray builds upon Heidegger's recovery of the ancient sense of nature as physis, self-emergence into presence. But, against Heidegger, Irigaray insists that self-emergence is a material process undergone by fluid elements, such as air and water, of which the world is basically composed. This article shows that this “elemental materialist” position need not conflict with modern science. However, the article criticises Irigaray's claim that men and women inhabit radically different sexuate worlds. Although this claim has some phenomenological basis, ultimately it is undercut by Irigaray's own elemental materialism, which implies that sexuate difference colours our perception but does not cleave it down a radical difference in kind. We can therefore accept and develop Irigaray's contribution to ecophenomenology without her insistence on radical sexuate duality.

Acknowledgements

I thank Simon James and Tanja Staehler for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

¹I take this thesis to be consistent with Husserl's diagnosis of the crisis of the European sciences – a crisis that for him arises because we have mistakenly come to identify the quantitative, modern scientific account of the world (derived from sense-qualities by abstraction) as the whole truth. See Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970.

²So David Wood argues in “What is Eco-Phenomenology?”, in Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, ed. C. Brown and T. Toadvine, Albany: SUNY Press, 2003, 211ff.

³Brown and Toadvine, “Eco-Phenomenology: An Introduction” in Eco-Phenomenology, op. cit., 12.

⁴This may seem surprising, since Husserl affiliates phenomenology with transcendental idealism, the view that objects are (from the transcendental perspective) phenomena, in that their structures derive from the constituting activities of the transcendental subject rather than obtaining mind-independently. However, I am only pointing to a strand that opens up within Husserl's work and that inclines against his overall idealism.

⁵Thus, Husserl writes, “Experience is the performance in which for me … experienced being ‘is there’, and is there as what it is”; Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. D. Cairns, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969, 233.

⁶Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (hereafter cited parenthentically as PP), trans. C. Smith. Reprint edn., London: Routledge, 2002, 18.

⁷This is distinct from other strands along which phenomenology is ontological, such as Sartre's view that consciousness opens directly, transparently, onto brute being, or Husserl's 1927 Encyclopaedia Brittanica position that phenomenology is ontological in that it is the science “not merely of the totality of objectively existing beings, [but of] … being in general which derives its sense of being … from the correlative intentional constitution” (in The Essential Husserl: Basic Writings of Transcendental Phenomenology, ed. D. Welton, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999, 333).

⁸Bruce Foltz claims that physis, self-emergence, is just one of eight primordial features of nature, yet that it is only in light of physis that all these other features can be apprehended, so that physis is nature apprehended phenomenologically (Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995, 125); while, he claims, physis also “characterizes being as such” (147; see also 13).

⁹“The rose does have no why [ist ohne warum]; it blossoms without reason”; Silesius, The Cherubinic Wanderer: Classics of Western Spirituality, trans. M. Shrady, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1986, 54. Heidegger analyses this verse in his 1955–6 lecture course The Principle of Reason, trans. R. Lilly, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996. For discussion, see John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought. Reprint of the 1978 edn., New York: Fordham University Press, 1986.

¹⁰Heidegger, “On the Essence and Concept of ϕὐσις in Aristotle's Physics B, I (1939)” in Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1998, 212; “Vom Wesen und Begriff der ϕὐσις Aristoteles, Physik B, I”, in Gesamtausgabe I: 9, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976, 276. Hereafter cited parenthetically as ECP with German pagination after English.

¹¹Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. M.B. Mader, Austin, TA: University of Texas Press, 1999, 5; L’oubli de l’air, Paris: Minuit, 1983, 12. Hereafter cited parenthetically as FA with French pagination after English. I sometimes amend the translation without special notice. I do not capitalise being (l’être) but include the French terms to distinguish being from beings (étants).

¹²Fielding, “Questioning Nature: Irigaray, Heidegger and the Potentiality of Matter”, Continental Philosophy Review 36 (2003): 3.

¹³On Antiphon see Aristotle, Physics, trans. R. Hope, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1961, 193a10–25.

¹⁴So Quentin Meillassoux puts it; After Finitude, trans. R. Brassier, London: Continuum, 2008, 8.

¹⁵For Aristotle, the roles of female and male in reproduction correspond to those of matter and form in general ontology – or, as wood and carpenter are to table, so are female and male to reproduction. See Generation of Animals, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953, 729b12–18.

¹⁶S. Alaimo and S. Hekman, “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory”, in Material Feminisms, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008, 4ff.

¹⁷See, respectively, Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, Elizabeth Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

¹⁸Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. M. Waller, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, 26.

¹⁹See Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, London: Routledge, 1998.

²⁰These musings recall Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh, which interweaves thinking and thought. Irigaray is indeed informed by the concept, which she discusses – critically – in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G.C. Gill, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993, 127–53. She criticises Merleau-Ponty on the grounds that flesh provides a surreptitious substitute for the maternal body, “holding” the perceiver as the maternal womb once did.

²¹See, e.g., Why Different?: A Culture of Two Subjects, ed. S. Lotringer, New York: Semiotexte, 2000, 85; “Why Cultivate Difference?”, Paragraph 25, no. 3 (2002): 82.

²²See, e.g., Conversations, Continuum, 2008, 24–5. Here Irigaray also speaks of an “economy of relations to the self, to the world and to the other specific to woman or to man”, 13.

²³“Je-Luce Irigaray: A Meeting with Luce Irigaray”, interview with E. Hirsh and G.A. Olson, Hypatia 10, no. 2 (1995): 110.

²⁴This is Wood's formulation: “What is Eco-Phenomenology?”, 212.

²⁵ I Love to You, trans. A. Martin, London: Athlone, 1996, 148.

²⁶For example in The Way of Love, 67–8.