Vital Matters and Generative Materiality: Between Bennett and Irigaray

Abstract

This paper puts Jane Bennett’s vital materialism into dialogue with Luce Irigaray’s ontology of sexuate difference. Together these thinkers challenge the image of dead or intrinsically inanimate matter that is bound up with both the instrumentalization of the earth and the disavowal of sexual difference and the maternal. In its place they seek to affirm a vital, generative materiality: an ‘active matter’ whose differential becomings no longer oppose activity to passivity, subject to object, or one body, self or entity to its (excluded but constitutive) ‘other’. For both thinkers, displacing the hylomorphic conceptual structures that have tended to dominate western metaphysical thought is inseparable from critiquing the model of the individual subject as bounded, autonomous and self-identical. Such individualism is countered by the relational ontologies figured in Bennett’s ‘distributed agencies’ and Irigaray’s ‘placental economy’, and by a shared attentiveness to the capacities of the human body to bear others within. Nonetheless, this paper argues that each thinker renders this ‘other within’ in very different ways. On the one hand, Bennett’s approach complements and expands Irigaray’s notion of the elemental by affording a greater attentiveness to (human dependencies on) inorganic and non-sexuate matters. On the other, Irigaray’s conception of generative relationality and the ontological priority of the in-between allows us to think such material entanglements in ways that more fully displace the twinned logics of individualism and instrumentalization. Her project thereby affirms the relational and irreducible differences on which the ‘vitality’ of a vital materiality depends.

Notes

¹J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010, ix. Henceforth VM.

²L. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. Gill, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 133. Henceforth S.

³ VM, 2, citing W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2005, 157.

⁴Bennett can be aligned with a number of thinkers who have come to be grouped under the heading “new materialisms”. See S. Alaimo and S. Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008; D. Coole and S. Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010.

⁵I borrow this phrase from H. Kopnina's critical discussion in “Forsaking Nature? Contesting ‘Biodiversity’ Through Competing Discourses of Sustainability”, Journal of Education for Sustainable Development 7, no. 1 (2013): 51–63.

⁶Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G.C. Gill, London: Athlone, 1993, 5.

⁷Broadly speaking, I understand the shift from “sexual” to “sexuate difference” in Irigaray's work as an attempt to deflect some of the more reductive understandings of her position that conflate sexual difference with either biological sex or sexuality. Partly because of her refiguring of matter, sexuate difference cuts across both nature/culture and sex/gender divides. As the irreducible difference that allows human beings to come into being and that inflects that being through and through, sexuate difference is ontological difference which, if appropriately cultivated, gives rise to differing sexuate subjects with differing relational identities.

⁸For Irigaray's most extended engagements with Heidegger, see, The Forgetting of Air, trans. M.B. Mader, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999; The Way of Love, trans. H. Bostic and S. Pluháĉek, London: Continuum, 2002.

⁹M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell, 1962, 292.

¹⁰Irigaray suggests that such elaborations of sexuate specificity should start from the originary relations to the maternal body through which our own sexuate being is disclosed. However, I do not think elaborations of sexuate difference need remain bound by the form of those initial relations, or that those relations necessarily preclude the affirmation of intersexed bodies, despite Irigaray's own emphasis on the cultivation of genres appropriate to the woman (or man) one is by birth. Given that one's birth is always dependent on the generative crossing of sexuate difference with maternal relation, it could be argued that the most “appropriate” way to cultivate the sexuate being one is by birth is to repeat the generative movement of sexuate becoming that birth embodies. Such a movement would be found in transgendered and transsexual elaborations of sexuate being as readily as cis-gendered ones – perhaps more readily, given that working through such possibilities under heteronormative/hom(m)osocial conditions is more likely to involve critical attention to questions of sexuate difference as well as the complexity of maternal relations. Amongst these sexuate becomings, intersexed bodies might be seen not so much as confounding sexuate difference as its embodiment, insofar as such bodies incorporate the irreducible difference of sexuate difference within themselves, and disclose such difference as a confounding of the logic of the One and the Same.

¹¹On the figure of the interval in Irigaray's work, see R. Hill, The Interval: Relation and Becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle and Bergson, New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.

¹²That these “betweens” are irreducible to one another is noted in Irigaray, Conversations, London: Continuum, 2008, 66.

¹³ This Sex Which is Not One, trans. C. Porter with C. Burke, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 205–18.

¹⁴Irigaray, je, tu, nous: Towards a Culture of Difference, trans. A. Martin, London: Routledge, 1993, 39.

¹⁵Ibid., 42.

¹⁶The “priority” in question is not just temporal but (more importantly) ontological. I borrow the notion of “differentiation without separation” from Alison Stone's Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity, London, NY: Routledge, 2012 (7, 103–6). In this book Stone offers an extended recuperation of the maternal relation “in terms of an active process and [the] work of generating meaning out of body relations” (61).

¹⁷Irigaray, Elemental Passions, trans. J. Collie and J. Still, London: Athlone, 1992, 13.

¹⁸Collie and Still's translation of “bouge” as “quickening” is felicitous: in English, “quickening” can be used to refer to the stage of gestation where fetal movements are first felt by the pregnant woman. In addition to its modern temporal connotation, “quick” originally meant alive or living; thus, “quickening” speaks of a temporality that emerges in and through the fluid movements of a vital, sexuate matter.

¹⁹As Stone notes, Irigaray's approach renders fluid “the forms of bodies, as well as their material composition”; Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 99.

²⁰This is why, in Irigaray's invocations of the homophone la mère/la mer, it is crucial that we learn to hear the difference between them as well as registering their shared alliance with a life-sustaining fluidity.

²¹This problematisation of anthropocentric thought is undercut elsewhere in Irigaray's work by the reinsertion of a generalised, constitutive distinction between humanity and animality; see In the Beginning, She Was, London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

²²E. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994,19.

²³On the human species as an abstraction, see also A. Malm and A. Hornborg, “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative”, The Anthropocene Review, published online (January 7, 2014), doi:10.1177/2053019613516291.

²⁴It is true that Irigaray privileges sexuate difference over other kinds of difference, including race, class, ethnicity or sexuality, which she does not see as having the same kind of ontological status; however, she repeatedly insists that the transformed relation to difference required for an ethics of sexuate difference would both enable us to attend to differences of all kinds without assimilation or appropriation, and demand that we do so.

²⁵See Malm and Hornborg, “The Geology of Mankind?”, where the authors suggest that climate change is better described as “sociogenic” rather than “anthropogenic”. See also E. Yuen, “The Politics of Failure Have Failed”, in Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, ed. S. Lilley et al., Oakland: PM Press, 2012.

²⁶Yuen, “The Politics of Failure Have Failed”, 42.

²⁷See for example, “Between us, a Fabricated World”, in To Be Two, trans. M. Rhodes and M. Cocito-Monoc, New York: Routledge, 2001.

²⁸ VM, 60, citing L. Margulis and D. Sagan on V. I. Vernadsky in What is Life?, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 49.

²⁹Irigaray, I Love to You, trans. A. Martin, London: Routledge, 1996, 37.

³⁰See in particular Elemental Passions; The Forgetting of Air; Marine Lover: Of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. G.C. Gill, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

³¹ Elemental Passions, 80.

³²I borrow the phrase “self-unfolding emergence” from B. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics and the Metaphysics of Nature, Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1995. For Bennett on phusis, see VM, 118.

³³See I Love to You, 37.

³⁴This is why I think Bennett's strategy of anthropomorphising non-human matter to displace an anthropo-centric disregard for non-human agencies is problematic, even though I am sympathetic to her reasons for doing so (see VM, 120). The issue is not just whether we can really value non-human materialities as actants if we have already assimilated them to human actors, but which models of “the human” we are assimilating them to.

³⁵At one point, Bennett raises a series of questions that imply an ethical responsibility not entirely rooted in self-interest: “Do I attempt to extricate myself from assemblages whose trajectory is likely to do harm? Do I enter into the proximity of assemblages whose conglomerate effectivity tends toward the enactment of nobler ends?” (VM, 37–8).

³⁶Nietzsche makes the key point much more incisively: “Physiologists should think again before positing the ‘instinct of preservation’ [den Erhaltungstrieb] as the cardinal drive in an organic creature. A living thing wants above all to discharge its force [seine Kraft a u s l a s s e n]: ‘preservation’ is only a consequence of this”. The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage, 1968, 650, 340; F. Nietzsche, Nachlaß 1885-1887, KSA 12, G. Colli and M. Montinari, eds., Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999, 89.

³⁷The very appeal of the placental economy (from an Irigarayan standpoint) is that it diverges from the modern archetype of self-versus-other in ways the immune system does not, though our representations of the latter (as expelling “foreign bodies” for example) are of course themselves embedded in the conceptual paradigms that Irigaray is challenging (and are thus potentially revisable).