Breathing with Luce Irigaray 9781441115485, 9781472547965, 9781441145765

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Breathing with Luce Irigaray

Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy presents cutting-edge scholarship in the field of modern European thought. The wholly original arguments, perspectives and research findings in titles in this series make it an important and stimulating resource for students and academics from across the discipline. Some other titles in the series: Adorno, Heidegger, Philosophy and Modernity, Nicholas Joll Between the Canon and the Messiah, Colby Dickinson Castoriadis, Foucault, and Autonomy, Marcela Tovar-Restrepo Deconstruction without Derrida, Martin McQuillan Deleuze and the Diagram, Jakub Zdebik Deleuze and the History of Mathematics, Simon B. Duffy Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts, edited by Mary Caputi and Vincent J. Del Casino, Jnr Derrida, Badiou and the Formal Imperative, Christopher Norris Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure, Nicole Anderson Emmanuel Levinas, Abi Doukhan From Ricoeur to Action, edited by Todd S. Mei and David Lewin Gadamer and Ricoeur, edited by Francis J. Mootz III and George H. Taylor Heidegger and Nietzsche, Louis P. Blond Immanent Transcendence, Patrice Haynes Jean-Luc Nancy and the Question of Community, Ignaas Devisch Kant, Deleuze and Architectonics, Edward Willatt Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-Storytelling, Will Buckingham Lyotard and the ‘figural’ in Performance, Art and Writing, Kiff Bamford Michel Henry, edited by Jeffrey Hanson and Michael R. Kelly Performatives After Deconstruction, edited by Mauro Senatore Place, Commonality and Judgment, Andrew Benjamin Post-Rationalism, Tom Eyers Rethinking Philosophy and Theology with Deleuze, Brent Adkins and Paul R. Hinlicky Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Patricia Pisters The Movement of Nihilism, edited by Laurence Paul Hemming, Kostas Amiridis and Bogdan Costea The Time of Revolution, Felix Ó Murchadha

Breathing with Luce Irigaray Edited by Lenart Škof and Emily A. Holmes

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2013 © Lenart Škof, Emily A. Holmes and Contributors, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-1548-5 ePDF: 978-1-4411-4576-5 ePub: 978-1-4411-2660-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Breathing with Luce Irigaray/edited by Lenart Škof and Emily A. Holmes. pages cm. – (Bloomsbury studies in Continental philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-1548-5 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-4411-2660-3 (ebook (epub)) – ISBN 978-1-4411-4576-5 (ebook (pdf)) 1. Irigaray, Luce. 2. Respiration–Miscellanea. I. Škof, Lenart, 1972- editor of compilation. B2430.I74B74 2013 194–dc23 2013015423 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents Contributors

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1 Towards Breathing with Luce Irigaray  Lenart Škof & Emily A. Holmes (eds.)

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Part 1  Spiritual Breathing 2 When Cherubim Touch  Julie Kelso

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3 The Gift of Breath: Towards a Maternal Pneumatology  Emily A. Holmes

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4 The Prayers We Breathe: Embodying the Gift of Life in the Maternal Feminine  Eleanor Sanderson

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Part 2  Intercultural Breathing 5 Breath of Awakening: Nonduality, Breathing and Sexual Difference  Jean Marie Byrne

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6 That Tender Discipline: Spacing, Structured Nothingness & Kumbhaka  Antonia Pont

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Part 3  Natural Breathing 7 Between Goddesses and Cyborgs: Towards a Shared Desire for Sustainability  Claudia Bruno

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8 Breathing with the Natural World: Irigaray, Environmental Philosophy, and the Alterity of Nature  Tomaž Grušovnik

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9 Breathing with Animals: Irigaray’s Contribution to Animal Ethics  Sara Štuva

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Part 4  Contextual Breathing 10 All of My Work is Performance: Irigarayan Methods of Breath for Dance and Voice  Shannon Wong Lerner

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Contents

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11 Subjectivity and Sexual Difference: New Figures of the Feminine in Irigaray and Cavarero  Diane Perpich

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12 Breathing the Political: A Meditation on the Preservation of Life in the Midst of War  Elisha Foust

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13 The Distant (’dis-tənt) Stillness that is ’Breth  Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa

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Part 5  Conclusion 14 To Begin with Breathing Anew  Luce Irigaray

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Bibliography Index

227 243

Contributors Claudia Bruno is an Italian freelance researcher, journalist and web editor. She graduated in Communication Theory at the Roma Tre University, in Rome, with a degree in Political Philosophy (‘Ecofeminist culture award’, Eco Institute of Veneto Alex Langer, Laura Conti Award for thesis about environmental issues, 2009). She is a member of the editorial staff of Iaph Italia (International Association of Women Philosophers, Italy) and of the Italian feminist collective ‘diversamente occupate’. She has published articles and given public speeches about women, nature, sustainability and bodies. Jean Marie Byrne is a honorary research fellow at Curtin University (Perth, Australia). Her research interests include the intersections of feminist and yoga philosophy, Modern Yoga, Mindfulness and Childbirth Education. She is an authorized Ashtanga Yoga teacher and co-editor of Yoga in the Modern World (2008) with Mark Singleton. Elisha Foust received her doctorate from Royal Holloway, University of London, and is working as a Business Analyst at Teradata, UK. Her research interest is in Feminist Philosophy and Big Data Analytics. She is currently editing a volume entitled (Re)Branding Feminism from within the Movement. Tomaž Grušovnik is senior lecturer of Philosophy at the University of Primorska, Slovenia. His publications include a book on environmental ethics, Odtenki zelene [Shades of Green] (2011). He was a Fulbright visiting colleague at the Department of Philosophy, University of New Mexico in 2009, and Guest Lecturer at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo, Norway, in 2010. For his work on environmental ethics, he won a Herald of Science 2012 prize, awarded by the Science and Research Centre of Koper, University of Primorska, Slovenia. Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa is an interdisciplinary artist and philosopher based in New York. Her new media works have been exhibited nationally and internationally, and her writing – influenced by both Continental philosophy and feminism – addresses questions of language and the feminine, the act of reading and writing, and ‘ethics as first philosophy’. She is Assistant Professor of Art and Philosophy at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Wallis, Switzerland, and Director of Dissertation Committees and Chair of Independent Studies at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, Maine. She is the author of a forthcoming study on the writings of G. W. F. Hegel and Emmanuel Levinas. Emily A. Holmes is associate professor of Religion at Christian Brothers University in Memphis, TN (USA). Her main research interests include medieval theology and mysticism, women’s writing practices and food ethics. She is the author of Flesh Made  Word: Medieval Women Mystics, Writing, and the Incarnation (2013) and

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Women, Writing, Theology: Transforming a Tradition of Exclusion (2011), co-edited with Wendy Farley. Luce Irigaray is director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scienti­ fique in Paris. She has authored numerous books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, sexual difference, feminism, linguistics and ethics. Her original explorations on the problems of intersubjectivity and breathing are among the most important interventions into the theory of subject and ethical life since Hegel, Levinas and key Eastern thinkers. Julie Kelso is assistant professor of Philosophy and Literature at Bond University and Honorary Research Adviser (Women’s Studies) in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her publications include O  Mother Where Art Thou: An Irigarayan Reading of the Book of Chronicles (2007), three co-edited collections, along with numerous essays in feminist philosophy, biblical and literary studies. She is co-managing editor (with Roland Boer) of The Bible and Critical Theory journal. Diane Perpich is associate professor of Philosophy and Director of the program in Women’s Studies at Clemson University (USA). She is the author of The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (2008) and the co-editor with Brittany Murray of Taking French Feminism to the Streets: Fadela Amara and the Rise of Ni Putes Ni Soumises (2012). She is currently at work on a project tracing the contributions of the phenomenological and existential traditions to questions of social ontology. Antonia Pont is lecturer in TEXT (Profesional & Creative Writing and Literary Studies) at Deakin University, Melbourne (AUS). She publishes poetry, short stories and theoretical prose. Her research is committed to thinking the notion of ‘practice’ non-denominationally. She is a practitioner of Vijnana Yoga, and a student of the tradition’s founder, Orit Sen-Gupta. Reverend Dr Eleanor Sanderson is an Anglican priest in the Province of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia. Currently the vicar of St. Alban’s Parish, Eastbourne, Eleanor has held research positions in the Centre for Theology and Public Issues at the University of Otago and the School of Earth Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her area of research particularly explores international community development and Christian spirituality and her work can be found in a number of edited volumes and international journals, including special editions of Emotion Space and Society and Society and Culture. Lenart Škof is professor of Philosophy at the University of Primorska, Slovenia. His main research areas are ethics, intercultural philosophy and pragmatism. He is the author of Ethics of Breath and Atmosphere of Politics (2012, Slovenska matica, Ljubljana, Slovenia), Pragmatist Variations on Ethical and Intercultural Life (Lexington Books, Lanham, 2012), and co-editor of Bodily Proximity (with Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa; 2012, at: www.poligrafi/OnlineEditions). Lenart Škof has organized and chaired ‘The Age of the Breath Conference’ in Portorož, Slovenia in 2010.

Contributors

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Sara Štuva is a PhD candidate at the Science and Research Centre, University of Primorska, Slovenia. Her areas of research interest are animal ethics and animal philosophy. She is a co-founder of the Veganska iniciativa (Vegan Initiative), an informal organization that promotes the vegan lifestyle and engages in antispeciesist activism. The group is one of the most visible initiatives for promoting veganism in Slovenia. Shannon Wong Lerner is a doctoral candidate of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA). Her dissertation, The Modern Diva: A Cultural History of the Diva in the United States analyses shifts in the performances, representation, reception and practices of women artists known as ‘Diva’ brought about by advances in technology and new media. ‘No One Hurts You More than S/Mother’, Shannon’s ongoing collaborative opera, focuses on unrepresented women figures in opera culture, featuring the neglected dramatic mezzo voice, women of colour divas and powerful maternal bodies.

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Towards Breathing with Luce Irigaray Lenart Škof & Emily A. Holmes (eds.)

The many and varied writings of Luce Irigaray suggest that the task of philosophy is to awaken humanity to a new ethical constellation, in which our cultures recognize difference, and to new ethical spaces through which our attention to the other can be cultivated and transformed. As she describes this task in her essay on ‘The Age of Breath’ (2004b, pp. 165–70), this awakening of humanity is closely related to the breath of life we each receive and share with one another. But, in Irigaray’s words, for this awakening, nous devons passer à une autre économie de la conscience (Irigaray 2007b, pp. 325–9) – and this means that another temporality of life also is needed, one in which the ongoing becoming of subjects in their many differences is not subordinated to any idealized form or fixed representation. The spiritual task of our age is therefore intrinsically related to current debates about the subject, the recognition of difference and practical (inter)subjectivity. The ethical task of our age is theological, philosophical and intercultural in its nature, but foremost, it is, according to Irigaray, the age of the Spirit in which ethical awareness and embodied touch are reunited with reference to the divine. The aim of this collection of essays is to pay tribute to Luce Irigaray’s work through critical engagement and, as it were, through dialogically breathing with her thought and personality to open the horizon of this becoming. While previous generations of interpreters of Irigaray have related her work to the wider fields of feminist theory and philosophy and, at times, struggled with aspects of her thought in relation to serious concerns about essentialism, heteronormativity and orientalism, in this book, we present a new generation of Irigaray scholarship that breathes with her writings in order to contribute to larger contemporary conversations about the ethics of difference, peace, sustainability, feminism, spirituality and intercultural encounter. To breathe is to be alive and to exchange air with the living world around us – plants, animals and other humans. ‘Breath’, as William James observed, was ever the original of ‘spirit’. But philosophy has too often cut off metaphysical thought from this living, breathing world with its animal and female bodies, just as religious traditions have repressed the breathing flesh in favour of calcified word. The re-introduction of breath into philosophy and theology draws our awareness back to the body, to respect for the other and to nature, making awareness of the breath essential for an embodied ethics

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of difference in our globalized, ecological age. In this book, these themes are addressed through 14 essays, including an original essay from Luce Irigaray, contributed by an international collection of scholars. Irigaray has characterized her work in three stages, and although to some degree these overlap, it is possible to identify a clear line of development in her work.1 Throughout all the stages, the breath, breathing and air appear as thematic elements. The first stage opens the question of difference by uncovering the Western theoretical bias toward sameness through deconstructive readings of philosophy and psychoanalysis. Irigaray here uses strategies of mimesis, rhetorically identifying with the ‘feminine’ in male-authored texts, in order to demonstrate how it exceeds masculine discourse, and thereby opens a space for the possibility of female subjectivity.2 The second stage turns directly to envisioning the conditions for female subjectivity, that is, the conditions for the emergence of a female speaking subject in language, culture, politics and religion through the acknowledgement of sexual difference.3 This stage, more constructive than the first, has invited concerns regarding essentialism, universalism and utopianism.4 To many feminist critics, Irigaray introduces an idealized and romanticized, if not downright conservative, vision of ‘woman’ as having a distinct essence that is both grounded in the specificity of the female body, and yet, seemingly more spiritual than man.5 Irigaray’s concrete efforts to envision women’s full subjectivity in practical terms through sexuate rights, maternal genealogy, sociality among women and a divine in the image of women have provoked lively and important debates. In perhaps the most sympathetic reading, Irigaray’s writings can be viewed as opening a space for women’s subjectivity by reconnecting nature with spirit and culture, but without determining the content of that subjectivity, that is, what it means to be ‘woman’, which is always shaped by complex and intersecting particularities of race, class, sexuality, religion and so on. If Irigaray relatively easily escapes her critics’ early charges of biological essentialism, which largely resulted from a misreading of her work in, at the time, an empirically-oriented Anglo-American feminism,6 her claim of the primacy of sexual difference over other differences presents a more difficult challenge to feminist theory. Primary focus on sexual difference not only reinforces heteronormativity; it also appears to dismiss other differences as superficial and ignores the intersection of multiple differences (such as race, class, sexuality, ability) in the constitution of women’s subjectivity.7 Amy Hollywood, for instance, argues that ‘Irigaray’s claim to the primacy of sexual difference, by effacing the multiple differences of bodies and subjects, is fetishistic in ways that risk dangerous exclusions. Moreover, the very claim that we cannot think the body without thinking sexual difference leads Irigaray to evade the specificity of bodies and of history that, ostensibly, she wishes to embrace’ (Hollywood 2002, p. 185). This particular debate over the place and meaning of sexual difference in Irigaray’s work continues. In the third, most recent, stage of her writings, Irigaray turns her attention explicitly to the heterosexual couple in order to establish an ethical relationship between the sexes that acknowledges the difference between them, through what she calls an ontology and culture of being-two.8 In this perspective, sexual difference provides the negative or limit for each gender as well as the possibility of embodied transcendence, a sensible transcendental, through ethical love and divine becoming. Focus on the

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couple has provoked criticisms not only of continued gender essentialism but of an increasing heterosexual privilege within Irigaray’s work, and a perhaps surprising reluctance (in the context of Irigaray’s earlier deconstructive writings) to interrogate the binary pair of the couple.9 Others, however, identify the feminist value of her work for both lesbians and heterosexual women and the necessity of critically and ethically reimagining both heterosexuality and heterosociality to the benefit of all women (and men).10 Recognizing the history and value of these (ongoing) debates for the interpretation of Irigaray’s work, this collection focuses attention on the philosophical significance of the breath as a new and suggestive entry point into the contested terrain of sexual difference, the body, nature and the feminine. Breathing with Irigaray analyses the theme of the breath in Irigaray’s work in order to relate this topic to wider ethical contemporary concerns. The breath, breathing and air have been important themes in Irigaray’s writings ever since The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (originally in French in 1983) and An Ethics of Sexual Difference (originally in French in 1984; for the English Edition, we refer to Continuum 2004c, p.  108f.), works which point to Le temps du souffle (later translated as The Age of the Breath) in 1999, and on to Irigaray’s later books, such as Between East and West (2002a, originally in French in 1999), The Way of Love (2002b) and Sharing the World (2008c). Breathing also appears in Irigaray’s more recent writings (including her latest books, Il mistero di Maria (2010) and Una nuova cultura dell’energia (2011), neither yet translated into English), with respect to cosmological and ethical elaborations on the future of intersubjective relations. Breathing is closely connected to what Irigaray describes as a future task of philosophy as early as An Ethics of Sexual Difference – ‘We need to reinterpret everything concerning the relations between the subject and discourse, the subject and the world, the subject and the cosmic, the microcosmic and macrocosmic’ (Irigaray 2004c, p.  8). The aim of our collection is therefore to trace this theme of breath(ing) through her writings in order to contribute to contemporary scholarship on Irigaray and the wider fields of feminist theory, the ethics of difference and the philosophy of intersubjectivity. Collectively, our contributors sketch out this future ideal, when human beings in their many differences meet in ethical gestures, grounded in the awareness of breathing that links body with spirit, flesh with word, nature with culture, the subject with the cosmos, human beings with plants and animals and one another. In order to open the horizon of this volume, we offer a dialogical prologue using three examples or points of departure we take as inspiration for a fruitful engagement with Luce Irigaray’s thought – philosophical, intercultural and theological.

Breathing philosophically There are few instances in Western philosophy that can serve as a testimony or a genuine effort to breathe with the other, and in particular, the feminine other. For this reason, we would first like to put Irigaray in dialogue with perhaps the only male philosopher from the history of Western philosophy who was truly devoted to the path she proposes – Ludwig Feuerbach. In his works,11 he expounded in an unprecedented

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way a possibility for a new theory both of intersubjectivity as well as human religiosity, or, better, spirituality and ultimately, an ethics of love. His philosophy offers us an example of a philosophico-ethical opening towards the world of the other (the body and the self), of nature and even nonhuman animals. Feuerbach is a philosopher who can be (with Fichte and Hegel) justly designated as one of the most important early representatives of a theory of intersubjectivity, including the question of sexual difference within philosophy. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach writes: Personality, individuality, consciousness, without Nature, is nothing; or, which is the same thing, an empty, unsubstantial abstraction. But Nature, as has been shown and is obvious, is nothing without corporeality . . . But a body does not exist without flesh and blood. Flesh and blood is life, and life alone is corporeal reality. But flesh and blood is nothing without the oxygen of sexual distinction [orig. Geschlechtsdifferenz]. The distinction of sex is not superficial, or limited to certain parts of the body; it is an essential one: it penetrates bones and marrow. The substance of man is manhood; that of woman, womanhood. (Feuerbach 1989, pp. 91–2)

This reduction of all of the essential features of human personality to sexual difference is astounding as an ontological claim. It is also problematic from a feminist perspective, given the narrow ideological associations of ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’. Much depends on how those concepts are articulated and defined. However, for Feuerbach, these claims are strongly underpinned with his dialectics of intersubjectivity, which gives prominence to our sensitivity and sensuality and does not support any straightforward essentialist readings. For Feuerbach, sexual difference always already operates within a given dialectical relation between two persons, based on a feeling of dependence being also present in us as the foundation of religion (i.e., das Abhängigkeitsgefühl).12 Now, when reflecting upon language as a mediator between two beings, Feuerbach refers to ‘air’: Language is nothing but the realization of the species, the mediation of the ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ . . . The word’s element is ‘air’, the most spiritual and universal medium of life. (Feuerbach in: Wartofsky 1977, p. 182)

With that intuition attested in his thought, we find a starting point for a possible reconstruction in philosophy – in the form of a radical shift away from Cartesian or Hegelian legacy. The spirit of his philosophy of the future, as he named it, is thus closely related to what Irigaray proposes in her writings. For the new epoch to emerge, Feuerbach proposed a radical turn towards the new culture of love, grounded on his theory of intersubjectivity. In-der-Welt-Sein, for Feuerbach, means to dwell within the body and to communicate through touch with our sensitivity, literally with our skin (‘Soviel Sinne – soviel Poren, soviel Blößen. Der Leib ist nichts als das poröse Ich’) (Feuerbach 1975, p. 138) – the new notion of intersubjectivity departs precisely from our sensitivity rather than from rationality. For him, our spiritual essence resides in the heart, which is more (stereotypically) allied with the woman. The task of philosophy is no longer to cling to some transcendental being separated from humanity, but on

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the contrary, our task as finite human selves is to become divine, that is, infinite. For Feuerbach, the senses are thus the organs of philosophy and it is within the coordinates of sensibility that our (inter)subjectivity is born. This encounter with Feuerbach can be the starting point or a matrix for a new dialogue to be reopened within the Western philosophical tradition on the ethics of the senses. Feuerbach’s insistence on what he designates as ‘pneumatische Wasserheilkunde’ opens the path toward new sensibilities for the ancient, but forgotten logic of elements, of which air and water hold the pre-eminent place. Feuerbach is thus the most important bridge between the Presocratics and Irigaray, and his role is particularly important in the light of his choice of the elements. While the majority of Western thinkers, from Heraclitus to Heidegger, choose fire and earth as two preeminent elements of their philosophy and of the logos, it was only in Feuerbach, and later in Irigaray, that nature was granted with a philosophico-ethical gesture of resurrecting the elements of water and air/breathing from long metaphysical oblivion. According to Karl Barth, who elaborates on Feuerbach’s ‘pneumatische Wasserheilkunde’, water (and air, we may add) is the element that can reconnect the spheres of humans and nature – both being, for centuries, violently torn apart by Western philosophers.13 Just as water functions as a mediator between micro- and macrocosmic spheres for Feuerbach, it is the element of air and breathing in Irigaray that invites the cultivation of breath and Spirit. Like Irigaray, Judith Butler also notes how the breath mediates between the microand the macrocosm, between the human and the universe, in the poems written by those imprisoned in Guantanamo – ‘What I sense is that the ultimate source of these poems from Guantanamo is the simple, almost primeval, arithmetic of breathing in and out. The origin of life and the origin of language and the origin of poetry are all there, in the first breath, each breath as if it were our first, the anima, the spirit, what we inspire, what we expire, what separates us from extinction, minute after minute, what keeps us alive as we inhale and exhale the universe’.14 In her reading of these poems, Butler senses the link between the breath and the primeval origins of life, language and poetry, which we also find in the Vedic description of breath that Irigaray identifies as ‘Eastern teachings’.

Breathing interculturally Breathing with other cultures, particularly Asian traditions, in Irigaray’s work reveals her idiosyncratic and also practical encounter with Indian yoga practice and its cultivation of breath. Notwithstanding sharp and numerous criticisms of her selfauthoritative way of approaching Indian religious and philosophical traditions,15 Between East and West is, no doubt, still an impressive and important testimony to this intercultural encounter (Irigaray 2005a). Yoga and the so-called ‘Eastern teachings’ have enabled Irigaray ‘to return to the cultivation of sensible perception’ (Ibid., p. 56). By paying due attention to the breath and thus not forgetting it, ‘Eastern teachings’ are also close to what Irigaray proposed with her criticism of Western tradition. But what is the inner logic, and what are the limits of these ‘Eastern gestures’ of Irigaray?

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First, it is clear that the specific context of Irigaray’s thought is very closely tied to the so called ‘East–West’ intercultural paradigm. Within this ‘classical’ paradigm, too often, its ‘Eastern’ part was homogenized or idealized by different ‘Western’ scholars of ‘orientalism’, including Irigaray. In her critical essay on the presence of orientalism in Irigaray’s book Between East and West, Penelope Deutscher suggests that ‘the nuanced dilemma formulated by Gayatri Spivak – according to whom we must argue both that the subaltern woman can speak and cannot speak (.  .  .) – would be welcome’ (Deutscher 2003, p. 69). Irigaray seems unaware of the postcolonial theories of Spivak and others, and oversimplifies the position of woman and the feminine through the classical East–West paradigm. This paradigm has also been recently complemented by the ‘North–South’, ‘South–South’, or subaltern studies paradigms. Readers of Irigaray’s texts have also regularly critiqued her use of terms such as ‘Hindu’, ‘Vedic’, ‘yogic’, etc. which, in their uncritical or idealized form, are problematic in light of recent scholarship on South and Southeast Asian religions. The same holds for her use of universalizing concepts such as ‘India’, ‘Eastern’ etc.16 In this regard, Irigaray’s thought benefits from dialogue with different critical intercultural approaches (such as the philosophy of liberation approach of Enrique Dussel, for example) and related contexts of ‘world philosophies’. Dussel, for instance, charges present institutionalized forms of a liberal multicultural state with a ‘sterile multicultural dialogue’ etiquette and argues for a transmodern intercultural dialogue, which is sensitive to differences (or, ‘their own cultural experiences’, in Dussel’s words) beyond ‘the illusion of a nonexistent symmetry between cultures’, and is therefore liberating for a postcolonial and peripheral world (Dussel 2006, p. 21ff). In a similar vein, we have to interrogate Irigaray’s concept of ‘cultural difference’ – a concept questioned by many scholars, most notably, again, by Penelope Deutscher.17 (For an excellent overview of the vexed issues surrounding orientalism, and ways to engage constructively with Irigaray’s writing, particularly Between East and West, in spite of them, see Jean Byrne’s chapter in this collection, ‘Breath of Awakening: Nonduality, Breathing and Sexual Difference’). While Irigaray’s terms may be problematic, her point, when read with Dussel, is that all world philosophies are born from different (‘local’) cultures and the breath is one place where we can search for the meaning of cultural difference. That is, Irigaray’s concept of a culture of breath creates the space for an encounter between men and women from all cultures through which a culture (or, better, cultures) of difference can be built. In Irigaray’s thought, there are two interconnected features, a double reserve, as it were, which can explain her idiosyncratic (and, for many critics, highly problematic) topography of other traditions, and her invocation of ‘East’ and ‘Eastern’ in particular – breath and interiority. Breath is arguably one of the most important anthropological and intercultural constants for human beings of the world, carrying rich epistemological and ethical implications across cultures. According to Japanese intercultural philosopher Tadashi Ogawa, ‘breath’ has an intercultural potential, for ‘all humanity is aware of this phenomenon’ (Ogawa 1998, pp. 321–35). For Ogawa, it is ‘qi’ (ch’i), which, as a natural/cosmic phenomenon, ‘ “fills in” both an individual body and all that is between heaven and earth’ (Ibid., p. 321). As the wind of breathing, qi is both expiration and inspiration. But besides its biological (as breath in the body) and cosmic (as wind in

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the atmosphere) roles, there is also a communal sense of breath. According to Ogawa, and based on notions of mood (Stimmung) in Heidegger, or atmosphere (Atmosphere) in Schmitz, there is something between us human beings that makes it possible for us to be in the world and to interact – the atmosphere of love, for example, ‘appears in the situational eye contact or in the words of a love conversation’ (Ibid., p. 328). This approach resonates with breath and breathing in Irigaray – to be able to reground our intersubjective relations in an ethical way, we have to ‘acknowledge’ (presubjectively, internally, as it were, and with all our sensations and in the sense of a proto-logical truth of the world) the atmosphere of breath (interculturally thought as pneuma, prana, or ch’i), filling the world with an ethical mood, capable of transforming ‘our elemental vital breath into a more subtle breath at the service of loving, of speaking and hearing, of thinking’ (Irigaray 2010b, p. 4). Interiority is thus of key importance here – according to Irigaray, ‘I bear the other within me’ (Irigaray 2008c, p. 43). The other – ‘the widow, the orphan, the foreigner’ – using Dussel’s paraphrase of Zech. 7:10 (Dussel 2003, p. 139) – is sheltered through me. Interiority is the place for ethical gestures to arise, a cosmico-ethical mood capable of transforming what Irigaray rejects with the phrase ‘imposing our manner of being (.  .  .) on other cultures’ (Irigaray 2008c, p.  2). Springing from this interiority, the breath can function as the middle term between different cultures, and it is also the middle term between singularity and community, an opening, as it were, from which the Irigarayan couple, or any other dialectical relation between persons (including our relations with other cultures) is formed. Breath is also a primal cosmological and biological phenomenon, which precedes all ethical and socio-political reflection – it is ‘breath’ that can provide the human community with its first and primal experience and act of communication, that is, of the being-in-the-world-with-others mode. But even more importantly – it is precisely through breath that humanity has its most natural access to the phenomenon of life. It is against this sense of breath as an opening, that Irigaray’s writings on the so called ‘Eastern teachings’ were, perhaps, at times too quickly criticized. Sometimes, Irigaray directs our attention to the aboriginal cultures of India, while in others, she describes her personal encounter with yoga in narrative form. But Irigaray does not romanticize Indian (or any other) history, culture and politics. She knows very well the truth about different violent acts or atrocities committed against women in India (and elsewhere) in the past and today. One of the most important intercultural philosophers of our age, Heinz Kimmerle, has noted the deep affinity between philosophies of difference (Heidegger, Adorno, Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida, Irigaray and Kristeva) and intercultural philosophy (Intermedialities 2011, p. 137). Kimmerle praises the prophetic gesture at the end of Between East and West, with which Irigaray announces the need to enter into another era of humanity. While highly critical of the exclusionary focus on sexual difference, he still evaluates Irigaray’s ‘spiritual’ journey positively. It is perhaps in this prophetic temporality that one must let Irigaray speak and allow her to breathe also within the intercultural field. But still – to do justice to the tradition of Indian religion and philosophy – what are the predecessors of breath in what Irigaray designates with the tradition of ‘Yoga’? For this answer, we have to look into the Indian Vedic teachings, which paved the

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way for the systems and practices of Yoga and already outlined the possibility for the epistemology of the breath proposed by Irigaray. In the early Vedic scriptures (Rksamhita), breath is connected with the cosmic wind (vayu) and designated as a life. In the Rksamhita (10.16.3), we find the teaching that after death, breath returns to its cosmic equivalent, the cosmic wind. More concretely, in Indian Vedic (Upanishadic) thought, breath is the primary epistemological phenomenon – it is in breath or prana that our life dwells. But in this early epistemology, prana as vital breath precedes the mind (manas) or consciousness (vijñana) since it is in immortal vital breath (later in the development of Indian philosophy substituted by atman or self) that all other sense faculties are grounded.18 According to early Indian Upanishadic thought, breathing thus precedes all other vital functions, including our ability to speak. In an idiosyncratic Vedic plural form, ‘pranah’ (literally, ‘breaths’) actually denotes a group of five vital powers/senses – thinking, speech, sight, hearing and breathing. Within this ancient epistemology, breathing is the ‘best’ among them and these vital powers/sense faculties are thus idiosyncratically named after breath. It is this early legacy that led towards different Yoga schools and other important developments of Indian religiosity, including meditation or Buddhist mindfulness. In this ethico-cosmological sense, and without implying universal equivalence among the variety of cultural interpretations of breath/breathing, we can see that Irigaray’s thought is already a vital part of contemporary intercultural philosophy. The task we share is to attune ourselves to hear the voices of the other, to discern the signs and gestures inviting us to begin a dialogue with others in recognition of their differences. This ethical project will not be the privilege of one single culture or tradition but is a common task of humanity. We seem to find ourselves in an era of erosion of our natural and spiritual dwellings. It is thus an urgent task to learn how to respond to the call of the other person, or a nonhuman animal, and the natural world in an ethical way. The classical tradition of Western philosophy from Plato to Hegel, and even in Heidegger, has repressed and obscured breath and this essential ethical link we share with nature and transformed it to a metaphysical thought that suffocated the world of the other. One of Irigaray’s merits is to bring the cultivation of breath to the forefront of philosophical analysis through dialogue with Yoga and other ancient Indian teachings of ethical and spiritual respiration.

Breathing theologically The Western Jewish and Christian traditions also provide ample precedent for Irigaray’s engagement with the breath, typically encountered in the form of the divine Spirit. The Spirit of God is depicted as the divine, both above and within each person, the source of life, breath and inspiration. In the Hebrew Bible, the evocative word ruach indicates at once the spirit, wind and breath of God, which, in the opening verses of Genesis, hovers over the primordial dark waters that cover the face of the deep (Gen 1:2), and later, is breathed into the first human, whose body is formed out of the earth but who needs the breath of God to come alive (Gen 2:7). In the Christian Testament, the Spirit descends in the incarnate form of a dove upon Jesus at his baptism (Matt 3:16, Mark

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1:10, Luke 3:22, John 1:32-33) and on his disciples as a rushing wind and tongues of fire at Pentecost (Acts 2:2-3). These passages are the source of the most common Christian iconography for Spirit – flames, a dove and the waters of baptism that evoke the original waters of creation and birth. In the history of Christian theology, the Spirit is identified as the third person of the Trinity and often contained within the relationship of Father and Son (e.g., in the writings of Augustine) as an expression of their mutual, paternal and filial, love. The Nicene Creed affirms the Spirit as ‘the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father’ and, in Western Christianity, from the Son, who ‘is worshiped and glorified’ together with them. The Spirit is the source of inspiration, having ‘spoken through the prophets’ and inspired the Biblical writers, and of grace, as the source of the sacraments, the life of the church. But the Spirit also appears as the unpredictable member of the Trinity, the volatile one who ‘blows where it chooses’ (John 3:8). Consequently, the Spirit frequently appears on the margins of Christianity, in heterodox movements (such as the Montanists) that claim continuing revelation and new inspiration, or among those (such as the eighteenth-century Shakers) who celebrate a new incarnation of the Spirit in the body of a woman such as Mother Ann Lee. Luce Irigaray’s invocation of a new ‘Age of Breath’, which she identifies as the third age of the Holy Spirit following two previous patriarchal ages of the Father and the Son (see Irigaray 1993a, p. 148), finds direct precedent in the medieval works of Joachim of Fiore, a Calabrian abbot, prophet and interpreter of the Bible. Like Irigaray, Joachim also interpreted the book of Revelation through a Trinitarian understanding of history and hoped for the imminent arrival of the age of the Spirit, in which a new community of ‘spiritual men’ would renew the Christian church. In Milan, a group of Christians inspired by his ideas venerated a holy woman, Guglielma, as the incarnation of the Holy Spirit and initiator of the Third Age, renewing the church and instituting gender equality and partnership between men and women. Eschatological hope for a new age of the Spirit thus appears as a submerged stream that runs through Christian history, anticipating Irigaray’s invocation of the Age of Breath. Although Christianity has often lost sight of the Hebrew ruach that so directly identifies the breath of men and women with the ‘Spirit’ or ‘Breath’ of God, making the Spirit seem disembodied and immaterial, the role of the Spirit in the sacraments and in the life of prayer brings the Spirit back to the body and back to the breath. In Rom. 8:26, when ‘we do not know how to pray as we ought . . . that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words’ (emphasis added). Here, the Christian scriptures recognize that breath precedes and conditions language; this breath is divine, proceeding from and to God, divinizing women and men through the practice of prayer and participation in the sacraments. Contemporary theologians elaborate on these suppressed themes in Christian scripture and history, discovering the activity of the Spirit in other religions,19 connecting the Spirit to ecological concerns20 and to questions of disability21 and trauma.22 Although Irigaray has been critically received within feminist theology and philosophy of religion,23 including nuanced criticisms of the orientalist risks of her turn to yoga and Eastern religions and serious concern with the primacy of sexual difference in her work, there has been scant attention devoted to the ways in which

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her writings on the breath might contribute to a Christian theology of the spirit, or pneumatology. Irigaray contributes to this vibrant conversation in feminist, womanist, postmodern and eco-theological pneumatology by directly reconnecting the Spirit with the breath, the body and nature in her work, thereby opening a new era in the long subterranean history of the Spirit. *** The collection of essays in this book is thus devoted to Irigaray’s conceptualization of breathing and the phenomenon of breath. In the first section (‘Spiritual Breathing’), dedicated to Western religious traditions, authors present us with rich interpretative possibilities of breath/ing in Irigaray, based on their innovative readings of The Book of Chronicles (Kelso), then the possibilities of a feminist theology based on embodied spirit and pneumatology in dialogue with Irigaray (Holmes), and the theological or spiritual practice of embodied prayers, inhaling and exhaling in rhythm – through maternal embodiment – with the Giver of Life (Sanderson). Together, this section brings Irigaray’s writings on the breath into theological conversations on the ethics of difference, embodiment, maternality, spirituality and prayer. In the second section (‘Intercultural Breathing’), the emphasis turns to discussion of the rich varieties of Irigaray’s idiosyncratic thought within the contexts of intercultural philosophy. Here, Irigaray’s thought is critically discussed in light of recent criticism of her ‘Orientalism’ in order to assess the possibilities for a new, transformative and practical ethics of awakening toward sexual difference (Byrne). Irigaray’s thought is also read in the context of breathing techniques (such as yoga pranayama, or the yogic practice of kumbhaka). Drawing on Badiouian metaontology and his notion of the ‘void’ and the ‘event’, and Derridean scholarship on ‘writing’, and specifically ‘spacing’, as that which allows the register of representation to appear, the chapter responds to Irigaray’s suggestion that breathing as a practice can make possible a unification within the ‘twoness’ that we are (Pont). The third section (‘Natural Breathing’) explores some of the most interesting topics related to environmental philosophy and sustainability in Irigaray’s thought. With reference to the ‘different cultures of nature’, authors in this section discuss ways in which Irigaray’s thought contributes to contemporary conversations surrounding sharing the world with nature and its animal others. Authors connect Irigaray’s philosophy with the question of sustainability in light of eco-feminist theory (Bruno) and the problem of alterity of the natural world with respect to humans in contemporary environmental thought, particularly surrounding the question of animal ethics, rights and welfare (Štuva). This section also examines how both the mechanistic and exploitative view of nature as well as the ‘animist’ perspective (including Deep Ecology) stem from a common source – a peculiar crisis of Western (mono)subjectivity, that is, from the denial of dependent existence by the (masculine) subject (Grušovnik). In different ways, authors in this section turn to Irigaray’s writings on breathing as a gesture through which appropriate exchange between humans and the natural world can take place. The fourth and final section of this book (‘Contextual Breathing’) focuses on the meaning of Irigarayan gestures of breathing in the domain of politics, war and

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peace movements initiated by women (Foust), in the area of performing arts, voice and dance (Wong Lerner), in the context of feminist philosophy, subjectivity and difference (Perpich) and through experimental writing on language, sound and voice (Hackenberg). Together, these chapters and their wide variety of approaches and methods (philosophical, political, ethical, environmental, theological, artistic, literary) are a testimony to the inner strength (almost in the sense of a satyagraha) and flexibility of Irigaray’s thought when put into dialogue with others in different contexts. The book concludes with a new essay by Luce Irigaray, ‘To Begin with Breathing Anew’, in which Irigaray describes breathing as a condition for natural and spiritual life in the midst of our current culture, which is neglectful of air. She argues for the ways in which breathing allows the mediation of a living silence in an ethical relation with the other and concludes by examining the relationship between breathing and loving, which eternally need one another. In these essays, breathing emerges as one of the most significant philosophical and theological gestures of our time, sensitive also to various intercultural contexts. By reintroducing breath into our life-worlds, we become more attentive to our bodies, to respect for the other and to nature, and make awareness of the breath essential for an embodied ethics of difference in our globalized, ecological age. We can better attend to the voice of the other, begin a dialogue with her or him and respect the embodied needs of others, across all our differences – sexual, cultural, animal and natural. This attention to or respect for the other is a task yet to be realized and, according to Luce Irigaray, requires a transformation of humanity towards the ‘Age of Breath’ yet to come. Such transformation can best be characterized both as spiritual and ethical because it takes place through awareness of the embodied spirit or breath. It is our hope that this book will contribute towards this new ethical awareness and cultivation of breath.

Notes 1 See Hirsh, E. and Olson, G. A. (1995), ‘Je-Luce Irigaray’: A Meeting with Luce Irigaray. (Interview)’. Hypatia 10(2): 93–114, esp. 96–7, and Jones, R. (2011), Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy. London: Polity, pp. 7–8. 2 Irigaray, L. (1974a), Speculum de l’autre femme. Paris: Éditions de Minuit; translated by Gillian C. Gill as Irigaray, L. (1985a), Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, and Irigaray, L. (1977b), Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, translated by Catherine Porter as Irigaray, L. (1985b), This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; and Irigaray, L. (1993a), An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G. C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 3 For instance, in Irigaray, L. (1993c), Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press; Irigaray, L. (1994c), Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution, trans. Karin Montin. London: The Athlone Press; and Irigaray, L. (1993b), Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. A. Martin. London: Routledge. 4 Early critics include Moi, T. (1995), Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, and Jones, A. R. (1985), ‘Writing the Body: Towards

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5 6 7

8

9

10

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Breathing with Luce Irigaray an Understanding of l’Écriture féminine’, in E. Showalter (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. New York: Pantheon, pp. 361–77. Defenders include Grosz, E. (1989), Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Sydney: Allen and Unwin; Whitford, M. (1991), Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. New York: Routledge; Chanter, T. (1995), Ethics of Eros. New York: Routledge Schor, N. (1994), ‘The Essentialism Which is Not One: Coming to Grips with Irigaray’, in C. Burke, N. Schor and M. Whitford (eds), Engaging with Luce Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 57–78; as well as Cheah, P. and Grosz, E. (1998), ‘The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell’. Diacritics 28(1): 19–42. See Joy, M. (2006), Divine Love: Luce Irigaray, Women, Gender and Religion. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 136–7. See Chanter (1995), pp. 44–9. See, for instance, Irigaray’s claim in Irigaray, L. (1996), I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity Within History, trans. A. Martin. New York: Routledge, that ‘sexual difference is an immediate natural given and it is a real and irreducible component of the universal. The whole of human kind is composed of women and men and it is not composed of anything else. The problem of races is, in fact, a secondary problem – save from a geographical point of view? – which means we cannot see the wood for the trees, and the same goes for other cultural diversities – religious, economic and political’ (p. 47). While it could be argued that sexual difference is ontologically prior to sociological differences, that is not how most women experience their subjectivity, especially in multicultural contexts with a history of racism, colonialism and class stratification. For a critique of Irigaray’s inattention to race and cultural differences, see Deutscher, P. (2002), A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. For an extension of Irigaray’s philosophy of difference to the question of race, see Armour, E. T. (1999), Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference: Subverting the Race/Gender Divide. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. See, for instance, Irigaray, L. (1996), I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History, trans. A. Martin. New York: Routledge; Irigaray, L. (2001), To be two, trans. M. M. Rhodes and M. F. Cocito-Monoc. New York, NY: Routledge; and Irigaray, L. (2002b), The Way of Love. London: Continuum. See Irigaray’s remarks in Irigaray, L. (1991c), ‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas’, in R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley (eds), Re-Reading Levinas, trans. M. Whitford. Bloomington: Indiana University Press: ‘Pleasure between the same sex does not result in that immediate ecstasy between the other and myself ’. For the charge of heterosexism, see Jagose, A. (1994), Lesbian Utopics. New York: Routledge, pp. 25–42; Joy, M. (2006), Divine Love: Luce Irigaray, Women, Gender, and Religion. New York: Manchester University Press, pp. 97–101. See Cheah, P. and Grosz, E. (1998), ‘The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell’. Diacritics 28(1): 19–42 and Grosz, E. (1994a), ‘The Hetero and the Homo: The Sexual Ethics of Luce Irigaray’, in C. Burke, N. Schor and M. Whitford (eds), Engaging with Luce Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 335–50. We refer in this part to Einige Bemerkungen über den ‘Anfang der Philosophie’ (1841), Vorläufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie (1843) and Grundsätze

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13 14

15

16 17

18 19 20

21 22

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der Philosophie der Zukunft, (1843). See Feuerbach, L. (1975), Kritiken und Abhandlungen II (1839–43). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. For Feuerbach and Irigaray, see Whitford, M. (1991), Philosophy in the Feminine. London: Routledge, pp. 141–3. See also Hansema, A. (2008), ‘Horizontal Transcendence: Irigaray’s Religion after Ontotheology’, in H. de Vries (ed.), Religion: Beyond the Concept. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 813–23. On Irigaray’s criticism of a ‘patriarchal blindness to sexual difference’ in Feuerbach, see Martin, A. (2000), Luce Irigaray and the Question of the Divine. London: Maney Publishing, p. 106. In this, our undestanding of Irigaray’s later works is very close to Alison Stone’s reading in her excellent Stone, A. (2006), Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See especially her important claim about the ecological dimension in Irigaray, namely that ‘she sees nature not as a static realm of fixed forms but, rather, as a process (or set of processes) of openended growth and unfolding. By stressing that human beings belong to nature so conceived, Irigaray can maintain that human beings have natures which need to grow and express themselves culturally. She thereby links feminist and ecological politics, by arguing that the pursuit of our own flourishing as sexed beings must be based on recognition of our dependence on, and responsibilities to, the natural environment’ (p. 2). This passage is also strikingly close to our reading of Feuerbach. See Barth, K. (1976), ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’, in E. Thies (ed.), Ludwig Feuerbach. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, pp. 1–32. Butler, J. (2009), Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, p. 60. This passage originally appeared in Falkoff, M. (2007), Poems from Guantánamo. The Detainees Speak. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, p. 72 (from A. Dorfman´s Postscript). For a critique of Irigaray as orientalist, see Joy, M. (2003), ‘Irigaray’s Eastern Explorations’, in Joy, M., K. O’Grady, and J. L. Poxon (eds), Religion in French Feminist Thought: Critical Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 51–67; and Joy (2006), esp. 124–41. See also Deutscher, P. (2003), ‘Between East and West and the Politics of ‘Cultural Ingénuité’: Irigaray on Cultural Difference’. Theory, Culture & Society 20(3): 65–75. For ‘orientalism’ and Irigaray, see also Jean Byrne’s chapter in this book. See Joy (2006), pp. 124–41. See Deutscher (2003). Deutscher also observes here that in light of Irigaray’s suggestions for alternative models of cultural difference and new forms of multicultural integration, some of the living options for such models were ‘foreclosed by her own formulations’ (Deutscher 2003, p. 70). See Kaushitaki Upanishad 3.8. See D’Costa, G. (2002), The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books and Dupuis, J. (2002), Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. See Mark I. Wallace’s description of the embodied and wounded ‘bird God’ in Wallace, M. I., (2005), Finding God in the Singing River: Christianity, Spirit, Nature. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. See also Keller, C. (2003), Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London: Routledge, pp. 229–38. See Betcher, S. V. (2007), Spirit and the Politics of Disablement. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. See Rambo, S. (2010), Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

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23 See Kim, M. C. W., St Ville, S. M. and Simonaitis, S. M. (eds) (1993), Transfigurations: Theology and the French Feminists. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, pp. 199–214; Jones, S. (1995), ‘Divining Women: Irigaray and Feminist Theologies’. Yale French Studies 87: 42–67; Daggers, J. (1997), ‘Luce Irigaray and “Divine Women”: A Resource for Postmodern Feminist Theology?’. Feminist Theology 14: 35–50; Anderson, P. S. (1997), A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief. Oxford/Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell; Poxon, J. L. (2003), ‘Corporeality and Divinity: Irigaray and the Problem of the Ideal’, in M. Joy, K. O’Grady, and J. Poxon (eds), Religion in French Feminist Thought: Critical Perspectives. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 41–50; Jones, S. (2000), Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press; Joy (2006); Armour, E. T. (1999), Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press; Beattie, T. (2002), God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate: A Marian Narrative of Women’s Salvation. London: Continuum; Hollywood, A. (2002), Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press; Howie G. and Jobling, J. (eds) (2008), Women and the Divine: Touching Transcendence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Part One

Spiritual Breathing

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2

When Cherubim Touch Julie Kelso

(Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Bond University, Gold Coast, Australia, and School of English, Media Studies and Art History, The University of Queensland, Australia)

The angelic world, whether it be metaphor or reality, is a giant image in which we may see and study ourselves, even as we move towards what may be the end of our time. (Bloom 1996, p. 11)

1  Introduction: Philosophers and angels According to Harold Bloom, contra Augustine, a serious meditation on the angel is not a pursuit valid only as an intellectual exercise and nothing more. As the above passage suggests, to contemplate the angelic world entails the possibility of an encounter with our own image – one that changes through the ages, to be sure. In other words, the malleable conceptualization and theorization of that curiously beautiful, utterly strange, and at the same time, terrifying (as Rilke knew only too well) mediatory figure we find in so many of our world’s religions and their stories offers us the chance to assess, philosophically, who and what we were and are. And will possibly be? The final clause of Bloom’s statement is enigmatic – ‘. . . even as we move towards what may be the end of our time’. Bloom seems to suggest that we are still capable of seeing our image somehow in the angelic world (‘even as. . .’), despite our possible non-future (‘we move towards what may be the end of our time’). If so, what is this non-future, this possible ‘end of our time’? Is it the end of our era, be it the (then) twentieth century, modernity, postmodernity, late-capitalism, or some Old-Hegelian culmination of human progress? Or, is he heralding that most annoyingly fashionable (pre-mature) idea of the post-human (future)? Whichever it may be, the close study of these figures can serve an important purpose with respect to the future. This project of critically exploring the images and concepts that flood our past and present landscapes with the dual aim of understanding why we are what we say we are and what we may possibly become is, I think, a good way of generally describing Luce

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Irigaray’s philosophical interpretation of the angel. The appearance of the angel in her work is a rather beautiful and for many, at first, perplexing aspect of her writings concerning the possibilities of sexuate difference – of civic, intellectual, emotional and carnal relations between the sexes, especially through the becoming of female sexed subjectivity. Or, as Gail Schwab puts it more generally, the angel is ‘one of the most puzzling and profoundly original aspects of Irigarayan thought’ (Schwab 1994, p. 366). I suppose the perplexing or puzzling quality of the angel in Irigaray’s writing concerns the problem of utilizing such a religio-mythological figure in a discourse (philosophy) that, these days, is supposed to be resolutely secular and empirically reasonable. Surely, talk of angels in such a manner as Irigaray’s belongs only to the past, or to those with fundamentalist leanings, or (similarly) to the new-agers, who truly believe in such beings, especially the guardian variety? Moreover, statements such as ‘(t)he mucous should no doubt be pictured as related to the angel’ (Irigaray 1993a, p. 17) are perplexing for the novice reader, be they philosopher, theologian, biologist or feminist theorist. Yet, neither the presence of angels in philosophical discourse nor the question of how to interpret them is a new one. Appearing in many religious traditions, angels are described as those non-human, quasi-divine messengers who bear words that bring together the divine and the human, the transcendent and the material; they deliver messages that cannot be heard or understood according to the usual channels of communication and interpretation. And such figures, whether called angels or not, have been a part of the Western philosophical tradition. Indeed, mediation between the human and divine realms, between the material or immanent and the immaterial or transcendent, has often, it seems, been an intriguing aspect of Western philosophy. For example, in Plato’s Apologia, Socrates famously claims to have to daimonion (‘divine entity’) who warns him against making certain mistakes (see Joyal 2005). In the early Christian and medieval periods, when Christian theology and Greek philosophy were dancing around each other, this figure of mediation between the transcendent and the material realms became an important and prominent focus. In his Stromata, Clement of Alexandria claims that Greek (pagan) philosophy was stolen from God and brought down to earth by the fallen angels (his idea derived from the Watchers of 1 Enoch). While his opponents claimed this was why philosophy was not necessary to the Christian (it being false knowledge, and therefore the enemy),1 Clement seemed adamant that while stolen it may be, false it was not.2 Whereas Augustine had earlier declared that contemplating the nature of angelic being was useful only as an intellectual exercise, the later scholastics, notably Aquinas, the so-called angelic doctor, and Bonaventure, the seraphic doctor, took the questions concerning angels more seriously. Though Aquinas, despite popular belief, would not actually ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, he would ponder over whether angels pass from one place to another without going through the middle (Part I, q. 53, art. 2), whether angels have ‘morning knowledge or evening knowledge’ (q. 58, art.  6) and whether angels know each other (q. 56, art. 2).3 Later, Kant would speak of ‘beings of whom we are unable to say whether they are even possible’ (Kant 1929, A227–8; B333–4). Locke, less cautiously, would refer to beings (spirits [i.e., angels]) who are capable of knowing more than the human because of their ability to ‘frame and shape

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to themselves organs of sensation or perception as to suit them to their present design’ (Locke 1975, II.xxiii.13). In more recent times, the angel has served Heidegger and Benjamin. Specifically, Rilke’s Angel (of the Duino Elegies) represents, for Heidegger, Being itself. Benjamin argues that Klee’s Angelus Novus is how the ‘Angel of History’ must look, facing the past with his back to the future, blown on by a storm from Paradise called ‘Progress’. As Ross (1985, p.  60) points out, whether philosophers believe in such supernatural entities is not the point. The point is that these morethan-human images – in these cases, angels – are useful in some way to the progress of philosophy; they aid the lover of wisdom. So, while we may at first be puzzled at the image of the angel in Irigaray’s writings, we really cannot claim that it marks a departure from philosophy into, say, theology or mythology (though, of course, the distinction between these is a problematic one for Irigaray, justifiably, I think). The more astute and patient readers of Irigaray have more than competently interpreted the role of the angel in Irigaray’s philosophical project of thinking the possibility of an ethics of sexual difference. I am indebted to them in my own discussion, below, of this function. However, I have a specific interest here. I want to look, exclusively, at the biblical figures of the cherubim. For Irigaray, these ancient figures (from Exodus, especially) speak somewhat silently to the possibility of sexuate difference and sexual ethics – possibilities subsequently shut down by patriarchal desires. This is an important and invaluable suggestion for feminists who desire a recasting of sexual difference in Western culture. However, I wish to introduce the cherubim as they are described in the final book of the Hebrew canon, The Book of Chronicles (Divrei Hayammim) to argue that these curious cherubim insist on calling for sexual difference.4 In other words, while the configuration of the cherubim in Exodus may be ‘a representation of a sexuality that has never been incarnated’ (Irigaray 1993a, p.  16), the gesturing of the very unusual cherubim in Chronicles represents their desperation, indeed the exigency, of desire for difference. I suggest we need to include them in our genealogy of the ‘angel’ as harbinger of an ethics of sexual difference.

2  Irigaray’s angels In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray, with Heidegger, states that each age has but one issue ‘to think through’ (Irigaray 1993a, p. 5). For Irigaray, this one issue of our time is sexual difference, a project with far reaching implications for other major issues of our time (racial, ecological, economic, political and social). If we think through sexual difference, understood as recognition of two irreducibly distinct sexuated subjects, man and woman, we will effect a change for the better in our world: Sexual difference would constitute the horizon of worlds more fecund than any known to date – at least in the West – and without reducing fecundity to the reproduction of bodies and flesh. For loving partners this would be a fecundity of birth and regeneration, but also the production of a new age of thought, art, poetry, and language: the creation of a new poetics. (Ibid., p. 5)

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It is evident that, for Irigaray, the monologic of hom(m)o-sexuality not only has dire effects on the lives of women especially, but also men, though less so. Furthermore, the culture of death that reigns under Western patriarchies also has catastrophic effects on nature. Thus, our task is one of great exigency. Crucial to this task is a re-thinking of the relationship between space and time and between form and matter:5 In order for a new age to issue in, we need somehow to change our perception and conception of space-time, the inhabiting of places, and of containers, or envelopes of identity. It assumes and entails an evolution or a transformation of forms, of the relations of matter and form and of the interval between – the trilogy of the constitution of place. Each age inscribes a limit to this trinitary configuration – matter, form, interval, or power [puissance], act, intermediary-interval (Ibid., pp. 7–8).

Traditionally, woman has been reduced to the representation of place for man. As the maternal-feminine container or envelope, she is thus also a ‘thing’ for him, a spatial entity that exists for his respite, protection and nourishment. She is his original home and she continues to house him when he needs housing, outside of the world of his civic life. She is his domus. The problem, however, is that while she is asked to perform this function for man at all times, he very rarely returns the blessed favour (if at all). Moreover, as place for someone else, she has no place of her own. How is it possible to be a subject who first needs and then finds or is given a place of refuge if one is understood as place itself? This inability means that women are bereft of the necessary act of symbolically articulating their own specific relation to spatial origins, to the maternal body. Both mother and daughter represent the same thing – asexual, maternal place-holder of the void for man: She is left with a void, a lack of all representation, re-presentation, and even strictly speaking of all mimesis of her desire for origin. That desire will henceforth pass through the discourse-desire-law of man’s desire. “You will be my womanmother, my wife, if you would, and (like) my mother, if you could,” is a statement equivalent to: “You will be for me the possibility of repeating-representingappropriating the/my relation to the origin.” Now this operation – and we quote Freud’s own words against him here – in no way constitutes a displacement of the origin – desire of the little girl, of the woman. It is more in the nature of an exile, an extradition, an exmatriation, from this/her economy of desire (Irigaray 1985a, pp. 42–3).

As representative of origin (for man), woman can have no relationship with ‘it’, there can be no ‘ “other side” of the representation of origin. Woman cannot turn it into her project of return or turning back’ (Ibid., p. 41). She is in a state of ‘exile’ or ‘dereliction’. Ultimately, in a dreadful twist, woman’s destitution of place (because she represents what contains space) is threatening for man – she is an enveloping wanderer who lacks, a mendicant who is lack itself: The maternal-feminine remains the place separated from “its” own place, deprived of “its” place. She is or ceaselessly becomes the place of the other who cannot

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separate himself from it. Without her knowing or willing it, she is then threatening because of what she lacks: a “proper” place. (Irigaray 1993a, pp. 10–11)

Perceived as threat to his identity, man must contain woman. Intellectually and spiritually, he achieves this by prohibiting her from a genuine relationship to language, to image creation, to law, to anything outside (for him) the realm of mute nature. Physically, he has done this by giving her a pseudo-home, one where he can shut her in and return to her at his will. But she stagnates there, because it is, after all, yet another place for him to return and repose, not her – ‘he contains or envelops her with walls while enveloping himself and his things with her flesh’ (ibid., p. 11). This entombment, as we shall see, is evident to some extent in the temple description given in Chronicles. Ultimately, in the West, at least, all of this is symptomatic of the maladic fact that sexuate difference is yet-to-be. To understand how and why this has come to be, how and why this failure has been sustained, it is necessary to examine our history thoroughly, to return to the texts of our cultural past, those that are most meaningful to us (philosophical, political, religious, literary texts), paying close attention to the images we have employed therein. Irigaray’s task is not revisionist; she is not interested in simply exhuming these images for the purpose of improving our knowledge of the past. Such an act really counts for little more than nostalgia, particularly when it comes to our analysis of sacred literatures. Her interpretative purpose, as she puts it, is one of ‘founding a new ethics’: The myths and stories, the sacred texts are analyzed, sometimes with nostalgia but rarely with a mind to change the social order. The texts are merely consumed or reconsumed, in a way. The darkness of our imaginary or symbolic horizon is analyzed more or less adequately, but not with the goal of founding a new ethics. The techniques of reading, translating, and explaining take over the domain of the sacred, the religious, the mythical, but they fail to reveal a world that measures up to the material they are consuming or consummating (Irigaray 1993c, p. 86).

One of these figures of importance to Irigaray is the angel, and it is a figure whose function our tradition proffers as mediatory between distinct, though related, places and entities. Indeed, angels are in constant motion, are never contained in place, bear messages to and from a beyond, bear messages often of renewal, change and the new. Importantly, in the West, the angel is required by the god to communicate something that cannot be communicated by the usual channels. The angel is thus one of a number of figures (speculum, the ‘two lips’, the placenta, mucous) in Irigaray’s work that represent the ethico-nuptial work of the psychoanalytic practicable, the setting designed to enable and sustain meaningful, and ultimately healthy, dialogue between two distinct subjects, analyst and analysand.6 As Elizabeth Hirsch explains: the praticable as interpreted by Irigaray (re)mediates the “divorce” of the oppositions that silently govern the production of theory – silently, because they occupy the place of the a priori that stands outside and above any possibility of interrogation. Like a praticable connecting two spaces (one onstage and one off, for

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Breathing with Luce Irigaray e­ xample), the psychoanalytic praticable does not, ultimately, confound or destroy the identity of the two but depends upon preserving them as distinct even as it effects their connection. (Hirsh 1994, p. 289)

In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray speaks of an era to come, which she calls the ‘era of the spirit and the bride’. Here, in this ‘third era of the West’, Irigaray gives woman a place as she who shares in the spirit as an embodied, sensual and valued partner: ●● ●●

●●

The Father, alone, invites, and disappears with Moses and the written law. The son (and the mother) invites; but the son remains bound to the Father, to whom he “goes back,” to whom he arises. The spirit and the bride invite beyond genealogical destiny to the era of the wedding and the festival of the world. To the time of a theology of the breath in its horizontal and vertical becoming, with no murders (Irigaray 1993a, p. 149).

The spirit, ‘as the third term’, functions as a praticable capable of connecting man and woman, masculine and feminine, as two distinct participants who share and produce the world together.7 Most importantly, what is produced through this praticable is ‘an ethical God’, an ethics, in other words, of sexual difference: As long as the son is not in mourning for the Father, neither body nor flesh can be transfigured in the couple; as long as the daughter is in mourning for the spirit, then neither body nor flesh can be transfigured in the couple . . . For woman to affirm that her desire proceeds or wills thus, woman must be born into desire. She must be longed for, loved, valued as a daughter. An other morning, a new parousia that necessarily accompanies the coming of an ethical God. He respects the difference between him and her, in cosmic and aesthetic generation and creation. Sharing the heaven and the earth in all their elements, potencies, acts. (Ibid., pp. 149–50)

Irigaray’s poetic rendering of the figure of the angel, like the spirit, needs to be understood as an image or signifier of potentiality for sexuate difference, which is both currently impossible and yet-to-be. The angel may be read as one of our cultural signs of desire for difference, for intellectual and carnal interaction between two who still remain distinct and un-appropriable. However, they are also signs of the failure of an ethics of sexual difference to have taken place, in our recorded history at least. Staying with An Ethics of Sexual Difference for the moment, Irigaray speaks of the angel as an image of the failure, albeit a beautiful one, of this ethics taking place in the realm of time and space: The consequences of the nonfulfillment of the sexual act remain, and there are many. To take up only the most beautiful, as yet to be made manifest in the realm of time and space, there are angels. These messengers who never remain enclosed in a place, who are never immobile. Between god, as the perfectly immobile act, man, who is surrounded and enclosed by the world of his work, and woman, whose task would be to take care of nature and procreation, angels

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would circulate as mediators of that which has not yet happened, of what is still going to happen, of what is on the horizon. Endlessly reopening the enclosure of  the universe, of universes, identities, the unfolding of actions, of history. (Ibid., p. 15)

When divinity is cast beyond our space-time framework, and understood (barely) as the creator of everything who withdrew from his creation to dwell in a place best called ‘nowhere’, man will claim culture and relegate nature to woman. None of these three (God, man, woman) can move in this framework. God is the ‘perfectly immobile act’, man forgets to nurture his spirit and his body, busy as he is with his ‘work’ and woman is buried in the dirt she represents. It may be that we can interpret the angel – the one who mediates between these frozen players, heralding what will be – as symbol of the desire to shatter this sepulchral triad, to set free a future arrangement unimaginable by those who cannot move. The angels ‘destroy the monstrous, that which hampers the possibility of a new age; they come to herald the arrival of a new birth, a new morning’ (Ibid., p. 15). For Irigaray, the angels of the Bible especially seem closely aligned with sexuality, understood phallicly (i.e., teleologically) as procreative. Gabriel is, of course, both astonishing and problematic, for he announces the birth of a god as man. This will be a god-man brought into the world, like all humans, with and through the body of a woman, but there will have been no sexual act between a man and a woman here. There are those angels (though I will describe the problematic nature of this term below) in the Hebrew Bible, who announce the coming of a birth, extraordinary in the case of Sarah who is 91 (or so) when she gives birth to Isaac (a name that means ‘he laughs’). The angel, Irigaray suggests, is possibly ‘a representation of a sexuality that has never been incarnated’ (Ibid., p. 16). This sexuality that has never been incarnated is a sexuality that will come about once our obsession with the one, transcendent male creator god has itself been transcended. What is necessary for an ethics of sexuality is a radical recasting, or rather, an awareness, of divinity as both immanent and transcendent, where the divine is recognized as both within man and woman and also between them. In Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, Irigaray puts it this way: Surely evil, sin, suffering, redemption, arise when God is set up as an extraterrestrial ideal, as an otherworldly monopoly? When the divine is manufactured as GodFather? As long as the divine remains within the human as its strongest center of attraction – in the midst of and between the man and the woman, according to the myth? – would either fall or redemption have any meaning, except as a way to forget the deepest of the most intense aspect of the attraction? (Irigaray 1991a, p. 173)

Whether the angel is what will mediate between the sexes in this new era of the spirit and the bride has become a point of debate. According to Penelope Ingram (2000), both Gail Schwab (1994) and Elizabeth Grosz (1986), for example, misunderstand Irigaray to be extending the angel’s mediatory role into this new age, when it arrives. This reading, Ingram claims, is erroneous, for it fails to ‘recognize how Irigaray in

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theorizing her concept of the sensible transcendental has attempted to close the gap between God and the human’ (Ingram 2000, p. 66). Moreover, Ingram argues, if we wish to view the figure of the angel as the necessary mediator between men, women and the divine, both within and beyond them, we ‘continue to uphold the traditional Christian conception of “God in his heaven” a representation of God which Irigaray is at pains to dismantle’ (ibid.). Part of the problem with Grosz’s and Schwab’s interpretation of Irigaray’s angel is that they perceive a need to corporealize the immaterial and unsexed angel of the West; they want to gender the angel as in some sense maternal-feminine. Ingram suggests that the ease with which they associate the angel with the maternal is problematic because it gives a sexual embodiment to the angel; such readings corporealize the angel rather than angelicizing the human (ibid., p. 64). This gendered corporeal status is something enabled, to a certain extent, by Irigaray’s interpretation of the veil in little Ernst’s game of fort-da as comparable to the placenta and the veil that separates God and humans, one penetrable only by angels (Cf. Irigaray 1993c). Here, according to Ingram, the angel seems to be cast as appropriating the feminine relationship with divinity: When the angel goes toward her, might he not actually be coming from her? Hasn’t the angel taken off from her, flown away from her? Skin and membrane that can hardly be perceived, almost transparent whiteness, almost undecidable mediation, which is always at work in every operation of language and representation, ensuring that the lowest earth and highest heaven are linked, that first dwelling place in her, from which he makes and remakes his bed, and works out the transcendence of the lord. (Ibid., p. 37)

To be sure, in Grosz’s reading of Irigaray, an ethical sexual union ‘involves the corporealization of the angelic, an attribution of a body and sex to that always moving, shimmering being’ (Grosz 1993, p.  209).8 And Schwab, too, is problematic, for her interpretation of Irigaray’s anchoring of the angel image ‘in the female body, from which it had been carefully cordoned off before, since angels are supposed to have no sex’ (Schwab 1994, p. 369). Really, Ingram’s problem is that Schwab and Grosz do not acknowledge what she believes to be the temporary status of the angel as mediator in Irigaray’s re-conception, or name the future mediatory figure ‘God’ or the divine.9 They confuse Irigaray’s criticism of the angel as one of the symptoms of man’s inability to acknowledge his debt to the maternal body (a criticism Irigaray develops from her reading of Ernst’s game), with her recasting of the angel as harbinger of what is to come – an ethics of sexual difference. I think it is safe to say that the angel of the West is both, and this is precisely Irigaray’s point. The angel, this figure that stands between woman and the divine, represents man’s inability (or refusal) to acknowledge his debt to the maternal as giver of life and represents the future possibility of an ethical exchange between two sexuate, civic subjects. In this latter sense, the angel is a readable figure of our (man’s? – given that he has authored most of the religious texts of the West) desire for difference and for the possibility of its future coming. I think Ingram is correct in challenging the idea that the angel will have to continue its mediatory role once two sexuate, civic subjects emerge. However, I wonder if we are not a little premature in our presumed knowledge

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of the nature of that which we call ‘angel’. Perhaps some genealogical searching is necessary at this point in our attempts to think the possibility of sexual difference with the aid of this figure? Interestingly, Ingram finds evidence for this idea of abolition in Irigaray’s reading of the cherubim who guard the ark of the covenant in Exodus (Ingram 2000, p. 65). For Irigaray, the cherubim of Exodus represent the sexually differentiated couple who await the incarnation of a new divine: So here, two angels face one another to guard the presence of God, who may perhaps be turning away in his anger or absence. The angels face one another over the ark of the covenant. Beneath them, the tablets of the law, and between them, between their wings, the divine presence that cannot be sensed or seen . . . It seems to be setting up the future presence of God in the more airy element: he can come and go freely, the word that has already been offered and inscribed in stone is loosed, and a new covenant is prepared  .  .  .  Neither like nor other, they guard and await the mystery of a divine presence that has yet to be made flesh. Alike and different, they face each other, near enough and far enough for the future to still be on hold . . . Something forever deferred until the divine comes or comes back, perhaps has never taken place in this advent setup between the two angels: the advent of flesh itself, which in its most airy, subtle rapture might go beyond or before a certain sexual difference, once that difference has first been respected and fulfilled. Beyond and before this parting of ways, enveloping it as its future advent and ultimate home, here stand the angels in deep meditation. (Irigaray 1993c, p. 45; my emphases)

The cherubim do not here announce anything verbally, like the later angels. Their heraldry is readable only through their description, through ‘the gesture that represents them’ (Irigaray 1993a, p. 16). What I want to do for the rest of this essay is take a closer look at the biblical cherubim, for they are not so easily cast as angels. I think part of the problem Ingram finds with the reading of Grosz and Schwab (two fine readers of Irigaray, it has to be said) emerges out of the use of the (translated) term ‘angel’ by Irigaray to speak of the cherubim. The cherubim are not really ethereal mediators between the divine and the human; they are not translators or bearers of the words of the god. The cherubim are, if we can say anything about them (see below), guardians, as Irigaray makes clear.

3  What are the cherubim? The cherubim are now part of our angiologia, but they are not really angels, at least as angels have come to be conceived. The figure of the angel has a long, diverse and complex history. Most, if not all, religions or spiritualities include some figure or entity capable of mediating between the transcendent and immanent realms. In the ‘great’ monotheistic religions (Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity and Judaism), this figure is the angel. Most of us conjure the image of a winged, human-like ethereal being when we read or hear the word ‘angel’. This is the most recent and most popular form

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of this creature known as angelos in Greek and angelus in Latin. In fact, angelos means messenger and the Hebrew equivalent is malak, not cherub. Already, when we seek to contemplate the angel in Old Testament literature, we have a problem. Linguistically, our English word ‘angel’ derives from the Greek word for messenger, which originally, like malak, referred to anyone bringing a message. A human being can, of course, be a messenger and in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, more often than not, messengers are humans (for example, Gen. 32:4 and Judges 6:35). More problematic, however, are the messengers of Yahweh or ’Elohim (such as the one that brings Sarah the news). These figures, while human in shape, and without wings, seem sometimes capable of moving between the sky and the earth, and thus either more-than-human or not human at all. In post-biblical Jewish writings, with the development of Rabbinic Judaism, discussion on the nature of the angels is rich and extensive, as it is in Christian writings (and likewise often influenced by Aristotle’s ‘Intelligences’, especially in Maimonides). The Jewish angels, too, have become mediatory figures whose tasks include transferring the prayers of humans up to the god and pleading on behalf of the righteous. They are also understood as ministering to the god in heaven (though carefully constructed as non-divine, mere ‘agents’ of the One god), participating in creation, assisting the god in the performance of good works, guarding individuals and the 70 nations, involved in both life and death.10 In the Hekhalot literature (esoteric texts produced sometime between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages) and the Sefer ha-Razim (a collection of Kabbalistic adjurations generally dated around late third, early fourth century CE), we encounter hymns designed to bring angels down to earth to impart wisdom, instructions for how to get to the seven palaces in heaven to see the god and participate with the angels, healing incantations and rituals, etc. (Lesses 1996). The question of whether such beings are actually described in the canonical scriptures (excluding the Book of Daniel, which is traditionally assumed to be a later text than the rest) is still a perplexing one. In general, Jewish angelology derives from the Aramaic apocryphal text of 1 Enoch, itself a lengthy expansion of the story of the nephilim of Gen. 6:1-4, who are understood as ‘fallen angels’ (the word nephilim literally means something like ‘rejects’ or ‘refuse’).11 Nevertheless, the Hebrew cherubim are now generally understood to be angels (like the other Hebrew figures, the seraphim). This is largely due to their early acceptance as angelic by Cyril of Jerusalem (370) and St Chrysostom (about 400), but more popularly by their Renaissance reconfiguration in the form of a small child with a bow and arrow. This is cupid or eros represented in the form of the infant and called ‘cherub’. (As Bloom puts it, ‘[t]he popular imagination has achieved few triumphs more striking than the total transformation of the cherubim of Genesis, dread beings blocking the way back to Eden, into the baby cherubs of western painting’ [Bloom 1996, p. 57].) This later, complex conflation of the cherub with eros is, in light of Irigaray’s reading of the angel as heralding an ethics of sexual difference, an important one to which I shall return. For now, however, we need to note that, linguistically at least, if there is a Hebrew equivalent to angelos, it would be the malak, not cherub. So, what are the cherubim? Etymologically, we have no real answer due to the lack of a Hebrew stem, though the word does seem to be closely related to the Assyrian karâbu, which can mean

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either ‘to bless’ or, adjectivally, ‘great or mighty’. As Pfeiffer (1922) argues, after the discovery of three Assyrian texts that mention the kuribi, colossal creatures such as the winged bull and lion colossi, it seems that the cherubim are of Assyrian origin. Kuribi were statues erected at each side of the gates leading to the shrine of Ašur, according to one of the texts (Pfeiffer 1922, p. 249). The cherubim appear in Gen. 3:24 as post-fall guardians of the tree of life, though no detailed description of them is given. They are placed there with a ‘flaming sword which turned every way’. As guardians here, it is not unreasonable to presume that they are living creatures of some kind. Such mythological examples also appear in Psalm 18:11 (18:10 in the English) and 2 Sam 22:11, where the cherub functions as the living chariot of the theophanic god: He rode on a cherub, and flew; he came swiftly upon the wings of the wind. (Ps. 18:11/10) He rode on a cherub, and flew; he was seen upon the wings of the wind. (2 Sam. 22:11)

Ezekiel gives a very vivid description of the cherubim as the grotesque living chariot of the God of Israel (chapters 1 and 10). Each cherub has four faces (human, lion, ox and eagle); has the figure and hands of a human but the feet of calves; has four wings, two of which reach upward, the other two covering themselves; is covered with eyes; and is like burning coals of fire. Ezekial’s celestial vision is quite different to the description given of the cherubim upon the ark in Exodus, and those of the temple in Kings and Chronicles. I want to deal only with the differences between these three descriptions, with a main focus on Chronicles. However, I think it is important to remember that when these creatures are depicted as unambiguously alive, they are monstrous and to be feared. As Yahweh’s living chariot, they are far from our image of ethereal, robed, human-like winged beings, that is, angels. My interest in Chronicles stems from its quite utopian desire for a better future. It manifests a concern to ‘return’ to the past in order to effect some change in the present from which it arises (generally presumed within Biblical Studies to be a postexilic production; the sixth century BCE, postexilic period is understood to be one of instability and uncertainty). The Chronicler’s re-telling of Israel’s social, cultic and political history, including a discernable obsession with origins, is one that scholars have traditionally disregarded as fictitious in relation to the more historically ‘accurate’ version from Genesis to Kings. More recently, however, scholars such as Roland Boer (1997) and Steven Schweitzer (2007) have focused on the utopian features of Chronicles, with very interesting results. According to this type of reading, the ‘present’ context of the production of Chronicles is also understood as a present within which it functions as a possible catalyst for future change. The past is something that must be returned to, and reworked, without concern for historical ‘fact’, so that some unimaginable future may unfold from a present that currently forecloses all possibility of doing so. This construction of origins, and of the past, in relation to the present and the future can be read as a utopian desire. But, as I have argued at length (Kelso 2007) the relationship between origins or beginnings and the past, present and future in Chronicles, while

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arguably utopian, participates in a foundational denial. Indeed, it is the disavowal and repression of corporeal origins, the disavowal and repression of originary maternal space that enables the construction of the socio-political utopian vision of Chronicles. The alternative history given to us here prepares an unimaginable future that enables the progress of the masculine and of men, at the expense of the feminine and of women. Yet, according to the (Marxist) theory of utopian literary production (notably from Louis Marin and Fredric Jameson), utopian fiction always turns in to its opposite, dystopia – it fails, in other words, largely because of the impossibility of its project – the imagining of something impossible because unimaginable. But this failure is crucial. It is ultimately a productive, and necessary failure, for, out of the undesired dystopia, which can only be arrived at for now, emerge signposts for a better future. Thus, I wish to suggest here that the description of the cherubim in Chronicles might just offer such a signpost. This reading is really only possible, however, when read alongside Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference and, in particular, her incorporation of the figure of the angel into that philosophy.

4  The cherubim of Chronicles As I mentioned earlier, Irigaray’s reading of the biblical cherubim concerns their depiction in Exodus. After the dimensions and materials required for the ark are commanded by the god, followed by the instruction to place the testimony inside it, he then gives the following orders: Then you shall make a cover of pure gold; two cubits and a half shall be its length, and a cubit and a half its breadth. And you shall make two cherubim of gold; of hammered work shall you make them, on the two ends of the mercy seat. Make one cherub on the one end, and one cherub on the other end; of one piece with the mercy seat shall you make the cherubim on its two ends. The cherubim shall spread out their wings above, overshadowing the mercy seat with their wings, their faces one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubim be. And you shall put the mercy seat on the top of the ark; and in the ark you shall put the testimony that I shall give you. There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are upon the ark of the testimony, I will speak with you of all that I will give you in commandment for the people of Israel. (Ex. 25:17-22)

The ark is to be placed in the tabernacle (mishkan, ‘dwelling place’) that they are to build so that Yahweh can ‘dwell in their midst’ (Ex. 25: 8). This will, in turn, be placed in a tent. Later, with King David, Yahweh desires a proper home in Jerusalem, so he orders the building of a temple. However, David is said to be too war-loving and bloodthirsty, and so, must leave this job for his son, the wise king Solomon (a name meaning ‘peace’). This story appears in both Kings and Chronicles, giving remarkably different historical accounts of the Davidic line. Likewise, the description of the temple structure in the two versions is quite different. Before giving an account of this difference, and its importance for this present study, let me first show how the configuration of the

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cherubim in Chronicles differs to that of Exodus. In Chronicles, they are described as follows: He made, in the house of the Holy of Holies, two cherubim (cherubim shenayim), a work of sa‘asu‘im (meaning unknown), and they overlaid them with gold. The wings (kanephe; masculine plural) of the cherubim were twenty cubits long; the wing of the one, for five cubits reached (magga‘ath; 3rd feminine singular Hiph`il participial form of ng‘) to the wall of the house and the other five cubit wing reached (maggiy‘a; 3rd masculine singular Hiph`il participial form of ng‘) to (or for?) the wing of the other cherub. And the wing of the one cherub, five cubits, reached (maggiy‘a; 3rd masculine singular Hiph`il participial form of ng‘) toward the wall of the house and the other five cubit wing cleaved (debeqah; 3rd feminine singular Qal form of dbq) to the wing of the other cherub. The wings of these cherubim were spread over twenty cubits. They stood on their feet with their faces toward the house (2 Chr. 3:10-13).

We note already that the cherubim are quite different in design to those of Exodus, for here, they do not face each other with their wings folded inwards and upwards. Rather, they face the same direction, towards the house or sanctuary, with their wings outstretched so that one wing touches the wall while the other touches the wing of the twin cherub. On closer inspection of the Hebrew, however, things get a little more interesting. The first feature to note is that the word used initially to describe the cherubim (sa‘asu‘im) is untranslatable. Usually, the translations will suggest something like ‘wood’, so that the text reads ‘a work of wood’ (although the Jewish sages Rashi, Mefaresh, Radak and Mettzudos translate it as ‘child-like’). However, this word does not even appear to be a proper Hebrew word, having too many consonants. Elsewhere (Kelso 2007, p. 181), I have suggested that this word alerts us to the difficulty the author has, from the beginning, in describing the cherubim in Chronicles (this strange word does not appear anywhere else). Second, while the plural ending ‘-im’ is a masculine ending in Hebrew, meaning that ‘cherub’ is understood as a masculine noun, each of the cherub’s wings, while of the same length, has a specific gender associated with the verbs of reaching and cleaving. Each cherub thus has one masculine wing and one feminine wing. Where the text reads ‘the wings of the cherubim’, the gender of the plural ‘wings’ (kanephe) is masculine, although the word kenaph is generally feminine. There is nothing particularly unusual here. However, according to the verbs, the inner wings of the cherubim – the ones that touch each other – are masculine in the case of the first cherub, and feminine in the second case. Indeed, they are not described as simply reaching each other in the sense of measured extension. Rather, the feminine wing cleaves to her partner’s masculine wing, with this masculine wing reaching to (or for?) this cleaving feminine wing. It is important to note that this bi-gendering of the cherubim is absent from the parallel description in  1 Kings 6:27, where only feminine forms of the verb ng‘ are used. In other words, there is no bi-gendering of the cherubim in Kings because all of the verbal acts associated with the wings are feminine. Furthermore, the feminine cleaving wing in Chronicles is not present

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in 1  Kings 6:27. There, the two middle feminine wings are described as touching (nog‘ith; the Qal, feminine plural participle of ng‘). We should also note that in Exodus, the wings do not get to be the subject of strong verbal actions, for the verbs of spreading (porese) and overshadowing (sokkim) are participial in form (as are three of the wings in the Chronicles configuration). The verb ‘to cleave’ itself is interesting. In the pointed Hebrew text (the Masoretic version), the word is made an adjective, while the consonantal form allows for the word to be interpreted as a verb. Consonantally, we may read this word debeqah as the third feminine singular Qal form of dbq, ‘she cleaved’, though with qere (as it is pointed/spoken), the word is a feminine adjective. Given the repeated verbal forms of ng‘ in 3:11-12, and the gender pattern that emerges here with the verbs, the pointing may be an interesting example of Masoretic interpretation. That is, while the masculine wing only reaches to (or for?) the feminine wing, the latter cleaves, which is considered a more forceful verb according to Jewish tradition (Eisemann 1987, p.  21). Perhaps our medieval scribes could not consider the possibility of a stronger feminine verbal act, and thus pointed it such that it be read as adjectival, not verbal (‘cleaving wing’)? Furthermore, this verb is associated with ‘marriage’ language. In Genesis 2:24, we are told that ‘man leaves his father and his mother and he cleaves to his woman’, albeit because she is made from his flesh. Nevertheless, the verb is associated with carnal union between the sexes. In order to push our comprehension of this strange image a little further, it is crucial to examine the curious structure of the temple as it is described in Chronicles, the ‘place’ that houses these figures. The first feature of interest is the temple’s vestibule or hall: The vestibule [or porch] in front of the nave of the house was twenty cubits long, equal to the width of the house; and its height was a hundred and twenty cubits. He overlaid it on the inside with pure gold (2 Chr. 3:4).

This vestibule is described as being 20 cubits wide and 120 cubits high. Given that the entire length of the temple is 60 cubits, and its width 20 cubits, this enormous vertical structure at the entrance is architecturally improbable, though perhaps not impossible.12 Still, it is rather a precious ‘thing’ – something that is overlaid inside with gold. And the second intriguing feature is that, while windows with recessed frames are a feature of the temple as described in the parallel text of 1 Kings (6:4), the temple in Chronicles seems utterly devoid of windows, and only brief mention is made of doors to the great court: 2 Chr. 3:9, and ‘the entrance of the house, the innermost doors to the Holy of Holies, and the doors of the house for the Temple . . . ’ (4:22). There seems to be only one entrance to this house, with all other doors being internal, or leading to the courtyards. When trying to imagine what this internal space of the temple might look like, based on the description given, without windows, with only one door leading outside, and a series of internal doors, I find myself in darkness. Without any details of the windows, and with only one main entrance, the building as it is described is a cave-like space, with all its internal chambers.

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The third interesting feature is the description of the curtain that separates the Holy of Holies from the main section of the temple: And he made the curtain of blue and purple and crimson (fabrics?) and linen, and he worked cherubim upon it (2 Chr. 3:14).

A delicate piece of fabric separates the holiest place in this construction, not a wall or a door – something tear-able, though untorn, decorated with cherubim similar to the ones located within the inner sanctum, the holiest place, where the God-Father’s law will be located and his name and presence contained (restrained?). Within this cavelike architectural space, with one principal entrance, no windows and what appears to be a number of internal rooms or chambers, we arrive at this intricate curtain, beyond which is the Holy of Holies. Elsewhere (Kelso 2007), I have argued that this temple, with its anomalous vestibule and internal structure, is testimony to the repressed status of the maternal body, for it reveals, symptomatically, the phantasy of the mono-productive male body – a male (phallic) body with a womb. It exposes the repressed status of the maternal body in this discourse as a whole, a repression that enables the phantasmatic construction of a political utopia, if you like, that is almost devoid of women. If man is self-producing, he has no need for woman and can get on with the business of running his society as his god has ordered. First of all, the vaginal and cave/womb-like interiority of the maternal body is useful to this representation. The maternal body, repressed from the beginning of the narrative, returns here in imaginary service as a prop, even a stage, for this sacred drama. But even more striking is that this architectural construct reveals, symptomatically, the phantasy of the mono-productive body that sustains this discourse. The temple consists of both an enormous, almost unsupportable erection along with a vaginal and womblike internal space. In other words, this temple, as described in Chronicles, is a doubly sexed body – a male (phallic) body with a womb.13 Furthermore, the curtain separating the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple is untorn, signifying a preference, if you like, for the virginal maternal body. The Father-God will be both honoured and contained by the son (who is erecting this monument) in this maternal space – no sexual alliance for these two. Returning to the cherubim of Chronicles, on an initial reading, we might argue that the doubly sexed cherub replicates the doubly-sexed structure of the temple itself, that is, they alert us to the governing fantasy of the mono-productive male body in Chronicles – double-sexing equates to an appropriation of maternal productivity by the masculine subject. Or we might even see something of Aristophanes’ lovers, wherein ‘the yoking of two into one same one paralyzes the whole scene’ as Irigaray describes them (Irigaray 1993c, p. 46). And yet, the Jewish sage Malbim has something interesting to offer us.14 In his commentary on Leviticus 16:5, Malbim argues that when the two cherubim face each other, they constitute one unit – this denotes a perfectly matched pair. In such cases, the correct wording for ‘two cherubim’ is the construct form – shene cherubim. He then notes that, according to Bava Basra 99a, the positioning of the cherubim

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portrays God’s relationship to Israel. He also notes that the cherubim are made male and female to denote the source and recipient of divine favour. Presumably, Malbim is imagining that each cherub maintains a distinct sex. It is only when the two face each other (as they do in Exodus) that the relationship between God and Israel is as it should be. However, if the two face forward, they disregard each other. As such, their sexual difference is maintained. For such cases, the unusual cherubim shenayim will be used. The construct form is used when a pair is perfectly matched, meaning, the identities of male and female have been eradicated, while shenayim is used when the difference is maintained. When shenayim is used, in other words, as it is in Chronicles, God and Israel are not in a proper relationship and corporeal sexual difference exists. This is consistent with the feeling in Chronicles – that proper relationship is to come. We might give Malbim the benefit of the doubt and say that he is acknowledging the eradication of traditional, binary sexualities (presumably all he could know) when God and Israel are said to be in a proper relationship, and when the (traditional) male and female distinction remains (i.e., when each cherub has a distinct gender), then that relationship is unsatisfactory. Is Malbim hoping for the advent of a new sexual difference, an ethical one such as that toward which Irigaray is working? Probably not. Haven’t we come to realize that the desire for the neutral or neuter is really just a masked desire for the masculine? To put it simply, Malbim is saying that when sexual difference disappears (‘neither male nor female’ as that Jewish follower of Jesus will put it), all will be right with God and Israel (and gentiles; ‘neither Greek nor Jew’). The idea is that all difference will be eradicated, and this is hardly consistent with what we who engage with Irigaray are aiming for today. But, then, what of the cherubim of Chronicles? Shenayim is used, but we can hardly say that the cherubim are gendered unproblematically male and female. Nor can we say that gender is eradicated (which it could not be anyway, given the fact that Hebrew is a gendered language with no neuter). This configuration does not make sense on Malbim’s and Bava Basra’s terms. Are they ultimately, hopelessly mono-logical, as per the Aristophanic model? If so, why are there two of them, two bi-gendered creatures gesturing to each other, when one would have sufficed, given that male and female coalesce in one form? There is, of course, a ‘queerness’ about these figures. There are, no doubt, many who will wish to suggest that this double-sexing possibly subverts the dominant patriarchal ideology of heterosexism, with the double-sexing effectively queering the ‘individual’, the relation between ‘the two’, and the sacred itself. I do not have the space here to address fully the challenging question concerning Irigaray’s theory of sexuate difference and its possible uses (or not) for those interested in queer politics. It seems to me crucial, however, to recognize the deeply problematic consistency between what Irigaray calls the fundamental logic of Western, masculinist thinking – monosexuality attained through the appropriation of the feminine by the masculine for itself – and so-called subversive models of sexuality. My own feministpolitical allegiance is to radical heterosexuality, to the love that can not (yet) speak its name, and to an unapologetically absolute rejection of the socio-economicpolitical heteronormativity that currently oppresses women and men, whether gay,

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queer, heteronormative, whatever. Such an allegiance thus leads me to the following interrogative reading of the cherubim. And so, I ask the following – each cherub is given both sexes, but together, do they long for each other as distinct sexual beings, a longing for sexual difference despite the imposed double-sexing of their own being? Why not have unambiguously feminine cherubim? Or masculine cherubim? Why not have one masculine (two masculine wings) and the other feminine (two feminine wings)? How are we to understand this desperate verbal instance where a feminine wing cleaves to a masculine wing? If she simply wanted the masculine, couldn’t ‘she’ have turned inwards towards her bi-gendered self, cleaving to the masculine wing on this/her doubly-sexed (Aristophanic) body? Instead, ‘she’ reaches out beyond to a different ‘being’, or rather, to the masculine wing of the other cherub. And let us not forget that these curiously double-sexed cherubim have been placed in the holiest space in the building, that appropriated womb-like place in this phallicized building. Do these angels protest such a structure, portents of a yet-to-be sacrality, which we can recognize, but ultimately must conceal (and yet, alas, cannot)? Do they protest the asexual status of the mother and father (indeed, anticipatorily, do they reject Freud)? This desperate feminine act, reaching out for, holding on to, but more strongly cleaving to that masculine wing that belongs to the other begs us, I think, to yearn for, indeed work for a sexual and sexuated difference. Were this cleaving feminine act not present, I think we would have a different picture. In other words, I want to suggest that these strange, ancient, doubly-sexed cherubim implore us to work towards the possibility of a yet-to-exist, genuinely heterosexual economy (a radical heterosexuality – the love that can not [yet] speak its name?), one that refuses the phantasy of mono-sexual, masculine production. This cleaving feminine wing belongs to a doubly sexed entity. But does ‘she’, who is housed and protected (why?) in that most holy space, not ask us, even perhaps (silently, yet, audibly through her gesture) beg us, to set her free? Perhaps her rejection of this imposed foreign gender will be painful. Perhaps she is willing to endure that. Perhaps the day will come when the pain will have actual rewards, if it happens at all. But most importantly, perhaps she wants us to set her free so she may love the other, the masculine who, here, himself, can only, simply, reach for her. I maintain that we do well to consider the non-verbal message conveyed by the gestures of these two strange guardians of divinity in our tradition as we continue to try and think through the current impossibility of sexual difference.

Notes 1 On Justyn Martyr’s loathing of the fallen angels, see Reed (2004). 2 So too Hermias, in his Irrisio Gentilium Philosophorum. See Bauckham (1985). 3 See Ross 1985, pp. 495–6, for a discussion of the mistaken belief that Aquinas pondered the question of angels dancing on a pinhead. 4 What follows is developed from an idea I could not explore in great detail in Kelso 2007, though some of that work appears here, notably the final paragraph.

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5 For an excellent elucidation of Irigaray’s analysis of the space–time dichotomy in Western metaphysics, see Alfonso (2011). 6 I have written at length about the importance of the practicable as a mode of interpretation. (See: Kelso 2007, pp. 68–109). 7 See also Irigaray, ‘Divine Women’ (Irigaray 1993c, pp. 55–72), ‘Letting Be Transcendence’ (Irigaray 2002b, pp. 65–75), ‘Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato, Symposium, “Diotima’s Speech” ’ (Irigaray 1993a, pp. 20–33). 8 As Ingram points out, she is quoting from a re-published version of Grosz’s ‘Irigaray and the Divine’, which was originally published in 1986. In Grosz’s Sexual Subversions (1989), Grosz put this differently – ‘In her ideal union of and exchange between the sexes, each seeks to become a corporealisation of the angelic, a sexualised, shimmering, always moving being’ (Grosz 1989, p. 161). 9 For an interesting interpretation of the mediatory function of the angel in the late medieval period, see Ashton (2002). 10 For a discussion of the Rabbinic angels, see Fass (2001). 11 For a good discussion of how the ‘fallen angels’ appear in Jewish, Christian and Mohammedan literature, see Jung (1925). 12 For most scholars, this figure of 120 cubits must be an error on the part of the ancient writer or copyist. For a more interesting reading of this feature of the temple as it appears in Chronicles, see Boer (1997, pp. 146, 161). Boer introduces the argument from Marxist utopian studies that descriptive language necessarily breaks down within utopian writing: . . . the idea of a vestibule six times as high as its width, even twice as high as the length of the full temple, indicates a representational flaw: a temple with an immense tower at its front is followed by the main sanctuary which is half the distance (on the ground) of the tower itself. This is not implausible – a high rise temple for Solomon would be novel – but it seems to me that this is another example of the breakdown of descriptive language in the realm of utopian construction. (Boer 1997, p. 146) Thus, the description of the temple in Chronicles symptomatically alerts us to a politically utopian form of thinking on the part of the Chronicler, a form of thinking distinct from that of the so-called Deuteronomist. Boer, however, makes nothing of the obvious phallic structure here, nor is he interested in the relationship between this phallic vestibule and the rest of the features of the Chronicles temple. 13 Instead of dismissing this description of the temple vestibule in Chronicles as an error, I argue that it is more productive to read it in such a way that builds upon Irigaray’s thesis that the phallus monopolizes conceptual (masculine) thought, and that the maternal body is the mute foundation of that thought: The phallus erected where once there was the umbilical cord? It becomes the organizer of the world of and through the man-father, in the place where the umbilical cord, the first bond with the mother, gave birth to the body of both man and woman.” (Irigaray 1991b, p. 38) This is how men gather together in the mystery of the here and now present of a body and a blood that have not figured on the stage and thus allow that stage to be set. Many, many years ago, in our tradition, the pick was driven into the earth-mother’s womb in order to build the sacred enclosure of the tribe, the temple, finally the house. (Irigaray 1993c, p. 47)

When Cherubim Touch The temple in Chronicles reveals, if you like, the phallocentric logic underwriting the very concept of sacred architectural space. As Grosz puts it (with respect to Irigaray’s thesis on the masculine appropriation of the maternal body): Irigaray claims that masculine modes of thought have performed a devastating sleight-of-hand: they have obliterated the debt they owe to the most primordial of all spaces, the maternal space from which all subjects emerge, and which they ceaselessly attempt to usurp . . . The production of a (male) world – the construction of an “artificial” or cultural environment, the production of an intelligible universe, religion, philosophy, the creation of true knowledges and valid practices of and in that universe – is implicated in the systematic and violent erasure of the contributions of women, femininity, and the maternal. (Grosz 1995, p. 121) 14 What follows, concerning Malbim, comes from Eisemann (1987, p. 20).

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The Gift of Breath: Towards a Maternal Pneumatology Emily A. Holmes

(Dept. of Religion and Philosophy, Christian Brothers University, Memphis, Tennessee, USA)1

Luce Irigaray describes in several different texts the gift of breath that each person originally receives from the gestational mother. According to her, the gift of breath provides for the survival and eventual autonomy of the child. The breath of the mother is shared rather than given away; the mother must retain her own breath in order to ensure her (and the child’s) survival. Breathing is not restricted to the level of the natural, however. When cultivated, mature breathing leads to interiority and speech, both markers of subjectivity, and even further, to the possibility of a soul and divinity. From the beginning, Irigaray argues, the role of the breath in pregnancy and birth indicates that these are not simply natural, but cultural and spiritual events in the life of the mother and child. When cultivated and shared, the gift of breath provides the passage from the natural to the spiritual. Much of Irigaray’s writing on the breath emphasizes the exchange of breath between lovers, and the importance of cultivating and sharing the breath through a spiritualization of carnal love. In this chapter, however, I focus on the origin of the breath in the maternal body. I examine Irigaray’s discussion of the breath in order to contribute to a feminist theology of embodied spirit, which in traditional theological terms is called pneumatology, a theology of the Holy Spirit. Irigaray’s writings on the gift of breath offer an alternative interpretation of Christian theological themes of incarnation, divinization and spiritual rebirth, or being ‘born again’. Cultivation of the breath that originates in the body of the mother provides the pathway for becoming divine.

The gift of breath In gestation and in giving birth, the biological or gestational mother gives the foetus breath, along with flesh and blood. Oxygen passes from the mother’s bloodstream through the placenta and the umbilical cord to the bloodstream of the foetus. During

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pregnancy, the mother gives of her own breath to breathe for the foetus, or more precisely, she shares breath with the foetus (Irigaray 2002a, pp.  79–80). Breathing cannot be strictly delineated. Breathing blurs the boundaries between one breath and the next, between self and other, mother and child. Consequently, the gift of breath is unlike other gifts, for it is a gift that is shared. Irigaray notes that ‘maternity is often spiritually valorized as material gift, of blood, of body, of milk, and not as sharing of breath, sharing of life, sharing of soul. The mother gives her breath and lets the other go; she gives the other life and autonomy. From the beginning, she passes on physical and metaphysical existence to the other’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 81). Unlike other gifts, the mother does not give away or sacrifice her breath; rather, while pregnant, she has an excess or surplus of breath that is both physical and metaphysical – she is ‘breathing for two’. The mother breathes for the foetus until the moment of birth when, for the first time, the newborn begins to breathe for himself. The surplus of breathing leaves the gestational mother’s body with the newborn, but the sound of the mother’s breath will continue to comfort the newborn and help him to regulate his own breathing. This moment of birth, at which the newborn begins to breathe for himself, could not be reached without the shared gift of breath received during the previous months of gestation. The moment of birth signals a transition in the way breath is given and received. Breathing alone is necessary for the newborn’s survival. It is, according to Irigaray, ‘the first autonomous gesture of the living human being. To come into the world supposes inhaling and exhaling by oneself. In the uterus, we receive oxygen through the mother’s blood. We are not yet autonomous, not yet born’ (Ibid., p. 73.) For Irigaray, there is a sense in which this unconscious, prenatal breathing can continue after birth, when breathing is merely for survival. Unconscious breathing remains ignorant of the sources of breath in the mother’s body, in plants and in other people – ‘After birth, whoever does not breathe, does not respect his or her own life and takes air from the other, from others’ (Ibid., p. 50). This unconscious breathing, which she also calls vital or survival breathing, is merely natural. It is not yet spiritual, because it takes air from others without acknowledging the gift received. In a way, the individual is not yet fully born – he exploits the breath of others because he breathes unconsciously, without acknowledging the gift of air. When consciously cultivated, however, breathing can signify autonomy and freedom, separation from the biological mother. ‘Breathing in a conscious and free manner’, Irigaray writes, ‘is equivalent to taking charge of one’s life to accepting solitude through cutting the umbilical cord, to respecting and cultivating life, for oneself and for others’ (Ibid., p. 74). Irigaray here takes biological birth as a metaphor for autonomy. Consciously cultivating the breath corresponds to a process of being ‘born again’ (Ibid., p.  5). When the individual accepts responsibility for breathing alone, he separates himself from the mother. Recognizing separation means that he can acknowledge his indebtedness to the gift of breath received as a foetus – without separation, there can be no gratitude. Consciousness and gratitude make breathing into more than the minimum necessary for survival. Breathing becomes a spiritual gesture. Consciously breathing for oneself, with awareness, helps to develop other features related to autonomy or being ‘born again’. It leads to the development of interiority by

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focusing inward, and creativity by acknowledging the creativity of birth – ‘To remain silently attentive to the breath comes down to respecting that which, or who, exists and maintaining for oneself the possibility to be born and to create’ (Ibid., p.  51). Irigaray associates recognition of being born – natality – with autonomy, interiority and creativity. These characteristics signal the birth of subjectivity, which, in her view, can be cultivated or developed further through attentiveness to the breath. In her book I Love to You, Irigaray explores the role of the breath in language, particularly as it is spoken (Irigaray 1996, p. 121). She has been concerned from her earliest work with what she calls parler-femme (speaking-woman/speaking as woman) and the position of enunciation that indicates women’s subjectivity in language. In this book, however, she notes the risks associated with a certain manner of speaking – ‘Speech, instead of bearing breath, takes its place, replaces it, which invariably stifles and preoccupies the place for silence. People who pay no heed to respiration, who breathe poorly, who are short of air, often cannot stop speaking, and are thus unable to listen’ (Ibid., p. 122). Cultural and religious traditions founded on speech without silence fail to respect the breath of life that makes speech possible – ‘By forgetting the gift that comes from the living world (particularly the vegetable world), and human bodies (particularly female bodies), they become dogmatic. Such traditions substitute words for life without forging the necessary links between the two’ (Ibid., p.  122). While such calcified logocentrism stifles breath and preempts silence, cultivation of the breath can, conversely, transform language by remembering the gift of breath from the mother’s body and the living world. This transformed language operates through both speech and silence and is directed towards the other. Breathing gives rise to and embodies speech by giving language material support. Breath-filled speech is necessarily embodied and thus remains flesh while becoming word, as in Irigaray’s examples of poetry, praise, question and song (Ibid., p. 123). While survival or unconscious breathing remains at the level of the natural, conscious breathing, paying attention to the breath, is a passage from the natural to the cultural, indicating autonomy, freedom, interiority and creativity – in short, subjectivity and its location within speech and silence. This natural/cultural subject is possible, thanks to the gift of breath and birth received from the biological mother and consciously taken upon oneself. Irigaray, however, does not end her discussion at the level of the subject, for breathing as a passage between nature and culture is importantly also a spiritual practice. Through cultivating the breath, she writes, ‘we transform our vital respiration into spiritual breath. Nature becomes spirit while remaining nature’ (Ibid., p. 123). And here, rather than speaking of the subject, Irigaray begins to speak of the soul. For her, our first breathing at birth is the beginning of the possibility of a soul. Intriguingly, she suggests that prior to birth, the foetus perhaps shares a soul with its mother through her ‘surplus’ of breathing. Just as breathing cannot be strictly delineated between the mother and foetus, but is a gift that is shared, so, too, do they share a soul, which expands during pregnancy. Only when the infant breathes independently, in Irigaray’s view, does the infant begin to develop his own soul. Consciously cultivating the breath amounts to cultivating the soul, which is neither strictly identified with nor in dualistic opposition to the body.2 Breathing is the passage between the oppositions of nature/spirit, speech/silence, flesh/word, and it is the path to becoming divine. In

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Between East and West (2002a, p. 76), Irigaray describes breathing as a yogic practice of gradual transformation,3 whereas in ‘The Age of the Breath’, Irigaray interprets breathing in the Christian tradition, with reference to biblical passages relating to the breath or spirit of God – for instance, God’s creation through breathing in Genesis and the Annunciation in the Gospel of Luke.4 These biblical examples in her writings indicate the potential for her interpretation of the breath to contribute to a feminist pneumatology, a theology of the Holy Spirit.

Divinization and incarnation For Luce Irigaray, to become fully human is to become divine, and becoming divine is best accomplished through the cultivation of the breath. Whereas the masculine subject (in the West) has denied the creative power (puissance) of the mother, switched the gender, and ascribed it to a masculine God who creates using his breath, Irigaray finds in biblical passages describing the breath and spirit of God a tacit recognition of the spiritual powers of the mother and the potential of breathing as a path to divinization (Irigaray 2004, p.  169). She describes this path as a kind of rebirth and creativity that is autonomously undertaken for oneself. Because the breath is potentially divine, Irigaray’s thinking here provides an alternative understanding of the Holy Spirit, which is figured as the breath of God in both Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Out of her writings on the breath, therefore, one might construct a feminist theology that links the biological experience of mothers giving, and all of us receiving, breath with the Christian theological themes of incarnation, divinization and spiritual rebirth. Theologians have traditionally described becoming divine with the term theosis, or divinization. Irigaray closely associates divinization with incarnation – a term she uses to refer to the embodiment of the divine generally. The Christian theological tradition, however, has typically limited the incarnation to ‘the Word made Flesh’, the embodiment of God in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth. Reading Irigaray’s writings on the breath together with the Christian theological tradition, one can extend the concept of incarnation to include the cultivation of the breath, through which the spirit is quite literally embodied in each person. Such a notion is not as foreign to the Christian tradition as it might first appear. To speak of divinization in connection with the incarnation is to take up the formula of fourth-century bishop Athanasius – ‘He, indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God’ (Athanasius, On the Incarnation, sec. 54). For Athanasius, the ontological transformation wrought in human beings by the divine gift of the incarnation leads to their own divinization. The interrelation of incarnation and divinization is central to thought of medieval women mystics as well, such as the thirteenth-century Franciscan Angela of Foligno, who wrote, ‘my God became flesh in order that he might make me God’ (Angela of Foligno 1985, p.  714). Like Athanasius, Angela understands divinization to be the direct result of the incarnation. Irigaray’s description of divinization as a response to the incarnation, with spiritual practices as the path to becoming divine, participates in a long Christian tradition. This tradition includes heretical movements such as the

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thirteenth-century followers of Guglielma of Milan, who was revered as the incarnation of the Holy Spirit,5 as well as the nineteenth-century Shakers, who believed Mother Ann Lee to be the second coming of Christ in the body of a woman through a new outpouring of the Spirit.6 In both of these cases, the divine breath – in the form of the Holy Spirit – linked the female embodiment of God as a new incarnation with ideals of gender equity and communal life through which divinization takes place in this world. While the traditional Christian understanding of the incarnation operates through a dualistic opposition between God and humanity, between ‘word’ and ‘flesh’ (both of which are classically understood as normatively masculine), breathing provides a passage between the two. It is both the deconstructive third element that releases the grip of binary thinking and the mediation that makes possible the incarnation. In traditional Christian language, it is the Holy Spirit that prepares and exceeds the historical event of the incarnation, the third person of the Trinity who is both already present and promised to come, the wind of creation that ‘blows where it chooses’, opening up unexpected directions in Christian thought and unforeseen passages of spiritual becoming.

The middle Spirit In recent years, Christian feminist theologians have identified the Holy Spirit as the disruptive and subversive third person of the Trinity who provides a way through calcified dualisms and false dichotomies.7 Shelly Rambo calls this ‘the middle Spirit’. In her nuanced reading of the Gospel of John, Rambo notes how the Spirit remains on Holy Saturday between the death of Jesus on Good Friday and his Easter resurrection. This Spirit of the ‘middle day’ signals the fragile love of God between death and life. Even after the death of Jesus, the Spirit remains in the bodies and breath of the disciples, witnessing with them the liminal space wherein they dwell, not knowing when or if he will return. Rambo reads the passion narrative through the lens of trauma theory, noting how trauma survivors also dwell in the ambiguous space between death and life, suffering the lingering effects of an embodied event that escapes their language. The middle Spirit, she contends, remains with all survivors of trauma and witnesses their suffering in that disorienting and tragic space. This Spirit provides a fragile glimpse of divine love there where all hope of breathing freely again has been threatened by trauma. With other theologians, Rambo maintains that the ‘Spirit is God’s breath’(Rambo 2010, p.  117).8 The Hebrew word ruach can be translated as breath, wind or spirit in the Hebrew scriptures. In each instance, ‘it signals God’s presence in and with creation’ (Ibid., p.  117). Notably, ruach is gendered feminine, evoking ‘the imagery of childbirth, of God’s Spirit as not only the breath of life but as the labouring breaths that bring about life’ (Ibid., p. 117). The feminine term ruach as used in the Hebrew scriptures thus links the divine breath with the maternal body, giving birth to creation and signalling God’s ever-present dwelling in the world. In the liminal space where life struggles to be born, the divine gift of breath is aligned with the mother’s laboured breathing, giving life and breath to her child.

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The Christian scriptures use the masculine Greek term pneuma to refer to God’s Spirit, tying it to the figures of Jesus and his Father. This emphasis on the masculine Father and Son frequently elides the maternal origins and actions of the Spirit, but it does not erase them. Rambo traces references to the Spirit through the Gospel of John to recover the ambiguity of the middle Spirit, who remains as witness between death and life. The Spirit descends upon Jesus in the form of a dove, guides his ministry, and is breathed out upon his disciples by the risen Christ. Rambo focuses much of her attention on Jesus’ last exhalation, in which he ‘hands over his Spirit’ to his disciples at the foot of the cross. This final exhalation is both the breath of death and the gift of the Spirit, mingling with the disciples’ own breath without clear delineation (Ibid., pp. 118–20). These movements of the Spirit ‘give rise to new forms of life. Spirit is the breath that gives rise to form. This cannot be exclusively tied to the figure of Christ but is tied to the breath of witnesses, to those who remain’ (Ibid., p. 120). Rambo’s reading of the pneuma of the Gospel of John here echoes the ruach that gives rise to form in creation. Jesus’ gift of breath to his disciples also evokes the maternal body and the gift of breath at birth. This evocation occurs through Jesus’ instruction to be ‘born from above’. When questioned by Nicodemus as to whether one can literally be born again from the mother’s womb, Jesus replies, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit’. This passage is widely take as a reference to baptism (‘water and spirit’) and may have Gnostic overtones of a hierarchical opposition between spirit and flesh. It is possible, in a critical feminist hermeneutic, to read the injunction to be ‘born from above’ as a repudiation of the maternal-feminine origin – the ‘flesh’ seen as unclean, making necessary a second, masculine, spiritual birth that recalls a true, heavenly origin. In this view, being ‘born from above’ would simultaneously appropriate and repudiate the maternal powers of birth. But when the Spirit is linked to the mother’s body through the gift of breath, a different reading emerges. In his farewell discourse, Jesus makes an analogy between a woman in labour and the coming suffering of his disciples after his death – ‘you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy. When a woman is in labour, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world’ (John 16:20b-21 NRSV). The analogy of pain turning to joy by giving birth follows Jesus’ promise of the Paraclete, the Advocate or Comforter identified as the Holy Spirit – ‘if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you’ (John 16:7).9 After his death and resurrection, Jesus breathes on his disciples, telling them to ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ (John 20:22), the formal gift of breath and Spirit that is anticipated by his last exhalation on the cross in John 19. Reading these passages together prevents any simple criticism of ‘born from above’ language as appropriating maternal powers. For, if Jesus’ followers are asked to become like children, born again this time of water and Spirit, they are also asked become like mothers, labouring in pain that will turn to joy with Jesus’ return. Jesus is figured both as the newborn, in whose birth/resurrection the disciples will rejoice, and as the mother, who breathes the gift of breath and Spirit upon his disciples. In these shifting analogies, Jesus and

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his followers switch places, while the Spirit/breath is the passageway between them. The Spirit/breath traces the rebirth of baptism back to the maternal body and the breath and life that emerge from it. We should not be astonished that Jesus says, ‘You must be born from above’, when being born from above is a hidden recognition of being born from below – from the body and breath of the mother that weaves through the text like the wind. ‘The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit’ (John 3:8). The Spirit is unpredictable and cannot be confined by institutional controls or patriarchal traditions. Being born of this Spirit, which exceeds the Father and Son, means recognizing and remembering the mother’s gift of breath. Jesus says we do not know where the spirit/wind comes from – but is this because we have forgotten and denied our debt to the maternal body?10 Being born again, born of the Spirit, might then be a way of remembering the gift of breath and cultivating that breath through spiritual practices, practices that do not leave the body or flesh behind but connect to the divine through the material and embodied breath. Following the Spirit through these biblical passages between life and death, between spirit and body, between word and flesh, leads the reader at each turn back to the maternal body.

The maternal body The Christian doctrine of the incarnation has traditionally referred to the Word made flesh, the second person of the Trinity embodied in Jesus of Nazareth. The event of the incarnation, and the breath that precedes and proceeds from it, begins in the maternal body. Womanist theologian Delores Williams notes, ‘though incarnation is traditionally associated with the self-disclosure of God in Jesus Christ, incarnation also involves God’s self-disclosure in a woman: Mary.  .  .  .  Translated in terms of African-American heritage from traditional African religions, one can say, “The Spirit mounted Mary” ’(Williams 1993, 168). The initial location of the Spirit in Mary’s body allows Williams to extend the doctrine of the incarnation from the particular male body of Jesus to the body of his mother, Mary, interpreted through traditional African religions as possessed by the Spirit. This incarnation of the Spirit is further extended to the wider Christian community – ‘The word was first made flesh in Mary’s body. Incarnation, in a womanist understanding of it in the Christian testament, can be regarded as a continuum of the manifestation of divine spirit beginning with Mary, becoming an abundance in Jesus and later overflowing into the life of the church’ (Ibid., p. 168). Similarly, according to Irigaray, the Annunciation depicts Mary’s spiritual conception prior to her biological conception of Jesus. Here, the Spirit signifies Mary’s own breathing, just as her virginity signals her autonomy and self-affection – ‘It is Mary’s spiritual virginity which makes her a potential mother of a divine child, a virginity that she herself had partly received by birth, and that she succeeded in protecting and conserving thanks to her relation with the Spirit. . . . Mary is thus the spiritual ancestor and spiritual mother of Jesus before being his natural mother’(Irigaray 2004f, p. 152).11

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Unlike Williams, Irigaray does not describe Mary’s conception of Jesus as her own divine incarnation; instead, Mary plays the part of co-redemptrix in the unfolding historical drama of the breath. ‘In my opinion’, writes Irigaray, the third age, the age of the Spirit, rather corresponds to the age of cultivation, by man and woman, of the divine breath they received as human beings. . . . The God-Father creates humanity by sending his breath into matter, into earth, the text tells us. Then sin occurs, the loss of divinity for man and for woman, and the necessity of the second age, the age of the redemption through the generation of a woman – Mary – and of a man – Jesus – who are both inhabited by the breath of the Spirit. In the third age of the history of Judeo-Christianity, after the age of the world’s redemption, thanks to Mary and to Jesus, the task of humanity will be to become itself divine breath. Man and woman then must be able to cultivate within themselves, and to give one another, or to exchange, a breath become divine. (Irigaray 2004, p. 168)

For both Williams and Irigaray, the Virgin Mary is central to a feminist interpretation of the incarnation and divinization. Each refers to the Gospel of Luke to describe the origin of the breath in the maternal body, narrated as the Holy Spirit’s descent upon Mary. Although Luke prioritizes the Father God as the source of the Spirit, it is possible to see this as a theological reversal, a tacit acknowledgement of the origin of breath in the maternal body that is attributed to the masculine creator-God (Daly 1973, pp. 95–6). If we remember that the gift of breath originates in the mother’s body and is embodied from the beginning as the necessary support of life and speech, we can see Spirit as the passage between flesh and word, as depicted in Luke’s narration. Mary’s experience of ‘spirit-possession’, in Williams’ terms, dramatically reveals the becoming-word of her flesh in her visit to her cousin Elizabeth. In the Visitation, the Spirit is again located in the maternal body as the pregnant Elizabeth responds bodily to Mary’s incarnation by experiencing quickening and her own possession by the Holy Spirit. In both women, the spirit-filled flesh issues in speech – first Elizabeth to Mary, an expression of wonder, and then Mary’s prophetic hymn known as the Magnificat. In this hymn, Mary links her embodiment of the divine to themes of social justice, indicating respect for the poor and the oppressed as beloved of God. Mary’s Magnificat is a beautiful example of inspired speech, a speech that issues from the breath – in this case, the surplus breathing of the pregnant maternal body.12

Natality and the soul The representation of the maternal body as the locus of the Spirit in the Christian gospels, and its interpretation and extension by Williams and Irigaray, indicate what the feminist philosopher of religion Grace Jantzen calls a symbolic of natality. Jantzen borrows (and modifies) this term from Hannah Arendt13 to indicate the fundamental

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human condition of being born – ‘although not all women give birth, every person who has ever lived has been born, and born of a woman. Natality . . . is even more basic to our existence than the fact that we will die, since death presupposes birth’ (Jantzen 1998, p. 144). Jantzen identifies several characteristics of natality as it is expressed in the Western imaginary and symbolic through key religious texts and images, such as the nativity of Christ – embodiment, gender, relationality, creativity and hope.14 Embodiment is a central feature of natality because we are foremost bodies born of bodies. In the Christian perspective, birth is the way the divine enters the world and becomes embodied through the incarnation. Natality makes it necessary to ethically consider the human being as an embodied whole person and, therefore, to support the material conditions of human flourishing (food, water, shelter, etc.). Gender, or in the context of Irigaray’s thought, sexual difference, is linked to birth because human beings have evolved through sexed reproduction, of at least two sexually differentiated types.15 (While intersex and transgendered persons indicate that humanity may not be limited to just two sexes, at minimum, two are necessary for sexed reproduction). To be sure, sexual difference is not intrinsic to pair bonding, marriage, or parenting children, nor are two sexes the only ones recognized cross-culturally.16 Rather gender/sexual difference is a feature of birth and therefore ontologically connected to our human natality, however configured socially and culturally. The philosophical category of natality identified by Jantzen and Arendt also indicates relationality, the intricate and interdependent web of life connecting human beings and all other forms of life. Each person who has ever lived was born of a woman, who was born of a woman, and so on, back through our evolutionary history, connecting us to all other human beings and non-human animals.17 Natality is also the source of our human freedom and creativity. For this insight, Arendt refers to Augustine, who links human ‘beginnings’ to divine creativity in The City of God – ‘That a beginning might be made, man was created, before whom nobody was’.18 In other words, because we each have a beginning, in our birth, we have the freedom and ability to create anew and to begin, again and again. Lastly, natality expresses the theological virtue of hope rather than despair. Giving birth is a gesture oriented towards the future, and new life indicates the promise of that future – as long as babies are born, life will continue.19 Grace Jantzen hopes that attention to human natality can subvert what she calls the Western, masculinist fixation on death, so that natality might function as a ‘therapeutic symbol’ for a violent and death-obsessed culture (Jantzen 1998, p. 129). Her approach to the philosophy of religion is influenced by both psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and thus, she finds evidence of morbid fixation not only in the overwhelming Christian focus on crucifixion, sacrifice and substitutionary atonement, but also in the history of Western philosophy. In The Gift of Death, Derrida describes philosophy from Plato to Heidegger in relation to dying – ‘Philosophy isn’t something that comes to the soul by accident, for it is nothing other than this vigil over death that watches out for death and watches over death, as if over the very life of the soul. The psyche as life, as breath of life, as pneuma, only appears out of this concerned anticipation of dying’ (Derrida 1995, p. 15). Derrida’s analysis of the centrality of death in the origins of philosophy reveals philosophy’s often unacknowledged foundation in the ‘gift of

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death’. His reading lends support to Jantzen’s concern with the centrality of death in Western thought and culture. Jantzen benefits from Derrida’s reading of this history to ask what might philosophy, and in particular, philosophy of religion, look like if it were grounded in a culture of birth rather than death, of natality rather than mortality?20 The most immediate and striking difference is in the philosophical understanding of the soul. To return to the quotation from Derrida above, the classic philosophical view of the soul – the pneuma or breath of life – appears only ‘out of this concerned anticipation of dying’, as in Plato’s Crito. But in a feminist philosophy of religion, the gift of breath takes the place of the gift of death. In connection with the features of natality outlined by Jantzen and following Irigaray’s writings on the breath, the soul – the breath of life – can be seen to have its origins in birth, in the gift of breath first received from the biological mother and then cultivated for oneself. The breath of life is fully embodied, and here and now, rather than an anticipation of dying or preparation for the afterlife. Instead of one’s singularity or soul being given in anticipation and concern for death, Irigaray locates autonomy and the soul in breathing for oneself. Her writings on the breath, as taken up by Jantzen, point the way to a different understanding of the philosophy of religion – instead of the practice of death, philosophy in the feminine can be described as the practice of breath. Instead of the concerned anticipation of dying, the grateful acknowledgement of birth lays the foundation for a feminist philosophy of religion that takes seriously the view of the soul as the breath of life.21 This view of the soul is consonant with a feminist, maternal pneumatology.

Spiritual practical directions If the gift of breath originates in the maternal body, how does one receive that gift with gratitude? How can it be cultivated as the sign of interiority, autonomy, subjectivity and speech? As a spiritual practice towards divinization? In her essay, ‘Ethical Gestures Toward the Other’(Irigaray 2010b), Irigaray outlines several spiritual and ethical practices that can assist in cultivating the breath, and through it, a relationship of love and respect for the other. She is quite candid about the influence of both yoga and her Christian heritage, and it is clear how these multiple religious practices have influenced her thought, although she interprets them with new signification for the ‘age of breath’. Because these practices begin with and develop the cultivation of the breath which is, in the Christian tradition, identified with the Spirit, they are also instances wherein the Spirit might be recognized and embodied in each person. The first practice that can cultivate an ethical and loving relationship with the other is, of course, breathing. Breathing, for Irigaray, is the first and last autonomous gesture of life, and it is a path of spiritualization that makes love divine. But breathing must be consciously cultivated – too often, as noted above, we breathe unconsciously and take for granted the breath of others. Consciously focusing on the breath is a common form of meditation in contemplative strands of Buddhism and Hinduism.22 In the Christian tradition, hesychasm – the prayer of stillness, focused on Jesus – in the Eastern Orthodox monastic tradition functions similarly as a path of divinization by

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integrating prayer with the breath. Focusing on the breath is a surprisingly difficult spiritual practice that trains the attention to the present moment and awakens human awareness of the self and the other. Breathing thus forms the foundation of subsequent spiritual practices. The second practice is self-affection; love of self makes it possible to meet the other, but it is a practice that must be cultivated. It is necessary to be able to receive love and love oneself before one can love others. Irigaray thinks self-affection is cultivated in different ways by men and women, but in either case, it begins with acceptance and gratitude for the gift of breath given in love by the mother. The third practice is the cultivation of sensory perception in order to educate the senses to perceive the other without appropriation. Perceiving oneself, the other and the world without violent reduction or appropriation must be practiced, and it begins with perceiving one’s own breath in the present moment. Sensory perception is necessarily embodied, it is prelinguistic, and it is not restricted to sight – all the body’s senses come into play in a deep form of contemplation rooted in the breath. The final two spiritual practices progress from breathing, self-affection and sensory perception to form the foundation for speech or dialogue with others across difference. First, the practice of silence, which opens a space for meeting the other without preestablished truths. In this silence, only the quiet sound of breathing can be heard. Silence provides a place of hospitality, a sign of welcome and recognition of the other with respect for his singularity. Beginning with the practice of silence, one can proceed to a breath-filled speech, but only by retaining the spaces of silence in between words. The final practice is listening. We can practice listening to the other as other not only to hear some new information, but to hear the other as unique, still unknown, and irreducible to my world. In other words, we listen for the breath of the other. Irigaray identifies these five as practical means to encounter the other, and I have called them spiritual practices. We might add others – breathing exercises for labour and birth, meditation, yoga, singing, writing and prayer that incorporates both speech and silence. What makes them spiritual is not only their similarity to recognizable forms of prayer and meditation found in multiple religious traditions. It is also their rootedness in the breath of each person as well as their function as a path of divinization. That is, they are spiritual practices because of their development and cultivation of the breath received from the mother as a path to divinization, which, for Christians, takes place through grace and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. But not one of these practices comes easily, even by grace; they require human cooperation and effort, which is why they are practiced, over time, until they become spiritual habits.

Conclusion The features of natality outlined above – embodiment, gender/sexual difference, relationality, creativity and hope – emerge in a culture of the breath, where the gift of breath is indicative of the new life received from the mother. The gift of breath is the basis of singularity, autonomy, interiority, creativity, speech and silence. Cultivated from mere survival breathing to spiritual breathing, it is the source of divinization,

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that is, spiritual growth towards becoming divine. These aspects of the gift of breath contribute to a feminist reconception of the Holy Spirit as found in a culture of birth rather than sacrificial death. In this perspective, the Holy Spirit does not merely signify a distinct person or hypostasis of an all-male Trinity, a ghost that does the bidding of the Father and Son, nor is it simply the representation of their mutual love. Rather, it is the subversive third term, the middle space, the passage between life/death, speech/ silence, flesh/word, human/divine. The Spirit does not come from above, but originates here on earth, in the body of the mother, and becomes incarnate in each person, who becomes divine by cultivating and sharing the breath. This view of the Spirit as breath, originating in the body of the mother, gives a radically different picture of humanity, God and redemption than conventional Christian interpretations. Using the same language and imagery found in traditional sources – Hebrew and Christian scriptures and theologians, both mainstream and marginal – Irigaray’s writings on the gift of breath invite us to reconsider doctrinal orthodoxies long taken for granted.23 If we take the biblical identification of the Spirit with breath seriously, and the Spirit originates in the gift of breath from the body of the mother, the traditional and hierarchical view of God over and above creation is upended – we first encounter God from below, in our bodies and in our breath. This theological shift in perspective has several concrete implications for Christian life. In our conception of what it means to be created human, Christians are asked to remember the debt each of us has to the mother. This debt, of breath and body, is too frequently forgotten and elided by reference to a Father-God who has taken the mother’s place in creation. When recognized, the gift of breath can be cultivated through spiritual practices that require synergy between human effort and divine grace. While the Spirit/breath is the transcendent gift that always exceeds human limitations, it requires human cooperation to encounter and cultivate it through embodied practices. The traditional Christian picture of the divine also looks different from this new perspective. Encountering the Christian Trinity begins with the Spirit/breath received from the mother. The Spirit is fully embodied in Jesus, but also points beyond him, to the transcendent reality traditionally figured by the first person (the Father). Rather than an immaterial spirit, the divine is embodied and experienced through human embodiment, but it is not limited to bodies. This pneumatological perspective corresponds to a process theological emphasis on panentheism – all things are in God, but what we call God transcends and exceeds all things. Like all things, the divine, too, is changing and becoming, in and through our bodies and our breath.24 A new interpretation of redemption follows from this change in perspective on God and humanity. Redemption is not achieved through sacrifice or substitutionary atonement – the gift of death of the crucifixion – but instead, through the incarnation and divinization that begins with the gift of breath. In this view of redemption, Jesus provides the model and the path. He is divine because of Mary’s body and spirit, and he teaches others how to be ‘born of the spirit’ in giving them his breath. The language of spiritual rebirth or being ‘born again’ need not entail a repudiation of this life or this world in anticipation of heavenly reward. Instead, it signifies a conversion that looks back as well as forward – from remembrance, with gratitude, of the gift of the mother’s breath towards divinization through the work of the Spirit.

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Notes 1 I wish to thank Shelly Rambo and Michelle Voss Roberts for their careful reading and comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 2 Irigaray here recalls Aristotle in identifying the soul with the breath or pneuma of the body, and yet, she does not restrict the breath to the natural. 3 For a critique of Irigaray’s orientalism, see Joy, M. (2003), ‘Irigaray’s Eastern Explorations’, in M. Joy, K. O’Grady, and J. L. Poxon (eds), Religion in French Feminist Thought: Critical Perspectives. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 51–67. 4 To my knowledge, Irigaray nowhere discusses Jesus’ breathing on his disciples in the Gospel of John (20:22). 5 See Wessley, S. (1978), ‘The Thirteenth-Century Guglielmites: Salvation Through Women’, in D. Baker (ed.), Medieval Women. Oxford: Blackwell, 289–303; and Newman, B. (2005), ‘The Heretic Saint: Guglielma of Bohemia, Milan, and Brunate’. Church History, 74(1): 1–38. 6 See Francis, R. (2000). Ann the Word: The Story of Ann Lee, Female Messiah, Mother of the Shakers, the Woman Clothed with the Sun. New York: Arcade. 7 See Keller, C. (2003), Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. New York: Routledge; Betcher, S. V. (2007), Spirit and the Politics of Disablement. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press; Grey, M. C. (2004), Sacred Longings: The Ecological Spirit and Global Culture. London: SCM Press; and Wallace, M. I. (2005), Finding God in the Singing River: Christianity, Spirit, Nature. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005. 8 See also Congar, Y. (1983), I Believe in the Holy Spirit. New York: Seabury Press. 9 Irigaray reads this verse to indicate that the incarnation is partial and incomplete. See Irigaray, L. (1994a), ‘Equal to Whom?’, in N. Schor and E. Weed (eds), trans. R. L. Mazzola, The Essential Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 63–81, 76. 10 See Irigaray, L. (1993c), Sexes and Genealogies, trans. G. C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press. 11 Cf. Kung, C. H. (1990), Struggle to Be the Sun Again: Introducing Asian Women’s Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, pp. 76–9. 12 See Irigaray (2004f), p. 162. 13 Arendt, H. (1985), The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.; see also Bowen-Moore, P. (1989), Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Natality. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 14 Jantzen outlines these characteristics succinctly in Jantzen, G. M. (2000), ‘Nativity and Natality’, in G. J. Brooke (ed.), The Birth of Jesus: Biblical and Theological Reflections. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, pp. 115–20. 15 See Cheah, P. and Grosz, E. (1998), ‘Of Being-Two: Introduction’. Diacritics 28: 9, who write that in Irigaray’s understanding, sexual difference ‘is an originary nonanthropocentric form of negativity that issues from nature itself. Sexual difference undoes the binary opposition between nature and spirit because it is nothing other than the internal natural means by which nature becomes spiritualized’. 16 See Herbert, G. (1994), Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books; and Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000), Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000.

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17 Jantzen refers to Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, who writes, ‘far from being a “coming from nothing”, birth is a coming from a mother’. See Cavarero, A. (1995), In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, trans. S. Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Á. O’Healy. New York: Routledge. 18 See Jantzen (1998), p. 145. 19 The apocalyptic film Children of Men (directed by Alfonso Cuarón, 109 min., Universal Studios, 2006) examines the implications of a world without the birth of children summarized as, ‘No children. No future. No hope’. 20 Irigaray (1996), p. 121. 21 This feminist view is in striking contrast to other contemporary philosophy of religion. For instance, Jean-Luc Marion argues for a phenomenological reduction to the given without a giver, in which the one who receives finds his being precisely as ‘gifted’. Marion does not consider the phenomenology of birth, in which the mother is giving birth to the one who is being given birth, that is, who is being given being. See Marion, J. (2002), Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; and Marion, J. (1995), God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 22 See, for example, Hanh, T. N. (2009), Happiness. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, pp. 3–8. 23 Catherine Keller troubles orthodoxies such as creation ex nihilo in her Face of the Deep; see especially, 41–99. 24 See Irigaray’s description of the ‘sensible transcendental’ in Irigaray, L. (1993a), An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G. C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 129.

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The Prayers We Breathe: Embodying the Gift of Life in the Maternal Feminine Eleanor Sanderson

(The Centre for Theology and Public Issues, University of Otago, New Zealand)

Taking part in a passionate and beautiful task To speak and listen within the ‘age of the breath’, as articulated through the work of Luce Irigaray, is to self-consciously cultivate the ‘passage to another epoch of the reign of spirit’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 91). Such cultivation is a ‘passionate and beautiful’ task Luce Irigaray charges to women in the cultivation of their breathing (ibid., p. 91). This cultivation of breath is significant not only for a person’s own liberation but for creating ‘a culture of life and love’ (ibid., p.  91), which reflects the Spirit’s Age. In this chapter, I seek to cultivate, and contribute, a conversation within the framing of this task. In particular, I wish to bring together the insight and emphasis Irigaray places on breath in the maternal feminine with the spiritual prayers of members of the Mothers’ Union, a Christian organization concerned with the wellbeing of families worldwide. My intention is to speak creatively into the fecundity that I perceive between the concerns of the Mothers’ Union and the desires expressed in the writings of Luce Irigaray. My ‘speaking’ here is not an abstract or solely intellectual process, but embodied in my own practice as a Mothers’ Union member. I speak as a Mothers’ Union member, not of (or for) the organization, its history or its present configuration. My desire is not to deaden a world by describing what is, but ‘cultivating what it could become’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. vi). This ‘conversation’ therefore takes place in the context of real relationships and is personally embodied. Through the exchanges within these relationships, I am asking, ‘what might I, in my spiritual and natural practice, as a new generation of Mothers’ Union, cultivate within myself, and subsequently share with others, of Divine breath?’ To ask this question is also to create new pathways for women between natural and spiritual identities, which Irigaray perceives as necessary in the culture of life and love that depicts the epoch of the spirit.1 Luce Irigaray identifies a particular significance to the sharing of breath in the maternal feminine as part of this cultivation. The maternal feminine, in this instance, describes the specific embodiment of the pregnant mother who, through her own

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breathing, shares her breath with the child she carries within her. Through this chapter, I explore the practice of Christian prayer as spiritual breathing inspired by the embodiment of the maternal feminine. I interweave examples from the life of prayers articulated within the Mothers’ Union from around the world, with the attention to breath and maternal embodiment given by Irigaray. I assert that, as the mother shares her breath to bring life to the child within her, so the practice of Christian prayer in the manner of spiritual breathing is a participation in a relationship of life-giving intention. This intention extends towards oneself, towards the other for whom one is conscious in prayer and towards the Trinitarian Divine. I perceive that the rhythm and practice of spiritual breathing can inform this relationality in a manner akin to the spacing of desire expressed by Irigaray in the ‘to’ of ‘I love to you’ – the inhale, the exhale and the silent space between. Paying attention to relationality is a crucial part of paying attention to spirituality. I therefore draw attention to future possibilities, as well as potential tensions, in an exchange between the work of Luce Irigaray and my contemporary practice as a Mothers’ Union member. This exchange leads to a discussion of the potential significance that embodiment in the maternal feminine might have for those, more generally, who would seek to breathe in rhythm with the Creator, Redeemer and Giver of Life (an expression of the Christian Trinitarian Divine) within Christian spirituality. First, however, a further brief amplification on my understanding of the ‘task’ of speaking and listening within the ‘age of the breath’ in the context of this discussion. Reference to the ‘age of the breath’ and the ‘epoch of the spirit’ speaks to, and from, but also potentially beyond the Christian spirituality which is the tradition of the Mothers’ Union (cf. Irigaray 2002a, p.  76).2 It is important to name this potential tension in order to respect the concerns around orthodoxy within the Christian tradition and also Irigaray’s desire that her philosophical project should not become subsumed within only one spiritual tradition.3 To speak solely within this dogmatic framing of debate, however, is exactly to impede the pathway to another way of thinking and communicating, which Irigaray articulates is needed (Spiritual Tasks for Our Age in Key Writings). Irigaray warns that the task of speaking and listening within the age of breath is not easy because sharing with others in this manner, ‘necessitates the construction of an interiority that is still lacking for us’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 114). To give due recognition to this assertion, my reflection serves, therefore, to cultivate, as well as articulate, my own interiority. This cultivation patterns the process Irigaray invites, in which we ‘communicate with the soul of the world  .  .  .  with the soul of others, and afterwards return to the solitude of the own soul’ (Irigaray 2004e, p. 167). I stress this pattern in order to emphasize that I am not presenting, or representing, here a spiritual gesture which is complete or without any of the tensions implicit in our contemporary experience. Instead, this exchange between the work of Luce Irigaray and the work and life of the Mothers’ Union traces pathways of becoming (to use a term particularly significant within Irigaray’s philosophy). These are possible pathways that, I believe, can serve, in their own small way, to contribute to a ‘culture of life and love’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 91) and are therefore worth exploring.

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The prayers we breathe The Mothers’ Union has over four million members in 83 different countries and works to ‘support family life and empower women in their communities through supporting the needs of families, tackling the causes of injustice and also providing a network to strengthen members in their Christian faith’.4 The Mothers’ Union vision is to ‘bring about a world where God’s love is shown through loving, respectful and flourishing relationships’ (ibid.). The organization was inaugurated by Mary Sumner, the wife of an Anglican priest, in 1876 and has been strongly associated with the Anglican Church throughout the world. While potentially open to critical feminist and postcolonial analysis, historically and at present, the Mothers’ Union has been, and is, an important place of teaching, learning and community development for women. This effect is particularly evident in areas where ordained church ministry is restricted to men. The Mothers Union represents a considerable network of individuals and communities (with membership now unrestricted by gender or parental status) involved in political advocacy, community development and Christian spirituality, with a strong commitment to local contextual leadership. There is a small book produced by the Mothers’ Union that gathers together prayers written mostly by Mothers’ Union members from around the world called The Prayers we Breathe. It is a book ‘reflecting the diversity of our membership’ and affirming ‘that we are all part of the same family in Christ’ (Mothers Union 2003, p. 5). The book takes its title from a personal prayer by Mary Sumner in which she refers to her prayers issuing from her breath. The prayers within this book are not directed at cultivating spiritual breathing, and neither has the practice of spiritual breathing been a part of my experience within the Mothers’ Union. However, perhaps here in this small book, we can see the seed of the interiority that Luce Irigaray considers so important for women to cultivate – the way of breath in the maternal feminine and the prayers breathed by Mothers’ Union members.

The spiritual breath of mothers The third age [the age of the breath] corresponds, in fact, to the one which unites the earliest time and the most future time, that is, the beginning of natural life and the accomplishment of spiritual life. In other words: the age which reunites the breath of the woman-mother with the divine redemption of humanity. (Irigaray 2004e, p. 168)

Luce Irigaray asserts that women’s breathing is ‘at the origin of human generation’ (ibid., pp. 168–9). The gift of life, as told in Genesis, comes from the breath of God to man and woman. The first breath of an infant is given from the mothers’ own breath, as she breathes for herself and for the child within her. The mother shares herself, her breath, in order to bring to life an autonomous person, one who must

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breathe for him or herself (Irigaray 2002a, pp. 80–1). A mother’s breath in natural life is therefore a sharing of the self towards the gift of autonomy. The spiritual breath of the mother can also be perceived as such a gift – ‘Becoming spiritual amounts to transferring our elemental vital breath little by little into a more subtle breath in the service of heart, of thought, of speech and not only in the service of physiological survival’ (Ibid., p. 76). This direction of vital breath can be seen as directed towards our own and others’ ability to receive and participate in the gift of life. Such an attitude towards the cultivation of our breathing is also, therefore, a sharing of the self towards the gift of autonomy for the other. The concerns of the Mothers’ Union could be conceived within this imagery. To empower women in their communities, support family life and tackle injustice – all are expressions of life-giving desire. This desire is for men, women and children to breathe freely the life-giving breath of God. There is therefore an implicit public theology within the work of the Mothers’ Union. An implicit connection is made through the life of Mothers’ Union members, between the breath of the mother and the life of the community which surrounds her. Luce Irigaray’s concern for the epoch of the reign of the Spirit and the role of women’s breathing within this epoch (cf. Irigaray 2002a, p. 91), particularly the mother’s breath, therefore, has deep resonance with the life and work of the Mothers’ Union. This connection is also made within Womanist theology (a theology grounded in the lived reality of African American women) and worth noting here because of the insight it provides. Delores Williams criticizes the perpetuated myth of the black mother who is ‘invulnerable’ because of her faith (Williams 1999, p. 99). Oppressions, Fry Brown (1997) observes, have an asphyxiating effect. Fry Brown’s work with support groups for black women illustrated the inability to ‘raise each others voices’ before first being able to breathe more freely. This insight is pertinent to Luce Irigaray’s concern for women’s breath and their ability to cultivate self-affection, particularly in their spirituality.5 Womanist theology articulates implicit connections between spiritual well-being and self-affection and opportunities to overcome the asphyxiating effects of societal oppressions – ‘if womanist thought and practice fails to address the material needs and concrete concerns of African American girls and women, it will only serve to increase black women’s inability to breathe in the breath of life and live’ (Townes 1997, p. xv). The life-giving intention of the maternal breath (for breath to become ‘vital’ as well as ‘physiological’) (Irigaray 2002a, p.  76) is therefore something to be sought and fought for. Within The Prayers we Breathe by Mothers’ Union members, we can see this desire expressed: Father, we thank you that you have created us Into families, So that we may live, play, work, rejoice and grieve together. Above all, we thank you that we are able to be Members of your family and mothers in your church . . . We pray that our hearts may be united in prayer

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Breathing with Luce Irigaray So that we are able to share one another’s burdens, Rejoice in one another’s blessings And strengthen one another in the power of your Holy Spirit. Amen Doris Decker, Diocesan President Ghana (2003, p. 29)

There is an implicit connection being made within this prayer between the life of a family, the life of the broader grouping of church and the life with the Divine. An exchange, an embrace, with the Holy Spirit occurs in a broader celebration of relational contexts. The concept of relationships is paramount within the Mothers’ Union. The current worldwide president, Rosemary Kempsell, has introduced annual themes to inform the work of the Mothers’ Union for her time as president, with each theme focusing on a different aspect of relationships. The theme for 2010, for example, was ‘relationships not rules’. This particular prayer focuses on relationships that exist within the family. The language used within this prayer refers to the maternal in the ‘real’ and ‘natural’ sense of mothers in family units as well as articulating the role of being mothers in the church. A connection is made here between the real lives of family identities in a way which does not allow the complete abstraction of maternity into a symbolic notion within the church – a long-standing historic abstraction which Luce Irigaray critiques for disconnecting humanity in their natural and spiritual identities. Luce Irigaray considers the civil identity for the family unit an important location of transformational change in a globalized world (Irigaray 2004e, p. 225). This interconnection is also spiritually and politically emphasized within the Mothers’ Union. This particular prayer illustrates the centrality of relationships for the spiritual life and work of Mothers’ Union members. Specifically, it illustrates the life-giving intention of prayer towards the self, towards the other and towards the Divine (the Divine articulated here in the traditional Christian Trinitarian phrasing of Father and Holy Spirit). This prayer exemplifies much of the foci of prayers within The Prayers We Breathe but also within Christian spirituality, more generally. The emphasis I wish to place on a definition of prayer in this context, is to approach prayer as ‘being with’ – being with the Creator, Redeemer and Giver of life (to use the non-masculine Christian Trinitarian phraseology), with oneself and with the others for whom one prays. Mothers’ Union prayers are arranged around themes of concerns in the world, around the daily lives of families and around the cycles of the day, cycles in our life and the cycles of the church’s liturgical calendar. This communion of prayers is, in many ways, a gathering together both to seek, and to fight for, a communal and personal vitality. Perceiving prayer as a process of ‘being with’ immediately points to the challenges implicit within  all inter-relationality (with the concept of relationality being perceived as a more nuanced understanding of ‘being with’). These are the challenges of moving between the spacing of the self and the other in the context of differential access to power and self-realization, which Luce Irigaray’s work illustrates and addresses. A challenge, which she asserts, begins in relating between the sexes and then between cultures. I consider that the practice of prayer as spiritual breathing, in a practical form, can potentially cultivate a consciousness of the inter-relational desire

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(or ­perhaps better phrased as The Way of Love 2002b) as articulated by Irigaray. This way of desiring, and way of loving, intricately expanded within Irigaray’s later work (see Sharing the World) is concerned with the spacing of desire and self in relation to the other. Integrating this spacing of desire with the spacing of the breath, I believe, holds possibilities for cultivating the relationality articulated within Irigaray’s work. It is to this possibility that I now turn.

The relationality of breath There are three phases to the breath – the inhalation, the exhalation and the pause in between. It is possible to apply the consciousness of relationality expressed by Luce Irigaray, to this consciousness of breath – the approach to the other, the place of being with the other and the return to the self (cf. Irigaray 2008c). Being faithful to the spacing of breath, this ‘rhythm and melody of the universe’ (Irigaray 2004d, p.  50), can perhaps assist in keeping a faithfulness to oneself, to the other and to the Divine, desired in the spiritual practice of prayer. To include another in your own prayers, to pray for the other, requires us to maintain a spacing in our fidelity to prevent their subjectivity being consumed within our own, or our own subjectivity being lost within the others – the other being the person (or world) for whom we pray or the Spirit to whom and with whom we pray. This lack of spacing in inter-relational desire is the lesson of Eve perceived by Luce Irigaray – attempting ‘to appropriate divine knowledge, instead of respecting it as breath’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 83). In other words, being with the divine in prayer, being with ourselves and being with others is importantly distinct from being. The inhalation and the exhalation can maintain the distinction between the self and the other, including the life of the self and the divine life extended towards us by the Divine Spirit of God. Yet, there is also an integrity to the whole of the breath that comes from cultivating these distinct parts. Keeping that consciousness, or mindfulness, through the physical process of breathing in prayer, generates a greater awareness of ourselves as distinct from the other, yet in a relationship of fidelity with the other. This encouragement towards distinction, intimacy and union can be seen through the practice of Centering Prayer. Centering Prayer is the name given to the most common form of spiritual breathing in the Christian tradition. Centering Prayer practice combines a focus on the breath and the use of a simple word or phrase (such as ‘breathe on me breath of God’ (Muyskens 2010, p. 30). Through Centering Prayer practice, the person praying is led into a deeper consciousness of the presence of God and, in that presence, the presence of oneself. Basil Pennington describes this invitation as ‘opening out to you something of the full beauty of who you really are and gently inviting you to enjoy that beauty, to wonder at it, to live out of its fullness’ (Pennigton 2001, p. 10). In this consciousness, he encourages us to see our own, ‘limitless potential to share divine life and happiness’ (op. cit., p. 165). The invitation within Centering Prayer is founded on a respect for freedom – a freedom, Pennington asserts, that is part of our own divine potential (op. cit., p. 10). Such freedom is necessary for a relationship of mutual respect. As Thomas Keating asserts, ‘Centering Prayer is both a relationship

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and a method to foster that relationship at the same time’ (Keating 2009, p. 142).This is a relationship, Cynthia Bourgeault articulates, of awakening and discovering of one’s heart, with the ancient understanding of the heart as ‘an organ of spiritual perception’ (Bourgeault 2004, p. 163). Being attentive to the stages of the breath in breathing prayer (such as within the practice of Centering Prayer) can assist in fostering the consciousness of relationships and ‘being with’ that prayer, in itself, constitutes. This consciousness can be understood as the profound intimacy of God’s self-giving Spirit in breath and the vital cultivation of that breath in the one who breathes with the breath of God; cultivating heartfelt relationships with God and God’s world. To return to the lesson of Eve, a focus on fidelity and distinction means an awareness of that which is given to us by the other and that which is kept by the other and requested to be respected as distinct. Such a distinction can be spaced and maintained by the silent space within the breath. This is the space perhaps of the ‘to’ in I love to you, which prevents the ‘you’ being lost within the love of ‘I’: To love to you and, in this “to”, provide space for thought, for thought of you, of me, of us, of what brings us together and distances us, of the distance that enables us to become, of the spacing necessary for coming together . . . To you: spacing in order to pass from affectivity to the spiritual, from interiority to exteriority. (Irigaray 1996, p. 149)

In the silent space of the breath, between the inhale and the exhale, there is an opportunity to wait in openness and receptivity for the gift of air, in either its receiving or its releasing. Being receptive towards the gift of air can be akin to being receptive towards the Giver of Life, the Spirit as articulated in the Christian Trinitarian Divine. It is with this attitude of openness and receptivity towards the gift of life that a consciousness of breath is then able to incarnate life towards the self or the other as (to write in reference to Bourgeault) one’s heartfelt union with God is experienced. This process can be an example of a spiritual practice being tangible within ‘the cultivation of the natural’ (Ibid., p. 51), where spiritual becomings in our humanity are intertwined with the gifts given to us in our natural human being. This tangible connection between the spiritual and material, particularly in the context of cultivating our relationships, is extremely significant in overcoming some of the dualisms that have historically been oppressive in the lives of women and mothers.6 To speak of spiritual breathing is therefore not an abstract analogy for the spiritual life, but a cultivation that, in practice, can stimulate the life-giving significance of prayer. This significance is particularly pertinent in the context of maternal breath and the prayers breathed by Mothers’ Union members. The following extracts from prayers by Mothers’ Union members strongly embody the relational desire of ‘being with’ and the ‘giving of life’ through the practice of prayer: Melt the pain of my heart, open my ears and my eyes. Let your love flow through me And out into your world. With your promise, Lord, I walk from the shadow into the light. Ankole Diocese, Uganda, (2003, pp. 21–2)

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Lord of the outback, glorious in vastness breath in red dust, mist of green forest, Praise to you! Splendid in outback gifts, wide horizons, star-filled skies, waiting silence. MU Australia (2003, p. 51)

The prayer from Ankole Diocese speaks of the relational interchange between the one praying, the Divine and the other, framed in the desire of transformative love. When such words are prayed from an added consciousness of breath, and particularly, with the relationality that can be facilitated through the breath, this cultivation of love takes on a particular embodiment and practice. This cultivated embodiment is perhaps an example of the concern Luce Irigaray expressed for the sensible transcendental within spiritual practice. In the instance of this prayer, the receptivity of life and love for the one praying maintains her awareness of transcendence but also opens herself to experiencing, in her sensibility, being with that transcendent reality. That reality is manifested in ‘walking’ in a renewed solidarity of life-giving and ‘light’-giving intention. The prayer from MU Australia speaks with powerful imagery of the earth, ‘breath’ and the specific space of ‘silence’ in the outback context. This prayer is a celebration of life. In this celebration, there is a profound gratitude for the life-giving relationship the one praying has within this particular part of creation and with the Creator God and Spirit. Incorporating the practice of breathing prayer adds a further potential depth to the proximity and relationality that the prayer fosters. There are, however, tensions as well as these possibilities in combining Irigaray’s cultivation of the breath with the written prayers gathered by Mothers’ Union members. I recognize, within this exchange, spiritual possibilities and tensions characteristic of our current epoch. The prayers often combine fresh images and language in prayer with the masculine imagery of God (Father, Lord), of which Irigaray and many feminist theologians are critical (cf. ‘Divine Women’ by Luce Irigaray in Sexes and Genealogies 1993c). For many Mothers’ Union members throughout the world, the church and language customs may not incorporate the flexibility in gendering language about God that is more customary in Western contexts. The tension exists, however, not simply in the use of masculine language, but in the dilemma of articulating both the self and the Divine through language itself. Luce Irigaray’s linguistic work asserts that there are distinctive aspects to the fallibility of language in regard to sexual difference,7 which compounds the accepted difficulty in speaking about the Divine. There is therefore a possibility that the language used in these prayers, and indeed the use of language itself, can be considered unconducive to the ‘age of the breath’ desired by Irigaray.

A spiritual gesture which remains open: Between silence and speech Spiritual breathing practices in the Christian tradition often have a movement within them between silence and speech. The movement is often towards a deeper space of

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silence.8 The contemplative traditions within Christianity, such as those fostered by St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross, often make distinctions between ‘ordinary’ prayer and a more ‘mystical’ practice of prayer (Jones 1986, pp.  17–24). Centering Prayer, as dicussed earlier, uses words as a part of a pathway to silence. As Thomas Keating asserts, Centering Prayer seeks to overcome ‘our own internal noise’ (Keating 1998a, p. 130) and ‘allow the silence of God to well up from within’ (Keating 1998b, p. 13). A similar process can be seen in the hesychastic tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy in the use of the Jesus Prayer, which encourages the person praying to integrate the words of the prayer into their breath and heartbeat to a depth of stillness beyond verbal utterance.9 This practice is similar to other religious contemplative practices,10 which use an attention to the breath, and/or significant words, as a means of invoking the Divine (Loude 2006, p. ix). Attitudes towards the significance of breath in these practices are, however, diverse. There is a possibility that the breath is used, not to reconnect with the breathing body, the rhythm of the self, but to transcend the physical through the asceticism which has often accompanied contemplative practices. Such an approach is contrary to the importance of air and breath in Luce Irigaray’s work. Cleo McNelly Kearns, for example, in her phenomenological analysis of Luce Irigaray’s use of prayer and breathing, highlights the way that Irigaray speaks within an Eastern understanding of breathing as a process of divinization (in The Phenomenology of Prayer). Exchanges between Western and Eastern spiritual practices in regard to breathing, mediation and contemplation are diverse and both a source of tension and mutual benefit.11 Recognizing this broader context of possibility and potential tension is important when discussing the significance of silence, speech, breathing and prayer in relation to Irigaray’s work. However, I am not seeking here to present an analysis of the spiritual gestures offered within the Mothers’ Union prayer practice within that context. Instead, I wish to emphasize that the transformative and divine association of breath within Luce Irigaray’s work constitutes part of the philosophical shift towards relationality that I perceive as central to Luce Irigaray’s work. In other words, the focus of breath within Irigaray’s writing is not so much a dogmatic examination of a physiological and potentially spiritual phenomenon, but a relational encounter. It is this relational encounter that is privileged within the age of the breath (Key Writings). It is also this relationality that I perceive to be central to the spirituality and political practise of the Mothers’ Union. To return, therefore, to the prayers breathed by Mothers’ Union members. The words of these prayers can be approached as an invitation into a practice of spiritual breathing that can potentially lead to a place of silence. Above all, however, they can be approached as an invitation into a life-giving relational exchange. It is that exchange that I wish to privilege in their spiritual gesture, above the limitations and invitations that occur as a result of the use of silence or speech. However, integrating these prayers within a spiritual practice of breathing ensures that silence is given space. There is always a space of silence within the breath. Through this space, a spiritual gesture is potentially kept open. A rhythm of breath, such as that used in Centering Prayer practice, can be applied to the words of the prayers. To pray ‘breath in red dust’ in contemplative repetition fosters a conscious fellowship with the divine to which those words are prayed, but

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also a greater consciousness of the one from whom those words have come. ‘The Prayers we Breathe’ by Mothers’ Union members therefore becomes a symbolic and actual invitation to breathe together. When this breathing together occurs with the consciousness of relationality discussed in the previous section, a greater understanding of communality and relationality is fostered within this worldwide fellowship. This invitation, in the context of the implicit public theology of the Mothers’ Union, is also an invitation to dwell together on the need to overcome the ‘asphyxiating effects of oppressions’ (to use the terminology and challenge of womanist theology) (Fry Brown, op. cit.). The life-giving desires expressed in the words of the prayers become grounded in the breath of those who pray them and subsequently embodied in the community development and political advocacy life and work of the Mothers’ Union. In this political and spiritual process, words as well as silence are potentially needed. The use of language, can, but does not necessarily therefore limit the openness of a spiritual gesture for others. Both words and silence can facilitate or frustrate the relationality fostered in their exchange. Kearns (op. cit.) speaks of the way prayer suspends propositional language and particularly moves away from a univocal language. While this may be true to some extent, prayer is not a realm devoid of the problems and possibilities of language. Kearns perceives that Luce Irigaray invites a new way of thinking about prayer which – ‘deconstructs the metaphysics of presence at a philosophical level but opens up a space for other ways of knowing and thinking, ways that often entail a change of genre, orientation, and even bodily experience as well as change of mind’ (ibid., p. 117). It is the foundation of relationality that lies at the heart of this change – the complex demands of fostering a culture of the two that can progress to a culture of many. The focus of prayer within the Mothers’ Union becomes more explicitly ‘being with’ when seen through this lens. While not dismissing the potential tensions within this exchange, the ‘Prayers we Breathe’ and the Mothers’ Union cycles of prayer for each other12 can, perhaps, be approached as a way to teach the girl how to let breath ‘remain in her [in order for that breath] to be able to be shared, to be made fertile’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 85). In other words, there is an invitation here to approach the breathing of prayers as a means of facilitating the self-affection and cultivation of interiority that Irigaray perceives as necessary to mature our relational culture. Incorporating within this spiritual practice the relationality within the breath can also facilitate a fidelity in ‘being with’ the other who remains transcendent to the self. This approach is perhaps part of the ‘surrender or letting go’ Cynthia Bourgeault (op. cit.) identifies as fundamental in Centering Prayer. There is therefore a challenge to embody the paradox of self-limiting and self-giving that takes its model from the kenosis of Christ. The imagery of the maternal gift of breath being breathed for the life of the self and the life of the other may be particularly helpful in this process. The challenge of maintaining an openness within relational gestures raises the question of how the ‘Prayers we Breathe’ can demonstrate a way of breathing ‘in order to live but also in order to share, to communicate, to commune’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 86). This question challenges us to think about relationality in the framing of maternal embodiment; how can maternal embodiment inform what it means to be in a relationship of life-giving intention with others?

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The relationality of spiritual life in the maternal feminine The maternal breath is implicitly relational; it is a practice embodying the gift of life towards the other. Likewise, the prayers breathed by Mothers’ Union members are practiced with a self-conscious cultivation of being in communion with each other and with the Spirit, the Giver of Life. The Mothers’ Union in its affinity with the Anglican Communion faces contemporary challenges relating to the structure of relationality – challenges for remaining in unity amid axes of difference. This contemporary experience is also that of Western society as a whole – a humanity struggling to share the world and approach a genuine culture of difference with a philosophy founded on a solitary horizon instead of ‘being as we’ (cf. Sharing the World; Between East and West, p. 99). This need for another way of thinking and being in the world lies at the heart of Luce Irigaray’s work and the momentum behind a move towards another epoch for humanity. In the contemporary era, in a philosophy founded on the singular with the overwhelming dominance of propositional thought, language and dogmatics, we are reduced to ‘a hunter of the absolute at war with every other’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 101). The spiritual, in consequence, is misappropriated as knowledge – divine knowledge to be owned and fought over – the lesson of Eve unlearnt.13 Combining the life-giving intentions of Mothers’ Union members with an awareness of breath in the maternal feminine may be a timely and apt reminder to breathe in rhythm with the Giver of Life. Such a project within the institutional context of the Mother’s Union may be an opportunity also, perhaps, for communication symbolically and practically between mothers and fathers about the gifts to be given to their children.14 The gift of breath, framed in the Mothers’ Union context, necessarily incorporates every aspect of their work – fostering life-giving spirituality, fighting oppressions that frustrate the wellbeing of family life, supporting the welfare of women in their communities. Luce Irigaray claims that to remain passive in breath is to remain attached to a ­‘socio-cultural placenta [of] already used . . . not truly pure air’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 74). However, to breathe with the intention of sharing life with the other, following the gesture given to us by the Creator, Redeemer and Giver of Life in the Christian tradition, is perhaps also to cultivate a new socio-cultural placenta of vitality. Paul’s epistle to the Romans within the Christian scriptures speaks of ‘the whole creation . . . groaning in labour pains’ (Romans 8:22, NRSV), a groaning in which those in conscious relationship with the Divine also participate. In this process, ‘we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words’ (Romans 8:26, NRSV). These are rich images that encourage a self-understanding informed by maternal embodiment. With these images in mind, and recognizing the significance of the breath of the mother within Luce Irigaray’s work, I wish to return to my own specificity. In Aotearoa, New Zealand, the context from which I write, I perceive three significant gestures as important strands to weave together to inform a relationality of spiritual life in the maternal feminine. These gestures, these gifts, consequently inform the prayers which I breathe as a Mothers’ Union member. First, the Tangata whenua, the indigenous people, use the same word to speak of the earth and to speak of the placenta – whenua. Any relational approach, in the context of the whenua, implicitly

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binds together life-giving consciousness of maternal embodiment with our own materiality as interconnected within the natural world. This relation reinforces the implicit connection between spiritual and material wellbeing and between natural and spiritual identities.15 It is because of the significance of the whenua in my own context, and the respect which is accorded to it, that I speak of the possibility of a socio-cultural placenta of intentional vitality. Secondly, a cultural practice of greeting called the hongi is an integral part of ceremonial and cultural community life. In a hongi, the bridge of the noses touch between two people and breath is exchanged. This practice is understood spiritually as an unvoiced recognition of the life in the self meeting the life in the other. It is a practice which, in some tribal traditions, is taken from a creation mythology in which Tāna finds Hiniahuone in the earth, he blows into her aperture and she sneezes responding, ‘Tihei Mauri Ora (I am life)’.16 This practice demonstrates a depth of appreciation for the life within the breath. This is an association similarly expressed in Christian theology and also originating in the breath of life being breathed into the the first human by God, as articulated in the book of Genesis. The practice of the hongi also expressly recognizes the transcendence of the life of the other to the life of the self and profoundly respects meeting another in our humanity. The gesture of the hongi powerfully embodies possibilities for what it can mean to breathe in prayer in a fresh perspective. Of significance also, is a hand-drawn sketch which hangs in the theological college where I currently reside, which depicts two figures with their foreheads touching in the exchange of a hongi. The picture is entitled ‘The Trinity’. This picture and the significance of the hongi therefore provide a powerful relational interpretation of the Christian Trinitarian Divine. Breath, in this context of Aotearoa, is part of relational and community ritual – to great one another in breath is an essential part of being in relation with each other. Thirdly, the Mothers’ Union to which I belong is structured to reflect the three ‘Tikanga’, cultural ways of being, of the three dominant cultures in our church (Pakeha/ European, Aotearoa and Polynesia). While not without its problems,17 this structure prioritizes explicitly what it means to be in relationship with others across our cultural ­differences, by attempting to recognize being as ‘we’ in all aspects of our communal life.18 Collectively, these are three gifts that I perceive in the cultivation of new pathways within the age of breath – the significance of the whenua; our relational structure, and the respect for the breath which shapes the ceremonial practices of our coming together. These gifts therefore inform my own interiority and what it means for me to breathe in prayer in my own embodied relationship with the Creator, Redeemer and Giver of Life. Through these reflections, I have woven together aspects of the philosophy and writing of Luce Irigaray with the life and work of the Mothers’ Union and something of the specificity of my own relational context. The metaphor of weaving is highly significant for women engaged in theology within the Pacific region (Johnson, Filemoni-Tafaeono 2003). These reflections, this weaving, represent the origins of a bigger research project in which members from each of the Tikanga in the Mothers’ Union in my church will, in a sense, sit upon this woven mat, and together reflect upon

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what relationality means to us in our spiritual, political and community practice.19 What, in other words, are the relational wisdoms embodied by Mothers’ Union members from each of our unique and diverse Tikanga as we seek to see a world where God’s love is shown through loving, respectful and flourishing relationships. This question, in part, arises from the recognized role that the Mothers’ Union has in generating a sense of unity within the Anglican Communion. It is motivated by the need to reflect more intentionally on what a spirituality informed by the imaginary and political praxis of the Mothers’ Union can generate for those who seek to breathe and pray together more generally. This conversation to come could be seen as an attempt to speak and listen within the age of the breath as articulated by Luce Irigaray. It is to take part in a passionate and beautiful task, to discern the pathways we consider important to cultivate the culture of life and love implicit in the life-giving intention of Mothers’ Union members natural and spiritual identities. Such a conversation ‘requires patience, perseverance, faithfulness to self and to the other’, virtues which are worth pursuing, Luce Irigaray asserts, ‘out of love of self, out of love of the other, out of consciousness of the importance of women’s spiritual role for the present and the future of humanity’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 91). This role requires vitality in the prayers we breathe if we, indeed, are to embody the Gift of Life: The pregnant pause between the breath’s intake and release where silence is fertile and the gesture is to be still to release and wait upon the self-giving life-giving Divine breath which is received which is released which is received which is released Tihei Mauri Ora The life in me greets the life in you Tihei Mauri Ora

Notes 1 This connection between natural and spiritual identities for women is understood as necessary to subvert the masculine dominance within psychoanalytic discourse. Amy Hollywood (2002, p. 181) describes part of Irigaray’s concern as being to

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‘articulate a new symbolic and imaginary grounded in the morphology of the body marked as female within male-dominated discourse’. There is always a debate about the congruence between the Christian Divine Trinitarian understanding of the Holy Spirit with any writing about the Spirit/spirit or spirituality (cf. Kim 2007). See, for example Alison Martin’s interpretation of Luce Irigaray and the Question of the Divine, in which Christ is described as a bridge to other spiritual traditions. http://www.themothersunion.org/vision.aspx See, for example, Emily Holmes’ discussion of self-affection in relation to women medieval mystics (‘Writing the Body of Christ’, in Teaching). This is particularly significant in the context of international development and the need to overcome Spirit/matter and mind/body dualisms that have prevented the, often, implicit interplay of gender, faith and development (see the two special issues of Gender and Development 7:1 and 14:3) and also Sanderson (‘The Challenge of placing Spirituality within Geographies of Development in Geography’ Compass 1:3) for a discussion of the need to overcome this dualistic thinking. Here, I refer to the extensive area of Irigaray’s linguistic work, which articulates masculine and feminine language constructions, particularly regarding subjectobject and subject-subject preferences (see, in particular, ‘towards a sharing of speech’ in cf. Irigaray 2004). See, for example, Cynthai Bourgeault’s description of the progressive path of prayer from words to silence (2009, pp. 15–27). A particularly vivid example of this process can be seen in The Way of a Pilgrim (translated by Olga Savin). For example, the recitation of the name of the ‘lord’ in Buddhist practice (cf. Weil 2006). See, for example, Thomas Keating’s description of his personal journey through this exchange in Intimacy with God (Keating 2009). These cycles ensure that every Mothers’ Union group is prayed for by Mothers’ Union members through daily services of prayer. This appropriation can be seen, for example, in definitions of spirituality which mark a clear distinction from theology (cf. Jones, Wainwright and Yarnold 1986, pp. xxi–xxvi); separating the two to enable conceptual elaboration of God to be distinct from the more amorphous, embodied and living relationship with God. While there is a symbolic element to being fathers and mothers in the language of the church, my own emphasis here is on the natural role of parents and adults who are passing on spiritual practices and perspectives to the next generation. As a mother, I ask myself how I can continue to help my children cultivate their own breathing in a way which also enables the others with whom they are in relationship to also cultivate their own breath. There is no spiritual-material dualism within traditional Māori understandings of the world. Women are aligned with the land because the earth is seen as that which gives birth to humanity, as women do (te whare tangata, meaning the house of humanity, is the name given to the womb (Royal 2010, p. 40) – ‘all life takes place within the womb of the world. In that womb, preparations are being made for a new world. We are children within the womb of the new world, soon to be born into another reality’ (op.cit. p. 43). I wish to acknowledge my kaumatua (elder) the late Rev Dr Hone Kaa for his reflections on the significance of the hongi.

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17 Luce Irigaray, of course, proposes that a culture of many can not be achieved without first cultivating a culture of the two, which she locates in the primacy of sexuate difference before cultural difference. 18 Partly because of this cultural distinction in our relational structure, I am very aware that the gifts which I have chosen to write about in the close of this chapter are not from within my own Tikanga. There is therefore a tension, which it is necessary to retain, when one speaks of gifts from among our different cultures. This tension specifically relates to historical injustices in the use of cultural ‘ways of being’ (as has occurred within Aotearoa New Zealand), which are at risk of being perpetuated in the articulation of another culture to which we do not primarily belong. 19 An earlier version of this text was shared with Mothers’ Union members and has generated sincere interest in the way Luce Irigaray’s philosophy can speak within the fresh expressions of the Mothers’ Union.

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5

Breath of Awakening: Nonduality, Breathing and Sexual Difference Jean Marie Byrne

(School of Nursing and Midwifery, Curtin University, Australia)

Introduction Luce Irigaray’s work in Between East and West: From Singularity to Community explores the relationship between Eastern practice, philosophy and the question of sexual difference.1 Like many practitioners of yoga and meditation, Irigaray discovers the profound and transformative effects of conscious breathing as a vehicle for her personal awakening and discovery. Breath ‘can be shared by all men and women’, and by its nature, it demands ‘the respect of natural and spiritual life of the self and of the other’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 13). In other words – sexual difference can be attained through the yogic practice of breathing – prān. āyāma. Irigaray explains: Through practicing breathing, through educating my perceptions, through concerning myself continually with cultivating the life of my body, through reading current and ancient texts of the yoga tradition and tantric texts, I learned what I knew: the body is the site of incarnation of the divine and I have to treat it as such. (Irigaray 2002a, p. 61)

Emphasis on the cultivation of breathing is a simultaneously practical and philosophical response to the problem of sexual indifference she believes pervades Western culture, but Irigaray registers some concern about the nondual philosophical context associated with Eastern traditions, such as tantra, that inspire her. This is because she believes the nondual experience made possible by attuned breathing to be an end in itself. However, and as I shall discuss, this is not necessarily the case. Instead, following a nondual experience, the practitioner returns to a dualistic context that is transformed, and perhaps, differentiated as Irigaray intends. My gesture here of bringing sexual difference and nonduality into dialogue may appear philosophically problematic, not least because nonduality is not so much a theory as an experience in which there is no ‘one’ experiencing anything. The theory of nonduality emerges out of duality, whereas, in the realization of nonduality, the

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dualistic subject–object divide collapses. Thus, there is no ‘one’ to theorize. In order to understand the experience from which theories of nonduality emerge and then relate that experience to sexual difference, we need to inquire into the nature of the experience, question and concept of nonduality as well as the role that breath may play in realizing that nonduality. Irigaray is rightly suspicious of theories and experiences of oneness/nonduality – she worries that they equate to sameness. But if we see her journey through, we may find that, in the experience of nonduality, man no longer monopolizes subjectivity because there is no subject, no object, no man, no woman. There is only the ‘metaphysical home’ (dwelling in self-affection) that Irigaray argues women must construct for themselves in order to realize their sexual difference. Margaret Whitford writes that to respond to and engage in dialogue with Luce Irigaray, you must ‘put yourself into play, you cannot stand back at a safe distance’ (Whitford 1991, p.  24). Accordingly, this dialogue is preeminently personal. As a woman, a yoga practitioner, and a student of Buddhism, my navigation of the relationship between nonduality and sexual difference has been ongoing. Irigaray and various Indian teachers have taught me that philosophical inquiry is the essence of life, research and spiritual practice. While this paper is not autoethonographic in nature, we always ‘put ourselves into play’ when we write; discussion, here, is unavoidably informed by my own lived experience as a woman, breathing, practicing and teaching yoga. With that in mind, this chapter is an offering, a possible avenue by which to think through the relationship between nonduality and sexual difference.

Sexual difference and the problem of nondualism Irigaray’s larger intellectual project outlines the sexual indifference she sees in Western philosophy and culture. Her practice of breathing, among other things, is a response to this sexual indifference. In Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray argues that Freud’s and Lacan’s theories of sexual development, in which the maternal-feminine is sublimated, are heir to the sexual indifference that we find more generally in Western philosophy and culture. According to Irigaray, the founding gesture of this indifference is in Plato’s Republic. In brief, it is in Plato’s allegorical cave that Irigaray thinks the split between the sensible and transcendental occurs in Western thought. This split means that women are associated with materiality and nature, unable to articulate our own subjectivity within masculine discourse, and ‘Truth’ becomes noncorporeal, masculine and transcendent. For Irigaray, Plato abstracts his ‘Truth’ from the physicality of his senses such that he needs the maternal feminine to represent it for him. Because of this, ‘woman’ is relegated to the realm of nontruth, or appearance. Within Platonically influenced Western discourse, women are unable to be epistemological subjects. Essentially, Irigaray believes that it is with Plato that we see the beginning of the universalization of masculine subjectivity and truth in the West. She thinks that, from Plato onward, virtually all philosophers are complicit in the forgetting inherent in that universalization of man’s subjectivity. In response to the splitting of sensible and transcendental in Plato’s work (and in Western philosophy, more generally), Irigaray realizes that women must have a

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direct relationship with transcendence/God/Truth in order to articulate our subject position as women rather than as a semblance of men. With her term sensible transcendental, Irigaray brings materiality and knowledge into relationship in order to free women from representing nature in man’s truth and thus to provide the space in which women might construct their own subjectivity, free from the harmful and divided duality of corporeality and knowledge. Sensible transcendental is the term she uses to speak about the divinity of materiality and the body. Crucially, it is here that we begin to see the interaction of spiritual practice (such as yoga) and her theoretical work. For Irigaray, the sensible transcendental is not simply a theory but a realization. While Irigaray constructs a strong theoretical framework supporting her sensible transcendental as an appropriate response to the situation of sexual indifference, it is also a realization or experience arising through her yogic practice of breathing. Even before the publication of Between East and West, in which Irigaray extensively discusses the importance of breathing to sexual difference, her elemental books offer an explanation of the relationship between corporeality/elementality and breathing. Irigaray’s ‘elemental philosophy’ is central to her postulation of the need for the sensible transcendental: She argues that the philosopher has forgotten the elements in his search for a transcendental subjectivity. Man’s search has, in complex ways, both excluded and incorporated the maternal feminine and nature; as a consequence, both nature and the feminine have been bound together in Western thought and practice. In her examination of the elements earth, water and air, Irigaray outlines the way in which each element is forgotten by a particular philosopher. Her aim in examining this ‘forgetting’ is to create the conditions by which the split between corporeality and truth may be overcome, allowing philosophy to be reconciled with its forgotten materiality.2 Irigaray’s elemental philosophy reveals earth, air, water and fire as the preconditions for man’s subjectivity. Of these four elements, she explores three – water in Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, air in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, and earth in Elemental Passions. She has mentioned but not yet written a book on fire in relation to the work of Karl Marx. In these texts, she adopts what might be termed a therapeutic relationship to each philosopher, reading his work and engaging in dialogue with him in order to find the hidden elementality of his philosophy. Essentially, her elemental philosophy is a description of how the schism between nature and transcendence has occurred in the work of specific philosophers. Having said this, I think that it is important to point out that Irigaray’s discussion of air – in relation to Heidegger’s work – is the most compelling of her elemental series because there she encourages us, in very practical terms, to reconnect with this element. Irigaray urges us to cultivate our own bodily connection to it in and through our breath. She claims that we have forgotten about breath and the divinity it holds – our culture has split the breath (sensible) and spirit (transcendent). Cultivating our breathing may be the gesture that can reunite what philosophy has split apart. Bringing the sensible and transcendental into relationship is an attempt to undo Platonically influenced philosophy’s exclusion and dubious incorporation of women.  Her conception of the sensible transcendental provides the conditions

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necessary for women to have a relationship with the transcendent. Because women are not explicitly reflected in most Western concepts of divinity, their bodies are used as the basis for men’s transcendent subjectivity. In the context of the sensible transcendental, man reclaims the materiality of his truth and women’s bodies become their own. Women no longer need to represent the materiality of men’s truth and can begin to articulate their own subjectivities. In doing so, women become subjects themselves, subverting the primacy of the (singular) male subject position. The creation of this new subject position that the sensible transcendental enables means that there can be an other of the other. If woman can be subject, then man can be her other – and vice versa. The exchange that the sensible transcendental enables is between two subjects; it is a ‘mode of ethical being’ rather than an ‘exchange of commodities’ (Whitford 1991, p. 165). The sensible transcendental enables an intersubjective economy; it is a direct response to the problem of sexual (in)difference. We can regard the sensible transcendental as Irigaray’s utopian vision for a world in which women can articulate their own relationship to the divine, and a world in which sexual indifference has been overcome. For Irigaray, Eastern philosophy and practices, such as breath cultivation, enable her to realize the sensible transcendental and her own feminine divinity. Her engagement with Eastern philosophy is a response to the problem of sexual (in)difference because she uses breathing as a means by which the sensible and intelligible can meet – ‘the body can become spirit through the cultivation of breathing’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 7). Just as the sensible transcendental is central to her response to sexual indifference in her earlier work, spiritual practice – which, for her, includes pranayama, the cultivation of breath – becomes a crucial aspect of her later work, primarily in Between East and West. It is clear that in a variety of ways, Irigaray’s practice of pranayama initiates a relationship between the sensible and intelligible, between immanence and transcendence. For Irigaray, cultivating breathing may be the gesture that can serve to reunite what philosophy has set apart. However, as I mentioned earlier, in the traditions in which she finds inspiration, it may also be the case that breathing results in a reunification beyond what Irigaray seeks – a nondual experience. The ultimate lack of distinction between subject and object is at the heart of numerous Buddhist and Hindu schools of philosophical thought, all of which conceive nonduality in distinct and nuanced ways. The path to experiencing the nondual, as well as the exact relationship between subject and object, differs from school to school (cf. Loy 1982, p. 66). One feature, however, that is common to all, is that the experience of nonduality is fundamentally nonconceptual.3 As a consequence, nonduality becomes a complex area of philosophical inquiry, particularly when we are asking how the ‘one’ might relate to the ‘two’ – or, more specifically, how nonduality might relate to creating an intersubjective economy between men and women. What, then, is nonduality, if not a concept? Perhaps the best way to describe nonduality is as a realization in which there is actually no ‘I’ experiencing. With the realization of nonduality, the distinction between experience and experiencer, or subject and object, is dissolved. In this way, we can understand nonduality as a realization. As David Loy explains, nonduality is revealed in what might be termed ‘enlightenment or liberation (nirvān. a, moks. a, satori)’ (Loy 1988, p. 4).4 Depending on

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one’s particular philosophical or spiritual tradition, this realization is made sense of in different ways. However, given that nonduality is experiential, or nonconceptual, teachings on nonduality should not be confused with nonduality itself. In Heart of the Buddha’s Teachings, Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh explains, ‘the Buddha said many times, “My teaching is like a finger pointing to the moon. Do not mistake the finger for the moon” ’ (Hahn 1998, p. 3). Nevertheless, the tool we have with which to communicate here is words. In terms of nondual realization, words must serve an emancipatory purpose – that is, words about nonduality should point the practitioner in the direction of the direct realization of nonduality. With this in mind, and using the language available to us to communicate the philosophical implications of such a realization, the exploration of nonduality offered here is a gesture toward a horizon in which sexual difference and nonduality are brought fruitfully into dialogue. As a realization, nonduality is not necessarily a teaching or philosophy contained in a text that can be canonized; it is not static. Instead, nonduality may be a living tradition of inquiry into this realization. Such a lived engagement with nonduality may involve a search for techniques and teachings, or transmission from a teacher, but nondual experiences and the ensuing teachings or philosophies are not usually ‘reduced to the repetition of an already written corpus’ (Irigaray 2002a, p.  59), a repetition for which Irigaray criticizes Western philosophy. Although Irigaray is hesitant to engage with nondual philosophy, arguably the transmission of teachings in this way does engender the new way of knowing that she seeks. The corporeal sharing of knowledge between teacher and student in these traditions may be understood as a sharing of breath or, as I like to call it, a genealogy of breathing. Such a genealogy is based upon a living link between teacher and student, which Irigaray desires, as opposed to Western education, which she thinks overly focuses on texts and written transmission. The realization of nonduality is nonconceptual. However, upon return to the dual, the phenomenological experience of oneness leaves a ‘trace’ of this realization. That is, after the experience of oneness, an individual may retain an awareness of this realization in duality. This, however, is not knowledge in the traditional sense; the trace taste of śūnyatā can be understood as a ‘knowingness’ more than knowledge as such.5 Knowingness is what has been imbued in our very being from the realization of nonduality; it is like a background space – the foundation, substratum, where knowledge takes place.6 The way the self differs in each is also what further distinguishes conventional knowledge from the sense of śūnyatā that may arise out of the realization of oneness. Knowledge clearly has a subject, which constructs knowledge from particular paradigms, perspectives and disciplines. Although traditionally, knowledge and reason are considered objective, feminist thinkers have pointed out that the ‘neutral’ constructor of knowledge is far from disinterested.7 As promising as the concept of knowingness is, Irigaray expresses reservations about nonduality, which is a relatively foreign concept for most Western philosophers. Nondual theories and experiences exist within, and are constructed within, the matrix of philosophies that spring from the Indian subcontinent and East Asia. As such, the philosophies of yoga, Hinduism and Buddhism that I draw upon here to discuss

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nonduality function with underlying philosophical assumptions radically different from those of Western philosophy.8 Moreover, it can be said that ‘Indian philosophy points beyond itself to a realisation which transcends philosophy’ (Loy 1982, p. 65). The work in this essay, then, enters an arena in which Western philosophers have been hesitant to venture (cf. Loy 1988, p. 65). Irigaray’s engagements with Buddhism and Hinduism are not as extensive as her engagement with Western religious traditions. Nonetheless, she finds much use for Eastern thought, even though she is suspicious of nondual philosophies and teachings. This suspicion relates to Irigaray’s belief that Hindu and Buddhist nondual teachings result in an annulment both of the subject and the object, which she believes is desired by masters in these religious traditions (Irigaray 2002a, p. 50).9 For Irigaray, when ‘abolishing the distinction between subject and object’ becomes the end of the journey, as ‘several masters from the East would have it’ (Irigaray 2002a, p.  50), the possibility and importance of articulating women’s sexual difference is rendered irrelevant. Irigaray points to Yoga Sutra compiler Patañjali as an example of a master who desires this abolition. Such an abolition of the distinction between subject and object as ‘the end of the story’ would in no way further her project to articulate sexual difference. I consider Irigaray to be rightly suspicious of teachings that see the annulment of subject and object as ‘the end of the story’.10 Although she primarily focuses on Western philosophical and cultural traditions in her work, we can also see that, within Eastern traditions such as Buddhism, women are systematically denied a subject position. For example, in most schools of Theravāda Buddhism, women are no longer able even to hold the status of nuns (cf. Falk 1998, p. 156) since this tradition died out centuries ago, and there is much reluctance among the order of monks – who necessarily officiate the ordination ceremony – to revive it. So while Buddhism may have nondual philosophies, they exist within institutions that disallow women a subject position. Where nondual philosophies11 advocate experiences that defy subject and object positions (i.e., nonduality) as the ‘end of the story’, the problem of sexual indifference that we find in Western culture looms. By aggrandizing the ‘ultimate truth’ of nonduality over and above the ‘conventional truth’ (cf. Collins 1982, p. 19) of gender identity and sexual difference – and by seeing the annulment of male and female, subject and object as the ‘end of the story’ – Buddhism makes it virtually impossible for women to articulate their sexual difference and address discrimination on the basis of gender.12 Teachings of this nature then serve to replicate and reinscribe the sameness that Irigaray argues is central to Western philosophy and culture and that do indeed constitute a form of violence towards the other, resulting in the negation of women’s subject position and opportunity for spiritual practice. Worse still is the fact that any discussion of sexual indifference and its manifestation in social practices may be deemed dualistic, and thus irrelevant. In this way, we can see that nonduality, as a philosophy within a phallocentric institution, can, in subtle and complex ways, silence women. Irigaray has, of course, been criticized for claiming that sexual difference is the primary difference from which all relations of difference can be theorized. Arguably, one of her strongest critics on this point is Penelope Deutscher.13 On Irigaray’s

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depiction of race and cultural difference in Between East and West, Deutscher comments, She seems to think that a culture of sexual difference might allow better race relations. In Between East and West, a philosophy of sexual difference is depicted as already a philosophy of multiculturalism. But it is clear that a philosophy of race or cultural difference is not given the status in her work of a philosophy of sexual difference. Irigaray does not add to her interest in sexuate genre an interest in the development of diverse cultural or racial genres. In other ways also Irigaray has continued to be a philosopher who emphasizes sexual difference most strongly throughout her corpus. (Deutscher 2002, pp. 192–3 and cf. Deutscher 2003)

Deutscher rightly points out, I think, that Irigaray’s interest lies with sexual difference rather than racial and cultural difference, and that more elaboration of how these various ethics might relate to one another would make Irigaray’s discussion of racial and cultural difference more convincing. Additionally, Deutscher is sceptical about how Irigaray approaches the culturally different other, in this case, India, which is valued for its ‘utility in the intellectual transformation of a Western, feminist intellectual’ (Deutscher 2002, p. 169). However, in response to Deutscher’s point here, I consider the transformation Irigaray undergoes by practicing yoga to be simultaneously spiritual and corporeal, since she learns how her body can ‘become spirit’ through breathing. India is not valued simply for Irigaray’s intellectual transformation, although such a radical rethinking, or experience, of embodied spirituality does have clear intellectual implications for Western thought. Taking onboard some of Deutscher’s criticism of Between East and West, we can see that Irigaray’s work perhaps needs more transparency around her interaction with, and potential appropriation of, Eastern practices and philosophy. I agree with Deutscher’s claim that a geneaology of the unsaid about race and cultural difference remains the unsaid of Irigaray’s work (Deutscher 2002, p.  194). Yet – and this is important – for Irigaray to speak of racial and cultural difference is for Irigaray to speak as a woman. Deutscher’s criticisms of Irigaray are well founded and useful in suggesting avenues of further inquiry for considering what remains unsaid in philosophy about race and culture. Yet, an engagement with Irigaray’s work that prioritizes the possibilities she presents would begin to construct a reading of the exclusion of race and culture from the history of philosophy rather than insist that Irigaray be equally a philosopher of sexual and racial difference. Irigaray’s seeming lack of reflexivity on the way in which the ‘East’ figures in her work is nonetheless problematic. Her constant usage of ‘East’ is oppositional to her notion of the ‘West’, and this binary distinction might be construed as a manifestation of Orientalism. According to its original theorist, Edward Said, Orientalism is the ascription of an inherent duality between East and West and refers to three interrelated phenomena. One type of Orientalist is anyone who writes, teaches and researches about the Orient; Orientalism also attributes an ontological and epistemological difference to the ‘Orient’ as contrasted with the ‘Occident’; and Orientalism is a means by which one has authority over the so-called Orient (R. King 1999, pp.  82–3). In Irigaray’s

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case, we might say that Between East and West fulfills the first two characteristics of Orientalism – for example, she seems to be writing about and attributing ontological and epistemological differences to the ‘Orient’.14 What she knows of ‘Eastern’ culture and the distinctions she makes between East and West, however, are communicated in a highly personal manner, directly mediated by her experience. She does not seek authority over the Orient by ‘making statements about it, authorizing views of it  .  .  .  settling it, ruling over it’ (Said 1978, p.  1). Her opinions are based on an experiential engagement with Indian practices and the utility of these practices for articulating her subjectivity as a woman. To ignore the utility of yoga practice and solely focus on deconstructing Between East and West for its Orientalism would, from an Irigarayan perspective, serve to reinscribe phallogocentric logic, and create more ‘tearing apart’ and disharmony. So, while I do not consider Irigaray’s work to be immune to criticism, my engagement here with Irigaray’s thought focuses primarily on the possibilities she presents for our/my/her becoming and growth. Nevertheless, Irigaray’s work on India seems to display the characteristics of modernist Orientalist scholarship,15 and at times, appears to slip into the ‘mythology of “East is good” “West is bad” ’(Clarke 1997, p. 218). For Irigaray, India arguably serves as a somewhat idealized screen against which she projects the inadequacies she finds in Western thought. Although Morny Joy has opened the discussion of Irigaray and Orientalism in both the journal Paragraph (2002) and her coedited book Religion in French Feminist Thought (2003), Irigaray’s work in Between East and West has, to date, surprisingly not been strongly criticized along Orientalist lines. Still, For Irigaray’s project to be successful, it seems to me that the way in which we understand and experience duality must be radically reformulated – and a broader understanding of what she conceives of as ‘Eastern’ tradition helps in this respect. As Irigaray writes, For to speak of or about woman may always boil down to, or be understood as, a recuperation of the feminine within a logic that maintains its repression, censorship, nonrecognition. (quoted in Whitford 1991, p. 126)

Because of this, difference has a tenacious relationship with duality, as it is difficult to think about difference free of dualist trappings that have been harmful for women. Thus, Irigaray’s aim – to articulate difference while at the same time freeing ourselves from the duality of Western philosophy and culture, which has negated women’s subjectivity – is difficult to realize. Through her writing, she has sought to overcome this duality and looks to a horizon on which sexual difference may be a possibility. In Between East and West, she goes one step further by advocating a strategy or practice – the cultivation of breathing – that may enable women to articulate their sexual specificity. One possible way in which we might overcome this harmful duality is by thinking about difference and understanding duality not before the realization of nonduality, but following it. Thinking about difference beforehand makes it difficult to escape the inherent phallogocentric logic of duality. As Irigaray suggests, we need ‘another rationality’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 6) in order to articulate our difference. I suggest that, in order to elaborate this new rationality, we must overcome the sameness of Western philosophy via the realization of oneness and then return to the question of

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sexual difference. However, as we now think about difference, this will be informed by our realization of nonduality. Thinking through the problem of sexual indifference without participating in phallogocentric logic may be made possible with the concept of tripartite movement from apparent duality to nonduality and then returning to a transformed duality.16 This tripartite movement appears in the Shōbōgenzō, a collection of writings attributed to well-known thirteenth-century Zen teacher Dōgen, and may apply to the articulation of sexual difference. Essentially, this threefold movement uses the realization of a temporary but transcendent nonduality as a way of overcoming the harmful duality at the centre of Western thought and creating a metaphysical place in which we can dwell in the knowingness of our interconnectedness and our difference. Gereon Kopf discusses this tripartite movement as (1) the movement from everyday awareness to (2) the practitioner’s insight to (3) samādhic awareness (Kopf 1999, p. 212). I understand samādhic awareness to be the simultaneous realization that everything is two and not-two. Upon our return in the third phase, the dynamic we encounter entails the possibility of a true duality between the sexes. That is, it entails the possibility of sexual difference. It is clear that when the achievement of nonduality becomes the ‘end of the story’ or the ultimate goal of philosophical inquiry and spiritual practice, our ability to articulate sexual difference is negated, and thus the social change that is reliant upon this articulation is also compromised. However, the breath-based practices that Irigaray describes (which bring about the sensible transcendental) often serve, intentionally or not, as a gateway to experiences of the nondual. For me, this has indeed been the case, and my work here is informed by these experiences. Whether nondual experiences are universal is highly debatable, and I personally find it difficult to wholeheartedly agree or disagree with Irigaray’s belief that the ‘subjects are two, and thus the universal is also dual’ (Irigaray 2008b, p. 38). My experience is that for the other to remain unknowable, unappropriated by me, I cannot know what his experience of the universal might be or how, in the depths of his spiritual practice, it feels to him when the line between the breath and the person breathing becomes blurred or drops away – when there is no longer ‘someone’ breathing but, instead, just breath. Yet, I do not consider the universality of the experience of nonduality as central to my discussion here – more important is what happens after an experience of nonduality. What is often disregarded in the teaching and philosophy of nonduality is that the one who is aware of the nondual contains this awareness within a male or female body. Often, breath-based practices can invoke an experience of the nondual, and it is important that I, as a woman cultivating my breathing, remember that I do so in a body different from a man’s. As a woman, I breathe according to the rhythms of my body and stage of life. The breathing and yoga practices used by teenage women and pregnant women, for example, differ – and between women, the way in which the breath is cultivated differs along with individual natures and personalities. Wherever our breath-based practices lead us, we each begin with the experience of breathing in a gendered body. In this way, we can see that there is a meeting between the awareness of nonduality and our lived experience as gendered people.17 Clearly, if we adopt a path such as zazen, or prān. āyāma practice, this behaviour is not genderless, even though

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the realization to which these practices are orientated may ultimately be understood as genderless.18 If we can separate the awareness of nonduality after the realization of nonduality and the actual realization of the nondual, we might begin to talk about sexual difference, since this awareness resides within the body-mind complex of ‘us’, whether we be women or men. This awareness, or what I have earlier termed knowingness, is not the actual realization of nondual oneness (which is nonconceptual and has no ‘I’ or ‘me’) but is better understood as the trace or taste of nondual realization. With this residual taste, our perception of things ‘as they are’ may be fundamentally different from our understanding prior to the experience of nonduality. As mentioned earlier, this knowingness may mean an embracing of an internal quiet and space in which we can simply be at home with ourselves. To use Irigaray’s words, what I am referring to is the possibility to dwell in ‘self-affection’ – ‘a state of gathering with oneself and of meditative quietness . . . peacefully staying within and returning to oneself ’ (Irigaray 2010d, p. 6). It is in this way that I engage with nonduality – not as the end of the story but as the beginning and perhaps the foundation for dwelling in selfaffection. Before the realization of nonduality, the duality we experience is not a true one. Instead, it is a duality between man and not-man. By this, I (following Irigaray) mean that within Western philosophy and culture, the maternal feminine is sublimated, and women’s subjectivity and sexual specificity remain unarticulated. Irigaray claims that it is due to the phallogocentrism of Western philosophy and religion that women’s sexual specificity is articulated on male models, resulting in ‘sameness’ rather than difference. Because women’s sexual specificity remains unarticulated, the ‘duality’ before the experience of nonduality is, in fact, not a true duality. If it were a true duality, we might already see the creation of an intersubjective economy of relations between men and women. Because of this, in attempting to articulate sexual difference, we might remain entrenched in the duality central to phallogocentric thought. Consequently, any articulation of sexual difference may be done in a way that is oppositional, aggrandizing of one side of the duality over and above the other. As many feminist philosophers have pointed out, duality, as its stands and plays out in Western philosophy and culture, has not served women well. A rationality based upon nondual realization might arguably be free from the oppositional logic of phallogocentric thought and entail the possibility of a new perspective from which we can think about difference. Irigaray’s more recent response to the harmful ‘duality’ (which is actually sameness) of masculine and feminine in Western culture is to turn ‘East’. In doing so, she begins to find a way in which women might ‘escape from their compartments, their schemas, their distinctions and oppositions’ – a way in which we, as women, might ‘free ourselves from their categories’ and ‘rid ourselves of their names’ (Irigaray 1985b, p. 123). In later work, such as Between East and West, we can see that through cultivating her breathing in yoga, she seeks autonomy, and in the philosophy and imagery of tantra, she finds a new model of the relationship between men and women as a couple, both divine and different. Irigaray’s vision of intersubjectivity in Between East and West is partially inspired by tantra within which exists a divine couple that she has not found represented in

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Western religion. In this divine couple, masculine energy is understood as purus. a, and feminine energy as prakr. ti. Yet, within tantra’s symbology of masculine and feminine, we still find a harmful duality – once again, the feminine is associated with immanence, nature and materiality, whereas purus. a is understood as the masculine, spiritual principle. While this representation of masculine and feminine may differ from the way the same dualism figures in Western philosophy and culture – because prakr. ti is recognized as essential to purus. a rather than deeply forgotten, as is the maternal feminine is in Western culture – the dualism still remains. So, how might we begin to relate the realization of nonduality to sexual difference? At first, it may seem that nonduality necessarily means that there can be no separation between subject and object, or man and woman. Indeed, this is a mistake that is made many times over when nonduality is practiced and taught, and this is what Irigaray seems to refer to when she says that the annihilation of this difference is the ‘end of the story’ in the case of Patañjali. However, let me suggest that even speaking of the realization of nonduality requires that there be two – the one speaking of or remembering this realization, and the realization itself. Essentially, to be aware that there is one ‘actually implies that there are two, the One, and that which is aware of the One being One’ (Loy 1983, p. 211). The duality we experience in pre-nonduality is not, in fact, a being-two of masculine and feminine. As I have suggested, the projected duality of the sexes is part and parcel of the sexual indifference at the heart of Western culture, and it is also a duality in which the sensible and transcendental have been split. Since women’s subjectivity is theorized on masculine models, the current dualism between the sexes equates to, in Irigaray’s terms, sameness. Conversely, in the realization of oneness, there is no duality – ‘true’ or otherwise – as there is no distinction between subject and object. Regardless of the ways in which the subject–object relation is thought through in different philosophical traditions that have the realization of nonduality at their core, they agree in that this realization there is no ‘I’ or ‘me’. Furthermore, given that gender is part of our self-identity, in the experience of nonduality, there is no male and no female. This realization does not necessarily last, although the moment of this realization is considered timeless. Yet, for many who experience nonduality, there is a point at which the self returns. Indeed, for us to even know about nonduality and to speak of it, this realization must involve a gap in the continuum of the sense of ‘I’ and ‘me’. When the sense of self returns, what remains, as I have already suggested, is the knowingness or awareness of the nondual – the individual is aware that for a moment, ‘he’ or ‘she’ did not exist as a separate independent being, and it is partly this trace or awareness of radical interconnectedness that may remain after the experience of nonduality. Due to this awareness of the nondual, after the experience of nonduality, ‘one’s’ perception is invariably changed. A sense of radical interconnectedness, in which one’s understanding of the ‘self ’ may have fundamentally shifted, results in the many being understood as the ‘One’ and the ‘One’ as including the many. From the experience of the nondual, we return to the dual with a new understanding of the subject–object relation, and we can begin to imagine (or experience) between the sexes a twoness that is not simply sameness. I must reiterate, however, that due to the relationship between

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subject and object before and after the realization of nondual oneness, the original notion or experience of duality is qualitatively different from its final notion or experience. One who has realized nonduality has moved from the duality of everyday awareness to the experience of the nondual and returned to the (apparent) dual, in which difference and duality are understood from the perspective of samādhic awareness. After the experience of nonduality, the relationship between subject and object is nonoppositional, and the subject–object relationship is informed by a awareness of the oneness (or interrelation) of subject and object. Thus, rationality and epistemology after this experience do not remain entrenched in the duality of a hierarchical subject and object (in which one side of the binary is exaggerated). Freed from the harmful duality of Western philosophy and culture, we might begin to think about sexual difference again, which enables women to articulate their subjectivity. The subject– object relationship would then be held lightly. By this, I mean that the recognition of our separateness would be informed by an awareness or knowingness of our interconnectedness or oneness. Thus, the relations between men and women might then be characterized by relationality rather than hierarchy. A deep understanding of our separateness, yet interconnectedness as women and men may provide the foundations for enabling an intersubjective economy between men and women. In the post-nondual experience, we may know our difference, yet also retain an awareness of the nondual nature of all things. Thus, the interaction between the two would be enlightened, and this intersubjective economy would provide the foundation for our ‘interbeing’.19 Importantly, the realization of nondual oneness engenders a love based on inter­ connectedness and interbeing. Love, as Irigaray reminds us, is essential to cultivating an intersubjective economy between men and women. An economy of relations between men and women after the experience of oneness is informed by the knowingness of our simultaneous difference and an understanding that this difference is a manifestation of the ‘One’. We can then recognize our difference ‘with the eyes of interbeing’ (Hanh 1991, p.  98). Embodying such interconnectedness enables us to see another as simultaneously other and different, as we would no longer by bound by dualistic thought that seeks to aggrandize and incorporate ‘two’ into sameness. Embodying this difference in our actions and our speech would engage this realization, which in Zen Buddhism is spoken of as being ‘in the world’. This return to being in the world enables the individual to interact with the world from a space which Kopf names samādhic awareness. Samādhic awareness, which may develop as a result of conscious breathing, is, I believe, akin to dwelling in a space of Irigaray’s self-affection, which I understand as dwelling in a nonphysical space in which duality is transformed and we/I can know our/my difference.

Conclusion The breath-based practices of yoga and meditation guided me to this topic of research and to Irigaray’s work. Through my own practice of yoga, pranayama and meditation, I feel a freedom and strength as a woman, at home within myself, without needing

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to identify with a prescribed version of femininity or ‘womanhood’. In essence, my practice of yoga and meditation provides a ‘home’ for me that is without physical place, a metaphysical home in which I can dwell and from which I can move out into the world. When I dwell in this space and move out into the world, I begin the ongoing and perpetual navigation of the relationship between my practice of breathing, experiences of nonduality and being a friend, lover, wife, sister and mother. I experience a duality between myself and others that has been transformed through an experiential understanding of the nonoppositional nature of being. This home enables my own personal becoming and transformation. Through meeting with Irigaray, reading her work and engaging in my own breath-based practice, I understand this dwelling as a dwelling in self-affection. To use Irigaray’s words, it is through cultivating my breathing that I experience a freedom from ‘the fabricated character of my feminine identity’ (Irigaray 2000, p. 147) and awaken to the possibility of living in ‘an autonomous manner’ (Irigaray 2004, p. 4). Through breathing practices, I continue to peel away the layers of fabrication and artifice of who I ‘should’ be to experience in my body what it means to be me, a woman. I dwell in this awareness, at times not just for myself but also because in doing so, I may assist others in creating the possibility of dwelling in their own self-affection. When we dwell in our own homes and beings, we necessarily allow ‘Other(s) to exist, to grow, to blossom and to present themselves in a free space that we manage for their entering into presence’ (Irigaray 2008b, p. 46). Resting in such awareness allows others to reveal themselves to us, and that revelation of one to another is mediated by a sharing of air, a sharing of breath. Dwelling in my own space of self-affection and quiet, I may meet with another whose home does not require that I give up my breath, to represent the materiality of his being for him, and together, we each offer the other the possibility ‘of being born and reborn every second’ (Irigaray 2000, p. 133). To share in this way may be fearful to contemplate; to do so involves a letting go of expectation, of control, of an idea of how the other(s) should be with respect to me. What is involved is a trust in the magnificence of our own home that we have found and, equally, a trust in the other who has found his own home and who does not need me to represent it for him. Dwelling in a space of self-affection, wherein the harmful duality of Western philosophy is radically transformed, is most likely cultivated and accessed in ways very different for each individual. However, for those who practice yoga and meditation, it may be that the experience of nonduality has the potential to radically transform how we understand ourselves and other(s). An experience of nonduality, and the residual samādhic awareness, may indeed enable us to understand the paradoxical situation in which we find ourselves in as women – different, equal and interconnected. We can see that cultivating our own breath and dwelling in samādhic awareness (perhaps another name for self-affection) might not only help us to know our difference but, as I have mentioned, may indeed help others to know their difference also. In practical terms, by giving ourselves the time to breathe consciously, we give ourselves the gift of becoming and dwelling in who we are. Moreover, we open ourselves to the possibility that our breath may lead to an understanding of the interrelationship between people, known to us and unknown, animals large and small,

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and everything seen and unseen in our world. Together, we then look to a future in which we might meet one another with respect for our differences and recognition of our interconnectedness.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this paper, ‘The Oneness of Two: Non Duality and Sexual Difference’, appeared in Poligrafi. 2 However, it should be pointed out that Irigaray does not think this split has always existed. Indeed, she contends that pre-Socratic philosophy did indeed recognize the relationship between matter and knowledge, and she uses the work of Empedocles to make this point. Moreover, in his work, she finds a language with which she may speak of the elemental without perpetuating the schism that remains today. 3 Precisely because nonduality is an experiential reality rather than a concept, it is ‘by its very nature not susceptible even to adequate conceptual description, much less proof ’ (Loy 1988, p. 2). 4 The nondual experience at the heart of all of these schools seems to share similar characteristics. My purpose is not to homogenize all of these philosophical schools of thought but to simply highlight, as Loy has done, the similarities. 5 The distinction I am trying to make here between knowledge and knowingness may seem somewhat precarious. Elisabeth Grosz’s description of knowledge in the following passage highlights the point I am making here. She writes, ‘Knowledge is an activity; it is a practice and not a contemplative reflection. It does things. As a product or thing, it denies its historicity and asserts its indifference to questions of politics in such a way that it functions as a tool directed to any particular purpose its user chooses’ (Grosz 1995, p. 37). 6 I am indebted to Dr Tamara Ditrich for pointing out the distinction. 7 For further discussion on this point, see Grosz 1995. 8 For example, Descartes’s mind–body dualism, which has dominated the discussions of generations of philosophers, is not as salient in Indian and East Asian philosophy. 9 Irigaray (2008b, p. 41) explains, ‘From this perspective, overcoming the subjectobject categories is not suitable. For me, “subject” and “object” do not correspond to constructed categories but to diverse reals. And to overcome the duality between I and another living being, in particular a human being, is not fitting, even with the aim of reaching Samadhi’. 10 This is evident in the work of Rita Gross, a prominent Buddhist feminist. As I shall explain, Rita Gross situates her discussion of nonduality and gender identity/ feminism/sexual difference in the context of Tibetan Buddhism. That is, she is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist. Unlike Irigaray, she writes from within a religious tradition. Essentially, Gross seeks to reconstruct Buddhism in order to create ‘Buddhism after patriarchy’. Irigaray, on the other hand, while maintaining the centrality of women’s spirituality to her project, distances herself considerably from any particular religion. 11 For many Buddhist feminists, it is the emphasis on nonduality in Buddhist teachings that make the Buddhist tradition so appealing. Authors such as Rita Gross (1993, p. 115) and Sue Hamilton (1996, p. 104) believe that because of Buddhism’s nondual philosophies, women should fare well under such a system. However, Sally King makes the important observation that this is not the case

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because Buddhism’s egalitarian philosophies exist within a sexist institution. See S. King (1988), p. 8. This also makes it increasingly difficult for Buddhist women to receive the offerings (dana) required in order to support their spiritual practice. I have discussed this issue, particularly with regard to conventional and ultimate truth, in the article, ‘Who am I? A Response to the Koan “Woman” ’ (2004) and in ‘Why I am not a Buddhist Feminist’, which appeared in Feminist Theology. Yet, there are authors (see Deutscher 2002) who argue that although Irigaray’s main focus is on sexual difference, nonetheless, her work may be used to examine issues of race. Mary Bloodsworth (1999, p. 69), for example, thinks that ‘Irigaray, or an Irigarayan framework, can be constructively used to look at issues of race’. Such an application of Irigaray’s work to the issue of race is consistent with Irigaray’s gesture, as I mentioned earlier, ‘that indicates a path toward more continuity, less tearing apart, more interiority, harmony – in me, between me and the other(s)’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 22). According to Ronald Inden, who outlines a number of theoretical perspectives from which the West has engaged with India, it may also be true that Irigaray’s engagement with India is that of the ‘romantic’. Inden (1986, p. 430) explains that the ‘romantic typically takes the stance not of a supporter of Western values and institutions, but of a critic of them. Yet the romantic does not necessarily (or usually) accept those of the East as ready-made substitutes’. Nonetheless, according to Inden, the romantic is just as guilty of perpetuating false assumptions about Indian philosophy, culture and religion. According to Clarke, because Irigaray does not question the ‘essentialist East-West polarity’, her Orientalist attitude can be understood to be modernist, as opposed to postmodernist. The relationship between postmodernity and Orientalism is explained here by Clarke: Its tendency towards a romanticisation of the Orient has been replaced to a large extent by a more measured realism, with the East viewed, not as the site of some eternal, transcendent wisdom, but as a diverse and multilayered set of cultural factors and intellectual movements arising out of a variety of historical conditions. (Clarke 1997, p. 218)

16 Upon reading Irigaray and Dōgen, I find enormous similarities and resonances between the two. Both speak of something beyond, an escape from normative views of the mind, individuality, and, specifically for Irigaray, categories of ‘woman’. Dōgen speaks of mind as not different to ‘river’s the great wide earth, the sun and the moon’ (quoted in Loy 1988, p. 25). Irigaray seeks to escape from the distinctions man has prescribed, his naming and oppositional categorizing that incorporates the mute maternal-feminine into his discourses of truth. Dōgen speaks of realizing the inherent nonduality of all things, and Irigaray seeks the means to overcome dualistic discourse, which denies and silences the maternal-feminine. 17 With regard to the relationship between Buddhist practice and our experience as women, Kate O’Neil comments, I come to dwell in that refuge of the dharma without respect to race, gender, sexual orientation, ability and so on. The tricky part is there is no place without politics. Human beings have a say about the planet, our lives, and how we interact with one another. This is true both on and off our zafus [meditation cushions]. (O’Neil 1996, p. 34)

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18 In the case of Dōgen’s work, practice and enlightenment are one. He explains, In the Buddha Dharma, practice and realisation are identical. Because one’s present practice is practice as realisation, one’s initial negotiation of the Way in itself is the whole of original realisation . . . As it is already realisation in practice, realisation is endless; as it is practice in realisation, practice is beginningless . . . The way of maintaining the Buddha Dharma has always been like this. (quoted in Abe and Waddell 1976, p. 88) In terms of the way in which I am discussing the intersection of our lived, gendered, corporeal experience, we come to practice as women or men. If we understand practice in Dōgen’s terms – practice is realization, realization is practice – then practice cannot be understood as gendered because the practice and realization are one. Yet, when people sit for zazen, they are sitting as men and women, whereas when they ‘practice’ (by Dōgen’s account) is when the mind is free from thoughts and any sense of individuality and is Buddha Dharma, rather than just contemplating it. 19 Interbeing is a term used by socially engaged Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh (1999, p. 98).

6

That Tender Discipline: Spacing, Structured Nothingness & Kumbhaka Antonia Pont

(Deakin University, Australia)

Introduction In the discussion that follows here, I will attempt what I have decided to call an ontopoetic reading of the yogic practice of kumbhaka. I choose the double-barrelled nomination ‘onto-poetic’ since I would like to use my experience of kumbhaka both to think into certain current ontological paradigms and implications, and also to allow myself the flexibility and discipline that I associate with the poetic register. I will draw on three particular thinkers, namely Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray. Badiou makes very explicit metaontological claims that, I believe, have something to contribute to a reading of kumbhaka. Derrida, for his part, has written extensively about phonologocentrism and its inherent links with speech and breath in the history of phallocentric metaphysics. Irigaray, finally, demonstrates a way to think unity, breath and praxis so as to bring these conceptual strands together in a kind of elegant, but urgent, agency. What can the very practice of kumbhaka help me to think? And how can such thinking impact on what happens when I practice pranayama that involves kumbhaka? Kumbhaka can be situated as a practice within the broader discipline of yogic pranayama. Yoga, as it is often encountered in this historical moment in the so-called West, can appear to emphasize physical postures (which are certainly an aspect of its breadth). Yoga, however, as a technology of existential and ontological inquiry, has often, throughout its long and meandering history, made use of the manipulation of, and abstinence from, breath. I will begin by cursorily outlining the place of pranayama itself within the yogic canon of practice. Then, I will go on to explain specifically the technology of kumbhaka, before embarking on my onto-poetic discussion.

Pranayama According to the Raja (or royal) Eight-Fold path of yoga, pranayama constitutes the fourth rung on a cumulative, yet mutually reinforcing, ladder of clearly defined

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practices or technologies (Eliade 2009, p.  55). Pranayama might be translated most simply then as control, restraint, or arresting of the prana, or life force.1 Yama, as mentioned above, most easily translates as restraint or control. The yamas, however, actually name the first rung of this same system, and may quite simply be viewed as practices of restraint (ibid, p. 48). These include, for example, ahimsa (non-violence) or aparigraha (non-greed or restraint of avarice) (ibid, p. 50). In this sense, the yamas relate to a refraining from certain behaviours both prescriptively, as an end in itself, but also improvizationally, that is, to discover what might arise in the space left by this abstaining. The question I wish to raise here is what pranayama, and specifically kumbhaka, might contribute to an encounter with the ontological, or the register of Being. This relates to what the ‘restraint’ of kumbhaka might show us in its capacity to operate subtractively, as opposed to destructively.2 Let us clarify, firstly, what is meant by kumbhaka.

Kumbhaka Kumbhaka is most commonly translated as ‘retention’. It is the name of a technique or aspect of practice embedded within many of the varieties of pranayama technology. Two kinds of retention, or kumbhaka, are central. The first involves a retention of the inhaled breath – which is termed antara kumbhaka, or internal retention. The other is a ‘retaining’ of the emptiness that follows after exhalation – termed bhaya kumbhaka, or external retention. Both are commonly practised in conjunction with the lock or bandha called jalandarabandha, which is said to slow down the rate of the body’s decay, and which has both glandular and hormonal benefits, among others (Muktibodhananda 1998, pp. 353–5). Kumbhaka may be both an imposed technology, but also one that arises with a gentle practice of attending to spontaneous breath. When relaxed breathing is observed rigorously, it becomes clear that inhalation and exhalation do not follow on seamlessly from one another. There is always a kind of gap, and although pranayama would pertain to allowing this gap to lengthen, it would not necessarily involve forcing a break, since the break is inherent – that is, it is always already operating. To reiterate, yoga reveals quickly that there are not only two phases of what is called breathing. And it also shows that breathing, while also involving the movement of air in and out of the lungs, contains an aspect where movement is suspended or simply subtracted. This offers an alternative to the more colloquial assumption that breath is about air moving, and only that. It is such an assumption that I would seek to complicate in what follows, and to pursue the consequences of this.

Badiouian meta-ontology While currently occupying a controversial site within contemporary philosophy and mathematics, Alain Badiou has offered a straightforward, and I believe, persuasive

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and thorough, paradigm in which to discuss Being qua Being. Obviously, this is not a forum that allows me to present exhaustively the arguments put forward in his prolific oeuvre; however, I will attempt to outline the crucial concepts that pertain specifically to my argument about kumbhaka. Badiou, in the wake of Heidegger’s ontological efforts in natural language, has recognized in Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory a means whereby nomination and crude referentiality can be eschewed in favour of a system of inscription that speaks purely to relations, by means of the basic predicate of belonging or non-belonging (Î). This system, contained within the discipline of mathematics, is what Badiou chooses to call ontology proper. Meta-ontology, however, involves the philosophical interpretation of the consequences of what is revealed through relevant mathematical research (Badiou 2007, pp. 1–15). Badiou, like many of his predecessors, and further supported by the language of set theory, speaks within metaontology of multiplicities. Famously overturning Parmenides’ maxim of ‘The One is’, Badiou proposes the decision – at the beginning of Being and Event – that the One isn’t, or that the origin that traditional and patriarchal ontology would have purported to identify and predicate, has veridically no quality of unity or consistency. If the One isn’t, or isn’t originary, Oneness cannot be a term that would be at all applicable to Being. Badiou will, however, make the claim that within the register of presentation (or what ‘there is’), the category of the One can be seen to operate. Within presentation, in other words, there would appear to be ‘wholes’, or presented multiples. This consistency, if it is not original, must be the result – Badiou proposes – of an operation of belonging, or the count-as-one [le compte-pour-un] (ibid, p. 24). Using the axiomatic reasoning of set theory, we face the following question – if oneness is produced by the count, then what does this count count, if it is not counting ones (since they only arise afterwards within the register of presentation and are not a priori)? Badiou concludes that what must be being counted is inconsistent multiplicity, or the void (ibid, p. 28). The void, in this way, will pertain to the register of Being, it will have no quality or predicate, and the only access to it, which is a kind of non-access, will be via the mark of inscription, or the sign in set-theory for the null-set – ø (ibid, p. 69). From this, we can surmise at least two things: 1. For Badiou, Being is not whole, not consistent, not unified, and does not have any tangible predicate. Any unity that becomes accessible within presentation, ­therefore, is solely the result of the operation of the count, or the structure of belonging. 2. If one takes seriously the consequences of (1), then Being – for Badiou – amounts to nothingness. And we arrive at the maxim – Something is just structured nothing­ness. (Obviously, this term ‘nothingness’ has its own long history in metaphysical and existential thought, but it is helpful to put these associations aside, and to think along with Badiou within his carefully constructed axiomatic argument).

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If ‘something is structured nothingness’, then the corollary is that nothingness can be structured, and that this first structured register is what is commonly named ‘presentation’ or the register of appearance, and what Badiou will name the situation. It is this logical outcome of Badiou’s thinking that will be most useful to our argument later. Let us now turn to Jacques Derrida, for assistance with rethinking the perception of the breath in traditional (phallocentric) metaphysics.

Derrida’s destablizing of a pneumato-logo-centrism In his earlier works, especially Of Grammatology (1997), Derrida places an emphasis on the close associations within traditional metaphysics between the notion of selfpresence, the full or substantial origin, and the breath-as-speech. He points out that the degrading of writing has been justified on the grounds that speech – which is how man hears himself, and reassures himself of his own unmediated presence to himself – has been considered closer to logos, and hence as the purer connection to Being, and to Ideality (ibid, pp. 10–15). Writing in this way has been subsequently depicted as a secondary technology, a so-called ‘dangerous supplement’ (ibid, p. 141) to the relative purity of the spoken register. Derrida’s enlarged notion of writing challenges this traditional paradigm of the metaphysics of presence by pointing out that the structural predicates that define writing are the same ones that also make speech possible. Writing functions as writing due to its iterability and its capacity to operate in the absence of the writer. Speech, however, when closely analysed, operates in the same way. Speech, then too, Derrida will say, is a kind of signifier-of-the-signifier, and may be itself classified under the broader rubric of writing, rather than the other way around (ibid, pp. 6–7). (We will also see later in this chapter, how Irigaray re-evaluates the silence of breathing as opposed to phallocentric speech, placing air in a framework that acknowledges the necessity of the inaudible, a mode traditionally associated with the feminine.) Derrida’s challenge to a traditional and presumed hierarchy (in the case of speech and writing) has far-reaching consequences for other binary categories that are taken to be natural, and placed in a relationship of dominance and submission, which too is deemed natural and eternal (see, in general, Johnson 1981). This aspect of Derrida’s work is well-known and I will not elaborate it here. But crucial for our discussion is Derrida’s deconstruction of the traditional ‘logic’ and his destabilization of the accepted and simplistic positing of speech-breath as being most closely aligned with Being, or that which is outside of time. Taking the implication of this further, I find that kumbhaka offers a better analogy to the void register of Being, or ‘spacing’, and that inhalation/exhalation is that which helps to frame this possible impossibility, assisting us to turn our curiosity towards that which we cannot see, hear or ‘know’. This reminds one of Derrida’s commitment to a thinking of the To-Come (à-venir, which also means ‘future’ in French), something we cannot grasp with knowing, but something which we should not neglect or ignore on account of this difficulty (see Derrida 2007, pp. 45–6, for one example of this attitude).

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In relation to the origin, Derrida has contributed to unsettling the portrayal of this central ‘site’ of metaphysics. His lengthy work in Of Grammatology (1997), along with other texts, has made a persuasive argument for claiming that the so-called origin is also contaminated with the movement of the signifier – that is, of writing. This movement of deferral and differing (that relates to his notion of différance) has always already befallen the (accessible) ‘origin’, which can therefore not be predicated as full and present, and really can no longer be deemed originary, in any ordinary sense (ibid, p. 36 and 63). Absence, in a tradition of a metaphysics of presence, and of breath as substantial link to logos, is always framed as a modification on the origin which is assumed to be Presence. Absence would, in this paradigm, come along as an accident, interrupting from the outside, the fantasy of natural self-sufficiency, fullness and non-mediation. Derrida’s claim is radical, and remains radical even 40 years after its conception, since it warns us against positing a full past that can be regained by making absence absent! Derrida’s pressure on this traditional assumption may be seen also to undermine a patriarchal order, since women in binary equations have consistently been aligned with absence, and as a result, have been problematically associated with that which threatens the integrity or recovery of Presence. Derrida proposes to us the thought of a spacing that is not mere lacunae (see 1988, p. 10), that is, he invites us to think of spacing as ‘foundational’, and as the figure that generates writing, and therefore speech, and analogously, the realm of presentation and all that there is. Breath, subsequently, has a more complicated relation to the originary than it would have in a traditional metaphysics, and is itself more variegated and already two, if not more, thereby undermining the metaphysical reign of the One, no longer able to be posited as originary.

Using Derrida and Badiou to read Kumbhaka as a metaphor for being and appearance In the tradition of yoga practice in which I work, namely Vijnana, a practice session might begin with a period of ‘just sitting’, basically the shikantaza of the Soto Zen tradition. Generally, this is followed by the breathing practices of pranayama. Due to the increased energy that can be generated from breath retentions, some traditions have been cautious with the teaching of pranayama in general. Given, however, that one often begins with breathing techniques that fall under the classification of the shatkarmas – purification practices – this sequencing assists in cleansing the energy channels, known in Indian traditional medicine and yogic philosophy as the nadis, and avoids the undesirable effects of augmented energy in blocked channels (see Muktibodhananda, op. cit, pp. 149–58). During the course of pranayama practice, I perform the four phases of natural breath (albeit with a greater allowance for the spacing of kumbhaka than generally arises in day-to-day breathing). These phases are exhaling (prana), external retention (bhaya kumbhaka), inhaling (apana) and internal retention (antara kumbhaka).3 Those

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new to pranayama often perceive its aim to be about breathing more, whereas the more experienced practitioner knows – in fact – that pranayama leads to breathing less, or to the cultivation of the body’s ability to function well with less breath or oxygen – that is, to tolerate (the) spaces. The argument that I would like to make here is, simply, that kumbhaka – as well as being a specific practice within pranayama – might also be analogous with a Badiouian inscription of Being, or the void, and in this way can be (meta)ontologically instructive or revealing. Additionally, the practice of kumbhaka, I contend, may open for the practitioner – in an experiential way – the possibility for inhabiting emptiness, desire, stillness or waiting. The latter might equate to a Derridean ‘spacing’ being poetically performed in the bodily register, or it calls to mind Irigaray’s notion of a communion-with-self, and meditation [recueillement]. Let us approach the first of these claims.

a)  Kumbhaka and the Badiouian void I outlined above some of the basic tenets of Badiou’s conception of metaontology as resting on the axiomatic operations and procedures of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. To make only the claim that Being equates to the void (inscribed as ø) is perhaps only interesting for the hard-nosed metaontologist, but is not poetically, nor even politically, very interesting for many. There are, however, considerably more tangible consequences to Badiou’s system that flow from the position of the void in his oeuvre. The register of presentation will, for Badiou, arise through the most basic operation of the count-as-one; this he refers to as the situation. The void’s inconsistency, however, remains close to the surface, so to speak, within the situation. A second count will be required in order to secure the first. Poetically imagined, this is what prevents the world as we know it from threatening to dissolve back into inconsistent multiplicity. This further securing occurs via the simple operation of counting-again, termed inclusion in set theory. This is named by Badiou as the register of the state. The state includes what is also termed the Encyclopaedia for Badiou, or acknowledged knowledge, or the thinkable. Although it is crucial that the void be locked down within the second count in order that reality be stable, the state (as the term intimates) also has the tendency to stagnate, to petrify and to protect established orders (termed its transcendentals), including structures of hierarchy and, consequently, of injustice (Badiou 2009, pp. 109–22). This is the point at which the thought of Being as the void again enters. Despite its being unpresentable within representation, the void always haunts the situation, and certain mathematical convergences can result in a gap arising. It is arguably via this spacing that both chaos but also change and truths are made possible. (Worth noting is that Derrida has also spoken to – I believe – an analogous gap, in his discussions in Specters of Marx (1994). Speaking of Hamlet’s claim that time was ‘out of joint’, Derrida uses this metaphor as the figure of that which makes possible something which would not be the worst – in other words, that necessary risk taken in the face of the yet-unknown which makes any beauty or wonder possible

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(ibid, p. 34). The ‘out-of-jointness’, therefore, is something other than a problem (see also Derrida 1989, p. 84)). The event for Badiou arises when something in the count-as-one is abnormal. It is a mathematical fact, and cannot be forced by human will. Something errant and unpresentable will remain beyond the grasp of presentation. This malfunction in the structure (viewed from a strictly onto-mathematical perspective) permits the glimmer of newness and possibility – the potential for the emergence of truths. The forms of the latter to which the human can remain faithful, according to Badiou, are the four of art, politics, love and science (Badiou 2007, p. 340). How might this poetically relate to kumbhaka? If, as I am suggesting, we may read kumbhaka as analogous to the void or at least as a rupture in quotidian structure, then this space within breath offers something poetically salient for possibility, creativity and interruptions to the suffocation or oppression of the status quo. If yoga is a technology that has been conceived of as emancipating the self, but also as transforming our very understanding of the category of ‘self ’, then I wish to inquire into the importance of kumbhaka for this change. Rather than the phases of inhalation and exhalation nurturing the possibility of transformation, I wonder if it is not in the suspension and hiatus that is kumbhaka’s not-knowing or void, that the interruption to our prevailing sense of self, and its overall function, really arises. Of course, it would be artificial to separate these. What we know, however, as philosophers and yogi(in)s, is that pranayama would not function without kumbhaka’s generous spacing. It is a pertinent aphorism worth reiterating here that if one wishes to understand better one’s relationship to something, then the fastest way is to deprive oneself of that same thing! In the case of relation, the void that is nothingness is a register without relation, and this deprivation of such a structuring clarifies our relationship to relation proper, and to ourselves as generated out of our relations with each other. Badiou is particularly clear that the void is inhuman and completely indifferent to the anthropocentric. Devoid of structure, it does not have any matrix within which the human could be a priority, or exemplary (to use Heidegger’s term). This might be terrifying, but it also places our fragility into perspective, reaffirming how important it is that we operate together and not against each other. With no founding order to constitute nostalgically any shared relation, we are left solely with our own decision concerning this, and with the audacity to move forward into versions of humanness that remain to be invented. Let us turn now to Derrida’s contribution to a reading of kumbhaka.

b)  Kumbhaka as analogous to Derridean spacing Kumbhaka, in a certain way, may be uncomfortable for the beginner. The body, accustomed to substance, and to inhalation as the most substantial of the breath’s phases, may resist emptiness, or the holding-still of the inhaled breath. Kumbhaka may initially provoke intense longing for breath, and then if pursued further, existential panic itself. I suggest that this can pertain to our quotidian allergy for spacing, for patience and for not-knowing. When suspended in the space of

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kumbhaka, something about my arrogant sureness is precluded. I do not know. And I can perceive more clearly the thread of breath that connects me to others. Whereas for Badiou, the void will be a space of no relation, no structure, for Derrida, spacing will become what is pre-originary. It is the absence that we mourn before anything specific has been lost. For Derrida, like (I would argue) Badiou, it has been an error embedded within a metaphysics of presence to posit a full origin, or an origin aligned with the figure of the One. Speech, although being most overtly the sounds we hear, is actually structured at a logically prior level by the spaces between sounds. It is space on which substance or logos would be dependent. Writing, as we know too well, can only operate due to the space, the gap or the white of the page. The figure of the One simply has no bearing on this register, nor should a poetics of the ‘whole’ be smuggled in to mitigate this spacing. On a practical level, kumbhaka in isolation would not offer a metaphor for anything fertile. Without its relation to the other phases of breath, kumbhaka might only equate to death or oblivion. (Badiouian Being, incidentally, is also like this. However, the contrast provided by the ground of kumbhaka may recast our relation to the substantial, clarifying that from which things emerge, and unsettling our presumptions about substance, permanence and that-which-would-be-‘originary’. Such an unsettling is arguably ‘fertile’.) We can therefore read the ‘substantial’ phases (those of inhaling and exhaling), where the breath is palpable and moving, not as originary or foundational, but rather as secondary, or (as I want to suggest) as the weaving of the realm of presentation. This would be a kind of poetic resonance between both the Badiouian and Derridean models. Derrida’s notion of a spacing which is not ‘the simple negativity of a lacuna’ is crucial for displacing a phallologocentrism that makes a claim to Presence, subjugating that which the system cannot include and yet depends on, and thereby subsequently, the grace and horror involved in our interdependence. Kumbhaka, I propose, offers the practitioner an unnamed and visceral apprenticeship into spacing. This apprenticeship is ‘visceral’, or, at the very least, confronting, since the quotidian self, too, does not operate at this level of spacing. The self, as a bounded fiction, would emerge only at subsequent registers – the Badiouian registers of the situation or the state, for example. That is, the everyday self could only emerge from the operation of the ‘count’, or for Derrida, might be a chimera produced by the chains of signification, as writing. To dally in the subtraction of kumbhaka, then, is a moment of self-suspension. Without the self-reflexivity of breath-moving or thoughts-moving (since to restrain the breath is to restrain rumination), the self pauses in its moment-to-moment operation of selfing. I see this to be both graceful and horrifying. It is horrifying because the self ’s contingency is revealed, not theoretically, but operationally. The self does not contemplate the concept of its interdependence, or impermanence; rather, it is subjected to that fact, and that approaches our understanding of ‘horror’. There is to this suspension also an aspect of grace. A self that can be suspended is also a self that is not sedimented, permanent or definitively determined. It is a less lone self, its separateness having been revealed as an effect rather than as a foundation.

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We can say then, that while there might be a pleasure in the substantial giving and taking of inhalation and exhaling, the body through the practice of kumbhaka also revels in stillness or emptiness. In Le Mystère de Marie (2010c), Irigaray will emphasize that before we share breath with another (a lover, a child), we must know how to breathe with ourselves (see ibid, Chapter 2). There is a pleasurable balance that insists both on waiting and action, since too much of either would plunge the organic system into disarray. This is potentially instructive for many worldly fields, not the least for questions concerning our ecological survival.

Where Derrida and Badiou diverge It is important to note that Badiouian and Derridean conceptions of Being or ­origin are not easily conflated, nor it is necessary to seek such simple consensus. ­Badiou’s set-theoretical and axiomatic strategy permits him to make the audacious yet persuasive claim that Being equates to the null set – the set that contains nothing (­consistent) and which has no structures of belonging that would predicate it. There is a clear logical order to a Badiouian metaontological schema. The void is Being, and it is a priori, in a sense. Reading pranayama in this way renders the void of ­kumbhaka somehow ‘foundational’, analogous to the inconsistent multiplicity that will be structured by the count or by the framing of inhalation and exhalation, out of which presentation arises. Derrida, however, proposes a more complicated picture, with – what he will call – ‘the dyad as minimum’ (see ‘Ousia and Gramme’ in 1982). In this conception, initially similar to Badiou’s, there is also no unified or totalized origin. Derrida, however, unlike Badiou, will not go so far as to explicitly name Being as nothingness or void. Spacing will for him, however, be generative, and the spacing that is disarticulation will constitute a gap through which the impossible might become possible. To read with Derrida, I would say that kumbhaka, and inhalation and exhalation, are analogous to a pre-originary weft and warp, and that logically prior to this, we have no access. Another way to say this would be that something of a four-phased breath structure might intimate towards (if even that) something of the movement, or even towards the inconsistency, of that which we seek when we go questing for Being-quaBeing. This returns us, to an extent, to Badiou, who equipped with the very nimble symbols of mathematics, will still only go so far to say that the mark of the void (ø) is a suture to Being. Let us quote his provocative description, before we turn to Irigaray: ‘. . . being qua being does not in any manner let itself be approached, but solely allows itself to be sutured in its void to the brutality of a deductive consistency without aura. Being does not diffuse itself in rhythm and image, it does not reign over metaphor, it is the null sovereign of inference’ (Badiou 2007, p. 10).

What is crucial to note, for the rigour of our thinking, is that neither Derrida nor Badiou endorse a thinking of ‘oneness’. Badiou will relegate any such manoeuvre to the

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operation that generates ex-istence. If we use a grammatical conceit here, we can say that ‘one’ for Badiou is a verb, and never ontologically speaking, a noun. This verbal ‘one’ has nothing to do with a logos, a content, that would permit the theorizing of whole ontological foundations, or Being-as-One. Derrida, approaching the matter from a different angle, and being modest with the ontological tools in which he is fluent, simply abstains from plunging into claims about this ‘foundation’. The minimum to which he will speak is already within representation, within the topplings of writing, and has the dyad as its minimum. So, we see that we have nothingness, then one-as-verb, and then we are immediately in the register of the two. Badiou, using mathematics, may audaciously posit a null set as Being. For philosophers working outside of mathematics, accuracy consists of making the very clear assertion that, in terms of nouns, in terms of the register of representation, we always already begin with two.

Irigaray: A tender discipline of unity In her most recent work, Le Mystère de Marie (2010c), Irigaray reminds us of the importance of the practice of unifying the two-ness that we are. She gives the examples of the lips, eyes and hands, respectively, for their importance for the unseen, for silence and for prayer or meditation [recueillement] (ibid, Chapter 5). To quote her: ‘To feel this communing-with-self via two parts of ourselves that touch one another is necessary for our ability to experience an affect in our relation with the other without losing ourselves. It is essential to depart from, and to return to, the unionof-two that we are, before we are able to live the relation-of-two with another who is different’ (translation, my own).

Irigaray has in many texts emphasized this two-ness – that the world is not firstly ‘neutral’, read: masculine – as essential to a respect for sexual difference (see Irigaray 2004c, for example), and one imagines that Derrida as her contemporary, may have shared her interest in this question (see Derrida 1983). Derrida’s emphasis on the ‘dyad as minimum’, or the dyad as the simplest number that we can access, would reflect this. In his reading of Heidegger, there is no possible reduction of Geschlecht to one. As Irigaray has made clear, we cannot collapse sexual difference into one gender or the other. Neither male nor female, in simpler terms, arises first. Given the habits of conceptual thinking of a patriarchal ilk, this thought of a constantly generative and unstable two is uncomfortable. To place the hands together for reflection, to bring together the lips in order to return to the silence of (re)collection, to close the eyes to limit the distractions coming from the external world – all practices common in the curricula of yoga (cf. Eliade, op. cit, pp. 47–9) – may be read as exercising a practice of unification on a disparate origin. These movements, in other words, are structuring practices, ones that create wholeness – I propose – rather than recovering it. Here, I would refer us back to Badiou’s ‘origin’, which is the void or inconsistent multiplicity. This void is marked by its priorness to the count-as-one. Furthermore, Badiou will also make clear that the notion of the

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whole if it is posited as that which is, a priori – an enduring fantasy, in lay and religious culture – is mathematically inconsistent (Badiou 2009, p. 153). If the ‘origin’, or Being, is only inconsistent multiplicity, and wholeness as a foundational notion is not able to be consistently posited, I would like to propose that this suggests that unity is neither natural nor originary. Irigaray’s emphasis on practices (those from the yogic tradition, in her examples) and the importance of breath, as that which is necessary for bringing about an autonomy in each person, of a kind ‘that has nothing to do with withdrawal or narcissistic arrogance’ (Irigaray 2010c, Chapter 9) points us, I contend, towards a different understanding of unity, its possibility, and its role in the registers of thought and practice. At this point, I would like to propose a possible clarification within the varying notions of the natural. If this term is read as almost synonymous with ‘originary’ in an ontological sense, then what is natural would equate to the void, or to an inconsistency, where nothing is. For Derrida, such a notion might imply that which remains beyond access, the dyad being the minimum consistency that we can think. I think it is safe to surmise that a revering of a so-called originary ‘natural’ has often been conceptually complicit with a metaphysics of presence. Badiou, for his part, will designate a particular mathematical constellation as ‘natural’. As I understand his usage, this adjective applies quite simply to multiples which both belong (register of the situation) and are included (register of the state) (see Badiou 2007, p. 102). If we read (in a slightly more mainstream but hopefully still useful inflection) the natural as that which could be fecund, generative, sustainable but not static, and not antithetical to life, as I think Irigaray does, then the word points to something else. In the case of the latter, I am choosing to associate it with what I term a tender discipline. It is something I read Irigaray to be advocating – an action that is intentional, and that involves an understanding of, and respect for, both ontic and ontological registers. Out of what kind of understanding would a capacity for such a tender discipline arise? Why might a kind of (meta)ontological ‘literacy’ (if I may call it that), one perhaps informed by Badiouian accuracy, obtain to certain behaviours or attitudes that Irigaray describes? In Badiou’s metaontology, Being can be seen to ‘haunt’ the situation, even if that situation has been petrified into the (unjust or destructive) consistency of the State. When the count malfunctions (via the evental multiple that is itself presented but whose elements remain uncounted or unpresented – ibid, pp. 173–7) the ‘naturalness’ of the prevailing structure is undermined by this abnormal multiple, as the event which leaves no trace, and has no agency. Badiou will be quite explicit in stating that ‘Being prohibits the event’, or rather, that the strangeness of the event is not accounted for within the bounds of ontology-as-set-theory, as he describes the latter (ibid, p. 184). So, in terms of the situation or the state, the event never happens. There is no way via which it could be consistently inscribed (also within set theory, which finds the selfbelonging of sets, the structure of the event’s matheme, very uncomfortable). We may ask whether it is poetically productive to posit the event as nothing happening. If we say that this nothingness has no inflection, neither good nor bad, then its illegality simply disrupts the consistency that would preclude change, or deny its possibility, within the status quo, making it – for all intents and purposes – unimaginable.4

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For Badiou, it will only be when there is a response from a human being to this exception to normality, which they believe they have witnessed, that the event’s opportunity might unfold through discipline in the process of fidelity to the event. If one is (meta)ontologically informed, then one knows that the malfunctioning of the count, and the ‘immanence of the void’ (ibid, p. 208) are thinkable, and this in itself might impact on the likelihood that a human being could find the conviction and stamina to remain faithful to a witnessed event. Love, for Irigaray and Badiou, might constitute such a moment of possibility. Falling in love – for example – leaves no tangible trace; however, two humans may choose to respond to their being witness to an amorous event by embarking on the long and dedicated practice of producing truth(s), which from the perspective of the situation might or might not be deemed ‘relationship’ – this kind of twoness, is not sameness or merging, but an ongoing ‘encounter’, perhaps divine? (Badiou might call it faithful ‘discipline’) involving different-s. Otherwise, if the two humans are less metaontologically informed, and if the cultural moment in which they find themselves has no way to think this love, then they might just feel silly and impractical, and abandon the wild opportunity in favour of a comfortable but mere ‘statist’ arrangement. Any event, therefore, will promptly ‘disappear’ (since it never really appeared, anyway), unless the human(s) realize(s) their potential subjectivity and embark(s) on the point-by-point effort of forcing that truth into the world. Truths, for Badiou, are eternal, by definition, but their potency in the register of appearing depends on subjects available as ‘finite local configurations’ of truth procedures (ibid, p. 522). What further resonances arise between this notion and an Irigarayan framework? Without practice, without attending to breath, without the contemplative gestures of closed lips, closed eyes and hands joined together (as proven technologies and modes of ‘spiritual’ discipline), there is little chance, according to Irigaray, that humans will find a pathway for actualizing their divinity, to make – for example – a sustained expression of love between a couple possible. The origin (that we are, of all that is) is therefore not unified or consistent at all. When we dream unity as the lost past, a theme frequently encountered in Derrida’s oeuvre, we may, in fact, simply be already imagining the future we desire, and confusing creativity with memory (cf. in general, Deleuze and Guattari 2004). The term ‘discipline’ is fraught with negative associations. My intention here is to inflect it less as a coercion coming from the outside, and more akin to the tender practice of auto-affection or autonomy advocated by Irigaray. In Badiouian terms, I suggest that this bears thinking in light of ‘choice’ or ‘the decision’ (see Badiou 2006, p. 6). In Specters of Marx, Derrida also alerts us to the notion of articulation, which is a paradoxical operation involving something being joined, but still remaining distinct. Articulation is only possible between two things that are not the same. This is reminiscent of Irigaray’s insistence on sexual difference, and her call for a culture of breathing that would safeguard each person’s separateness in order to enable a divine encounter between two subjects who are not the same. Irigaray emphasizes that the two of ‘two lips’, as a self-relation, a self-affection that she advocates for a feminine subject, is not yet the two of two subjects (Irigaray 2008b, p. 66). To take up Irigaray’s offering poetically, we might say that we must ‘make’ the ‘ones’ – the subjects that

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we are – through our self-affections, but in the hope of relating to others who are different from us, and allowed to be different from us. Or, air must be able to circulate since, according to Irigaray, the diabolical prefers enclosed spaces and stagnant air (Irigaray 2010c, Chapter 2). Unity, therefore, is again not something that we recover, but something that we choose, practice and create. To actualize a wholeness or comingtogether requires then a determined and tender discipline, or an operation on the otherwise relationless register of Being qua Being.

Kumbhaka & the rupture Something remains for us to think, however, if we are to frame rigorously the opportunity of the event’s rupture and the tender discipline of practice, or Irigarayan breath or (re)collection. This framing comes together, I believe, in the analogy of kumbhaka. Let us summarize our argument, thus far. 1. The register of Being, or the ontological, is not consistent, unified. In other words, it does not support any kind of relation. 2. The possibility of the ontic – or the realm of appearing – arises due to an operation of the count-as-one, and then a subsequent re-counting (i.e., representation) that fixes, so to speak, and stabilizes what would otherwise be simply a disparate void, or an unstable situation. 3. Being haunts the situation always but cannot appear. The count which secures the void must ‘malfunction’ in order for an evental rupture to occur. 4. For real change to take hold within the register of appearing, discipline or the fidelity of a truth-procedure is necessary – a human activity, whereby subjectivity may result through commitment to, and as a consequence of, the event’s rupture. There is, in other words, a curious dovetailing of rupture and articulation that makes up a process of change followed through to its end. This is paradoxical, but its disjuncture can be juggled in thought. Kumbhaka, I contend, offers us a poetic depiction that resonates with that paradox. Kumbhaka at once performs something akin to rupture, or a break in breath as the manifestation of life, appearance and the ontic, but it also performs a ‘tender discipline’ which imposes upon inconsistency the decision of the human – in this case, that of the yogic ‘subject’. Kumbhaka is something one must decide to do. Since quotidian human breath is habitually unstable and irregular, and so is the mental state and fluidity of concentration (see Eliade, op. cit, p. 55 and 66), kumbhaka is post-human (as we know it), or ‘a-human’, if you like. And Irigaray here might employ the term ‘divine’. Kumbhaka, then, would facilitate an encounter with void or Being (as it haunts our regular situations), but also mimic that fidelity required by a Badiouian truth-procedure, where from the revelation of nothing, the human creates something, including-via that process- their own subjectivity. Badiou will make a clear distinction between the subtractive and the destructive, and I will make a clear distinction between this notion of ‘tender discipline’ (that I read

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from Irigaray) and the inept or stubbornly destructive use of state-like coercion – that repetition of the same, simply at greater amplitude or frequencies, which never leads to change of any kind.

Numbers & registers Before I turn to the conclusion of this discussion, it might be useful to pause for a moment to consider a possible schematic framing of what has been proposed thus far. It must be emphasized that Badiou’s work in Being and Event is deeply concerned with metaontological rigour, and clarifying for philosophy what its work can be. His ‘decision’ to make the audacious claim that ‘the one isn’t’ serves to open what has been a fraught ontological question to more straightforward ways of thinking this register. To this end, the ontological notion of the void (and its framing in his work) is a provocative and, I would claim, meticulous contribution. Irigaray, we could speculate, calls our attention to the lived demands, questions, sufferings and potential wonders of the ontic register. Within this register, the two is ‘originary’. Within representation, we are always already within the two – its challenges and its grace. In a certain way, we can read Badiou as also thinking the two, but vertically, rather than horizontally. For Badiou, there is (as ‘foundation’) only inconsistent multiplicity. Logically following this, there is the (verbal, that is non-nominal) compte-pour-un, which structures the multiplicity for the first time. Thirdly, constituting the register of representation (the state) – there is the second count, which includes the members of the first count. For ‘natural’ (Badiouian) multiples, there is always this so-called including count. Therefore, Badiou, it might be said, thinks the two vertically through various registers of the ontic, whereas Irigaray explores a horizontal two-ness (and one-ness) across the ontic order. Irigaray insists rightly on the necessity of the two-as-minimum for the ontic register. To impose the regime of the one or sameness within this register not only smears the metaontological precision, but also risks a falling into all the ills of a patriarchal or logophallocentric order that we know so well. If the order of inconsistent multiplicity is indifferent to human intervention, intention or fidelities, the ontic register is not. It does matter that we think accurately what would found representation (since our assumptions, here, feed back inevitably into our conceptualizations and actions as humans, and the means by which we work strategically for change). This is what I term a ‘(meta)ontological literacy’. Our work on ourselves and with others, our ‘disciplines’, pertain clearly to the ontic order. It is here that Irigaray’s insistence on the two is both astute and productive.5

Conclusion In the light of particular (meta)ontological inquiries, the practice of kumbhaka can inform a curiosity about Being qua being, and the potential opened by such a (be)wondering. Kumbhaka reveals a register within quotidian breath than can be viewed as analogous to Derridean spacing, or to the Badiouian void. In this way, the active

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phases of breath pertain more to the realm of presentation, and are neither originary nor analogous to Being qua being, as would be the traditional poetic association within phallo-logo-centrism. Kumbhaka, rather than being an accident that arrives to interrupt the full presence of breath, is always already at work, haunting spontaneous breath. When the practitioner allows the silent offerings of this spacing to emerge, something akin to a tender discipline is at work. Irigaray alerts us to this operation, I argue, in her writings, which advocate practices of autonomous breath, and the gathering together of the multiples-that-we-are into ‘selves’ that could relate ‘between two’. Derrida’s caution around projecting any kind of wholeness upon a purportedly lost and unified origin is further argument for my suggestion that unity is something we practice and create, rather than something pre-existing that we can recover by doing violence to the present. Inhaling-pausing, exhaling-pausing would perform a balance, then, between receptivity and decision – something that Irigaray will emphasize as essential for the redemption of humanity and for our shared, beleaguered planet. Pranayama then, as well as being a yogic technology, might also constitute a poetic apprenticeship into both ontological inquiry and wonder. It offers a praxis, a discipline for inquiry within the ontic register and intimates its accompanying responsibilities. With inhalation and exhalation framing that un(re)presentable register, we can contem­ plate that something other than the status quo might ‘happen’, and if we dare, take up the commitment of following its offering through with fidelity. The divine, then, is not behind us but rather ahead, unfolding with our practices of tender discipline.

Notes 1 Commentators have tended to approach this term as being ‘prana-aayama’, which, following the application of the sandhi rules in Sanskrit, becomes the term we recognize – pranayama. There is some variation in this approach, however. For example, Iyengar reads it as prana-ayama, which would translate then as the nonrestraining, or the expansion, of the life force (‘bioenergy’ as he terms it) via the practices of restraining the mechanisms of breathing. See Iyengar (1993), p. 30. In Sanskrit, a- acts as a negating prefix, seen in terms such as a-himsa (non-harming). 2 For a thorough, and worthwhile discussion of the notion of subtraction, compared to destruction, please refer to http://www.youtube.com/watch?vzefBDXmoQaE, for a film of Badiou speaking to this distinction. 3 The alignment of prana with exhalation and apana with inhalation is potentially controversial, since it has often been understood to be the reverse. This is a long and complicated debate among Sanskrit scholars and yogis, which exceeds the bounds of this paper. In the tradition in which I practice, however, this is the understanding. 4 Badiou makes clear that the name of the event is drawn from the void itself (see 2007, Meditation 20). 5 The author would like to thank Rachel Welsh for her precise comments in this regard, and her editorial suggestions for clarifying this distinction.

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7

Between Goddesses and Cyborgs: Towards a Shared Desire for Sustainability Claudia Bruno

(International Association of Women Philosophers, Italy)

“East” and “West”: An introduction In the latter phase of her work, Luce Irigaray talks about the contemporary age as the ‘age of breath’, the third time of History (Irigaray 2006). This third time, which is the time of the Spirit and of the overrun of genealogy as a founding principle of the community, does not ignore the relationship with the natural. On the contrary, it makes this an indispensable step for the re-founding of the community itself, a community in which a relationship between two different subjects can exist. In her work Between East and West, Irigaray suggests thinking about – and re-building – the connections between feminine cultures in the world, to make possible the coexistence of ‘different perspectives, subjectivities, worlds, cultures’ (Irigaray 1997, p. 19). Starting from this suggestion about a new conception of the world re-founded by a dialogue between women from different countries – concerning nature, culture and spirituality – we might wonder if a world capable of including ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ cultivation of nature can exist. This paper tries to answer partially this question, listening to the voices of two scientists of our day, Donna Haraway and Vandana Shiva. The hope is to offer a contribution to start thinking about ways of ‘sharing the world’ (Irigaray 2009) without denying ‘sexual difference’, the latter understood, not as a mere essentialist label, but as it emerges in Luce Irigaray’s theory. Also, to use categories as ‘East’ and ‘West’, ‘North’ and ‘South’ requires con­ textualization – in this paper, Irigaray’s categories of ‘East’ and ‘West’ will be used. Far from endorsing any kind of essentialization as regard cultures – ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ above all, as Said pointed out (Said 1978) – Irigaray’s ‘East’ and ‘West’ categories will be interpreted in a metaphorical way, which only partially correspond to geographical areas. From Irigaray’s angle, ‘East’ represents the Indian tradition of meditation and breathing practices, while ‘West’ corresponds to the Cartesian division between body and soul, physicality and rationality. At the same time, this paper will also introduce terms such as ‘North’ and ‘South’, meaning the social and economic contraposition

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between poor, ex-colonial and non-industrial population on the one hand, and rich, ex-colonialist and industrialized population on the other.1 This last distinction belongs to and emerges with the discourse about postcolonialism and globalization, in which we can properly situate Vandana Shiva’s thought and, to some extent, Haraway’s. It is here argued that Irigaray’s ‘East/West’ and Shiva’s ‘South/North’ dicotomies overlap, while keeping theorethical differences. Nevertheless, they could be combined to offer a wider scenario to better understanding issues at stake. In this chapter,2 I will try to put the comparison between Shiva’s and Haraway’s discourses about women’s cultivation of nature in the frame of Irigaray’s thought. The concern of this comparison will be to move towards a relational and embodied culture which could also become a shared ground between ‘easts’ and ‘wests’ of our times.

A desire for sustainability In both Haraway and Shiva’s texts, we can find something – I would call it ‘desire for sustainability’ – very close to the wish expressed by Irigaray for a gesture capable of ‘indicating a path towards a greater continuity, a minor laceration, a greater inwardness, concentration, harmony – in me, between myself and the living universe, between me and the other/others, respecting the living universe and its temporality’ (Irigaray 1997, pp. 25–6). This gesture seems to lie precisely in the encounter with ‘the other’ – the other culture, the other woman, the other nature – only this encounter can make the relationship between different subjects visible. For this reason, in many senses, we might say it embodies the élan that Irigaray calls the ‘desire for the other’ and the ‘desire for the beyond’ in her recent work Sharing the world (Irigaray 2009, pp. 78–84) – a desire that should be shared to make the building of a ‘common dwelling’ possible. The desire for sustainability could also be understood as the desire for a conscious breath, the first gesture of autonomy for living beings, described by Irigaray (Irigaray 1997, pp. 71–6), but also as the indispensable element for a community not based on exploitation. ‘Until we breathe alone, not only we live badly but we also usurp the lives of the others to survive’ (Irigaray 1997, p.  72), she says. It appears something similar to what is happening between Western and Eastern, Northern and Southern economies and cultures in the world. The rural East is breathing for others, while the industrialized West is engaged in denying its dependence on this breath. ‘A person who cannot stop talking is someone unable to listen, someone who doesn’t take care of its own breath’, Irigaray says (Irigaray 1993e, p. 124). So, the ‘developed’ West seems to be – a giant in apnoea, an infant unable to breathe by itself. The focus here, as anticipated above, is the comparison of two different feminine approaches to nature – the one offered by Vandana Shiva, the Indian physicist and environmentalist, and the other, offered by Donna Haraway, the Californian molecular biologist and historian of science. These two thinkers deal with the contemporary scientific discourse about nature. Vandana Shiva is among the founders of social ecology, close to women’s movements in the South, and she is a major reference for the global movement in reclaiming common goods. Donna Haraway, one of the theorists

Between Goddesses and Cyborgs: Towards a Shared Desire for Sustainability 103 who have most inspired contemporary Western feminism, is well known for the figuration of the cyborg. They both embody all the positive partiality of their cultural perspectives, two different ways of ‘being faithful to their gender’. Witnesses of the same era, they represent two different worlds, culturally and geographically apart – the ‘South’ and the ‘North’, ‘East’ and ‘West’, the commitment to biodiversity conservation in the Indian Doon Valley and the progressive ambitions of American Silicon Valley. As the first section of this paper will explain, how to act and think nature – for them – depends mainly on the boundaries that their cultures attribute to the concept of the sacred. Consequently, they have different ways of perceiving the body, and they have different strategies to reclaim their relationship with nature. For Shiva, on the one hand, we have to return to the feminine principle of the śakti – the self-generative energy which she borrows from Indian cosmology. On the other hand, Haraway suggests a feminist techno-science based on the cyborg figuration.3 At a first glance, these two perspectives are incomparably different. Nevertheless, they share an element that, according to me, relates them inextricably – the contemporary world as a shared world. In our times, with the implosion of boundaries, different voices belonging to different worlds unavoidably share the common global space, and thus are called to make the very relationships that exists between them visible. The attempt here is to try to find a dialogue between these perspectives in order to begin to tell the present and imagine the future. Both consider sustainability – although Haraway does not use this term explicitely – especially in relation to the new policies for the appropriation/control of bodies and ecosystems, as these processes emerge from the recent applications of genetic technologies and property laws on life. In both views, the desire for sustainability is expressed by the belief that re-founding the community, and overcoming the patriarchal family, can occur only by recovering the relationship with nature, and taking into account difference in all its modes. In this sense, Shiva’s ‘Earth Democracy’ and Haraway’s ‘Companion species’ offer an account for cosmopolitics starting from the overcoming of the traditional family model trough a radically renewed order among human and non-human lives, in a world which is a natural one. Henceforth, the desire for sustainability calls for an embodied knowledge, capable of situating thoughts in the body’s experience.

Rethinking boundaries: ‘beyond totem and idol’ In the frame of Irigaray’s conception of feminine approaches to the natural (Irigaray 2007c), we can consider both Haraway and Shiva’s ‘cultivation of nature’ (Burke 2008) as a set of specific practices which embodies the feminine perspective that nature and culture, the body and the environment, human and non-human, are not separate. In their works, the transition from nature to culture – and back – does not take the shape of a colonization/domination of a passive and inert object, but that of a relationship between different subjects. While their approaches to nature

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are both feminine – because they both are related with women’s cultures and feminist theories – it can be said that their perspectives are different and not reducible one to the other. In order to understand in which way Haraway’s and Shiva’s perspectives diverge, we need to introduce the issue of boundaries in nature, which also means to move towards the understanding of where the two authors stand in relation to the concept of the sacred in life.

Chances and challenges to life The perception of the sacred understood as a limen (Duden 1994, p. 122) – that is, the boundary between death and life, natural and not natural, human and non-human, organic and inorganic – will be the focal point of the encounter/clash between the two perspectives. This is especially true if we think about it in terms of ‘crossing the threshold’ in nature, that has become a crucial question in Western societies, even more  so after the post-Chernobyl debate (Irigaray 2007c, pp. 205–31). In fact, overcoming boundaries means also ‘to pollute’ nature and challenge life and its ability to resist external dominations/colonizations/appropriations. In harmony with Irigaray’s conception of the feminine relationship with nature, the ecological theory developed by Shiva is based on the ecosystem as a perfect natural cycle, hence as an inviolable threshold – ‘Mother Earth’ is understood as a complex organic system made up of interconnecting and interacting parts. These parts – plants, animals, humans, the soil, the sun, the air, water, minerals and so on – make up the whole by virtue of this interaction and not by accumulation. In this frame, the transition from a feminine culture to a patriarchal one coincides with the transformation of Terra mater into Terra nullius. This statement is very close to Irigaray’s account of this transition as the masculine spiritualization of the natural – through the creation of a ‘second nature’, the human nature – which has transformed the Earth into something dead and disconnected from the body, life and sexual difference (Irigaray 2007c; Burke 2008). Time should come to rebuild the connection, Shiva says, between the Earth’s body and the human body, starting from the link between women, health and ecology (Shiva 1992b). The ecosystem is considered by Shiva as a closed cycle capable of regenerating exactly what it needs to keep itself alive, without any waste: the body of each part – microcosms – and the body of the whole – macrocosm – are not disconnected. This is certainly a holistic perspective. In this kind of ‘culture of nature’, any external interaction – for instance, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, waste, greenhouse gas production, genetic modifications, exploitation of animal bodies and increase in industrial production to create surplus – may pollute and threaten the complex equilibrium of the cycle, its dynamics and hence its integrity, which Indian women are called to preserve, because of their specific knowledge and practices in agriculture, forestry and farming. ‘Shiva often describes the pollution of the organic matter, and of the cycle’s equilibrium, as something capable of ‘desecrating’ bodies and lives and as a threat to diversity and natural economy itself. On the contrary, the overcoming of the boundaries is not a problem for Haraway. She understands pollution – in its wider sense – as a positive figuration which promises

Between Goddesses and Cyborgs: Towards a Shared Desire for Sustainability 105 new possibilities of existential meaning. Although she recognizes that crossing the threshold means a challenge to life (Haraway 2000a), she does not speak about it in terms of violation but rather in terms of exploration, like an opening up to new solutions of being alive in relation with ‘the other’. Haraway’s message is very clear – whether we like it or not, the overcoming of boundaries is the reality we live in, denying it would be irresponsible. In other words, nature for Haraway is a hybrid world, this is why she distrusts holistic perspectives and escapes new promises of universal salvation. As she puts it, nature is a system whose resistance threshold painfully includes organisms and machines, humans and non-humans, the dead and the living. In Haraway’s opinion, nature always is ‘naturculture’. In this system, organic and inorganic matter are not considered separate and each element is treated in terms of disassembly/reassembly. Haraway’s nature is not a holistic system at all but rather a web of differences capable of interacting one with the other. In this case, the cycle is not closed and interaction is not necessarily understood as a perfect swap – there is always a surplus, a waste, an ‘indigestion’ (Haraway 2008). In Haraway’s cultivation of nature, there is no room for ideas of purity and integrity, with the exception of a diachronic comparison with the race discourse, for its desire to bring back the need for the preservation of boundaries to the obsession of purity (Haraway 2000a, p. 99). This interpretation is considered by Shiva as an academic justification which offends environmental movements and the inhabitants of the South, whose main need is to protect what she calls the ‘subsistence economy’ (Shiva 2001, p. 81). The point in this controversy, in some ways, is the question of the origin of diversity – where is diversity born? Is it generated by nature or is it generated by culture? Is it biological or is it technological? Is it a given or is it new? According to the answer we give, very different conceptions and political actions will follow. Diversity is for Shiva the value around which life organizes itself – it is something close to nature but also which concerns culture, especially in relation with local agricultural and sylvicultural practices – capitalistic technology is instead the expression of a culture based on master models which she calls ‘monocultures of the mind’ and which delete diversity. As she suggests, these monocultures produce boundaries on life and colonize the interior parts of women, plants and animals’ bodies; in this sense, a loss of biodiversity is a threat to life and its freedom to regeneration. Situating diversity in the implosion of nature/culture Haraway de-naturalizes the world – or naturalizes technology – an attempt to overcome the narratives of the Origin, and the discourses about the Same. Thus, Haraway fiercely questions the conception of the feminine approach to nature as ‘non-technological’. According to Haraway, technology is a natural overcoming of nature – the artificial is natural too, it is a well-established political fact, and women need to be empowered by technology in order to be responsible for their bodies and by this act re-found the community. We have to consider that Haraway’s voice is situated in the Western postmodern technobody – that is ‘made’ and not ‘born’. In her account, she also uses figurations taken from the scientific discourse about the human body itself, especially the immune system (Haraway 1991), 4 from which she borrows the image of nature as something in continuous evolution, where the practice of recognition between the self and the other is in constant redefinition.

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Looking for the goddess Both Shiva and Haraway see the link between nature and culture, but their cultural viewpoints are considerably distant. Haraway’s figurations are metaphors derived from western biological sciences while Shiva’s works are influenced by Indian symbology and the cultural and religious belief of life as something inviolable in all its shapes. The onco-mouse of Western laboratories and the sacred cow of Indian society – respectively figures in Haraway’s and Shiva’s discourses – truly represent the different approach to nature meant as the ‘non-human body’. However, looking at Shiva’s conception more closely, we can observe that the sacred suggested by her words is much more technical and material than it appears at first sight. As she points out, the sacred is ‘a cultural tool’ (Shiva 1995, p. 86) for the preservation of biodiversity and for the freedom of self-regeneration. In other words, the sacred is the value according to which the natural economic system is organized – the womb, the belly of the Earth, the flesh of the cow for Shiva are ‘sacred’ because they are essential to the subsistence cycle in which they are inserted. In some way, this view recalls the totemic cultures identified by Irigaray as feminine, embodied, close to nature and based on the preservation of difference (Irigaray-Burke 2007d, p. 361), and supports these claims. In Indian villages, Shiva tells, biodiversity is preserved by a set of cultural and political practices acted by local women – not only the knowledges of how to cultivate and preserve seeds, water, soil, forests, animals, but also the non-violent movements against colonizations and in defence of common goods. As Irigaray puts it, in communities where women are not excluded from social organization, the divine is not separate from nature – the sacred is neither something far from earth nor from human (Irigaray 2007c). Thus, in Shiva, the śakti (or ‘feminine principle’), – which she defines the larger creative force in the world, the recovery of ‘creative forms of being and perceiving’ (Shiva 2002, pp. 217–24) – in the management of natural resources and in the maintenance of life should be preserved not for its biological essence, but most of all for its cultural nature that includes a whole knowledge about bodies, health, food, connections between agriculture and forestry, human and non-human beings. This is a culture linked to the practice of relations, cooperation, symbiosis, co-evolution, connection, exchange and restitution, rather than to the cultivation of fighting, competition, individualism, separation, appropriation, accumulation of waste and open-ended growth. Sacred boundaries for Shiva are, above all, a way towards responsibility that holds together local actions and their global consequences, the essential step for a new ethic of global sustainability. As Shiva suggests, the challenge for every community lies precisely in the recovery of the śakti (Shiva 2002) – the feminine, generative and dynamic energy which makes up the universe and its matter. Therefore, we can say that the imaginary of the Goddess fading out in Haraway – as she says, ‘It’s not just that god is dead; so is the goddess’ (Haraway 1991) – is still alive in Shiva’s speech. Mother Earth, the sacred cow, the water cycle, the forest ecosystem – all these subjects embody the Goddess. For a better understanding of this point, it is necessary to deepen the question of the divine in female cultures, in light of Irigaray’s reflections. She points out

Between Goddesses and Cyborgs: Towards a Shared Desire for Sustainability 107 several times that Western cultures are devoid of ‘the goddess’ (Irigaray 2007c), but at the same time, she explains, in each culture, women are divine from birth. It is the patriarchal order which breaks the connection between human and divine, threatening the freedom of the female breathing, she says, ‘the feminine divine, is first of all related to the breath’ (Irigaray 2006, pp. 295–304).5 Bearing in mind Irigaray’s sexual difference theory – in relation with her concept of the sacred in pre-patriarchal cultures (Irigaray 2007c) – we can say that, for Shiva, society needs the recovering of harmony between masculine and feminine beings, whereas for Haraway, the very idea of a unitary and natural matrix that is feminine (or masculine), is no longer appropriate; as a consequence, categories such as innocence and salvation – which remain valid in the master narrative of the Same in modernity – are not applicable either. What is more, Haraway refuses the idea that a machine does not have a sex (Burke 2008, p. 191) – all the matter is sexed, relationships between different subjects are sexed, but sexuality lies in a nature which asks for a reinvention, she says. In other words, according to Haraway, difference is not something to preserve, diversity has to be reinvented, boundaries have to be explored, and the idea of nature as something to protect, in her perspective, seems like a sort of idolatry (Irigaray-Burke 2007d), an ideological trap for ‘the others on Earth’. In this context, we have to understand Haraway’s warning – ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’ (Haraway 1991). As she suggests, the figuration of the Goddess is not suitable for the time in which we live – a time characterized mainly by the overcoming of boundaries, in which a figure like the cyborg is more responsible because he/she/it is aware that contamination already exists. Onco-mice,6 genetically modified organisms, foetuses on the screen during an ultrasound, are above all cyborgs, she admonishes – they already belong to our imaginary. Although these two perspectives are wide apart, we can see they share a common political goal – the desire to achieve social justice through the reinvention/rediscovery of nature and its own strength and the understanding of this process as a liberation from the ‘master model’ of the patriarchal order. In both views, ‘the other’ – being nature, women, animals, the earth and all those who are different from the western white man – is not considered a victim but a witness repository of embodied knowledge. Therefore, if boundaries are the space in which these two perspectives show their major differences, it can be said that it is exactly by situating them on the limen that we can perceive all their political strength – the wish to re-explore relationships between differences, starting from the rebuilding of the connections that patriarchy has broken.

Beyond blood ties: Rethinking community In considering such different voices, we can try to follow the drive towards new forms of cohabitation. Both Haraway and Shiva reveal political models of global coexistence, both begin from the overcoming of the patriarchal family – based on blood ties – and go beyond its limits, towards other kind of ties. In Between East and West, Irigaray affirms that ‘enlarged families represent a key-site for the building of future societies’

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(Irigaray 1997, p. 137; Irigaray 1994b, pp. 87–95); she also suggests several times to start from the family to refound societies and reconnects this view to feminism, which coined the slogan the personal is political. It is exactly through the elaboration of new models of family that Haraway and Shiva enact a transition towards a refoundation of the community. We can consider Shiva’s Earth democracy (Shiva 2006) and Haraway’s Companion species (Haraway 2008) as two models of extended families. Both are more inclusive than patriarchal families because they involve difference as a founding principle of co-existence in all its forms. In this kind of proposal, civil cohabitation of the world is not necessarily understood as an ‘evolution’ of natural cohabitation but as a kind of natural cohabitation, which needs a specific set of practices capable of cultivating nature as something not disconnected from culture. Whereas Irigaray puts stress upon the preservation of human identity and against its loss, both Shiva and Haraway include the non-human in a more ‘­generous’ way (they include animals, Haraway includes also machines). In their elaborations of new models of families, sexual difference – the most important difference for Irigaray, from which she suggests going forth in order to re-found the community – becomes thus the starting point for the creation of a culture which takes into account other kinds of differences – the difference between human and non-human beings, Eastern and Western cultures, Northern and Southern bodies, local and global knowledges. Shiva understands this kind of attempt as a ‘Democracy of the Earth’s Community’ – a democracy which contributes to the transition from market economy to subsistence economies, that is to say the ecological cycle and the network of social relationships keeping all species alive. The central example of subsistence economies is the food chain in which women, local farmers, animals and forests play a crucial role in the South. In other words, Earth democracy is a democracy capable of ‘coming back to Earth’, which means moving from market productivity to nature productivity, from multinational agro-business to biological agriculture, from the monoculture of science to the knowledge of local farmers. But most of all, it means to recognize women’s knowledge and their work of caring and subsistence in the natural food chain. As Shiva suggests, the match is no longer between rich and poor worlds, but between life’s economies and death’s economies. The alternative, she says, is no longer between ‘having or not having’ but between ‘continuing to exist or disappearing’ (Shiva 2006). This perspective recalls in some way the ‘right to exist’, mentioned by Irigaray regarding the liberation from the patriarchal family (Irigaray 1994b). On a political level, Shiva describes Earth democracy as a new extended family which holds together transnational relationships in order to reach peace, justice and sustainability for all species. The world for Shiva should be, most of all, an ‘Earth family’ in which everything is related and nature – the access to water, seeds, soil, air – is a right rather than a commodity. The Indian term used by Shiva to describe this form of cohabitation is vasudhaiva kutumbhakam, namely ‘the set of all living beings which draw their livelihood from our planet’ (Shiva 2006, p. 7). Hence, contrary to the model based on the Earth thought of as a mine of raw materials, Shiva sets the model of the enlarged family of living beings, actors able to produce goods and self-regenerate

Between Goddesses and Cyborgs: Towards a Shared Desire for Sustainability 109 without waste and in reciprocal relationship with each other – not a Terra nullius, an empty earth, but a Terra mater, a generous Earth. Haraway’s proposal is quite different, because she considers the relationship with the other in its most radical form – the meeting between species. As she puts it, this kind of relationship is essential to develop new forms of cohabitation capable of overcoming the heterosexist nuclear family based on the oedipal imaginary which has become a sterile trap for politics. She supports the idea that to consider closeness simply as something belonging to familial relationships deletes a whole set of other possible different intimacies (Goodeve 1999). In fact, she explains, the political relationship does not have a familial nature and is based on affinity rather than on identity inheritance. According to Haraway, we need to tell different stories because they are already alive, we have to say what happens to the we when species meet, ‘because once we meet we can no longer be the same’.7 Shifting the focus on the tie between species for Haraway means to understand the relationship as a ‘becoming with’, which inevitably is a practice of what she calls ‘becoming worldly’. It is precisely through this reformulation of togetherness that Haraway comes to conceive a mundane coexistence capable of transforming the being in touch into the being itself – this means the self cannot precede the relationship with the other. This is the reason why the space in which responsibility takes place is just the encounter between species, she says. From this partial connection between different subjects, Haraway sets out to overcome familial narrations and she articulates a theory that is not founded on an Earth community/family, but on what she calls companion species. To answer the question ‘who are we?’ – where we means everyone sharing the planet nowadays – Haraway leaves aside holism and focuses on the tie. She answers we are companion species, a subject halfway between the individual and the community, in her words – ‘The partners do not precede their relating; all that is, is the fruit of becoming with – those are the mantras of companion species’ (Haraway 2008, p. 17). Preferring the figuration of companion species to the image of the Earth family, Haraway overcomes modern categories such as ‘family’, ‘race’ and ‘class’ and focuses on different ones. The stories she tells – for instance, her friendship with her female dog Cayenne Pepper (Haraway 2003) – are about companionship, coexistence, co-evolution, cohabitation and sharing of a common space, starting from worlds that are really different. In this way, she makes room for a new responsibility that is also a respecere, she explains, namely ‘to have respect’ but also ‘to look back reciprocally’ (Haraway 2006, p.  102). This kind of approach recalls what Irigaray writes about the ‘encounter’ in her recent work Sharing the world (Irigaray 2009), although she is explicitly concerned about humans. However, Haraway’s symbiogenesis, which she borrows from biology, is neither perfect nor symmetrical. As she suggests, the encounter between species is like the many and varied creatures on Earth trying to eat each other without the possibility of having a complete digestion. It is just this partial indigestion which makes the meeting possible – communication, she says, can take place because translation is not perfect. Against the ambition of equality, Haraway sets the challenge of asymmetry, understood as an imperfect meeting between different subjects – ‘that is not a barrier, it is the condition of signification’ (Haraway 2000b), hence of co-existence, we may add.

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Sharing desires To compare Haraway’s and Shiva’s proposals could be a way to imagine a feminine dialogue which goes through the recognition of difference not as an obstacle, but as an invitation to ‘cross the threshold’ and move towards the other, similarly to what Irigaray calls ‘to free the two from the one’ in reference to sexual difference (Irigaray 1994b, p.  115)? To answer our initial implicit question (whether or not there is a common feminine culture, a common way of thinking as a woman), we can say there are different feminine cultures in the world and there are many ways of being women according to the experience that each woman embodies. Looking for a dialogue between these instances means to follow the desire for sustainability which emerges from them. Rebuilding the connection between female cultures also requires making visible the very relationship which stands between northern and southern women, their bodies, their local or global knowledges, their different know-how (Western women spend a lot of time thinking but they have lost the inclination for practices), their Eastern and Western traditions, philosophies and religions, their ‘others’ (e.g., onco-mice and sacred cows), their settings (e.g., scientific laboratories and fields), their imaginary of motherhood and foetuses (e.g., female feticide in the ‘Third’ World and artificial insemination in the ‘First’), their relationships with nutrition (e.g., women’s knowledge and their work of caring and subsistence in the South, and eating disorders of women in industrialized countries), their jobs, their relation with technologies (e.g., women of Asian industrial suburbs are often employed at the assembly line of computer hardware whereas American and European women are habitual users of personal computers).8 In spite of their differences, what feminine cultures of the world have in common is precisely the fact of being ‘the other’ compared to the master models of patriarchy. In this sense, sexual difference is a universal. But it could be said they also share a ‘divine breath’ that moves towards the desire for sustainability, as emerges from Haraway and Shiva’s writings. When the internal parts of women’s bodies become visible (Duden 1994) and common goods (water, seeds, air, soil, life, knowledge) are transformed into private property, it is clear that what is at stake is precisely ‘survival’. In this sense, both the perspectives I have compared describe strategies of survival against new colonizations of bodies and minds. At this stage, it is necessary to wonder whose survival is at stake. The struggle for existence is the struggle of embodied others, all of which emerge from the crisis of identity in contemporary age. They are fighting against new biological and cybernetic powers exercised through new unfinished subjectivities and disembodied fetishes. It is precisely a shared desire for ‘sustainability’ which seems to be crucially important and a source of inspiration for these forms of resistance to the ‘diaspora of schizophrenic perceptions’, disintegration of the bodies and expropriation of regenerative functions. The desire for sustainability is nothing more than the desire for a happy life that takes shape through the articulation of shared political practices. Such a desire is something more than a need; it also includes the desire for the encounter with the other, the desire to transcend/overcome the self and reach the hereafter not only in

Between Goddesses and Cyborgs: Towards a Shared Desire for Sustainability 111 terms of space and culture, but also in terms of time – the desire for sustainability is the desire for the future. According to Haraway, thinking about the future means learning to move somewhere else and being able to go back with different eyes, starting from the wound and tending to regeneration rather than to rebirth. From this viewpoint, coming back to nature after the encounter/mutation is never an innocent return, and always means overcoming the natural itself. Here, contamination is seen as liberation from the domination network, to which the idea of inviolable nature belongs. Returning back to nature for Shiva instead means moving to a closed and perfect cycle capable of self-regenerating and which is regulated by processes of mutual restitution between actors. In this nature, evolution lies just in the recognition of this restitution, which is a material one even before being an ethical one. Shiva never intends development as something which goes towards an elsewhere – the image of the future is expressed through the return of fruits from seeds, the only change to be allowed is the one that does not produce any waste. In both perspectives, the important thing is to come back after the encounter with ‘the other’. As Irigaray puts it, to return to the self after the encounter with ‘the other’ is an essential step for a civic cohabitation – we need to know who we are, we do not need to lose ourselves in sharing the world (Irigaray 2009). We can consider the new shapes of co-existence described by Haraway as movements for sustainability as much as the Eastern rural women’s non-violent practices of civil disobedience in defence of common goods spoken of by Shiva. In both cases, sustainability means to survive the crisis, the resistance to pain, the minimization of entropy, the reinvention of social justice, the exploration of coexistence, the reworking of the community, the need to converse with the world as an actor and the need to create movements of liberation from old and new forms of domination. It could be said that in both Haraway’s and Shiva’s viewpoints, by rejecting Western humanist universalism, the desire for sustainability is translated into a critique of patriarchal globalization, that is also and above all, a desire to develop new cosmopolitics in which the human body, the earth body and the body politic are no longer disconnected. As Irigaray has suggested many times in her writings referring to sexual difference, sharing a desire can be the way to replace the lust for possession and domination with an authentic relationship between subjects. For this reason, I think the desire for sustainability can and must be women’s contribution to rethinking communities. What remains to be done is to contribute to a culture capable of re-building ‘the between two’, to look for a set of practices capable of making room to the dual nature of each and any relationship between different subjects sharing – and inhabiting – the same ‘space’. Quite in line with Irigaray’s latest works, I see in sharing the challenge of our time and also the key-site for the crisis we are living. To be sustainable, a world must be shared as a ‘common space’, the connections have to be rebuilt; it is just in sharing, just in the work that reconnects,9 that a society can continue to live and becomes responsible of this life. Probably, just starting from this reinvention and by re-building of connections between present differences, the planet’s inhabitants can imagine how the future might be.

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Notes 1 The dictionary of human geography, Blackwell Publishing 2000, p. 558. 2 This paper grows out of my thesis work titled Nature as a political issue: a comparison between Donna Haraway and Vandana Shiva, which won a special prize for ecofeminist culture by the Ecoistituto Veneto ‘Alex Langer’ in 2009. I would like to thank Federica Giardini, Alessandra Chiricosta, Angela Andolfi and Filippo Francocci for the invaluable suggestions in writing this paper. 3 In her words – ‘A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. . . . The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion’ (Haraway 1991, p. 150). 4 This figuration has a major similarity – the recognition of the other – and many differences with the way Irigaray thinks about the immunitarian logic in her dialogue with the French biologist Hélène Rouch, ‘On the maternal order’, in Je, tu, nous. Towards a culture of difference, pp. 37–44. 5 I found an interesting echo of this statements reading Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves and in the detailed account she gives about the ‘wild woman archetype’, which appears in different female cultures of the world. 6 In Western laboratories, mice are used to test the treatment on health disease, in this case (the onco-mouse) on cancer. 7 ‘Once “we” have met, we can never be “the same” again’ (Haraway 2008a, p. 287). 8 I found an interesting confirmation of this in Naomi Klein’s No Logo – ‘IBM claims that its technology spans the globe, and so it does, but often its international presence takes the form of cheap Third World labour producing the computer chips and power sources that drive our machines. On the outskirts of Manila, for instance, I met a seventeen-year-old girl who assembles CD-ROM drives for IBM. I told her I was impressed that someone so young could do such high-tech work. “We make computers”, she told me, “but we don’t know how to operate computers”. Ours, it would seem, is not such a small planet after all’ (Klein 2000, p. 15) 9 I borrow this expression from the eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, http://www. joannamacy.net.

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Breathing with the Natural World: Irigaray, Environmental Philosophy, and the Alterity of Nature Tomaž Grušovnik

(Faculty of Humanities Koper, University of Primorska, Slovenia)

Introduction: Environmental philosophy and the question of identification When Arne Naess developed Deep Ecology, his main aim was to argue for the intrinsic value of natural beings and the environment as such: for a farsighted and thoughtful ecologist, the natural world must have value independently from narrow – or ‘shallow’ – instrumental human interests. This is why the very first point of the famous Deep Ecology platform, proposed by Naess and George Sessions, starts by asserting so called ‘intrinsic value’ of life on Earth – ‘The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent worth). These values are independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes’ (Naess 2003, p. 264). Naess’ originality, however, lies not only in his idea of the deepening of ecological thought, but also in the way this deep attitude is to be achieved – it is by way of modifying oneself, of deepening one’s Self, that the more adequate relationship with the natural world is to be accomplished. Naess was convinced that the only way to grow and mature is by identifying with others in a process he called Self-realization – ‘Self-realization is hindered if the self-realization of others, with whom we identify, is hindered’ (Naess 2008, p. 82). For Naess, this process can, and must, cross species boundaries and it therefore does not stop at fellow human beings; this becomes particularly clear when Naess coins the concept of an ‘ecological Self ’ – ‘I therefore tentatively introduce the concept of an ecological self. We may be in, of and for nature from our very beginning. Society and human relations are important, but our self is richer in its constitutive relations. These relations are not only relations we have with humans and the human community, but with the larger community of all living beings’ (Ibid.). The deepened and mature state of our Selves can thus, according to Naess, be achieved only through identification with our fellow, neighbouring organisms

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which  inhabit  our  environment – our  particular interests must be aligned with interests of other beings if we ourselves want to flourish. Naess’ ideas have justly gained worldwide attention at a time they were first circulated – they undoubtedly mark one of the first, and for that reason, also the most important, strategic stages in the development of our ecological consciousness. For centuries, ecological thought of the West (if such a thing existed in the first place) was dominated by the idea of adjusting the natural world to human purposes. What Karl Marx describes in his Capital can be seen as the prevailing Western ecological mindset from at least the Enlightenment period until the twentieth century – ‘In labor man opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants’ (Marx, Capital, Volume I, Part III, Chapter 7, Section 1, 1906, p. 198). Thus, when Naess appeared on the Western intellectual stage with his idea of deepening our environmental attitude in order to overcome emerging environmental problems, as well as to enrich our psychological lives, this idea had to be welcomed without reserve, and it rightly gained general popularity. There is, however, one important nuance in his philosophy that can reveal itself to be particularly bothersome – its insistence on the process of identification of the (traditional) subject as the appropriate method of developing adequate ecological consciousness. As Rosi Braidotti observes, ‘The problem with this position is that in spite of and in flagrant contradiction to its explicitly stated aims, deep ecology promotes full-scale humanization of the environment. Naess’s deep ecology does not question the structures of possessive egoism and self-interest, but merely expands them to include non-human interests. What we end up with, therefore, is a quantitative expansion of liberal individualism, but individualism nonetheless. The human dimension here equates with the most classical anthropocentrism’ (Braidotti 2006, p. 116). The position of Deep Ecology was in a similar vein substantially criticized also by Val Plumwood. In her essay on ecopolitics debate, she argues – ‘Thus dominant forms of deep ecology choose for their core concept of analysis the notion of identification, understood as an individual psychic act, yielding a theory which emphasizes transformation and ignores social structure . . . A similarly apolitical understanding is given to its core concept of ecological selfhood . . . The result is a psychology of incorporation, not a psychology of mutuality’ (Plumwood 1994, p. 71). In light of these criticisms, one can wonder whether it would be more sound to consider the appropriateness of human relationship with the natural world not in term of identification, but rather of difference; and whether it is perhaps necessary to ask oneself exactly which, or what kind, of subject should be the starting point of environmental considerations. Or, to put the same point more generally – instead of jumping straight to processes and methods of developing environmental moral consciousness, environmental philosophers should perhaps first consider the very possibility and (cultural and historical) frameworks of the human–nature relationship. In this regard, Luce Irigaray’s contribution to environmental philosophy proves itself to be indispensable. For instance, when Irigaray reflects on talking about animals, on the one hand, she starts precisely with considerations about avoiding pitfalls of either

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reifing animals or, on the other hand, turning them into anthropomorfous friends which, of course, they are not – ‘How can we talk about them? How can we talk to them? These familiars of our existence inhabit another world, a world that I do not know. . . . To make them simple objects of study is not appropriate anymore than to make them partners of the universe they do not share’ (Irigaray 2004a, p. 195). It is precisely these two alternatives – of either reifying the natural world, or taking it for a human-like partner – that should be viewed with suspicion, and, in ultima analysi, seen as originating from the same underlying currents – anthropocentrism, on the one hand, and the human wish to deny our dependent existence, on the other. Apart from diagnosis and a critique of problematic human relationship with other living forms, Irigaray’s writings, meditating on the possibility of the genuine encounter with the other, can yield a platform for the construction of a more balanced and appropriate human attitude towards the natural world. Moreover, her figure of breath as the first autonomous gesture, based in respect of life and sharing of life (cf. Irigaray 2010b, p. 5), can be understood as a model of an appropriate exchange between individual beings, a ‘method’ for environmental philosophy, and her insights into silence can offer us a new viewpoint from which to contemplate the natural world. For even though Irigaray is best known as a feminist philosopher, ‘her idea transcends the usual boundaries between the disciplines of environmental ethics and the study of the sex and gender’ (Burke 2008, p. 189), and in this regard, Irigaray’s thinking ‘could be the foundation of a full-fledged environmental ethic’ (op. cit., p. 198).1

Denying and enveloping In the Western tradition, at least since the Enlightenment period, all life and nonhuman living beings have not been seen exclusively as automata.2 The fact that Cartesian mechanistic picture of the natural world prevailed, however, can hardly be disputed. It is curious, though, that the idea of animals having no consciousness or conscious feelings was able to gain philosophical prominence in the first place. For if it is, following Wittgenstein, hard to imagine that stones would have consciousness (cf. Philosophical Investigations, § 390), it should be – by inversion – equally hard to imagine that living beings would have none. Indeed, when read closely, Descartes’ decision to deny animals conscious feelings seems wholly arbitrary. In his Passions of the Soul, Descartes states the following: The same thing can be seen in beasts: although they lack reason, and perhaps even lack thought, all the movements of the spirits and of the gland that produce passions in us are present in them too, though in them they maintain and strengthen only the movements of the nerves and the muscles that usually accompany the passions and not, as in us, the passions themselves. (Descartes 1989 (Passions of the Soul, Part I, article 50))

According to Descartes, the functioning of animals is the same as the functioning of humans in all respects except in one – they lack what he terms ‘passions’ (and, of course,

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reason). It is clear, however, that this conclusion cannot be drawn on the basis of observation – for Descartes, everything that is observable in animals is precisely the same as in humans (‘all the movements of spirits and of the gland that produce passions in us are present in them too’). The decision to deny animals proper feelings – and with this, also consciousness – has thus to be based on some other (metaphysical, or at least non-scientific) grounds. Indeed, it seems that Descartes’ scepticism regarding conscious states of natural beings is but a subclass of his even more profound scepticism of other minds in general, for in the extreme phase of methodical doubt, he was willing to view even fellow human beings as complex machines, as he states in the famous passage from Meditations – ‘and yet what do I see from the window beyond hats and cloacks that might cover artificial machines, whose motions might be determined by springs?’ (Descartes, paragraph 13., II. Meditation, 2008, p. 84). What could, then, fuel such universal doubt? One of the most original answers to this question was proposed by Stanley Cavell. For Cavell, scepticism is prima facie not a theoretical, but existential problem. The cause of scepticism, at which Cavell arrives, is ‘[t]he attempt to convert human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty, a riddle’ (Cavell 2003, p. 138). That is, philosophical scepticism can, according to Cavell, be seen as a transformation of existential crisis into a cognitive problem. Indeed, in his seminal work, The Claim of Reason, Cavell states that, ‘In making the knowledge of others a metaphysical difficulty, philosophers deny how real the practical difficulty is of coming to know another person, and how little we can reveal of ourselves to another’s gaze, or bear of it’ (Cavell 1979, p.  90). Interpreted thus, scepticism ceases to be a theoretical problem of knowledge and becomes almost its own opposite – avoidance of knowledge, avoidance of the awareness of the finitude and partiality of our, human, existence. In his essay on Othello, Cavell sees Othello’s pathological jealousy – and his turning of Desdemona into stone (‘. . . whiter skin of hers than snow/And smooth, as monumental alabaster’ [Othello, V, ii, 4–5]) – as an outcome of his fear of his own imperfection, of his dependent existence; a ‘terrible certainty’ which has to be covered up – and so in a similar vein, the ‘cover of skepticism’ could be understood as a ‘conversion of metaphysical finitude into intellectual lack’ (Ibid.). Viewed from this perspective, Descartes’ denial of conscious states of natural beings can be interpreted not so much as a potential apology for ruthless exploitation and a consequence of the straightforward drive for domination, but as an outcome of the special, and terrible, knowledge of human finitude which has to be covered up with sceptical doubt that turns nature into stone, or clay, or a machine, into an automaton. And precisely this trait of human existence can account for the fact that the Cartesian mechanist picture of nature – albeit counterintuitive – gained such a wide Western approval. The Cartesian drive for self-sufficiency and consequential severing of bonds to everything that is external to the subject – including the denial of the other beings’ original subjectivity (which is seen as something I am not, as ‘the other of me’ – ‘for the other is always seen as the other of the same, the other of the subject itself, rather than an/other subject’ (Irigaray 1995, p. 8)) – is also a topic addressed by Irigaray in her writings. Rachel Jones observes that for Irigaray, Descartes’ process of universal

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doubt ‘is less driven by the quest for certainty than the meditator’s desire to free himself of dependency on anything that originates outside himself ’ (Jones 2011, p. 105). However, the self-sufficiency of the meditating Cartesian subject can never be quite secured, and it leaves the subject ‘. . . hungry for something other than my single certainty of being’ (Irigaray 1974b, p. 186). For Irigaray, this is the source of Descartes’ impulse to prove God; God, that is, is the ‘divine other’ who presumably can reconnect the self with his lost world. In this sense, the idea of God can be seen as a supplement of the absent mother (cf. Jones 2011, p. 107) to which the bonds were severed by the subject. Irigaray writes: The son, after busying himself with his own genesis, reproduces (for) himself, ‘on the third day,’ a ‘father-mother’ to his own specifications. Or in his own image? He creates the infinite bonus that is demanded by his lack of, and therefore his inability to perceive, the perfect existence, by his disappointment that the subject’s capacity to constitute himself must be exercised over and again because of his failure to resorb matter’s extension into thought. (Irigaray 1974b, pp. 186–7)

In this sense, the need for a divine other can be seen as an expression of inescapable existential dependency.3 The Cartesian meditating subject that wants to ground certainty, and by virtue of that, also his world, from within himself, that is, independently of his origin, a subject that ‘constitutes a new placenta in which to be sheltered in separating off from his natural birth’ (Irigaray 2008c, p. xi), is also a subject that tries to appropriate others into his own world: To impose a world of his own is, on the part of man, often an unconscious way of replying to a first dwelling in the mother, to a desire to remain in woman, to a necessity of begetting children within her. Man tries to envelop, by his world, by his transcendence, the one by whom he has been enveloped, nourished. (Irigaray 2008c, p. xiv)

Thus, the drive to dominate others, including the natural world, could indeed be seen as a derivative urge, as a consequence of some deeper crisis, namely that of a crisis of subjectivity, of the identity of a subject that wants to ‘go away without any return’ (Ibid.), that wants to forget his maternal origin in Irigaray’s terms, a subject that wants to impose a world of his own, because he cannot accept his dependent existence. Or, as Irigaray succinctly puts it – ‘The removing of woman from herself originates in man’s domination over nature – micro- or macrocosmic – as we can read in our mythologies’ (Irigaray 2004b, p. 167). After the radical sceptical doubt has been performed, and after the subject has denied his dependent existence, it finds itself, according to Cavell, in ‘a world that has died in his hands’ (Cavell 1988, p. 55). For Cavell, a response to this resulting world, a world bereft of significance, is romanticism and romantic animism: The glimpse is of an internal connection between skepticism and romanticism, of a sense of why skepticism is what romantic writers are locked in struggle

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against . . . and specifically in struggle for some ground of animism, . . . a struggle as if to bring the world back to life from the death dealt it in philosophy, anyway in philosophical skepticism. (Cavell 2003, p. 8)

More specifically, animistic romanticism could be seen as a dissatisfaction over Kant’s epistemological project where knowledge of the phenomenal world is gained at a price of abolishing knowledge of the thing in itself.4 But animism, present in romanticism, can be, similarly as scepticism, seen as yet another problematic stance; as if Cavell has, in his investigations, ‘transformed the issue of skepticism into the issue of animism, exchanged one form of craziness for another. (As if this answer to skepticism has gone further than it meant to; as perhaps skepticism itself did.)’ (Cavell 1988, p. 55) The most straightforward conclusion one could draw from this philosopheme is perhaps the idea that after doubt, there comes full-fledged embrace of the natural world, now artificially infused with some life-force. This, however, is not Cavell’s conclusion. Almost to the contrary, Cavell thinks that some sort of animism had already been implicitly present in the very idea of doubting world’s existence (cf. ibid.). Or, as David P. Haney puts it, ‘For Cavell, the world we see has life, not so that we may share a fundamental life-force, but so that it can adopt the role of an other of whom we can be jealous, and whom we are tempted to kill in an effort to go beyond the very human resistance it offers’ (Haney 1993, pp.  9–10). Thus, it turns out that even though this exchange of scepticism for romantic animism may be of ‘intellectual profit’ (Cavell 1988, p. 55), it is still ‘not as clearly advantageous a transaction’ (Haney 1993, p. 8). For this transaction does not so much dispel the sceptical doubt about the inaccessibility of the Kantian thing in itself, as it only reformulates scepticism. Indeed, ‘In this conception, the animation of the world is a threat, not a promise; rather than offer us a way out of Kant’s challenge, it presents life of the world in frightening forms . . .’ (Haney 1993, p.  10). But why a threat, what kind of a threat? The threat here presents itself in analogous terms as it presents itself in scepticism – the threat of realizing one’s separate, dependent, human existence. Again, what the animist wants is too much, too close a relation, almost a super-human relation with the world which, in turn, results in tragedy. When exploring the issue of animism, Cavell thus turns to Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, specifically the figure of the Mariner’s killing the albatross, to show how it is the Mariner’s wish to establish a relation to the albatross that goes ‘beyond the force of human responsibilities’ (Cavell 1988, p. 60) that results in the tragedy, in the killing of the albatross: The Mariner may just have wanted at once to silence the bird’s claim upon him and to establish a connection with it closer, as it were, than his caring for it: a connection beyond the force of his human responsibilities, whether conventional or personal, either of which can seem arbitrary. In dreaming his solution, to pierce it with his arrow, he split off the knowledge that the consequences of his act would be the death of nature, this piece of nature. (Ibid.)

As Michael Fischer puts it, the Mariner is not content with the crew’s superficial and pragmatic attitude towards the bird, so he rather puts it to death instead of feeling shut out of its life, or instead of having only a practical, conventional, everyday

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relationship with it (of, let’s say, feeding it) which, for him, does not suffice – ‘It is as if the Mariner, like the other-minds skeptic, cannot tolerate his distance or separation from the bird and as if, in the reaction to the discovery of this separateness, the Mariner inadvertently ends up perpetuating it, or radicalizing it, by putting the bird forever out of reach’ (Fischer 1989, p. 65). If the radical doubt annulled the natural living being, so does the animism, by trying to come too close to it, kill it; one could hardly describe what is going on better than this – ‘We want to have the entire world in our head, sometimes the entire world in our heart. We do not see that this gesture transforms the life of the world into something finished, dead, because the world thus loses its own life, a life always foreign to us, exterior to us, other than us’ (Luce Irigaray 2004g, p. 23). Now, if the first figure – the radical doubt resulting in a mechanized worldview of nature and domination of it – can be sensed in the greater part of the Western relationship with the natural world, then, I would argue, the second figure – that of animism, of wanting to establish a superhuman relationship with natural beings – can be traced in ecosophical philosophemes such as Deep Ecology. Indeed, if the deep ecologist does not exhibit an overt attempt at dominating nature by enveloping it in itself (in the ‘deepened and widened Self ’), then (s)he certainly exhibits an attempt at a super-human relation with the natural beings, a relationship where his, or her, interests are fully aligned with those of other beings, where he, or she, merges completely with his/her surrounding world. This, however, as we have seen in Cavell, can result in tragedy, in killing the living world, because such relationship, based on denied separate and dependent existence, cannot be established. Even though this last move is not explicitly present in deep ecology – for it wants to preserve the natural world, not kill it – some degree of aggression, coupled with sadism, is, paradoxically, inscribed in it. Some deep ecology adherents namely showed overt interest in letting people starve to death in the name of the ‘natural balance’ and ‘unspoiled nature’, as can be seen in Murray Bookchin’s report on what David Foreman, co-founder of the radical environmental movement Earth First!, told Bill Devall, a renowned environmental philosopher: Foreman, who exuberantly expressed his commitment to deep ecology, frankly informed Devall that ‘When I tell people that the worst thing we could do in Ethiopia is to give aid – the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance, to let the people there just starve – they think this is monstrous. (Bookchin 1999, p. 284)

It is hard to see how this strategy could be subsumed under the process of ‘deepening the Self ’. It seems that the mentioned environmentalist cannot extend his sympathy, his Self, even to fellow humans – how are then we to believe him that he can do so in respect to non-human beings? This profound incongruity between the noble psychological idea and shameful practical strategy can be understood as an ‘empirical symptom’ of some deeper, unconscious, mechanisms at work in the deep ecology theory. Indeed, as we have already seen above in Plumwood and Braidotti, deep ecology exhibits a special kind of drive for domination. Paroles such as ‘everything is one’, trying to emphasize the pervasive unity of the natural world, are more appropriately understood as ‘I am

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everything’, as a ‘L’univers, c’est moi!’. And as the next section tries to demonstrate, the notion of difference is a much more promising point of departure for environmental ethics than this disputable idea.

Differences, alterity, and breathing The previous section aimed to demonstrate that both alternatives in traditional Western outlooks and attitudes towards the natural world – mechanicism paired with exploitation and animism connected with enveloping nature – stem from common roots: if mechanicists such as Descartes are prepared to kill an animal (let us say, for the purpose of vivisection) because they deny it consciousness, turning it into dead moving matter, the animists such as the Mariner are equally willing to kill the albatross because, for them, the beings are too alive. Both stances – clearly paralleling Irigaray’s idea that living beings should not be viewed as either simple objects of study, nor as partners of the universe they do not share with us – have as their cause the crisis of Western subjectivity, the crisis of a subject, that is, which cannot face his (‘his’ – for it is a predominantly masculine subject that succumbs to this issue) dependent existence and must, consequently, deny his origin and his bonds to the world outside of his own subjectivity. It is only natural, then, that environmental philosophy should, before suggesting practical methods of improving personal outlooks, question this subjectivity; and this especially if it takes the subject as its starting point, like Deep Ecology does. Indeed, as Callicott observed when tackling the issue of morally regarding wholes, that is, groups of different organisms in ecosystems: .  .  .  mainstream modern ethical philosophy has taken egoism as its point of departure and reached a wider circle of moral entitlement by a process of generalization . . . The contemporary animal liberation/rights, and reverence-forlife/life-principle ethics are, at bottom, simply direct applications of the modern classical paradigm of moral argument. But this standard modern model of ethical theory provides no possibility whatever for the moral consideration of wholes. (Callicott 1987, p. 197)

Because ecological crisis stems from a problematic subjectivity, from something Irigaray may term Western monosubjective culture, it is not surprising that it will, in this sense, be a derivative issue, and, moreover, connected with other issues of oppression and domination, especially that of women. As Gaard and Gruen point out: Ecofeminism’s central claim is that these [environmental – T. G.] problems stem from the mutually reinforcing oppression of humans and the natural world. It is no longer possible to discuss environmental change without addressing social change; moreover, it is not possible to address women’s oppression without addressing environmental degradation. That these two worlds, the human and the natural, are inextricably interconnected, may seem so obvious that it’s hard to imagine that they are usually addressed separately. (Gaard and Gruen 2003, p. 277)

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Keeping this problematic in mind, it becomes necessary to rethink the starting point of environmental ethical departure, and, in light of it, to reinterrogate the nature of our attitude towards the environment. For if, as we have seen, the typical (masculine) subject, taken as a starting point in traditional ecosophy, is problematic as a theoretical basis, then the process of identifying it with other natural beings as a method of widening our environmental moral consciousness must necessarily result in failure to properly acknowledge the nature of non-human living beings. Consequently, more proper relationship between human and natural subjectivities (if the latter can addressed in this manner) would be the one based on acknowledged difference between these subjectivities. As Jim Cheney puts it, Ecosophy S, a version of Deep Ecology: .  .  .  expresses a yearning for embeddedness coupled with a refusal to forgo the hegemony over the nonhuman so characteristic of modernism. This is the subtext underlying the concepts of Self-realization, identification with nature, and ecological consciousness. Subtextually, the central operative idea at work in these concepts is the idea of containment, containment of the other, of difference, rather than genuine recognition, acknowledgment, and embracing of the other. What is called for, in contrast, is an environmental version of a ‘politics of difference.’ (Cheney 1994, p. 164)

For, if different forms of exploitation and domination take place in difference, then they should also be resolved in this difference. Or, as Irigaray says about the exploitation of women – ‘The exploitation of women takes place in the difference between the genders [genres] and therefore must be resolved within difference rather than by abolishing it’ (Irigaray 1995, p. 10). The difference between humans and nature and natural beings, however, cannot be simple difference or total difference. If this were the case, the difference would turn on nothing but a pure negation of ‘me’, of ‘I’, and would only perpetuate the logic of the same. This was the case above in Descartes’ attempt to deny the existence of animal feelings, where animals were fundamentally physically the same as humans, and yet, they were simultaneously seen as totally different in the spiritual sense (in this case, the spiritual was based on total difference from the material, and vice versa). And something quite similar is also the case in Aristotle’s definition of woman and the nature of her semen – ‘. . . the female is as it were a deformed male: and the menstrual discharge is semen, though in an impure condition: i.e. it lacks one constituent, and one only, the principle of Soul’ (Aristotle 1943, 737a, 27–9, p.  175). The principle of soul is, quite straightforwardly, denied to ‘female semen’ on a basis of simple (supposed/imposed) difference. As Rachel Jones observes, ‘According to Aristotle, the sperm is the active element in generation, providing the form  .  .  .  The mother passively provides this matter – but that is all she provides: dead matter that is brought to life . . . by the movement communicated to it by the sperm’ (Jones 2011, p.  97). Thus, ‘For Aristotle, “it is through a certain incapacity that the female is female” ’ (Ibid.). There is yet another example of total difference in Aristotle’s thought – the difference between God as a purely intellectual generative power in opposition to

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material passive nature. God is seen as a ‘wholly other to material nature’ (Ibid.). It is curious how this ascription of total difference operates both on the level of the natural world and the feminine. This can be understood as an another analogy that supports the claim that the domination of the natural world and the domination of women share common roots – ‘For Irigaray, Aristotle’s account of the form/matter relation, of reproduction, and of God all testify to a profound denial of human beings’ beginning in the body of the mother’ (Ibid.). However, contrary to the above examples of simple difference as a pure negation (which only perpetuates the logic of the same), true difference has to be a difference in its own right, on its own accord, and with its own content. The difference has to be such that the other has a chance to be approached as what he, she, or it, is – the other in his, her, or its own right, not the other in the sense of pure negation of ‘me’, ‘I’. But can – the question perhaps still persists – nature really be an other to humans, in Irigaray’s sense of the word? Is this naming appropriate? One could argue that in Irigaray, nature and natural beings cannot simply be viewed as other(s). When talking about the problem of the other, Irigaray has in mind the other in the sense of l’autre femme, and by virtue of this fact, viewing the natural world as the other in the proper sense can be seen as an unjustified extension. Nonetheless, it is clear that Irigaray often invokes precisely natural beings and phenomena as a key to encounter the other. This is obvious in passages like the following – ‘The state that springtime, certain landscapes, and certain cosmic phenomena provoke in us sometimes takes place at the beginning of an encounter with the other’ (Irigaray 2004g, p. 24). Moreover, Deutscher in her recent essay asks if perhaps Irigaray, while thinking about Nietzsche in her Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, interrogates the status of sexual difference through the status of animality, whereby the question of cherchez la femme could ‘. . . at least temporarily, [be] ­cherchez l’animal’ (Deutscher 2011, p. 56). More still, Rosi Braidotti is convinced that the natural beings in Irigaray’s context should be entitled to the status of proper otherness, or at least proper difference, with respect to humans (cf. Braidotti 2006, p. 117). Nonetheless, the issue seems delicate, so perhaps the concept that should be reserved for the otherness of nature and animals in relation to Irigaray’s thinking is that of an ‘alterity’, as used by Calarco and Atterton (Calarco and Atterton 2011, p. xxiv). If, then, the natural world undoubtedly exhibits alterity with respects to humans, the question arises how to approach it in a suitable way? How to relate to it in an appropriate way, without domination, beyond the logic of the same? How to respond to the mystery of nature without ‘reproduction, repetition, control, appropriation’? (cf.  Irigaray 2004g, p.  23) How to exchange with nature without, if we paraphrase Irigaray, ‘reducing it to myself, or reducing myself to it’? (op. cit., p. 25) In her writings, at least since The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, Irigaray gives more and more prominence to souffle, the figure, or gesture, of breath and breathing in illustrating the appropriate mode of exchange between different others. As read by Marie-Andrée Roy, Irigaray’s exploration of breath can be seen as one of ‘redefinitions’; she suggests, ‘As a part of her project to critique current understanding of the religious and the spiritual and to explore new avenues . . .’ (Roy 2003, p. 20). For

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Irigaray, thus, ‘Breathing corresponds to the first autonomous gesture of the living human being’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 73). In this sense, breathing symbolizes cutting the umbilical cord and consequent respect and cultivation of life for oneself and for others. Not living in an autonomous way, namely, corresponds to bathing in a ‘placenta’,5 that is – living in an imposed world. Burke, for instance, sees in this figure an important example of ‘developing ourselves, our capacity to perceive, and thus our capacity to relate to other living beings’ – ‘For Luce Irigaray, we do not breathe merely to access oxygen, as if it were the fuel for a bodily machine. Instead, our breath is our soul’ (Burke 2008, p. 196). In a similar vein, Jones states that ‘By taking up the figure of breath, Irigaray can be read as reclaiming one of the Greek terms for soul or spirit. . .’ (Jones 2011, p. 128). Breathing also amounts to a different mode of understanding than knowing – ‘Too often we confuse cultivation and spirituality with the learning of words, of knowledge, of competences. We have forgotten that to be cultivated amounts to being able to breathe . . .’. (Luce Irigaray 2002a, p. 73). If we keep in mind that: Our manner of reasoning, even our manner of loving, corresponds to an appropriation. Our culture, our school education, our cultural formation want it this way: to learn, to know, is to make one’s own through instruments of knowledge capable, we believe, of seizing, of taking, of dominating all of reality, all that exists, all that we perceive, and beyond. (Irigaray 2004g, p. 23)

It is then clear that, in order to respond to the natural mystery in a more appropriate way  with ‘astonishment, wonder, praise, sometimes questioning’ (Ibid.), we have to invent a new mode of exchanging with the natural world, based not merely on knowledge, but also on breathing. Being a natural gesture of every living being, connected with air, the cosmic wind, and atmosphere, breathing is – because of its natural proneness to exchange – undoubtedly more suited as a platform on which to build an ethical relationship than, for instance, the idea of ethics as possessing knowledge of principles. In fact, the very idea of ‘knowing’ as ‘possessing’ might be seen as problematic insofar it is connected with ‘controlling’ and ‘acquiring power’ – and thus, domination. Consider, for instance, Plato’s idea of ‘possessing knowledge’ (Theaetetus 197 B): SOC  Well, then, having does not seem to me the same as possessing. For instance, if a man bought a cloack and had it under his control, but did not wear it, we should certainly say, not that he had it, but that he possessed it. THEAET  And rightly. SOC  Now see whether it is possible in the same way for one who possesses knowledge not to have it, as, for instance, if a man should catch wild birds – pigeons and the like – and should arrange an aviary at home and keep them in it, we might in a way assert that he always has them because he possesses them, might we not? THEAET  Yes.

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SOC  And yet in another way he has none of them, but that he has acquired power over them, since he has brought them under his control in his own enclosure, to take them and hold them whenever he pleases, and to let them go again; and he can do this as often as he sees fit. (Theaetetus 197 B-C, p. 207)

If we compare this metaphor with the metaphor of breath as exchange, it is becomes clear that the latter is much more suited for addressing the problematic of the other than the first. The first metaphor of knowledge as possessing can also be seen as a masculine refusal to acknowledge the independent mother and her power. For isn’t one reminded of a Fort/da game when one reads ‘to take them and hold them whenever he pleases, and to let them go again, and he can do this as often as he sees fit’? Of a game that Irigaray interprets in the sense of the boy’s substitution of a mother he cannot control with the objects – toys – he can control? Or, as Cynthia Willett puts it, when interpreting Irigaray on the topic – ‘[the boy] deals with his mother’s power by denying her importance and then substituting toys over which he has control. Male selfhood is defined by a problematic response to the contingency and complexity of human interactions, beginning with the boy’s stoic response to the mother’s power’ (Willett 2001, p. 139). Moreover, the contrast between Plato’s metaphor of locking birds as bits of knowledge and Irigaray’s poetic descriptions of birds as instructors could hardly be starker. It is striking how both philosophers choose the same animals in order to convey their ideas explicitly connected with ‘knowledge’. This is what Irigaray has to say about the birds’ song: How to respond to [birds’] call? If not through becoming the delicate friends they want us to be? By listening to their instruction as well. Calling to love by singing: is that not better than using eyes or the hand to try to capture the other’s desire? It is, however, what our learned philosophers prescribe, imagining themselves very superior to animals. To subdue, to possess to violate the modest intimacy of the other, seems, for them, a proof of virility, rather than learning to sing to invite, at a distance, the other to come much closer. (Irigaray 2004a, p. 198)

But to return to breathing: as Irigaray describes it, it also – in contradistinction to ‘knowledge as possessing’ – ‘itself incites to an awakening, and the divine knowledge is [then] within me. To awake myself is more helpful for becoming familiar with such a science than leaving myself to appropriate knowledge that is not mine – even if it is called divine – and that cannot be of much use to me’ (Irigaray 2004b, pp. 165–6). The primordial character of breathing – it being the first gesture of an individual living being, and its connectedness with the air and wind (cf. Irigaray 2004b, p. 167) – does not only help us overcome the limits of the traditional Western epistemological philosophical tradition. For Irigaray, the human breath – especially what she calls woman’s breathing – can help us achieve better ethical life. It is interesting, although not surprising, that Irigaray argues for the primacy of woman’s breath over man’s precisely in connection with nature – because woman’s breath is ‘at once more linked with the life of the universe and more interior’, ‘It seems to unite the subtlest real of the cosmos with the deepest spiritual real of the soul. Which inspires a woman appears to remain joined with the universe’s breath, related to the wind, to the cosmic breathing’

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(Ibid., p. 166). Also, ‘The feminine divine assures a bridge between the human world and the cosmic world, between micro- and macrocosmic nature, the body and the universe’ (Ibid., p. 167). In the new Age, which Irigaray prophesizes, that is, the age of Spirit, of breath: the relation with nature will get changed. Indeed, the woman’s almost natural disposition to the divine does not tolerate the domination over nature, over the world, even arrogance towards them. (Ibid, p. 167)

The relation with nature in the Third Age will get changed, says Irigaray, but only when woman becomes creatress of humanity.6 The primacy of breath and its proneness to exchange can thus be seen as the venture point from which to understand the most important insight of environmental thought inspired by Irigaray – achieving our humanity can only be brought about with breathing – and a subsequent equal and horizontal exchange – with living beings and the natural world as such, respecting their alterity. It is thus unsurprising that Irigaray chooses precisely animals (with angels and gods) as our companions on the way towards achieving our humanity: To know in this way, the most intimate proximity and to work it out from a distance, in difference, in autonomous space and time but allowing a becoming of the encounter, seems the task to which we are called as human beings. For this unity of ourselves and at that crossroads where the other awaits us we are little prepared. It means learning to meet the other and to welcome them in their difference, to be reborn thus in a fidelity to ourselves and to this other. Towards this accomplishment we must force ourselves along the way with the aid or friendship of animals, of angels, and of gods who agree to accompany us in a course towards the accomplishment of our humanity. (Irigaray 2004a, p. 201)

Breathing is, however, most attentatively carried out in silence, and silence is another important figure of Irigaray’s thought that could, as the concluding section tries to demonstrate, play a central role in environmental thought.

Conclusion: Listening in silence If Only They Could Talk is a famous book by James Herriot, a memoir of a veterinarian. It is also a phrase we often use to describe what we think of our animals. What we are describing with this phrase is, however, our desire, the desire to hear them. It is curious though how this ‘inability to hear them’ silently transmutes into ‘their inability’ to talk. But do animals not already share their emotions, and their pain, with us? What if it is the other way around – what if we do not know how to listen to them, how to exchange with them? When talking about our inability to listen to the other, Irigaray again invokes ‘mastering of other beings’ in our tradition – ‘About this [listening to what he, or she, has to say to us] our tradition has seldom cared, striving instead to master living

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beings without being concerned about exchanging with them, indeed about receiv­ing from them anything without any form of domination’ (Irigaray 2008c, p. 15). Instead of viewing the animal, or even the whole natural world, as possessing capacities of addressing us in their own manner, we, by stressing their inability to ‘talk’, thus miss the possibilities of a more suitable, and subtle, relationship. For Irigaray, though, it is perfectly possible to imagine that ‘The animal is sometimes more advanced than man in communicating with the other – the animal which calls the other through its song for an approach between the two, or which modulates its singing according to what it would say to the other’ (Irigaray 2002b, pp. 39–40). In a beautifully poetic passage on the songs of birds, Irigaray goes even further in praising animals’ ability to exchange: Like mantras, they go from the low to the high-pitched and shrill, from the highpitched to the low, not without passing on certain tonalities, raising the breath without ever cutting it from its corporeal site, from the intimacy of the flesh. Moreover, their vocal scale changes according to the seasons, the hours of the day, and the weather. Birds celebrate the harmony of nature, they praise the return of the sun, the joy of spring. They transform the energy they then receive into useful activity, games, songs of thanks and love. Does there exist an amorous incantation more moving than that of a nightingale? No word of a human declaration has touched me as much at least in the instant. And the words of seduction of a lover either do not reach the most secret part of our flesh or we cannot perceive them as such at the moment we hear them. Words often fail us human beings, there where birds are capable of rousing us with their song. (Irigaray 2004a, p. 198)

Indeed, it seems that bird song in this case can be more powerful than words. What the bird song does, among other things, is also animating breath and restoring silence: The bird’s song heals many a useless word, it makes the breath virginal again and helps it rise. The birds’ song restores silence, delivers silence. The bird consoles, gives back to life, but not to inertia. The bird animates breath while safeguarding its materiality . . . Most of birds love us but want us inhabited by a subtle divine breath. (Ibid., p. 197)

Silence is thus another powerful element of Irigaray’s thinking. It opens up the space for welcoming the other. Irigaray therefore says that ‘the first word we have to speak to one another is our capacity and acceptance of being silent’ (Irigaray 2008c, p. 18). It is ‘the first wave of recognition addressed to the other as such’ (Ibid.). This silence is the place of the encounter. It indicates, as Irigaray points out, my ‘ability to relinquish meaning organized according to my signs and rules alone’. Therefore, the renunciation of speaking ‘is a welcoming to another world, to another manner of speaking and saying than the one we know’ (Ibid.). One of the most important characteristics of words that belong to this ‘another manner of speaking and saying’ is that they do not intend to ‘show, to make visible, and above all to demonstrate’ (Ibid., p.  19). These words are first of all not representations. They are, unsurprisingly, strange to our culture, but they do have the ability to stir, touch, move us. They act upon us, and

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yet, we do not appropriate them. Are they like the air we breathe – the air we inhale and yet also exhale, the air that we do not appropriate but only exchange, and yet, the air that in-spires us? But what could these words be? Again, Irigaray returns to the natural world to illustrate what these words could be like: Such is the case for the light of the stars, the music of the wind, the song of the birds. They do not force us to do anything; rather they give us assistance to our existence . . . This happens on the condition that we do not intend to possess them, nor even to appropriate them through words, which remain  always unable to express the energy, the life, that the light and music of the universe pass on to our perceptions, to the whole of ourselves. (Irigaray 2008c, p. 19)

This (re)turn to the natural world in Irigaray is, however, quite understandable. First, because the exchange of the natural world is unrestricted by the discourse of logos, or by ideologies and social conventions, and is thus in a more favourable position (than the human other) to prepare us to hear its call. And secondly, because of the abundance of nature, offered for exchange with humans. Breathing with the natural world – this amounts to saying that we should cultivate our breath, prepare ourselves for the encounter, for the achieving of our humanity, for reinvention of ourselves, by listening to the ways the natural world exchanges with us. This, again, is the insight of something we might perhaps call the atmospheric thought, the thought that relates itself to the sphere of breathing (‘atmo-’ being derived from Proto-Indo-European *awet-mo-, from the base *wet-, meaning ‘to blow, inspire, spiritually arouse’).7 It is the thought of the redemptive gesture that fulfils the desire for ‘new religion’, the desire expressed by Lynn T. White in his seminal essay, The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis (cf. White 1967, p. 1206), which can alone help us overcome environmental (but not only environmental) problems we are faced with. It is, simultaneously, what Rosi Braidotti calls Irigaray’s ‘new cosmology’ (Braidotti 2006, p. 117), or what Irigaray herself calls ‘the third age’, the time of the Spirit. It is perhaps to her, as living nature, that I have to abandon myself in order to preserve my own life, its growth, and what they bear of the life and growth of the other. Such hospitality is so subtle and intimate that I have to seek help in nature for my survival and my becoming, notably through being attentive to the abundance that she gives to be contemplated, heard, breathed, touched, felt. It suffices to agree to receive, in silence, this eucharist that she unsparingly offers – often without any visible object or symbol but as a communion with the real presence of the living. (Irigaray 2008c, p. 42)

Notes 1 The ‘idea’ Burke’s essay is referring to is the idea of ‘cultivation or culture of nature’. Burke says that taking seriously the idea that ‘culture is a culture of nature, a development out of and upon nature but not separate from it, requires not only a re-evaluation of the way in which we relate to our own bodies, but also

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Breathing with Luce Irigaray a re-evaluation of the way in which we relate to the rest of the natural world’ (Burke 2008, p. 198). Understood in this way, environmental ethics naturally becomes part of Irigaray’s thinking. Burke’s essay is valuable also because of its contribution to the understanding of Irigaray’s usage of concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and complicated relation between them. In Burke’s view, for Irigaray, ‘Culture, then, is a refinement or perfection of living nature, an accomplishment rooted in natural capacities, an achievement of specific bodily existence: culture corresponds to cultivated nature’ (Ibid., p. 199). Cf. Harrison’s (Harrison 1998) splendid essay on animals in seventeenth-century thought, presenting the varied and elaborated debate of Enlightenment thinkers on animal nature and human duties towards it which ensued as a result of for that time provocative Cartesian idea that animals do not possess consciousness. Cf.: ‘. . . both the need for a divine other and the doubling of the self in the cogito are positioned as signs of the inescapability of the self ’s existential and ontological dependency’ (Jones 2011, p. 108). Or, as Joshua Wilner puts it, ‘Cavell proposes more specifically that Romantic animism be read as the expression of disappointment with ‘the Kantian settlement’ by means of which philosophy had come to terms with that threat: granting the human mind its claim to knowledge of the phenomenal world of objects, on condition that it relinquish to the domain of the unknowable thing in itself ’ (Wilner 2011, p. 154). Here, Irigaray uses the word ‘placenta’ in the sense of ‘forming with others a sort of mass in which each individual has not yet conquered one’s personal life but lives on a collective, social and cultural respiration, on an unconscious breathing of a group, beginning with that of the family’ (cf. Irigaray 2010b, p. 4). This is to be understood as a metaphor, since foetus sensu stricto does not ‘live in’ a placenta. Irigaray, however, also uses the figure of ‘placenta’ in other contexts in her work, especially in her idea of ‘placental economy’ (in Je, tu, nous, for instance) where, as Jones puts it, ‘Otherness is tolerated within the self, rather than assimilated, excluded, or negated’ (Jones 2011, p. 161). The idea of ‘placental economy’ was developed by Irigaray while working with embryologist Hélène Rouch, where Rouch informs Irigaray in an interview that placenta ‘Plays a mediating role on two levels. On the one hand, it’s the mediating space between mother and fetus, which means that there’s never a fusion of maternal and embryonic tissues. On the other hand, it constitutes a system regulating exchanges between the two organisms . . .’ (Irigaray 1993b, p. 39). Some commentators are perplexed with such Irigaray’s statements, which may be seen as advocating some sort of essentialism and romantic view of women. Roy, for instance, asks this pertinent question, ‘When we examine [Irigaray’s] portrait [of women] that emerges, we find ourselves looking at something close to an idealized representation of women: they are naturally communicative, respectful of earth, concerned about relations with the other, spiritually awakened, and so on. All of these qualities are clearly positive, but if we turn them into quasi-innate qualities of women do we not enclose women within an essentialist paradigm?’ (Roy 2003, pp. 26–7). Furthermore, Ellen Armour finds Irigaray’s ‘evocation/invocation of a woman divine’ problematic in the sense that it only replaces masculine standard of sameness (God-the-Father) with female standard which only ‘keeps the economy of sameness in play’. ‘The truth of her insight is, unfortunately, borne out in her failure to heed her own warning’ (Armour 2003, p. 30).

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  When it comes to the interpretation of breath, Irigaray’s readers could be similarly perplexed – is she speaking metaphorically, or should we take her statements – for instance, the one about cosmic breathing – literally? Perhaps the most appropriate way to read and understand her statements about breath is to take them as an attempt at what Richard Rorty would call a ‘redescription’ and ‘reinvention of new vocabularies’. For Rorty, ‘. . . revolutionary achievements in the arts, in the sciences, and in moral and political thought typically occur when somebody realizes that two or more of our vocabularies are interfering with each other, and proceeds to invent a new vocabulary to replace both’ (Rorty 1989, p. 12). Since this redescription is achieved most successfully within literary framework (for Rorty, novels play a more important role in reshaping humanity than do academic discussions), it would be methodologically fruitful to consider Irigaray’s later writings as ‘poetic’ (Roy). This move towards literature could, in turn, be justified as an attempt at ‘distancing from’ – if not overcoming – ‘academic modes of knowledge production’ (Roy 2003, p. 25). 7 ‘Atmosphere’ also has a well known figurative meaning – of surrounding influence, mental or moral environment – which began to be used around 1800.

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Breathing with Animals: Irigaray’s Contribution to Animal Ethics Sara Štuva

(Science and Research Centre of Koper, University of Primorska, Slovenia)

‘The comfort lavished by animals, especially winged, is as timely as grace’. (Irigaray 2004, p. 197)

Introduction The aim of the chapter is to examine the question of the non-human animal in Luce Irigaray’s work and to draw out the specificity of Irigaray’s contribution to animal ethics, which, in my opinion, should be the ethics of complete animal liberation from human domination, of compassion and sustainable development, where the antispeciesist vegan lifestyle is implicit. This chapter also seeks to make a contribution to Irigarayan studies, since the role of non-human animals in Irigaray’s work is surprisingly underrepresented.1 Granted, Irigaray herself has not written much on non-human animals; entirely dedicated to the animal question is only her short text, ‘Animal Compassion’, published in the volume Animal Philosophy, edited by Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco in 2004. ‘Animal Compassion’, comprising only a few pages, is a text in which Irigaray presents her view on non-human animals through autobiographical stories. The narrative style of experiencing our relationship with animals is something that texts dealing with the animal question have often neglected, which imparts a special charm to her method. Individual animals are introduced to us as actual, physical beings, whose existence converges with hers. Sometimes, they are represented as symbols for an interpersonal relationship. And although the non-human animals featured in the text have mainly a therapeutic and symbolic role, this contribution, when combined with her philosophy of intersubjectivity, raises some positive points for animal ethics and philosophy. Irigaray’s contribution to the animal question will be first examined through her contemplative narratives on the animals. I will then discuss the concepts of difference and vulnerability, and put Irigaray’s philosophy into dialogue with Ralph R. Acampora, who extends phenomenological ethics to non-human animals. It will be shown how

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his approach of corporal compassion connects perfectly with Irigaray’s representation of non-human animals. Emphasis will be placed on the living body – the body in the context of its interactions with other beings/bodies in the existential space. The title of this chapter – Breathing with Animals is a metaphor for this coexistence. All living creatures on this earth live under the same sky and breathe the same air, share the same intercorporeal space and bodily vulnerability. Breathing is thus the first and last physical act that enables us to live, while at the same time making us corporeal, mortal and vulnerable.2

Contemplating non-human animals In ‘Animal Compassion’, Irigaray describes in narrative style how she met some individual non-human animals and how she used to observe and contemplate them for hours. She is impressed by the aesthetic dimension of non-human animals.3 Those individuals offered her happiness, beatitude (butterflies), support (rabbit), help, they rejoined her, ‘they comforted her, healing her, giving her confidence and energy’ (Irigaray 2004a, p. 196). Birds were welcoming her, greeting her, gave her friendship, comfort and the most mysterious aid, as well as blessing. Birds were ‘guides’, ‘scouts’, ‘a sign of life’, even ‘angels’ (Irigaray 2004a, p.  197). Birds are highly appreciated by Irigaray in general, as she also mentions them in Between East and West4 and To Be Two  (p.  3), where they are presented as ‘nature’s angels’. They represent mediators between God, man and woman. They are seen as spiritual assistants, who animate our breath – ‘Most of the birds love us, but want us inhabited by a subtle, divine breath’ (Irigaray 2004a, p. 197). According to Škof, Irigaray’s ‘birds are relatives of angels and guardians of the atmosphere of breath’ (Škof 2012b, p. 232), which is crucial for her theory and ethics of intersubjectivity. Birds visited her several times. A small bird was ‘a sign of life and friendship which was providential for [her]’ (Irigaray 2004a, p. 197): Birds are our friends. But also our guides, our scouts. Our angels in some respect. They accompany persons who are alone, comfort them, restoring their health and their courage. Birds do more. Birds lead one’s becoming. The bird’s song heals many a useless word, it makes the breath virginal again and helps it rise. The birds’ song restores silence, delivers silence (Irigaray 2004a, p. 197).5

At the same time, birds also help achieve our humanity, our spirituality. They encourage us to think about ourselves. Not only birds, but also other non-human animals ‘accompany us in a course towards the accomplishment of our humanity’ (Irigaray 2004a, p. 201). The birds’ song helps us to become human, to become more subtle in our dialogue with the other: Their vocalizings lead our breath from elementary vitality to the most ethereal of the mental, and beyond. . . . Birds celebrate the harmony of nature, they praise the return of the sun, the joy of spring. . . . How to respond to their call? If not through becoming the delicate friends they want us to be? By listening to their instruction

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as well. Calling to love by singing: Is that not better than using the eyes or the hand to try to capture the other’s desire? It is however, what our learned philosophers prescribe, imagining themselves very superior to animals. To subdue, to possess, to violate the modesty or intimacy of the other, seems, for them, a proof of virility, rather than learning to sing to invite, at a distance, the other to come much closer (Irigaray 2004a, p. 198).

Birds carry a symbolic value for interpersonal relationships. In general, the whole text turns out to be an appeal to human beings, our relational ontology, and advice on how to become more subtle, sensible and respectful to beings that surround us. It teaches us how to construct the ethics of love. Irigaray criticizes those philosophers and people who strive for the appropriation and subordination of the other, which is the focus of her entire intersubjective philosophy. According to her, in typical human society a ‘[l]ack of understanding dominates there. Compassion is rare’ (Irigaray 2004a, p. 196). Non-human animals help us in this since they enable our becoming and help us to learn intersubjective gestures such as love, compassion and hospitality. Non-human animals are even able to offer uncompromising help. As a person but also as a philosopher, Irigaray understands non-human animals as helpers – ‘What can I say as a philosopher, about these animal comportments? . . . in all the events narrated, it is always a question of bringing help’ (Irigaray 2004a, p. 199). Irigaray denies that this help is a projection of her own desires and feelings. No, this cannot be merely a matter of coincidence, ‘especially if all the signs of help received are placed in relation’ (Irigaray 2004a, p. 199). In this sense, the altruistic gesture of non-human animals could be thought of through the logic of relationship, interaction and dynamics between two subjects. In the words of Simon P. James, it was ‘an intertwining of bodily intentions, a shared response of two lived bodies to a common situation’ (James 2012, p. 5). Irigaray’s relationship with the non-human animal is shown as active, reciprocal and fruitful, as it enables interaction, help, becoming and spiritual rapture. This means that non-human animals are not only moral patients, but also moral agents, in some way. Whenever she was ill or going through a difficult time, a non-human animal, described as angelic, ‘appeared’ before her, giving her help, as ‘simply being there’ (Irigaray 2004a., p. 200). She writes that ‘the most precious and also the most mysterious aid has most often come to me from birds’ (Irigaray 2004a, p. 197). This happens since non-human animals are more receptive to certain phenomena than humans who have developed their mental powers to the detriment of the so-called more archaic zones of the brain? Capable of perceiving a call where human beings hear nothing, and of providing a comforting presence where more rational arguments would have neither appeased nor healed the suffering or distress. Where a human body or affectionate gesture would not have been able to have the simplicity of an animal presence. As pure as an angel, Rilke claimed (Irigaray 2004, p. 199).

An animal’s help is immediate, simple and does not threaten our freedom, according to Irigaray. In contrast, human help is complex, often given through ‘an instrumental and secretly hierarchical technique, because of an economy of debt’ (p. 200) as opposed to

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the help of non-human animals, which is simple and pure. As such, it appears as the proto-ethical understanding of one’s needs. Indeed, Irigaray understands the assistance of non-human animals as grace, as a merciful gift. (‘The comfort lavished by animals, especially winged, is as timely as grace’ (Irigaray 2004, p. 195).) It is a gift that should be understood as a gesture of generosity, mutual respect and pure altruism. Nature itself is nothing but divine for Irigaray, where the ‘communion with the real presence of the living’ is going on (Irigaray 2008c, p. 42). The refutation of the instrumentalization of the non-human animal is reinforced by the thought that Irigaray does not favour the domestication of non-human animals – ‘I do not like this relationship to animals very much, and I have only rarely, or briefly, animals at my home . . . I like animals in their home, living in their territory’ (Irigaray 2004a, p.  198). Elsewhere, she writes, ‘how not to understand that [the non-human animal] would truly be generous only when I contemplated it in a space appropriate to its life’ (Irigaray 2004a, p. 196). Although ‘Animal Compassion’ does not directly relate to animal ethics, it is very suggestive in that Irigaray presents non-human animals in the role of subjects. They are embodied subjectivities; they are capable of relationships with humans. The emphasis on the singularity of relationships is also important, that is, Irigaray places emphasis on individual subjects and her relationships with them. Irigaray does not speak about animal collectivity or a certain species of animal but refers to dialogue with individuals, with certain ‘friends’ (a cat, a rabbit, butterflies, etc.) and each of them evokes different relations and feelings for her. But where, for Irigaray, is the demarcation line for the subjectivity of others? What limits does she set for this kind of subjectivity? She even attributed a type of subjectivity to butterflies (‘A modest white butterfly seemed thus to assure me of its friendship. Perceiving to what point I needed its friendship?’ (Irigaray 2004a, p. 196).) She does not set any limit, as she says it is difficult to talk about nonhuman animals: How can we talk about them? How can we talk to them? These familiars of our existence inhabit another world, a world that I do not know. Sometimes I can observe something in it, but I do not inhabit it from the inside – it remains foreign to me. The objective signs that appear do not bring me the key to the meaning for them, the meaning among themselves. Not really, unless I project my human imaginary onto them. To make them simple objects of study is not appropriate any more than to make them partners of a universe that they do not share. What to say about them? Except to narrate signs of themselves that non-human animals have given to me? What I have perceived, received from them. To bring together at times what various authors, sages or traditions have already said. So, at first, to bear witness through relating (Irigaray 2004a, p. 195).

Irigaray is aware of the difficult task of describing a non-human animal. That is why she does not adopt a language of identity towards non-human animals as traditional animal ethics often does. Irigaray’s non-human animals are simply present, beside her, in relation with her, breathing the same air as she does. They are bodies in interaction with her body. She simply accepts their modes of being and of relation, and avoids limiting them to anthropocentric notions constructed upon human beings or defining their identity, as Tom Regan and Peter Singer do, to whom I turn my attention below.

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Considering the difference The irony of some animal rights philosophers and animal liberationists, who founded their theory on the same assumptions they are determined to avoid – hierarchy and anthropocentrism – has already been pointed out by Jacques Derrida (Cf. Callarco, Zoographies, and Derrida, The Animal Therefore I Am). Those theories try to unite the human and non-human beings on earth in a unique moral sphere which is designed after the human. According to the first and still most important philosophers from the field of animal ethics, Singer and Regan, ethical reasoning concentrates on whether non-human animals have characteristics such as self-awareness, wishes, beliefs or the sense of future.6 Consequently, both theories are accused of speciesism7 and anthropocentrism since, by broadening the category of human onto non-human animals, they humanize the latter (Cf. Acampora 2008, p. 31).8 They maintain the dualistic antithesis human/ animal, because they recognize that a binary and oppositional division between the human and non-human animal already exists. The only characteristic of non-human animals recognized as important is what is similar to or shared with human beings, and therefore they reject the uniqueness and multiplicity of animals (Cf. Braidotti 2006, p. 108).9 Non-human animals thereby become lower versions of human, and this approach both emphasizes and maintains the non-horizontal and hierarchic structure of the existential environment. This consequence was also true for the past philosophical perception of non-human animals (negative anthropocentrism) where non-human animals were viewed strictly through a human lens and found to lack capacities that are supposedly unique to humans (for instance, Aristotle based moral status on reason, Descartes on language, Kant on free will, etc.). For this reason, non-human animals were not given ethical consideration. On the contrary, Regan and Singer take some non-human animals (mammals and birds) into ethical consideration because they possess certain characteristics that humans have. The moral consequences of this approach are thus good for some non-human animal species, but to others – reptiles, fish or insects – it is speciesist. In negative anthropocentrism, the consequences are bad for all non-human animals. All the non-human animals are placed lower on the hierarchical scale. So, the two different declinations of anthropocentrism mean that the demarcation line of inclusion into the moral sphere is set lower or higher. But both forms of anthropocentrism construct the living space vertically; they are hierarchical, speciesist and exclusionary. Recent Western posthumanistic philosophies (Acampora, Haraway, Braidotti, Mazis) deviate from this kind of position by criticizing traditional ideas about rights and ‘pure identities’ (Cf. Maurizi, Filippi in Acampora 2008). Posthumanistic thought removes the requirement of assuming human characteristics as a criterion of comparison with non-human animals. The idea of accepting the multitude of differences of beings is the only possible framework for a deanthropocentred view and for considering the condition of non-human animals. New posthumanistic currents in animal philosophy want to abolish the negation and appropriation of the other that has been dominated for millennia (Maurizi, Filippi in Acampora 2008, Marchesini 2008, Marchesini 2010). The discourse of moral and political equality

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cannot ensure justice, which is something that Irigaray herself admits (Cf. Irigaray 2005a, p. 129). Ecofeminist Lori Gruen writes to this effect – ‘If a moral or political commitment is spelled out in terms of similarities that miss difference, then many will find such commitments alienating. One of the important lessons that feminists have learned from criticisms raised of these generalizations is how to think harder about understanding “difference” ’ (Gruen 2007, p.  337). In short, the focus of posthumanism is on the relationship and the diversity of beings, which rejects the premise of ‘pure identity’ of the subject. In similar fashion, Irigaray’s question on the non-human identity remains open, as she is not able to define it. How can we talk about non-human animals? What is a bird like? Who is it? Who is a cat? What does being a snake mean? What is a cow’s position? Irigaray’s thought reminds us of Thomas Nagel’s famous statement that we could never imagine what it is like to be a bat because we do not possess a bat’s perceptive abilities (Nagel 2000, pp.  391–414). We cannot describe what a bat is. Non-human animals inhabit a foreign world. What I can do to describe the other is just to speak about her/him through the relationship, describe her/him the way she/he shows her/himself in her/his relationship with me. I can actually describe only my own experience of contact with the other animal, which is what Irigaray does. Irigaray’s position can be equated with that of Ralph Acampora – ‘It is not even necessary to know precisely what it is like (hypothetically, in thought) to be that other subject-of-a-life in its own right. For our present purposes, it will suffice “merely” to arrive at some comprehension of what it means to be-with other individuals of different yet related species, because that experience of being-with gives us all the mileage we need for tracking crossspecies community’ (Acampora 2008, p. 68). What we can say about other animals is only the being-with syntagma. In short, Irigaray does not talk about the non-human animal mind (although this does not mean that she denies it, but claims it is difficult to determine, other than in our projections), so the experience of encounters with others is limited to encounters between bodies. The focus is not on the mental abilities of beings, but on the somatic in the relationship, the perception derived from seeing, hearing or touching the body of another. Irigaray’s approach is therefore not based on setting the conception of the human subject in the centre when defining non-human animals and according to which the plausibility of non-human subjects can be measured. Irigaray believes that every living being lives in its own world, in a space appropriate to its life-form. Irigaray is aware that a butterfly is radically different from a human, that a rabbit has its own way of living in the world, that they have ‘their universe’ (Irigaray 2004a, p.  198), live in ‘their territory’ (ibid.). There is the bird’s, rabbit’s, butterfly’s, etc. world.10 According to Acampora, besides humans, ‘there are other intelligent or sentient beings that engage in a whole range of different modes of organizing their own world’ (Acampora 2008, p. 40).11 Namely, the body is not only passively present in the world, but it shapes the world, its own world where it lives (Acampora 2008). This shapes in us a specific intelligence, that is, perceptive as well as locomotive abilities. Likewise, according to Braidotti, we are ‘embodied materiality’ (Braidotti 2006, p.  110), ‘environmentally bound’ and ‘territorially based’ subjects (Braidotti 2006, p. 41). Therefore, in posthumanism, it is inaccurate to say that intelligence or logic

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are the ‘highest powers attainable on the planet, and then measuring other beings in that light’ (Mazis 2008, p. 47).12 This posthuman perspective provides a paradigm of uniqueness, specificity, particularity and individuality, where the subject no longer has an identifiable and defined identity, but is a representative of difference. At the same time, the subject is inextricably defined by the context in which he/she lives. Therefore, seeing a being within a space that is part of their embodiment allows us to see differences within different contexts, and those are not judged as superior or inferior (Mazis 2008, p. 48). Irigaray’s understanding of non-human animals is similar as she emphasizes that there is an interspace, a field of difference between her/us and other animals. Since they inhabit another world, they are the representatives of the other that is unattainable for me, never completely recognized. Non-human animals represent the other; they are the ‘figures of difference’, as Deutscher establishes (Deutscher 2011, p. 71). Difference separates me from the other who is so different from me that I can never know him completely. I can meet the other and begin a relationship with him in a negative way, so I do not get to know him (because I never get a grip on him in his wholeness, just as I cannot at once see all the sides of a cube, in Heidegger’s or Merleau-Ponty’s sense). However, because of the positive recognition of difference, in which the multiplicity of beings is realized, it later seems disturbing when, in other texts, Irigaray combines non-human animals into a homogenous whole or at least into something completely separate from human, which is established by Hill – ‘The very gesture of establishing an interval between human beings and animals sets up an “us” and “them” relation that homogenizes animal species and tends to preclude a thinking of human animality’ (Hill 2008, p.  4). True, it seems that the word ‘animal’ is not used just because of terminological comfort.13 In addition, in certain texts, Irigaray presents the multiplicities of non-human beings with a common identity or group of identities (she uses the word ‘species’) completely separate from human beings, with reference to characteristics such as instincts or responsibility for one’s own actions.14 However, this does not mean that she considers non-human animals as inferior. As we have seen, she is critical towards those philosophers who deem themselves very superior to nonhuman animals. On the contrary, she sees some characteristics in birds, cats, rabbits that she misses in humanity. In my opinion, her presentation of the difference between human beings and non-human animals can be separated from the logic of hierarchy and understood as a possibility, a hint for connection, coalition and being-together. The alterity or difference of non-human animals is perceived and presented positively.15 Irigaray revaluated radically the non-human animal subject, which begins to be defined by him/herself. Irigaray’s non-human animal is not an imperfect copy of the human subject anymore. In other words, her point of departure is the notion that a nonhuman animal is different, but not lesser. It is not the other of the same, the other of the subject itself (Singer and Regan), but the other subject irreducible to the human subject, the other of the other – a subject which cannot be defined either, since it is impossible to know it fully. Irigaray’s dissolution of the traditional non-human identity is therefore realized, but it still has not reached the total deanthropocentred paradigm. Accepting of the

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alterity of non-human animals is not enough. Irigaray gives us a good ontological starting point, but it has to be extended from a conception of two worlds (human and animal) to a conception of ‘many worlds’ (which means an extension of worlds both in the human sphere and in the so-called sphere of animals – a cat-world, a pigeon-world, a female-sheep-world, a woman-without-children-world, a man-withglasses-world and so on), positioned on a horizontal existential level with humans. Such thinking is contained in Derrida’s neologism animot, which labels animals as an extremely heterogeneous set, divided by its multiplicity of characteristics. Such thinking imposes the goal of constructing a world in which many worlds are possible and for beings of all types (Calarco, Acampora and Braidotti also work on such a paradigm). The way of animal difference enables us to extend the circle of respect and include even insects within it (contrary to the majority of philosophers, Irigaray appreciates and mentions with kind delicacy small non-human animals as well – butterflies, even a hornet, which we all usually forget). Even though Irigaray has not written enough about non-human animals to give a more precise interpretation, it is possible to claim that Irigaray’s correction of speciesism is based on an ethics that does not start by caring for or respecting someone that is similar to me, but requires an effort in order to widen my responsibility towards those most different from me. Therefore, we could understand her phrase ‘familiars of our existence’ as the concept, coined by Paul Shepherd, of being relatedly other. Difference in the related other, as opposed to the deviantly similar, is perceived positively. We understand the related other as a being with unique and admired characteristics. The other is understood as the other, of first quality and not as deviantly similar. Deviantly similar would mean that the other is someone or something that should be similar to us but it manifests itself differently; namely, it does not show the characteristics that we consider normal, healthy, correct, advantageous. In the relationship with us, the other is abnormal. He is like a monster that needs to be dominated, or he is identical to us but of bad quality (Acampora 2008, p. 103). It is also true that if the beings on earth were absolutely different (as the old negative anthropocentrism advocated), we could agree with Acampora that ‘no interspecies relationship could be possible’ (Acampora 2008, p. 53), hence the idea of ‘familiars’. Despite the aforementioned ontological difference between the human and nonhuman animal, Irigaray maintains the Darwinian continuity among all beings, which is marked by sexual difference: The natural aside from the diversity of its incarnations or ways of appearing,16 is at least two: male and female. This division is not secondary nor unique to human kind. It cuts across all realms of the living which, without it, would not exist (Irigaray 1996, p. 37).

Sexual difference is an universal category that concerns almost everything in nature. It is a fundamental difference within nature. It is a mechanism by which life reproduces itself. According to Elizabeth Grosz and Pheng Cheah, Irigaray suggests that sexual difference ‘is an originary nonanthropocentric form of negativity that issues from nature itself ’ (Cheah, Grosz 1998, p.  8). Difference and negativity are already part

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of nature as the mechanism by which many plants and animals reproduce. In this regard, there is continuity between the human and the non-human animal in Irigaray’s thought since, in the context of sexual difference, they are both part of the evolutionary mechanism. Although widely condemned by many philosophers, Irigaray sees sexuate physical or natural difference (i.e., sexual difference) as prior to other differences. In her own words: It is evident that female and male corporeal morphology are not the same and it therefore follows that their way of experiencing the sensible and of constructing the spiritual is not the same (Irigaray 1996, p. 38).

In relation to this view, Sara Heinämaa writes, ‘what we meet and encounter, in our experience, are living bodies, animal and human, and we experience these bodies as being composed and as moving in two different ways’ (Heinämaa 2007, p. 250). Irigaray’s conception of the morphology of the body is as two – female and male. Although it would be very interesting to investigate how Irigaray sees the relationship between her and, for example, a female-cat (as Derrida did, cf. Derrida 2008), compared to a male-cat, it is not my intention to speculate about it here. What serves my purpose is that Irigaray’s encounter of the other always begins with the other’s physicality, namely, with the other’s body. On this subject, Acampora states – ‘the live body is the originary space where existential community between human and nonhuman organisms manifests itself ’ (Acampora 2010, p. 265). This line of thought was already outlined through Irigaray’s discussion of non-human animals. Being-with the other’s body is the theme of ‘Animal Compassion’, which I will additionally elaborate through the concepts of vulnerability and symphysis.

Being-with and being a vulnerable body The body, for Irigaray, is not ‘a simple “facticity”; it is a relationship-with: with me, with my gender, with the other gender’ (Irigaray 2001, p. 33) and the other animal, we could add. Being-with is not a static interval, but it is always functional, dynamic and productive. We have always been and always are subject to relationships with the other. According to Irigaray, we are placed in a being-with experience already by being born. Our first relationship is with our mothers. Our mothers are our first others, which means that every subject faces the existence or world of the other immediately. This happens the moment he/she begins breathing by him/herself, because before this, he/she gets oxygen from his/her mother (Irigaray 2008c, p. XV and p.  105). So, as Acampora puts it, we are ‘always already caught up in the experience of being a live body, thoroughly involved in a plethora of ecological and social interrelationships with other living bodies’ (Acampora 2008, p. 31). This primordial experience is the basic position which has to be recognized as such – existentially, phenomenologically and scientifically. We cannot liberate ourselves from relationships, not from any kind of relationships, not even those with non-human animals. Marco Maurizi and Massimo Filippi say to

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this effect – ‘We cannot rip ourselves from the relationship with a non-human animal because it watches us, it moves, it approaches us, it avoids us’ (Maurizi, Filippi 2008, p. 12). It approaches us with its body and we meet with our bodies. Every day, we are faced with relationships with others as animals. We exchange our gazes, space, sun, we share air. And when we meet, as Calarco brilliantly puts it – ‘there are various ways in which animals might interrupt us, challenge our standard ways of thinking, and call us to ethical responsibility – and many of these ways could be located more or less within the sphere of the proto-ethical’ (Calarco 2008, p. 120). Two beings who meet each other share a physical experience of themselves. The body in itself is mortal, vulnerable and this experience of corporeality is something that we share with other creatures. Through their somatic perceptions, they each feel that their own physical vulnerability is similar to that of the other. When we watch, feel, perceive, touch and enter in a relationship with another body/being, we are at the same time reversibly watched, perceived, touched, which arouses physical sensibility in me. The awareness of my body, and therefore my vulnerability, leads me into being aware that the other’s body is also vulnerable. Seeing the other in his or her environment means directly being sensible to his or her body. As Acampora puts it, there is a matrix of flesh or body that is pre-existential and it determines in itself the inalienable affinity of every subject/body with all the other sentient and mortal beings. It is a pre-reflexive perception of the other’s vulnerability. In the same way, I can perceive whether the other is older or younger than me, without them having to tell me their age. This ‘intersomatic experience (which is rooted in the corporal phenomena of reversibility and mix), carries with it the primordial feeling of reciprocity’ (Acampora 2008, p. 218). What happens in the relationship is a pre-reflexive perception exceeding the differences of species, in which attention becomes co-attention, since it is impossible to be just a neutral viewer (not only in the sense of watching but also in the shape of other perceptive abilities). In this context, Acampora introduces the term symphysis (cf. Acampora 2008, p.  56) with which he emphasizes the physical component of somatic relationship and separates it from sympathy (which is a mental mechanism) (cf. Acampora 2010, p. 272). With symphysis, he wants to stress that the experience of meeting another body is emotional and that it is a direct physical perception and an interpretation of the others’ bodies, but this experience is principally pre-reflexive. Symphysis means becoming or being sensible of the inter-zone, this interspace of coexistence in which our bodies spread and which has already been formed (Acampora 2008, p. 156). With symphysis, there comes compassion; in other words, compassion between species is transmitted through physical experience. In this sense, the body is a medium. We are talking about an original connection, which Acampora defines as pre-moral and upon which the cross-species community can be built (cf. Trassati 2008, p.  87). According to him, corporality is what opens us to our environment and this offers us a place for different species to coexist (cf. Acampora 2008, p. 216). Symphysis enables me to perceive the corporeal vulnerability of a being; the awareness of symphysis forces us to feel obligated to protective behaviour, while vulnerability raises concern and respect (cf. Acampora 2008, p.  219). When meeting a cat, I am aware that the cat’s body is vulnerable; if I hurt it on purpose, I break the symphysic world of life with cats.

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For Irigaray, the interval, the interspace of coexistence, the encounter of bodies is also determined by mutual assistance, by recognizing the other’s vulnerability. Thus, the ethical imperative is already present in the interspace. Her animals are capable of perceiving a call, sometimes even more than human beings – an individual nonhuman animal is ‘more receptive to certain phenomena than humans’ (Irigaray 2004a, p. 199) and ‘having at its disposition sense capabilities that we, as humans, have lost’ (Irigaray 2004a, p. 200). Another autobiographical story neatly explains this: Once, during a stay with a friend living on a high floor of an urban tower, I was seized by a disturbing and ambiguous vertigo. I tried not to let any of it show. But the cat of the household perceived my difficulty: he came over to walk between the opened bay window and the place where I had stopped during the time it took for my malaise, my anguish, to dissipate . . . – he was acting as lord of the manor, seeming to know what was suitable for each and to play his role in maintaining order in the world (Irigaray 2004a, p. 199).

The cat acted symphysically towards Irigaray – (s)he sensed her problem and offered her assistance, a merciful gift, as it were. There is extensive scientific and ethological knowledge, as well as personal experience that support this kind of intra- and interspecific assistance in non-human animals. We are all familiar with the interspecific cohabitation of our fellow creatures that live in our homes with us (mice, cats, parrots, dogs); there have also been cases of carnivores adopting animals of different species, or monkeys giving help to stray dogs, or laboratory animals of different species crowding together facing the vivisector. We know how elephants or gorillas linger beside their dead cubs, how they encourage and nurse them. Cows have reportedly been seen crying (literally shedding tears) over the loss of another cow too. All those animals do not have the objective knowledge of death (it has not been confirmed by a doctor or an EEG monitor), which is not even necessary because we can talk about physical knowledge, knowledge that is physically and emotionally informed. Symphysis functions also through the perception of the other’s breath(ing). I perceive that other’s chest lifts like mine when I breathe. I feel his breath like my breath, I perceive it in myself. We breathe the same air, we share the same world, or the atmosphere. For Irigaray, the interspace between me and the other is filled with air. There is air filling the space. Air is not only breathed, but it creates an ethical interval between us – ‘the one, the other, and the air between us’ (Irigaray 2001, p.  11). ‘Is not air the whole of our habitation as mortals?’ (Irigaray 1999, p.  8).17 And elsewhere, ‘you who flow between one and the other but without destroying either’s boundaries proper, you who respect the skin and nourish it, and who procure the medium for every contact, you who maintain life’ (Irigaray 2001, p.  116). Air preserves life but acts also as an ethical mediator between me and the other, between my body and his. Air makes symphysis possible. I exhale and the other inhales this same air and vice versa. This is a fore-feeling, a non-reflexive intercorporeal experience that prevents me from killing/hurting him/her and thereby interrupting his/her breath. When I see or touch him/her, the other being sees and touches me at the same time. This experience is originally conveyed with physical sensitivity. This pure, pre-reflexive feeling is proto-moral in itself. As Škof states, ‘From this

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point of view, breath functions as a rudimentary layer/element of (this) solidaristic community life’ (Škof 2008, p. 72). I perceive or feel when somebody dies, his chest does not move anymore. He stops breathing. Even though it was not medically proved that he has died, I know this with a pre-cognitive look at him. Škof summarizes this – ‘Sensitivity is our ability to take in our (prereflective) experiences; it is also feeling, seeing, understanding (i.e., our sentential attitudes) the lives of others, from our closest kin to ever broader contexts, nondiscriminately including also other nonhuman sentient beings’ (Škof 2012a, p. 90). Symphysis is direct physical perception that does not require words. Irigaray says that we need to cultivate our perception. According to her, coming closer to the other can provide sensory apprehensions that our culture generally neglects or under­ values – perceiving through our eyes or through our ears, which however does not obey the same temporal rhythms (Cf. Irigaray 2008c, p. 12). It is essential to evaluate the body’s perception skills, according to her. Irigaray writes: No word of a human declaration has touched me as much at least in the instant [as the amorous incantation of a nightingale] . . . Words often fail us human beings, there where birds are capable of rousing us with their song . . . Birds seem more advanced than we are in the amorous dialogue, and could serve as our guides at least a part of the way, if we keep still to listen to them  .  .  .  (Irigaray 2004a, p. 198).

It is precisely being-with a certain animal that opens us to our physicality, our perception, to a zone of live physicality between me and the other. Irigaray’s emphasis on the cultivation of our senses and perceptions carries a phenomenological value for the human–animal relationship. As we have seen, Irigaray believes that ‘our passions are educated every moment through the meetings with the other respected in his difference’ (Irigaray 2007a, p. 21). Irigaray thus emphasizes the reflexive form of sympathy/moral sense towards the other, unlike Acampora. For an ethical relationship, it is, according to Irigaray, necessary to listen and feel, to open ourselves to our senses – ‘Listening, feeling’ (Irigaray 2004a, p.  200), ‘welcoming animals, observing what we can learn from them and cultivating our sensory perception’ (Irigaray 2010a) are Irigaray’s commandments; this truly is the emanation of generosity into the ethical world. Likewise, Josephine Donovan thinks that we have to ‘listen to animals, pay emotional attention, tak[e] seriously – car[e] about – what they are telling us’ (Donovan 2008, p. 47). But listening to animals also means listening to their desperate call not to be eaten or exploited – ‘We should not kill, eat, torture, and exploit animals because they do not want to be so treated, and we know that. If we listen, we can hear them’ (Donovan in: Gaard 2012, p. 19). Feminists demand time, the readiness to compromise and the care that we give to our loved ones. Therefore, opening up to our sensory abilities, such as smell, touch, taste and hearing, even breath, which we often forget, since we favour the visual, can bring us even closer to non-human animals, not only by symphysis. This seems important when symphysis, as Acampora rightly recognizes, is not enough to ensure our ethical attitude towards animals. First, we must refute the speciesist and anthropocentric ideology that clouds the mind of society and let compassion and sensitivity in. In the encounter with the non-human animal, there is

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an exchange, not of words, but of air, of gaze, of sharing bodily vulnerability, and, using Irigaray’s words for animals, of ‘hearts, of thoughts, of all ourselves, a total embracing at some crossroad of our way’ (Irigaray 2004a, p. 201). At that crossroads ‘where the other awaits us’, it means ‘learning to meet the other and to welcome them in their difference, to be reborn thus in a fidelity to ourselves and to this other’ (Irigaray 2004a, p. 201). In Sharing the World, she also stresses that it is important to ‘Cultivat[e] our sensibility, including our corporeal sensibility, in order to enter into relation with a different other . . .’ (Irigaray 2008c, p. 135). So, physicality is a concept that proves to be important in the ethical sense for Irigaray as well.

Conclusion The purpose of this chapter is to make a contribution to animal philosophy, as well as Irigarayan studies. Irigaray’s work on animals can be understood in light of two concepts – difference and vulnerability. Seeing all animals as different, rather than equating them to the human subject, is a paradigm of respecting them. To recognize the other means to recognize the differences and the limits that separate us, and that makes the ethics of peaceful coexistence possible. The difference does not assimilate into the same. Consequently, the other becomes my reference point of awareness that the world is not reducible to only one world, to my world, to my breath. The other who is different but not lesser constitutes a challenge to the anthropocentric world. But to completely get rid of anthropocentrism, the model of animal difference should be extended to a model where human and non-human animals are understood as a multiplicity of different beings that cohabitate in the world. Such a line of thought makes it possible to build a cross-species community on a horizontal existential level. The understanding of vulnerability offered by Irigaray goes hand in hand with the philosophy of Acampora. His concept of symphysis can be perfectly incorporated in Irigaray’s autobiographic encounters with animals. In bodily proximity, animals offered her their assistance as a merciful gift. Also, their encounter was determined by recognizing another’s vulnerability. With such thinking, animals acquire the value of subjects in her essays and, most importantly, they are not something static, but rather an independent subject that interacts with her, joins in relation with her. In the encounter with the animal, there are forms of interaction and becoming for both the participants. Indeed, the non-human animals in ‘Animal Compassion’ are roughly presented as the subjects that have to encourage us to think about ourselves, about our humanity. They are the subjects that enable our becoming and they are also the subjects that offer us help. Such understanding attributes to non-human animals even a type of moral agency, as capable of symphysic activity. To sum up, one special significance of Irigaray’s teaching is also a positive contribution to the ethics of animal liberation, to the phenomenological approach18 of the human–animal relationship, but also for our everyday life. Irigaray writes on the virtue of human compassion. She teaches us how to contemplate animals and nature. Her approach does not concern cold rationalist rules but appreciates and promotes

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emotions, gestures of hospitality, grace and compassion. She is a vegetarian out of compassion and she admits that her ultimate goal is a gesture of universal hospitality for all creatures, even for the ones that are as small as a hornet. And let us conclude this reflection with her prayer, or hope, as beautifully expressed by her – ‘Let us hope that Buddha will lead me to universal hospitality and that every animal will become, by that fact, a guardian for me’ (Irigaray 2004a, p. 198). Let us start doing the same.19

Notes 1 There are only a few accounts where her writings on animals are analysed. An exemplar is the article of Penelope Deutscher on sea animals in relation to Irigaray’s reading of Nietzsche, ‘Animality and Descent’, and a conference paper by Rebecca Hill, ‘Becoming Bird in Irigaray’. 2 When we discuss the mental dimension of human, we tend to forget our physical and animal identity. As MacIntyre affirms, we have our ‘physical sides’, which we then blur, shape, control, regulate with culture – ‘we learn what constitutes politeness and what rudeness by way of sneezing, spitting, burping, farting, and the like’ (MacIntyre 2007, p. 61). 3 Aestethic contemplation of animals can help us to even greater compassion. Similarly, the perception of the beauty of nature can help us understand that we are a part of it, according to Kate Rigby. See Rigby (1992). 4 In Between East and West, ‘humans also have lost the capacity that birds have of singing in harmony with the state of the universe, of celebrating nature such as it is in the moment’ (Irigaray 2005a, p. 56). See also an interesting article about birds by Wendy Woodward (Woodward 2009). Cf. Cixious (1993). 5 Irigaray talks about silence, the irreducible silence between me and you, which enables the meeting and relationship, respecting differences (Cf. Irigaray 2007a, p. 37). Silence is the threshold of my world, the threshold to relate to the other as other, without appropriating the other. Silence is the meeting point between one being and the other. 6 Singer’s utilitarian ethical system establishes the criterion of being able to feel pain. But when reflecting about the morality of slaughtering animals, he opens the question of the ethics of killing a person. A person is, according to Singer, a ‘rational and self-aware being’ (Singer 2011[1979], p. 75), therefore, a being that is reasonable and aware of himself as a distinct entity with a past and a future, which means that a person is not only aware, but also perceives himself as a distinct entity in the past and future. It follows that killing a person who preferred to continue his or her life is immoral (Singer 2011). Singer’s list of persons includes all mammals and birds although he speculates about whether chickens are self-conscious beings or not (Singer 1991). The moral status with the criterion of person raises the aforementioned non-human animals to the level of human, which ensures them ethical treatment. Likewise, Regan’s theory of rights relies on the so-called subjectsof-a-life, which means that, like Singer, in order for beings to achieve moral status, they have to possess an articulate set of characteristics modelled after human (beliefs, desires, goals or preferences, sensations and emotions, intentional acting, remembrances, sense of future, etc.) (Regan 2003). He writes, ‘Some nonhuman

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Breathing with Luce Irigaray animals resemble normal humans in morally relevant ways . . . Like us, they possess a variety of sensory, cognitive, conative, and volitional capacities’ (Regan 2004, p. xvi). The subjects-of-a-life therefore have inherent value, which means that they are the addressees of the unalienable moral right to be treated respectfully; they are not reduced, in the Kantian sense, merely to an instrumental value for meeting human needs (Regan 2004). Regan refers to all mammals of one year and older in this way, since he believes that only after one year, mammals begin to have cognitive and emotional capacities, but as he admits, drawing this line is tentative (Cf. Regan 2004, p. 78). ‘Speciesism’, a term coined by Richard Ryder 1973, means discrimination against individuals of other species. Today, speciesism does not have the meaning as it had during Singer’s time (i.e., prejudice, such as racism), but it is understood as an ideology (Cf. Calarco 2008). Likewise, Braidotti says, ‘Singer’s utilitarian position consists in anthropomorphizing animals, by extending to them the principle of equality or equal rights’ (Braidotti 2006, p. 107). Nussbaum also criticizes Singer, cf. Nussbaum 2007, pp. 325–407. Luisella Battaglia, the Italian animal rights philosopher, warns that non-human animals need to be dehumanized; we have to accept their difference and specificity, we have to stop inventing wrong identities, thus exceeding human as the only defining paradigm. Animals have to be granted rights on the basis of their difference. Biologists also reiterate that each animal forms its own specific intelligence based on sensory capabilities and the environment where it lives (Battaglia 1997). In this way, following Acampora, we can reject Heidegger’s anthropocentric beingin-the-world (Cf. Heidegger 2010), which can be replaced with being-in-one-world. Here, Acampora relies on Agnes Heller and her work A Philosophy of History of Fragments. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Heidegger thought that animals have a poorer world or they do not have one. Cf. Caputo (1993). Jakob Von Uexküll, the nineteenth-century zoologist, already spoke in a nonanthropocentric perspective about the infinite diversity of perceptive worlds, equally perfect and mutually connected, unifying and mutually exclusive (Cf. Agamben 2004, p. 45). Uexküll tried to prove that there is not only one world, like there is not a time and space equal for all beings. This means that my world, that is, my time and space, is completely different from that of a cat, scorpion, swallow, horse, etc. Every being understands the world/environment through its perceptions, the environment forms it and it forms the environment. The term climaticity, used by Acampora, is defined by the dimensions of space and time which are the internal dimensions of the shaping of the primordial environment; from the physical point of view, they signify being-in-one-world intentionally. In his novel The Lives of animals, 1999, John M. Coetzee elucidates this way of thinking very well. The protagonist of the novel, Elizabeth Costello, summarizes an ape experiment that was conducted in the 1920s by Wolfgang Köhler. The ape named Sultan was deprived of bananas in various ways, until he reasoned how to obtain them. He was forced to think as the experimenter wanted, based on the model of human intelligence. He had to think like a human, in order to get the bananas. How can we talk about the beings that we do not respect enough if we do not start at the concept that has separated them from human, that is, animal? The problem is a linguistic one. As Calarco nicely summarizes, ‘as Georges Bataille notes, that the world is always richer than language and that language will always fail to do justice to the world’ (Calarco 2008, p. 143).

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14 Anyway, Irigaray mentions in another part of Sharing the world that what separates human from animals is that animals are guided by instincts only (‘desire remains or falls back into instinct, an instinct the connotations of which it sometimes seem more uneducated than in the animal world itself ’ (Irigaray 2008c, p. 4)), and that animals cannot accept responsibility for their actions/words (‘. . . but rather as an experience of a saying for which we are responsible. Through such a gesture, we become humans, women and men assuming their nature with a relational perspective that is different from that of the plant or animal kingdoms’ (Irigaray 2008c, p. 29)). 15 Also, in Braidotti’s view, difference is valued positively (Cf. Braidotti 2006, p. 94). 16 She has probably hermaphrodites (e.g., snails) or numerous hermaphrodite plants in mind as well. Some individuals change sex during their lifetime. In short, there is always a principle of both sexes. 17 Irigaray draws also from Indian philosophy, which considers breath to be one of the four main vital powers, besides sight, language and reason (Škof 2004, pp. 119–23). In the Vedas, breath is connected to life. In Atrharvaveda Samhita (AS 11.4), the breath is as a cosmic breath (cosmic prana) the primary basis, and as the first thing in the universe, it is the master of nature and the vital principle (Škof 2004, pp. 119–23). Irigaray believes that ‘Air and sexual difference may be the two dimensions vital for/to life. Not taking them into account would be a deadly business’ (Irigaray 1996, p. 37). 18 There is little literature on the phenomenological approach to the human–animal relationship. Besides Acampora’s Corporal Compassion, I can mention the excellent collection of Painter and Lotz (eds), (2007). All the contributions in the collection try to find the meaning of what it means to share the world with non-human others and so they try to find out the senses of being-with-animals or living-for-animals. The editors establish that the lack of phenomenological contributions on the nonhuman animal can be attributed to the abundance of phenomenological interest in the environment and nature. 19 I am deeply thankful to Lenart Škof, Emily A. Holmes and Antonia Pont for their precious help, suggestions and support.

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Contextual Breathing

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All of My Work is Performance: Irigarayan Methods of Breath for Dance and Voice Shannon Wong Lerner

(Communication Studies, Performance Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA)

I realize now, after meditating on it for several months, the meaning behind Irigaray’s personal message to me during our first sharing at the conference in Portoroz, Slovenia, ‘The Age of Breath: Femininity, Yoga, and Breath’. Madame Luce Irigaray began our conversation with the extraordinary phrase, ‘All of my work is performance’.1 She then left it up to me to sort out the weight of this inspired message. Despite the exhaustive number of books and articles that I have read to support my theory of Irigarayan performance (by Irigaray and her scholars/critics), this single phrase has become the confirmation that I have been seeking to continue my work. Madame Luce Irigaray followed with the foundational question that I could not adequately answer, ‘What is performance?’ She wanted clarification on how I was using the term performance within my conference paper, and to distinguish it from the more trendy use of the term, to better apply performance to my reading of her work. I offered the succinct explanation that performance was breath. And she responded that breath did not necessarily equate performance. It matters from which tradition this breath practice originates. She explained that readers of her work do not usually perform her work, but rather, they merely appropriate her work. Or, they ‘act within’ her work, failing to deliver a performance. She then told me that performance should present something new. It should create a new sense in those who experience it. The last thing that Irigaray said to me in our meeting was that performance is not explicit, or direct, and does not even need to be named for it to be performance. I knew then that if I were to write as one of those rare scholars who perform Irigaray’s work that I would need to unite my performance practice to my writing. This would have to be performance that is not merely physical, but also projects from within, through the emotion, the heart, and the spirit of my work. It was only then that I could interpret her words and write as performance. As I revised my purely theoretical paper on Irigaray’s work, eventually, I had to throw it out. I realized that I was regurgitating the critiques of other theorists, only to limit myself within the work that had gone before me, tied to the page. I knew

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that I had to apply Irigaray’s theories towards performance off the page before I could bring it back to the theoretical. As a yoga teacher, vocalist and artist-scholar, I decided to collaborate with a modern dancer and an opera singer to use movement, gesture, and voice to materialize Irigaray’s concept of sexuation.2 For the process of performing Irigaray’s work, this begins sequentially from meditating on Irigaray’s words, then sitting quietly with breath, and then finally, allowing for movement, gesture and voice to come from this meditation. I acknowledge the potential that any discussion about the sexuate specificities of women’s bodies and their identities, not treated carefully and methodically, could evoke notions of sexed, biological or ‘essentialist’ constructs. Furthermore, these are the same constructs that have been used in exclusion of women, towards linguistic/figural misrepresentation, but also real, material atrocities against women.3 However, I disagree with the charges of ‘essentialism’4 ‘hetereonormism/sexism’5 and ‘Orientalism’6 provoked by some readers of Irigaray’s work. First, as Naomi Schor has mentioned in her article ‘This Essentialism Which Is Not One’ and Elizabeth Grosz posed to Judith Butler in the interview ‘The Future of Sexual Difference’ – would it not be more productive to brave the difficulties or polemics that tend to accompany a conversation about women’s sexuation, as compared to potentially silencing those who attempt to address these issues?7 Second, if feminist scholars of any concentration avoid the word ‘sexuation’ because we believe it mirrors the ugly past of pre-feminism, filled with egregious events that have contributed to the struggle of women, women’s social and economic exploitation and their lack of voice, that does not necessarily mean that the material consequences of these structures, still present in theoretical and empirical contexts, will disappear. To help remediate this situation, I have applied sexuation in this chapter so that other women scholars might be able to include it in their template of theories and practices, to better understand the origin of struggles of women, and, thereby, to work towards the transformation and reconstitution of the term. In the spirit of Griselda Pollock8 and Hilary Robinson,9 respected scholars in the art world, I begin a conversation that travels between Irigaray’s key concepts surrounding breath, and foundational performing arts practices and pedagogies, through operatic voice and modern dance. With this framing, I integrate Irigaray’s work with embodied exchanges from both Marie Garlock, modern dancer and artistscholar, and Monifa Harris, opera singer and vocal teacher. As Pollock and Robinson make a point to render Irigaray’s key concepts legible to their readers through art examples, I have tried to include multiple audiences through this practice-based style of writing that presents theory step-by-step through the embodied acts of breath, yoga, vocalization and movement. I hope to be inclusive of readers who are less familiar with theory, while maintaining the interest of feminist theorists and interlocutors of Irigaray’s writing. In the first section, ‘Irigarayan Breath and Performance’, I introduce performance through Irigaray’s notion of sexuate breath. In the second section, ‘Maternal Dance: Performing Air Through Relational Identity’, I demonstrate an Irigarayan dance pedagogy. In the third section, ‘The Pelvic Exercise, The Vocal Cords: Operatic Singing

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as Divine Feminine Morphology’, I describe the process of vocal pedagogy through Irigaray’s example of the Annunciation. In the fourth section, ‘Cosmological Art and the Aesthetics of Breath’, I conclude with a reflection of dance and voice as feminine forms of cosmological art through an Irigarayan method of breath.

Irigarayan breath and performance Irigaray insists that on inclusion of the mother in subject formation and divorced of a masculinist symbolic system,10 a woman’s form of gesture, movement and voice might have a chance to develop.11 The ‘woman’ is that which we cannot know or perceive. ‘Woman’ is that which has never existed within science, philosophy, religion, culture and the arts because Western civilization has always circulated in terms of the masculine. One of Irigaray’s inspired contributions is that ‘woman’ is first known through the milieu of the mother’s12 body that makes breath relevant. It is only after acknowledging the mother’s body that the woman’s milieu can be found in language, culture and, most important for the purposes of this collaborative in this article, performance. For example, as women performers who attend to an Irigarayan method, we must move within and through the ‘blind spots’ of ‘woman’s’ performance – silence, listening and breath before engaging in dance and voice (Irigaray 1985a, p. 314). The grounds for this conscious development of ‘breath’ (as compared to the autonomic ‘breathing’ of the nervous system) must be located in a theory of performance rooted in the mother’s body. Within the collective’s practice and through Irigaray’s concept of maternal breath, I interpret our account of the feminine13 breath that resides within us. In our practice, we recognize that the neglected ‘sexuation of breathing’ in terms of the feminine must evoke the actual bodies of women into the culture of their belonging (Irigaray 2005a, p.  10). As the life force that we need to locate, circulate and then cultivate, we use feminine breath as a leading philosophical force as well as a material artistic practice. For us, we are in a mode of discovery and invention through the functions of our sexuate bodies. As women, we are cognizant of our sexuate specificity as we transform breath into dance and voice. As we embark upon this journey, as daughters and mother-figures to our female students, we explore the desire of our female bodies. It is a different form of pleasure that is not necessarily applicable to sexual desire, but rather to the exploration of women’s jouissance14 – that bliss which exceeds phallic pleasure as residing in the sexual genitals. Instead, our meetings, to read and workshop are couched in the sounds, joy and elation of laughter, wordplay and the bliss evoked from the transformation of conscious breath to dance and voice. The closeness of feminine sharing, of physical touch, of seeing the progress of a breath practice leads us to a generative understanding and sharing of the negative,15 an intimacy of breath that when shared will ‘respect my life’ as well as the life of the other (Irigaray 2005a, p. 12). We recognize a sexuate breath practice, as it leads into both dance and voice, as a materialization of spiritual virginity.16 For us, Irigaray’s concept of spiritual virginity is materialized within the reservoir of air that is necessary to sustain the kind of rigorous vocalizations of operatic singing, as well as the intricate muscular patterns of modern

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dance. It is our conjecture that, if sustained, practiced daily and upheld, this reservoir of air awakened through breath has a political and social value that will carry over into women’s artistic practice as well as audiences. In Irigaray’s book, Je, Tu, Nous, she carefully outlines the benefits of virginity, in terms of reclaiming the representation of women in civil law for healthy portrayals of women, and not for their exploitation, violence, or appropriation. She explains virginity as part of sexuate rights to attain human identity – ‘The legal encodification of virginity (or physical and moral integrity) as a component of female identity that is not reducible to money, and not cash-convertible by the family, the State, or religious bodies in any way’ (Irigaray 1993b, pp.  87–8). Although Irigaray also explains the protection of women against violence in civil law in terms that seem commonplace in our modern culture as, ‘the abuse of female bodies for the purpose of pornography or advertising; discrimination in the sexist definition and use of the body, of images, of language’, these particular women’s issues are fitting for our project (Irigaray 1993b, p. 79). These are quite radical claims, considering many popular genres of the performance world are saturated with sensationalism of women, for example, in the form of sexualized images, derived from pornography, violence against women in the way Irigaray describes, or emulating within the fine arts a traditional ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ paradigm in which women have been cast in the role of either mother, wife or sexual object.17 In contrast, through this collective, we hope to hold the development of girls’ and women’s bodies in the highest regard, to uphold their integrity and their abilities to know who they are, through their development that is close to themselves and other women. This integrity of virginity necessitates the potential for symbolic codes that figure prominently into Irigaray’s concept of the poetic. Performance is conceived within the poetic movement of Irigaray’s writing, ‘caring for the intention, the rhythm, the style, the breathing which animate and support the unfolding of the words’ (Irigaray 2002, p. xix). Similarly, modern dance and operatic singing have a distinctive vocabulary, that, when performed in the feminine, manifests either attentive to the integrity that we strive to hold for ourselves and other women, or claims a ‘neutered’ or desensitized sexualized approach to women’s representation. Select vocabulary for modern dance – sustained movement, momentum, contact and release, weight sharing, mirroring, and flocking; and operatic singing – diaphragm, vocal cords, air pressure, and the resonance areas of the chest, middle, and nasal/head have all been worked through in breath and feminine morphology.18 In the sections that follow, I go through select terms as concepts for the practice of modern dance and operatic singing, but also I consider each term to contain its unique form of thought that add to the philosophical arguments contained in Irigaray’s work. As Ellen Mortensen explains, within performance terms applicable to this article, ‘touching thought’ is extant within ‘poetic thinking [that] attempts to listen to that which has been forgotten or unheard in that very language or mode of thought’ (Mortensen 2002, p.  1). In the ‘language’ of modern dance and operatic singing, we attempt to discover its mode of thought specific to its composition as well as a materiality, corporeality, and when blended with a feminine breath practice, that which exceeds language/thought to create anew.

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Maternal dance: Performing air through relational identity Marie Garlock is a modern dancer, artist-scholar and graduate student. We have just started to interact with Irigaray’s writings through a combination of yoga, dance and voice in performance workshops. Through this integrated practice, I experienced breath through dance as a non-visual, tactile form of performance that evokes sexuate identity and maternal genealogy from the dancer and between women in dance collectives. In Between East and West, Irigaray explains that what the mother gives to the daughter includes that which cannot be seen. In the womb, this engendering occurs ‘invisibly and silently, before any perceptible word or gesture’ (Irigaray 2005a, p. 80). Irigaray goes beyond the conventional associations with maternity, ‘material life, of blood, of milk’, to help us think about the invisible sharing that occurs within the relational identity between mothers and daughters. This relational identity is brought about by breath. Irigaray explains that while feminine breath tends to be inward, masculine breath is ‘no longer shareable’, as the masculine subject tries to construct himself away from relations with his mother, the one who gave him life. However, the girl acts the opposite from the boy. She ‘keeps breath inside her’ because of ‘her physiological identity . . . relational identity . . . Born of a woman, her mother, with the capacity to engender and to love like her, the little girl possesses from the beginning, within herself, the secret of human being and of the relation between human beings’ (Irigaray 2005a, p. 85). In turn, rather than separation from the mother, the girl dancer figured in ‘Gesture and Psychoanalysis’ does not feel loss in the same way, and she does not merely use the codes that were given to her by masculinist training in dance. Rather, through her expression in dance, she plays at the edge of meaning, symbolized as the neglected relationship to her sexuate identity. Irigaray explains the healing of Western civilization through a depiction of dance and the refusal of a woman’s prefigured masculinst identity, which, then, necessitates the symbolic codes, knowing, spirit and identity passed on from mother to daughter. As Heidegger explained absence as that which resides at the edge of meaning, Irigaray asked if air was not the feminine other neglected in thought.19 This other presides as the mother within the girl dancer. Standing on that edge, the girl dancer uses the symbolic codes through the language of dance, she ‘is calling the other to her and playing with the borders that give access to the territory where she stands’ (Irigaray 1993d, p. 98). Irigaray depicts girls as constantly performing – creating ‘space around themselves’ as they ‘enter language by producing a space, a path, a river, a dance, a rhythm, a song . . .’. There, they are constantly at play with the ‘space around themselves’ rather than forcefully moving or ‘displacing a substitute object from one place to another’ (Irigaray 1993d, pp.  98–9). This creativity, this pull to change their environment, to interact, to relate is tied directly to a woman dancer’s relational identity. She does not feel loss at the mother’s absence. Rather, she wishes to perform it, to recreate it through her rearrangement of her geography, word play, movement and the call to relate to others. In ‘Gesture and Psychoanalysis’, Irigaray describes performing relational identity from the mother to the daughter as the girl moves in dance, ‘the daughter has the

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mother under her skin, secreted in the deep, damp intimacy of the body, in the mystery of her relationship to gestation, to birth, and to her sexual identity’ (Irigaray 1993d, p. 98). Similarly, as I move with the other women in the workshop, the sweat, odours and intermingling of women’s bodies in gestures that are mirrored, or through contact, resonate with the mother–daughter relational identity of feminine breath. Because we are attending to breath prior to and throughout the dance workshop, we develop a special relationship with its cultivation and directivity within our dancing. Even if we dance alone, we are still in relationship with those elements that surround us, the earth, and, more notably, the air. As we let the gesture of breath direct us, we notice that the air that surrounds us has a particular value, as negative space.20 The terms carried by the air, slicing and culling are all modern dance techniques used as a way to interact with the negative space surrounding our bodies. While dance is most notably a visual art for the spectator, for the artist, it depends highly upon the kinesthetic response of the dancer, unaccounted for in visual cues. While the beginner practices with a mirror, the more experienced dancer is expected to already be aware and attuned to his/her movements. In interaction, weight sharing and gesture – whether quick or fluid – modern dancers must acquire inventiveness, trust and intuition as part of their repertoire. In my short time with modern dance, I have experienced it as maintaining the space of irreducible difference in breath with myself and my environment, cultivating self-affection, feminine healing, as well as holding open the space of the negative for the other to exist. Modern dance, as one of its most defining characteristics, establishes a special relationship with the earth, often through an elaborate succession of movements close to the floor. Another defining characteristic is the preparation of the dancer’s body to perform through a series of breath exercises. The Alexander technique, within the same realm of yoga as a somatic art, relies upon the rootedness of the body in breath for its alignment with the ground. The most basic exercise starts with an awareness of breath to the feet under hips, a straight spine, shoulders directly above hips and the leading extension of the neck supporting the head that through a visualization exercise is pulled by an invisible string that extends into the ceiling. Here, through breath and alignment, the body may feel at once engaged and weightless. An important exercise of ‘breathing into’ different parts of the body carries the effect of a presentness and awareness, as gained from a breath practice, to entering into each of the dancer’s various steps. With yoga, we are taught to ground ourselves through our root chakra, only reaching samadhi after attaining perfect alignment, breath flow and energy release after a series of poses when we are in shivasana, corpse pose, lying on the ground. In our first dance workshop, as Marie Garlock21 interacted more with the air, whipping her body around in circles, seemingly weightless, I was transfixed by the floor beneath me. The more I became gravity-bound, the more Marie leapt into the space above and around her with abandon. Marie explained that usually she is the one on the floor, but as I took that space, she felt drawn towards the upright, the rapid breath-directed movements that required more use of the negative space that surrounded her. It was the unknown to her, which was most compelling, and for me, as I was just beginning to discover my dancer body in this new way.

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As we incorporated sound, Marie admitted to me later that she was nervous that the vibrations that came from her mouth did not fit with any tones from a musical scale. I admitted that I was equally nervous that the gestures, the movements and the transitions I made while unable to leave the ground were not from any dance steps that anyone had ever taught. Then, we realized that through Irigaray’s work, especially relating to the arts and performance, the exploration and meaning making presides with each woman, individually. I explained that the tones that came from her body would meet the musical tones when they were ready, as my gestures would too meet that of modern dance. Modern dance necessitates a non-objective stance to the elements, person or surface that presides before you; however, it also depends upon a feminine breath as an autonomous breath built within the dancer’s training that can engender and circulate within itself. As a subject–subject model, breath requires the dancer to accept the force of the other as much as she asserts her force. In this exchange, the other presides as a subject, with the space, and life force safeguarded and not possessed by the dancer. The exchange stays reciprocal, in consideration of the love, sharing and alterity of the other. Through this women’s collective, we attempt to cultivate a fluid economy, as com­pared to a phallic economy in dance that supports the male fantasy such as the requirement of waifish body types in ballet or women’s sexualized images and representation in other popularly understood forms of dance. Through the Irigarayan emphasis on women’s corporeality and experience, symbolic codes that once defined women’s ­sexuate and sexual identity within these art forms become radically reconfigured. In this section, I have offered an early development of the production of Irigarayan ­symbolic codes for women through a feminine breath practice that I have developed, followed by a modern dance practice that is equally attentive to women’s breath.

The pelvic exercise, the vocal cords: Operatic singing as divine feminine morphology Monifa Harris is a professional opera singer, and for several months, I have traded private yoga lessons for opera instruction. We have spoken about Luce Irigaray with each meeting, in conjunction to our lessons. Through the course of our time together, I have understood that the vehicle to reach the animation of voice is through the pelvic breath practice that protects the vocal cords, evoking the feminine morphology of the vocal student. As I train in operatic singing, I recognize an interesting parallel between Irigaray’s reading of the Annunciation and the concept of spiritual virginity and this holistic approach in vocal technique. I discuss this holistic approach through women’s sexuate identity in the ways in which breath is respected as animating the life of the singer, resonant of Irigaray’s concept of feminine autonomy through breath. Just as Irigaray explains that learning to breathe on one’s own is synonymous with ‘be[ing] born to

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my life’, learning to sing marks the transition from speaking through the dependence on another’s language/thought, to finding one’s voice (Irigaray 2005a, p. 5). In Between East and West, Irigaray describes Mary as an example of a woman allegorical character who co-created with God through a shared breath. As an effect of this gesture, she transformed her breath-based spirit into flesh. As Irigaray relates this ‘shared breath’ to ‘sexual difference as a spiritual path, which can lead us to love, to thought, to the divine’, I compare the animation of voice through the medium of the woman vocalists’ body (Irigaray 2005a, p. 83). Just as Irigaray has created a description of a feminine figure in biblical allegory, to fulfill a woman’s role as sexuate in the incarnation, women’s sexuate identity as well as feminine morphology should be brought back to vocal technique. With the pelvic breath practice, a singer can visualize breath coming from the pelvic area while protecting the most delicate organ in the vocal mechanism, the vocal cords that I have configured within this practice as the third set of Irigaray’s figure of ‘two lips’ of feminine morphology. Monifa and I both visualize the three sets of ‘two lips’ within our breath practice as a form of focus, alignment and an invigoration of feminine energy for yoga and voice. In this co-constitutive teaching practice of entre deux, Irigaray’s term to signify ‘the gesture between the two’,22 we are surrounded by the fluid properties fundamental for voice (Todd 1995, p. 5). Air is taken in as breath, but so is the mucoid that has been used to describe the mucous membranes as the ‘internal economy’23 protected by feminine morphology. These forms of fluidity are necessary for the entre deux in theory, language and material practice, the fluid substance that allows for two people to stay in the same space, shared while protecting their identity to not pass into the space of the other. As we build breath inside24 of us, in the reservoir of breath, we recognize the fluidity of the multiple functions of voice. For just as the two lips of the mouth or the sex, most prominent in Irigaray’s earlier work, relies upon the mucous to find each other in auto-affection, the two lips of the vocal cords,25 as an alternate form of feminine morphology, require moisture, mucous, sustained breath and a certain temperature to function for voice. This practice of vocal pedagogy refers to Irigaray’s reading of the Annunciation from Between East and West, an example in which a woman’s voice comes from the cultivation of breath specific to her sexuation. In this example, Mary is asked her consent26 before she conceives God’s child. Irigaray sees this announcement of consent that comes prior to the conception as that which allows for a woman’s voice, followed by a shared breath that creates a spiritual child. This ‘shared breath’ comes from the spiritual virginity of Mary as: ‘maintaining the existence of two sexes, of two genders, as source of biological and cultural creation’ (Irigaray 2005a, p. 69). Irigaray explains that it is a woman’s duty to breathe to transform that negative space that surrounds them, to bring unity and harmony between sexuate identities. Just as Mary shared her breath to conceive of God’s child, animating that negative space with the divine, the vocal teacher attends to the anatomy that resides within her only to share it with the student that awaits her. As both Monifa Harris27 and I give our consent to work with each other’s bodies featuring the most delicate parts, the vocal cords for voice, and the tendons for yoga, we actively listen to each other, both in voice

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and body language for discomfort or unease. Because the most important parts of the vocal anatomy are those that stay hidden from singers and that they cannot control, such as the diaphragm and the vocal cords, singers must develop their intuitive sense to remember particular types of sensation and feeling when learning to sing. Because we are both women with the same relational identity, we are closer to one another’s vocal anatomy and emotional ties to voice. We also share the same register, mezzo-soprano, as well as the dramatic mezzo voice type, an especially dark ‘large’ voice, similar in tone, colour and vocal issues. Monifa better understands my experience with voice through her years of training and can better assess my voice (because it is as if it were her own) to create vocal exercises for my development as an opera singer. Monifa explains to me that there is a different vocal pedagogy that considers the pelvic exercise through the practice of operatic singing. Before sound can occur, breath must be drawn in and seated by the relaxation of the diaphragm and harnessed by the activation of the intercostals (plus surrounding muscles), and it must begin with the pelvis in order to use breath for operatic singing. If the student has used her pelvis to breathe, she can build a reservoir of breath to let it out gradually to support higher pitches, sustained phrases and deeper tones. The most distinctive visualization and alignment exercise that Monifa has shared with me is the one in which we breathe from the pelvis. We tuck our tailbones as we exhale from the pelvis, and then inhale from the pelvis, feeling the muscle that reaches all the way up into the diaphragm area. Before working with Monifa, I had always experienced visualization as that which I embrace in silence with meditation and yoga. This has occurred as a technique of breath control, and in particular, holding the breath inside the body between inhalation and exhalation. To cultivate this reservoir of breath, I must bring energy and my breath from my root chakra into my pelvis and hips, align my spine, position my shoulders back and down, align my neck and head, all before I can continue my series of poses. But I had never experienced this as a vocalization or materialization of my breath and body, as that which could eventually translate as a feminine form of speech or language. In turn, Monifa explains to me that she experiences the pelvic exercise as the awakening of divine energy specific to the feminine voice, to the sexuate breath. Monifa explains that as a Christian vocalist, the Holy Spirit is always within you as breath – ‘The idea of breathing in the Holy Spirit is a form of renewing or refreshing the Holy Spirit’ (Harris 30 September 2010). Monifa explains that as a Christian vocalist, ‘the Holy Spirit enters her as an entity, that, in turn, enters through women to reanimate their voices with the feminine spirit of God’ (Harris 30 September 2010). Through Monifa’s concept of the feminine divine, breath runs over the vocal cords so women vocalists might build a system of remembering through the reconfiguration of feminine morphology as the spiritual. This remembering that begins with the pelvis could safeguard women against possible vocal trauma or abuse that might occur from the neglect of her spiritual virginity or feminine morphology in breath. While Monifa explains the feminine divine within the Holy Spirit as that breath that supports voice through the pelvis, I interpret this rendering through Irigaray’s concept of the shared breath of Mary as her sexuate and sexual identity, made divine at the moment of conception. While engaged in this practice, Monifa explained, that

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through breath and voice, you discover the divine part of yourself as a woman – ‘As you breathe in fully and “seat it” in your pelvis, this part becomes the most divine part of you, because it was the Holy Spirit that breathed life into you to give you life’ (Monifa 28 September 2010). Monifa explains that for her, this exercise within the concept of the feminine divine reconfigures breath as that spirit that moves through her as a Christian woman. For Monifa and I, we have spoken and practiced an extension of Irigaray’s theory of feminine divinity as the feminine teachings that are passed on from woman to woman, including the women with whom Monifa studied under in her career. This form of teaching is parallel to Irigaray’s concept of the mother–daughter relationship that should be figured for women’s subjectivity. In turn, we have concentrated on the integrity and safeguarding of our bodies as women singers – attentive to gathering consent from each other when trying out new yoga poses or voice exercises. Although I know more about yoga and Monifa knows more about voice, we do not use our knowledge to consume, overwhelm or intimidate the other, potentially having the effect of neglecting the truth and experience from the other’s body as student. And finally, we have found a form of scholarship and teaching within the resonant paths of the spiritual, the holistic and the creative that also attends to sexuation through feminine morphology. As we practice and speak about breath and voice within the Christian tradition, I wonder if our practice might be a way to access the feminine divine, both in Christian tradition and yoga practice in a way that might lend itself to the social work that we want to develop within this collective. I wonder if it might be a way for older women as mentors, and younger women as mentees to identify themselves in their cultural practices more clearly as women. To evoke social action within this line of thought, we hope that the sharing of our practices continue for the growth and well-being of young girls and young women through the arts.

Conclusion: Cosmological art and the aesthetics of breath This article is not a call to a ‘womanist’ movement or a claim that women’s art as a finished product is necessarily different from men’s art. But rather, this pertains to the groundwork for performing women’s art. In ‘The Age of the Breath’, Irigaray explains the difference in feminine breath pertaining to women’s closer ties to cosmological forces.28 If cultivated, maternal breath could impact all who practice to ‘unite the subtlest real of the cosmos with the deepest spiritual real of the soul’ (Irigaray, 166). This practice, which begins with women’s breath strengthens my interpretation of Irigaray’s larger project, as a reparation of speech to the real, fulfilling language’s debt to the maternal body that is reliant upon cosmological forces. Maternal breath is the very attention to movement, gesture and voice and the nearness to cosmological forces that I posit constitutes that art. If an attention to breath is an attention to the impossible, then we cannot claim to know what women’s art is any more than we can concretely know women’s language or women’s socio-political space. Irigaray confesses that breath and energy work

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carries with it ‘the problem of perceiving the invisible’, and yet, this illusiveness is fitting because  as a woman, Irigaray explains, ‘the true origin and meaning of what I perceive remains hidden from me’ (Irigaray 2008b, pp. 40–1). All has been ordered by men, and women artists have been trained in the masculinst arts. But we can come closest through Irigaray’s very important claim that language owes a debt to the woman’s body – and more specifically – the maternal. In the elemental stage of making language – through the mother’s body, what the mother gives to the child is not only the connection to the real through her body, but what remains to be unseen is breath. I would like to close with my sincere thanks for the gracious sharing of dance/ voice practice and embodied knowledge from my two collaborators, Marie Garlock and Monifa Harris. Through the process of writing this article, I have learnt a performance practice other than that of master–student, and rather from womanto-woman. I have learnt that performance becomes ‘the gestures and words that we have to invent’ (Irigaray 2002b, p. 153) to create harmony between sexuate identities that could potentially echo and move through a collective practice and community practice. I hope that within this collective that we might share our practice with other women so that they might learn the benefit of sexuation as the integrity of women, for themselves and those with whom they communicate. With this new thought, and through attending to these relationships for women’s integrity, deeper and more respectful exchanges and communications of love, I hope to continue these practices in our personal, public and professional lives. By sharing our work, I hope to hold the democratic values of equality, in consideration of difference to address the sociopolitical conditions of women’s exploitation; and, in turn, to better the conditions of women through the arts.

Notes Thank you to Madame Luce Irigaray, Marie Garlock, Monifa Harris, Ali Karim, Madelyn Wong Lerner, Elizabeth Grosz, Chris Lundberg, Rich Cante, Paige Cramond, Emily A. Holmes, Jonathan Foland, my students from the class of COMM 160 and the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill for the support to unite performance practice with Irigarayan theory and/or for comments and edits on previous drafts. 1 Meeting During Conference. The Age of Breath: Yoga, the Body and the Feminine. Portoroz, Slovenia. 9 May (2010e). 2 Irigaray explains in Conversations, her reason for the present use sexuate as compared to sexual – ‘. . . I use the term “sexuate”, rather than “sexual”, in order to avoid the all too frequent confusion between sexuate identity and sexual choice. Sexuate difference is more basic and it is more determined by birth than sexual choice . . .’ (Irigaray 2008b, p. 142).   Bostic, in ‘Luce Irigaray and Love’, also makes an eloquent distinction of sexuate and sexual – in French is sexue(e) as compared to sexuel(le) – ‘The former term represents a way of trying to think sex/self without necessarily referring to sex/ act. The use of sexue(e) to describe the human subject, then, is a gesture toward bracketing carnality while addressing identity’ (Bostic 2002, p. 606).

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  As Irigaray has said, there are many ways that sexuate difference can translate within sexuated interactions, such as in a relationship, for a woman as spiritual guide or as a sexual relation that transforms the carnal into a divine carnality. I focus on the sexuate embodied acts of modern dance and operatic singing, with women in self-affection, as well as the relational identity that daughters and mothers share. 3 Elizabeth Grosz explains the tenuous relationship that feminists have had to psychoanalysis and any association with signature terms as sexuation, because of its reliance upon female ‘objects’ of study (Grosz 1989, pp. 7–8). I would add that, for some feminist scholars, including terms as sexuation in their writing risks repeating misogynist, colonialist structures of power in which men were historically considered experts in the sciences, psychoanalysis and theory, and women and people of colour were frequently exploited and mistreated as their objects of study.   The word sexuation has appeared, not just with the terms that Irigaray uses in her work, but through her writing style. An Irigarayan writing style works strategically or tactically to ‘ “jam . . . the theoretical machinery” of philosophical systems, and to interrogate the “truth systems” or assumptions that uphold certain discourses as authoritative’ (Irigaray 1985a, p. 78; Grosz 1989, p. 139). In parallel, after mastering, and then navigating philosophical systems, women may assert positive value systems for their own representation. Guyatri Spivak has referred to this move as ‘strategic essentialism’, necessary for any discourse because every mode of reasoning depends upon masculinist constructs, including forms of phallocentrism, or logocentrism (Spivak and Rooney 1994, pp. 153–4; Robinson 2006, p. 191). Through performance practice, I have tried to embody and then write with and then through the term sexuation, including dominant discourses within dance and voice cultures. 4 Naomi Schor’s ‘This Essentialism Which is Not One’ in Engaging with Irigaray is still one of the most widely-cited sources on charges of essentialism within Irigaray’s work. Another recognized source that addresses Irigaray as ‘essentialist’ is Tina Chanter’s Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers. 5 Heidi Bostic’s article, ‘Luce Irigaray and Love’ in support of Irigaray’s larger project, is probably one of the most eloquent treatises that addresses heteronormism/ sexism charges. Bostic explains not only the background of Irigaray’s theoretical commitments in continental philosophy (unknown to many Anglophile critics who have asserted this charge). Bostic also implies that just because Irigaray does not say so explicitly, her work does not preclude the possibilities of queer or same-sex relations – ‘Nowhere does Luce Irigaray make the claim that someone of the other sex must be my life partner. Love between men and women need not mean a sexual relationship . . . Irigaray suggests that we all, regardless of sexual orientation, must learn to love across the lines of gender in order to build a new social order’ (Bostic 2002, p. 605).   In ‘The Future of Sexual Difference?’ Elizabeth Grosz and Pheng Cheah discuss Judith Butler’s and Drucilla Cornell’s move away from Irigaray’s thought because Butler and Cornell sense heteronormist/sexist impulses in her later work. (Though Butler is careful to label her concern, ‘presumptive heterosexuality’ and an ‘overt heterosexuality’, not heteronormism/sexism. It is Cheah who calls Butler’s and Cornell’s concerns ‘heterosexist’ in his defence of Irigaray’s ideas.) (Cheah and Grosz 1998, pp. 27, 28). This mention of the term ‘heterosexist’ marks the 1984 shift in Irigaray’s key concept sexual difference, to potentially include men in her theory (Irigaray 1985f, pp. 7–19). Rather than sexual difference referring to

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women exclusively, to decentre the masculine subject, and, then, to evoke feminine subjectivity, this shift centred on the ‘man’ and ‘woman’ couple, and a space of ‘difference’ as an ‘interval’ or neutral space, that could not be appropriated by either identity (Irigaray 1985f, p. 9). 6 Edward Said defines Orientalism as a Western construction of Asian cultures – ‘the Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences’ (Said, Edward W. 2003, p. 1). As a romantic construction from anthropologists, explorers and travelers over many centuries’ time, ‘the East’ was created as an exotic ‘other’.   Penelope Deutscher explains the critiques of Orientalism and multiculturalism posed by scholars Rada Ivekovic and Patricia J. Huntington in response to Irigaray’s book, Between East and West. Deutscher asks in her book A Politics of Impossible Difference – ‘But should we suppose that sexual difference means the same thing throughout cultures, at least sufficiently so that we could say that “it” does permeate them all . . . What is the status of cultural difference in Irigaray’s work?’ (Deutscher 2002, pp. 164–5). Using her background in philosophy and legal studies, Deutscher investigates Irigaray’s claims that a theory of sexual difference will help bring together and unify people from a multicultural and global set of differences.   For this chapter, I have attempted to bypass concerns of Orientalism in Irigaray’s work on yoga by focusing on the practical uses of Irigarayan work for dance and voice. In Between East and West, Irigaray has proposed yoga and meditation breath practices for healthier communication between women and women and women and men. This application avoids the trappings that Orientalism critiques offer – those of European or North American descent attempt to transcend their ‘Western’ positionality within an ‘Eastern’ panacea. Instead, this chapter acts as a proposal of Between East and West, and for performance preparation, towards a set of wellgrounded practices to improve vocal/dance training, pedagogical practice and communication with collaborators.   My use of breath practice resonates with the sentiments of Gail M. Schwab’s essay ‘Beyond the Vertical and the Horizontal: Spirituality, Space, and Alterity in the Work of Luce Irigaray’ in the volume Thinking with Irigaray. Schwab explains the purposes of Irigaray’s inclusion of yoga and her experience in India from Between East and West, as less of an accurate historical depiction of India through fact and South Asian theory, than as a way readers might ‘seek Irigaray the reader and thinker’ as well as for ‘those seeking models of transformation’ that might be fulfilled through such practices (Schwab 2011, p. 87). 7 In the essay, ‘This Essentialism Which is Not One’, in the volume, Engaging with Irigaray, Naomi Schor deconstructs the term essentialism between several different discourses and fields of study, demonstrating its popularity and misusage. Schor questions whether ardent ‘antiessentialism’ is not in actuality an ‘essentializing [of] essentialism’ (Schor 1994, p. 60). Antiessentialism, in effect, threatens to silence critical voices, that, if allowed to speak, might bring to surface ideological forces at work, and hence, offer crucial insights to the ways in which scholars might develop a more ethical set of discursive practices – ‘What revisionism. . .was to MarxismLeninism, essentialism is to feminism: the prime idiom of intellectual terrorism and the privileged instrument of political orthodoxy . . . The word essentialism has been endowed . . . with the power to reduce to silence, to excommunicate, to consign to oblivion’ (Schor 1994, p. 59).

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  In ‘The Future of Sexual Difference’, Elizabeth Grosz and Pheng Cheah both interview Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell about their critiques of ‘conservatism’ and ‘fundamentally conservative’ (Cornell speaking) politics of Irigaray’s later work (Cheah and Grosz 1998, p. 30). When Butler explores notions of ‘essentialism’ and Irigaray’s work, Grosz inquires how she uses the term, and the exact meaning of essentialism. She cautions against theorists replacing careful criticism with the overarching applications of such terms – ‘Doesn’t it buy into the question of nominalism, which is often linked to the question of essentialism, that is, is it a category that we impose on things that aren’t otherwise necessarily alike?’ (Cheah and Grosz 1998, p. 22, italics added). 8 For an excellent set of examples of feminist art criticism and Irigaray’s work, see the following works written by or edited by scholar Griselda Pollock (1999), Differencing the Canon; Framing Feminism: Art and the Woman’s Movement 1970–1985. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (eds), London and New York: Routledge, 1999; Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art. London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2003; Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey Sauron (eds), The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008. 9 Hilary Robinson, in Reading Art, Reading Irigaray translates Irigaray’s work as ‘readable’ and ‘legible’ for discourses about women artists and their craft. At times, she focuses on the poeticism and the potential discursive practices derived from Irigaray’s writing and thought. One of her most engaging chapters for the pedagogical purposes of this piece on performance and sexuation is her first chapter, ‘Mimesis’.   Irigaray’s interlocutors have hailed mimesis, as both a concept and writing style unique to her work. On the one hand, mimesis has been revered as a provocative approach for engaging dominant philosophical texts, and on the other, mimesis has been critiqued as repeating the historical violence done to women within these texts. Robinson looks at a series of women’s contemporary art pieces in terms of ‘productive’ and ‘maintenance’ mimesis. Robinson asks if these pieces, with their focus on sexual specificity, help to ‘maintain’ the structures that have marked women’s sexuality as inferior, or have they created something ‘productive’ for repeating and then transforming women’s representation to help form healthy and healing images? She determines the success of ‘productive’ mimesis in terms of its ties to genealogy (as a mother–daughter bond/economy) and syntax (series of readable vocabularies in which viewers can understand the successful reconstitution of sexed codes through art) (Robinson 2006, pp. 8–9, 19).   This chapter, although not explicit about mimesis, addresses resonant concerns as Robinson in terms of maintaining the health and healing of women artists in the face of violent, or potentially traumatizing historical contexts/content. We recognize parallel risks of mimesis in women’s contemporary forms of performance art, as we have recently faced while producing the one-woman operetta by our collaborative, ‘No One Hurts You More than S/Mother’. This operetta is figured through Irigaray’s work on the maternal body, and focuses on the violence perpetuated onto/through the maternal body and the potential of sexuate breath practices for healing and ‘keeping peace’ at times of great danger (Wong Lerner 2012). 10 The Symbolic is the Lacanian psychoanalytic phase of human development in which the male subject’s entrance to symbolic-societal networks of meaning occur through speech. His speech, marked with his desire to possess the mother

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comes out of a masculinist system of symbolic codes, such as from the phallus, or Law-of-the-Father. Speech, knowledge, rationale, identity based upon masculinism figured on the phallogocentric, the isomorphic, is only that which occurs on the outside, requiring the specular. Irigaray’s critique within psychoanalysis and continental philosophy is that the maternal, and hence, women have been left out of the Symbolic, language and culture, and therefore we need to refound society based upon the ‘two’. Irigaray makes the bold statement that reflects this movement – ‘Our interpretation of human identity is both theoretically and practically wrong’ (Irigaray 1996, p. 20; Bostic 2002, p. 604).   In response, for the purposes of this article, I look to Irigaray for alternatives to the masculinist symbolic codes in performance. For this article, the isomorphic functions as Irigaray explains, ‘the privilege of unity, form of the self, of the visible, of the specularisable, of the erection (which is the becoming in a form)’ of performance technique. This is the ‘shape and form’ women performers assume in practice, that does not necessarily resemble their sexuate identity. Irigaray reconfigures the psychoanalytic ‘lack’ of a woman’s sex into examples of a multivalent female identity – ‘Now this morpho-logic does not correspond to the female sex: there is no “a” sex. The “no sex” that has been assigned to the woman can mean that she does not have “a” sex and that her sex is not visible nor identifiable or representable in a definite form’ (Grosz 1989, p. 111; Irigaray 1977a, p. 64). In this article, I describe Irigaray’s figures of feminine morphology that appear outside of such isomorphic constructions, such as with the ‘two lips’. 11 Throughout this article, I reference The Way of Love and Between East and West, in both of which Irigaray describes inventing gestures and words as a form of representing women’s sexuate identity. In the case of Between East and West, daily breath practices and yoga practices cultivate the negative between those of difference. 12 In this article, the terms ‘mother’ and the ‘maternal’ does not refer as much to maternity rights and child rearing, but to the roots of Irigaray’s project as a feminist deconstruction of psychoanalysis. I refer much in the same way to ‘woman’. Much of Irigaray’s early work that focused on the ‘mother’ recognizes women’s exclusion within language, culture and identity that, in turn, describes a sexuated performance practice that had only relied upon masculinist constructs of women’s representation in the arts. 13 I want to make clear that I am using the term feminine through women’s practices that have been left out of the disciplines of operatic singing and modern dance. The feminine is not synonymous with ‘women’, but rather, I have purposefully and tactically chosen to use the term ‘feminine’ (figured through the morphological) to describe neglected practices of women’s performance. 14 Here, I refer to jouissance as that non-religious ‘bliss’ which exceeds the term, pleasure or sexual pleasure (as Freudian and considering primarily the pleasure of men). In her later work, I interpret Irigaray’s discussions on yoga and breath practice as a woman’s self-affection to be more appropriate for this collective’s project in the arts. This is as compared to the earlier discussions of jouissance as woman’s autoaffection. For an excellent description of jouissance, see Elizabeth Grosz’ index of terms from Sexual Subversions, pp. xix, 55–6. 15 ‘Hegel’s negation of negation is an obliterating absolutism that ignores the difference between sexes. Irigaray counters Hegel’s negative, or the finality of absolute spirit, with a place of presentness, “grounds of a groundless ground”, that enables a

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continuing communication that “is without definitive resolution or assumption, always becoming in the outward and return journeying between one and the other, the ones and the others, with no end or final reckoning”’ (Wong Lerner, Shannon 2008, p. 71; Irigaray 1996, p. 107). For this article, I use the negative in terms of the sexuate axis as the stage in which women performers place themselves. The negative, thus, as a woman’s sexuate figured space, does not blur the different sexes but rather, it opens up intimate understanding, union and loving exchange between women performers and the audience as well as other performers, their surroundings and props. 16 In early discussions of virginity, Irigaray has referred to Marx by explaining the term to signify women’s ‘exchange value and use value’, in which ‘women’s bodies – through their use, consumption, and circulation – provide the condition making social life and culture possible, although they remain an unknown to the ‘infrastructure’ of the elaboration of that social life and culture’ (Irigaray 1985e, p. 171). For purposes of this article, I address the sexualized images of women and underage women for the purposes of a male economy of desire in dance and voice. Irigaray explains that she reconfigures the word for women’s identity in her response to Judith Still for the article ‘Poetic Nuptials’ in the journal Paragraph, Irigaray describes her use and articulation of the term: ‘ “Virginity” is a key-word in the definition of feminine identity. But this word, which in fact concerns the woman, serves to define her from a masculine point of view, and in order to structure the exchanges between men. It was thus indispensable to give back to the woman a word which has served to alienate her. I define “virginity” as psychological autonomy and integrity, safeguarded by the woman herself. Virginity no longer alludes to the part of the female body which will prove to a man that he is the first one who makes love with this woman. Virginity rather signifies a capacity of the woman herself to be autonomous and to keep herself free and whole in relation with any one’ (Still, Judith 2002, pp. 7–21). In reference to spiritual virginity, Irigaray’s reading of Mary in the Annunciation as not accepting the role of a female receptor for a masculine spirit, but rather through integrity and autonomy, she grants her consent for the conception. In turn, through a woman’s sexuate practice, she becomes a co-creator for the incarnation. My use of spiritual virginity, then references that invigorated energy that comes from singing and dance when our collective has practiced/performed holding a parallel integrity and autonomy of our sexuate identities as women. 17 In her earlier work, Irigaray explains that women have been used for the ‘needs/ desires/exchanges among men’ (Irigaray 1985e, p. 171). Women maintain roles within man’s needs/desires as ‘mother, virgin, prostitute’ (Irigaray 1985e, p. 186); however, within these roles, the woman is only part of a currency of male exchanges, ‘offering herself as its material support without getting pleasure herself ’ (Irigaray 1985e, pp. 186–7). The same could be said of young women’s association to dance and voice through the higher distribution of the more popular genres, many of which focus on the commodification of women’s bodies for male desire. 18 I use the term ‘feminine morphology’ as a woman’s social, psychical and the historical body that is always already coded by networks of meaning. In this article, I devise the morphological for the ‘language’ that is reconfigured as applied vocabulary for the dancer and the vocalist. These vocabularies always tend to the practical,

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physical application of technique through the use of potentially sexuated, coded terms that are not necessarily ‘sexual’, such as the ‘two lips’ of the vocal cords. These vocabularies also attend to the creative, visual rendering to help students remember the physical placement of their bodies for these disciplines. For an excellent description of morphology within Irigaray’s use of the term, see Elizabeth Grosz 1989, pp. xix–xx, 113–19.   These vocabularies carry both anatomical references (as that which is given) and philosophical/linguistic significance (as that which is produced) that attend to the feminine morphology of the artists. I consider Elizabeth Hirsh’s work in which she explains the possibility of sexual difference as that which is ‘produced’ rather than that which is ‘given’ (Hirsh, p. 287). I differ from Hirsh in that I assert that sexuate difference, through women’s performance practice, might work as both (Hirsh, Elizabeth 1994, p. 287). 19 Irigaray, Luce (1999). The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger. trans. By Mary Beth Mader. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. In this book, Irigaray writes about Heidegger’s inquiry of man’s being, or of ontology as that which could be reconfigured through a feminine breath, or a remembering of air that figures in the feminine. Nair, Sreenath. Restoration of Breath: Consciousness and Performance. (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007). I also considered Sreenath Nair’s section ‘Being/and or Breathing: Heidegger and Irigaray’ in Restoration of Breath in which he refers to Irigaray’s work on breath and the conscious production of breath as feminine. 20 Todd, Sharon. ‘Curriculum Theory as In(ter)vention: Irigaray and the Gesture’. Paper presented at that Annual Meeting of the American Research Association. San Francisco, CA: (April 1995), pp. 3–12. While Todd’s space/time refers to the amniotic as that which holds student and teacher together within a shared space, in this article, negative space more appropriately fits for a performance practice of dance and voice. I use negative space to describe the active reconfiguration of the women performers to materialize that feminine space around her. 21 Marie Garlock is a dancer-scholar who is in the same graduate program as me, Performance Studies, The Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Marie is based out of Durham/Hillsborough, North Carolina. 22 Todd, Sharon. ‘Curriculum Theory as In(ter)vention: Irigaray and the Gesture’. Paper presented at that Annual Meeting of the American Research Association. San Francisco, CA: (April 1995), pp. 3–12. Todd refers to the ‘entre deux’ or ‘gesture between the two’ in terms of the sexuate gesture in between teachers and students for curriculum development (Todd, ‘Curriculum’, p. 7). Translation footnote on Irigaray’s essay, ‘Sexual Difference’ in An Ethics of Sexual Difference explains – ‘Irigaray plays on the double sense of entre, meaning both “enter” and “between”’ (Irigaray 1985f, p. 12). 23 Robinson, Hilary. ‘Approaching Painting Through Feminine Morphology’. Paragraph 25.3 (2002): 93–104. In the response to Hilary Robinson’s article, ‘Approaching Painting Through Feminine Morphology’, Irigaray clarifies the difference between morphology and fluidity. ‘Morphology generally refers to an external structure and mucous to an internal one. And it seems very problematic to confuse external and internal, especially for feminine subjectivity . . . Skin must protect the internal mucous world. It is its morphology which permits the economy of mucous to exist’ (Robinson 2002, pp. 101–2). My discussion differs slightly from Irigaray’s

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description of feminine morphology because I present the vocal cords as a possible figure of feminine morphology that appear as ‘two lips’ but are partly anatomically comprised of mucous membranes. 24 For this article, I provide active descriptions of sexuate identity and feminine morphology that allow for ‘inner’ performances. ‘Inner’ or ‘inside’ does not necessarily refer to the biological, but references the holistic gestures of the performer’s spirit, mind and body for self-development divorced from the isomorphic stance of performance as the end result, or the performance product. ‘Inner’ also refers to the internal workings of the vocal mechanism, with a focus on the mucous, breath and vocal technique to maintain the vocal cords. 25 See Irigaray’s ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’ in This Sex Which is Not One. Marie and I have danced from passages of ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’. References to the morphology of sex, mouth and implicit reference to vocal cords are present in these texts (Irigaray 1985d).   This refers to the beginning of my work on vocal cords as the third set of ‘two lips’, the feminine intermediary lips that reside between Irigaray’s figure of the ‘two lips’ of the labia and the mouth. I propose that the vocal cords offer a drastically different reading of Irigaray’s use of this figure that, in turn, better reflects her embodied style of writing. The vocal cords hence cannot be reduced solely to manifest neither speech of the mouth nor to the ‘essentialism’ of the labia. I refer to the vocal cords in this article through a holistic vocal pedagogy that, instead, uses breath to modulate singing. 26 In regard to consent, Irigaray draws attention to ‘numerous traces of this historical stage . . . in [French] legislation’ where ‘the legal age of marriage is eighteen for a boy and fifteen for a girl, in other words the age of civil majority for the one and the age of natural maturity for the other’ (Irigaray 2005a, p. 111). ‘This law does not pretend to acknowledge women as adult citizens making adult decisions . . . Without God asking Mary’s consent, we have ‘the imposition of a patriarchal order on a virgin adolescent bound to another man’ (Wong Lerner, Shannon 2008, pp. 88–9; Irigaray 2005a, p. 53). 27 Monifa Harris is a professional opera singer, vocal teacher and collaborator in the opera based on Irigaray’s work ‘No One Hurts You More Than S/Mother’. Monifa is based out of Durham, North Carolina and New York. 28 Grosz has described Irigaray’s use of the term cosmos pragmatically within Irigaray’s discourse on the divine and God, and within the context of her larger project. Her reading is also relevant for my use of cosmos and performance process and pedagogy. It is productive and necessary to the understanding of theological terms for this chapter to quote her at length – ‘The divine is the projections of self-chosen ideals, paths of development to a chosen ‘perfection’. God or the gods are not simply external beings, watching, judging the subject. God is, for Irigaray, the ideal or perfected self-representation of a desiring subject. At the same time as representing a future path, a kind of temporal horizon for women’s existence, God is also a name for an infinite space, a space which, in other terminology, is the cosmos. In order for woman to find/make an identity for herself, she must situate herself (and be situated by others) within a natural or terrestrial order as well as a cosmic or celestial order’ (Grosz 1989, p. 180, italics added).

11

Subjectivity and Sexual Difference: New Figures of the Feminine in Irigaray and Cavarero1 Diane Perpich

(Dept. of Philosophy and Religion, Clemson University, South Carolina, USA)

The need for new figures of subjectivity It is a commonplace of feminist theory in both European and Anglophone contexts to say that the neutral, universal subject of Western theoretical discourse is neither neutral nor universal but, in fact, reflects the interests and self-conceptions of a very narrow range of subjects – typically, white, middle-class, straight, able-bodied men. Two sorts of critical projects have arisen in relation to this realization, both of which focus on women’s exclusion from the domain of subjectivity but in quite different ways, and with different theoretical and political consequences. One side has focused on what might be called women’s de facto exclusion, pointing out that women have been denied full subject-status by a philosophical tradition that defines subjectivity in terms of reason and autonomy and then claims that women are capable of fully possessing neither. While this sort of critique may want to change certain aspects of how we view autonomy, reason or subjectivity, it does not see women’s exclusion as built into these notions as they are currently understood. Beyond such de facto exclusion, however, many feminists – especially those aligned with so-called French feminism – have recognized a further conceptual or symbolic exclusion which cannot be rectified by merely including women in existing cultural, political and economic practices and institutions. Moira Gatens makes the difference clear when she writes that the difficulty seen by the second sort of critique ‘is not so much that women are explicitly conceptualized as irrational but rather that rationality itself is defined against the  “womanly” ’ (Gatens 1996, p.  50)2. The problem is not just that women have been viewed as less rational than men and excluded on that ground, but that Western philosophical conceptions of reason and corresponding notions of a rational, autonomous subject have been constructed through the repudiation of female bodies and attributes coded as feminine.

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In texts such as Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray suggests that ‘any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the “masculine” ’(Irigaray 1985a, p. 133). Irigaray’s worry, reflecting the second sort of critique, is not only that women have not been accorded the status of subjects in the same sense or to the same degree as men (de facto exclusion), but more significantly, that the conditions under which (masculine) subjectivity has been produced in Western theoretical discourses have demanded the invisibility of the feminine and feminine desire (symbolic exclusion). The notion of a universal subject, she argues, occludes the possibility of sexual difference, denying the specificity of women’s experiences and promoting masculine modes of self-understanding to the level of universal norms. In a system that recognizes only a single, purportedly neutral subjectivity, woman ‘can only come into being as the inverted other of the masculine subject (his alter ego), or as the place of emergence and veiling of the cause of his (phallic) desire, or again as lack, since her sex for the most part – and the  only historically valorized part – is not subject to specularization’(Irigaray 1985b). As Judith Butler explains, for Irigaray ‘women can never be understood on the model of a “subject” within the conventional representational systems of Western culture  .  .  .  precisely because they are the relation of difference, the excluded, by which that domain marks itself off ’ (Butler 1990, p.  25). Women’s identities, by being constructed in opposition and subordination to men’s, do not express sexual difference per se because they express only a relative difference that effectively operates to construct and support dominant identities by serving as their inverse or complement. A critique such as Irigaray’s faces significant obstacles by comparison with one concerned only with de facto exclusion since it must make visible within the terms of the system it opposes something that the system has an interest in keeping from view or is constituted in such a way as to render incomprehensible. If Irigaray is right, however, and feminine subjects are excluded not just in fact, but at the level of the conceptual construction of subjectivity and the symbolic systems in which subjectivity figures, then strategies that work toward inclusion in fact only will be insufficient practically and politically as well as theoretically, since inclusion in such cases will be inclusion within a system built upon the erasure of feminine desires and subjects.3 For Irigaray, finding a place for the feminine – or for a plurality of feminine styles and voices – within sexual difference requires that dominant conceptions of subjectivity undergo significant change. As Ofelia Schutte notes, ‘We depend generally on the notion of the subject to construct our theories of knowledge, value, personal identity, and sociopolitical rights. If our conception of the subject is askew, so will be the values we try to defend and pursue in our civilization’(Schutte 1991, p. 65). In a 1995 interview with the journal Hypatia, Irigaray suggests that whereas Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One were concerned primarily with a critique of existing forms of subjectivity, her work since then has been occupied with defining ‘those mediations that could permit the existence of a feminine subjectivity’ and with ‘the construction of an intersubjectivity respecting sexual difference’ (Hirsh, Olson 1995, p.  2, 97). Thus, her most recent writings – those that are the focus of this essay – belong, by her own admission, to a more constructive phase of her work

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interested in making concrete proposals and developing new models of social and political interaction based on new models of subjectivity. A similar aspiration animates the recent work of political philosopher Adriana Cavarero. Noting that ‘in Western history, every redefinition of politics is a redefinition of the very notion of the subject’, Cavarero argues for a shift away from approaches that emphasize the what of subjectivity in favour of those that ask who the subject is (Cavarero 2002, p. 97). Cavarero belongs to an Italian tradition of sexual difference feminism (penserio della differenza sessuale) significantly influenced by Irigaray’s thought, but she is increasingly impatient with debates about sexual difference that either condemn it for its purported essentialism or save it from essentialism by aligning it with a postmodernism that leaves the subject fragmented and on the cusp of political irrelevance. Irigaray’s thought is liable to be dismissed no matter which side of this coin one considers since if she’s not an essentialist (strategic or otherwise) who returns feminist thought to a long-discarded metaphysical conception of ‘woman’, then she is a postmodernist in favour of multiple, fragmented, decentred subjectivities and runs up against the problem of how such subjects can also be agents in the sense that feminist political action seems to require. As Cavarero humorously sketches the dilemma in relation to her own work, ‘any Italian feminist espousing the theory of sexual difference, when participating in a meeting with Englishspeaking feminists, knows that if she does not pronounce the magic word “multiple subjectivity”, she will probably be attacked as an across-the-board antiquated, European, essentialist, metaphysical thinker. Additionally, she knows that she will cut the sad figure of someone not prepared for the coming third millennium. She knows, even better, that she will be tagged for who, effectively, she is: someone to whom, guiltily, the fate of postmodernist thought is not important. Just try it and see’ (Cavarero 2002, p. 89). Essentialists and postmodernists alike, in Cavarero’s view, share a commitment to asking what the subject is, and the differences between them come only from the fact that they give opposing answers to the question. For example, even as postmodern political projects purport to leave behind the language and the metaphysical commitments of Cartesianism, they continue to speak the language of the abstract what. Citing the work of Butler and Haraway in this regard, Cavarero claims that though they centre their political proposals on a ‘strategic re-blending of identities’, rejecting the idea of a single or universal subject, they nonetheless continue to rely exclusively on ‘universal concepts, general categories and collective identities’ failing to consider that these intersect in a unique and singular being who cannot be reduced to her group memberships or cultural inheritances (Cavarero 2002, p. 98).4 Drawing inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s notion of the political subject as a distinct, singular being amid other equally distinct, singular beings, Cavarero gives precedence theoretically and politically to the who of subjectivity rather than to its what. Who comes after the subject? The question is, in fact, crucial. Because, if it is true, that the subject is dead – and we [women] are all truly happy about it! – we should not at all content ourselves with the fragments into which it dissolved, and much less should we be happy to recycle its language of abstraction and its ‘whatifying’

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grammar in some other way. ‘Who comes after the subject?’ is then a crucial question in that it suggests that, after the subject, doesn’t come something else, something – a thing; instead, someone comes. . . . In sum, who comes, then, is the embodied uniqueness of the existing being as he or she appears to the reciprocal sight of others (Cavarero 2002, p. 99).

Summarizing Cavarero’s debt to Irigaray, Rosi Braidotti notes that her method is a ‘direct application of the strategy of mimetic repetition. She questions the patriarchal order by trying to locate the traces of the feminine as a site of male projection but also as a site of feminist reappropriation of alternative figurations for female subjectivity’ (Braidotti 1995, p. xvi). Irigaray and Cavarero turn to similar figures to find the resources to rewrite or reconceive subjectivity in a way appropriate to a politics of sexual difference. In the recently translated Between East and West, Irigaray draws on the notion of breath as it is found in Eastern yogic traditions to represent the possibility of a form of subjectivity that is embodied without being reducible to its material determinants and whose spirituality5 remembers and respects this embodiment. Moreover, the practice of breathing comes to represent non-hierarchical modes of exchange and relationship between subjects. In a similar manner, Cavarero employs the figure of voice in recent texts to represent the unique, embodied subject existing in a historical community of other, equally singular subjects. In what follows, I argue that these metaphors of breath and voice yield a reconceptualization of subjectivity as unique, embodied and relational, and that, when interpreted in light of Cavarero’s reorientation of the question of subjectivity from a what to a who, this newly configured notion of subjectivity can serve as the basis for a non-essentialist politics of sexual difference.

Breath and embodied subjectivity There has been such furore over the texts belonging to the constructive stages of Irigaray’s thought that an initial word about the problems raised in this connection may be in order before turning more specifically to the figure of breath. The style of the essays in Between East and West mirrors that of other recent works such as Je, Tu, Nous and I Love to You – short, programmatic pieces concerned principally with the possibilities for cultural and political change that would open the way to the recognition and expression of sexual difference. Most of the well-known charges against Irigaray’s work could easily be repeated in the context of this new book. There are statements that sound essentialist and that seem uncritically to promote a view of women’s divinity and closeness to nature; there is a tendency to speak about women in general seemingly ignoring significant differences between them; there are descriptions that appear irredeemably heterosexist and passages that subordinate racial and class differences (among others) to sexual difference. Indeed, all of the difficulties that Penelope Deutscher characterizes as sites of ‘Irigaray anxiety’ (Deutscher 1996, pp.  6–16) are apt to recur in relation to Irigaray’s discussions of breath, and to them can be added a troubling tendency to romanticize certain aspects of the Eastern traditions on which

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she draws, even though she takes a more balanced and critical view of other aspects of the same traditions. Ironically, whereas the earlier works were heavily dependent on the discourses of psychoanalysis and deconstruction as well as on the history of philosophy, and were consequently criticized for being inaccessible and elitist, the accessibility of Irigaray’s recent writings and their lack of reference to specific texts have made them vulnerable to charges of being oversimplistic and unscholarly. The approach taken here is not intended as a defence of Irigaray’s thought for, like Margaret Whitford, I often feel ambivalent about Irigaray’s more global pronouncements and out of tune with her associative, poetic style (Whitford 1991, p. 4). I agree with Whitford, however, that ‘the diversity of interpretations to which Irigaray’s work has given rise is itself an indication of a fertility and complexity which should encourage us not to discard too quickly this feminism of difference, with all its problems’ (Whitford 1991, p. 5). Ultimately, Whitford argues, ‘rather than imprisoning Irigaray in the limitations of her own perspective’, the best approach is one that engages Irigaray ‘in order to go beyond her’ (Whitford 1991, p.  6). In what follows, I try to adhere to this advice as I argue that despite certain limitations in Irigaray’s appeal to ‘Eastern traditions’, the figure of breath permits her to imagine an embodied, sexed subjectivity that problematizes the dichotomies that have traditionally structured Western notions of subjectivity – dichotomies as basic as mind/body, culture/nature and universal/singular. Elemental metaphors have been a staple of the Irigarayan imaginary since the publication in the early 1980s of Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche and Elemental Passions. Air was the thematic focus of Irigaray’s 1983 engagement with fundamental ontology in The Forgetting of Air In Martin Heidegger and recurs as a significant theme in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, I Love to You, and To Be Two. More recently, the figure of breath has had a prominent role in texts such as Le Souffle des femmes and Between East and West. The meanings Irigaray associates with air and breath have remained largely consistent over time and have primarily to do with mediating between regions or positions traditionally thought of as ontologically separate or opposed  – paradigmatically spirit and body, but also by extension, language and materiality, culture and nature, masculinity and femininity. Moreover, because Irigaray maintains that such mediations are life-affirming and that their absence has been detrimental, perhaps even disastrous, for women and other ‘others’ (including other marginalized groups but also the natural environment), she insists that they must be rescued from their status as ‘forgotten’ or ‘repressed’ within contemporary culture and the canonical texts of the Western philosophical tradition. Irigaray’s assertion that we have ‘forgotten air’ is modeled on the opening gambit of Being and Time where Heidegger remarks that even though we all tacitly know what we mean by the word ‘being’, when pressed, none of us can say exactly what ‘being’ means. Analogously, Irigaray suggests that though we all know how to breathe, we neglect to breathe ‘consciously’, which is to say that we fail to inquire into the meaning of breathing or to develop the connections between breathing and other spheres of human life and action. Most especially, she argues, we fail to see the indispensable relationship between poesis, understood in the broad sense of making and constructing

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culture in language, and the processes of nature or phusis, represented paradigmatically by maternity and birth: As we move farther away from our condition as living beings, we tend to forget the most indispensable element in life: air. The air we breathe, in which we live, speak, appear; the air in which everything “enters into presence” and can come into being. This air that we never think of has been borrowed from a birth, a growth, a phusis and a phuein that the philosopher forgets. . . . In all his creations, all his works, man always seems to neglect thinking of himself as flesh, as one who received his body as that primary home . . . which determines the possibility of his coming into the world and the potential opening of a horizon of thought, of poetry. . . .(Irigaray 1993a, p. 127)  

Remembering air thus involves remembering an ‘unpaid debt to the maternal, the natural’, though it is worth noting that air is not on the side of nature as opposed to culture but represents a medium which, in terms of its possible significations, is prior to this dichotomy and represents the possibility of retrieving a sense of their interconnection. What Irigaray imagines in her exhortation to ‘remember’ air is a culture that no longer denigrates and subordinates those actions, processes or bodies that it terms ‘merely’ natural while elevating others that it deems ‘properly’ cultural. Moreover, a culture that remembered air would be one in which exchanges between natural and cultural spheres might begin to break up the sedimented opposition between these regions in order to expose their interconnection and mutual dependence. Similar sentiments are expressed in Between East and West where Irigaray notes that we speak of eating and drinking as fundamental human needs, but rarely talk about breathing in this way even though the need to breathe is ‘our first and most radical need’(Irigaray 2002a, p. 74). Here, as in earlier texts, forgetting the importance of breathing represents buying into cultural and philosophical presumptions that opposes bodily, material life to the life of mind and spirit and valorize the latter at the expense of the former. Specifically, for the task of creating a culture that respects sexual difference, Irigaray argues that the ‘mistaken division between body and soul’ is reflected in a similarly distorted and mistaken conception of the difference between the sexes (Irigaray 2002a, p. 77). In part, the concern here is the familiar one that women’s bodies are allied with nature in a manner that coincides with women’s exclusion from civic life and political culture at the same time as it brings their bodies under the jurisdiction of those same spheres. But Irigaray is equally concerned with the disregard for sexuality itself as a relationship to self and others and laments that sexual activity is reduced in Western conceptions either to its role in reproduction or to the status of an animal instinct – both of which relegate sexual desire to a ‘natural’ sphere as they simultaneously construct that sphere in ways that impoverish it as a resource for ethical and cultural exchanges between subjects who cannot be reduced to a single model or form. Contrary to a Christian tradition that teaches us to despise the body for the sake of the soul, Irigaray finds in certain Eastern traditions, primarily the practice of yoga, an imperative to cultivate breathing as an activity of the self understood holistically,

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body and spirit together. She notes that for these traditions, breathing is not just a requirement of the organism or necessary for bodily health, it corresponds to a practice, in Greek terms, an askesis, that is integrally tied to conceptions of the proper or best way to live one’s life.6 The encounter with yogic traditions gives the figure of breath a further range of meanings for Irigaray, while still incorporating its role as a medium for exchanges between body and spirit, nature and culture. Irigaray reports that for ‘Eastern Sages’, the cultivation of breath ‘brings them little by little to a second birth, a birth assumed by oneself, willed by oneself and not only by our parents and a physiology that dictates its laws to us’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 74). In the essay ‘Eastern Teachings’, Irigaray notes that the first thing she learnt from yoga was to breathe, which corresponds, she says, ‘to taking charge of one’s own life’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 50). She makes the point even more baldly in an interview with Il Manifesto – ‘There is neither life nor relation without autonomy, and there is no autonomy without air’ (Irigaray 2000, p. 137). Breathing will thus become the figure for an obligation to recall one’s debt to the natural world and to maternity in remaking culture – ‘Breathing is thus a duty toward my life, that of others, and that of the entire living world’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 50).7 ‘Taking charge of one’s life’ is opposed to infant dependency, both in the sense made familiar by Kant of coming out of a state of tutelage and beginning to think for oneself and to rely on one’s own capabilities, and in the less familiar sense – though one that will be familiar enough to readers of Irigaray or Levinas – of letting go of forms of relationship that are appropriative or which ‘reduce the Other to the same’ (Levinas 1969). Put simply, the problem of appropriation is the problem of how to represent the other in his or her alterity without misrepresentation; and as Anthony Easthope has remarked, the human sciences generally are ‘now fraught with anxiety’ about this problem of speaking for the other (Easthope 2002, p. 38). The characteristic case of appropriation considered by Irigaray is the appropriation of women’s identities by men in so far as feminine identity is held to be nothing in and of itself but only a complement or inverse of masculine identity.8 Such appropriative forms of relationship, however, are also clearly at issue in encounters between different cultures and between different sub-groups within a culture. In Irigaray’s sense, to begin to breathe ‘in a conscious and free manner’ requires cutting the figurative umbilical cord that binds one to forms of life that are unthinkingly, perhaps even unwittingly, but most certainly appropriative of others. While she gives little in the way of specifics, it seems clear that she has in mind all the ways in which Western late capitalist industrial societies appropriate and exploit the unpaid or underpaid labour of women in all nations and almost all strata of society, the labour of men and children in developing nations, and various natural resources in the environment. She argues that, ‘As long as we do not breathe in an autonomous manner, not only do we live badly but we encroach upon others in order to live’ (Irigaray 2002a, pp. 74–5). Perhaps not surprisingly, maternity serves as a figure both for unhealthy, appro­ priative relationships and for the sorts of relationships Irigaray envisions taking place in a newly formed culture of respect for sexual difference. As long as ‘we do not take care, in a conscious and voluntary way, of our breathing’, we are said to ‘remain passive . . ., bathing in a sort of socio-cultural placenta that passes on to us an already

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exhaled, already used, not truly pure air’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 74). Here, ‘we’ are figured as a sort of monstrous foetus who refuses to be born, refuses to breath on its own, clinging to an exhausted womb that provides an increasingly unhealthy environment and with no concern for the mother whose body is used and used up in this process. Irigaray’s ‘we’ is reminiscent in many respects of Heidegger’s das Man, the ‘they’ of ‘they say that . . .’ or ‘they do things differently here’ – a they to which one belongs oneself as an indistinguishable member of the group. The ‘unconscious breathing of the group’ stands in stark opposition to another model of community in which breath and air are shared – ‘The mother gives her breath and lets the other go; she gives the other life and autonomy’ (Irigaray 2002a, p.  81). If motherhood and maternity are usually, and in Irigaray’s view, mistakenly or dangerously, valorized in terms of an ideal of the sacrificing mother who gives material gifts of blood, body and milk, Irigaray’s invocation of a mother who shares her breath is meant to invoke an exchange in which the mother is not sacrificed or used up, is not appropriated by the other, but remains autonomous even as she provides a means for the other’s transition to independent life. Thus, maternity is likened to teaching where the knowledge one passes on does not deplete one’s own knowledge and may even increase it. While Irigaray’s texts initially rely on the literal sense of these statements about air and breath – for example, air is necessary to human and plant life and we live in a time of unprecedented air pollution – the force of the claims is clearly meant to carry over to the other functions and meanings that will be attributed to air and breath as the metaphors are unpacked. Thus, for example, as breath is developed as a metaphor for the possibility of non-hierarchical, reciprocal (though not necessarily symmetrical) exchanges between subjects and as an element that undergirds intersubjective relationships between sexed subjects, the fact that we take air for granted and that economic imperatives in both the developing and developed worlds have overridden environmental concerns become, by extension, figures for the ways in which an economically and technologically oriented culture has been similarly detrimental with respect to cultivating sexual difference.9 Similarly, when Irigaray remarks the air we breathe entails ‘an unpaid debt to the maternal’, she means, first of all, quite literally that each person who breathes on her own does so thanks to the mother who initially breathed for her by delivering oxygen through the bloodstream. Ultimately, however, the fact that we take our ability to breathe on our own for granted, that we do not theorize its maternal origins in our accounts of human capacities or freedoms, and that our conceptions of autonomy do not recognize the manner in which prior relations of dependence make current forms of independence possible, all become part and parcel of what it means to have ‘forgotten’ air and its debt to the maternal. From the first, the use of metaphors has played a significant role in Irigaray’s methodology. In the interviews in This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray identifies metaphoricity with materiality in the sense of being possessed of a surplus or excess that overflows any containable or manageable meaning. Metaphor itself is thus a figure for the possibility of creating meaning outside of and in opposition to the systems in which such metaphors appear. Donna Stanton notes that Irigaray’s texts (as well as those of Cixous and Kristeva) privilege metaphor because it is ‘the trope upheld from

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classical to modernist times as the optimal tool for transporting meaning beyond the known’(Stanton 1989, p. 157). She argues, however, that all three of these thinkers risk inverting traditional hierarchies while leaving the operative dichotomies intact, thus risking ‘an enduring confinement within the parameters of the dominant [patriarchal] discourse’ (ibid., p. 169). Commenting on the identification of the maternal with the sea (la mère with la mer) in Cixous and Kristeva as well as Irigaray, Stanton protests that in the ‘evocation of fluidity, softness, movement, life, antithetical to masculine solidity, hardness, rigidity, and death, the feminine, the devalued term in phallologic, becomes the superior value, but the system of binary oppositions remains the same’ (ibid., p. 167). Although Irigaray does suggest that a culture that remembers air will be one in which, for example, mothers and maternity are valorized in new ways, her position is by no means as simple and wanting to invert existing systems of valuation. The appeal to air and the associated figure of breath are employed not merely to invert the hierarchical arrangements within traditional dualisms, but to destabilize the dualisms themselves, and more specifically, to serve as figures of a threshold between binarily opposed terms, across which differences can be mobilized and mediated. Breath thus joins a host of figures of undecidability in Irigaray’s corpus – the morphology of female genitalia which Irigaray describes as ‘neither one nor two’ or the notion of mucous she extolls as neither solid nor fluid, to mention but two well-known examples. Breath, as Irigaray deploys this figure, is at best quasi-material and quasi-spiritual, neither and both at once. It represents the rejection of views for which the subject is essentially an animal body endowed in addition with consciousness or, alternatively (though it amounts to the same thing), essentially a spirit or mind subsequently encumbered by body. In so far as breath is neither mere, dumb matter like a rock or a corpse, nor wholly immaterial or incorporeal, it augurs a conception of subjectivity in which materiality and spirituality, nature and culture, flesh and words are thought as inseparably intertwined. Moreover, in so far as breath is neither mine alone nor a property of someone else, but an element – which is why Irigaray writes that it is ‘impossible to appropriate breath or air’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 63) – it represents the priority of inter-subjective spaces and relationships over the individuality of subjects. Breath and breathing are the opposite of substances that remain contained and immobile, fixed in one place; breath is constitutively that which crosses boundaries between inside and outside, between multiple spaces and subjects.10 Writing of the work of the between (entre), Deutscher notes, ‘[w]hile a complex reconstruction of Irigaray’s concept of mediation is necessary to understand what makes possible the entre deux, the values it represents are clear: nonappropriation of the other, irreducibility of the one to the other, valuing the possibility of mystery between self and other, respect for what we cannot know’ (Deutscher 2002, p. 167). Deutscher emphasizes the alterity of the other and Irigaray’s conception of the relation between sexually differentiated subjects as a relation that respects and preserves that alterity (much in the vein of Levinasian ethics). In line with this interpretation, breath is interpreted here as a figure of nonappropriative exchange between subjects and as a model for a reconceived subjectivity and intersubjectivity with correspondingly new possibilities for understanding individual autonomy.

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Voices in relation to singular selves Adriana Cavarero is plainspoken about her commitment to a relational model of subjectivity and her suspicion that death-of-the-subject postmodernisms are not unqualifiedly useful allies in this endeavour – ‘In my opinion, Derrida’s deconstructivism belongs to this endless funeral of the auto-affecting modern subject: a very intellectual ceremony in which the relational self continues not to be born’ (Cavarero, unpublished, p.  22). While Cavarero is largely in agreement with postmodern critiques of the Cartesian subject that point to its false universalism, dualism and narrow conception of rationality, she is less sanguine about whether post-modern textuality, which comes to replace the notion of subjectivity, is really all that different from the modernism it purports to usher from the scene.11 Views of language that see it as the formal play of signifiers and signifieds are as deficient, in Cavarero’s view, as those that privilege its role as a means of representation or a medium for the communication of ideas from one autonomous subject to another. What such views of language share, despite obvious and important differences, is an abstraction from the spoken word and thus from the realm of singular, living, bodily voices. For Cavarero, ‘before and beyond consisting in a system of signification and communication, spoken language consists of voice’ (Cavarero, unpublished, p. 6).12 Voices, moreover, are always singular – ‘Every speaker has a different voice’ (Cavarero, unpublished, p.  6). They are embodied – a voice is ‘a living, bodily vibration that washes over other bodies in musical modulations’ (Cavarero, unpublished, p. 5). And they are constituted in relation to other voices and subjectivities. As a figure of relational subjectivity, voice mirrors the Irigarayan figure of breath in complicating the question of whether subjectivity belongs on the side of mind or of body. Voices are not merely the physical means by which interior thoughts are transmitted or exteriorized. Tone and inflection, for example, make up part of the meaning expressed in spoken language, marking the difference between an assertion and a question, or between a remark made jokingly and the same remark made in all seriousness or in anger. Moreover, even voices that make meaningless sounds – say, the repetitive phonemes of infant speech, a wordless cry of distress, or a laugh – are not, in themselves, meaningless. Such voices still signify precisely in their materiality, that is, as emanating from unique, living bodies. Again like breath, voice is understood by Cavarero as a ‘material, fluid substance’ (Cavarero, unpublished, p. 5). It enacts a ‘circuit between mouth and ear’, and while this circuit might be construed as running between the speaker’s own mouth and ear, establishing the self ’s relation to itself, it is first and foremost, according to Cavarero, a circuit that runs between the ego and an other (Cavarero, unpublished, pp.  6–7). It is a circuit in which one body affects another. Voice, like the body in general, in Cavarero’s view, is expositive; in so far as it is that which individuates and distinguishes the self, it simultaneously exposes the ego to others constituting it in relation. Neither unity nor fragmentation is the ‘truth’ of the body, or of identity and selfhood for that matter. Rather, it is the way each subject desires the narration of its life-story as the expression of its self-unity that makes the subject a who rather than

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a what. Theories of subjectivity that focus on what the subject is to the exclusion of who s/he is tend to determine the subject either as essentially unified (modernism/ Cartesianism) or as essentially fragmented (postmodernism), whereas Cavarero sees subjectivity as emerging in the movement between these poles occasioned by the self ’s desire for the narration of its story. ‘Between identity and narration . . . there is a tenacious relation of desire’ (Cavarero 2000, p. 32). ‘To put it simply, everyone looks for that unity of their own identity in the story (narrated by others or by herself), which, far from having a substantial reality, belongs only to desire’ (Cavarero 2000, p.  41). Narration does not translate into words the ‘objective’ truth of the self ’s identity any more than the undoing of a narration reveals the ‘objective’ truth of the self ’s fragmentation. Further, narration does not establish the unity of the self, but instead, presupposes it, while at the same time, revealing it as a fantasy or projection. Although Lacan is mentioned nowhere in Cavarero’s Relating Narratives, the story she tells resonates with Lacan’s mirror stage account in emphasizing a constitutive lack at the heart of self formation – ‘Indeed, the first and fundamental chapter of the life-story that our memory tells us is already incomplete. The unity of the self . . . is already irremediably lost in the very moment in which that same self begins to commemorate herself. This loss of unity gets turned into the lack that feeds desire’ (Cavarero 2000, p. 39).13 In emphasizing that, as a who, the subject is unique and unrepeatable, Cavarero recognizes that she is using terms that seem ‘perilously close to the modern conception of a unitary, substantial and self-referential subject’ (Cavarero 2000, p.  69). The uniqueness of the relational subject, however, is not attributed to the permanence of substance. In speaking of what the subject is, one speaks of the ‘qualities, the character, the roles, the outlook of the self ’ (Cavarero 2000, p.  73). Virginia Woolf, to use Cavarero’s example, is a ‘Eurocentric, white, lesbian, bourgeois, eccentric, feminist, etc., etc., writer’ (Cavarero 2002, p. 92). In this, she is not unique or unrepeatable since there are other authors (‘fortunately for us’, says Cavarero) who are all these things as well. Nor presumably is her uniqueness a matter of expanding or revising this list until one has a set of qualities that have never existed or coalesced in any other person’s life or history – Woolf, for example, as the author of The Waves. What makes a self a who is not a content or substance; it is not some property or achievement, but simply that the self is and is ‘an existing being of flesh and blood who simply appears to another’s sight and who shows him/herself to be such: unique and unrepeatable’ (Cavarero 2002, p. 93, translation modified). Postmodern accounts of subjectivity are right, in so far as they speak of what the subject is, to insist that identities must always be spoken of in the plural. It is obvious, Cavarero notes, that every human being is many things during the course of a lifetime and need not, at any given time or for any given audience, express its identities in a consistent and coherent manner. What any given subject is changes over time and is open to multiple interpretations and judgements, the ‘who, on the other hand – as the uniqueness of the self in her concrete and insubstitutable existence – persists in continual self-exhibition, consisting in nothing else but this exposure, which cannot be transcended’ (Cavarero 2000, p. 73). The unity of the self, for this view, is thus not

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a factual or substantial unity, but is forged externally through the self ’s self-exposing desire for unity and narratability: The self – to the extent to which a who is not reducible to a what – has a totally external and relational reality. Both the exhibitive, acting self and the narratable self are utterly given over [consegnati] to others. In this total giving-over, there is therefore  .  .  .  no interiority that can imagine itself [autoaffabularsi] to be an inexpressible value. What is more, since the scene of action is contextual and mutable, the reality of the self is necessarily intermittent and fragmentary. The story that results therefore does not have at its center a compact and coherent identity. Rather, it has at its center an unstable and insubstantial unity, longed for by a desire that evokes the figure – or rather, the unmasterable design – of a life whose story only others can recount (Cavarero 2000, p. 63).

Cavarero is sensitive to the linguistic difficulties posed by her insistence on a who rather than a what. She quotes Arendt on this point, who writes, ‘the moment we want to say who somebody is, our vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of the qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; we begin to describe a type or “character” in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us’ (Arendt in Cavarero 2000, p.  37). Moreover, Cavarero is clear that ‘there is no who that is not always already intertwined with its what’ (Cavarero 2000, p. 73). But neither point is sufficient to invalidate the claim to the who – ‘. . .no demonstrations or logical rationalizations are necessary to argue that each human being is a unique being with a face, a name, a story’ (Cavarero 2002, p. 93). The figure of voice is particularly suited to Cavarero’s notion of the subject as a who, since voices are always singular, but in a manner that is, from the first, inseparable from the universality of language and the plurality and contextuality of linguistic communities. In spoken discourse, general statements are announced in the voices of absolutely unique, singular beings. But these general statements and the universality they contain or express is itself already a funny sort of universality since it is itself already plural rather being than a monolithic, undivided one. In speaking, I speak a language that has been given to me by others – a language that thus always already comprises a plurality of voices and a consequent plurality of shades of meaning. The language I speak and the meanings I express are not entirely mine, though neither are they entirely foreign or alien. Thus, despite their singularity – or perhaps more interestingly, because of it – voices are inherently plural and relational. To speak necessarily consists in a speaking to that, in an important sense, does not originate with the subject but already involves and presupposes the other (and still other others) by virtue of the plurivocity of language.

Refiguring subjectivity Both Irigaray and Cavarero undertake to imagine forms of subjectivity that do not reduce all desires, experiences, bodies and modes of being to a single type, thus

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allowing for more than a single, universal subjectivity. Their claim is not just that women’s desires and experiences have been ignored or pushed to one side by traditional discourses on the subject, but that these desires and experiences are constitutively excluded by traditional constructions of the subject. According to traditional views, for example, race, sex, gender, sexuality, class status and family structure (among other particularities) are taken to be incidental to subjectivity ‘proper’ and thus to have no bearing on questions of knowledge, truth, objectivity, rationality, autonomy or justice. Indeed, the very notion of a subject (as opposed to an individual person) is usually thought to represent those shared, formal characteristics that are the necessary conditions for rational thought, action and judgement, and thus to express something general and universal about human beings. To introduce difference into the heart of subjectivity (and intersubjectivity), as Irigaray and Cavarero do, is thus no small matter of belatedly taking account of what was previously neglected, or of including women (or other Others) where they were previously denied admission. Rather, Irigaray and Cavarero point to the necessity of attempting to reconfigure the notions of the subject and subjectivity by conceiving them against a different and differentially constituted ground. In what sense, however, are subjects the bearers of difference? If difference is construed in terms of a property of subjects, the question quite naturally arises as to why sexual difference should be given priority over other kinds of difference and especially over those, such as race or class differences, that are equally socially salient in the current context. That is, why should we think of subjects primarily as sexed subjects rather than as raced subjects, or better yet, shouldn’t we give an intersectional analysis that constructs the subject in view of the interconnection of race, class, gender and other features that structure current socially and culturally embedded hierarchies? Another way to put the potential difficulty raised here is to say, what is at stake in speaking specifically of feminine subjects? Does the notion of the feminine simply stand for all socially relevant differences? Crucial to both Irigaray’s and Cavarero’s politics of sexual difference is the development of a figure of subjectivity that exhibits the subject as a singular, embodied and relational being. What remains to be shown is that the unique interrelation of these three terms yields a conception of subjectivity for which the notion of a sexed subject and a sexual politics need not be interpreted in essentializing ways or in ways that introduce a new hierarchy of differences with sexual difference coming out, inexplicably, as the highest rung. To be a singular being for both Irigaray and Cavarero is to be marked by differences that make a difference to who one is, but without the subject’s being reducible to those differences or to their sum total. Some differences, indeed many, may be incidental to subjectivity – whether one has an even or an odd numbers of hairs on one’s head, whether one lives on the first or fifth floor of a building. And though some of these incidental differences may affect one’s life for better or worse, they do not necessarily make a difference so far as subjectivity is concerned, or make no difference in the current cultural context. Differences such as sexual difference, however, exert a pervasive influence within every domain of contemporary subjective life. As Elizabeth Grosz notes, sexual difference ‘infects the most objective and “disinterested” knowledges, the most benign and well-intended social and political policies, the very infrastructural

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organization of institutions, group practices, and interpersonal relations’ (Grosz 1994b, p. xi). In insisting upon the singularity of the subject, Irigaray and Cavarero insist that subjects be recognized in their differences. And yet, the singular subject cannot be reduced to her or his differences. There is always something more, an excess over and beyond the particular differences which constitute the subject. This something more is not an ineffable je ne sais quoi, but is due to the ability of agents to effect changes both intended and unintended at the personal and collective levels, to the malleability of social categories and to the polyvalence of bodies as they interact with cultural constraints. Acknowledging the role of difference in the production of subjects does not commit one in advance, then, to an essentialist view of just which differences will play a role in subjectivity or to an essentialist view of those differences themselves; nor need it commit one to a simplistically binary account of difference (sexual or otherwise). Which differences mark or produce subjectivities in their singular expressions will differ with differing cultures, subcultures, historical and geographic locations, relations of power, and material and linguistic conditions. Indeed, markers that are significant or seem inevitable in one society may well be absent in other societies and may disappear altogether in future societies; likewise, differences that are incidental or barely imaginable today may come to mark future subjectivities. Further, if sexual difference in current contexts must be understood in binary terms, as permutations of the differences between male and female bodies and masculine and feminine corporeal styles, this does not mean that these will always be the forms of difference that determine this category and its lived realities, nor does it mean that masculinity and femininity have a fixed essence or that male and female bodies are biologically determined. To say that subjects are inherently relational is to say that they exist within a field of differences. That is, the subject is not an isolated existent who has relationships as external associations or bonds that it can take on or give up as a matter of will; the subject is its relations in the sense of being constituted by them in ways that, while malleable, are not wholly up to it to control, either as a matter of fact or with respect to their personal and social significance. Moreover, singularity is not in tension with relationality but is part and parcel of relational subjectivity since it is my relations that constitute me as this singular subject rather than another. To have this life story rather than another is to be the daughter of this mother and father, to belong to this class, race and gender, to have this nationality, speak this language and to have benefited from a particular education, among other specificities. Such relations are by no means incidental to the actions and judgements the subject engages in or to the knowledge she can claim. Indeed, what counts as a rational course of action or a considered judgement will depend on the ways in which such relationships position one visà-vis others and society in general. While Irigaray’s favourite example of this is the mother–daughter relationship and the significance that comes from being of the same sex as one’s mother rather than a different sex, cultural anthropology has shown that all kinship relations constitute the subject in this socially mediated way. To be a brother or a son, a sister or a daughter is not a matter of biology but of the interaction of cultural meanings with biological or natural categories. Who counts as one’s sister

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or brother, father, mother, cousin . . ., and what one is thought to owe to this other in the way of material support, loyalty, obedience and love is a matter of how kinship is socially organized, and how a given culture interprets and assigns significance to biological facts. Class, race, gender – these are not in any simple fashion on the side of ‘social construction’ any more than they are wholly or simply on the side of ‘nature’ or biology; rather, they exist at the intersection and through the co-implication of ‘cultural’ and ‘biological’ relations.14 Singularity and relationality presuppose not just that the subject has a body but that body and subjectivity are non-reductively inseparable. To say that the subject is embodied is to say that it is an existent for whom the body is the lived site of subjective significations. Bodies singularize subjects in the double sense of individuating them and of being the locus where differences are produced. Many, perhaps even all, of the differences that we find socially salient – for example, sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, nationality – are ‘written’ on the body. In every case, it is particular kinds of bodies (bodies of women and men, blacks and whites, workers and owners, gays and straights, Muslims and Christians, Jews and Germans) that are subject to legal and cultural policies, deemed worth saving or protecting, separated from or included within social institutions. Embodiment is that which exposes us to nature and culture alike and which effects our relationships to others. In their discussions of breath and voice, Irigaray and Cavarero both stress the material quality of relationships and the manner in which embodiment gives them their specific forms. As Cavarero emphasizes, identity is at once expositive and relational – to appear is to appear to someone, and subjects ‘appear to each other reciprocally – first of all in their corporeal materiality and as creatures endowed with sensory organs’ (Cavarero 2000, p. 20). Taken together, singularity, relationality and embodiment imply that there is no universal subject as such. But what do they imply for sexual difference and the political and symbolic problem of its exclusion? How can singular subjects be sexed subjects? Does the qualification ‘sexed’ detract from or contradict the notion of a subject who is singular and unique? Or, is it rather the case that a subject cannot be seen as singular unless she is recognized as sexed? Irigaray’s later philosophy especially appears to have a conflicting message for readers on this point. Consider in this regard the following claim found in Between East and West – ‘The human species is made up of two genders, irreducibly different, attracted to one another by the mystery that they represent for one another’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 84). On the one hand, this statement appears to defend a fairly conservative view of sexual difference, retaining a strong binary organization and, with the reference to the ‘human species’, seeming to base sexual difference in biological or natural fact. On the other hand, sexual attraction is not put down to a ‘natural’ or ‘biological’ ‘instinct’ (all problematic terms, at best) but is said to be a function of the ‘mystery’ that each gender is for the other, thus bearing a reference to the non-appropriable alterity of the other. To put the ambiguity in Cavarero’s terms, those moments that seem most essentialist in Irigaray’s text are also those that seem to make of sexual difference a what, an abstract property or quality of the subject, while those that move away from and problematize any possible essentialism are those that speak the language of the subject as a who.

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Irigaray’s later work might be said to position gender or sexed subjectivity between the what and the who, between the abstract and concrete – a position that would be in accord with the emphasis in these same works on sexual difference as a threshold. I Love to You, for example, describes sexual difference as a ‘living universal’, which is to say a ‘universal related to our real person’ – ‘Each man and each woman is a particular individual, but universal through their gender’ (Irigaray 1996, p. 51). Being sexed or gendered, according to Irigaray, puts an end, first of all, to the possibility of any subject standing in for all subjects; thus, it puts an end to the myth of a truly neutral, universal subject (seeming, thus, to point to the who). It also puts the lie, however, to the idea of a subject whose relation to itself is direct and unmediated, since every self-relation is mediated by gender (genre) and the individual ego is not in control of the meanings and social expectations that come with belonging to a gender. No one subject can represent subjectivity simply as such since each is already marked by the disappropriation of gender; the ego is never simply an ‘I’ but always this man or this woman. And for the same reason, the ‘I’ is never only an absolutely concrete individual, a pure me, since by virtue of belonging to a gender, one belongs to a general category – ‘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 one’s self ’ (Irigaray 1996, p. 106). In Relating Narratives, Cavarero argues explicitly for sexual difference as belonging to the who or ipseity of subjectivity rather than being a quality of the subject – ‘From birth, the uniqueness which appears, and which provokes the fundamental question “who are you?”, is an embodied uniqueness and therefore sexed’ (Cavarero 2000, p. 61). And more explicitly still, ‘sexual difference does not qualify the existent, it does not specify the what, but rather embodies the newborn’s uniqueness from the moment of this inaugural appearance’ (Cavarero 2000, p. 38). But Cavarero is equally aware of the way in which gender identity in a sexist society produces a ‘contradictory effect’ since it pushes simultaneously towards the concrete and the abstract. Discussing the consciousness-raising15 groups of the seventies in Italy, Cavarero remarks that the recognition of sexual difference that was the desideratum of these groups put the women in them at risk for taking their group solidarity with other women as a new self-identity. Rather than coming through such practices to an awareness of the who of subjectivity, the risk was that in them, one what replaces another. The empathy between women ‘risks producing a substance. Put simply, who I am and who you are seem to surrender to the urgency of the question of what Woman is’ (Cavarero 2000, p. 60). Focusing on who rather than what the subject is makes a difference to the place one accords to sexual difference. If sexual difference is ultimately taken to be some thing, and thus taken to be a quality or property of the subject, the politics based on it continues to be exclusionary in both senses outlined at the outset of this essay. Any definition of the subject in terms of properties is bound to leave some individuals stranded on the outskirts of the definition, without recognition for the particular way in which their subjectivity differs or deviates from the created norm. This leads to one of the most paradoxical dimensions of Cavarero’s reorientation of politics towards the who, but also to that dimension of it which, in my view, makes it such an appealing

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and promising view. Strangely, though Cavarero pursues her political path in the name of a feminist politics of sexual difference, sexual identities (whether these are in terms of sex, gender or sexual orientation) become secondary from a political perspective. Collective identities (woman, lesbian), in Cavarero’s new political schema, are not the endpoint or goal of political processes or the formation of political groups; rather, they have a preliminary role in opening up the political spaces in which unique voices can then be heard. It is a common identity – for example, ‘lesbian, philosopher, communist, etc’. – that brings a group of women together to create a shared political space, but the identity that is ‘staked’ in such a place is not the collective identity but the unique, embodied, relational who of each woman (Cavarero 2002, p. 101). The political voice of the who is not a lone voice in the wilderness nor the voice of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness that necessarily misrecognizes itself when the law of its own desire is raised to the level of a universal. Nor is it a voice of narrow self-interest that joins with others only to further its own private ends or to secure a place for its version of the good. The political agent whose voice resounds in Cavarero’s political landscape is a voice forged in the context of relationships that constitute the self as a unique being among other equally unique beings. It is not beholden to the collective or to genre, but neither can it ignore or dismiss them as irrelevant. As Cavarero emphasizes, when she argues that politics needs to be reoriented by the question of the who instead of the what, the ‘instead’ should be understood not as an adversative but as a matter of priority. ‘To wit’, she says, ‘I am not talking about the negation of common identities or underestimating their strategic value. I am simply not assuming them to be constitutive, primary, or even exclusive elements of political agency’ (Cavarero 2002, pp. 100–1). Political agency is the agency of the one who lives a singular, unique, unrepeatable existence and it is in the name of this singularity that the agent claims political rights, some of which will be the familiar rights of modern liberalism (e.g., the right to freedom of expression), others of which can as yet be only vaguely imagined or expressed. Collective identities are not denied by this view, but their role has changed from being that in virtue of which rights are claimed to being the effective means that open the political space in which the claims of singular voices become intelligible and more likely to be heard. Thus, for Cavarero, explicitly, and for Irigaray, when read alongside the work of her friend and colleague, the possibility of a politics that recognizes and respects sexual difference thus depends on the development of a conception of sexed subjectivity, but in such a way that this being sexed is not a property but a part of the overarching relational structure of subjectivity that makes each subject a unique and irreplaceable who.

Notes 1 Reprinted with permission from Continental Philosophy Review 36 (2003): 391–413. 2 Gatens is referring in this passage to the argument formulated in Lloyd, G. (1984), The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy. London: Methuen. 3 Of course, feminist critiques that attend only to de facto forms of exclusion do not necessarily affirm wholesale the systems in which they would like to see women

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Breathing with Luce Irigaray included nor need they even be seen as necessarily conservative of such institutions. Critiques of this sort might argue that a greater inclusion of women in existing social and political arrangements will ultimately effect changes at the institutional or systemic level as women bring to bear a perspective shaped by significantly different experiences from those of men. Such strategies seem likely, however, to effect progress only very gradually and the worry is that systemic changes will be realized very slowly, if at all. See a similar criticism of postmodernist feminism in Cavarero, A. (2000), Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. P. Kottman. New York/London: Routledge, p. 75. Irigaray uses the term ‘spirituality’ in ways that are exceedingly general and, for that reason, potentially misleading and confusing. Though this term sometimes denotes the subject’s relation to the divine or to various forms of religious life, it can almost always be read simply as denoting the connection of the subject to everything that transcends it, or in a more Heideggerian vein, as the subject’s own transcending or ‘standing out’ into Being. Hence, far from being a narrowly religious or theological term, it refers to the subject in so far as it is also a consciousness. Irigaray writes, ‘In the East it is more common to remember that living is equivalent to breathing. And the Sages there care about acquiring a proper life through practicing a conscious breathing’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 74). Lest Irigaray’s interest in spiritual practices be derided as ‘new age’ nonsense, it is worth remembering that Greek and Christian spiritual practices have been the subject of considerable interest and discussion in recent French philosophy. Foucault’s last writings on the ‘care of the self ’, for example, were concerned with ancient philosophy not as philosophical doxa but specifically as a set of practices or ways of giving a ‘style’ to one’s existence. Similar themes are treated in a more straightforwardly scholarly fashion in the work of Pierre Hadot, Foucault’s colleague at the Collège de France. See Foucault, M. (1986), The Care of the Self, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books; Hadot, P. (1995), Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. with an Introduction by A. Davidson, trans. M. Chase. Oxford/ Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Where Irigaray can justly be criticized is in presenting almost nothing in the way of detail about the practices she is concerned with here. Her work in this regard lacks the scholarly apparatus one would expect of a comparativist project, giving the impression (whether mistaken or not) that she lumps diverse social, linguistic, political, historical and religious realities together under the heading ‘Eastern traditions’. Equally potentially problematic is the way in which these ‘traditions’ seem appropriable without remainder in her reading of them. On Irigaray’s failure to problematize her own position vis-à-vis the ‘other’ of the ‘Orient’, see the excellent discussion in Deutscher, P. (2002), A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ch. 10. The Kantian resonance of this passage with its evocation of duties towards self and duties towards others deserves more comment than I can give it here. I do not think that the reformulation of Eastern practices of breathing in the language of duty and autonomy is especially helpful. Besides wanting a more careful examination, in the spirit of comparative work in philosophy and religion, of whether and how such concepts figure within the Eastern traditions Irigaray draws on here, the notion of a duty with what it implies of a principled foundation seems prima facie at odds with the notion of a practice or a way of life that might be, in many respects, more fluid in how it is grounded and articulated.

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8 As Deutscher emphasizes, this does not mean that women are only victims of appropriation and cannot, in turn, be appropriating subjects. Both men and women are ‘prone to the day-to-day appropriative relations in which I am less interested in the other than in the recognition, love, or identity the other seems to give me’; indeed, ‘women are prone to this appropriative tendency according to Irigaray precisely because they are caught up in the specular self-capture of masculinity’ (Deutscher 2002, p. 78). 9 For an example of this, see ‘Being I, Being We’ in Irigaray 2002a, pp. 93–104 and Irigaray 1993a, pp. 128–9. 10 In this respect, it functions metaphorically like the angels described in An Ethics of Sexual Difference as figures of a possible mediation between what is and what has not yet come into being, namely, between masculine subjects and as yet undeveloped feminine subjects or between a culture that does not as yet realize sexual difference and one that does. See Irigaray 1993a, p. 15. 11 ‘One could indeed maliciously suspect that the whole affair about the centrality of the text, which reduces the existence of the living to a status of extra-textuality, depends on the well-known tendency of intellectuals to represent the world in their likeness and image. . . . [T]he subject fades away – but not the sacredness of intellectual work . . .’ (Cavarero 2000, p. 76). 12 Cavarero is certainly aware of Derrida’s polemic against the philosophical privilege accorded to voice in the history of Western philosophy; however, she is not overly concerned by it. Despite Derrida’s concern for plurality and difference, she sees little room in his thought for the subject as a who rather than a what. Moreover, as she notes in the passage quoted in the first section of this essay, she is relatively unconcerned about the fate of postmodern thought as such, hence relatively unconcerned about trespassing against some of its own most privileged categories, writing or écriture being principal among them. While I am sympathetic to Cavarero’s hesitations about postmodernism in some respects, her worries seem more apropos to deconstruction in its earlier phases. Many of Derrida’s relatively recent writings, influenced as they are by Levinas’s rethinking of ethical relationships, would have to be read as containing a notion of subjectivity as a who rather than a what. 13 The similarities are even more pronounced if one follows Jane Gallop’s reading of the mirror stage, which emphasizes that the fragmented ‘body in bits and pieces’ does not precede the image that reflects the jubilating infant back to himself as a unified, self-mastering ego, but is produced at the same moment as the fantasized unified self. See Gallop, J. (1987), Reading Lacan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 14 On this point, see Grosz (1994b), p. 21. See also Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000), Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books. 15 The Italian feminist practice of autocoscienza is quite similar to the North American practice of consciousness-raising, though as Lucia Re remarks, ‘This process of selfdiscovery was also the process of establishing a collective sense of self with other women, and an expression of the need for a common language and a philosophical framework through which to reflect on the implications of sexual difference. Thus, unlike the North American groups, the Italian groups developed in a separatist direction which critiqued the politics of equal rights as a mystification, although many women continued simultaneously to work for women’s rights in the so-called practice of double-militancy’ (Re 2002, p. 58).

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Breathing the Political: A Meditation on the Preservation of Life in the Midst of War Elisha Foust

(Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK)

In the following, I consider the political potential of Luce Irigaray’s theory of the breath. I ask – are there historical moments in which a return to the breath, and thus a return to the self, has provoked real change in society? In order to perform my brief inquiry, I consider Irigaray’s text ‘The Way of Breath’ (Irigaray 2002a), published in Between East and West, alongside the 2008 documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, directed by Abigail E. Disney and Gini Reticker. The documentary is exemplary of Irigaray’s project in breathing because it details the lives of women – both Christian and Muslim – who turn their silent individual breath into a public, physical female presence so as to bring peace to war-torn Liberia. Bill Moyers describes the situation in Liberia in 2002 on his U.S. public-television series, Bill Moyers Journal – ‘Liberia was gripped by civil war, mostly between the government of the corrupt and ruthless Charles Taylor, and warlords battling to overthrow him. More than 200 thousand people had been killed. One out of three were homeless’.1 Civilians suffered violence and coercion throughout the war – children were conscripted to fight and women made the targets of brutality and rape. Lynn Sherr, an American broadcast journalist who covers events in Liberia, explains that children were ‘kidnapped, forced to be fighters, forced to do unspeakable things to family members. Women were raped regularly. Rape was a weapon of war’.2 In 2008, Sherr interviewed Leymah Gbowee, who was the face and voice of Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace in 2003. Gbowee describes the war in the following way – ‘You wake up in the morning and you’re just wondering what is going to be different today. Am I going to be shot as I walk the streets? Or is my younger brother going to be conscripted? Or am I going to be raped?’ The 2002 civil war threatened the lives and liberty of all Liberians. In Pray the Devil Back to Hell and interviews following the release of the film, Gbowee recalls a dream she had during the war. In her dream, she was told to bring the Christian and Muslim women of Liberia together to pray for peace. The film documents how Gbowee came together with women of both faiths, including Asatu Bah Kenneth, Comfort Freedom, Etweda Cooper and Vaiba Flomo, to build a peace movement.

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This was no easy task. In the film, Vaiba Flomo notes that for some Christian women, ‘being a follower of Christ and going to work along with the Muslim mean[t] they were diluting their faith’. Gbowee and other leaders of the movement had to confront and diffuse the fear and prejudice the women felt towards those who did not share their religious affiliation. The film suggests that praying for peace brought the women together to create real change in Liberia. I wonder how prayer, a seemingly passive though, in fact, very active encounter, can provoke political change? For, doesn’t prayer belong to the private world of the individual and not to the public world of politics? Even when it is performed communally in churches and mosques, prayer retains its status as a private practice. This is particularly true in our Western, secular societies. Thus, how can it be that in Liberia, a multi-religious country, the prayers of women calmed the violence of war? One way to theorize prayer as belonging to the public, and thus the political, is to think of it as breath. To enable such a comparison, I turn to Luce Irigaray’s Between East and West. In this text, Irigaray argues that taking an active and conscious breath lays down the path which leads us to experience two modes of existence – our singularity and our belonging to a community. For Irigaray, the breath – when it is consciously taken – is not only solitary and thus private; it is also public. The breath is public in that it enables one to create and maintain interconnecting intervals with others. Through the breath, an individual learns to cultivate her autonomy while also nourishing the society in which she lives. Irigaray’s understanding of the breath is like prayer in that both have the unique quality of leading to our singularity and our public life. For this reason, her theory is valuable for understanding how the women of Liberia used prayer-as-breath to change their world. Pray the Devil Back to Hell is exemplary of Irigaray’s theory of the breath because it tells the story of a group of women who learnt to breathe as individuals; their desire for peace gave them an autonomy they did not have before the movement began. Learning to breathe as individuals, in turn, taught each to share her breath with others. Sharing fortified the women’s spiritual commonalities – their desire for peace – while also provoking in each, a respect for religious differences. Having learnt to respect the religious differences in one another, the women extended their breath, their prayer, to an even wider society of men and women. Peace became their shared mantra, one they breathed into all of Liberia. According to Irigaray, breathing has been forgotten by our Western cultures. She notes that ‘The forgetting of breathing in our tradition is almost universal’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 77). The neglect of breath places us at a distance from ourselves and from others by driving a wedge between body and soul, men and women and nature and culture. In order to restore these connections, Irigaray teaches that we can learn lessons about breathing from Eastern thought. One important lesson that she turns to is the idea of sharing the breath. She writes, ‘The Eastern master shares his breath, passing on to the disciple part of the breath that leads him to awakening’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 79). The master teaches the way of breath to his or her disciple not to gain authority or the power of command. Rather, the master shares the breath with the student so that she or he may be awakened in autonomy. This sharing with the hope of helping another to awaken is vital to Irigaray’s understanding of the breath.

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Irigaray also teaches that the breath can be a catalyst for change. In order to be so, however, it must be made visible. Yet, there are few instances in which the breath is noticeable; breath is thought to be internal, private and unseen. One way we can think the breath as visible in both its individual and communal forms is by thinking of it as public prayer. When conscious breathing is understood as prayer, it takes on more than an individual connotation. Breath-as-prayer is a communal, and therefore political, event. It can inspire political change. In the following discussion, I detail three ways that the film Pray the Devil Back to Hell makes the breath visible and political. I first describe how the film distinguishes between the passive form of breathing and the voluntary form of breathing, which Irigaray discusses in ‘The Way of Breath’. For her, the voluntary breath leads to a deeper understanding of one’s own autonomy than does the passive form. I then consider how the film re-imagines the breath as the connection between body and soul. According to Irigaray, Western culture undermines female autonomy by figuring women’s bodies as separate from a masculine spirit. The breath allows us to reinstate this connection and also to re-conceive female autonomy. Finally, I consider one of the most compelling stories the film tells – that of Christian and Muslim women coming together to work for peace. Gbowee notes that the protest at the fish market in Monrovia in 2003 was ‘the first time in our history of Liberia where Muslim women and Christian women were coming together’. Irigaray’s theory of the shared breath enables us to better understand how the women quieted their fear of religious differences and worked together towards the shared goal of political peace in Liberia. I find that it was perhaps the women’s marginalized status within their respective religious traditions that enabled them to come together to share their breath in this way.

From passive to voluntary breath In ‘The Way of the Breath’, Irigaray distinguishes passive breathing from voluntary breathing. Of passive breathing, she writes that ‘we are not really born, not really auto­ nomous or living as long as we do not take care, in a conscious and voluntary way, of our breathing’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 74). When we breathe passively, we breathe used, stale air. We take the breath of others. In so doing, we ‘live badly’. She continues – ‘We remain confused with others, forming a sort of mass, a sort of tribe, where each individual has not yet conquered his personal life but lives on a collective social and cultural respiration’ (Irigaray 2002a, p.  75). The passive breath does not promote autonomy. Rather, it is a breath of dependence and servitude. By contrast, when we breathe in a conscious, voluntary way, we take charge of our lives, ‘accepting solitude through cutting the umbilical cord’ (p. 74). Learning to breathe consciously teaches us about our autonomy, about what is at stake for our own existence. It also teaches us to share the breath. As mentioned above, this sharing of breath connects us with others. But it does not, Irigaray reiterates, deprive us of our autonomy. Rather, sharing the breath means that we keep our breath for ourselves and give it away. To breathe voluntarily is to share without losing ourselves.

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Pray the Devil Back to Hell tells the story of women who learn to breathe voluntarily together. The film details a grassroots movement; the women who became involved in peace-building in Liberia were not leaders of their communities. In fact, they, like their mothers before them, lacked political or social autonomy. They lived in a world in which they laboured and the men made the rules. Sexual difference in Liberia at this time manifested in a strict division – women worked and men often did not. In 2008, at a press conference held at the Tribeca Film Festival, Gbowee describes the situation in 2001. She says, ‘Women in the eastern part of Liberia . . . have always been the slaves. They are the ones who work. Their husbands sit in town and play checkers all day’.3 The women who volunteered for the two and a half years of protests were not independent women; they were passive to a patriarchal system which enslaved them. Before the movement, these women breathed unconsciously. They did not know they could breathe any differently. For example, in the interview with Lynn Sherr, Gbowee notes that before she became involved in the movement, she did not think of herself as a leader and that her inability to think of herself in this way was related to her church community. She says, ‘in my church, I could not excel to any position of authority because I wasn’t married. And you constantly hear things being badgered into your head that women who are not married and have children are the worst sinners. And you’re fornicating and you’re committing adultery’. Prior to the peace-building movement, Gbowee and the women in Liberia breathed for survival. In so doing, they maintained the status quo by remaining powerless to stop the cycle of violence and war that was killing them and their families. To make the charge that the women sustained their existing condition by breathing passively may seem harsh because such an accusation implies that they were responsible for a war they did not begin. How could they be held accountable for the atrocities of violence when they had no real political power to stop the civil war? For Gbowee, and perhaps also for those who led the peace-building movement alongside her, the women had to be taught how to take responsibility for war, if they hoped to put an end to it. In the film Gbowee says, ‘Men were the perpetrators of violence, so either by commission or omission you were guilty’. For her, powerlessness did not deprive the women of their responsibility. They were, as were the men who committed the violence, responsible for ending war. The organizers of the peace-building movement taught the women to take responsibility for the conflict. Before they could do this, however, they had to educate the women about their autonomy – a lesson that would empower them to end the violence. According to Irigaray, to learn autonomy is to learn to breathe actively and consciously, to become aware of the self. Breathing is, she points out, ‘the first autonomous gesture of the living human being. To come into the world supposes inhaling and exhaling by oneself ’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 73). The civil war in Liberia had produced stale, stagnant air. The women, and all Liberians, had become used to breathing this air, used to the stench of death. To teach the women about their autonomy, the organizers of the movement created a fresh space in which the air was not putrid, but hopeful. They did this by separating the women from the men. The organizers instituted a strategy of sexed segregation. Of this strategy, Gbowee says, ‘the idea was that we were separating women, preparing them to get into the larger peace building [movement]’.4 Without this

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separation, she notes, they would not have been able to empower the women to think beyond their present situation because they ‘always consulted with their husbands’. The all-women environment of the fish-market protests in Monrovia gave the women of Liberia space and time to re-create their first breath of life. There, they learnt to breathe and exist for themselves as individuals. The protests at the Monrovia fish market were made up of thousands of women, including Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). At times, they sat praying together on the ground. At other times, they danced, sang and clapped together. All the women dressed alike. They purposefully removed their jewellery; they tied and covered their hair with white scarves. They wore white shirts as a symbol of peace. Their similarity of dress was a visual mark of their cohesion. When looking at the footage of the protests, one cannot distinguish Muslim from Christian. Yet, this unanimous dress does not indicate that the women were of one mind, blindly and passively following a leader. The women are energetic and hopeful. They laugh and share stories. The footage shows an environment of hope. It is as if they are breathing fresh air for the first time in a long time. This society of women sustained the movement. Those who joined the peacebuilding effort continued to sit at the fish market throughout the remainder of the war. Even after the violence had spread from the countryside to the capital city, the women remained at the market. In learning to breathe for themselves, they had grown strong and brave – determined to stay their course for peace, no matter what the cost. Following Irigaray’s thought, it can be said that the leaders of the peace-building movement taught the women of Liberia to breathe for themselves by creating a space of hope. Women who were accustomed to breathing for others – for the men they loved and in many ways served and the war they endured – became new women. By coming together, they became singular.

From soul to body; from body and soul In Between East and West, Irigaray discusses the separation of the body from the soul in Western culture. She writes, ‘The culture that we have been taught says that it is necessary to despise the body in order to be spiritual; the body would be the nature that we have to surpass in order to become spirit, in order to become soul’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 75). Her concern about the split of body from soul is not a new one. It is one she has expressed many times and in many different ways throughout the years.5 According to her, the separation of body from soul operates in a hierarchical gender divide in which woman is defined as body and man is defined as spirit (Irigaray 2002a, p. 77). Relegated and confined to her body, woman is denied access to knowledge and spiritual enlightenment. One real-life consequence of this confinement to corporeality is that, globally speaking, the work that is available to woman is often disproportionately physical when compared to the work available to men. Current research being done in feminist cultural studies supports this claim. In her 2010 publication, The Equality Illusion: The Truth about Women and Men Today, Kat Banyard reminds us that ‘Women do

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two-thirds of the world’s work, yet receive 10 per cent of the world’s income and own 1 per cent of the means of production’.6 Banyard goes on to argue that the ‘equality that so many people see existing between women and men is an illusion’. The physical demands of labour are not, of course, the same the world over nor are they the same in terms of economic class. This is to say that even though the work women do in poorer countries is different from that in, for example, middle-class Europe, there is an association between physicality and women’s work shared among women of diverse cultures. For instance, in her 2009 One-Dimensional Woman, Nina Power draws a connection between women’s bodies and their availability for work in the United Kingdom and the United States (Power 2009). She argues that service-oriented corporations have created a feminized labour force. By this, she does not mean that big business has grown concerned with the responsibilities that overwhelmingly belong to women – motherhood and domestic work, for example. Rather, the term ‘feminized’ describes a worker that costs little and is always physically available for work (Power 2002, p. 20). Power writes that the world of work increasingly demands ‘that one is always contactable (by email, by phone), that one is always an “ambassador” for the firm (don’t write anything about your job on your blog), that there is no longer any separation between the private realm and the working day’ (Power 2002, p.  26). In this context, feminization of labour requires the body to be constantly ready to work. A woman working in the service industry has little time for a personal life that is truly cut-off from the expectations of her job. This is, Power argues, also true for men. Yet, the inequality in pay, mothering responsibilities and the higher number of women in part-time work means that women’s and men’s bodies are co-opted by the feminization of labour differently. Research such as that conducted by Banyard and Power reminds us that Irigaray’s philosophy is grounded in the reality of day to day life. She has for the last 40 years – using philosophy, linguistics and psychoanalysis – theorized the basis of inequality between men and women. In her recent work on breathing, she brings to light the fact that this inequality is also spiritual. For her, the cultivation of the breath offers a possible solution to the problem of devaluing women by assigning them to category of body because the active breath reconnects the body to the soul. The breath shelters the body and soul in harmony and denies the split that has preoccupied Western philosophy for too long. Irigaray writes, ‘Without a cultivation of breathing, in each person and between them, man and woman are also thrown back upon death. And they remain in a perpetual conflict concerning who, of the two, best assures the survival of the human species’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 77). Pray the Devil Back to Hell describes the plight of an entire country that had been thrown back upon death during 14  years of war. The film depicts the ever-present spectre of death in Liberia. It shows a vast number of boys and young men holding guns too large for their hands. They occupy the towns and villages, driving large jeeps through muddy streets. They constantly seek out provisions for survival from townspeople and commit violent acts – rape, murder, torture – in order to take what they need and want. The film producer, Abigail Disney, notes that the footage of the young men was easy to come by.7 It was easy because the international journalists in Liberia focused predominantly on violence in the region. The media framed the civil

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war as a male affair. Thus, the tools of violence – young boys with guns – dominate the broadcasts sent to the world. Footage of the women protesting was much more difficult to find. Disney explains that this was ‘because these women did not look or sound or seem like they mattered. For reasons of gender, for reasons of class, education, convention. For a lot of reasons, these women had, very deliberately, not chosen to dress and frame themselves in a certain kind of way. And so, therefore, they were being dismissed’. The footage of women used in Pray the Devil came mainly from individuals. It was taken on tiny Betamax cameras by spectators. The challenge of making the film was to locate these individuals and convince them to share their tapes. That the international media ignored the women is telling. The women were not recognized as having a voice or a visible presence in the midst of war. The journalists focused on death, rather than understand the women to be a force of life struggling to come to the surface. The female organizers of the peace-building movement were cognizant of the fact that women were not being shown by the media. They devised a series of strategies to alter this situation and to make the presence of women visible. In so doing, they demanded that the world acknowledge that these women’s lives were threatened by violence. However, the organizers did not only wish to make a statement about the physical vulnerability of the female population; they also sought to make clear that the war was affecting the spiritual life of Liberia as a whole. They thus had to find a way to make Liberia’s spirit visible. The organizers increased the visibility of the women in a couple of ways. First, they prompted all the women to remove their jewellery, to cover their hair and to wear white.8 For Gbowee, the unadorned dress was important. In the film she says, ‘We went back to the Bible. We saw what Esther did for her people, that she went in sackcloths and ashes, saying “I mean it”’ . In actuality, it was not Esther who wore sackcloth and ashes. It was Mordecai, who thought of Esther as his daughter. Esther 4:1 reads, ‘When Mordecai perceived all that was done, Mordecai rent his clothes, and put on sackcloth with ashes, and went out into the midst of the city, and cried with a loud and a bitter cry’. Mordecai wore sackcloth out of profound grief and mourning for his people, who King Xerxes had decreed be killed – ‘And the letters were sent by posts into all the king’s provinces, to destroy, to kill and to cause to perish, all Jews, both young and old, little children and women, in one day, [even] upon the thirteenth [day] of the twelfth month, which [is] the month Adar, and [to take] the spoil of them for a prey’ (Esther 3:13). Although the biblical factuality of Gbowee’s statement is not completely accurate, the symbolic gesture of casting off expensive clothes and jewellery to express mourning for a people remains true to the story of Esther. The women of Liberia wore plain, unadorned white clothes and headscarves to express the deep fear they felt for their own people – their kin as well as those who, like them, were victims of war. They chose white, rather than the traditional black associated with sackcloth, because white is the colour of peace. The organizers ensured that all women had access to white clothes by providing them with t-shirts. This unified dress gave the women a cohesive, visual presence. Second, the visibility of the woman was increased by the fact that they prayed and thus breathed together. The image they presented was in sharp contrast to how the international media portrayed the groups of men in Liberia. Whenever men were

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filmed, guns were present. The women, by contrast, sat calmly. At one point in the film, Vaiba Flomo, President of the Christian Women’s Peace Initiative, says, ‘When Leymah [Gbowee] got on stage . . . we were holding hands and praying. I said . . . “Jesus give her the strength”. I said, “we rebuke any evil force that would make her weak” ’. It is difficult to describe the way that prayer looks. The film, however, captures the essence of the women’s bodies in prayer in the Christian sense of the term. They sit on the ground with their heads bowed, eyes closed and their legs crossed. The heat waves of the African sun bounce off the ground around them. Their bodies rock with the slight shuffle of deep thought. The film represents their bodies as the physical manifestation of prayer. Although they appear to sit calmly, the women were not calm. Because they donned the highly visible uniform of white on white, they were easy to identify by those for whom war had become a way of life. The site of the protests, the fish market, was an exposed location. It was easy to access by a large number of people, as most markets are. On this site, the women were exposed. They lived with a potentially higher threat of violence than they would have done had they not been dressed alike. The images of their bodies in prayer might seem like bodies already at peace; what is closer to the truth, however, is that the bodies are slightly kinetic. They move, shuffle, rock and wave constantly. They take purposefully deep breaths. The images of the women in prayer are alive with the motion of fear and hope. The women’s bodies came to represent the spiritual life of Liberia. This became clear during the peace talks in Ghana. At the request and urging of the women, Liberia’s president, Charles Taylor, agreed to enter into peace talks with the rebel leaders. The women too went to Ghana because they wanted the world to see that there was another population in Liberia, one that was not engaged in fighting, but was composed of the victims of war. They went to Ghana to make their presence known to the world. They were there for three months. The peace talks did not go smoothly. The men were more concerned with negotiating for territory and wealth than they were with negotiating for peace. They spent their time posturing for power. Fed up with their focus on power, the women staged a sit-in towards the end of the third month. They sat at the door of the meeting room, locked arms and refused to let the men exit. In so doing, they sought to deprive the men of food and water in the same way that those men denied the children of Liberia access to sustenance. The women refused to leave until a peace agreement had been signed. Security forces were called and when they arrived, they threatened to arrest Gbowee, accusing her and the women of obstructing justice. She was enraged with the use of the word ‘justice’ by the police. Having no political power in the situation, she responded to this threat with the power she did have – her body. She did not fight. She did not seek to harm the police. Instead, she threw off her hair tie and said, ‘I am going to make it very, very easy for you to arrest me.  .  .  .  I am going to strip naked’. In the film, Etweda Copper explains that ‘it’s a curse in Africa to see the naked body of your mother. . . . Especially if she does it deliberately’. When Gbowee threatened to undress in front of the men, she threatened them with the power of this curse. In so doing, she revealed to them the deep pain that the women and children were suffering at their hands. In that moment, her body became the messenger of her spirit – communicating

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the physical and spiritual vulnerability of an entire people in a way that it had not been communicated before. Gbowee’s actions completely changed the dynamics of the talks. The women agreed to end the sit-in if their demands were met. These demands were – that the talks focus on creating peace in the region, that all delegates attend sessions regularly and that the men would stop insulting the women. If these demands were not met, Gbowee told the media that the organizers would pull women from the refugee camps in Ghana and increase the number of protestors to more than 1,000. Their demands were met. They were met because the women kept to the moral discourse at the talks. They did not provoke revolution, nor did they fight with the men. Instead, Gbowee used her body to make their spiritual desperation known. How can we understand the deeper meaning of the power of the female body in this context? Why did Gbowee’s body alter the nature of the talks so radically? One way to understand this body is as having the power to strip the men of their authority. In stripping them of their power, Gbowee returned the men to their humble, vulnerable human selves. Abigail Disney notes that Gbowee’s threat to reveal her naked body created an environment in which ‘the men were brought back to themselves’. She goes on to say that these women reminded the men of the children they once had been. Once they were able to recall their own vulnerability, the men were able to talk about peace. Disney’s comment about Gbowee’s actions suggests that the women of Liberia had the power to teach the men to understand themselves differently. Prior to the peace talks, the men understood themselves as powerful warlords, who had grown comfortable breathing the air of war. They imposed this air on the women and children of Liberia so that they could increase their authority and wealth. In effect, they forgot that the victims of war were autonomous individuals in whom spirit dwelled. Gbowee’s threat to expose her body changed their perception of themselves by calling into question their authority over others. Judith Byfield explains how this same threat was employed by women in the mid-1940s in Nigeria in order to strip male leaders of their authority. Byfield writes, ‘This act of undressing in public expressed women’s deep contempt for alake [the king]. By removing their clothes, the women symbolically removed their respect for Ademola [Alake Ademola II] and ultimately stripped him of his authority’ (Byfield 2002, p.  43). A similar process of removing the symbolic authority from the male leaders can be said to operate in Gbowee’s threat to take off her own clothes in front of the rebel leaders at the peace talks. This threat stripped the men of their prestige and humbled them. Another way of understanding why Gbowee’s actions turned the peace talks around is to consider the notion of sharing, which Irigaray discusses in Between East and West and elsewhere.9 Irigaray argues that the ethics of sexual difference can become a reality when each of us learns to return, by way of the breath, to ourselves. By threatening the men with the nakedness of her body, Gbowee not only symbolically removed their power from them, she also actively cultivated her own breath – taking power back into herself. This power, however, was not the power of violence, but the power of the spirit that is associated with maternity. In this respect, by actively breathing within herself, Gbowee provoked a different kind of autonomy in the male other – one not associated with violence or negotiations for control and resources, but one instead associated with

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the first breath of life. In Irigaray’s terms, Gbowee’s actions can be said to symbolize how a mother shares the first lessons about autonomy with a child. For Irigaray, the lesson of sharing is natural to mothers. She writes, ‘Before feeding, before giving herself as nourishment, woman gives, or more exactly, shares her breath, her natural spiritual life’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 80). Irigaray teaches that sharing is ethical because it awakens in the other an independent self. She continues, ‘The mother gives her breath and lets the other go; she gives the other life and autonomy. From the beginning, she passes on physical and metaphysical existence to the other’. Thus, although Gbowee had no political power at the peace talks, she tapped into the symbolic power that is embedded in an African mother’s threat to expose her body publicly. In so doing, she reminded the men of the first maternal lesson of spiritual autonomy. She put peace on the table for Liberia for the first time in 14 years.

The proximity of religious differences The war in Liberia was not just a political conflict; it was also a clash between religions. On one side, there was President Charles Taylor, who preached to Christian congregations that he had been chosen by God to lead Liberia. On the other side, there was the predominantly Muslim Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD). In Pray the Devil Back to Hell, Gbowee notes that ‘Taylor went to the church and the leadership of LURD went to the mosque’. During his presidency, Charles Taylor made flamboyant displays of his faith. He was advised by the evangelist Kilari Anand Paul, who recently stood with Florida pastor Terry Jones in support of burning the Quran on 11 September 2010. The people of Liberia knew Taylor was a Christian. Yet, they wondered how he could possibly reconcile his actions in the Sierra Leone Civil War and the Second Liberian War with his faith. The same can be said of LURD. Led by Sekou Conneh, with support from the Muslim-dominated government of Guinea, the rebels violently attacked Liberians living in the countryside and in refugee camps. Neither the Christian-based government nor the Muslim-based rebellion had an interest in protecting the people of Liberia. Both groups were equally feared. Gbowee describes an attack at the refugee camp in Monrovia in the film. She says, ‘The rebels would come in and attack, and the government troops would go in there to say they are safe-guarding the people, and they would equally attack, and commit the same atrocities that the rebel had committed on these people’. The people were not protected nor supported by either group. The women knew that successfully negotiating the religious differences of the fighting forces was key to building a peaceful Liberia. They directly addressed the Christian and Muslim leaders of both factions. Gbowee says, ‘Taylor could pray the devil out of hell. And we said, if this man is so religious, we need to get to that thing that he holds firmly to’. The organizers sent their peace messages to Taylor through the bishops and pastors. The film documents Gbowee speaking to a church congregation. ‘We are tired!’ she says.‘We are tired! We feel it’s now time to rise up and speak. But we don’t want to do this alone. We want to invite the other Christian churches to come and let’s put our voices together’. Gbowee and others came together

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to form the ­Christian Women’s Peace Initiative, which was made up of ‘everyday’ women from various Christian churches. In the early stages of the peace movement, these women went to their local congregations and asked the church leaders to talk to those in Taylor’s government about peace. As the movement gained in momentum, the organizers reached out to Muslim women. Asatu Bah Kenneth, Assistant Director of the Liberian National Police, was crucial to the success of the movement. She invited and convinced Muslim women to join the Christian women. Standing before the same Christian congregation that Gbowee addressed, she says, ‘I have a surprise for you. I am the only Muslim in this church. I was moved and I’m impressed by the Christian Women’s Initiative’. She goes on to say that it is not a problem for Christian and Muslim women to join together because their faiths embrace a similar understanding of the divine. In both faiths, she says, ‘God is up. We’re all serving the same God’. By this, she means that in both religions, the divine is understood to be in a vertical relation to human beings. The divide between the human and God stretches over an insurmountable distance. This commonality, she argues, unites the women of Liberia. ‘Religion is not a barrier for us’, she says later in the film. As Gbowee and members of the Christian Women’s Peace Initiative had done with the pastors and bishops, Kenneth encouraged Muslim women to speak to their imams with the purpose of sending LURD warlords the message of peace. They wanted the warlords and fighters to leave the countryside, return home and talk about ending the war. The women of Liberia, like the men, were living in a country divided by religion. How were they able to work together where the men had failed? Even though Vaiba Flomo’s comment, quoted in the introduction above, suggests that some Christian women were concerned that working alongside Muslims would dilute their faith, the film implies that religious differences did not present a substantial problem for the movement. Why might this be? One hypothesis is that the women who organized Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace were both Christian and Muslim. The film suggests that there was a balance of the two religions and that this balance created an environment in which neither religion dominated. In which case, nor was either religion marginalized within the peace-building movement. Gbowee and Kenneth, for example, are consistently shown working together, strategizing together and being in proximity with one another. It may be that these leaders acted as role models to those who joined the protests in the fish market. Their actions demonstrated that working with members of different religions did not dilute one’s faith. Rather, by accepting difference and focusing on common concerns, the film implies that the women tapped into a communal spirituality they did not know before. Another hypothesis for why the women were able to come together in a way that the men were not is that in terms of the structure of both religions, the women occupied a marginalized space. This space may have enabled them to more easily cross the boundaries of religion, to be influenced by each other’s faith and also to better understand their own faith as a result of their multi-religious encounters. Jeannine Hill Fletcher offers a perspective similar to this in ‘Women’s Voices in Interreligious Dialogue’, a text in which she, following the work of Maura O’Neil, claims that because women’s voices are at the margin of religious dialogue, their contributions

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to inter-faith discussions are distinct from those made by their male counterparts (Fletcher 2006). She expands upon this point in Monopoly on Salvation in which she argues that women occupy a uniquely hybrid space due to their marginalized status in traditional religious discussions (Fletcher 2005). This hybrid space is not foreign to the tradition but stems from the history of the tradition itself. She writes: as history shows, Christian self-understanding has often emerged out of the conversation and exchange with persons of different faiths. Encouraged by these precedents, Christians today might also engage across religious boundaries and become affected by persons of other faiths. A feminist analysis of human identity as multifaceted and intrinsically hybrid provides a framework for structuring engagement across religious versions that can be mutually enriching. (Fletcher 2006, p. ix)

In the film, neither Gbowee nor the other leaders of the peace-building movement make any claim to feminism as it is understood in the United States or the United Kingdom. However, behind the actions they took to bring the women of both faiths together – segregating them from men and re-enforcing the message that peace was beneficial to everyone – there seems to be a belief that the women could cross religious boundaries in a way that strengthened their individual religious convictions. Rather than depleting their faiths, the encounters with those of different faiths seem to make the women’s trust in their own religion stronger. When we consider Irigaray’s work on the breath, this hypotheses – that the women were initially better adept at negotiating religious differences than were the men – is strengthened. Recall that for Irigaray, women are natural teachers. They engender the spirit of the other not only when they give birth, but also by sharing the breath. She writes, ‘Women, like the creator God, engenders with her breath. But she does it from the inside, without demonstration. She does it invisibly and silently, before any perceptible word or gesture.Woman teaches through her very doing, at each moment of the present and in a continuous manner’ (Irigaray 2002a, p.  80). According to Irigaray, women teach others to actively breathe when they consciously breathe for themselves. Sharing the breath is not a lesson communicated through words nor by making demands upon the other. Rather, it is a lesson taught, almost unconsciously, by consistently living well. Irigaray’s argument that women are better adept than men at teaching the cultivation of the breath is not, however, unproblematic. Like much of Irigaray’s later writing, Between East and West carries the burden of essentialism with it. In the context of this paper, this text suggests that women are born teachers, not that they become teachers. A charge of essentialism has followed Irigaray for over 40 years.10 This is the case even though Irigaray anticipated and responded to this charge early on. Recall that in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, she makes clear that a world in which each sex is recognized and valued for its unique specificity has not yet come into being. (Irigaray 1984) We are living in a single-sex world in which only the male sex counts. In An Ethics, Irigaray set herself the task, as a female philosopher, of imagining what the world might look like if it was inhabited by two sexes, not just one. For her, a multi-sex world will be possible when woman as well as man is recognized as distinct and autonomous.

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In An Ethics and in the work that closely followed, Irigaray developed what some call a strategy of ‘strategic essentialism’ in order to provoke a new, sexually differentiated world. To think strategically about essentialism is to deploy the roles and characteristics traditionally assigned to women in ways that have not been employed before. For example, rather than think the role of teaching as being one that deprives women of autonomy, Irigaray argues that teaching is a way towards female autonomy. By focusing on female autonomy, Irigaray argues that we, men and women, will be able to create a world of sexual difference. She writes, ‘This has never existed between the sexes since wonder maintains their autonomy within their statutory difference, keeping a space of freedom and attraction between them, a possibility of separation and alliance’ (Irigaray 1984, p. 13). In her early work, Irigaray made the critical component of the redeployment of traditional roles clear. In her later work, particularly in Between East and West, however, her use of language suggests that she has forgone the strategic aspect of her strategy and reverted to uncritical essentialism. These works lack the explicit proclamations that the earlier works contain. To those unfamiliar with Irigaray’s earlier work, these texts seem to suggest a rigid assignment of sexually determined roles rather than the critical deployment of tradition to effect change. These later texts also seem to carry the rather depressing message that women are destined to live out their lives assigned to these roles in such a way that deprives them of escaping the traps of teaching, caring and nurturing. Irigaray’s message that it is possible to think differently about essentialist attributes without falling into essentialist traps is becoming harder to hear. Yet, I do not think this makes texts such as Between East and West any less relevant. It might be the case that in order to understand the critical importance of this text as well as its shortcomings, we need to turn elsewhere. Turning again to Pray the Devil, we can see how the women of Liberia redeployed traditional female roles in ways that are reminiscent of Irigaray’s earlier engagement with strategic essentialism and also with her later focus on autonomy. I find that inhabiting the role of carer or teacher did not lead to the sacrifice of female autonomy. On the contrary, the act of caring and nurturing changed the entire political landscape. By inhabiting traditional roles, the women of Liberia created a new Liberia – one in which female autonomy was better recognized than it had ever been before. The leaders of the peace-building movement employed two practices for teaching the women about the importance of sharing in an inter-religious community. First, they emphasized the fact that neither the government of Charles Taylor nor LURD had a vested interest in protecting the people of Liberia. Each woman, man and child was at risk of attack from either group. During the peace talks in Ghana, one of the LURD leaders made this clear. He said to Etweda Cooper, ‘Well, we’re going to kill the people in Monrovia, and then we’ll go back there, and we’ll bring women with us, and we will replenish the population’. This disregard for human life, particularly for the unique individuality of women, was enacted consistently on the people of Liberia during the war. Vaiba Flomo tells of how government and rebel soldiers would leave the front and go to the civilians ‘because they wanted to loot, because they wanted to rape’. Neither LURD nor the state-sponsored army controlled the fighters they put in the field. The civilians were left to defend themselves against those purported

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to safeguard them. In order to arm themselves against the chaos, the organizers of the women’s peace-building movement stressed that war made religious prejudice obsolete. Christian and Muslim lived in the same conditions with the same threats. To this point, Flomo says, ‘The message that we took on was, “Can a bullet pick and choose? Does the bullet know Christian from Muslim?” ’ The leaders reinforced the point that the threat of death did not distinguish between religions. This was one of the core messages that enabled the leaders to build upon the marginalized status of the women: by sharing in the common fear of war, the women overcame their fears about one another’s religious difference and were thus able to create a community for themselves. The second lesson is interrelated to the first. The organizers taught the women about living in what Irigaray calls proximity. Proximity is the essence of the ethical scene. In Between East and West, she locates this scene in the maternal. She writes, ‘The customs of the maternal world are generally ruled by proximity, but proximity unthought as such’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 18). Proximity describes the ethical encounter because it entails two complementary practices – the return of the breath and sharing the breath, both of which I describe above. To breathe in such a way that one returns to herself is to breathe in autonomy. Irigaray calls this type of breathing the conscious or active breath. Through the active breath, one becomes accustomed to one’s autonomy; one acknowledges the self as independent and separate from all others. To breathe the breath of return is to accept the insurmountable distance between ourselves and everyone else. She writes, ‘The near [proche] calls for difference. If the other or I lack our proper borders, we cannot approach one another’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 18). Yet, for Irigaray, what is also the case is that when we do maintain our own proper borders, our own singularity, we create a community of individuals who live ethically together. The word ‘ethically’ here describes a community that functions through respecting the singularity and difference of the other. An ethical community is thus, for Irigaray, a community built upon proximity. One of the great achievements of the peace-building movement in Liberia was that the women not only created a community of respect for difference within the movement, they also extended this way of living ethically together to the entire community of Liberia. Thus, the women who came together to protest the war not only shared their breath with one another, they took the messages of the breath, of peace and tolerance, to the country. From learning to live in proximity with one another, they educated Liberia about the complementary practices of breathing consciously and sharing the breath. These lessons were particularly valuable following the peace talks in Ghana. After the talks, the Liberian parties signed a peace agreement in Accra. Two significant conditions of that agreement were the resignation of Charles Taylor, which took place on 11 August 2003, and the deployment of United Nations forces to aid the National Transitional Government of Liberia on 18 August 2003. Taylor was exiled to Nigeria and the people of Liberia welcomed the UN troops. The women wondered if their role in politics had now come to an end. They came together and decided that it had not. Peace-building had only just begun. They agreed that in order for peace to be sustainable, they would continue to integrate themselves into the political process. In the film, Gbowee states that they ‘wanted to show members of the

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transitional government and the rest of the world that we were carefully watching the implementation of the peace agreement’. The women took on two significant roles in the redevelopment of Liberia after the war – they intervened in the disarmament process and they developed a cultural strategy of forgiveness. In December of 2003, the UN military forces began disarmament. This, however, was not Liberia’s first experience in weapons reduction. Etweda Cooper notes that because the country had undergone disarmament before, the women ‘had some idea about what works, and what doesn’t work’. Their voices were, however, initially ignored by the troops, who claimed greater expertise than the women. On the day of the weapons/benefit exchange, the experts found that they had organized the disarmament badly. Gbowee describes the situation – ‘By 2 p.m., you have over 3,000 fighters, standing here with different kinds of weapons, and smoking weed, and doing all kinds of drugs and alcohol, and no one is doing anything’. She continues, ‘Then the whole thing just erupted’. Cooper adds that the UN troops did not know what to do. ‘Fortunately for them’, she says, ‘the women were there’. The women issued a statement on radio, ‘calling for calm among the fighters, that the women were doing everything in their will and power to ensure that they got their benefits’ (Gbowee). The women intervened to protect the fighters and help them feel safe. They wanted them to know that their mothers were on their side. Still clad in white t-shirts and white headscarves, they stood at the weapons exchange sites holding signs that said, ‘We love you/drop your guns’. One fighter describes the reaction to the presence of the women. He notes that among themselves, the men said to one another, ‘Gentlemen, do not give our arms to these people’. However, ‘the ol’ ma’s were saying, “No, our children, we beg you”’. Another young man comments, ‘We appreciate them a lot; and we’re still there for them. They are our mothers’. After a few days, the situation de-escalated. Many of the fighters handed over their weapons, sometimes giving them directly to the women. The women’s role in disarmament was indicative of way they understood peace after the war. For them, peace was not an event, it was a process. This process depended upon forgiving their aggressors. One woman remarks, ‘We have to accept our combatants into our midst. We cannot hold it against them’. Recall, that the war in Liberia was a civil war. After the fighting had ended, those who had stolen, raped and killed returned to being Liberian citizens. The women understood that welcoming them back with love was the only way to help them make the transition from warrior to private citizen. They knew that if peace was to be sustainable, forgiveness was key. Forgiveness however, did not come easily. Flomo remarks that after hearing the stories from the women, she found it difficult to forgive the men. Gbowee too felt angry at what she calls the ‘ex-child soldiers’. However, she took it upon herself to work with them. In so doing, she came to understand that they too were victims of war. Often taken from their homes, the boys were given drugs by the warlords so as to enslave them in a cycle of dependency and fighting. Because the women had learnt the valuable lesson of living in proximity with one another – a lesson which taught them that difference was not something to be tolerated, but was a way in which one could better understand oneself within one’s community – they were better able to extend the breath of love to the fighters. As a result, the community of the country began to change and evolve. This community had ceased to be dependent upon the air of death

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that comes when people live for the power associated with wealth and violence. Liberia began to breathe a calmer breath. After the disarmament, the women continued to participate in the political process. They became involved with election campaigns in 2005. They agreed that only through democracy could Liberia find real peace. Organizing voter drives, talking to women in their neighbourhoods and educating citizens about the election process were some of the ways they contributed. Due to their efforts, on 17 January 2006, Liberia elected its first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Liberia was the first country in Africa to elect a woman as president.

Conclusion What is most often striking about Irigaray’s work is her conviction that men and women operate, think and exist differently in the world. At times, this conviction has made her work popular among feminists and scholars. At other times, this conviction has provoked severe criticisms, particularly with regard to the notion of essentialism. It is therefore important to recognize situations, such as the women’s peace-building movement in Liberia, in which Irigaray’s theoretical work can be seen at work within the lives of real men and women. Looking back to the Liberia of 2001, we encounter a world in which men and women lived very different lives due to an environment of violence and destruction – men perpetuated war while women and children (and also men) were victims of this war. Today, we encounter a different Liberia. It is now a country marked by the peace-building efforts of women, who, by finding and sharing their autonomy, significantly altered the lives of everyone. We also find a story of women continuing to breathe autonomously and communally so as to sustain the social change they initiated. The women of Liberia breathed life into a community that had, in Irigaray’s words, been ‘thrown back upon death’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 77). And they did this in an unquestionably feminine way – ‘by engendering with [the] breath’ (Irigaray 2002a, p. 80). Importantly, the change these women created has been recognized by the international community. In 2011, Leymah Gbowee, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Tawakkul Karman were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The summary of the award reads, ‘We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society’.11 This statement not only acknowledges the tremendous effort made by the women of Liberia, it also, in the context of this paper, suggests that Irigaray’s vision of a mutually respecting, sexually differentiated world might be becoming more and more possible.

Notes 1 Bill Moyers Journal, (PBS, 19 June 2009) http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/ 06192009/watch.html [accessed 20 April 2011].

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2 Sherr, L., Gbowee, L. and Disney, A. ‘Interview’, featured on Bill Moyers Journal. 3 Tribeca Film Festival press conference for Pray the Devil Back to Hell (5 July 2008) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v8Vt3QZ2u-EE&featurerelated [accessed 20 April 2011]. 4 Tribeca Film Festival press conference for Pray the Devil Back to Hell. 5 Irigaray is, of course, not alone in this interpretation. Feminist theology has a tradition of critiquing the gendered hierarchy integral to mind/body dualism. For an overview of some of the current debates in feminist theology, see: Frank Parsons, S. (ed.) (2002), The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 6 Statistics from Robert H. Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism (Allyn and Bacon 1999), p. 354, cited by Banyard, K. (2010), The Equality Illusion: The Truth about Women and Men Today. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., p. 2. 7 ‘Interview’, Bill Moyer Journal. 8 The strategies the women of Liberia used are reminiscent of those employed by the Abeokuta Women’s Union in support of market women in Nigeria. Byfield, J. (2004), ‘Dress and Politics in Post-World War II Abeokuta (Western Nigeria)’, in J. M. Allman (ed.), Fashioning Africa: Power and Politics of Dress. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 31–49, especially p. 42. 9 See also: Irigaray, L. (2008a), ‘The Return’, in L. Irigaray and M. Green (eds), Teaching. London: Continuum, 2008, pp. 219–30. 10 Alison Stone’s Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference offers a clear telling of the history of the essentialism debate. 11 Den Norske Nobelkomite, The Norwegian Nobel Committee, ‘The Nobel Prize for 2011’ [online]. Available at: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/ laureates/2011/press.html [Accessed 1 July 2012].

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The Distant (’dis-tənt)1 Stillness that is ’Breth2 Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa

(European Graduate School, Media and Communications Division, Switzerland)

What if we were able to listen to hear, as it were, hören, zuhören,3 ‘Erhören’,4 that is ‘radically listening’ (Irigaray 2002b, p. 48), sporadically, intermittently, with irregularity, carefully, that is, silently listen glisten or glow and flutter flutter flutter like a firefly Leuchtkäfer oder Glühwürmchen5 in space through air (her) 彼女6 and were able to feel fühlen7 embrace embrasser8 embracer9 (‘from en-  brace pair of arms’)10 breath’s immeasurable stillness? In the stillness of flight, soaring, airborne and winged, Nature ferrying consciousness,11 upon the curvature of the ’breth, spiritus,12 the feminine bodily thought unfolding and folding herself, trespassing, that is passing herself itself herself along alongside within and upon nature natura – natus, nasci,13 nacimiento14– that is, to be born of breath gently, in Stillness, shizukesa,15 flickering softly as in a demureness or reticence of breth 息,16 in modesty, treading lightly upon earth, infatuated groundlessness, the very humility that is inner breth.17 The before over and above supra18 supernal ‘from on high’19 sepal (floral leaf) spiral sprawl spraying sacred sūtraSanskrit (thread threading)20 coming before over elsewhere, unknown. What if her space (she), then, were that which evaporates itself upon that which breathes it? The lagoon of an extensive and transformative arena, the site(lessness) of a divine transcendence? High Altitude and elevation, a hovering of breath or cosmic breath, ‘high above mean sea level’21 where aer22 meanders by Standard Zero (NN: Normalnull)23 and wherein breathing currents slowly rebound(ing) aroundandabout (deep)space espace24 spatium,25 as in the distance ahead, or the distance left behind, or, shall we say, the’ breth left ahead? That is, a volume volume26 of breth volvere27 rolle28 rollen29 rolla30 roule31 rolling upon the breth. Breth(s) interval, a feminine breth, asitwhere, (she), w(h)ere here there there elsewhere body, horizon or tender caress. And what if breath were space or breath space itself, that is, aer32 aēr?33 Would we still embrace it(her) with such tenderness that each breath would deserve its own celestial address? As it were, the breathing that lingers upon another breath, a mouthful of air, or gulp of air, a breathing space or interval of breath, chameleon in its (un) likeness, distinctness, both visible and invisible, divisible and indivisible, therein proffers the celestial and/or cosmic breath. Breth, then, unpronounced, ungathers itself beyond the very act that is speaking stillness upon (alterity’s) otherness ungathering itself upon the human (he, sche,34 hit,35 it, other, feminine, masculine, feminineother,

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masculineherhim, be_tween) and by turn, turning, turns itselfher to another—that is Other of another—in profoundest anonymity. A breath unremembered before breath, (her) (his) another’s an other(s) breath to Sing, Singing Song, whisper(s), whispering nature’s breath, a primeval breath. anciently. breathing before breth. The stillness or silence that is (stille36 stilli37) eine stille Nacht,38 as in the stillness of Nyx Νύx39 or night, wherein the bræth,40 breathless, unspins and unbreathes the time that is history, soundlessly and inaudibly breathing history elsewhere aside. That is Bræth generating herself bræth upon bræth, unthreading unspinning the night of broken glass the crystal night that is Kristallnacht.41 A respite of bræth or body, the interval (intervalle)42 of breath/ing entreval43 intervallum44 and/or interstice, an interstice of the breth, a breathing space; a ‘fluid’45 fluide46 fluidus fluere (flow)47 flowing over of the breth. A flowing of the bræth, a breathing that is breath breathing breath, an atmosphere, spatiality, or repose ungathering itself in the stillness and silence or distance that envelops or unfolds upon bræth the stillness that is be sīdan (beside)48 nationality or xenophobia (from the Greek xέnόV: xenos referring to ‘stranger’ and/ or ‘foreigner’ and fόboV: phobos meaning fear).49 The borderlessness or spatiality of a breath that calls forth exile and homelessness—the not at homeness (Levinas) that marks the unwrapping of thought, language, ideology and history—while unidentically (Adorno) heralding itself as the most intimate act, living the intimacy that is breath, a stillness and or silence silencio50 that folds upon life itself, the living breath, el aliento de vida,51 that is, anima ’ænɪmə animus ’ænɪməs.52 Perhaps, as it were, a swift wind ventus53 gliding along the expanse of the Red Sea, or, a lover’s breath, aura (breeze) aurae (breath of air),54 even death deeth55 herself flattering life, a mere silence of the breath, the last and the first. Where (were) we, are we, then, to consider the breth as an unlimited expanse expansus56 and/or site, sanctuarylessness and sweeping in (its) her hers distance 距離,57 which holds (un)holding and keeps(un)keeping, that which marries (gathers, ungathers, and borders) the empty and the between, a breth infinite in its generation, intangible, aleatory in its nature, beckoning the ancient Anemoi Ἄnɛmόi (winds) Boreas, Zephyrus, Notus and Eurus (North, West, South, and East winds).58 Thus, they thou we her Sche59 it hit him her hire60 (s)he may meditate upon the invisibility and disparity that is breath, its secret expansiveness, and 距離,61 that is proximité,62 in remoteness, ever closer. A mere 距離63 of the breath, as it were, a breathing spell or incantation, an enchantment (Stephen David Ross), arousing emptiness (empty hoursless) and nān thing nāthing(ness)64 niksheid,65 that is a breathing space unidentically exhaling and inhaling a thousand and one breaths upon Scheherazadea,66 her tongue meandering upon finitude and infinity as if it were none other than aeternitat aeternitas aeternus67 eternity. We are here referring to the fluidity of breath la fluidité du souffle68 facilitating an elemental reverence toward flesh, a carnal passage and/or threshold, a bending and bowing (to bow bhujati Sanskrit69) and/or stretching of the flesh towards that which is yielding body in spirit, as Irigaray suggests, fomenting an inclination of the breath towards affection and love, and, in turn, fōstoring70 ‘a wisdom of love’ (Irigaray 2008g, p. 25)71 alongside La Voie de l’amour (Irigaray 2002b, p. vii). The way, that is, to carry vehere72 spiraling upon heavenly bodies (in the plural), vaporously atmospheric and,

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notably, aphrodisiacal in nature, procuring breath’s ‘regeneration’ (Irigaray 2005a, p. 55), ‘fecundity’ (op. cit., p. xiii), ‘virginity’ (op. cit., p. 68) and ‘astonishment’ (op. cit., p. 122). Like an angel ángel angelus angelos 天使,73 breath breathing flesh, engendering an aromatic consciousness. In modesty and humility, a breath that is ungathering itself in the silence of an interval, overflowing herself, inhaling that which is (a) listening,74 in the very process of its cultivation (cultivatus cultivus cultus75) and regeneration, an inhalation drawing on the breath fostering the advent of an interior and secret engagement. A ‘greater interiority of the breath’ (Irigaray 2005a, p. 11), in Irigaray’s words, such as that which dissembles, vaporizes and wanders upon waters, aers and flesh. A fleshing of the spirit, the carnal meandering upon materiality and immateriality, lightness, and the very gravity that is breth, ungathering themselves itself silently and unpronounced, toward the immeasurable stillness that ascends in the between two subjectivities. We are in this instance referring to breth, (a) breathing as that which amorously ‘grants’76 the language that is of breath upon the flesh, a divine carnal exchange. A slipping and sliding upon language 言語77 that is whispering and susurration effortlessly rising, ascending, descending, rolling and licking, kissing or wrapping itself around flesh, the saying, the word, as it were, in the advent of pronunciation and unpronouncement, in stillness and silence, as bodily gesture and flesh. A meditation upon lips and mouths practiced in the inhaling and exhaling of the breth. To speak eirein78 silently, invisibly, inaudibly as if it were but rumour, a declaration undeclared, proverb, prayer, gospel, hymn, or verse, or, its very inverse, that which is ungathering and undoing the word upon breath. The cultivation of an (a) earthly while heavenly transcendence 超越79 (ascendence/descendence ascent descent dissent) in a delicate folding upon nature’s body, nature and consciousness, ungathering themselves, as Irigaray specifies, in the evolving regeneration of the natural and celestial breath. A breath that in its aspectus80 divinus81 facilitates a regeneration and balance between natura82 and humanus,83 the humain84 restoring within (it) us, that is—between two—an amorousness towards earth erthe eorthe erda era,85 animal animale animalis anima (soul),86 mountain muntaine montanea montaneus,87 and sea see sæˉ sē saiws.88 A love of the stranger alterity that is her and him and (the) you ungathering itself themselves in a state of elemental reverence upon the flesh of divine lovers. As it were, the evocation of a threshold such as the silence that lingers upon the ‘greater interiority of the breath’ (Irigaray 2005a, p.  11) engendering a stillness that calls forth the possibility of the mystical and/or enigmatic in the everyday practice that is living. An interior turning towards the irreducibility and alterity that is in the very elicitation that is mystiikka mysticā mysticae89 mystical breath. Respiration therein considered in the widest or narrowest possible sense, fostering an alterity of breath in celebration of that which we may call silence and unknowing, an intertwining of flesh and spirit, intuition, consciousness, and the unconscious, the before conscious. An alterity of breath or breathing that meanders upon revelation, foresight and prophecy, the sacred and the profane, that which is ‘in front of ’ and ‘outside the temple’90 (profanus),91 beside holy places, of sacred things, and of ‘things set apart’ (Durkheim 1915, p.  47).92 ‘[T]he fecundity of our double truth – natural, human, [and] divine’ (Irigaray 2005a, p. xiii), as Irigaray suggests, marking the cultivation in ‘the present’

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(Irigaray 2002b, p. 131) of two subjectivities, individually, one and other, inhaling and exhaling alongside earth, sky, divinities and mortals (Heidegger).93 The breth doubled, as it were, in two, holiness incarnate, tilling the breth. In particular, Irigaray fathoms the notion of a generative breath wherein the instance may welcome the eternal.94 Fathoming therein the unwinding or unthreading of time in the cultivation of a breathing that ungathers itself as a virgin breath, where breath folds herself upon the sheer delight of the amative susurration between ‘lovers’ who, in turn, become ‘lovers of the universe’ (Irigaray 2005a, p. 29). Signalling a precocious, if not astonishing, flexing of time and temporality, breath in its susurration and evocation therein permitting the passage of a ‘physical and spiritual temporality’ (op. cit., p. 33), a threshold that is passaged and sensed upon bodily breathing, therein yielding breath’s regeneration in an ungathering of the mysticus mystikos95 that fathoms the irreducible alterity that is of the lover or beloved loverbelovedstranger. A lover’s breath or silence can thus be experienced as a gesture amorously whispered to the beloved in praise of life and earth, while the cultivation of the caress, transforms the very instance that lies before or beside (her) lover  beloved, a lover(s) caress stretching forth the very horizon that inhales and exhales the breath of life itself. Irigaray thereby insists upon the delicacy of the gesture that we may enumerate in the fragility of the caress, as a gesture thus welcomed, not as a form of ownership, but as the very motion that articulates and cultivates the amorousness, the astonishment that is living itself. In Irigaray’s words, a gesture fathoming an ‘awakening’, a ‘repose’, an act ‘less utilitarian’ attending a passage tōweard towardes96 an ‘incarnate subjectivity’ (Irigaray 2001, p. 27), caressing ‘the air between us’ (op. cit., p. 11), that which remainders between two. The caress as a whisper or murmur invoking language, a breath that touches the word as a bodily figuration. In the provocation that ungathers itself alongside the borders of an irreducible strangeness, the silence and diffidence that wander upon breth suggest the possibility of a ‘mythical time’ (Irigaray 2008f, p.  74), an instance where ‘philosophy, art and prayer’ (Irigaray 2008h, p. 99) may meet, where ‘seeing’ is on the threshold of ‘another relation between flesh, vision and thought’ (Irigaray 2008d, p.  109), a relation, responsive to ungathering itself in contemplation, beside domination and possession. A breath and/or sight skέptόmai (sképtomaĭ)97 specere (to look)98 that lingers upon the invisible would thus be an adequate means of (un)articulating that which cannot or should not be articulated in the sense of form or clarification. The invisibility of the eye and/or the breath, in this case, hints at a passage or threshold that breathes the mυstikόV mustikos and mύsthV mustēs,99 the mysterious and the secret, a gift that ungathers and/or unravels itself in uncertain measure as the very gesture that fosters the irreducibility and alterity that is the stranger. The eye as an uninhabited blindness, that motions itself beyond pure visibility ‘outside of all representation’ (Irigaray 2008d, p. 113).100 A blindness or invisibility, that is in contrast to ‘the hegemony of the look’ (Irigaray 1999, p. 161) and beside representation, meandering towards aer, the breath fostering a form of humility and quietude in us, while, at the same time, ungathering herself him her we you you therethere in astonishment and rejuvenation, a veiled breth, remainde(r)ing upon the mystikos101 and the mysterious as its sacred ethos. A blind eye, then, that motions far beyond its possible spectral gaze specere, a horizon that

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persists upon a spectral blindness passaging the abode that is ‘natural, human, [and] divine’ (Irigaray 2005a, p. xiii). In its subtle form, the veiled eye or breath thus motions towards a transcendent and/or mystical experience, wherein ‘breathing, love, words, [and] thought’ may intermingle, accentuating ‘a spiritual virginity’ which keeps and transforms the breath in such a manner that the unknowable and/or mystical may arise (Irigaray 2008h, p. 105). The unknowable and/or mystical may thus delineate an intimation or ungathering towards that which remains upon the unspoken and the unseen as a figuration of the divine breath that enfolds, unwinds and ungathers itself upon lover and beloved, him and her, his    hers, her    her, him    him, proffering a passage to a holy and celestial abode, in the manner of a ‘bequest’ (Heidegger), ungathering itself among mortals, gods, goddesses and demons alike. A seizing (however gently) of the breath as the ungathering of a groundlessness that calls forth the mysterious and the mύsthV mustēs102 in the unknowing that still lingers upon knowing while bypassing and slipping beyond itself. A breath which meanders upon nothingness, the negative or negativity, in the Hegelian sense, the void and the abyss, a supreme form of unknowing which filters upon the gathering and ungathering of the body ‘natural, human, [and] divine’ (Irigaray 2005a, p. xiii), the celestial and the profane. A breath light as a feather beckoning the relation unfolding upon separation, distance, and unrelation, in the Levinasian sense, while, for Irigaray, it is of a relation to come fostering the ‘you’ and ‘I’ Sche and ‘he and He’ and ‘she and She’ (Irigaray 1992, p.  4). An ungathering of the I beyond the Same that faulters upon the you as if it were travelling transforming bequeathing itself upon love(r) and the beloved accosting themselves herself alongside her(s) his theirs ungathering theirs—a divine figuration, unraveling herself, as it were, by breath. That is to say, a goddess disclosing herself upon the corpus of a triple figuration ('Ekάth Hekátē)103 calling forth the notion of a fluidity of body of the many and the one, the human and divine, a passaging of bodies that reimagine and reinvent themselves, and, effectively, remain themselves,104 at every instance, yet again. A femininebreath, she and I scheSche that remain in mystery, beyond relation, as the corpus of an ‘infinite intuition’ (Irigaray 1999, p. 103) veiled in primordial beginninglessness and nonorigins offering the promise of the mystical breath that proffers the anticipation of unknowing itself, a divine that crosses ‘within her as well as outside of her’ (Irigaray 2005b, p. 11E). A fluidity and/or preponderance of the body which can be demarcated as that which avails itself from stasis, a movida,105 emanating stillness and equilibrium while moving beyond itself, a multiplication or plurality in figuration demarcating infinite possibilities of ‘exchange’, breaths and bodies uniting ‘the earliest  .  .  .  and the most future time’ (Irigaray 2005b, p. 14E). We may thus consider breath as a provocation capable of inciting a time or timelessness that is at once (1) fluid, that is to say, beyond a singularity of time, and (2) capable of implicating a ‘carnal and spiritual alliance’ (Irigaray 1993b, p. 11) that breathes itself to life, ‘a breath become divine’ (Irigaray 2005b, p. 14E)106 as it passages and engages (3) the bod(y)(ies) (in the plural). A divine carnality in alliance with an infinite possible number of bodies enlivening the one as well as an other, pertaining to a plurality of bodies that remain in difference, herself, many, within her itself and in

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fidelity to heritself, just as breath may gather herselfthemselves upon the visitation of another. But, what is this which remainders upon many, in the plural, within her itself and in fidelity to her itself which likewise may gather upon the visitation of an other? Can it be supposed that the many, within nature, the human and the divine be that which ungathers itselfherselfthemselves to the unknown as a promise which we shall intimate upon, let us say, the very notion that is called upon fidelity, as that which remains within a spatiality that is unknown, to another and to itself? That is, fidelity in the widest and most expansive possible sense, not precluding perfidy or betrayal, but as a circumflexing of the very notion of fidelity and its inverse, that is a fidelity of the breath considered as a spatiality (in the plural) or transgression, unidentically passaging that which calls forth righteousness and corruption, depravity and dissolution. Fidelity, as a form of inequity, that ungathers sexuate difference, in the re(imagine)(n)ing of woman, for example, delineating a blossoming ‘never to be completed in a single form . . . ceaselessly becoming . . . again and again’ (Irigaray 1993b, p. 103). A ceaseless ungathering of that which emanates in breath, engendering the possibility for woman to stay ‘close to herself and the living world’ (op. cit.), therein remaining in fidelity to herself and nature, and, in turn, enabling woman ‘to pass from nature to . . . spirit’ (op. cit., p.  105). That is, fidelity as the procuration and preservation of the breath with the intimation of that which trespasses and transgresses knowledge and the unknown as a spatiality that welcomes sanctuary in the form of shelter-less-ness, the mυstikόV mustikos107 and elemental which proffers that which is still to be thought or that which remains unidentified, ‘prior to all naming’ and secret in nature (Irigaray 1999, p. 102). The unspoken, unseen, even the unnam(e)able feminine (Lori Martindale), therein, fosters the cultivation of the breath as a transcendence which effectively remains terrestrial in its abode. The feminine in this sense practices the inhalation that fosters yet another exhalation, a practice that remains within the quotidian, our daily living and the commonplace. Calling forth a plethora of modalities, breath ungathers itself upon the spatiality of the translucent, emanating, as it were, as ‘[a] sign of presence in and through absence’ (op. cit., p.  48). Its secret is that it ‘never appears’ (op. cit.). Breath thus remains furtive, ‘unpresentable, indemonstrable, and unpronounceable’ (op. cit., p.  119), a mystical emanation that passages beneath or below logos, meandering upon ‘senseless utterance’ (op. cit., p. 139), escaping appropriation. Breath ‘overflows’ (op. cit., p. 149) herself and arrives at her own departure, ungathering a speech that hearkens upon the ‘imperceptible’ (op. cit.). Breath, ungathering herself beside ‘infinite intuition’ (op. cit., p. 103), a feminine breath that befalls the mysticae (in the feminine),108 crossing the breadth of innocence, in the balance—it offers itself unknowingly, intuitively, even before intuition. That is to say that it is that which calls forth the very gift that ungathers itself infinitely with the promise of yet another tomorrow, another breath expanding the periphery of that which we may consider to be common time. Breath encircles the celestial and the terrestrial abode, appealing to an infinite spatiality and regeneration. That which is ‘indemonstrable’ and ‘unpronounceable’ and which paradoxically multiplies itself in the demonstration of an infinite ‘un[re]presentable’ (Irigaray 1999, p. 119).

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Divine inspiration may thus spring forth alongside that which we may endeavour upon the mystical path of unknowing, a path, designated in the plural, multiplying itself ad infinitum that is i n d e f i n i t e l y. Breath, as the intimation of language, body incarnate, on the mystical path, as it were, bespeaks a simplicity that is availed upon the act of breathing that is speaking or whispering upon that which remains ‘still inexhaustible’ (op. cit., p. 168). A gesture of the breath breathing language upon the gift of an ‘[u]ncommon destiny’ (op. cit., p. 173). That is, Alterity, in the figuration of the saying, as divine inspiration, ungathering a future already past, remaining upon the body that is language as prophecy or prayer, the breath of a caress, and in fidelity towards speech, unfolding in the spatiality that is the breath, its whisperings impermissible and unpronounceable. Holding forth the earthly as greeting, a breath or whispering therein remains to be thought and, too, to be undone; a language of the breath beckoning the topography of lover and beloved, a stranger alterity, expounding the fragrance of a speech, among lovers and strangers. What could this speech be if it were not behest to that which indefinitely remains foreign and unsaid, effectively de-territorialized? A breath beyond nationality or territory, that is, without a country sans patrie,109 or as Cixous notes, ‘despays (uncountry)’ (Cixous 1994, p.  131). A stranger breath therein folds upon secrets whose mystical aspirations circumvent a destination. Breath uncommonly thought as the aspiration towards a spatiality that whispers and remainders upon breath as susurration, inhalation and exhalation as the invocation of a mystical breath wherein language 言語110 unwraps itself around heaven and earth. Irigaray refers to such a 言語 as a ‘[l]anguage that is innocent of all calculation’ (Irigaray 1999, p.  156), and as the ‘[m]ystery of [an] unthought site’ (op. cit., p. 167). Such language and/or breath still remains to be thought and calls forth the sitelessness of an ‘“intemporal” spatiality where everything takes place’ (op. cit.). Language 言語 would thus meander upon the breath as a daily activity, in the cultivation of a particular simplicity in the breath, an evocation in breath as poetic endeavour, and as an emanation of a mysterious language, a 言語 which remains hidden, secret and uncommon while ungathering itself in its commonest activity, that is, quotidian speech. Breath, in the form of a mantra, calling forth that which is to remain secret, a secret breath which ungathers itself as an unheard and uncalled exchange; a fluidity of bodily language as the mere gesture of a breath. 言語 thus bespeaks of a modality of the breath, of a voice yet to be spoken or heard. Heidegger will refer to 言語 as something that ‘befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us’ (Heidegger 1982, p. 57). 言語 as a susurration, that inaugurates a form of ‘listening’ (op. cit., p.  71), marking a ‘listening to the grant’ (op. cit.), while for Irigaray, the breath of 言語 aspires to a listening in the form of an inhalation that fosters breath’s exhalation and regeneration. Further still, Heidegger notes, 言語 may be considered as something that ‘withholds’ (op. cit., p.  81) itself as it speaks and, furthermore, ‘passes unnoticed’ (op. cit.). The 言語 of the breath can thus be thought or unthought of as a traversal,111 a form of recitation and/or meditation that is speaking ‘language, from within language’ (op. cit., p. 85). Perhaps, it is a language that can be referred to as breathing breath, from within breath, as if  言語 were breathing bodily breath, a type of feminine outflow that calls forth an inhalation from within inhalation traversing itself only to whisper upon exhalation

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and regeneration. Conceivably, 言語 may espouse itself to be among an uncommon ground, that, strangely, is rooted within the commonest of grounds. That is to say, that 言語, itself, upholds or ungathers itself as a form of divergence and unrootedness while it lies at the deepest and profoundest rootedness that is breathing breath, from within breath. 言語, in this sense, may transcend and surpass herself as breath, trespassing herself into the mystiikka mysticā mysticae112 and divine realm that is 言語. That is, the breath of language or the language of breath113 offers herself as an aspiration that is of a language unknown, remaining among the ‘language of the birds’114 die Sprache der Vögel el lenguaje de los pájaros 鳥の言葉,115 that is a language of divination. A language of the breath that is prior or before language, a priori, musical in its manifestation and prior to its very beginning, such a breath would call forth the imperceptible that is language and be contrary to that which encourages ‘reproduction, repetition, control, [and] appropriation’ (Irigaray 2005a, p.  122). The breath of language therein recalls Irigaray’s reference to the ‘irreducible transcendence of the you’ (op. cit., p. 123)—the language or breath which astonishes in the very act of an encounter with an other— alterity as the very unrootedness which forestalls alienation (Levinas).116 Strangeness as the breath of a spatiality that ungathers an ‘[a]wakening’ (Irigaray 2005a, p. 123) in us, ‘beyond all knowledge, all judgment’, an encounter mystical in its implication and emanation (op. cit., p. 124). A form of incantation, the divination of the breath may be thus relegated to the inhalation and exhalation of a cosmic breath, a divine listening to the parousia117 of song. An amplification of a song, breath, or language, in the sense that Anne Marie Oliver describes it—and we, in turn, may interpret—as a drawing near one to the other una a otra uno a otro118 to the present among futures die Vergangenheit der Zukunft119 out of tiempos pasados and antepasados,120 to her to the other to that which arises a lo que surge en el secreto121 in the secrecy of the beloved ljubljena122 auf das, was in der Geheimhaltung des Geliebten entsteht.123 Oliver notes, ‘When we interject another person, a person whom we love or respect, a person to whom we belong in the most powerful sense of the word, we amplify ourselves, and we amplify them’ (Oliver 2010, p. 21). This amplification, which so greatly moves us, may be that which is aligned in the very breath that speaks to another and to ourselves. A breath that is amplified in the exchange of a language that can be said to belong ungathering itself upon the beloved, to a lover of another future, present, or, past, whispered, silently, evocatively as a breath that in secret exchanges the breath of life, that is, el aliento de vida.124 A language or breath that secretly echoes how it is that we deeply belong pertenecemos125 to each other and how language pronounces this sense of belonging, not in the sense of appropriation but, rather, invoking a mystical sensibility that is in fidelity to irreducibility and the unpronouncement of mastery. An amplification, as Oliver states, that ungathers itself in the encounter of an other, lover or beloved or stranger—that is in the widest possible sense of the word, delineating the ungathering of a stranger alterity in the unpronouncement that fosters the irreducibility that is secretly pronounced in the consecrated, revered, and irreverent that is the breath of the word. That which remains unseen and unspoken, unnam(e)able and unpronounced ungathers the breath in its multiplicitous configurations. A breath that lingers upon language, whispering and susurration before its beginnings is likewise the breath of a future that is already present, a future that has already passed, in a breath that calls forth

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the divine upon the terrestrial and celestial abode, a breath and breathing, eroticizing the very mouth that lives and breathes the breth of life Lebenszeit (lifetime)126 love Liebe Geliebte(r) (beloved)127 and the divine das himmlischeheilige.128

Notes 1 Distant – pronunciation: ’dis-tənt. Word pronunciations unless otherwise noted are quoted from merriam-webster.com. 2 Breath – Middle English breth – pronunciation: ’breth. References to Middle English unless otherwise noted are quoted from merriam-webster.com. 3 To hear/listen to – German hören, zuhören. 4 See Heidegger (1996), p. 47. 5 Firefly – German Leuchtkäfer, Glühwürmchen, Johanniskäfer. 6 Her – Japanese 彼女 (kanojo). 7 Feel – German fühlen. 8 Embrace – French embrasser. 9 Embrace – Anglo-French embracer. 10 Ibid. 11 Luce Irigaray notes, ‘. . . nature becomes consciousness. In order to be and to remain two in love, including carnal love, it is necessary, in fact, that the body become flesh awakened by consciousness’ (Irigaray 2005a, p. 118). 12 Breath/Spirit – Latin spiritus. 13 Nature – ‘from Latin natura, from natus past participle of nasci, to be born’. See http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nature [accessed 09/09/2012]. 14 Birth – Spanish nacimiento. 15 Stillness – Japanese 静けさ (shizukesa). 16 Breath – Japanese 息 (iki). 17 See references to Irigaray’s notion regarding the ‘interiority of the breath’ in Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, p. 11. 18 Above – Latin supra. 19 See http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/supernal [accessed 09/09/2012]. 20 See http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sutra [accessed 09/09/2012]. 21 See the following references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_altitude [accessed 09/09/2012], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_sea_level [accessed 09/09/2012] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Above_mean_sea_level [accessed 09/09/2012]. 22 Air – Latin aer. 23 Standard Zero – German NN: Normalnull – also referred to as Normalhöhennull. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalhöhennull [accessed 09/09/2012]. 24 Space – Anglo-French espace. 25 Space – Latin spatium (area). 26 Volume – from Latin volumen (roll, scroll). 27 Roll – Latin volvere. 28 Roll – Middle English rolle. 29 Roll – German rollen. 30 Roll – Medieval Latin rolla. 31 Roll – Anglo-French roule. 32 Air – Latin aer.

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33 Air – Greek aēr. 34 ‘Sche (pronounced [ʃeː]) was the feminine, third-person, singular, personal pronoun (subject case) in Middle English’. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sche [accessed 09/09/2012]. 35 It – Old English hit. References to Old English unless otherwise noted are quoted from merriam-webster.com. 36 Stillness – Middle English stille. 37 Stillness – from Old High German stilli (still). References to Old High German unless otherwise noted are quoted from merriam-webster.com. 38 This is a reference to the German song ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’ (Silent Night). 39 Night – Greek Nyx Νύx ‘primordial goddess of the night’ (Greek Mythology). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyx [accessed 09/09/2012]. 40 Breath – Old English bræth. 41 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht (9–10 November 1938), [accessed 09/09/2012]. 42 Interval – Middle English intervalle. 43 Interval – Anglo-French entreval. 44 Interval – Latin intervallum. 45 Luce Irigaray writes: ‘My body is fluid and ever mobile. It brings you blood and milk, air and water and light’ (Irigaray 1992, p. 25). 46 Fluid – French fluide. 47 Fluid – Latin fluidus, from fluere (to flow). 48 Beside – Old English be sīdan. 49 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophobia [accessed 09/09/2012]. 50 Silence – Spanish silencio. 51 The living breath – Spanish el aliento de vida. 52 Breath – Latin anima – pronunciation: ’ænɪmə animus – pronunciation: ’ænɪməs. See the following sources: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/anima [accessed 09/09/2012], http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/animus [accessed 09/09/2012] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anima_and_animus [accessed 09/09/2012]. 53 Wind – Latin ventus. 54 See http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wordz.pl?englishbreath [accessed 09/09/2012]. 55 Death – Old English death, Middle English deeth. 56 Expanse – Latin expansus. 57 Distance – Japanese 距離 (kyori). 58 Winds – Greek Anemoi Ἄnɛmoi – wind gods (Greek Mythology). See http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anemoi [accessed 09/09/2012]. 59 See endnote 34. 60 Her – Middle English hire. 61 Distance – Japanese 距離 (kyori). 62 Proximity – Middle French proximité. References to Middle French unless otherwise noted are quoted from merriam-webster.com. 63 Distance – Japanese 距離 (kyori). 64 Nothing – Old English nān thing, nāthing. 65 Nothingness – Afrikaans niksheid. 66 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheherazade [accessed 09/09/2012]. 67 Eternity – Latin aeternitat aeternitas aeternus. 68 . . . the fluidity of breath – French la fluidité du souffle.

The Distant (’dis-tənt) Stillness that is ’Breth 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

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Bow – Sanskrit bhujati. Fostor – Old English fōstor. For further discussion on this topic, see Irigaray, The Way of Love, especially p. 11. Way – from Latin vehere (to carry). Angel – Spanish ángel, Late Latin angelus, Greek angelos, Japanese 天使 (Tenshi). Irigaray notes: ‘Generally, as I already said, speaking corresponds more to exhaling and listening to inhaling’ (Irigaray 2008e, pp. 48–9). Cultivate – ‘Medieval Latin: cultivatus, past participle of cultivare, from cultivus cultivable, from Latin cultus, past participle of colere’. See http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/cultivate [accessed 09/09/2012]. Heidegger writes, ‘Only what is granted endures. That which endures primally out of the earliest beginning is what grants’ (Heidegger 1977, p. 31). Language – Japanese 言語 (gengo). To speak – Greek eirein. Transcendence – Japanese 超越 (chōetsu). Aspect – Latin aspectus. Divine – Latin divinus. Nature – Latin natura. Human – Latin humanus. Human – Middle English humain. Earth – Middle English erthe, Old English eorthe, Old High German erda, Greek era. Animal – Latin animale, animalis, anima (soul). Mountain – Anglo-French muntaine, Vulgar Latin montanea montaneus. Sea – Middle English see, Old English sæ ˉ , Old High German sē, Gothic saiws. Mystic/Mystical – Swedish mystiikka, Latin mysticā mysticae (feminine). See http:// en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mysticus [accessed 09/09/2012]. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profane [accessed 09/09/2012]. Profane – Latin profanus. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred-profane_dichotomy [accessed 09/09/2012]. In addition, see Durkheim (1915), p. 47. See Irigaray’s reference to Heidegger’s ‘fourfold’, in The Way of Love, pp. 131–2. See Irigaray’s Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, in particular, pages 32 and 33. Mystic/Mystical – Latin mysticus (of mysteries), Greek mystikos. Toward – Old English tōweard (facing, imminent), Middle English towardes. Observe – Greek Obskέptomai (sképtomaĭ). Aspect – from Latin aspectus, aspicere (to look at), specere (to look). Mystic/Mystical – Ancient Greek mυstikόV mustikos (‘secret, mystic’) and mύsthV mustēs (‘one who has been initiated’). See http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ mysticus [accessed 09/09/2012]. Irigaray notes the following – ‘My inner space is thus, for various reasons, modified by the things, and even more by the others, whom I encounter. It is inhabited in multiple ways, and the manner in which I look cannot be reduced to the mere perception of the visible external to me. I co-look with that which already inhabits me, outside of all representation’ (Irigaray 2008d, p. 113). Mystic/Mystical – Greek mystikos. Mystic/Mystical – Ancient Greek mύsthV mustēs (‘one who has been initiated’). See http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mysticus [accessed 11/04/2010].

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103 Hekátē – Ancient Greek Ἑkάth (Greco-Roman Goddess). See http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Hecate [accessed 05/14/2011]. 104 In this instance, Irigaray refers to that which is unable to ‘remain in itself ’ as that which suffocates breath (Irigaray 2005b, p. 6E). 105 Move (in a game) – Spanish movida. [mwc] Also a reference to ‘La Movida Madrileña’. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Movida_Madrileña [accessed 09/09/2012]. 106 It should be noted that Irigaray’s consideration of the mystical and/or divine should not be viewed solely under the guise of a single tradition or fascination, but rather as expansive concepts that traverse both Eastern and Western traditions. 107 Mystic/Mystical – Ancient Greek mυstikόV mustikos (‘secret, mystic’). See http:// en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mysticus [accessed 09/09/2012]. 108 Mystic/Mystical – Latin mysticā mysticae (feminine), ibid. 109 Without a country or homeland – French sans patrie. 110 Language – Japanese 言語 (gengo). 111 See Heidegger (1982), p. 85. 112 Mystic/Mystical – Swedish mystiikka, Latin mysticā mysticae (feminine). See http:// en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mysticus [accessed 09/09/2012]. 113 Heidegger writes the following – ‘The being of language: the language of being’ (Heidegger 1982, p. 94). 114 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_the_birds [accessed 09/09/2012]. 115 Language of the birds – German die Sprache der Vögel, Spanish el lenguaje de los pájaros, Japanese 鳥の言葉 (tori no kotoba). 116 Levinas writes: ‘Paradoxically it is qua alienus – foreigner and other – that man is not alienated’ (Levinas 2000, p. 59). 117 Imminent arrival and/or presence – Greek parousia (feminine). See http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parousia [accessed 09/09/2012]. 118 One to the other – Spanish una a otra, uno a otro. 119 The past of the future – German die Vergangenheit der Zukunft. 120 Passed times – Spanish tiempos pasados and ancestors antepasados. 121 To that which arises in the secret – Spanish a lo que surge en el secreto. 122 Beloved – Slovenian ljubljena. 123 To that which arises in the secrecy of the beloved – German auf das, was in der Geheimhaltung des Geliebten entsteht. 124 The living breath – Spanish el aliento de vida. 125 Belong to – Spanish pertenecemos a. 126 Life – German Lebenszeit (lifetime). 127 Love – German Liebe, Geliebte(r) (beloved). 128 Divine – German himmlisch (heavenly), heilig (holy), göttlich (godly).

Part Five

Conclusion

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To Begin with Breathing Anew Luce Irigaray

(Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris)1

Breathing as a condition for natural and spiritual life Breathing amounts to living, living in an autonomous way. Unfortunately, we defend badly the autonomy of our breath, as badly we defend our life itself. Instead of taking care of our life as such, we waste it by not cultivating our breath. Hence, our being dependent on our environment, on the world as it is constructed, on others. Consequently, we remain in a state of interdependence that does not correspond to our desire but to our needs, especially to our need for air. This leads to a master–slave struggle as far as our survival is concerned. Such a struggle is not firstly situated at an economic level, as is too often affirmed in our times, but at the level of life itself. Without attaining an autonomous life, each attempts to possess the life of the other in order to survive, even if in a state of dependence that is more often than not unconscious. Being autonomous at the level of breathing, of breath, is essential to reach a relation without conflict to and with the other. Cultivating our breathing is also necessary to ensure our growth. Growing cannot amount to being subjected to a natural growth or decline, but implies that we become able to go beyond the level of organizing mere survival towards living humanely. This requires a continuous growth, in particular a transformation of our vital breath into a breath in the service of our heart, our listening and speaking, our thinking, that is, in the service of a proper spiritual becoming and a social and cultural autonomous coexistence. The breath is a medium, a mediator, which is essential for a becoming of the relation to ourselves, to the world, to the other. To cultivate one’s breath means keeping alive a possible mediation between oneself and oneself, oneself and the other, oneself and the world. Breathing cannot be assimilated to an abstract and unconscious gesture. Breathing must become an autonomous, active and conscious gesture towards a living spiritual becoming that is both embodied and embodying. Air as a mediation needs limits to avoid fusion, undifferentiation. Cultivating one’s breathing with one’s own growth and the autonomy of one’s own becoming in mind can prevent the risk of merging with the world or the other, especially through a regression to the maternal world – an inclusion, an undifferentiation

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or a dependence with respect to the mother, to the maternal world. Such a lack of differentiation from whom, or from what, is at the origin of our life prevents a possible communication or communion with the other, which can only happen after winning a real autonomy and a possible return to oneself, to the world that is one’s own. Only cultivating our breathing can bring us independence from our natural origin. The passage from our dependence on the maternal world to that on the discourse of the father, acting as a law, cannot guarantee our autonomy. This discourse merely imposes a world parallel to the world of life. Only an autonomous and cultured relation to the natural world – to air, to fire, to earth and to water – can grant us a separation from the mother that does not mean that we renounce our natural belonging. What matters is thus to substitute a partial dependence on nature for the dependence on our mother. We do not produce by ourselves the air, the fire, the earth and the water that we need to live. Before resorting to any fabricated means, it is nature that can provide us with them. Although they are essential for ensuring our autonomous survival, the natural elements do not yet suffice to ensure our human becoming. We could survive in nature while remaining dependent on human society and culture. Autonomy at that level needs a further step from us, the step of recognizing that we first received the oxygen necessary for living from a human being, from our mother. For lack of acknowledging this first gift, indeed this exchange or sharing, of life and of giving thanks for it to the one who is its origin, we might remain unconscious and passive with regard to the breathing which provides us with oxygen, and thus completely dependent on nature, but also on culture, on others. Acknowledging the source of life that comes from our mother amounts to recognizing that our relation to her is not merely natural, but potentially spiritual. Air is essential for our bodily existence, but also for its transformation into a spiritual life. Air is the element that allows us to survive and also to attain a vital and cultural autonomy that is both our own and shareable with others. Air is necessary for an access to the transcendental that a true and free relation to the other as other requires. Air is the material and the medium for sensible and sensory life, but also for spiritual and relational life. Air is the most universal element, both material and spiritual according to the use we make of it. Essential to our survival and that of the world and all living beings, air is able to be transformed so that it can become the privileged mediation towards a living cultural and spiritual existence. If our breathing does not play a part in that existence, then it is limited to a repetition of the past or an abstraction from the present, without the elaboration of a living relation to the real, to the other and to the words that we pronounce. These do not have their origin in what is left unsaid in a culture of breath which allows the one who pronounces them to use them as an efflorescence of life and not as mere utterance of an already existing discourse. The words, then, flower from a subjectivity that is not mere survival, and they bear witness to a supplement of life, often sustained by a desire for sharing, a desire for loving. Nothing of all that can really happen without a cultivation of breathing. Indeed, if desire does not take root in a life of one’s own, it might be reduced to an appropriation or a consumption of what it aims at and, consequently, fade unless it becomes destroyed by fire, it becomes itself consumed. Breath protects desire

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against fire through air that both ensures autonomy of the life of each one and acts as a mediation between the two. It is not always the same quality or consistency of air that can guarantee these different functions. The air that is necessary for survival, for vegetative life, has neither the same density nor the same temperature as those of the air that allows us to pass to spiritual life or of the air that supports desire and is animated by it. In these two later cases, air must be more subtle and, if becoming spiritual requires air to ascend towards higher and cooler spheres, in desire, air needs some sunshine, some warmth. No doubt, the two intertwine because going from one state to another needs energy, fire, but also the freshness required for the access to a higher degree of energy, of being, to a transcendence with regard to all that already exists. Moreover, tending towards the other implies the intervention of fire, but respecting this other as other calls for a renunciation that is no longer commanded by fire, but instead by longing for its transformation into a light able to ensure a becoming of life without consuming or destroying it. More often than not, Western tradition has imposed on us a transcendence, a moral doctrine, concepts – to say nothing of a culture of energy, especially of breath – that make those inadequate for processes of a living becoming. Eastern tradition, for its part, at least that concerning yoga but not only that, lays the stress on the necessity for a cultivation of breathing, but without indicating its meaning for the becoming of humanity enough. Some Indians even laughed at me when I told them that, in doing yoga, I am in search of something other than being in better health and more effective in my work. According to me, there is a paralysis of human development in both cases – either through a theory or a culture that privileges the mental state presumed already existing or through a physical practice of which the cultural or spiritual stake is not truly obvious or clear. Which somehow or other establishes a split between body and spirit. No doubt, a few masters escaped such an impasse but this one remains too often the norm. The encounter between two cultures may allow a new step to be made towards accomplishing our humanity, notably by giving more breath to meaning and more meaning to breath. This passage requires the possibility of a return to a more basic life and the ability for a new cultivation of it, thanks to leaving aside some meanings already ordered by one or another tradition. Thus, our breath is not necessarily divine, but it can become, or become again, divine, neither is this breath merely corporeal; it is always already relational and cultural. In other words, a culture of breathing cannot be the privilege of a tradition; it first has part in all becoming human. And cultivating our breathing cannot only aim at achieving physical good health or being effective in one’s work, but must necessarily involve an intention of spiritual nature and the realization of this. Such a realization can happen independently of a specific tradition and permits any religious belonging and the coexistence between different traditions. Being capable of spiritualizing one’s breathing – without making one’s breath dependent on words, beliefs or absolutes already determined – seems a privileged path towards the divinization of humanity. Perhaps it would be appropriate to allude in this regard to a spiritual virginity allowing the incarnation of a divine yet to happen and for which our epoch is longing.

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Breathing allows the mediation of a living silence Cultivating one’s silent availability is perhaps the final stage in a spiritual journey, the one to which some Eastern or Western masters bear witness, leaving continually open to a beyond the objective of their sensible and mental way. Keeping in abeyance or surpassing any object in a spiritual course leads to a gradual transformation of being, in its global nature, into and thanks to a more subtle and enlightening breath – that some will name a soul. Such a breath modifies the materiality of the body without subjecting it to imperatives or specific cultural norms which often oppress, indeed deny, it but instead through animating it by a fluid that makes it an alive, subtle, changing and even shareable flesh. Such an evolution renders possible a communion without confusion between us, whatever could be our membership to a sex or to a culture. This way appears the one to be taken by us to reach a coexistence without conflicts or wars between different natural, but also cultural, identities. It presupposes the possibility and the aptitude for a silent sharing, without any regression to a lack of differentiation, through a personal cultivation of the breath. Indeed, this element, both material and potentially spiritual, exists in each one and permits a return to oneself, dwelling within oneself and becoming, but also a union with the other, with others, that goes further than a common participation in a natural or cultural atmosphere which is essential for the survival of each one. No doubt, paying careful attention to a spiritual virginity of the breath represents a path towards a self-accomplishment and a sharing, including an amorous sharing, with the other. It is also a path that presupposes respect for nature and the living world in their entirety while taking part in them with a human responsibility. Following this way does not confine itself to a mental nor even a linguistic course. It rather corresponds to a manner of being, of loving, of thinking and acting that ought to be the one that humans must assume in the world wherever they are situated without pretending to dominate it, but by cooperating and helping the permanence and becoming of this world in their specific way. A culture of the breath is accompanied by a culture of silence. The importance of silence has been underrated, indeed forgotten, in our tradition. We have been trained to repeat already existing words without being taught how the words that we pronounce have to take root in silence in order to have meaning. Moreover, as our language was presumed to ensure the mastery of our natural origin, it remained extraneous to our carnal reality, and what it expressed was always parallel to life and prevented us from being really present to ourselves, to the world, to others. This language went no further than a sort of technique that was useful for emerging from our natural identity and coexisting at best between the same ones, especially at the level of our individual and collective needs. Even our relation to the absolute remained at the level of a need being, at least in part, the result of such a use of words. Hence our difficulty in distancing ourselves from it and in coexisting with traditions whose absolutes do not coincide, each one comparing its absolute – or Absolute – to the real itself, a real that it is important to defend at any cost. Returning to a silence that corresponds with life, with our flesh, with our global existence and presence is necessary for discovering the words, and also the gestures,

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that make possible coexisting and sharing on this side or beyond different cultural constructions. Silence is a place of possible encounters between human beings, more generally between living beings who do not speak the same language and do not obey the same values, the same ideals. Such a silence corresponds to a breath that is not yet determined or expressed in a certain way, according to certain rules, a certain logic, and thus can be respected and shared as life itself beyond its various embodiments and forms of expression. This silence is also a consideration for autonomous breathing of each one and, sometimes, for a common breathing ensured in a specific way by each one. This silence ought to remain the basic condition and place for any sharing between living beings who are dependent on air for their own subsistence. Silence is also a way to pass from need to desire. It is an essential mediation, within ourselves and between us, to overcome the immediacy of the needs and transform them towards a beyond, be this beyond a value that transcends need itself or an other who transcends the sameness of the self. Cultivating breathing, as cultivating silence, is a necessity for a passage from need to a desire which does not destroy life, its possible becoming and sharing. Whoever does not breathe in an autonomous and conscious manner is incapable of reaching a silence that does not amount to a deprivation of words but is an expression of life, of flesh. Nor can one in such a case carry out a spiritual development respectful of one’s own existence and that of other living beings, and no more attain a sharing of desire that does not involve a reduction or paralysis of life itself. Returning to silence is especially crucial in a culture which has subjected life to conditions that are extraneous to it instead of cultivating it as such. Hence, our being divided and lacerated between two appeals or requirements: taking care of our life and respecting that of others, on the one hand and, on the other hand, adapting ourselves to a culture that aims at dominating life without cultivating it as such. We are torn apart between demands that are, in fact, incompatible with one another. In logical terms, one could say that we are subjected to contradictory reasons: in one respect, we must obey our natural belonging, which has a specific economy and its own forms and, in another respect, we must accept to be formed and informed through a language and a culture that do not take into account the logic of our natural existence. The principle of non-contradiction, which underlies our cultural universe, is already found beginning with a contradiction that it has to hide by imposing on us a cultural identity that is independent of our natural identity. It is imperative to overcome this split to return to a real that is both elementary and universal with respect to our humanity. Withdrawing from a cultural world, which often substituted for our first placental dwelling, requires us to discover or rediscover an autonomous breathing in order to escape the danger of dying.

A culture neglectful of air We also must return to the source and the sap that give us life. Unlike the plant world, at least from what we know, we have to take charge of our natural existence, an

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existence that we do not merely receive from the environment and its cycles, especially the cosmic cycles. To live, as a human, already implies a cultivation of our natural existence that we have too often neglected. What is more, its most fundamental aspect is the one that we have most forgotten: cultivating our breathing. Without a cultivation of our breathing, we do not really exist as humans. We subsist, divided into diverse parts of us that feed themselves on nature itself, on other living beings that surround us, and also on an already existing culture. This does not yet mean living by oneself as a human being. Starting our journey again by taking charge of our life through a cultivation of an autonomous breath also opens up a possible path for reunifying our existence. For example, the opposition between a natural belonging – which is supposed to live, and even to survive, by itself without caring about the origin and the cultivation of this existence – and a cultural belonging – that would signify entering into a human identity and community presumed to be higher than the world of life – implies that a passage has been interrupted between nature and culture and a continuity has to be restored between the two. We cannot flower as a natural being, on the one hand, and as a cultural being, on the other hand. We must discover a blossoming of life that suits our humanity, a means to grow and to become that does not divide the natural world from the cultural world but links them together. This requires us to turn back our path in order to undertake another way towards our development. Air, then, can play a fundamental part as it is an element essential both to life and to its surpassing, a surpassing of our existence here and now towards what transcends it – a transcending that no longer means entering another life, but gradually transforming this one. Matter necessary for our present survival, but also material able to ensure a passage to a future that transcends it in the relation to ourselves, to the world, to the other and others, air is the most essential, but also the most forgotten, element for our being and becoming humans. Air is forgotten because of various reasons. It seems that air goes without saying, is obvious, but in reality, it already results from an operation, a transformation. It is, without being merely by itself. What is more, air as such is invisible. It does not simply appear and can even less be represented as air. Now, our Western tradition, originally founded on appearing, little by little has evolved towards a truth dependent on representation. Perceiving the existence of air became more and more problematic, except sometimes for a philosopher such as Hegel, who takes an interest in nature, but does not attach to air its true status or function in the becoming of subjectivity. Religion, on its side, remembers something about the importance of breath, but it grants the privilege and the responsibility of it to God more than to humans. God would create them with his breath, redeem them with his spirit, often compared with breath, but a breath then imagined to be fire more than air. However, there are angels or archangels who appear to be the embodiment of the divine breath, especially Gabriel, the privileged messenger of God, who intervenes in the Annunciation to awaken the breath of Mary to make possible a divine incarnation. A culture of breath is little present in Western tradition, and if I succeeded in perceiving its importance, it is through approaching the Eastern traditions, in particular, those linked to the practice and culture of yoga.

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Having become familiar with the tradition of yoga, I henceforth wonder about the reciprocal contributions of Western and Eastern traditions. One question seems especially crucial in our epoch: How, in a culture of appearance, of image, which is now ours, can humans still preserve their being? In other words, one could say: How can we appear while remaining faithful to our own integrity, to our virginity? Could this happen starting anew from cultivating our breathing as a condition for constituting an interiority not dependent on seeing, not reliant on objects, not the outcome of an already appeared or a thirst for appearing? Western man, until now, did not consider enough the fact that appearing or projecting oneself outside needs a withdrawal within the self. He exhausted himself in an appearing – through things, through acting, and finally through his image, his reproduction, his double – that paralyses and sterilizes his being in appearances. The disappearance of our being – and Being – in various sorts of beings, in particular visible beings, could be interpreted from two causes: a lack of respect for life and a lack of cultivation of our interiority. Being can be approached and kept only at the bridge between these two scenes: the place created by life itself and the place opened by our perspective on life. One dimension springs, in a visible or indirect way, from the existence of life itself, that is, from the inside of the living being towards its external manifestation. The other dimension is exerted from the outside on the living being through the perspective that we have on it and in which we situate it. But such a perspective asks of us an interiority capable of respecting life without forcing upon it norms that are extraneous to it. Now, we still lack such a culture and education. It could be useful that we care about a culture of what exists by itself, of a culture of phusis, according to the first Greek philosophers, beginning with a training of children that takes into account their natural belonging. The path towards such an education cannot do without a cultivation of our relation to air. A development of our being presupposes a cultivation of our natural identity. This requires a method of teaching that we have ignored except, really partly and indirectly, as a cultivation of singing and, for only a short time, as a return to ecological considerations. But when we speak about nature, we more often than not allude to a reality somehow in front of us as every object of our representation. We little think of nature as being ourselves, and of a becoming of nature as our own becoming. Be that as it may, the becoming of nature never is situated in front of us. The metabolism of life is never simply present to us, especially with regard to air. Being of things, a fortiori our own being, is never merely present or representable to us, which does not mean that we must make it dependent on an essence, reversing in that way the order of things. Being of things, as ours, appears in an indirect way through their existence: it is only partially and indirectly visible. What it is really is not perceived and is sensed only through and thanks to a part of our own being that remains faithful to its source, to its natural birth and is not only in accordance with an already constructed truth. What this latter makes obvious to us more often than not already corresponds to an outcome of the abolition of both the visible and the invisible manifestation of life itself. We must cross back over the separation from life that our culture has imposed on us – by making a leap, perhaps Heidegger would say – in order to perceive life again. Life never appears in its proper origin or becoming, but only through the form that

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it assumes in the present. Its being as such – its Being? – never appears to us in the present, Heidegger would also say. However, what we meet with must be perceived in the horizon of the Being proper to them although this does not appear as such and remains unrepresentable. For perceiving or only sensing what concerns being – or Being – taking into account the existence of air is important. Heraclites already wrote that Being likes to make itself invisible. Heidegger, for his part, stresses the fact that the disclosure proper to Being cannot happen without some veiling. Whatever or whoever does not withdraw within the self cannot appear, at least in faithfulness to one’s being – or Being. Now, what ensures our first and last withdrawal within ourselves depends on the existence of our breathing. Hence, the significance of a cultivation of breathing that is not limited to guaranteeing good physical health and increasing our performance in work, but aims at gaining an autonomous interiority, one could say a soul of our own. A soul in the ancient sense of the word, that is, that does not result from an allegiance to texts or beliefs, but is a reserve of breath, together material and spiritual. Such a soul can express itself, within or outside ourselves in an indirect way, but it never immediately appears as such.

Breathing and loving need one another The soul of a human is different from the sap that animates vegetables, and even animals, especially because it presupposes a safeguard and a cultivation of breathing as both breath and an in-us-for-us. Cultivating breathing can render our body and our bodily exchanges spiritual. It grants us a greater intimacy with our flesh and an ability to share it in a more intimate and spiritual manner. Indeed, this cultivation allows us to overcome the scission between body and spirit. It animates the body with an energy that is no longer merely vital and makes possible a spirit that remains flesh. Such a cultivation is essential to build a bridge between body and spirit and, for lack of paying attention to this cultivation, we harm the two and, more generally, are unfaithful to our being human. If our heart can establish a link between our body and our spirit, it needs also breath in order to achieve such an undertaking without falling back into a consuming passion, unless it confines itself to moral precepts or hangs on ideals or absolutes that keep us split between animality and angelicism or divinity without accomplishing our humanity. For our human becoming, we need to combine breath and love, to maintain our life, but also for what this means as connection with the other(s) and with the world. This interrelation represents another pole and food for our growth, another path to go from a vegetative body to a body that acts as a mediator in our human existence and becoming. Jointly keeping alive breath and love necessitates a faithfulness to our sexuate difference. Only a culture of difference that takes root in our natural belonging can allow us to realize their combination and development. Such a gesture requires us to modulate our affects, thanks to a return to our own existence, to an autonomous breathing, in order to avoid subjecting to one another, merging into one another or the one and the other into the lack of differentiation of a ‘one’ or a ‘someone’. In this

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‘one’, both breath and love are sacrificed to an artificial individual imposed by norms that are contrary to life, that is, to a ‘one’ or a ‘someone’ that life no longer feeds and of which the function is to compel us to give up a particular growing to conform to an impersonal pattern that is presumed to be valid for everyone but does not correspond to any living being. In reality, we have modelled our life on imperatives and a prioris that aim at raising it to the status of a human existence. One of those, the a priori of all the a prioris, is still lacking, perhaps because it is of another nature: to flower our humanity as such, to cultivate its energy and wisdom, and share them with the other, with others. The first a priori from which we must start again is that we are differentiated as living beings, especially through our sexuate identity. This is one of the foundations that has to ensure the gathering together and the coherence of our belonging to a cultured world. The a priori conditions for our present culture are intended to establish a universe of manifestation which does not take into account nature, in particular in its invisible aspect. Now, our will, like our freedom, involve limits, those of respect for a real existing before they exist as such, a real that is perceived with difficulty and can be thought only through another logic, a logic in which reason corresponds more to our global being and where perception takes into account touching as much as seeing and listening to. This presupposes a sort of reversal, at least a partial reversal, of the relation between activity and passivity. Touch is what can introduce us into a dialectics, until now unknown to us, in which passion finds a measure, especially thanks to the intervention of breath that tempers its immediacy, leading it to safeguard life and to be transformed into more and more subtle affect and exchanges capable of keeping desire alive and in becoming, in each one, but also between the one and the other. It is a cultivation of touch, connected with a cultivation of breath, that can modulate passion more than the intervention of a discourse that pretends to dominate it by placing itself beyond its reach. It is through a cultivation of touch and of breath that we can differentiate ourselves from the maternal world by taking charge of our life as an existence of our own, notably in its unique link with ourselves, with the other, with the world. It is not the subjection of the living world to a discourse or a law that are parallel to life that is able to transform our bonds with our origin, especially with our mother. Such a subjection is not even able to lead us to the awakening of our consciousness. What we call consciousness will then remain dependent on the judgement that we pass on a real from which we are already separated. Consciousness will not be of use as a place to assess our faithfulness to ourselves, to the world, to the other. It will confine itself to a set of criteria which will be useful for us valuing, in more or less, our compliance with imperatives extraneous, if not opposed, to a perception of life, especially of ours. Consciousness will be reliant on our subjection to a prioris that are defined independently of our present existence and defer this one to an ideal life in another world. We still lack a consciousness that truly corresponds to our human identity. A culture of breathing can bring about its discovery because it is able to lead us to a perception of ourselves without being subjected to a prioris that have nothing to do with us. Joined to a culture of love for the other, as well as for ourselves, in respect for our difference(s), a culture of breathing establishes in us a place where the perception

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and the development of consciousness are henceforth founded on touch as much and even more than on seeing and listening. It is an intimate touch that can inform us about the sound decision to be made in accordance with life and its sharing. We are a long way from the dimensions of facing and representing that have ruled our consciousness for centuries. Perhaps they were the necessary roundabout means, and they sometimes remain still that, to approach the most intimate heart of ourselves, a heart that we must still and always reach in order to perceive and to share.2

Notes 1 Many thanks to Nicole Fermon for agreeing to reread my English version of the text. 2 It would be suitable to refer to the books The Forgetting of Air (University of Texas Press, 1999) and Between East and West (Columbia University Press, 2002) for a better understanding of the text.

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242

Index Adorno, Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund  7, 204 aer  203, 205–6 age of breath  9, 39, 51–2, 58, 61–2, 158 new  9, 19–20, 23, 125 of spirit  9, 22–3, 43 the third  9, 43, 52, 125, 127 ahimsa  84 air  1–5, 11, 37–8, 56, 58, 60, 69, 79, 84, 86, 95, 104, 108, 110, 123–4, 127, 131, 133, 139–40, 142, 151–4, 156, 171–5, 188–90, 194, 200, 203–4, 206, 217–9, 221–4 see also aer alterity  10, 113, 122, 125, 136–7, 155, 173, 175, 181, 203, 205–6, 209–10 angel  17–27, 33, 125, 131, 205 anima  204 animal  1, 10–11, 104, 120–2, 126–7, 130–43, 172, 175, 205 animism  118–20 Annunciation  39, 42, 151, 155–6, 222 Aotearoa  60–1 apana  87 appropriation  31–2, 46, 73, 103–6, 122–3, 132, 134, 152, 175, 182, 208, 210, 218 Aquinas, Thomas  18, 55, 58, 135 Arendt, Hannah  43–4, 169, 178 Aristotle  26, 121–2, 134 art  150–1, 154–5, 158, 206 asceticism  58 atman  8 atmosphere  7, 123, 131, 140, 204, 220 Augustine of Hippo  9, 17–18, 44 auto-affection  94, 156 autonomy of breath  36–8, 42, 45–6, 53, 102, 155, 174, 187–90, 194–5, 217–19 female  188, 198

awakening  1, 6, 10, 56, 67, 124, 157, 187, 206, 225 Badiou, Alain 83–96 baptism  8–9, 41–2 Barth, Karl  5 becoming  1–2, 18, 22, 38, 40, 43, 51, 53, 56, 74, 79, 109, 124–5, 127, 131–2, 139, 142, 198, 201, 208, 217, 219–25 divine  2, 36, 38–40, 47, 53, 56, 217–19 human  18, 79–80, 125, 127, 131–2, 142, 217–19, 220, 222–5 Being -in-the-world-with-others  7, 60 qua Being  91 -two  2, 77 with  135, 138–41 belonging  85, 91, 93, 109, 210, 218–19, 221–5 Benjamin, Walter  19 bird  118–19, 123–4, 126–7, 131–2, 134–6, 141, 210 birth  19, 23, 37–8, 40–2, 44–7, 173, 223 blood  4, 28, 36–7, 107, 153, 174, 177 Bloom, Harold  17, 26 body female  1–2, 24, 75, 137–8, 151–2, 167, 180, 194 male  31, 75, 137–8, 180 maternal  20, 24, 31, 36, 40–5, 158 Boer, Roland  27 boy  124, 153, 191, 195, 201 Braidotti, Rosi  114, 119, 122, 127, 134–5, 137, 170 breath -as-speech  86 awareness of  3, 60 divine  40, 43, 50, 62, 131, 207, 222 gift of see gift of breath maternal  36, 42, 52–6, 60, 138, 151, 158

244

Index

sharing of see sharing of breath spacing of see spacing of breath spiritual  38, 46, 51–7 vital  7–8, 53, 217 breathing passive  188 voluntary  188–90 Buddhism  45, 68, 71–2, 78 Butler, Judith  5, 150, 168–9 capitalism  17 caress  203, 206, 209 Cartesianism  169, 177 Cavarero, Adriana  167, 169–70, 176–83 Cavell, Stanley  116–19 cherubim  26–33 Christianity  4, 9, 25, 43, 58 Chrysostom, St. 26 Cixous, Hélène  174–5, 209 Clement of Alexandria  18 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  118 colonization  103 communion  60, 62, 88, 127, 133, 218, 220 community  7, 9, 52–3, 59, 61–2, 67, 101–9, 111, 113, 115, 135, 138–9, 141–2, 159, 174, 182, 187, 189, 198–201 compassion  131–2, 139, 141–3 consciousness  4, 8, 37, 54–9, 61–2, 114–16, 120–1, 175, 182–3, 203, 205, 225–6 corporeality  4, 69, 139, 152, 155, 190 cosmos  3, 124, 158 couple  2–3, 7, 22, 25, 76–7, 94, 192 creation  9, 19, 21–3, 26, 39–41, 47, 57, 60–1, 70, 76, 104, 108 creator  23, 43, 51, 54, 57, 60–1, 197 cultivation of breath  5, 8, 11, 36, 38–9, 45–6, 50, 53, 57, 67, 70, 74, 88, 154, 156, 173, 191, 197, 205–6, 208, 218–22, 224–6 of nature  56, 102–6 of spirit  5, 59–60, 123, 223 culture of death  20 of difference  60, 224 of life  50–1, 62 of love  4, 225 of the two  59

cyborg  103, 107 Cyril of Jerusalem  26 dance  11, 18, 149, 151–5, 159 Darwin, Charles  137 death  8, 20, 26, 40–2, 44–5, 47, 90, 104, 108, 118–19, 140, 175–6, 189, 191–2, 199–201, 204 deconstructivism  176 Deleuze, Gilles  7, 94 democracy  103, 107–8, 195, 201 Derrida, Jacques  7, 44–5, 83, 86–94, 97, 134, 137–8, 176 Descartes, René  115–17, 120–1, 134 desire  19–20, 22–4, 27, 32, 53–4, 56–7, 59, 88, 102–3, 110–11, 117, 124–5, 132, 151, 168, 172, 177–9, 183, 187, 217–19, 221, 225 for difference  19, 22, 24 feminine  168, spacing of  51, 55 Deutscher, Penelope  6, 72–3, 122, 136, 170, 175 development sexual  68 dialectics  4, 225 dialogue  3, 5–6, 8, 10–11, 21, 46, 67–9, 71, 101, 103, 110, 130–1, 133, 141, 196 différance  87 difference cultural  6, 73 sexual  2–4, 7, 10, 12–13, 19, 22, 24–6, 28, 32–3, 44, 46, 48, 57, 67–9, 71–7, 80–1, 92, 94, 101, 104, 107–8, 110–11, 122, 137–8, 145, 156, 160–1, 165, 168–70, 172–4, 179, 181–3, 185, 194, 198 sexuate  18–19, 21–2, 32, 208 differentiation  218, 220, 224 discourse  2–3, 18, 20, 31, 41, 68, 102, 105, 127, 134, 167, 175, 178, 194, 218, 225 discrimination  72, 152 Disney, Abigail  186, 191–2, 194 distance  56, 68, 119, 124–5, 132, 187, 196, 199, 203–4, 207 divinity  23–4, 33, 36, 43, 69–70, 94, 158, 170, 224

Index divinization  36, 39–40, 43, 45–7, 58, 219 Dōgen  75 dominance  60, 86 masculine  39 domination  103, 111, 116–17, 119–23, 125–6, 130, 206 Donovan, Josephine  141 dualism  40, 56, 77, 175–6 mind/body  171 non- see nondualism duality  69, 73–9 Durkheim, Émile  205 Dussel, Enrique  6–7 dwelling  24, 40, 76, 78–9, 117, 220–1 placental  221 East  6, 9, 58, 67, 69–70, 72–3, 102, 108, 110–11, 170, 172–3, 187, 204 earth  5, 8, 18, 22, 24, 26, 60, 104, 106–9, 113, 119, 131, 134, 137, 205, 218 ecofeminism  120 ecology  10, 102, 104, 113–14, 119–21 deep- 114, 119 economy intersubjective  70, 76, 78 phallic  155 ecosystem  104, 106 ego  176, 182 elementality  69 Eliade, Mircea  84, 92, 95 embodiment  10, 24, 39–40, 43–4, 46–7, 50–1, 57, 59–61, 136, 170, 181, 222 enclosure  23, 124 encounter  5–7, 46–7, 58, 84, 94–5, 102, 109–11, 115, 122, 125–7, 135, 138, 140–2, 197, 199, 201, 210, 219, 221 entre deux  156, 175 entropy  111 envelope  20 environment  10, 103, 113–27, 134, 139, 153–4, 171, 173, 222 epistemology  8, 78 essence  2, 4, 68, 106, 180 essentialism  1–3, 150, 169, 181, 197, 201 biological  2 strategic  198 eucharist  127

245

event  93–6 evolution  44, 105–6, 108–9, 111, 220 exchange of air  1, 36, 43, 61, 122, 124–5, 127, 155, 174, 205, 207, 209–10, 224 relational  58, 70, 106, 115, 122, 124–5, 127, 139, 142, 155, 170, 172, 174–5, 197, 205, 207 with nature  10, 127, 139, 142, 172–3 exchanging  123, 126 exclusion  2, 69, 73, 150, 167–8, 172, 177, 181 symbolic  168 exhalation  41, 55, 84, 86, 89, 91, 97, 157, 208–10 exploitation  102, 104, 116, 120–1, 150, 152, 159 existence  10, 37, 44, 110, 115–21, 127, 130, 133, 137–8, 156, 168, 177, 183, 187–8, 195, 218, 220–5 bodily  218 experience  6, 7, 39, 43, 51–2, 59–60, 67–75, 77–9, 92, 103, 110, 135, 138, 139–41, 155, 158, 168, 178–9, 187, 200, 207 nondual  67, 70–1, 75, 78 expiration  6 faith  53, 196–7 family  52–4, 60, 103, 107–9, 152, 179, 186 father  9, 22–3, 31, 41–3, 47, 53–4, 57 femininity  79, 149, 171, 180 Feuerbach, Ludwig  3–5 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb  4 fidelity  55–6, 59, 94–5, 97, 125, 142, 208–10 Filippi, Massimo  134, 138–9 finitude  116, 204 fire  5, 9, 27, 69, 218–19, 222 flesh  1, 3–4, 19, 21–2, 25, 30, 36, 38–43, 47, 106, 126, 139, 156, 172, 175, 177, 204–6, 220–1, 224 Fletcher, Jeannine Hill  196–7 Foreman, David  119 forgetting  3, 5, 38, 68–9, 122, 171–2, 187 forgiveness  200 fort/da game  124

246

Index

framing  50–1, 59, 91, 95–7, 150 Freud, Sigmund  20, 33, 68 friendship  79, 109, 115, 124–5, 131, 133, 140, 183 Gbowee, Leymah  186–9, 192–7, 199–201 gender  2–3, 9, 24, 29–33, 39–40, 44, 46, 52, 71–2, 75–8, 92, 103, 115, 138, 153, 155–6, 179–83, 190, 192 genealogy  2, 19, 71, 101, 153 generation  1, 22, 43, 50, 52, 63, 121, 204 Geschlecht  92 gestation  36–7, 154 gesture  5, 7–8, 10–11, 25, 33, 37, 44–5, 60–2, 67–71, 94, 102, 115, 119, 122–4, 127, 132–3, 136, 143, 150–1, 153–6, 158–9, 189, 192, 197, 205–6, 209, 217, 220, 224 ethical  3, 5, 7 spiritual  37, 51, 57–9 gift  36–47, 50, 52–3, 56, 59–60, 62, 79, 133, 140, 142, 206, 208–9, 218 of breath, 36–42, 45–7, 56, 59–60 of death, 44–5, 47, 174 of life, 50, 52–3, 60, 62, 219 girl  59, 153 globalization  102, 111 God  8–9, 18, 22–5, 27, 31–2, 39–44, 47, 52–3, 55–8, 61–2, 69, 117, 121–2, 131, 156–7, 195–7, 222 Goddess  106–7, 207 Grosz, Elizabeth  23–5, 137, 150, 179–80 Guantanamo  5 Guattari, Félix  94 Haraway, Donna  101–11, 134, 169 health  104, 131, 219, 224 heart  104, 131, 219, 224 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  4, 8, 183, 222 Heidegger, Martin 3, 5, 7–8, 19, 44, 69, 85, 89, 92, 122, 136, 153, 171, 174, 206–7, 209, 223–4 Heraclitus/Heraclites  224 hesychasm  45 heterosexuality  3, 32–3 hiatus  89 hierarchy  78, 86, 88, 134, 136, 179 Hinduism  45, 71–2

Hirsch, Elisabeth  21 Hollywood, Amy  2 hope  9, 40, 44, 46, 95, 101, 187 humanity  1, 4, 6–8, 11, 39–40, 43–4, 47, 52, 54, 56, 60–2, 97, 116, 125, 127, 131, 136, 142, 219, 221–2, 224–5 accomplishing  219, 224 hypostasis  47 identification  47, 113–14, 121, 175 identity  20–2, 54, 72, 108–10, 117, 133, 135–6, 152–4, 156–7, 168, 173, 176–8, 181–3, 197, 221–2, 225 feminine  79, 173 gender  72, 182 human  108, 152, 163, 197, 222, 225 non- see non-human identity natural  220–1, 223 non-human  135–6 self- 77, 182 sexual  154–5, 157 sexuate  153, 155–6, 225 immanence  70, 77, 94 incarnation  9, 25, 36, 39–40, 42–4, 47, 67, 156, 219, 222 inclusion  88, 134, 151, 168, 217 infinity  204 Ingram, Penelope  23–5 inhalation  55, 84, 86, 89, 91, 97, 157, 205, 208–10 inspiration  3, 6, 8–9, 70, 110, 169, 209 interbeing  78 interiority  6, 7, 31, 36–8, 45–6, 51–2, 56, 59, 61, 178, 205, 223–4 intersubjectivity  3–4, 76, 130–1, 168, 175, 179 intimacy  55–6, 124, 126, 132, 151, 154, 204, 224 invitation  55, 58–9, 110 Irigaray, Luce  1–11, 18–28, 31–2, 36–9, 42–7, 50–62, 67–79, 83, 86, 88, 91–7, 101–27, 130–43, 149–59, 167–75, 178–83, 186–91, 194–5, 197–201, 203–10, 217 Islam  25 James, William  1, 125, 132 Jameson, Frederic  28

Index Jantzen, Grace  43–5 Jesus  8, 32, 39–43, 45, 47, 58, 193 Jones, Rachel  116–17, 121, 123 Jones, Terry  195 jouissance  151 Joy, Morny  74 Judaism  25–6 justice  7, 43, 107–8, 111, 135, 179, 193 Kant, Immanuel  18, 118, 134, 173 Karman, Tawakkul, 201 Keating, Thomas  55–6, 58 kenosis  59 ki see qi Klee, Paul  19 Kopf, Gereon  75, 78 Kristeva, Julia  7, 174–5 kumbhaka  10, 83–91, 95–7 labour  46, 60, 173, 191 Lacan, Jacques  68, 177 language masculine  57 propositional  59 univocal  59 Lévinas, Emmanuel  173, 175, 204, 207, 210 liberalism  183 liberation  6, 50, 70, 107–8, 111 animal  120, 130, 134, 142 life  1, 4–5, 7–9, 11, 20, 24, 26–7, 36–8, 40–7, 51–63, 67–8, 75, 84, 93, 95, 97, 103–6, 108, 110–13, 115, 118–21, 123–4, 126–8, 131, 133, 135, 137, 139–45, 151, 153, 155–6, 158, 160, 164, 171–80, 184, 187–8, 190–3, 195, 198, 201, 204, 206–7, 210–11, 217–26 limen  104, 107 listening  46, 51, 101, 124–5, 127, 131, 141, 151, 203, 205, 209–10, 217, 225–6 Locke, John  18–19 logocentrism  38 logos  5, 86–7, 90, 92, 127, 208 love  2, 4, 7, 9, 32–3, 40, 45–7, 50, 52, 56–7, 62, 78, 89, 94, 124, 126, 131–2, 141, 155–6, 159, 164, 181, 200, 204–5, 207, 211, 224–5

247

carnal  36 cultivation of  57 lover  19, 31, 36, 58, 79, 91, 126, 204–10 macrocosm  5, 104 Maimonides, Moses  26 man  4, 6, 9, 20–3, 31, 43–4, 46, 52, 67–8, 70, 76–8, 117, 123, 131, 167–8, 173, 182, 187, 189–201 manas  8 manifestation  42, 72–3, 78, 95, 193, 210, 223, 225 mantra  187, 209 Martin, Alison  3, 69, 122, 171 Marx, Karl  69, 88, 94, 114 Marxism  28 Mary  42–3, 47, 156–7, 222 masculinity  2, 10, 22, 28–44, 54, 57, 68, 76–7, 92, 104, 107, 120–1, 124, 151–3, 168, 171, 173, 175, 180, 188, 203–4 materiality  61, 68–70, 77, 79, 126, 135, 152, 171, 174–6, 181, 205, 220 maternal  2, 10, 20, 24, 31, 36, 40–5, 50–6, 59–61, 68–9, 76, 117, 151, 153, 158–9, 174–5, 195, 199 maternity  54, 153, 172–5, 194 matheme  93 matter  20, 43, 104–7, 117, 120–2, 175–6 mediation  4, 11, 18, 24, 40, 58, 87, 168, 171, 175, 217–21 meditation  8, 17, 25, 45–6, 67, 78–9, 88, 92, 101, 150, 157, 205, 209 metaphysics  87 phallocentric  83, 86 of presence  59, 86–7, 90, 93 microcosm  3, 104 mimesis  2, 20 mind  8, 76, 105, 110, 116, 135, 141, 171–2, 175–6 mindfulness  8, 55 Mortensen, Ellen  152 mother  20, 30, 36–9, 42, 45–6, 50–3, 60, 117, 124, 138, 151, 153–4, 159, 174, 180, 195, 218 motherhood  110, 174, 191 multiculturalism  73 mythology  19, 61, 74

248

Index

Naess, Arne  113–14 natality  38, 43, 44–6 negativity  90, 137, 207 Nicodemus  41 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm  23, 69, 122, 171 nondualism  68 nonduality  67, 70–9 North  6, 101–3, 108 nothingness  85–6, 89, 91–3, 207 One  7–8, 15, 21, 26, 70, 73–4, 77–8, 85, 87, 90, 92, 116, 122, 126, 135, 150–1, 167–8, 174, 186–8, 190–1, 194, 196, 199–200, 223, 225 oneness  68, 71, 74, 76–8, 85, 91 ontology  85, 132, 171 of being two  2 meta- 10, 84–5, 88, 93, 132, 171 opening  4, 7 openness  56, 59 order patriarchal  87, 107 organ  56, 156 organism  105, 107, 113, 120, 138, 173 orientalism  1, 6, 10, 73–4, 150 origin of the breath  43 desire for  20 of language  5 of life  5, 52, 218 of poetry  5 oxygen  4, 37, 88, 123, 138, 174, 218 Parmenides  85 passivity  225 Patañjali  72, 77 patriarchy  107, 110 peace  11, 186–201 perception  19–20, 46, 56, 76–7, 86, 104, 134–5, 139–41, 194, 225 performance  26, 149–55, 159, 224 phallocentrism  72, 83, 86 phallogocentrism  74–6 phenomenon  7–8, 10 philosophy animal  134, 142 feminist  11, 45

nondual  71 of religion  9, 44–5 phonologocentrism  83 placenta  21, 24, 36, 60–1, 117, 123, 173 plant  174 Plato  8, 18, 44–5, 68, 123–4 pleasure  91, 151 pneuma  7, 41, 44–5, 47 pneumatology  10, 36, 39, 45 poetry  5, 19, 38, 172 politics of difference  121, 170, 179, 183 pollution  104, 174 pornography  152 posthumanism  135 postmodernism  169, 177 practice contemplative  58 spiritual  10, 39, 42, 45–6, 55–9, 68–72, 75 of Yoga  78–9, 172 prana  7–8, 84, 87 prayer  9–10, 26, 45–6, 50–62, 92, 143, 187–8, 193, 205–6, 209 -as-breath  187 centering  55–6, 58 pregnancy  36–8 Presocratics  5 procedure  88, 94–5 truth  94–5 projection  132, 170, 177 proximity  57, 125, 142, 195–6, 199–200 psyche  44 psychoanalysis  2, 44, 153, 171, 191 qi  6 Qur’an  195 race  73, 179 rape  186 rationality  4, 74, 76, 78, 101, 167, 176, 179 receptivity  56–7, 97 Regan, Tom  133–4, 136 regeneration  19, 105–6, 111, 205–6, 208–9 register  10, 83–97 ontic  96–7 relationality  44, 46, 51, 54–5, 57–60, 62, 78, 180–1

Index religion  2, 4, 6–7, 9, 17, 25, 42–5, 74, 76–7, 110, 127, 151, 181, 184, 195–7, 199, 222 reproduction  19, 44, 122, 172, 210, 223 respiration  8, 38, 188, 205 revelation  9, 79, 95, 205 right(s)  10, 108, 120, 168, 183 animal  134 sexuate  2, 152 Rilke, Rainer Maria  17, 19, 132 romanticism  117–18 Ross, Stephen David  19, 204 Roy, Marie-Andrée  122 rupture  89, 95 Said, Edward  73–4, 101 sameness  2, 68, 72, 74, 76–8, 94, 96, 221 satori  70 satyagraha  11 Schor, Naomi  150 Schwab, Gail  18, 23–5 sea  175, 203–5 Self care of  95 ecological  114–15 self-affection  42, 46, 53, 59, 68, 76, 78–9, 94–5, 155 selfhood  114, 124, 176 self-realization  54, 113, 121 sensitivity  4, 140, 141 separation  37, 77, 106, 119, 153, 190–1, 198, 207, 218, 223 sex 4, 24, 169, 181, 198, 221 sexism  150 sexuality  2, 19–20, 23, 32, 107, 172, 179, 181 sexuation  150–1, 156, 158–9 sharing of breath  50, 71, 79, 189 feminine  152 of life  37, 116 of the negative  151 Shiva, Vandana  101–8, 110–11 signifier  22, 86–7, 177 silence  11, 38, 46–7, 57–9, 62, 72, 86, 92, 115, 118, 125–7, 131, 151, 157, 204–6, 220–1 Singer, Peter  133–4, 136

249

singing  46, 124, 126, 150–2, 155, 157, 204, 223 singularity  7, 45–6, 67, 133, 178, 180–1, 183, 187, 199, 207 Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson  201 Socrates  18 solidarity  57, 182 solitude  37, 51, 188 song  38, 126–7, 131, 141, 153 soul  36, 38, 44–5, 51, 121, 123, 190–1, 224 South  6, 101–3, 105, 108, 110, 167, 204 spacing  10, 54–6, 86–91, 96–7 of breath  55 of desire  51, 55 speaking  2, 7, 20, 38, 50–1, 77, 88, 92, 126, 156, 169, 173, 177–9, 190, 195, 203, 209, 217 species  4, 103, 108–9, 113, 133–6, 139–40, 142, 181, 191 speciesism  134, 137 speech  8, 36, 38, 43, 45–7, 53, 57–8, 78, 83, 86–7, 90, 106, 157–8, 176, 208–9 -as-breath see breath-as-speech phallocentric  86 spirit  1–3, 5, 8–11, 22–3, 36, 38–43, 45–7, 50–1, 53–5, 57, 60, 69–70, 73, 101, 123, 127, 153, 156–8, 171–3, 175, 182, 188, 190, 193–4, 197, 203–5, 208, 219, 222, 224 age of see age of spirit spirituality  1, 4, 10, 51–4, 58, 60, 62, 73, 101, 123, 131, 170, 175, 196 subject autonomous  167, 176 differentiated  175 relational  176–7, 180 sexed  18, 174, 179, 181–3 singular  170, 180–1 universal  167–9, 179, 181–2 subjectivity  1, 2, 5, 10–11, 36, 38, 45, 55, 68–70, 74, 76–8, 94–5, 116–17, 120, 133, 158, 167–71, 175–83, 206, 218, 222 embodied  170 female  2, 170 sexed  18, 182–3

250

Index

subordination  132, 168 substance  4, 89–90, 156, 176–7, 182 Sumner, Mary  52 sustainability  1, 10, 101–3, 106, 108, 110–11 susurration  205–6, 209–10 symbiogenesis  109 symbolic  43–4, 59 symphysis  138–42 system patriarchal  189 tantra  67, 76–7 teacher  71, 75, 156, 198 teaching Eastern  5, 7 Vedic  7 technology  83–4, 86, 89, 97, 105 temporality  1, 7, 102, 206 theology  1, 9–10, 18–9, 22, 36, 39, 50, 53, 59, 61 feminist  9–10, 36, 39 womanist  53, 59 theosis  39 thought metaphysical  1, 8 Upanishadic  8 time  19–20, 22, 41, 52, 79, 101, 107, 111, 125, 127, 174, 190, 206 touch  1, 4, 29, 92, 139–40, 225–6 tradition Judeo-Christian  43 Indian  87, 101 transcendence  24, 57, 61, 69–70, 117, 203, 205, 208, 210, 219 embodied  2 transcendental  4, 68–70, 77, 218 sensible  2, 24, 57, 69–70, 75 transformation  11, 26, 39, 73, 79, 89, 104, 114, 116, 150–1, 217–20, 222 transgression  208 trinity  9, 40, 42, 47, 61 truth procedure see procedure umbilical cord  36–7, 123, 173, 188 undifferentiation  217

union of two  24, 55, 220 universalism  2, 111, 176 universalization  68 Vedas  5–8 veganism  130 vegetarianism  143 victim  107 violence  7, 72, 97, 111, 152, 186–7, 189–94, 201 virginity  42, 152, 205, 223 spiritual  42, 151, 155–7, 207, 219–20 virility  124, 132 visitation  43, 208 vocalization  150, 157 voice  11, 150–1, 155–8, 170, 176, 178, 183, 192, 209 void  20, 85–6, 88–92, 95–6, 207 war  10, 60, 186, 189–95, 199, 201 water  5, 41, 69, 106, 218 West  6, 19, 24, 73–4, 102, 114 Whitford, Margaret 68, 70, 74, 171 wholeness  92–3, 95, 97, 136 wind  6, 8–9, 27, 40, 42, 124, 127, 204 wing  25–30, 33, 130, 133, 203 cosmic  8, 123 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  115 woman  6, 9, 20, 22, 24, 31, 40–1, 43, 70, 74–5, 110, 117, 121, 124, 153, 156, 158, 168, 182, 190–2, 195, 197, 200–1, 208 womanhood  4, 79 womb  31, 33, 41, 106, 153, 174 Xerxes  192 Yahweh  26–8 yama  84 yoga  5, 7, 9–10, 45–6, 67–9, 71, 73–5, 78–9, 83–4, 87, 89, 92, 150, 153–8, 172–3, 219, 222–3 zazen  75 Zen  71, 75, 78, 87 Soto  87 Zoroastrianism  25

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