The subject of love: Hélène Cixous and the feminine divine 9781847793393

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Manchester Studies in Religion, Culture and Gender

The subject of love

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Manchester Studies in Religion, Culture and Gender This series was edited by the late Grace M. Jantzen

Already published Religion and culture Michel Foucault selected and edited by Jeremy R. Carrette Representations of the post/human Monsters, aliens and others in popular culture Elaine L. Graham Becoming divine Towards a feminist philosophy of religion Grace M. Jantzen Divine love Luce Irigaray, women, gender, and religion Morny Joy Literature, theology and feminism Heather Walton

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Manchester Studies in Religion, Culture and Gender

The subject of love Hélène Cixous and the feminine divine

Sal Renshaw

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Sal Renshaw 2009 The right of Sal Renshaw to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 6960 4 hardback First published 2009 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09

Typeset by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

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For Ann Game Because this journey began with you . . . In Memory of Grace Jantzen Who is undoubtedly becoming divine . . .

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‘Now’ is a gift of the gods and an access onto reality. To address yourself to the moment when Eros glances into your life and to grasp what is happening in your soul at that moment is to begin to understand how to live. Anne Carson, Eros: The Bittersweet (Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998: 153)

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CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Introduction: in the spirit of the gift of love

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1 Speaking of love: philosophy, theology, and French feminism

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2 Feminist theology: for the love of god

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3 Hélène Cixous’ subject of love

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4 Graceful subjectivities

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5 Divine Promethean love

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Conclusion

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INDEX

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It should come as no surprise that a book about abundant, generous, otherregarding love should begin with something of a hymn to the generosity and love that have both framed and exceeded the context of its writing. I couldn’t have written this text outside of the complex and varied relations with love that have supported and challenged me in infinite ways. They have provided the quotidian experiences of a love divine, mostly joyful, sometimes agonising, experiences that inevitably come in the living of a life with others. For me these experiences have been generously framed by life’s so called simpler pleasures; fabulous food in the spirit of agape feasts; shared dogs walks in Northern Ontario’s most spectacular woods; companionable and sometimes consoling conversation with the most beloved of friends, often on the phone, best over wine and cheese! I am so very grateful to all of those who have and continue to live love with me, in all its quixotic complexity. I realise now, in writing this, that I am truly blessed in knowing that they are actually too many to name. May we all be blessed in this way! And then there are those other lessons in love, those supposedly ‘intellectual’ ones that are distilled from and honed in the often seemingly loveless environments of the academy. My interlocutors, mentors, colleagues and ultimately friends in this context of a love divine include especially Dr Ann Game of the University of New South Wales, Australia, Dr Rosalyn Diprose also of the University of New South Wales, and Dr Lisabeth During of the Pratt Institute in New York. In their wisdom they have each pushed me to think both more carefully and more rigorously about love, and in their generosity they have encouraged my own, both to the thinkers and ideas I am ostensibly writing against, as well as to those I am so clearly writing to and with. I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Dr Donna Jowett, my colleague and friend in the Philosophy Department at Nipissing University. Donna’s extraordinary capacity to truly read well, to read what in truth I hadn’t yet written, while I still had time to write it, makes this a far more complex yet clearer book. Lastly, I couldn’t have written this book without the formative lessons in love I learned with my first family, my mother, Margaret Dennewald, and her husband, Barry; my father, Wal Renshaw, and my brother Tony Renshaw. I am eternally grateful to them all.

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INTRODUCTION

In the spirit of the gift of love

To a considerable extent Western cultures now live with and through the knowledge that there is no ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’, no ontological site of absolute certainty, no absolute authority at all that can be the basis of an appeal to a permanent, or even a stable truth. In other words we live with, if not the knowledge per se, then perhaps the effects of the ‘death of God’. Yet, for all that the institutions of religions have supposedly been revealed as being founded upon illusory ideologies, little more than the exercise of Nietzsche’s will-to-power, there is nonetheless an apparent revivification of something that might be loosely referred to as spirit, throughout Western cultures. Across a diversity of post-industrial contexts can be clearly observed an increasing array of social phenomena that signal that, while God may be dead, many are reluctant to surrender to the past all of the things that God has traditionally signified, and this includes the elusive notion of divinity. I am not referring here to what is also a clearly observable, if lamentable, phenomenon, the conservative turn or re-turn to religious fundamentalism. Perhaps nothing is more illustrative of Nietzsche’s prophetic and acute observation that we will indeed be a long time living in the shadow of the death of God than the anxious grasping on to tradition that fundamentalism so clearly implies. I see this phenomenon as an expression of a very particular relation with power. Albeit cloaked in the garb of religious authority, this is not ‘religious’ in the sense in which I am here using the term. Rather, I am referring to what must be thought of as a far more elusive expression of religious signification that is reflected in the multiple roles and yearnings that the signifier, divinity, continues to evoke and especially in the context of discourses of subjectivity. In other words, to the extent that religious discourses imagine, invoke, and deploy numerous understandings of divinity, my concern is specifically with the ways these deployments come to mediate and facilitate the relation between self and other. Inasmuch as ‘God’ has historically been a master trope of radical alterity, the transcendent other who remains wholly other as the difference that cannot finally be recuperated and returned to the self, God has functioned to define the limits

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The subject of love of self. Yet this radical alterity has also functioned as a horizon of becoming, an ideal through which the ‘human’1 is plunged into the immanent challenge of being. Thus, God reveals the impossibility of a unified subject, the impossibility of a totalised absolute being, at the same time as it reveals that the real task, the truly human task of becoming is always an intersubjective one. Inasmuch then as we find our ‘selves’ at all, we do so somewhere in the space between that which returns to us, that which we recognise as the same, and that which escapes us, that difference which we fail to finally subdue. God, as the archetypal signifier of that which escapes us, signals the wound at the heart of fantasies of absolute unity, at the same time as it suggests the promise and wonder of truly encountering the other as other. Could it be, then, that, in the death of this transcendent master trope, a new space of immanent becoming that is not in mourning for that which it is not, for that which it cannot ‘subdue’, might be opening?2 At the level of the quotidian, the ‘death of God’ is alluded to in such Western cultural practices as the growing interest in Eastern spiritual traditions; holistic therapies that emphatically locate human beings within, rather than above or outside, the phenomenal world, and that then go on to speak of this phenomenal world, and this beingness in sacred terms; and communitarian and liberation theologies that inflect and redirect the ideologies of traditional Judaism and Christianity in their attention to the human, all-too-human, realities of life. Even global human rights discourses that rely on notions like ‘fundamental human dignity’ find themselves precariously positioned on the borders of the religious when it comes to providing an account of just what it is that they are referring to when they invoke concepts like ‘human dignity’. The very notion of ‘human dignity’ exceeds the semantic boundaries of the liberal humanism that ostensibly gave it birth in Western jurisprudence. It reaches back to a classical religious imaginary, now long subsumed beneath Judaic and Christian theologies, where human reason was understood as a reflection of universal divinity, a sacred piece of the divine in

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1 Since the second wave of feminism, many have become increasingly aware of the extent to which the term ‘human’ has referred exclusively to maleness. The sense in which God has functioned as a horizon of becoming that is a gendered horizon is something to which I will return more specifically through a consideration of the work of Luce Irigaray at the end of Chapter 2. In more general terms, this book offers a consistent critique of the gender-blindness that has defined many religious traditions and much religious language. 2 Questions concerning the existence and nature of God, somewhat ironically, have found a champion in the work of a number of prominent French thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, a scholar whose work is more typically, if falsely, accused of issuing the death certificate on God, and the Catholic philosopher Jean-Luc Marion. They are but two of a growing list of philosophers whose work is now being positioned in the context of what is being termed a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century ‘re-turn’ to religion. This apparent return has found an equally receptive audience in North America, giving rise to such events as the biennial Villanova conferences on Postmodernism and Religion. The work of John Caputo, Richard Kearney, Mark C. Taylor, and Michael Scanlon, to name only a handful, can all be seen to be participating in the same conversation.

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Introduction ‘man’. Similarly, such a notion now extends beyond the Judaic and Christian logos and gestures towards a new way of thinking about humanity and divinity as the question of human reason, once seen as the defining aspect of humanity, is again being put into question. There are now innumerable examples of the phenomena to which I am referring. Somewhat unshackled from the constraints of institutional dogma, it seems religious meaning is finding the contemporary culture of postmodern diversity a very fertile place indeed. In an important sense then the place that has traditionally been reserved for God in the conversation about being/becoming is a place that is no more empty now in ‘his’ absence than it was before that God emerged. And it is intriguing to observe the extent to which popular culture has rapidly reconciled itself to what would, in only the very recent past, have been unthinkable: the notion that God was indeed brought into being; the notion of God as a historical phenomenon. Perhaps this acceptance could not be more succinctly articulated than via a stroll through any local bookstore where the shelves are replete with genealogies, histories, and biographies of God! The same shelves are also bursting with an eclectic array of ‘spiritual’ texts, the diversity and complexity of which surely surpass the easy accusation that they are simply panaceas for the inevitable ennui that has resulted from a spiritual or religious apocalypse the effects of which few had really thought to anticipate. It does seem to be the case that irrespective of the critique to which religious beliefs and practices were subjected throughout the twentieth century, a certain religious consciousness is nonetheless not simply persisting, but is rapidly adapting to the needs of a decentred, deconstructed, postmodern world. There is apparently something about religious being, or being religious, that continues to be invested with profound and significant meaning. The religious imaginary has not remotely disappeared into the oblivion of incomprehensibility heralded by Nietzsche’s twilight of the idols; something one might reasonably have expected that it should have done in the face of the challenge that Western science and Enlightenment ideologies have clearly posed. At this early historical point, then, I find myself disinclined to go so quickly down the same path that thinkers like the radical Protestant theologian Don Cupitt have done when it comes to rethinking the place of religion in contemporary life. In his understanding of this emergent diasporic spirituality as simply a different face of a certain cultural resistance to the otherwise inevitable loss of religious meaning in everyday life, Cupitt prematurely terminates a theological conversation that is surely just beginning.3 Perhaps the re-emergence of ‘spirit’, for want of a better way of defining it, has more to offer in rethinking the place of the religious imaginary in contemporary life than such a prophetic suggestion permits.

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See Cupitt’s After God: The Future of Religion (1997).

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The subject of love And indeed a serious reconsideration of religious meaning would seem to be one way of making sense of the renewed passion for all things religious – the gift, love, divinity, fidelity, death, the sacred, evil, scripture, even God ‘himself ’ – which continues to inflect much of the work in contemporary European philosophy. This renewed interest in the traditional terrain of religion and theology is something of an irony in the face of the general allegation that postmodern thought is substantially responsible for the impossibility of taking seriously religious meaning in the contemporary world. Moreover, this continental philosophical interest seems less clearly delineated from theology itself, or even from traditional philosophy, than one might expect. The more distant appeal to the ‘objective’ that has characterised philosophy’s engagement with religion, via ‘religious studies’, has traditionally drawn the line between philosophy and theology around the question of position. Philosophy has historically represented itself as being outside the religious world, looking in. Theology, on the other hand has claimed the authority of the inside reflecting on itself. Between the two disciplines the line of demarcation has been drawn through the issue of belief and faith, an issue generally presumed to be transparent and thus easily discernible. In the more traditional approaches to religion that have characterised philosophy’s engagement we are likely to find a consideration, for example, of the concept of grace, but never an invocation of it – at least not intentionally. The same cannot be said, however, of the contemporary trend in continental philosophy where the very notion of an ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ that can be clearly established has been revealed as a function of a very particular kind of epistemology. I have found myself wondering about Foucault’s claim that the twentieth century was marked not by a silencing of sexuality but by an obsessive speaking of it. Perhaps, then, the twenty-first is to be marked by a similar ‘not speaking’ that is nothing but speaking, of the supposedly unspeakable – religion in the reign of scientific truth. Against this background of tentative observations about the challenges that religious meaning is facing in postmodernity, the French feminist ‘poeticophilosopher’4 Hélène Cixous’ theorisation of a ‘feminine’5 relation to the gift

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4 Cixous’ work is notoriously difficult to contain within the conventional categories of the academy. It has variously been described as literary theory, literary criticism, poetry, and philosophy. While she has repeatedly asserted her primary commitment to the poetic, her work is equally informed by the theoretical discourses of psychoanalysis and post-structuralism. The term poetico-philosophy is one that Cixous has herself employed and it often seems to best capture the aspect of her writing with which I am engaging here. See ‘Theatre, History, Ethics’ (1997: 425–456), an interview with Bernadette Fort. However, there are times throughout this book when I do refer to Cixous’ work as theo-poetic and theo-phenomenological. I do this to challenge the ease with which the neologism philosophico-poetics erases the religious undercurrents in Cixous’ work, undercurrents that I take to be as significant as those which may be more obviously indebted to institutional philosophy. 5 Cixous goes to considerable lengths in her landmark 1975 essay, ‘Sorties’, and elsewhere, to distinguish between the feminine and woman, masculine and man. While it is fair to say that the feminine is typically associated with woman, this is a matter for her of culture and not nature.

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Introduction emerged for me as a way of rethinking the place of divinity beyond the ‘death of God’. Given Cixous’ more or less explicit goal of developing a way of thinking through an economy of gendered social relations that is principally defined against the negation and the appropriation of difference, her work is not an obvious place to turn in thinking about divinity. Yet without deviating from the issue of the difference that particularly sexual difference makes, the analyses she offers, the texts she draws upon, and the metaphors she invokes, frequently return in different guises to the same questions, questions that seem unmistakably religious in character. Could there be a gift that is given, not by a me or a you, but as a kind bestowal, a gift that escapes a debt economy, a gift that is not in some way returned? Can we think of the divine as signifying this moment in which the difference of otherness escapes the impulse to subdue? Is the gift a metaphor for that which exceeds the return to self, that which permits a genuine encounter between self and other? In this sense, Cixous is exemplary of what I have suggested is this emerging alternative approach to the religious that, in part, I am endeavouring to sketch here. Her attention in considering these kinds of questions is often to the domain of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Her focus is on how the experiences of the self/other relation might be lived, what it is about our relation to our selves, to others, and to knowledge that might permit or exclude a different relation to difference. Yet, throughout all her work the challenge of achieving what might be understood to be a just relation between the masculine and the feminine is configured with reference to a sacred or religious imaginary – whether through her use of language or concepts or via her invocation of particular scriptural references. Thus, Cixous’ apparently ‘political’ work on sexual difference seems to imply that this is perhaps a question of divinity as much as it is a question of social justice. Indeed, as I hope to show, Cixous’ emphases on love, grace, and the gift exceed the terms of the political or pragmatic, but this is not to suggest that this then makes them irrelevant to those domains. On the contrary, nothing in Cixous is abandoned in that way. We are perpetually challenged by a structure of relations framed not by either/or but by both/and.

Cixous resists essentialism at the same time as acknowledging that the effects of sexual difference do have a claim to the ‘real’. She says: ‘I make a point of using the qualifiers of sexual difference here to avoid the confusion man/masculine, woman/feminine: for there are some men who do not repress their femininity, some women who, more or less strongly, inscribe their masculinity. Difference is not distributed, of course, on the basis of socially determined “sexes”’ (‘Sorties’, 1986a: 81). Cixous does not take issue with the idea that bodies are different, rather that the value attached to this difference can and does have ‘real’ effects, the results of which can be described. Bodies marked by sexual difference come to bear the inordinate weight of being such that it remains meaningful to describe something like ‘women’s experience’ within an economy which distributes value along gender lines. I have chosen not to signpost this qualification with what would be the perpetual use of quotation marks but rather invite the reader to keep in mind that whenever the words feminine and masculine appear in this text they are not an appeal to essentialism.

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The subject of love Thus, I found myself captivated by the idea that Cixous’ work was and still is all about questions of divinity, and that these questions are a reflection of a very different understanding of the place of religion in contemporary theory. In this respect, then, her work on subjectivity and writing, on love and death, or even her more recent work on the tragedies of history, are all different faces of the same question. Put another way, the gift that Cixous is most interested in is the gift of love. If any single theme can be thought to dominate her work, it is the theme of love’s work. Can we love? Can we love as a gift that does not return? What would it take to love the other as other, neither to refuse nor to embrace the other, but to create a space in which the other is met, is brushed against, is perhaps felt as well as seen? Can we live our subjectivities in a way in which love emerges in the in-between not as something an ‘I’ does or has, but rather as something that happens to an us, that emerges, in the very space of meeting? What kind of being does it take to love the other in their otherness and not to sacrifice oneself in doing so? What kinds of relations to and between subjectivities make possible this notion of a divine meeting in difference? On the one hand, Cixous’ thinking about a just love of the other that involves an encounter with the otherness of difference does have a certain presence in the history of love. In a qualified sense, I find it tantalisingly evocative of the Christian concept of agape, which has been understood as a universally oriented, other-regarding, selfless love. In theological terms, God’s love is agapic, and it is characterised as a universal bestowal that arises not in response to the specificity of the object of love but rather out of a fundamental nature that is loving. God is the paradigmatic self/less lover who in the radical absence of a self that is ‘doing’ the loving is therefore nothing but the becoming of pure love. While the translation of this theological conception of idealised selfless love has in practice been very problematic, particularly for women around the question of selflessness,6 there is, nonetheless, something radically egalitarian about a conception of love that is universally expressed regardless of the specificity of the object of that love. Indeed, I would argue that this egalitarian aspect of Christian love, to the extent that it bears on an ethics of intersubjective relations, has potentially been Christianity’s most unique, radical and indeed provocative contribution to ethics. However, the other-regarding aspect of agapic love, when applied to humans, and not to God, has, in the practice of much theological interpretation, often been twinned with an equally defining feature. Other-regard is dependent firstly upon the selflessness or self-denial of the subject who loves. Agape, then, is selfless otherregarding love, and in this sense, it can be found to be profoundly implicated in sacrificial logic. Love of the other that is genuine, and thus divine, in the orthodox reading of agape, is predicated upon a self that, on the most common interpretation of the model of Jesus, is apparently willing to sacrifice itself to the utmost

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See Chapter 2 for a thoroughgoing analysis of the issue of women’s selflessness.

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Introduction for the sake of the other.7 In this respect, it is a kind of love that is peculiarly inimical to human subjectivity. It is considerably less gift than it is duty, and this aspect of agape displaces any obvious connection between Hélène Cixous’ understanding of an ethic of love and that of orthodox Christian theologies. As a writer who has embraced and indeed inspired many of the insights of contemporary feminism, Cixous is clear that women have traditionally borne the brunt of sacrificial logic in a patriarchal world. The demand for self-sacrifice has been a masculine ideal, but a peculiarly feminine practice.8 So in that sense Cixous’ love, while clearly understandable as other-regarding, is strictly speaking not agapic, for Cixous is typically no advocate of sacrificial logic.9 Furthermore, the challenges that the concept of agape faced in the twentieth century have turned out to be almost insurmountable even within the province of mainstream Christian Protestant theology. From the 1930s, with the Protestant theologian Bishop Anders Nygren’s publication of his controversial Agape and Eros (1982 [1932/1938]), and in the subsequent work of Reinhold Niebuhr, agape again became the subject of serious theological controversy.10 The very conservative, largely Pauline, readings of the conditions of agapic love that characterised the work of both these men seemingly emphasised the notion of self-denial to 7

The crucifixion has long been interpreted as the archetypal example of sacrificial love. While there is much to be said about this interpretation, it is not the primary focus of this work. Nonetheless, it is important to note that the sacrificial interpretation of Jesus is highly contested within the field of religious studies. The work of René Girard, to which I will refer in more detail shortly, is but one place where a non-sacrificial interpretation of Jesus and the Gospels can be found. 8 The same insight informs a landmark essay by the feminist theologian Valerie Saiving. Saiving’s article ‘The Human Situation: A Feminine View’ was published in The Journal of Religious Studies in 1960 and is now considered to be a key text marking the emergence of the new discipline of feminist theology. In this piece Saiving particularly challenged the theologians Anders Nygren and Reinhold Niebuhr, both of whose work emphasised the sacrificial aspect of agapic love. Saiving proposed that the theological understanding of the human/divine relation on which Nygren and Niebuhr relied in turning to self-sacrifice as the proper character of agapic love – namely that the human situation is characterised by anxiety, estrangement, and the conflict between necessity and freedom; that sin is directly related to the seeming incorrigibility of human pride, the willto-power and exploitation; and the treatment of others as objects rather than as persons – could be sufficiently understood only by recognising that these concerns do not in fact reflect human experience, tout court, but male experience, quite specifically. Female experience, Saiving felt, was characterised by the opposite of self-interest, that is, by an abandonment of self in the face of the other, and self-sacrifice could hardly then be offered as a corrective. 9 While my interest in Cixous’ work has consistently been grounded in the way I read her as developing a notion of love that is ethical primarily to the extent that it is abundant, excessive, and generous and thus that runs counter to sacrificial versions of love, in some of her very recent memoir writing which includes reflection on her animals, there is the disturbing trace of sacrificial logic. See for example ‘Stigmata, or Job the Dog’ from Stigmata: Escaping Texts (1998) where she narrates the tragic story of her childhood dog, Fips. See also Messie (1996), where her reflections turn to her beloved cats. 10 See Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man Vol. 1 and 2 (1941; 1943) and Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932).

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The subject of love such an extent as to render it a human impossibility. So problematic were their conceptions of agape that even mainstream theologians found themselves tempering their self-annihilatory conceptions of other-regard with at least some semblance of qualification on behalf of the self. And this was well before feminist theologians like Valerie Saiving even entered the discursive fray, bringing with them a thoroughgoing critique of the patriarchal affiliations of selflessness as the foundation of agapic love.11 For good or ill, the agape that Nygren and Niebuhr had imagined as the sublime bestowal of a divine other-regarding, selfless love has all but disappeared as a way of conceiving love in the contemporary world. It seems that there is general agreement, even within conservative theological circles, that agape is a concept better understood in psychosocial, psychobiological terms. Inasmuch as it still has some purchase on the imaginary, let alone as an ethic of intersubjective relations, the supposedly unconditional love of a mother for her child is its archetypal secular model. But, as a way of managing or imagining relations of difference, relations between subjects, a reconstituted and expanded notion of eros seems to have been better equipped to deal with the demands of contemporary thinking about subjectivity in both the philosophical and theological domains. The notion of agapic love as gift or bestowal has apparently either been largely lost or considerably ‘domesticated’ amidst the legacy of Enlightenment anxieties about individuality, selfhood, embodiment, sexuality and autonomy. And I hesitate to suggest that this is as true of much of the work in feminist theology as it is of the more mainstream theological traditions, regardless that their reasons for arriving in the same place may be informed by very different concerns. Yet the love of which Hélène Cixous most passionately speaks, in the name of a different, more just relation between self and other, seems to be a love which nonetheless bears an uncanny resemblance to at least to the spirit of agape. It is divine, at least inasmuch as the divine signals a mystery that escapes the capacities of signifying systems. It is a gift, but not one that an ‘I’ can give a you, for an ‘I’ can never have it to give in the first place. It is neither decided upon nor willed, but functions more like grace. In its most ideal form, Cixous’ love is bestowal; it is a blessing, except that in her case the metaphor is more one of emergence in the in-between rather than a descent from a heavenly above. And, like agapic love, it is deeply implicated in the relationship between the self and itself in the context of an other-regard that remains other-regarding. 11

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The French philosopher Alain Badiou’s unconventional rereading of Paul, published in 1997 as Saint Paul: La Foundation de l’universalisme (translated into English in 2003 and published as Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism), does touch on the question of agape in relation to subjectivity. Badiou offers a particularly compelling account of the problem of self-love (2003: 88–90), however, his explicit rejection of post-structural understandings of subjectivity as dispersed, fragmented, and in a constant process of becoming means that we come at the question of the significance of agape from very different positions.

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Introduction At the phenomenal level of the subject’s relation to being, or perhaps in more Cixousian terms, becoming, I find Cixous’ work on a kind of divine other-regarding love is most suggestive. For in her attention to the phenomenal experience of subjectivity a glimpse can be seen of the way in which an other-regarding love might be lived outside of and beyond the self-sacrificial logic that has historically dominated so much of Judaic and Christian conversations about love. In repudiating any formal allegiance to traditional religious institutions or their texts, yet in nonetheless locating so much of her writing within the language of these traditions, Cixous seems free to engage in a kind of theo-poetic philosophy that is not in a defensive relation to the orthodoxy of institutions. Thus, I want to suggest, perhaps her interest in a just relation between human beings, her theorisation of a graceful relation to and with difference, and her invocation of a worldly rather than other-worldly divinity, have much to offer feminist theological theory, precisely because of the extent to which she can be understood as engaging in and through a religious imaginary that is already beyond the formal questions of institutional religion and theological tradition. The debates concerning agape and eros in late twentieth-century theology were, furthermore, markedly defined by a widening recognition of the impact of Church doctrine on the experience of sexual difference. In this context, the selfsacrificial aspect of agapic love that Valerie Saiving so clearly identified in gendered terms in the 1960s has been thoroughly disclosed by later feminist thinkers to have been little more than an instrument of oppression for women. It is women who have historically been the ‘special’ subjects of the demand for self-sacrifice. It is women whose relations to love and the beloved have been idealised in the absence of a self to do the loving. And the theological justification for this demand can still be traced, in part, to the misogynist interpretations of Eve, that ‘first’ woman; the woman who stands for all women; the woman whose specifically female sexuality came to define sin in so much of the masculine traditions of Christianity. In an attempt to redress the injustice that this interpretative tradition has represented, much of the work in feminist theology has concerned itself with elucidating the impact of the patriarchal and hegemonic reach of such interpretations on the everyday lives of women regardless of whether or not as individuals they would identify as Christian. Sexuality has been long and widely recognised as an instrument of suppression and oppression in and through much Church doctrine and across a wide range of denominations. In being endlessly subjected to regulation, examination, prohibition, and confession, sexuality has also frequently been the axis around which the potential divinity of women has relentlessly been spun. Of course, it is precisely the presence of embodied sexuality (as if embodied subjectivity is only the province of women!) that has marked the absence of spirit and thus the absence of divinity for women. Similarly, there has also been considerable recognition on the part of many feminist theologians – deriving from the wider debates in feminist theory – of

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the extent to which both the Judaic and Christian traditions, in having been so deeply woven through the abominations of Leviticus, have reviled and made the basis of sin the very exigencies of human corporeality. For many contemporary feminist theologians, then, any conception of love that is unable to fully embrace all aspects of what it means to be human, including embodied sexuality, cannot be considered to be a just love, and, in that sense, it cannot have the redemptive qualities necessary for it to be truly Christian. Traditional agape has fallen well short of these criteria; firstly in typically being interpreted as self-denying, secondly in being so thoroughly abstracted from the world, and thirdly in being humanly impossible. Nonetheless, I would argue that to a great extent it is the pre-Christian, classical divinity of eros that is re-membered and then Christianised through a feminist theology that has not deeply taken into consideration the ways in which sexual difference is implicated at the level of subjectivity. With their attention sharply focussed on the problem of selflessness, and by extension the self of the already taken-for-granted ontological subject, woman, much of feminist theology seems to be marked by an unconscious allegiance to the notoriously masculine, Enlightenment ideals of what a subject is in the first place. Eros fits well into this story of both love and subjectivity. But I want to suggest that in Cixous’ detachment from many of the formal questions concerning orthodox religions, and in her recognition of subjectivity as an ongoing process of becoming rather than being, fragmentation rather than unity, her work permits the emergence of a conception of love that is divine yet is not predicated upon sacrificial logic. Alison Weir, in her extensive study of the relationship between sacrificial logic and identity, exposes a similar challenge to a project of rethinking identity beyond patriarchal Enlightenment ideologies. She insists that any model of subjectivity must retain some notion of coherence at the level of social participation while simultaneously rejecting an essentialist ontology of authentic selfhood (1996: 185). To whatever extent the notion of authentic selfhood might apply to Cixous’ subject, it does so by contrast with the Enlightenment subject. The ‘authentic’ self is not the self that pre-exists the moment. On the contrary the authentic self emerges in opening on to an endless process of becoming, thus can never be thought of as unified or stable. In this vision of the subject as emergent in its relations to and with the world and others, I will suggest that Cixous’ subject gives rise to the possibility of a love that generates a certain divinity that might not be equally possible, even in a re-membered eros. The love of which Cixous speaks is thoroughly human: it is not inimical to the questions of embodiment or sexuality for it is not lost in an encounter with either. Its divinity lies in its willing embrace of the limits of human being, its recognition that divine love is not the possession of a subject to give, or to receive. Rather divinity is something that emerges, like grace, in a space which is in many respects beyond the subject/ object distinction yet is not dismissive of it.

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Introduction Hélène Cixous’ work is undoubtedly an unlikely place to find a love that resembles agape. And perhaps it would be fair to say that the ways in which it is not agape are so significant as to render this a very long bow to have drawn. Yet, I want to return to the spirit of things. In a sense, it is in the spirit of the way in which Cixous invokes a kind of other-regarding ‘selfless’ love, in the spirit of a selflessness that derives from generosity and excess that I find the most compelling invitation to return to agape. In the spirit of a love that is ‘truly’ otherregarding, meaning that it is the other that is loved in and for their otherness, love is positioned from a place of self-generosity rather than anxiety. In a most meaningful sense is this not the spirit of agapic love?12 And is it not also this aspect of agapic love that is most mysterious and elusive yet most ethically important and challenging? Cixous’ recognition of the fragmentary yet dynamic nature of subjectivities, which is informed by a different relation to alterity, a feminine relation, provides a way of reconsidering the very real problem of selflessness or self-denial that has plagued interpretations of agape as an ethical basis of love. So it is in the spirit of considering just what the conditions of such a divine and other-regarding, non-sacrificial love might be, that this project can be located. Cixous’ theorisation of a subjectivity lived differently in and through a love which ‘truly’ recognises otherness throws an intriguing backlight on the Christian notion of agapic love and invites us to continue thinking about the place of divine love beyond Nietzsche’s tendentious and perhaps premature declaration of the death of God. Other love What might it mean to ‘truly’ love the other, to love them in their alterity, for their indeterminable differences? Assuming that it is even a possibility, why might we want to, and should we think of this loving in other ways than as a sublime affection of the heart? Is this simply another face of ‘unconditional’ love, where the ideal is one in which self-interest is entirely eliminated? These questions raise the issue of whether we can do anything that benefits another without simultaneously benefiting ourselves? Or do we find our ‘selves’ necessarily implicated in any and all acts of giving? Can we, as Hélène Cixous proposes, escape what she understands to be the masculine economies of debt that mediate and define the space of the entre deux/nous, and make of the gift of love something that does not inevitably return to us? And who might it be that is the subject of a giving and receiving, a loving and being loved, which has indeed escaped this masculine economy? 12 I do not mean here to give the impression that I am excavating a theological tradition regarding the sublime generosity of agape that once held sway. To my knowledge no such tradition exists. I am, nonetheless, suggesting that through the gaps in the tradition that does exist we can indeed glimpse the possibility of a different reading.

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The subject of love From both Judaism and Christianity, but particularly from Christianity, questions of love have long been threaded through discourses of sacrifice where giving is inevitably tied to taking (as opposed to receiving), or to loss. The Christian ethic of generous other-regarding love, through which Christianity has virtually been defined, has typically brought with it a powerful yet often submerged caveat. To ‘truly’ love the other, and thus to sufficiently embody the second Biblical commandment to love our neighbours, we must sacrifice ourselves. Only a radical selflessness can function as the basis from which a truly other-regarding love can arise, for only a radical self-sacrifice can overcome what is assumed to be a defining sin of humanity – the inevitability of self-interest. If there is any benefit to self within this vision of the Christian logos of love, it is one that is deferred to the ephemeral space of beyond life, the after life. As I previously noted, through the narrative of the crucifixion Christianity has, albeit perhaps unintentionally in light of the contemporary debates concerning this reading of the crucifixion, arguably nonetheless provided Western consciousness or culture with the archetypal trope of self-sacrifice on behalf of the other. For surely this is what Christ has most powerfully come to symbolise: the sacrifice of one’s ‘self ’ in the name of love. Yet, despite Jesus’ supposedly willing surrender of his individual corporeal existence on behalf of the other, indeed, on behalf of all others, this single sacrifice of one life alone was clearly not enough. Rather in Christian terms, loving the other has come to involve a perpetual sacrifice of oneself, ostensibly from each of us and on an ongoing basis. However, there can be little doubt, as many feminists have noted, that the self-sacrificial imperative within what I take to be this particularly patriarchal logos of Christianity has been configured in feminine terms, and thus has primarily fallen as an expectation of women, rather than to a universal ‘us’. Notwithstanding this important distinction, and following the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, contemporary thinkers like René Girard – who has written extensively on the relationship between violence and sacrifice in religious discourse13 – are right to understand the historical practices of Christianity as fortifying a matrix of intersubjective relations that are deeply sacrificial.14 Although Western societies are preoccupied with secular ideologies like individuality, autonomy, and independence, one need only look 13

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Girard’s theo-anthropology offers an account of the relationship between sacrificial discourse in religious traditions and the place of violence in culture. In his attention to Christianity, and particularly to the figure of Christ in the Gospels, he suggests that the Gospels signify a shift in the scapegoating mechanism whereby there is a recognition of the innocence, rather than the guilt, of the sacrificial victim. For Girard, this recognition carries the potential to break the mimetic escalation of violence that is otherwise apparent in sacrificial discourse. See particularly Violence and the Sacred (1977) and The Scapegoat (1982). 14 While Girard’s work offers a powerful critical tool for thinking about the role of sacrifice in religious discourses, he does not bring to it a significant gender analysis. I would suggest that this is actually a deficiency in Girard’s wok. See Martha J. Reineke, Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence (1997), for a feminist analysis of Girard and Kristeva on the question of sacrifice.

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Introduction to that ubiquitous mirror of contemporary souls, mainstream cinema, to see the ways such ideologies are rarely applied to discourses on love. In offering a critique of the patriarchal and masculine character of these very notions of autonomy, independence and individuality, second-wave feminism has undoubtedly paved the way for a rethinking of women’s relations to these symbolic, secular attributes of power. Nonetheless, mainstream cinema tells a story that suggests that, when it comes to love, the self-sacrificial imperative of the normative Christian logos continues to be an operating principle, especially as it concerns women. Returning briefly to Girard on sacrifice: he distinguishes between the practices of religion and theology because he aims to find a notion of love, in his case a Christian notion, that is not essentially sacrificial. In a 1993 interview in the Journal of Religion and Literature (1993: 25) Girard responded to a question that arose from the work of the feminist philosopher Edith Wyschogrod on self/other relations. In her groundbreaking book Saints and Postmodernism (1990), Wyschogrod proposed an ethics of intersubjectivity – her postmodern sainthood – wherein an excessive desire for the other is based on an excessive desire for what the other desires for herself or himself. What is at stake in Wyschogrod’s work, like that of Hélène Cixous, is a critique of social relations that are predicated on the negation or appropriation of difference, and it is this aspect of her work rather than her affirmation of excessive love of what the other loves that is groundbreaking. Wyschogrod is interested in the possibilities for generosity; hence she begins with the archetypal figure of one whose life is dedicated to giving to others, the saint, because she wants to explore the very structure of selflessness as a basis of generous other-love. But she, like Cixous and unlike Girard, comes to the questions of saintliness and subjectivity from a postmodern context where the notion of a fully self-present subject who precedes their encounter with the other has been revealed as a ‘fiction’ of historical and social construction rather than as an ontological fact. The self that is the subject of selflessness in Wyschogrod’s work is a temporal phenomenon who does not fully precede the moment but comes to be in an encounter with the other in an instant that punctuates the flow of time. Her proposed ethics of excessively desiring for the other what the other desires for himself or herself is thus neither sacrificial nor self-interested, but rather it arises out of a recognition of the very difference that the other represents.15 When his interviewer asked Girard if his theory of non-sacrificial love could account 15

My reference here to Wyschogrod in some sense brings with it an implicit and not inappropriate invocation of the work of Emanuel Levinas, for Wyschogrod is heavily indebted to his work. And in many respects I take Levinas to be an absent presence in this book, just as I take his thought to be an absent presence in the work of Hélène Cixous, which is the subject of this study. There is sufficient overlap in the concerns of both Cixous and Levinas with respect to the question of an ethics of alterity to assume reasonably that she is familiar with his work, yet she makes few explicit references to him. It is to a later study then that I leave the question of their sympathies and differences for, in this context, the concept of agape takes me in a different direction.

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The subject of love for this kind of excessive desire on behalf of the other that Wyschogrod proposed, he responded in the affirmative. His response, which is also very evocative of the work of Hélène Cixous, reflects one of the central concerns of this book: the relationship between other-regarding love and divinity. He does indeed offer an ‘account’ of Wyschogrod’s excessive desire on behalf of the other: he proposes that it is divine. He says: ‘wherever you have that . . . really active, positive desire for the other, there is some kind of divine grace present’ (1993: 25). Between the lines of Girard’s statement can be seen the shadowy presence of Aquinas’ conception of God – the wholly other, all-active lover/creator – peeping through the cracks of contemporary theory and signification. God’s love is generative love, not sacrificial love. An active desire on behalf of the other, in this respect, then, is a loving that is ‘like’ God: it generates rather than destroys. Girard’s divine grace can really arise only in a context wherein self and other become in their differences and sacrifice is not the anvil on which their encounter is hammered, although this is by no means how Girard expresses it. In many ways these three thinkers, Girard, Wyschogrod, and Cixous, are more notable for their differences than they are for their similarities. For instance, reading any notion of equality grounded in an acknowledgement of difference into Girard is a matter of reading between the lines. This is far less the case in the work of Wyschogrod and it is not at all the case in the work of Cixous where notions of differences which survive, or better still, flourish in the encounter between self and other are both central to her ethics and inseparable from her understanding of questions of sexual difference.16 Yet, in variously tackling questions of difference, all these thinkers find themselves relying on and invoking notions of divinity, albeit very different notions. For Cixous, the possibility of a genuine encounter between self and other is one that circulates around a love that can arise only from generosity. A divine meeting in love is a generative meeting through which alterity leads to birth and not death. At stake is always the question of alterity: How do we love the other without either sacrificing otherness or sacrificing self? How can we think through a structure of social relations where self and other are not constituted as opposing categories that meet

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16 The concept of equality did not emerge unscathed from the late twentieth-century secondwave feminist debates on sameness and difference, at least in the context of Anglo-American scholarship. To the extent that the term is inseparable from Enlightenment ideologies of human subjectivity it is also inseparable from a male vision of humanity. Thus, amongst other things, appeals to equality run the risk of erasing sexual specificity or sexual difference in the assertion that women must have the same rights as man. However, neither the term equality nor justice, which is a close corollary in Cixous’ work, can be assumed to rely on an underlying appeal to either sameness or autonomy. Cixous’ acknowledgement of the interdependence of a subjectivity that arises in and through difference, as I hope to show, renders incomprehensible the Enlightenment characterisation of discrete, authentic selves who pre-exist their encounters with others and achieve a certain equality (sameness) in having the same access to rights or resources. Thus, in the simplest terms, equality in the Cixousian lexicon assumes and embraces difference.

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Introduction over the ashes of negated difference? Can love arise in the face of differences that are indeterminable? Had the institutions of Christianity, over the course of millennia, not been so heavily implicated in the formation of the religious, affective, and ethical imaginations of Western subjectivity, the role of this religion in such speculations about love and difference might not be so central. But, and without wanting to universalise or condemn Christianity unjustly, I want to take very seriously the extent to which its influence in shaping the Western imaginary has been virtually inestimable. I also want to take seriously the fact that it is also true that, through the concept of agape, Christianity is one of the few religious discourses to have privileged the notion of a generous, other-regarding love as the foundation of ethical relations between self and other, notwithstanding the attendant difficulties that have also accompanied the practice of this ethic. These difficulties will be addressed in more detail in Chapters 1 and 2, but particularly in Chapter 2, where I will be considering the recent work of a number of feminist theologians who extend and develop the earlier insights of Valerie Saiving concerning the orthodox emphasis on the sacrificial aspect of agapic love. In bringing a gender analysis to bear on their reflections on divine love, many feminist theologians, as previously noted, have opted to abandon the concept of agape, believing it to be irredeemably patriarchal and incapable of signifying the mutual love of equals. In balancing their feminist and theological commitments, many have turned to the notions of mutuality and a reconceived eros, to reconfigure the sacred in terms of an ethics of intersubjectivity. The concept of mutuality is understood to redress the repudiation of self that has historically been a defining principle of other-regarding love within Christian theology by displacing the binary discourse of self-interest versus other-regard with a discourse on shared power. The feminist theological structure of mutuality derives from the recognition that subjectivity itself is necessarily a relational concept, and, in this respect, mutuality shares with Cixous’ feminine economy of exchange between self and other a rethinking of the subject/object dichotomy that has typically defined love relations in Western discourse. Furthermore, in focusing on the gendered nature of agapic love, feminist theologians have drawn out the connection between this very disembodied, abstract, masculine ideal and the concomitant repudiation of the body and sexuality, namely, the female sexual body, which has also defined the Christian vision of love. In being historically constituted against eros – the love of desire, and hence the love of self-interest – traditional agape has served to reinforce further the association of women with the carnal, rather than the divine. However, it is the conceptual, imaginary life of other-regarding love that is actually the subject of my interest here, rather than orthodox theological interpretations of agape. I depart from a position informed largely by the insights of post-structuralism and feminist psychoanalysis, and approach the question of

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The subject of love other-regarding love in a Christian context with very different investments from those of many feminist theologians. In being inseparable from the hegemonic structures of patriarchal logocentrism, Christianity in all its complex guises and permutations has long exceeded the influence afforded it simply by the faithful. Moreover, and perhaps as a result of the fruitful union between the concepts of God, man, and reason, Christianity has found itself implicated in a complex labyrinth of contradictions where its theologies often bear little or no resemblance to its institutionalised practices. While this project will, to some extent, engage with the more orthodox theological discourses on other-regarding love, it nonetheless does so from a position of some distance. Through the concept of agape Christianity primarily provides me with a compelling interrogative for thinking about the ways in which an other-regarding love that opens on to divinity, one that is or can be sourced in generosity and abundance, has been and might be imagined and, perhaps more importantly still, has been and might be lived. In Chapter 1, I explicitly consider agape against the background of what is perhaps philosophy’s most distinguished discourse on love, Plato’s Symposium. I reflect on the tension between Plato’s eros, both vulgar and divine, and Christianity’s divine love, and inquire into who might be the subjects of these loves. However, it is from the writings of the French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous that this project principally draws its inspiration. In Cixous’ work I find a conception of a generous other-regarding love that is indeed other-regarding, but that also uniquely escapes the problem of self-sacrifice that attaches to agape. Through the discourses of feminism,17 post-structuralism and deconstruction, and especially in her analysis of specific literary figures, Cixous writes of a meeting between subjects in a moment of love that escapes the Hegelian impulse either to assimilate or to annihilate the other. Against the abstracted unity of the masculine subject of modernity that aspires to be in possession of itself, she proposes the immediacy of a feminine subjectivity that is dispersed and shifting, always open to change, always in a process of becoming rather than being. Thus, with a view to becoming, Cixous’ own writing privileges the domain of experience via an attention to the embodied, phenomenal life of the subject in the very immediacy of living. Pushing the literary into the closest possible relation to the present, Cixous’ writing frequently traces the incessant movements of an embodied subjectivity as it comes into life or living with the other. For Hélène Cixous, whose focus is on ‘life’ and what it means to move towards living, love is possible only in movement, hence in difference, for movement

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17 Cixous does not in fact identify with the term ‘feminist’. Indeed she has distanced herself from this term, seeing it as a specific signifier of Anglo-American approaches to sexual difference. I use it here to the extent that it does signify her interest in questions of sexual difference, and to alert readers to her specific interest in women and the feminine within patriarchal discourses.

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Introduction itself presumes difference.18 As such to imagine a love for the other in which selflessness is reconstituted as other than loss or sacrifice one has to imagine a subjectivity that does not privilege the notion of the self who precedes the moment of love, the self who already is. In this respect, Cixous’ selfless lover can be thought of as finding her self, such as this self is, rather than losing her self in her encounter with the other in the present. Thus, in Cixous’ theorisation of what some might argue are truly ethical love relations, but what I am here suggesting are in fact divine love relations, any possessive attachments to self are seen as precluding the possibility of the subject approaching the other in his or her alterity and thus occluding the horizon of divinity. Such self-possessive relations are more characteristic of what she takes to be a masculine relation to subjectivity, and they signal the impossibility of a genuine meeting between subjects who can truly meet in and through their differences. The self that is in possession of itself, the self that is the subject of a statement like ‘I love you,’ is better understood, according to Cixous, as only one possible moment of subjectivity. This subject does not amount to the totality of itself, is never in the end fully present to itself, despite the fact that such a conception of identity has been privileged in patriarchal Western cultures, and despite the fact that we can indeed identify a certain social mask of subjectivity with the appearance of self-present unity. Cixous would likely be in agreement with Alison Weir on this point that ‘to rise above the interior chaosmos each one of us gives ourselves a spokesperson I, the social I who votes, who represents me’ (Cixous, 1994a: xviii). But identity and subjectivity cannot be reduced to that spokesperson: ‘I ask myself, but I do not answer’ (Cixous, 1994a: xviii). For Cixous the subjects that we are invoke all the ages that we have been as well as those we will be; so too then, are we all the characters of our dreams, for which one of them can we say is not, in some sense, us? ‘Pure I, identical to I-self, does not exist. I is always in difference. I is the open set of the traces of an I by definition changing, mobile, because living-speaking-thinking-dreaming’ (Cixous, 1994a: xviii). Differences, then, are the ground of whatever unity is imaginable and expressible. Through difference we become and as such only through difference can we come to truly love with grace, if only momentarily. I will never say often enough that the difference is not one, that there is never one without the other, and that the charm of difference (beginning with sexual difference) is that it passes. It crosses through us, like a goddess. We cannot capture it. It makes us teeter with emotion. It is in this living agitation that there is always room for you in me, your presence and your place. I is never an individual, I is haunted. I is always, before knowing anything, an I-love-you. (1994a: xviii) 18

Jacques Derrida’s recent memoir of his friendship and longstanding intellectual conversation with Hélène Cixous, H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . (2006), reflects in its very title this emphasis on life and living that has characterised Cixous’ work from the outset. Derrida constructed the book around the notion of taking sides, he the side of death, she the side of life.

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The subject of love In the work of Hélène Cixous, with her constant invocation of a generous and generative love, I find the echoes of agapic love, not as theology in the orthodox sense, but as kind of theo-phenomenology, a theology of the body. As we will see specifically in Chapter 5, and passim in Chapters 3 and 4, for Cixous an otherlove that is other-regarding is also a feminine love. Moreover, in a feminine relation to the other lies the possibility of divinity; something she has often described as a ‘second innocence’. Her conception of a feminine economy of desire that is the basis of this other-regarding love is grounded not in the teleology of an other who is other-for-me, but rather in an other who is beyond and elsewhere to me, an other whose difference calls me/us into becoming. Thus, love arises in the moment of meeting when both self and other are freed from the constraints of having to be anything. For Cixous, as I hope to have already suggested, the possibility of a generous love of the other rests on a very different understanding of subjectivity itself. In Chapter 3 I will consider what is perhaps her most well known essay in AngloAmerican feminist scholarship, ‘Sorties’ from The Newly Born Woman (1986a [1975]). This essay focuses specifically on her concerns with sexual difference, which she addresses partially through an examination of the differently gendered structures that underpin the act of giving.19 At this time Cixous proposed the notion that there are two different sexual ‘economies’ of exchange in culture: a masculine economy that is circumscribed by profit, and a feminine economy that subverts the return to self that is implicit in profiting from ‘one’s’ gifts. In asserting and considering a feminine relation to the gift, Cixous tentatively broaches a conception of subjectivity that she understands to reflect this gendered relation to difference. Her goal is to imagine an intersubjective relation in which the other remains other in a moment of genuine meeting, but her emphasis is on the possibilities afforded by a feminine ‘economy’ of exchange between subjects. The first two-thirds of ‘Sorties’ forms something of a dialogue between the subjectivities

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19 In Rootprints: Memory and Lifewriting (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 1997 [1994]), Cixous has been understood to have distanced herself from the essays of the 1970s for which she is most well known in Anglo-American scholarship, ‘Sorties’ from The Newly Born Woman, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ and ‘Castration or Decapitation’. Her concern in Rootprints, however, is clear; it is a concern with the way those texts read as strategic deployments of a kind of politics which in many respects sacrificed the poetic that typically defines her writing, ethics, and work. They are, as she says, didactic, in a way she typically avoids. Nonetheless, I do not read her as distancing herself from much of the content of those essays and she herself refuses regret. ‘I was inspired to write those texts by the urgency of a moment in the general discourse concerning “sexual difference”. Which appeared to me to be confused and to be producing repression, and loss of life and of sense. I would never have thought, when I began writing, that one day I would find myself making strategic and even military gestures: constructing a camp with lines of defence! It’s a gesture which is foreign to me. I did do it. Because of ideological aggressions, all marked by intolerance – that were not addressed to me personally – all of a sudden I saw myself having an obligation to become engaged to defend a certain number of positions. To do this, I left my own ground. I do not regret it. To “defend” is sometimes a necessity’ (Rootprints, 1997: 7).

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Introduction she identifies as masculine and feminine, and she specifically addresses the role that the patriarchal conception of the Judaeo-Christian God(s)20 have played in supporting and sustaining economies of exchange that are defined by the subordination of one to the other.21 Indeed, she offers a blistering critique of this unjust conception of divinity, rejecting its complicity in discourses of annihilation. However, in the last third of ‘Sorties’, Cixous returns to the question of love, and continues her search for examples of other-regarding love that reflect her speculative theory of a feminine relation to the other, a relation necessarily defined by generosity and other-regard. Believing literature to be one of the few places where the cultural unconscious, the repressed feminine other, does find expression, her search for an other-regarding love takes her to Shakespeare and the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist. I will also reflect on her readings of these tales of love, for they signal her effort to link to the divine an other-regarding love that refuses to appropriate the otherness of the other. In other words, they speak of Cixous’ engagement with a feminine conception of divinity. In Chapter 4, I continue exploring Cixous’ feminine subject through a close reading of her essay ‘Grace and Innocence’ (1992).22 In this work she uses two of Kleist’s tales as interrogative devices to restage questions of the kind of subjectivity that is signified in typical readings of the Biblical account of the Fall.23 One story interrogates the grace of an inanimate marionette as opposed to a human dancer, but for Cixous the story also opens on to a more extended engagement with the notion of the subject of grace. The other concerns the instant when a 20 While it is customary to collapse Judaism and Christianity within the expression ‘JudaeoChristianity’, to do so is to collapse some very significant differences and to imply that they share the same conception of divinity. My pluralistic inscription of God is a gesture towards acknowledging both the extent to which these religions share significant theological concerns and the extent to which they differ. Given that the interrogative structure of this book derives from a Christian conception of love, there will be times when it is important to distinguish more explicitly between Judaism and Christianity. Typically, they have been understood to have very different conceptions of divine love. Although this point is debatable and I wish to acknowledge that, I will not be taking up these differences in any sustained way. On the question specifically of patriarchy, I think both traditions share a similar history of interpretation which, at least in principle, has endorsed male supremacy. 21 While Cixous deploys the language of economics in suggesting an alternative structure of desire, this is perhaps misleading. In many respects, her feminine economy of desire so exceeds the notion of economics that it would be better termed an-economic. 22 In fact ‘Grace and Innocence’ is not, strictly speaking, an ‘essay’ by Hélène Cixous. Drawn from transcriptions from the seminar series Cixous teaches at the Université de Paris VIII, it was translated, compiled and published by Verena Andermatt Conley in a text called Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector and Tsvetayeva (1992). 23 The story of the Fall appears in Genesis, thus making it firstly a Jewish/Hebrew Story. The subtle and complex ways in which Cixous evokes and references this story reflect both its Hebrew interpretative origins and its subsequent Christian interpretations. Perhaps because, as she herself claims, she is not indebted to any particular religious tradition she is free to draw on and make reference to a complex pastiche of allusions, thus placing the reader in the final position of interpreter.

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The subject of love

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young boy loses his innocence in front of a mirror when he catches a reflection that resembles not himself but a famous statue. In both these readings, Cixous draws out the connection between innocence, knowledge, and the Biblical Fall, from which I take her to be proposing that it is not knowledge per se that inaugurates the fall from grace but rather a way of possessively living knowledge that defines this moment as one of loss. In both these readings, Cixous refines her theorisation of masculine and feminine relations to subjectivity, and implies that, in a feminine relation to self, consciousness is not engaged in a process of identifying itself as a fully self-present unity. While these readings do not explicitly engage the concept of love, they do lay an important foundation for what I take to be Cixous’ conception of divinity, and for this reason I turn to them before considering in detail her exemplary divine love story, The Book of Promethea (1991a), in Chapter 5. In ‘Grace and Innocence’ (1992), Cixous’ subject of innocence is one who has a specific relationship to time. In proposing that the issue of the Fall is not one that concerns knowledge per se, but rather a way of living knowledge, Cixous privileges a relationship to subjectivity that approximates something like a nonself-present present. Developing her earlier work in ‘Sorties’, she suggests that in a feminine relation to self-possession – a relation that is actually marked by the dispossession of self-possession – can be found a different way of thinking of the subject who knows it knows, i.e., a different way of thinking about the subject that was inaugurated in the Fall. The subject of a ‘second innocence’, and thus of paradise, then, is the feminine subject of the present who has relinquished a relation to herself as the subject of knowledge. In The Book of Promethea, Cixous’ implicit consideration of the relationship between feminine subjectivity and divinity is extended as she explores the conditions of love in a relationship between two women who are ‘in’ love. In The Book of Promethea, a feminine relation to self functions as the basis of a unique love that gestures towards the divine. From the outset the figure of Promethea herself is affiliated with divinity through the concomitant suggestion that her non-possessive relation to herself is the very source and soul of the connection. Freed from the constraint of defining herself through a possessive ‘I’, Promethea is able to engage in a relationship with the other that calls forth, rather than negates, otherness. But Promethea is variously counterposed to the narrators, for whom the challenge of self-dispossession proves great indeed. Caught midway between an awareness that Promethea’s selfdispossession signals divine possibility, and their recognition that masculine or cultural power still resides in the security of identity categories that are necessarily in debt to notions of self-possession, they are reluctant to surrender their ‘self’ to the present. In the end The Book of Promethea poses the notion that a ‘genuinely’ otherregarding love is determined by a non-possessive relation to self, and throughout Cixous’ work notions of dispossession have consistently been configured in

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Introduction feminine terms. The self that relinquishes possession of itself as the subject of experience can be understood, then, to be immersed in the phenomenal world of immediacy, and thus to become in and with the other simultaneously. There can be no space for appropriation of difference, nor for self-sacrifice, in the traditional way in which that notion has been understood, for neither self nor other pre-exists the other. Cixous’ dispossessed feminine subject then, is dispossessed of the relation to itself on which sacrificial love has traditionally been founded: there is no ‘self ’ pre-existing the moment of meeting to whom the sacrifice in love can subsequently be referred. Thus, it is in a feminine relation to subjectivity, one that is marked by becoming rather than by being, that Cixous understands to be capable of calling forth the divine. Yet, as she consistently notes, we are made for an eternity cut to our size: divine love is not a state to which we can aspire, a restored Eden. Rather it is a moment, indeed always only a moment, an instant that is constrained by the temporal limits of being human and thus is destined always to melt gently away.

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CHAPTER 1

Speaking of love: philosophy, theology, and French feminism

Love of self raises a question for language, a question for the subject, for the world, for the other, for the god(s). Love of self represents an enigma, an impossibility, sometimes a taboo. Often in this era of sexual subjectivism, all that remains of self is a kind of masturbation, certain modes of pleasure and jouissance. But love? This question seems to be much more difficult and is not necessarily to be confused with questions of pleasure or of jouissance. Love of self is a question of eros, of agape, of eroticism, of death. (Irigaray, 1993a: 60)

The body and soul of divine love

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Throughout history theorists and philosophers of love have been preoccupied with the relationship between the subjects and objects of love. From Plato’s reflections on the divinity of a disembodied love of wisdom to the Christian ideal of loving our enemies, there is a recurring concern with understanding the mediating aspects of love. How should we think of the kinds of exchanges that love brings about? Whether thinking about love concerns relations between human beings, or relations between humans and the divine, the very notion of love as developed in Western thought presupposes that something is loved, while someone else, as subject, does the loving. Even if the possibility of a reciprocal love is acknowledged, and the one who is loved is also understood to love, the notion of love itself circulates around a subject/object dichotomy that presumes specific patterns of relating governing the exchange between sameness and difference, self and other. As such, if and when there is a presumption to speak meaningfully of lover and beloved, the concept of love is necessarily implicated in concerns about subjectivity. For the feminist thinker Hélène Cixous, the sexual politics of how love has traditionally been understood to negotiate a subject/object relation has been a constant preoccupation of her work, which is informed by, and contributes to, contemporary philosophical reflections on difference and subjectivity. Throughout her writing she explores the ways in which different conceptions of love have been implicated in the production of unjust and unequal relations of exchange,

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Speaking of love and she laments that, historically, our thinking has been mired in the dialectical structures of a patriarchal logos. Wherever dialectical relations govern the patterns of exchange, difference is subordinated to sameness in a ‘battle for mastery that rages between classes, peoples etc.’ (Cixous, 1986a: 78). The history of patriarchal ideals of love centres on the subject, and the otherness of the other is routinely denied in and by the privileging of subjectivity. For Cixous, the history of Western culture is ‘his story’ and ‘the same masters dominate history from the beginning, inscribing on it the marks of their appropriating economy’ (1986a: 79). The subject of love in Western discourse is predictably masculine, and the economy of relations within which ‘he’ operates has been defined by reversal, by the negation of the (feminine) other. As Cixous says, ‘The paradox of otherness is that, of course, at no moment in History is it tolerated or possible as such. The other is there only to be reappropriated, recaptured, and destroyed as other’ (1986a: 71). Love of the other within this masculine economy is tantamount to little more than a narcissistic love of the self. It is a kind of love that reflects back on the subject, one that loves only that which returns as profit to the lover. As the dialectic implies, the net effect of the subordination of difference leads to the ‘Empire of the Selfsame’ (1986a: 78), and other-regarding love is effectively a contradiction in terms. Yet within this very history of masculine writing on love runs a deep vein of concern particularly about the role of the self in relations of love. In many respects the question of the self has become paradigmatic in thinking about love. Whether the story begins with the Symposium’s various proposals on the nature of love, or whether one looks to more contemporary theological apologists like C. S. Lewis24 – who began with wanting to oppose ‘need-love’ to generous love, and then found himself caught in a labyrinth of theological implications in negating the role of the self in ‘need-love’ – the story invariably returns to the question of self. Always at stake seems to be an implicit assumption that the self is an obstacle to loving the other and especially to a generous love of the other. And contemporary secular discourses are no less vulnerable to measuring the generosity of love against an assumption that the self represents a problem. In discussions of altruism, for example, it is often the teleology of the gift as it relates to the subject who gives that defines whether or not the gift is given with generosity. If there is symmetry between intentions and outcome, i.e., if someone intended to give generously, and, in the end, apparently derived no personal gain from the gift, one can conclude that the gift was altruistic. The question of the other, or the receipt of the gift, is very often submerged to the point of invisibility, as the subject’s awareness of itself in the act of giving is constituted as the yardstick of love and of generosity. While in the realm of the philosophy of love Plato is understood as the first apologist of rational love, a love that lends itself to being thought of in terms of 24

See C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960).

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The subject of love intentions and outcomes, the very tradition within which he was working reveals both longstanding tensions and far broader concerns. Plato was more than aware of Cupidian Eros, the supposedly non-rational, experiential, aspect of love that betrays a very different vision from the orderly love of rational philosophy.25 Where Plato’s divine, rational love is predictable, stable, and focused on the eternal, unchanging realm of universal forms, Cupid’s vulgar love is embodied, chaotic, unpredictable, and carnal. Cupid is an archetypal transgressor of boundaries, as, under his tutelage, mind over matter threatens to transform into matter over mind. However, while Cupid himself might be an intermediary being, a god who provides a link with humanity, his work is resolutely located in the realm of appearances. It is the quotidian that he rules not the transcendent universal. In threatening to bring the experience of love to the fore, Cupid has always signified that there’s more to love than the rational. For Martha Nussbaum, the key to reading Plato’s account of love in the Symposium lies in the closing speech of the irrepressible Alcibiades. In the face of what Alcibiades knows is the Socratic rejection of the particular as a meaningful path to knowledge, he proceeds, nonetheless, to claim he will tell the ‘truth’ of love. And he does so, not by offering a discourse on love as all the other speakers have done, but by telling of his own very particular tragicomic experience of loving Socrates (Nussbaum, 1979: 153). Plato, it must be understood, then, gives the last word in the Symposium to the experience of a very particular love from the mouth of a man who has, throughout the dialogues, been a glorious testament to the failure of practical reason to manage a life. Alcibiades closes the Symposium on the apparent impossibility of reconciling love as an abstract principle and love as experience: in other words, with the irreconcilability of love of the mind or soul with love of the body. I will come back to both Nussbaum and Plato shortly in considering in more detail Plato’s conception of the self in love as he addresses the issue of universal and particular loves. Returning for the moment, however, to the trope of Cupid: ‘he’ expresses one of the most significant oppositional distinctions in discourses of love, the distinction between body and soul, or body and mind. His arrows are the symbols of an unasked-for gift, although the metaphor of weaponry betrays something of the gendered anxieties that underpin this particular configuration of the gift of love. By their very nature Cupid’s arrows appear unexpectedly, disrupting what are apparently otherwise stable boundaries as they puncture the bodies and souls of their targets. The trope of the arrows that penetrate the flesh, leaving an open wound, have consistently evoked the corporeal side of love. Moreover, 25

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It should be noted that, while Plato seems most supportive of Diotima’s speech in defence of love – at least that is what the typical reading of Plato’s Symposium has assumed – Socrates, in the final analysis, cannot account for the experience of the unity of the rational mind of ‘man’ with the divine logos without resorting to an invocation of the mystical. So much for Plato’s supposedly unequivocal support of rational love!

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Speaking of love Cupid may be random in his aim but, when his arrows find their mark, there is no resisting the wound of love, and it is the very threat of Cupid’s irresistibility that Plato found himself writing against. In reflecting an aversion to the flesh as the site of contingency, disorder, and chaos, and, by contrast, an affinity with the mind, order, and rationality, Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium have become archetypal texts in an epic discussion of the nature of love. It is a discussion that has turned on an opposition between soul or mind and body. The body’s affinity with desire made it an obvious target for anxieties about self-interest in a dualistic world that had already separated mind and body. Thus, in many respects, interpretations of Plato which rely on and emphasise this dualistic vision of human beingness mark a significant shift on the path of foreclosing on the possibility of understanding the body as the site of generous love. Cupid’s arrows, particularly as they relate to the body, are the symbols of that which must be overcome. In the terms of early Greek philosophy, the body was understood as the site of a desire that relentlessly constituted the other as an other-for-me. The body is needy and avaricious, insisting on its own carnal satisfaction, it pays no genuine heed to alterity, to the other as other. The other is always in some sense an other for me. The only possible site, then, of a generosity towards the other must lie in the mind or soul, yet even this is complicated if Plato is taken as exemplary. The ideal other in the Platonic logos is not a person but a concept, an abstraction. Plato’s divine erotic lovers are the lovers of Wisdom and Beauty, expressed in their universal forms, not in their particular manifestations as they might appear as qualities in one’s beloved. While it is possible to conceive of generosity in an exchange between humans, what need is there of generosity in the relationship between the human and a universal principle? The syncretic nature of much of early Christian thought tells us that classical philosophical dualism undoubtedly provided a fertile field in which Christianity could sow its own specific investments in dualism. One need only trace the wound of ‘Cupid’s’ arrows to get a sense of the shift that took place in the Christian logos. The wound of love that punctured the desiring body in classical Greek conceptions of eros, regardless of how disruptive it might have been to the rational order of things, was, nonetheless, the wound of a living body. While embodied desire was an ever-present threat to Platonic reason, Plato cannot be read as advocating the transcendence of life itself. However, in much of the Christian logos, the wounds of Cupid’s arrows became mortal through the figure of Jesus who came to symbolise a new conception of divine love through death. As Nietzsche acerbically says, ‘Christianity gave Eros poison to drink’ (1990: 105), and, in interpretations of the crucifixion which emphasise Jesus’ supposedly willing sacrifice of the sensuality of the temporal body in favour of the embrace of an eternity of disembodied spiritual love, can indeed be found the Greek aversion or ambivalence desiring flesh taken to new heights. Bearing witness to towards

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The subject of love this shift from a body that signifies life to one that signifies death, medieval and Renaissance art traces the revelation of the awesome reversal in signification that takes place between classical and Christian ideas about the body and love. No longer do we primarily see images that celebrate the strength and vitality of the living body. Henceforth it is the dead body of a god, bearing the gruesome evidence of the mortality of flesh in the wounds of the stigmata, that signifies a new understanding of vitality, the vitality of the spirit of love that has thoroughly transcended the corporeal. Consider Nietzsche’s remarks on the enormity of this shift. Modern men, with their obtuseness to all Christian nomenclature, no longer sense the gruesome superlative, which lay for an ancient taste in the paradoxical formula ‘god on the cross.’ Never and nowhere has there hitherto been a comparable boldness in inversion, anything so fearsome, questioning and questionable, as this formula: it promised a revaluation of all antique values. (1990: 75)

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Nietzsche’s critique though is unfair. He is opportunistically assuming that there is inevitably only one possible signification of Jesus, but this is clearly not the case. As previously noted, the emphasis on the crucifixion is a matter of interpretation and, while a certain body loathing can quite easily be read into it, it is not the only interpretation of the symbolic significance of Jesus or of Christianity’s relation to the body. Indeed in any focus on the Incarnation and the Eucharist we find precisely the opposite symbolic signification, a deep arbitration of the divinity of the living, thus desiring, human body. Hence this question that Nietzsche implicitly poses about the resignification of ancient values from a divine living body to sinful flesh is significantly a matter of the habits of interpretation and not a matter per se of the fundamental truth of Christianity and the body. We would do better perhaps to consider why the emphasis on the crucifixion with all its attendant symbolism, of all possible readings of the symbolic significance of Jesus, is the reading that has been so favoured in the male-dominated history of theological interpretation. While Plato was undoubtedly profoundly ambivalent about the selfishness of the body’s desires, it took this interpretative emphasis on the sacrifice of Jesus within Christianity to shed the body of the last traces of its divine fecundity. In and through Socrates, Plato had found a model for the possibility of managing the corporeal dilemma without boycotting life altogether. Socrates offered Plato a vision of the unity of divinity and humanity that was not predicated on the literal death of the body, for all that contemporary thinkers might now be critical of the bent of his corporeal anxieties. While it could be argued that Socrates’ own death signals the limits of Plato’s investment in the divinity of life, and thereby foreshadows the transition that takes place in the Christian logos, the significance of the context of many of the Socratic dialogues cannot be underestimated. Recall that exceptional day that provides the setting for Phaedrus, when Socrates was persuaded to walk beyond the walls of his beloved city, only to find himself seduced

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Speaking of love as much by his environment as he was by the beauty of his young companion. So often, the seemingly incidental details that begin the dialogues serve to do so much more than simply locate them in time and space: they very often locate them in the corporeal realm of quotidian pleasure, thus affirming the Greek embrace of life. While the connection has long been made between the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus, the parallels are tenuous at best, and one of the most significant differences between them lies in the configuration of the relationship between divinity and humanity in relation to life and death. In the Christian logos, the notion of divinity in life is significantly displaced, as not only the body but the living body becomes the thing to be transcended on the path to eternity.26 While there is little evidence to tell us about the conception of love prior to the advent of writing, the increasing array of archaeological artefacts reveals the magnitude of the historical transition that has taken place in thinking at least about the relation between the body, sexuality, and divinity. In the sculptures of ancient goddesses, for example, can be found the traces of the fecund sexual body as a trope of divinity. In their emphasis on the reproductive aspects of female embodiment, with their swollen bellies, their voluptuous hips, and their overfull breasts, it is difficult not to see the symbolism of an abundance and generosity that seems to be resolutely located in the generative, life-giving power of the female body. These artefacts from a differently constituted symbolic universe indicate that the body has not always been precluded from symbolising a graceful generosity. But in the transition from the fecund body of woman to the fecund mind of man can be witnessed the rise of a divine symbolic imaginary that reaches a zenith in the disembodied, monotheistic, male God(s) of law and love in Judaism and Christianity. In the writings of contemporary French feminism, the question of generosity has again been taken up around the trope of love in the context of contemporary debates on subjectivity. But it is a different question now. The binary dualism of the Platonic and Christian universes has been revealed as neither essential nor gender-neutral, thus opening the door to questions of power. In reflecting again on the archetypal problem that the self seems to have historically represented to other-regarding love, we see that this is a question that has been thoroughly informed by masculine ideals and masculine anxieties. In the remainder of this chapter I will briefly sketch more fully this question of self and other love as it appears, firstly in Plato’s Symposium and secondly in certain interpretations of the Christian vision of divine other-regarding love, agape. Lastly I will turn to the work of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous, to explore 26

The eschatological context of early Christian thought provides a certain rationale for the reversal of signification of the body, and thus for the increasing idealisation of what amounts to a living of the body as a dead body in life. However, the tenacity of this ideal in the absence of the realisation of the return of God to the earthly plane suggests that this ideal has served other than strictly spiritual ends.

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The subject of love the ways in which their attention to sexual difference provides a different vision of the self/other relation in and through love. While in their respective work they differ considerably, they apparently share a vision of love that refocuses on a concern with the conditions of its relationship to divinity and generosity. Plato’s Symposium In many respects the history of scholarship on love has been unfair in treating the Symposium and Phaedrus as wholly representative of Plato’s views on love, or indeed as fully reflecting the summum bonum of classical views. I take David Halperin’s well-made point on this issue. [W]e must realise that by eros Plato refers not to love in the global sense in which we often intend that word but to one kind or aspect of love – or, rather, to the intense desire which often goes by the name of love . . . Platonic eros, then, refers in the first instance not to love but to sexual attraction. (1985: 164)

However, for my purposes in tracing a certain genealogy of a generous, otherregarding love that opens on to the divine, I cannot ignore the extent to which later writers on divine love have written against Plato, on the assumption of the very fallacy that Halperin is alluding to – that the Symposium was indeed Plato’s definitive position on ‘love’. Halperin is right to note the importance of philia as a classical concept that more closely resembles understandings of generous love in a contemporary context, and he is right to note that Plato explicitly states that this is not the kind of love that he is discussing in the Symposium. Indeed, Plato actually makes light of the idea that eros might be applicable to non-amorous relations such as those between parents and children. These, then, are affective relations rather than appetitive relations, and the notion of philia, as in ‘brotherly’ love, seems better able to embrace a more reciprocal understanding of love. Nonetheless, it is mostly Plato’s eros that later Christian writers found themselves writing against in developing the notion of other-regarding Christian love, and to that extent it is important to consider what Plato does say about erotic love. Moreover, and more importantly, through the specific context of eros rather than philia Plato constructs a vision of love that borders on the divine. Inasmuch as philia may more readily lend itself to notions of reciprocal other-regard, it would seem that in itself this is not sufficient to open it to divinity in Plato’s imaginary, nor in the imaginary of many scholars of love.27 27

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Augustine’s anxieties about the appropriateness of his deeply passionate attachment to his friend in the Confessions reiterates the notion that the love of friendship is other to the love of God. It is precisely a kind of divine love misplaced. To love a human as if they were immortal is to misunderstand the character of human love. This is the love that for Augustine is ‘ordered’ only when directed towards God. Thus, in abandoning his own experience of the passion of loving his friend, when ultimately confronted with the pain of his friend’s loss, Augustine contributes to the notion that human love cannot embody divinity (see Book IV of the Confessions).

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Speaking of love Through the dynamic figures of Love and Beauty that permeate the Symposium, but particularly as they relate to the speech of Diotima, Plato seems to have found a way out of the metaphysical dilemma of establishing a connection between his otherwise disconnected, dual worlds of being and becoming. He reveals that, through the mysterious and powerful medium of ‘love’, men may eventually go beyond the realm of becoming and arrive at an experience of ultimate meaning in knowing the highest Good. The soul is then united with the form of the Good, thus opening the lover to the mystical and divine experience of arriving at the Truth. Like so many theorists of love, Plato attends to the motivations of his lovers as a means of establishing the character of the love under discussion. Thus, he concludes, the soul of the lover who has achieved this mystical union with the Truth, or the Good, is one that is firstly conditioned by lack. The soul is in want and need of that which it doesn’t already have, and it is the condition of want that leads the soul through the ascent towards the permanent possession of the object of love. While the object of love in the Symposium is a divine, transcendent object, i.e., the form of Beauty, which is itself another expression of the form of the Good, Plato’s emphasis on the grasping, desiring soul has led to the consistent criticism that, regardless of the worthiness of the final object, his account is one of acquisitive love. The lover of Beauty is a lover motivated by his own desire to possess the beauty of the other, and the concern for later thinkers, particularly early Christian thinkers, has been that any desire that leads to benefits to the self simultaneously precludes the possibility of divinity. Yet Plato seems relatively unconcerned about this privileging of the self in divine love, and still less concerned about a structure of love relations that define the other as an other-for-me. An equally significant critique of this dialogue, and one well made particularly by Gregory Vlastos and Martha Nussbaum, turns on a not unrelated issue, the lack of value Plato places on the love of one unique person. As Nussbaum notes, ‘[b]y treating the person as a seat of valuable properties, and describing love as directed at those repeatable properties, rather than at the whole person, he misses something fundamental to our experience of love’ (1979: 133).28 Indeed he does, but it is only in treating unique persons, i.e., the beloved, as offering instances of more general principles, that Plato can justify his rational account of the ascent of the soul of the lover as it is increasingly oriented towards the world of being rather than the world of becoming. For the world of being is a world of universal, not particular, truth, and the particular beloved, in so far as they are particular, cannot function as a passage to the universal in Plato’s economy of love. An overview of the arguments offered by a number of the respondents in the Symposium, as they speak in praise of love, serves only to reinforce the centrality 28 Nussbaum is in significant agreement on this point with Gregory Vlastos (1973), but Halperin considers them both to have fallen into the trap of assuming that Plato is speaking more generally of love in making this criticism. It ceases to be as readily applicable if one takes seriously the idea that Plato is speaking of sexual desire.

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The subject of love of the subject of divine love, the lover, in this dialogue. The first speaker is Phaedrus, who accounts for the pre-eminence of the ethic of love in the worthy life on the basis of the mirroring function of the beloved. For it is the beloved’s capacity to reflect the lover back to himself that ensures that the lover will at all times behave virtuously in order to avoid the shame of his own poor reflection in the eyes of the beloved. ‘And how you ask will love guide us? By instilling in us that piercing shame we feel when we act ignobly, as well as the yearning that incites us towards any noble pursuit’ (Plato, 1998: 178d).29 Of course, the other side of the coin of shame is the admiring affirmation of one’s success, something that is also dependent upon the reflective gaze of the other who is unmistakably an other-for-me. While Phaedrus does touch on what has traditionally been considered an expression of generous love in recounting a number of mythical tales of sacrificial love – Alcestis who agreed to die in her husband’s place, and Achilles who preferred to embrace death rather than be separated from his lover Patroclus – Phaedrus’ attention to the divine rewards with which each of his examples were blessed reveals the acquisitive structure of this sacrificial love. Why should we sacrifice ourselves in the name of love is the question this speech seems to pose. Because it ultimately leads to divine rewards for ourselves. In the speech of Pausanius can be found the distinction between heavenly and vulgar eros, wherein vulgar eros is associated with baseness and heterosexuality, and is opposed to the noble and homosexual love of heavenly eros. According to Avi Sharon (1998), Pausanius’ painstakingly drawn argument, one that relies on legal rather than mythic authority as Phaedrus’ had done, reflects his own investment in defending the moral superiority of his personal homosexual orientation. Again, eros is placed in the service of the subjectivity of the lover. The merit of including Phaedrus’ contribution here, then, lies in the vituperative critique he offers of embodied desire, which is worth briefly revisiting in the light of my previous remarks on the genealogy of the impossibility of a divine embodied love. Love, in and of itself, is neither honorable nor disgraceful, since its character and quality must be determined by the way in which it is carried out. To give oneself to a vile man in a shameful manner is disgraceful, while to love a good and useful man in a noble fashion is honorable. We call the vile lover vulgar, for he is intent on the body rather than the mind. Such a man will not abide long in love because he loves those things which themselves do not long endure. When the body’s lovely bloom of spring begins to fade, he himself takes flight and departs, making a mockery of all his verses and vows. But he who falls in love with a good fellow will remain in love to the very end, for he has bound himself up with that which is itself constant. (Plato, 1998: 183d–e)

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I am relying on a recent translation of the Symposium by Avi Sharon (1998). Like all translations, it suffers from both strengths and weaknesses, particularly to the extent that it aims at modernisation and accessibility.

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Speaking of love In the shift to the speech of the comic poet, Aristophanes, however, there is more than a quaint rendering of an ancient cosmogony of sexual difference. Aristophanes’ detailed description of the severed halves of primordial humans, each desperately searching the earth for its other half, returns us to the realm of human affect and to embodied sexual desire. Our once perfectly spherical forebears, who apparently took the compound form of male and male, female and female, or female and male, acutely suffered from human hubris, and in attempting to ascend to heaven to topple the gods they found themselves at the mercy of divine retribution. Their punishment was to be split from their compound but unified state of perfect circularity into two separate beings. So great was their suffering in separation – they were at risk of starving to death, for they abandoned the practical demands of life in favour of grasping on to their severed half in a desperate embrace – that the gods took pity on them and offered them the consolation of sexual intercourse as a symbolic expression of the unity they once had. Having previously been an internally unified compound of body and soul, these twin creatures now suffer from multiple divisions. Separate in body from each other they are also separated internally between body and soul. And, as Nussbaum notes, their bodies are now the source of great ambivalence rather than the image of perfection. They signal the limits of unity even in the act of sexual intercourse, which can only ever offer momentary relief from the pain of separation. Here are these ridiculous creatures cut in half, trying to do with these bodies what came easily for them when they had a different bodily nature. The body is a source of limitation and distress: they do not feel at one with it, and they wish they had one of a different sort; or perhaps none at all. (1979: 141)

Aristophanes’ speech is really the first to raise the possibility of empathy. In walking a fine line between the comic and the tragic he invites us to laugh at our own identification with the futility of the longing that his severed humans express, but it is bitter laughter. Moreover, while his severed humans appear to be in concert in their longing and grief for their other halves, and therein represent a certain mutuality, this is no more than the good fortune of having coincidental aims. What remains at stake in Aristophanes’ tale is the satisfaction of individual desire, and, again, the other is placed in the service of the self.30 While Socrates’ speech will echo some of Aristophanes’ concerns with the question of unity and wholeness, he thoroughly repudiates even Aristophanes’ qualified suggestion that sexual union is an adequate expression of this unity. Through Diotima, Socrates exploits and displaces the metaphor of sexual union by appropriating the feminine 30 This is a point also made by Halperin: ‘That does not mean, however, that eros in Aristophanes’ myth represents a love of whole persons, as Martha Nussbaum claims. On the contrary: Aristophanes’ fragmentary beings desire one another not for the sake of one another but for the sake of individual self-fulfillment and existential restoration’ (1985: 168).

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The subject of love trope of pregnancy and deploying it in the direction of a mystical, spiritual union of the mind with the form of the Good. The site of generation, once the province of a female body, is well along the path of becoming the province of a fecund male spirit in Socrates’ account of the conditions and results of divine love.31 In what is an unprecedented instance in the Socratic dialogues, the speech that Socrates offers in praise of love is significantly not his own. Casting himself in the role of pupil, he turns the dialectic on himself as he re-enacts the lesson in love that he learned through the wisdom of the priestess Diotima. Diotima herself is an unprecedented presence in the Platonic dialogues, albeit an absent one, for there is no other instance when such a significant argument is left to be made by a woman. Yet, as we know, Diotima is not actually there at the symposium, and Socrates offers us no meaningful picture of how, or when, or where, he encountered her, or of how she herself came by the extraordinary wisdom she imparts. Prior to actually turning to his remembrance of things past to narrate the lesson of Diotima, Socrates clearly establishes the terms of the discussion that has thus far been held and sets the scene for the one to come. He distills from the speeches two significant points on which he establishes general agreement: eros is a desire for something, and eros desires that which is lacking (Plato, 1998: 199e, 200e). Therein really lies the heart of Socrates’/Plato’s vision of eros, and Diotima herself does little more than add flesh to the bones of these premises. We might question, then, the extent to which Socrates truly casts himself in the role of the pupil of this mystical woman! Diotima is apparently committed to a hierarchical or dialectical view of love; hence what she traces is the ascent of the soul from an embodied, particular love to a universal, non-particular love. From Agathon’s speech, immediately preceding hers, we have learned that we love beautiful things and that beautiful things make us happy. Moreover, as Socrates has established, we love only that which we don’t have, therefore love is synonymous with lack, which itself leads to desire – the desire to repair this lack. Diotima’s significant intervention, then, is to untie the link between desire, beauty, and things, to the extent that ‘things’ reflect immanent objects. In Diotima’s hands, eros remains an object-oriented conception of love – at least superficially – but it is a transcendent object to which it is aimed. What we desire, Diotima thinks, is Beauty, and we mistakenly identify it with the beauty of particular things. In pursuing this desire we make ourselves slaves to objects and compromise the self-sufficiency that would otherwise order our lives around practical reason. For Diotima, our understanding of Beauty is mistaken. We desire a particular beautiful body because we think it is beautiful in 31

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See Elizabeth Pender, ‘Spiritual Pregnancy in Plato’s Symposium’ (1992), and David Halperin, ‘Why Is Diotima a Woman?’ (1990) for a more sustained reflection on Plato’s appropriation of feminine tropes through the figure of Diotima.

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Speaking of love itself. Yet we can specify the elements of beauty in the beautiful body, and thus we can extract from the particular the qualities of beauty that might then appear in another body. When we recognise that these beautiful properties can appear in other instances – for example, we also see them in inanimate things such as art – we realise that it is the more general sense of beauty that we desire. The steps by which the lover must proceed, either alone or with guidance, are these: First, begin with the beauty you can see in someone’s body and fall in love with that. Then, as if you were climbing the steps of a ladder, continue one rung up and there you will fall in love with physical beauty in general. Take another step up and you will reach the beauty of law and custom and from there it is just one more rung to reach the beauty of the different branches of knowledge. Then, finally ascend to the very top of the ladder, to the recognition and study of that ultimate knowledge which is the knowledge of Beauty itself. (Plato, 1998: 211c)

So begins the ascent of the soul away from the realm of the corporeal, for in its contingency this realm can only ever be one that risks suffering. In directing our desire for happiness to the world of contingency we will never possess happiness in the way we apparently truly wish to possess it: not as a fleeting moment, but continuously and without end. Hence, the highest point of Diotima’s ladder is not beauty in general but Beauty ‘in itself, by itself, alone, endless and whole’ (Plato, 1998: 211b). And in the final analysis, Beauty is revealed to us in the manner of a divine mystery: ‘All at once he will see a beauty marvelous in its nature, for the sake of which he had made all his previous efforts’ (Nussbaum, 1979: 152). Thus, in transcending the desire for particular things, we disclose our self-sufficiency and open ourselves to the possibility of immortality, for, in orienting desire towards the possession of the unchanging, we open ourselves to the everlasting. Much of Diotima’s speech, at least as Socrates represents it, then, rests on the assumption that our desire for the other is a veil drawn over our desire for our own radical self-sufficiency and immortality. Inasmuch as erotic love is object-oriented, it is so only to the extent that the object is an object-for-me. The object-in-itself and for itself is irrelevant. To all intents and purposes, there seems to be no place in this economy of divine love for a generous love of the other as other. I want to turn briefly to Martha Nussbaum’s engagement with the speech of Alcibiades, for, rather than read this speech as a demonstration of the failure of the particularity of corporeal love, and therefore as grist to Diotima’s mill, Nussbaum credits both Alcibiades and Plato with offering us a more ambivalent picture of disembodied love than has been typical of the criticism of this text.32 Moreover, while Nussbaum does not pursue to any significant extent her own insight into the implications of the gendered economy of love that is under discussion throughout the Symposium, she does note that in many respects Alcibiades 32 While Plato offers multiple views of eros in the Symposium, it is the speech of Diotima that had traditionally been assumed to be authoritative and finally reflective of Plato’s views.

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The subject of love is a complex amalgam of masculine and feminine traits. In the context of contemporary discourse, it has long been noted that the Symposium tells a gendered story of love, and that this is primarily evident in the distinguished place that is granted to homoerotic relations above all others.33 In this context, then, I want to consider Nussbaum’s insight regarding Alcibiades and apply it to the different picture of love that she understands him to represent. If Diotima’s speech is aimed at offering an account of eros that is not hostile to a life managed by practical reason, Alcibiades, by contrast, reveals the sacrifice that lies at the heart of Diotima’s tale. Alcibiades is the very embodiment of classical, masculine, and thus Cupidian, eros. His physical beauty was legendary in the Athens of his time, as were his intellectual skills, typically deployed in the service of military strategy, but also in oratory. Yet the story of Alcibiades is also read as a story of loss and squandering, and, as Nussbaum notes, it bears witness to ‘the failure of practical reason to shape a life’ (1979: 132). His passions were often excessive, as were his ambitions. As legend has it, so determined was he to win the chariot races at Olympia one year that he entered seven chariots! Even still, he won only first, second, and fourth places, and was profoundly resentful of the elusive third. Perhaps the most legendary example of Alcibiades’ inability to rise above vulgar eros, however, lies in his attack on the Eleusinian mysteries. In a fit of jealousy-inspired pique, he apparently tore through the city of Athens, defacing the faces and genitals of the statues of the gods. For this excess, he was brought to heel by his fellow citizens. In the end, Alcibiades died an ignominious, although not altogether unexpected death: he was murdered, and all of this tells a very masculine story of Alcibiades. However, as Plutarch would have it, the night before Alcibiades was murdered, he dreamed of his own death at the same time as imagining himself being dressed as a woman and having his face painted by a courtesan. Moreover, Alcibiades – this beloved vision of Athenian masculinity – was finally buried wrapped in the clothes of a woman: the courtesan, his mistress, Timandra. It seems a paradoxical story that bespeaks of a blurring of gender boundaries that we find incompatible with our understanding of Greek ethics. For Nussbaum, Alcibiades’ dream of himself dressed as a woman expresses a kind of erotic exhaustion. She understands him at this point, in terms of desiring a passivity that comes of abandoning any attempt to order one’s life according to practical reason. ‘In the soul of this proudly aggressive man, is a dream that expresses the wish for passivity, the wish to lose the need for practical reason, to become a being who could live entirely in the flux of eros, and so avoid tragedy’ (1979: 169). Alternatively, she says, 33

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See, for example, J. K. Dover (1978) for one of the earliest accounts of the significance of homosexuality in the Symposium. See also Luce Irigaray (1993a), Michel Foucault (1988, 1990), and David Halperin (1990). James Davidson’s The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolsm, 2007) appeared while this book was in production.

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Speaking of love Alcibiades’ dream could also express a desire to be no longer an erotic being, for only in some form of activity in the world can love actually be present. The entirely passive object is, she says, ‘as unerotic as the self-sufficiency of the god’ (1979: 169). Nussbaum’s account of Alcibiades’ death raises significant questions about the status of the feminine in the Symposium’s account of erotic love. Given his longstanding association with vulgar rather than divine eros, we apparently have in Nussbaum’s account a stereotypical configuration of the split between masculine reason and embodied femininity. However, it is the trope of passivity I wish to pursue here, for, throughout Nussbaum’s reading of Alcibiades, it is his openness to the other, rather than his passivity before the other that she privileges. Only in the closing paragraph of her account does this openness become a wholly negative trope of feminine passivity. Alcibiades has typically occupied the position of ero¯menos in the Socratic dialogues, itself a quasi-feminine role. He is the beautiful beloved youth, whose job in the highly structured homoerotic exchanges of classical Greece was to be cool and aloof, to remain largely unaffected by the desire of his older lover, the masculine eraste¯s. At stake is his future autonomy. The ero¯menos must never concede to his own desire. He is to do no more than acknowledge the desire for him that is felt by his lover, without ever returning that desire himself. As Nussbaum notes, ‘the inner experience of an ero¯menos would be characterised, we may imagine, by a feeling of proud self-sufficiency’ (1979: 157). But this is not the account of desire that is expressed by Alcibiades in the Symposium. On the contrary he seems to undergo a transgressive transformation from ero¯menos to eraste¯s as he narrates his experience of loving Socrates as a desire to open himself to the other. In a speech that echoes the earlier account of Phaedrus, Alcibiades notes that Socrates is the only person before whom he has felt shame. He is vulnerable to Socrates in his role of ero¯menos, but he betrays his failure in self-sufficiency when he acknowledges that he too desires. ‘He thought of his alliance with Socrates as a decision to grant a favor, while remaining basically unmoved (217a). And yet now he wants, and needs, the penetration and illumination of the other’s presence’ (Nussbaum, 1979: 157). Attendant on this desire to continue to be the object of desire comes another, disconcerting desire for Alcibiades, which confuses still further the roles of eraste¯s and ero¯menos, masculine and feminine. He finds himself wanting the other to open to him and is frustrated by Socrates’ almost impenetrable inaccessibility. Nussbaum notes that this desire is given both sexual and epistemic expression. On the one hand, Alcibiades wishes to hear everything that Socrates knows. On the other, his confessional and frustrated account of finding himself in the extraordinary position of trying to seduce Socrates, who to all intents and purposes should be the seducer, reveals a more corporeal face of Alcibiades’ desire. It also invites us to reflect on the relationship between the epistemic and the sexual. Given the reversal of traditional roles, for in this recounting Alcibiades casts himself in the role of eraste¯s, his confession before the collected company

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The subject of love

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is dramatic. Yet he confidently risks shame in assuring them, nonetheless, that the evening he spent with Socrates wrapped in his arms, beneath his coat on a couch, ‘was as chaste as if [he’d] spent it with [his] own father or older brother!’ (Plato, 1998: 219d). Were it not for the transgressive desire that Alcibiades expressed to expose himself to the risk of love, his account of wanting to open the inaccessible Socrates would be no more than a continuation of this masculine story of love. But his entire speech is saturated with the confusion that has arisen from his desire both to possess and to be possessed, from his inability to remain unmoved by love. Moreover, in defiance of the Socratic condemnation of particulars as the potential locus of truth, throughout his speech he privileges the irreplacability and specificity of Socrates as the specific object of his desire. There is none other like him, he says, and it is in Alcibiades’ recognition of this uniqueness, this otherness, that he reveals the difference between his vision of intersubjective relations and that of Socrates. While Alcibiades does not escape unscathed from the discourse of constituting the other as an other-for-me, he does complicate the story that Diotima has told. To the extent that all the speeches remain locked in a conception of love that circulates around the notion of possession, they provide a typically masculine vision of erotic love. However, to the extent that Alcibiades struggles with the desire to open himself to the other, he begins to reveal the cracks in this masculine story. In another sense, Alcibiades’ refusal to abandon altogether the realm of embodied love, a realm typically configured in feminine terms, offers another instance in which we can see Plato staging a contest between masculine and feminine conceptions of love. In his confused and chaotic speech Alcibiades continually conflates the border between soul and body, applying to the soul the metaphors and tropes of embodied existence. He describes the effect of Socrates’ wisdom, i.e., his words, as like the bite of a snake that painfully wounds his soul in the way a snake wounds flesh. And he suggests that Socrates’ words are like lightning bolts that tear through his arrogant self-sufficiency and reveal its illusory nature. It is a corporeal suffering of the soul which Alcibiades experiences in his encounters with Socrates, and it is the same kind of suffering that he finds himself wishing to inflict on his beloved. As Nussbaum notes, in applying the fleshly language of embodied suffering to the discourse of the soul, Alcibiades gives an ‘extraordinary defense of “physicalism” for the souls of lovers’ (1979: 161). In narrating the extent of the appeals he made to seduce Socrates, the very appeals that undo his straightforward relationship to his role as ero¯menos, Alcibiades himself shoots words like lightning bolts in the hope that they will pierce Socrates’ flesh and reveal that he too is vulnerable (219b). But much of his remaining speech in praise of Socrates serves only to illustrate that Socrates is not a man of the flesh. Heroic stories of Socrates’ ability to endure extreme physical discomfort; his standing for hours in one spot while he contemplates a philosophical problem; and the

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Speaking of love innumerable references to how much wine he can consume without ever becoming drunk, are exemplary tales of the extent to which Socrates has been a very good student of Diotima, or at least of the Diotima he chooses to venerate. When I turn to consider briefly the work of Luce Irigaray, I will return to the question of Diotima’s message and Socrates’ inability to hear what it is that she is saying about love, for there is more than one story to tell of Diotima’s tale. Alcibiades, then, bears witness to the cost of Diotima’s vision of love. If we are to achieve the kind of unity with the divine that she advocates as the best Good for human nature, we do so at the cost of experiencing the other, and perhaps ourselves, in and through particularity. In Diotima’s account of ideal eros, the particular does not open on to the universal, but is the obstacle to be dialectically transcended. There seems little room for a rapprochement between Alcibiades and Diotima, no room for a meeting in difference where the autonomy of the other’s reason co-exists with the desiring, longing, embodied self. Yet, Alcibiades’ desire to open to the other and to have the other open to him reverberates with a different way of thinking about love, a way that in the work of Hélène Cixous is understood through a feminine economy of desire. While Nussbaum reads Alcibiades’ desire through the very gendered stereotypes that Plato himself is deploying – masculine activity versus feminine passivity – Cixous, as we will see, reconfigures the notion of opening to the other away from a misogynist discourse of feminine passivity. For Cixous, there might well be something feminine about Alcibiades’ desire but it is more likely to be found in his willingness to surrender a possessive, masculine economy of desire that would constitute the other as an other-for-me, in favour of an encounter in which alterity remains. Alcibiades is by no means a perfect exemplar of Cixous’ vision of love in difference, for in the end, he too lacks generosity. But this lack is not to be found in his love of particulars, or in his embodied erotic desire. Rather it lies in his refusal to surrender fully a masculine economy of possession. In the end Alcibiades is a masculine trope of love regardless of the fact that he hints at more complex possibilities. Agape: the divine love of God? From the Greeks early Christianity inherited a tradition of thinking about the ideal of love that ultimately, despite pretensions otherwise, ended up focusing on the subject of love. As enmeshed in dualist and binary logic as were the Greeks, the early Christian writers were confronted with ideological problems on all fronts: how to define themselves against Judaism; at least initially, how to survive the Romans; how to unify the proliferation of Christianities; how to reconstruct rather than overthrow the Judaic understanding of God’s nature; how to understand the Christ event. What eventually emerged from this diversity of concerns was a new and unifying conception of love that Christianity would come to raise as

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The subject of love its highest ideal, agape. In what, on the surface, appears to be an inversion of the Platonic emphasis on the desiring self, Christianity developed an ethical ideal of love that in the first instance was to be understood as other-regarding, and in the second was to derive from a model of God’s generosity and abundance. Thus, agape is firstly other-regarding, generous love. In the Christian logos, divine eros had been thought to barely rise above vulgar eros, for it had generally been recognised that both privilege the concept of the self, and neither seemed a satisfactory way of conceptualising the human/ divine relationship. Where vulgar eros risks turning God into the object of corporeal or, worse, sexual desire, divine eros does no more than place God in the instrumental service of an avaricious soul who desires to realise its own perfection. However, the subject in a world now constituted not simply as an imperfect reflection of a more perfect world, but as the corruption of God’s divine creation, cannot, in any straightforward sense, then, be the subject of divine love. Where Plato’s individual citizen subjects were rewarded for aspiring to assume divine status as the highest ideal of self, the same dynamic in Christianity, and indeed in Judaism, defines human hubris and the fall from grace. Ironically then, in the Christian conception of love there is also a significant emphasis on the desiring subject, but only to the extent that this subject represents an obstacle to the new emphasis on other-regard as the basis of ethical love. From the outset there has been controversy over the relationship between signifier and signified in the use of the term agape. Although it was not unfamiliar to Greek readers, it was by no means a term that was common to the discourses of love, particularly in its abstract noun form.34 Eros and philia were by far the more common terms. Yet the frequency of the noun form of agape in the Gospels, and particularly in the Pauline Epistles, does suggest that there was an attempt to expand the ways in which love had been understood, and this expansion took place largely around two important questions.35 If, as 1 John 4:8 and 16 suggest, ‘God is love’ (and love here appears as agape), how, then, are we to understand the meaning of love, and, indeed, the meaning of God?36 Secondly, how should

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34 One of the most significant uses of the term agape in the discourses of early Christianity was as a reference to the communal meals held in the house-churches of the fledgling religion. They were known as agape feasts. The implicit celebration of life and community that tends to accompany rituals involving food, I would argue, makes this one of the most positive expressions of agape as a trope of abundance. 35 See Catherine Osborne, Eros Unveiled (1994), and particularly chapter 2, for a thorough analysis of the linguistic significance of the noun versus the verb form of agape in the New Testament. 36 While the writings of Paul are the primary source for understanding early Christian thought regarding agape, the first Epistle of John contains the ultimate statement of God as Love. Conservative Christians tend to believe that the Epistles were also the work of the Apostle John, and therefore can be read along with the Gospel; however, there is considerable evidence to suggest they were written earlier, and by another author who remains unknown. All Biblical citations are from The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, Expanded Edition, Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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Speaking of love we understand the cardinal love commandments – to love God and to love one’s neighbour37 – for together they have provided the fulcrum on which New Testament ethics have turned? Having made selfless other-regarding love the defining quality of its deity, Christianity has had a longstanding investment in thinking about agapic love.38 To that extent its theological writings on love offer an extraordinarily rich history, not simply of love but of divine love. Yet agape has been a notoriously elusive notion, which itself has been the source of considerable, if productive, angst for contemporary theological scholars who are caught in the will-to-truth games of modernist discourse. At the heart of this truth game in the twentieth-century debates was the Protestant theologian Bishop Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros.39 Written in the 1930s, Agape and Eros revived and continued an already often torrid debate on the nature of Christian love. So bold are his claims to offer a definitive account of divine love that, unsurprisingly, his text has produced considerable attention, much of it now deeply critical. While I wholeheartedly join the voices of those who have accused Nygren of being a gender-blind misanthrope – and I will say more about this shortly and in the following chapter – I nonetheless, find his painstaking account of the conditions of a love that arises from generosity to be illuminating. Firstly, his work does tell us something about the way patriarchal religious discourses have construed generous love. And secondly, it illuminates the extent to which the concern with self that was evident in Platonic eros has remained a central, if now inverted, aspect of discourses of love. Moreover, as I noted previously, many 37

Both the love commandments appear firstly in the Hebrew Bible: Love thy God appears on multiple occasions in Deuteronomy: 6:5, 10:12, 11:1, 13, 22, 19:9, and 30:6. Love thy neighbour appears in Leviticus 19:18 and 34. However, Anders Nygren, whose work I will be shortly considering, makes a typically Christian point in noting that they appear in the Hebrew Bible as one of many rules and regulations. Arguably, he asserts, it is in Christianity that they are imported with new meaning and become the cornerstone of the divine/human relationship (Nygren, 1982: 32). They appear together in the New Testament in the parable of Jesus in which he responds to the question of which is the greater of the love commandments, Matthew 22:39 and Mark 12:31. 38 One significant strand of thought regarding divine Christian love comes through Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. In their views the relationship of ‘man’ to God is one of passionate love, wherein man loves God, and God calls man to love. For Aquinas, the influence of Aristotle is evident in the notion of God calling the lover into love. However, for Nygren this conception of love still privileges the subject of love and therein reflects eros rather than agape. A second important tradition runs from Luther through Kierkegaard and focuses on the sinful and fallen nature of humanity. Our very sinfulness, i.e., our self-interest, impedes the universality of agapic love and thus requires of us a conscious decision to relinquish ourselves and surrender to God. Nygren is more firmly located in the second tradition; however, his commitment to a radical form of selflessness, as I will argue, actually negates the significance of this ‘willed’ decision. 39 As previously noted, the work of Reinhold Niebuhr is equally important to the twentiethcentury investment in understanding agapic love as self-sacrificial. While I will continue to mention Niebuhr, and particularly in the following chapter in reference to Barbara Andolsen’s work, I have chosen to focus on Nygren, primarily because he takes agape as the substantial subject of his work.

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The subject of love feminist theologians now find Nygren’s conception of agape to be wholly untenable. His interpretation of agapic love as it pertains to ‘humans’, predicates otherregarding love on a radical sacrifice of self. While the love of God retains an aspect of generosity, Nygren finds humans wholly unable to sustain the same ideal. Thus generous, divine love is ultimately translated into sacrificial love over God’s selfless gift of love that is represented in the Incarnation and Resurrection. Given that woman has historically been virtually synonymous with self-sacrifice, agape, as I have noted already, has not leant itself well to feminist appropriation. To the extent that it has been interpreted according to Nygren’s account, which has privileged a sacrificial structure, it has generally been rejected altogether as a meaningful conceptualisation of love that can foster a climate of justice and equality. However, the contemporary feminist theological literature has surprisingly little to say about the aspect of generosity and abundance that has also been a part of this Christian conception of other-regarding love.40 In returning then to Nygren, I wish to also engage with the gender implications of his work, firstly as they relate to the assumptions he makes about the nature of the subject of love. Secondly, I wish to consider the difference that sexual difference makes to Nygren’s thinking on divine generous love, and reflect on the implicit transition that takes place in his work between generosity and sacrifice. In so doing, I hope to provide a background to my later reflections on Hélène Cixous’ conception of a divine feminine love that derives from generosity. Nygren’s account of agape is principally organised around his belief that agape needs defending from the encroachment of eros, i.e., the encroachment of acquisitive love. He is at pains to promote agape’s uniqueness and to constitute it as the defining principle of Christianity. ‘Agape comes to us as a quite new creation of Christianity. It sets its mark on everything in Christianity. Without it nothing that is Christian would be Christian. Agape is Christianity’s own original basic conception’ (Nygren, 1982: 48). Thus, Agape and Eros is an ambitious excavation of the history of theological conceptions of love that has as its principal goal the exposition of Nygren’s belief that agape has continually been watered down by the intrusion of eros. Even Church Fathers like Augustine are subjected to Nygren’s rigid imposition of a binary understanding of love as Augustine’s conception of caritas, for instance, is charged with being considerably more eros than agape.41 For Nygren, there is no question that agape and eros reflect two very different ways of

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40 Combining recent theories of excess and exchange, Stephen H. Webb’s book The Gifting God (1996) offers a reconstructed model of the Trinity as the Giver, the Given, and the Giving, which has considerable resonances with my interests here. Webb too is attentive to the possibility of a gifting relation that is not predicated on self-negation. While Webb does make reference to the theologian Sallie McFague’s feminist and ecological work on the embodiment and immanence of God, his work is not substantially committed to a gender analysis. See bibliography for a selection of McFague’s work. 41 See Agape and Eros, especially part II, chapter 2, 449–559 and 700–721.

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Speaking of love conceptualising love, one that is other-regarding and therefore Christian, and one that is self-interested and therefore not. There cannot actually be any doubt that Eros and Agape belong to two entirely separate spiritual worlds, between which no direct communication is possible. They do not represent the same value in their respective contexts, so that they cannot in any circumstances be rightly substituted for one another. (Nygren, 1982: 31)

Nygren has a very specific investment in his pursuit of agapic love, namely a defence of the uniqueness and revolutionary nature of Christianity. However, as I noted previously, I have a different investment in his work. My focus is specifically on the qualities that he attributes to agapic love as an expression of generous, otherregarding love, and on his account of the obstacles that he imagines are faced by humans. As such, I am less interested in his justifications than I am in his imagination. While I cannot wholly avoid exploring his theological reasoning, I am not offering an argument in defence of it. His concern is Christianity, mine is generosity. Nygren draws most of his authority regarding the character of agapic love from the writings of Paul; however, the first Epistle of John is where he finds agape given its ultimate formal expression. ‘Nothing greater can be said than this: God is love, and love, Agape is God’ (Nygren, 1982: 147).42 Thus, the God of the New Testament is not simply a God whose qualities include love, rather God and love become synonymous. While Cupid was also a god in the Greek logos, and therein is signified his distinguished status, he was by no means the transcendent defining principle of all Greek deities. In Christianity, however, ‘God is love’ is the transcendent defining principle. Nonetheless, Nygren does acknowledge that the signification of agape undergoes a transition in the New Testament, which is a curious assertion given his efforts to refute anything other than a stable meaning. Ironically, in defending his position regarding the exclusively Christian nature of agapic love, he finds himself arguing for the agapic quality of the three fundamental dogmas, Creation, Incarnation, and Resurrection. An obvious consequence of this emphasis that passes unnoticed by him is that he places the origin of agapic significance in the hands of the creative Hebrew God Yahweh, thus inadvertently extending agapic significance well beyond the limits of Christianity that he wants to exclusively affirm. Notwithstanding this paradox, throughout Agape and Eros Nygren’s primary focus is on the Cross (the Atonement) as the defining moment through which we can understand the meaning of agapic love. Thus, the generative God of Creation is a shadowy presence in his account of agapic love as the concept of generativity is still further abstracted from the world. ‘Agape is creative love. God does not love 42

‘He who does not love does not know God; for God is love’ (1 John 4:8) and ‘So we know and believe the love God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him’ (1 John 4:16).

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The subject of love that which is already in itself worthy of love, but on the contrary, that which in itself has no worth acquires worth just by becoming the object of God’s love’ (Nygren, 1982: 78). Nygren is not suggesting that the world was valueless and was transformed into value by God’s love. Rather he is committed to a thoroughly theocentric view that makes God, and therefore God’s love, the reference point of all value. Having begun by asserting that love and God are synonymous, Nygren offers an explanation of what this means. He notes that God’s love, as Jesus represents it, is entirely spontaneous, unmotivated, and indifferent to value. If one seeks a motivation in anything other than God himself, one implicitly compromises God’s omnipotence. There are no extrinsic grounds on which to rest an explanation of God’s love. God’s love is altogether spontaneous. It does not look for anything in man that could be adduced as motivation for it. In relation to man, Divine love is ‘unmotivated’. When it is said that God loves man, this is not a judgement on what man is like, but on what God is like. (Nygren, 1982: 76)

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In the ‘righteous’ love of the Judaic tradition, against which Nygren counterposes Christian love, he found a model of love that he believed was not unmotivated. God’s love, in Judaism, he thought, was reserved exclusively for the righteous. However, Nygren wants to claim that Jesus reverses this understanding of God’s love via the priority that is granted to the inclusion of sinners, whose very sinfulness makes them both unrighteous and undeserving. Furthermore, this does not then imply that God loves sinners because they are sinners, and are thus in need of his redemptive promise, for this too would reflect motivation. Rather God is utterly indifferent to the intrinsic value of the object. ‘When God’s love is directed to the sinner, then the position is clear; all thought of valuation is excluded in advance; for if God, the Holy One, loves the sinner, it cannot be because of his sin, but in spite of it’ (Nygren, 1982: 77). The unmotivated spontaneity of God’s love is construed by Nygren in such a way as to avoid any suggestion that God is subject to desire. In more radical terms the implication tends towards suggesting that God is in no way responsive to the particular needs of the created universe. ‘It is only when all thought of the worthiness of the object is abandoned that we can understand what Agape is. God’s love allows no limits to be set for it by the character or conduct of man’ (Nygren, 1982: 77). On the basis of this reasoning Nygren asserts the universal character of God’s love. Thus, he determines that agapic love is spontaneous, unmotivated, indifferent to value, and universal in character. ‘God does not love in order to obtain any advantage thereby, but quite simply because it is His nature to love – with a love that seeks, not to get, but to give’ (1982: 201). God’s agapic love is constructed on the model of a gift that is freely given with no view to a return, thereby making him the paradigmatic example of unconditional, excessive love.

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Speaking of love What, then, is the significance of the Cross to the qualities of agape that Nygren argues are fully realised only in the crucifixion event? Firstly, the significance is inseparable from the writings of Paul, for Nygren finds that it is in Paul that we see the thoroughgoing joining of agape with the Cross. For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth his love [agape] toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. (Romans 5:6–9)

If we look to the Cross of Christ to tell us about the nature of God’s agapic love, which Nygren thinks we must, we will see that it is intrinsically related to a new vision of sacrifice in religious discourse.43 The crucifixion, Nygren asserts, ‘testifies that [agape] is a love that gives itself away, that sacrifices itself, even to the uttermost’ (1982: 118). God’s love is kenotic, a self-emptying love that pours forth on the other. For God to offer himself in and through his Son, for the sake of our salvation, and for no reason that speaks of our inherent worth, is the defining expression of sacrifice on behalf of the other. Where sacrifice in religious discourses has typically been in the direction of man to God, in the Cross we have a significant shift in both direction and object. Nygren understands this shift to refer to the direction of agape, something that still further distinguishes it from eros. Eros is the love of an aspiring soul, a love that climbs towards heaven, whereas agape is always a descending love that flows from God to us. There is no way in the new Christian logos for us to reach this wholly other God by virtue of our own actions. We require God’s divine gift of agapic love, which always precedes us and any gift we might subsequently make. Stephen Webb makes a similar point: For Christians, God’s giving is initially hyperbolic, or, in other words, it is excessive because it initiates all of our own giving. The Christian paradigm suggests that giving always begins not with some heroic act or erotic profusion but with a prior giving . . . The Gift always precedes the act of passing it along. (1996: 139)

While the reason for God’s sacrifice in view of our unwarranted salvation resonates with implications about the gift – and I am interested in the way this connects 43

The work of René Girard offers a significant challenge to Nygren on this question. Nygren unhesitatingly attributes the defining shift in Christian ethics to God’s willing sacrifice of himself, i.e., through his Son who is one with him. For Girard, it is we who sacrifice Jesus, not God, and, in our realisation of having sacrificed the innocent, we have the opportunity to break the chain of sacrificial violence that underpins religious traditions. For Girard, the ethical shift in Christianity is dependent upon the recognition of the innocence of the victim. See Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1977) and The Scapegoat (1986).

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The subject of love with Hélène Cixous’ writing on the gift – in theological terms, it actually provides the basis for the Christian grace of redemption that restores to humanity our lost immortality. God’s gift of himself/his Son is the gift of grace, unasked for, undeserved, and unmerited. It is without justification and can be explained only with recourse to the apparently generous but indifferent nature of the source, who, in this ‘gift’, demonstrates ‘his’ wholly other-regarding nature. Hence, Nygren is implicitly suggesting that in the Cross agape realises its ultimate significance as selfless other-regard in the form of sacrificial love. In the figure of the sacrificed Christ, Nygren founded divine love on God’s willingness to sacrifice himself to the utmost. While the other qualities of spontaneity, universality, and generosity remain significant, their meaning now derives exclusively from the Cross event. Against this background, perhaps it is no surprise that Nygren cannot in any straightforward way assert the agapic nature of human love. He assumes that we are by nature, or by fallen nature, self-interested. He also assumes that in the Cross God models the perfection not of self-love but of a divine, other-regarding love that only ‘He’ is able to fully embody. What, then, can be the meaning of the first love commandment to love God? In what way can humans offer anything to God? The short answer is we can’t, but clearly this is a dilemma because it is one of the cardinal commandments that is reasserted by Jesus. Nygren deals with this dilemma through Jesus’ suggestion that the appropriate attitude to God is one of total surrender. Thus, he gets out of the problem of human love for God, which cannot be truly agapic, for, in always following God’s agape, it takes on the character of response and is therefore precluded from being spontaneous and unmotivated. [T]o have love for God means, as Jesus sees it, exactly the same as to be possessed by God, to belong absolutely to Him. This being possessed by God both excludes all thought of absolute spontaneity on man’s part, and includes a relative spontaneity, which gives to love for God a quite different character from that of human ‘motivated’ love. (Nygren, 1982: 94)

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Nygren tries to have it both ways here but in the end he is more than willing to sacrifice man on behalf of God. There is no meaningful distinction between God’s agape for the world and man’s agape for God. In surrendering to possession by God, we merely become vessels for God’s agape. Thus, God remains the unending source of agape. When Nygren turns to the second love commandment, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, he does so with a view to restoring to humanity something of the spontaneous and unmotivated qualities that define God’s agape. In other words, while we cannot truly love God agapically, agape has some significance in human relations. Nygren is also anxious to preserve both the uniqueness and the unity of the love commandments, rather than to fall into the trap of subsuming the second beneath the first. Hence, he says, to love one’s neighbour is not in any sense reducible to loving God, yet its very possibility is predicated on love for

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Speaking of love God. Only in having surrendered ourselves to God can we be in a position to love our neighbour in the manner of agape. However, while there seems to be a gesture on his part to restoring to humanity some form of agency in respect of agapic love for others, he is never clearer regarding his concerns about self-interest than he is in his analysis of the second love commandment. The door is opened to this concern because of the way the second commandment appears to use the self as a reference point for measuring other-regard, and Nygren is aware that this passage has been used by theologians who are anxious about the apparent hostility to self-love that is conveyed in agapic love. It is in his radical refusal to countenance any form of self-interest, or self-love, that we see most clearly the sacrificial demand that underlies his conception of human agape. Self-love, he says, ‘is man’s natural condition, and also the reason for the perversity of his will’ (1982: 101). Self-love is the very thing that is to be overcome in our other-regarding love of our neighbour. So hostile is Nygren to any version of self-interest in otherregarding love that he claims that agape spells judgement on the life that centres on the ego and its interests (1982: 130). Only in adopting the same self-emptying posture that he understands God to adopt in the sacrifice of Christ will we be able to overcome our attachments to particular loves. Only in being radically selfless will we be capable of transcending the particular and embracing the universal. In the final analysis the subject of neighbourly love retains little of what we might recognise as the defining qualities of subjectivity in Nygren’s account. While he attempts to restore to humanity the qualities of spontaneity and universality through our other-regarding love towards our neighbours, he nonetheless concludes that ‘[I]n the life governed by Agape, the acting subject is not man himself; it is . . . God, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, the Agape of Christ’ (1982: 129). Inasmuch as we adopt a posture of self-emptying, we do no more than create a space in which God’s love passes through us and into our neighbour in our own absence. From a vision of divine love that arises from a generous and excessive abundance that extends to everything regardless of specificity, Nygren, through the symbol of the Cross, transforms this vision into a deeply sacrificial one. All traces of the abundance and life-oriented generosity that accompany the Creation and Incarnation events are subsumed beneath the priority Nygren places on the crucifixion and Resurrection. I am reminded of Nietzsche’s ascerbic condemnation of the Christian privileging of the dynamic of sacrifice. ‘The Christian faith is from the beginning sacrifice: sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit, at the same time enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation’ (1990: 75). While Nygren would surely reject the last half of Nietzsche’s remark, it seems he would willingly embrace the first. And at the heart of his understanding of the need for radical self-sacrifice lies his understanding of the human subject as naturally predisposed to serve its own particular interests above all others. In other words agape and eros are locked into a profoundly binary structure. Where

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The subject of love there is agape, there is never eros. Where there is eros, there can be no agape. There is no room for both/and. Moreover, Nygren is blind to the interdependence of the two terms, so resolutely committed is he to an either/or conception of love and to a decidedly modernist understanding of subjectivity. The economy of ideal love that Nygren advances is, in the end, in the service of eradicating all difference. Agape’s indifference to the particularity of the object of its generosity functions to erase entirely the qualitative value or significance of difference. While agape is ostensibly cloaked in the garb of being other-regarding, it is entirely and ironically dependent upon the self for its realisation. The other, per se, is never permitted to have a bearing on agape’s realisation. Indeed, Nygren has nothing to say about recipients of the agapic gift of love beyond his assumption that they are in receipt of a gift that, if it is agapic, is freely given, which paradoxically obliges them in turn to ‘freely’ give. Inasmuch, then, as agape can serve as a model of love between subjects it does so only by erasing the notion of subjectivity and relationship in the first place.44 In the absence of difference, the exchange is one between two absences, two utterly selfless existences, thus making Nygren’s ideal subject a void, no more than a space which can be filled by God. While Nygren argues that agape is more than a theoretical concept – it is, he says an attitude to life (1982: 56) – his discussion of it is remarkably abstract. Beyond his demonstrative use of the parables of Jesus, he otherwise makes few references to the quotidian.45 His more recent critics, on the other hand, are struck by the implications of his conception of love when applied as an ethic of living.46 Agape is a concept that virtually denies the possibility of relationship, for it not only denies the value of treating the other as a particular other; it denies the subject any meaningful agency in the act of generosity. Even if we do not take Nygren at his most radical, wherein he actually attributes our love of our neighbours to God, the recipient of our other-regard is still functionally irrelevant. If we are to imagine that our response to the other arises out of anything other than their mere, brute existence, then we are in the trap of motivations, and, thus, not in a condition to love agapically. This effectively means that Nygren assumes there is no relevance to affectivity in human relations: empathy and affection, for example, 44

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Stephen Webb tackles the question of debts that arise in the face of God’s gift by asserting that the excessive nature of God’s giving requires a response not of gratitude or thanksgiving, both of which signal an end to the cycle of giving, but a continuation of giving that endlessly reproduces itself (1996, 146–147). 45 In an important sense, this absence is what markedly distinguishes Nygren from Reinhold Niebuhr whose theology is a theology of the everyday. 46 See for example, Paul Avis, Eros and the Sacred (1989), Don Cupitt, The New Christian Ethic (1988), Mathew Fox, Original Blessing (1983). Each of these writers, in different ways, challenges Nygren’s assumptions about the redemptive nature of his structure of selfless love; the impossibility of his premise of separating agape and eros; and the ethical significance of his hostility to self-love in human relations. See also Chapter 2 for a more detailed account of feminist theological critics of agapic love.

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Speaking of love are unnecessary. As is the case with God’s universal agape, there must be nothing specific about our neighbour that provokes our other-regarding love. Rather, we must adopt an attitude of other-regard that is virtually independent of the other, which, once again, ironically privileges the role of the self in discourses of love. Moreover, because of the tendency to orient the flow of other-regard in one direction only, from God to man, and from man to the neighbour, agape grants no value to any notion of reciprocity, let alone mutuality. Similarly and in closely following Nygren, Reinhold Niebuhr argues that radical self-sacrifice is the appropriate posture of agape because, even in relations of mutuality, man’s inherent self-interest will emerge. Mutuality can offer no guarantee that the self does not in some remote sense derive satisfaction from the exchange on which the concept of mutuality depends. ‘Complete mutuality, with its advantages to each party to the relationship, is therefore most perfectly realised where it is not intended, but love is poured out without seeking returns’ (Niebuhr, 1932: 265). Nygren’s continuation of a tradition of thought that radically separates mind from body, and that constitutes the body as the site of selfish desire, is evident in the extraordinary lengths to which he goes in trying to oppose agape to eros. As I have noted, he is relentlessly committed to an either/or binary logic. To this extent he fits neatly into a tradition of male thinkers whose perspectives on the human condition have been exposed as being perspectives on the male condition. Nygren’s will-to-truth betrays considerably more than his religious zeal. It reveals the extent to which he speaks from within, and about, a very specific understanding of subjectivity. It is the liberal man, whose aspirations towards autonomy and independence seem to threaten the very foundation of God, to whom he implicitly speaks in his construction of a love that is radically selfless. Moreover, Nygren’s masculine anxieties are never more in evidence than in his repression of the agapic aspect of the two dogmas that he subordinates to the third. Where the Creation and the Incarnation bespeak a gift of love that derives from the generosity of generativity, and to this extent they are glaringly feminine tropes, the crucifixion’s affiliation with death and suffering locates Nygren within a masculine logos that subordinates the immanent value of life to the transcendent value of spirit. His account of love, in the end, relies on the repression and suppression of the feminine, the elimination of difference and the denial of the possibility of a mutual love between human beings. His account of otherlove is so radically exclusive of the value of human existence that he offers us a thoroughly life-denying picture of love. For the feminist theologian Carter Heyward, whose work I will be turning to in the next chapter, the obvious question that arises from Nygren’s work concerns how ‘our life together is strengthened spiritually or morally by understanding God as agape rather than as philia or eros’ (1996). In the following chapter, I will return to the gender implications of Nygren’s work in reflecting specifically on the critique of agape offered from within theology

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The subject of love by a number of feminist theologians. However, I turn now, albeit too briefly, to a consideration of the broader place of love in the contemporary work of two of Hélène Cixous’ contemporaries, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. While the work of all these thinkers differs considerably from and between each other, they collectively reflect a strand of contemporary concerns about love that share in spirit many of themes of which I offer a detailed analysis in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 via a close reading of a selection of texts exclusively from Hélène Cixous. Luce Irigaray’s writing on the history of philosophy and psychoanalysis along with Julia Kristeva’s similar interests in psychoanalysis allow us to see the work of Hélène Cixous as part of a wider ‘feminist’ conversation about subjectivity that is informed by post-structuralism. This wider context provides an essential framework through which to make sense of what I am claiming is the reemergence of a notion of abundant divine love in a most unlikely place, the work of a French feminist, poetico-philosopher. More about the feminist aspect of this conversation shortly. French ‘feminist’ love

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In the French philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary scholarship that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, the problematics of difference became a pivotal concern. The antecedents of this interest are to be found initially in Nietzsche’s critique of the logic of identity, wherein it had previously been assumed that the individual exists as a self-subsisting discrete phenomenon. Anders Nygren’s understanding of subjectivity is paradigmatic of Nietzsche’s point here. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s subsequent insight that it is difference that lies at the heart of all linguistic systems, and thus of all meaning, only consolidated this new interest in alterity that has characterised an important strand of French thought for more than forty years and is now most readily associated with deconstruction and the work of Jacques Derrida. Saussure explained that the meaning in language is derived not from the discreteness of the individual sign but from its relationship to, and difference from, other signs. It is only by virtue of the fact that A is not B, or B is not C, that A, B, and C come to signify at all. Signs, then, are not entirely self-identical; rather they depend on a whole network of other signs for their ‘self’-identity. Where autonomous individuality had historically been assumed to be the linchpin of identity, the significance and centrality of relationship became critically apparent. In the context of the challenge to identity that was being made in linguistics, the Freudian emphasis on subjects divided between a conscious they have some control over, and an unconscious they have virtually no control over, raised still further the issue of self-identity. The subject that is radically divided in itself, that is, that has a part of itself that is other to itself, is clearly not so simply the self-knowing subject of Truth that had defined the liberal discourses of the

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Speaking of love previous three hundred years, and that effectively culminated in the work of Hegel. Moreover, Freud’s concern with questions of sexual difference inaugurated a whole new domain of inquiry into questions of difference, for he laid a foundation for actually considering the differences between sexually differentiated subjects. And threaded throughout all these inquiries, which trace this path from Nietzsche to contemporary continental philosophical theory, has been a new way of understanding relations of power. With the work of Michel Foucault has come an understanding of power that has reoriented the historical assumption that it has any existence or meaning outside of the social and historical contexts in which it is deployed. Power is a force that is not harnessed but rather discursively produced in specific circumstances and through specific institutions, epistemologies, and phenomenologies. It is considerably less repressive than it is productive, and it is better thought of as being exercised rather than possessed. In refuting the top-down, hierarchical approach to power that had been characteristic of liberal political discourse, Foucault revealed that there are a multiplicity of strategies at work at any given moment that are implicit in the dynamic, rather than the static flow of power. Against this general theoretical background we can locate the work of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. While the differences between them have often been submerged in the context of Anglo-American feminist scholarship, which has tended to think of them as something of an exclusive female philosophical trinity, referring to them as ‘the’ French feminists, being ‘theorists of difference’ albeit in very different ways, is perhaps something they do, nonetheless, actually have in common. Moreover, in taking up questions of difference and considering them with reference to sexual difference, all these writers have found themselves, at different times, substantially engaging with a thematics of love. The following brief sketch of something of Luce Irigaray and Julie Kristeva’s different engagements with and on love will serve to broaden the context in which I will later position Hélène Cixous’ thought as well as illustrate some of the meaningful differences between them all. LUCE IRIGARAY

In her book An Ethics of Sexual Difference 1993a [1984], Irigaray turns to the history of philosophy, a history that she understands to be a male history, to take up the question of sexual difference by considering the means by which thought and language are gendered. Because Irigaray believes that understanding the ways in which sexual difference is constituted, interpolated into discourse, and, thus, lived, is essential to developing an ethical relation between different subjectivities, she focuses her analyses of classic philosophical texts through the polyvalent trope of love. In attending to both the presences and absences in the work of male thinkers, Irigaray follows de Beauvoir’s lead in considering woman as the exemplary case of otherness, and she asks what difference this other makes to the stories men

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The subject of love have told. Irigaray’s work on love is actually extensive, but I wish to focus here on her reading of Plato’s Symposium in An Ethics of Sexual Difference.47 Unsurprisingly perhaps, Irigaray is interested in Diotima. She notes, at the outset, that Diotima takes her place as a woman in a masculine economy, simply by virtue of her absence, but Irigaray also raises the amusing possibility that perhaps Diotima was actually invited to attend this banquet – but declined the invitation (1993a: 20). It is only on later reflection, having read the whole essay, that we come to realise this is not at all an incidental remark. Yes, it’s an amusing proposition, but it is also a disruptive one. What would it mean for the exchanges that take place if indeed Diotima had chosen not to attend? How might this change the way we think about Socrates? Would we see him as opportunistic instead of wise? Would it change the significance that is placed on this speech of all the speeches in this dialogue? As I have already noted, the history of interpretation of this dialogue has tended to extract from it a single truth, the truth of Diotima’s lesson in the telos of erotic desire. But what if she said No? Of equal importance for Irigaray is not only what Diotima does say but also the way she says it. She notes that the structure of Diotima’s speech is dialectical, but not in the way we imagine if we are thinking of Hegel. In her construction of eros, Diotima ‘establishes an intermediary that will never be abandoned as a means or a path’ (1993a: 20). She reveals the presence of a third term that animates the relationship between oppositional structures – specifically in this case, that of the universal and the particular – but is not itself annihilated in so doing. Unlike Hegel’s dialectic, which, in order to move, must synthesise, and thereby appropriate the difference between the two opposing terms, Irigaray suggests that there is no necessary erasure of the intermediary in Diotima’s dialectic. On the contrary, ‘the mediator is never abolished’ in playing its role as intermediary, and thus in bringing to fruition an encounter and transvaluation of the two between which it mediates. And the archetypal trope of an intermediary term, she says, is love. Why? Because in its role as intermediary it keeps open the possibility of becoming. Everything, she says, ‘is always in movement, in a state of becoming’ (1993a: 21). With her emphasis on movement and becoming, Irigaray, as we will later see, is very close to Cixous here. Contrary to the either/or logic of vulgar, as opposed to divine, eros, or indeed of agapic, as opposed to erotic, desire, which have dominated masculine discourses of power and knowledge, for Irigaray, Diotima, is offering us a feminine structure of desire, a structure in which there is no necessary destruction of one or other term. We are in the terrain of both/and here: ‘It is love that both leads the way and is the path’ (1993a: 21). Throughout Irigaray’s reading of Diotima it will be this third term, this other way, that will dominate her analysis, for she

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47 Other texts by Irigaray which focus extensively on love include Elemental Passions (1992), Je, Tu, Nous (1993b), and I Love to You (1996).

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Speaking of love understands Diotima to be disrupting the binary structure of relations that underpin the assumptions that the Symposium rests upon. Irigaray is quick to note that Diotima’s interlocutor, Socrates, betrays his investment in dualist logic when Diotima asserts that eros is neither beautiful nor Good, and he responds by assuming this means she is saying ‘he’ must be bad and ugly. For Irigaray this is a definitive example of masculine logic in which there is a failure to recognise ‘the existence or the in-stance of that which stands between, that which makes possible the passage between ignorance and knowledge’ (1993a: 21). In another of her texts on love, Elemental Passions, Irigaray makes a similar point about the intermediary role of love. In her additional emphasis here on the generative aspect of a love that is ‘the motor of becoming’ this quotation prefigures where Irigaray also goes with the initial part of Diotima’s account of love, and to which I will now turn. Love can be the becoming which appropriates the other for itself by consuming it, introjecting it into itself, to the point where the other disappears. Or love can be the motor of becoming, allowing both the one the other to grow. The one should not be the source of the other nor the other of the one. Two lives should embrace and fertilise each other without being a fixed goal for the other. (1992: 27)

In many respects, the love that appropriates the other to itself is the story of love that has been attributed to Diotima, and even Irigaray concedes, by the end of her reading, that there is good reason for this charge. Diotima does capitulate to a masculine economy of desire – at least in so far as Socrates reports it – and the capitulation occurs around the metaphor of generativity that Diotima invokes. Having firstly reminded us of the intermediary nature of eros – born of plenty and poverty, he is the god/daemon who connects the human with the divine – Diotima goes on to affirm ‘his’ corporeal and spiritual nature. To Socrates’ question of how we should understand the desire that is inaugurated through eros, Diotima responds: ‘This action is engendering in beauty, with relation both to body and to soul’ (Plato in Irigaray, 1993a: 25).48 And to demonstrate her assertion, she echoes the earlier speech of Aristophanes by locating this beauty in the embodied fecundity of the union between man and woman. ‘The union of a man and a woman is, in fact, a generation; this is a thing divine; in a living creature that is mortal, it is an element of immortality, this fecundity and generation’ (Plato in Irigaray, 1993a: 25). For Irigaray, this is Diotima’s greatest insight. In this moment Diotima privileges the intermediary affiliation with becoming, for at this point she offers no other telos than love itself. Love, Irigaray says, must be read here as ‘fecund prior to any procreation’ (1993a: 25) and ‘all love is seen as creation and potentially divine, a path between the condition of the mortal and that of the immortal’ (1993a: 25). In the end, Diotima’s metaphor of the 48 Irigaray’s English translator uses Lane Cooper’s translation (Plato 1938) of the Symposium. See bibliography for full citation.

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The subject of love union of man and woman does provoke the issue of procreation. The intermediary nature of love is displaced by a telos that is outside of loving itself. Initially this is symbolically represented in the child of the procreating couple, who becomes the object of love, and, in so doing, inaugurates the binary structure of lover and beloved that was absent in Diotima’s initial account of the generative union of lovers. Secondly, as the discourse returns to the abstract account of the ascent of the soul, the telos of procreation transforms into the bringing forth of wisdom, along with every other spiritual value (Plato in Irigaray, 1993a: 29). The embodied immediacy that characterised Diotima’s initial insight is lost as the binary logos affirms the superiority of abstract spiritual values over the spiritual and corporeal affinities of lovers. To fall in love, to become divine, or immortal, is no longer left to the intermediary current but qualified, hierarchized, and in the worst case, love dies as a result. In the universe of determinations, there will be goals, competitions, and loving duties, the beloved or love being the goal. The lovers disappear. (Irigaray, 1993a: 36)

For Irigaray, the economy of desire that is ultimately represented in Diotima’s speech conforms to a logic of exclusion in which dualities are constituted in and through binary relations of opposition wherein identity is won at the cost of the other. However, from the outset of her writing, she has explored the gendered affinities of this economy of desire. Her now infamous invocation of the metaphor of women’s lips, i.e., their vaginal lips – which is actually part of yet another of Irigaray’s texts on love – as a way of theorising a different relation to difference, still stands, over twenty years later, as a powerful exemplar of feminist criticism of this masculine logic.49 In the invocation of a female body that simultaneously invokes and resists binary division – for the two lips are in constant connection with each other – we have an image of a very different way of negotiating the boundaries between sameness and difference. Where in the constant enfolding of flesh end does one begin and another end? From the female body Irigaray builds a new logic of difference in which the fully embodied experience of sexual difference is the paramount value, a value that cannot be won at the cost of the other. JULIA KRISTEVA

For Julia Kristeva, whose affinities with Lacanian psychoanalysis are closer than those of either Luce Irigaray or Hélène Cixous, the concept of love is the key to considering the ethical relations between men and women in a social and historical context. Drawing extensively on the history of writing on love, she has written a substantial work, Tales of Love (1987a), which ranges from reflections on classical tropes of love to the representation of love in literature, to the

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See Irigaray, ‘When Lips Speak Together’ (1985), 205–218.

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Speaking of love construction of love in religious discourses. Believing that ‘the lover’s bond’ has been central to the organisation of the social bond, Kristeva interrogates love in the context of a world that is perpetually changing (Guberman, 1996: 68). She also notes that the lover’s discourse50 has historically been inseparable from religious discourses, and that, in the face of the crisis that religious consciousness is facing in the contemporary West, the homogeneity of the lover’s bond has been broken.51 ‘There is no more religion, which once served as a lover’s discourse but is currently breaking down’ (Kristeva in Guberman, 1996: 68). For Kristeva, psychoanalysis offers a ‘new’ model of love in this contemporary climate of diversity, for it offers a space in which the lover’s discourse can be spoken in the context of a relationship that she understands to itself be predicated on love. ‘Psychoanalysis has given shape to a lover’s discourse striving to be new; it is the only place laid out explicitly in the social contract that allows individuals to speak about their loves’ (Kristeva in Guberman, 1996: 69). Moreover, she asserts that the psychoanalytic privilege of embodied knowing breaks with the history of the dichotomous split between mind and body, and therein offers a challenge to the history of constructing love on a model of binary oppositions. Psychoanalysis, as practice as well as theory, has a particularly significant place in Kristeva’s work, and this distinguishes her from both Cixous and Irigaray. While Irigaray is also a practising psychoanalyst, she has tended to engage with psychoanalytic theory as opposed to psychoanalytic practice. Her more recent work, however, does draw considerably more on her experience as a practitioner. In reflecting on an ethical couple relation Kristeva implicitly draws on a Marxist model of social relations, noting that the aspect of productivity, i.e., procreativity, which once formed the unifying link is less apparent in the contemporary context of newfound freedoms. The couple ‘as a unity of production’ no longer has the same place in the social contract that it has historically occupied. As such, a certain psychic autonomy now pervades the former space of unity and complicates the relation between two individuals who are now characterised more fully as having different interests that reflect sexual difference (Guberman, 1986: 70). Managing heterogeneity rather than homogeneity is the challenge of love in contemporary discourse. Kristeva believes that, in this contemporary climate of ‘psychic autonomy’, the amatory relationship must be predicated on the recognition of the freedom and independence of the other. Only in the context of an acknowledgement of the other’s freedom can difference be adequately preserved and a negative dependency avoided. Thus, the object of love cannot be constituted in terms of the telos of becoming for the subject. ‘Each individual must find his or her own motifs, 50 Kristeva’s use of this concept of a lover’s discourse reveals her affinities with the work of Roland Barthes. See Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse 1978 [1977]. 51 See also Kristeva’s In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (1987c) for a detailed engagement of the affinities between the discourses of Judaeo-Christianity and psychoanalysis.

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The subject of love causes, and objects of gratification and satisfaction while establishing a modicum of consensus and communication with a steady partner’ (Kristeva in Guberman, 1996: 70–71). While the threat of dependency in relations of love cannot be avoided altogether, Kristeva privileges the idea that there is a type of dependency which can be chosen, one which does not inevitably signal submission or surrender to the other. In other words, there are good and bad dependencies. In addition to the questions of love in the couple relation, the trope of maternity has been particularly crucial to Kristeva’s contribution to debates on sexual difference, and to an ethics of intersubjectivity based on love. Contra Freud, and indeed, contra the history of much of male writing on love, Kristeva believes that it is the imaginary of the mother that allows for continuity in relationship, i.e., it is the maternal bond that provides the model for a love in which there is both separation and connection. While she undoubtedly acknowledges that the maternal bond can reflect a negative dependency in which the autonomy of the other fails to be recognised, she nonetheless proposes that the ideal mother–child bond is one in which the subject is constituted in a relation to and with the other. This is a relation that is marked by continuity rather than the cut of separation that has historically defined the Freudian model of achieving subjectivity. To this extent, Kristeva refutes the logic of Enlightenment ideology wherein the subject precedes itself in its relations with others. Rather the subject is continually becoming. There are significant affinities between Kristeva, Irigaray, and Cixous in their construction of love as a ‘third term’ in relations between subjects. Kristeva’s emphasis on a positive maternal love that allows the birth of the other in freedom resonates with Irigaray’s notion of love as an agent of becoming rather than being. As we will shortly see, Cixous’ construction of love is similarly oriented towards the notion of becoming, and she bases this possibility on a feminine relation to difference that has similar debts to the maternal model, as does Kristeva. For each of these writers the trope of difference permits a reconstruction of the masculine logic of sameness that has dominated discussions on human life, and that has excluded a recognition of the significance that sexual difference makes to all knowledges. In different ways, each of these writers has seen woman and the feminine as the sacrificial object on which man has constituted himself as subject, and it is in opposition to this sacrificial logic that each of them proposes a new conception of love. Concluding remarks

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I began this chapter with the assertion that the history of love has clearly been defined by a discursive privileging of the binary structure of love. Lover and beloved, eros and agape, generous and acquisitive love – these are the oppositional tropes through which the lover’s discourse has been imagined. What I hope to

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Speaking of love have illustrated here is the extent to which this very binary structure has limited the discourse of love to a discourse of the ‘self ’ in love – and that this has reflected a masculine imaginary of love relations. While the concept of agape holds out the promise of a generous, other-regarding love, in the hands of even relatively contemporary thinkers like Anders Nygren the anxiety about self-love leads to the loss of the other as other, as well as to the sacrifice of self. And in the work of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, this loss of the other is clearly gendered and identified as the loss in particular of the feminine other, the feminine other who instead of embodying generosity and abundance becomes instead the paradigmatic sacrificial object. In attending, then, to the otherness of woman within the masculine logos, we can see even in the all too brief engagement with some of their thought here that each of them works instead towards initially revealing and then offering an alternative to the binary logic that has managed the lover’s discourse seemingly for as long as it has been one. Each of them, in different ways, reopens the space of love with a view to the possibility of a generous love of the other.

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CHAPTER 2

Feminist theology: for the love of God

Speaking of divine women . . .

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As is already well evident even here, in discourses of love the overwhelming presence of the opinions, experiences, and reflections of men is uncontestable. If history is indeed a record of ‘winners’, as feminists have by no means been alone in suggesting, this insight should come as no surprise. The historical record of love is primarily the written trace of a masculine vision of love, and Plato’s Diotima stands as an effulgent exemplar of woman’s place in that record. Diotima is the absent presence of woman, spoken about, but not actually speaking; spoken through, but unable to speak for herself. In structural terms, she stands in a similar relation to Socrates as does the Virgin Mary to the Church Fathers. In both cases we come to understand that there is something problematic about the corporeality of woman when it comes to divinity. In order to speak of divine love, Plato suppresses Diotima’s corporeal presence, which is inseparable from her sexed body. We cannot forget that Diotima herself, the woman Diotima, was not actually in attendance at this hallowed discussion of love and wisdom that takes place exclusively between men. And nor can we consider Mary to really be present at the incarnation of the divine that is the birth of ‘her’, no, His, son. Just as Diotima is reduced to the symbolic through the literary device of ventriloquism, for the voice we hear is Socrates’, not hers, so too is Mary reduced to insubstantiality, and thus to the symbolic, as her sexed subjectivity is denied in order to permit the presence and passage of the Holy Spirit. Mary cannot proclaim herself ‘beloved of God’, for the act of divine love that is the ‘gift’ of Christ incarnate is predicated upon Mary’s absence from herself. Inasmuch as Mary ‘is’ at all, she is not ‘as’ woman. Rather, she is closer to a configuration of space and time, a liminal passage constituted as the nexus between men and their projection of themselves as perfected divinity. To carry the divine and to give birth to this perfected masculinity, Mary must be absent from herself, absent as woman, absent as mother, and, like no other woman, she must be absent as the source or giver of

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Feminist theology: for the love of God life.52 Why such radical negation in the birth of this most august human life, of all lives? Obviously, because this is not in fact the birth of human life. Rather it is the incarnation of a divine masculinity that is imagined without question through the figure of the male sex. Thus, Mary shares with Diotima the dubious honour of being an archetype of female subjectivity understood as absence, and together they proclaim the impossibility of coincidence between femininity and divinity within the patriarchal logos. While Christianity is clearly not the source of woman’s seemingly inevitable association with the ‘sins of the flesh’ – such misogynies find themselves in many religions – the Church’s extraordinary success as a socio-cultural politics has ensured that its apparently divinely sanctioned misogynist ideologies have benefited from wide and sustained circulation. Moreover, with the textual authority of the ‘Word of God’ disguising the will-to-truth proclivities of so many scriptural interpreters, God, as divine Author, has, until recently, been well sheltered from challenge. Indeed, in historical terms, to challenge the misogyny of the ‘Word of God’ has been a heresy equivalent to challenging God himself. But this is a ruse that operates at multiple levels. Firstly, it requires us to believe that man mimics woman’s relation to subjectivity in his relation with God by willingly absenting himself from himself in order to be redactor and not author of the Biblical texts. Secondly, it denies the social construction of textuality, and, thirdly, it relies on an unshakable correspondence between signifier and signified, word and world.53 While Biblical scholars have long argued over questions of scriptural interpretation and translation, thus addressing the issue of correspondence between word and world, and, indeed, have also argued over the limits of ‘man’ as ‘scribe’, few have applied the implications of these debates to the concerns of women. It 52 Anxieties about women’s role in the generation of life have a longstanding history that predates Christianity. The spontaneous generation of the goddess Athena, variously from the head of her father, Zeus, or the foaming sea, gives archetypal expression to fantasies of a masculine usurpation of this creative power that long predate Christian cosmogonies. Moreover, we need consider only Aristotle’s ostensibly ‘scientific’ pronouncements upon women’s role in the generation process to find the antecedents of women’s reduction to empty vessel that echo Mary’s relationship to Jesus. In Aristotle’s thinking, woman contributes nothing to the generation of life beyond the provision of a corporeal vessel in which to contain the already fully formed soul of new life whose defining qualities are conveyed exclusively through the male seed. 53 In suggesting that this dynamic is a ruse, I necessarily position this critique outside of orthodox theological discourse and am drawing on contemporary deconstructive, linguistic, and feminist critiques of authorship and textuality. Theological discourse, however, has long wrangled with the debate over ‘man’s’ status in respect of God, and, from the position of orthodox DivineCommand theory, ‘man’ is indeed understood as passive in relation to an active God. Yet DivineCommand theory itself raises questions regarding the status of ‘man’s’ free will and hence runs headlong into an equally powerful theological ethic that is shaped not by divine command but rather by natural law. In this model of human/divine relations, ‘man’ retains an active relation in respect to God and in respect of his participation in the world. See Edward Collins Vacek’s (1996) ‘Divine-Command, Natural-Law, and Mutual-Love Ethics’ for a contemporary summary of strengths and inadequacies of each position.

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The subject of love has taken the secular advent of the second wave of feminism to create the occasion to hear substantial numbers of women’s voices enter the theological discursive fray, thus challenging the universality of the claims of man.54 Thus, the past thirty years or so, have seen women from within various religious traditions return to sacred texts to inquire after woman, to sort ideology from theology, particularly patriarchal ideology, and to address what is perhaps the most urgent of questions: What is the nature of the relationship between women and divinity?55 While the field of feminist theology is as diverse and plural as feminism in general, there is, nonetheless, a general recognition that the institutionalisation of Western religions has inscribed sexual difference in ways that have profoundly limited women’s participation at the level of practice. But, more importantly, there is also a general acknowledgement that women’s participation in religious discourses has also been proscribed at the level of imagination. Women’s sex-specific divine imaginary, at least within much of Christian history, has virtually been exclusively restricted to representation via the Virgin Mary and a handful of female mystics.56 Yet, as I have already noted, Mary’s relationship to her sexed subjectivity is a complicated one, and this is equally true of the mystics.57 The Jewish

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54 I am not suggesting that women before the 1960s did not discuss, theorise, or write about religion’s impact on women or women’s place within religious discourses. Rather I am suggesting that it wasn’t until the 1960s that we could really say that feminist theology, as a field of scholarship, found a place within the patriarchal institutions of both the academy and the Churches. We need refer only to the late 1800s publications of women like Elizabeth Cady-Stanton’s Woman’s Bible in the 1890s or Matilda Joslyn Gage’s Woman, Church and State (1893) to see the antecedents of feminist theology in the first wave of feminism. See also Serenity Young’s An Anthology of Sacred Texts by and about Women (1993) for a comprehensive herstory of women’s presence in religious discourses. 55 As an intellectual practice, theology has a complicated relationship with questions of truth. Faith presumes a certain ‘truth to the text’, and theology, unlike most other disciplines, declares its taken-for-granted assumptions at the outset. Thus, the project of sorting ideology from theology has a different currency in feminist theologies than it does in much of secular feminism. 56 Much of the recent interest in exploring Goddess religions, as well as the feminine imagery within orthodox Christianity, derives from the recognition that the historical emphasis on masculinity has given the distorted impression that only masculinity is associated with divinity. Rosemary Ruether’s early strategy of referring to ‘God/ess’, for instance, is one way of rendering the divine inclusive of both male and female aspects (1983). Similarly in her essay ‘Why Women Need the Goddess’ (1979) Carol Christ has emphasised the plurality of inference that goes with the term Goddess, from invoking a female deity to affirming female relations, power, and experience. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s exploration of sophia/wisdom as a sacred aspect of female power within scripture offers yet another way of affirming an association between the feminine and the divine. See in particular her chapter ‘The Sophia-God of Jesus and the Discipleship of Women’ from In Memory of Her (1983). 57 For a comprehensive study of the relationship between women, mysticism, and embodiment in the Middle Ages see Carolyn Walker Bynum’s Fragmentation and Redemption (1991). While Bynum acknowledges that a significant strand of medieval thought continued to promulgate the notion of the polluted, corrupt feminine body, there is evidence in female mysticism of a counterposition. Contrary to the tendency to consider the female body as having always occupied the position of other to a sacred masculinity, Bynum argues that the experiences of mysticism in the late Middle Ages staged the feminine body as a locus of divine possibility.

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Feminist theology: for the love of God tradition suffers no less from a poverty of representation when it comes to women, as the exegetical trend of Judaism has seen Biblical women reduced to wives, mothers, and sisters on the one hand, and prostitutes, seductresses, and objects of exchange between men on the other. It is no wonder then that many feminist theologians have embraced Paul Ricœur’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (1970) as a methodological departure point in their reconsideration of patriarchal religions. Suspicion has given feminist theologians a powerful critical edge in examining the ways in which religion has been implicated in the denial of women as equal subjects. While in the spirit of contemporary feminism the affirmation of diversity and plurality remains a central tenet of most feminist theologies, there is a shared concern with the ways in which the theological enterprise has long promulgated a rhetoric of dehumanisation when it comes to women. The feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether gives expression to this shared concern, which also functions to outline the ethical spirit of much of the feminist theological project, in her groundbreaking Sexism and God-Talk. The critical principle of feminist theology is the promotion of the full humanity of women. Whatever denies, diminishes, or distorts the full humanity of women is therefore, appraised as not redemptive. Theologically speaking, whatever diminishes or denies the full humanity of women must be presumed not to reflect the divine or an authentic relation to the divine, or to reflect the authentic nature of things, or to be the message or work of an authentic redeemer or a community of redemption. (1983: 19)

Notwithstanding the problems of ontology betrayed by the invocation of the notion of authenticity, Ruether’s concern with the denial of full humanity for women connects the projects of feminist theologies with the broader concerns of feminism.58 Indeed, her concerns echo the recent writing of the French feminist philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray, whose ‘Divine Women’ (1993c) can be read as an explicit call for women to constitute a concept of divinity imagined in their own likeness. Man, Irigaray says, ‘is able to exist because God helps him to define his gender (genre)’ (1993c: 61), in a world in which the divine still sanctions and authorises notions of freedom, autonomy, and sovereignty (1993c: 62). Such freedom and autonomy will be available to women only ‘if a God in the feminine gender can define it and keep it for us’ (1993c: 72). Similarly, Julia Kristeva’s concern with the maternal or sacred, about which I will say more later in this chapter, and, to name only example from Hélène Cixous’ work, her perennial return to the trope of Eve, all signal a shared concern with the relationship between 58

A significant debate within feminist theological discourse concerns the referential nature of religious language, and, thus, the issue of ontology. While Ruether’s statement appears to presume a certain ontology of the divine, her work is situated firmly within a tradition that rejects the Enlightenment ideal of correspondence between language and reality. Ruether’s divine is located in historical discourse and subject to the perspectival specificities of time and space.

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The subject of love

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women and divinity that goes beyond the disciplinary boundaries of religious studies, theology, or philosophy. Deriving their ideas in part from the insights of the wider debates within feminism, feminist theologians who have concerned themselves with the ways in which religious traditions have sanctioned the subordination of women have focused considerable attention on the association of women’s bodies and women’s sexuality with sin. Beginning with, and returning to, Eve as the ultimate signifier of this association, much orthodox Christian doctrine is profoundly implicated in the production and privileging of women’s sexual nature as an explanatory paradigm for the negative aspects of the human condition in general. As the feminist theologian Norma Rosen remarks, from the perspective of the early twenty-first century we could consider the Biblical Creation story as just a tale, an arcane reminder of the patriarchal religious imaginary that has long been transcended. But to do so is to negate the extent to which this narrative ‘has been the matrix of centuries of persecution of women. Eve as Everywoman, source of the world’s corruption’ (1996: 32). And feminist theology, like feminism in general, is committed to a dual programme, one of scholarship and exegesis on the one hand, and one of activism and advocacy on the other. Women’s experience in history, and thus in the world, is, in a very important sense, the touchstone of feminist theological methodologies. As a religion that privileges the role of other-regarding love and makes of it a fundamental feature of its identity, Christianity has long differentiated itself from its progenitor, Judaism, on the basis of their supposedly different understandings of God and love. However, it has also had to find ways continually to navigate the complexity of human love relations in a more quotidian sense. Two thousand years of male-defined and male-authored theological exegesis leaves little doubt that the legacy of Plato’s dichotomous conflict over vulgar as opposed to divine eros has found its own expression within the terms of the Christian logos, notwithstanding the vast denominational, theological, and interpretative variations. To this extent, then, Christianity has generally been implicated in the perpetuation of an understanding of love in binary terms, thus affirming the seemingly irreconcilable division between the embodied love of eros and the spiritual love of God: the agape that Anders Nygren and Reinhold Niebuhr so insistently defended at the beginning of the twentieth century. As I noted in the previous chapter, for Nygren particularly but implicitly also in Niebuhr’s work, agape and eros bespeak two entirely different spiritual worlds. Any connection they might have historically derives from misunderstanding and a misattribution of the qualities of one for the other. However, for feminist theologians this bifurcation of love into the forms of a profane embodiment on the one hand, versus a sacred disembodiment on the other, has had unmistakably negative consequences for women. Women have been almost exclusively identified with the negative aspects of eros, and as a

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Feminist theology: for the love of God consequence they have become the special focus of the self-sacrificial, otherregarding demand of agape. As Barbara Hilkert Andolsen says, the irony of this demand for women is that ‘Men have espoused an ethic which they did not practice; women have practiced it to their detriment’ (1981: 75). Self-sacrifice, exclusion, and denial have been the fulcrum on which women’s relations with love have turned within orthodox Christian theology, and it is agapic love that many feminist theologians have understood as being the theological justification of this demand. It should come as no surprise, then, that contemporary feminist theological scholarship from the 1960s onwards found itself particularly attentive to the emerging work on Christianity and on eros that was being done by feminist thinkers such as Mary Daly and Audre Lorde.59 In particular, Lorde’s critical analysis of eros demonstrates the extent to which its historical interpretation has been indebted to patriarchal attempts to control women’s sexuality. With much of the work of feminist theology at this time being situated in a concrete socio-historical framework, the realisation ‘that the control of eros was connected to the control of women’s sexuality and reproductive capacities’ (Gilson, 1995: 64–68) led to a liberating theology that affirmed the embodied sexuality of women. Sexuality, in contemporary feminist discourses, has come to be seen as part of God’s divine gifts to humanity and not the grounds for humanity’s fall. For many liberation theologians, feminist reinterpretations of eros have become a powerful instrument for arguing against the oppression of women and the ‘feminine’ within the Church. Yet the work on eros that has been and continues to be the focus of much feminist theo-ethical scholarship seems to call forth the question, at least for me, of what has happened to agapic love. Indeed, the same question ironically applies even to those who struggle to redefine agape outside of patriarchal logic, those who engage in a feminist strategy of re-appropriation. In the feminist theological re-turn to eros and reworking of agape as a way of explaining and understanding human love relations that are predicated on equality rather than hierarchy, what has happened to the notion or theology of a spontaneous, abundant, and generous other-regard? There is little emphasis in the feminist theological literature on interpretations which refer to these qualities, which ironically raises the spectre for me of sacrifice. In what way might the notion of an equality that is envisaged as a defining aspect of genuine agapic love be incompatible with the qualities of spontaneous generosity? The remainder of this chapter will explore the feminist theological rejection and/or reconfiguration of agape in the exemplary work of thinkers like Barbara 59

See Audre Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ (1984) and ‘Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving’ (1984). See Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (1985a) Gyn/Ecology (1978), and Beyond God the Father (1985b).

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The subject of love Hilkert Andolsen and Sally Purvis, both of whom wish to retain a notion of agapic love and to refine its orthodox interpretation in the direction of mutuality. I will also consider the work of the radical feminist theologian Carter Heyward, for whom a reconfigured eros that can and does embrace the erotic, embodied experience of love is understood as better fitted to express a divinely sanctioned equality between human beings. I will conclude by briefly considering the relationship between these feminist theological concerns for equality, on the one hand, and, on the other, the apparent turn towards divinity that is reflected in some of the recent writings of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous, writers not typically associated with theology. It should be noted again, however, that throughout my concern is less about the issue of whether or not a particular configuration of love can be thought of as genuinely Christian, which is undoubtedly the form that much of the debate concerning erotic versus agapic love has taken within theological discourses. Rather, my concern is in tracing the conceptual life of a configuration of love to which certain qualities have been attributed, a love that is other-directed yet derives from an excessive abundance, a generous love. Sacrificing agape In reviewing the late twentieth-century feminist theological literature regarding love, what stands out is the relative silence concerning agape, even though it is generally acknowledged ‘that the role of agape in Christian ethics has been a major concern for twentieth century ethicists’ (Andolsen, 1981: 69). An exception to this more general silence is Judith Plaskow’s Sex, Sin and Grace (1980) which, following the insights of Valerie Saiving, offered a more extended critique of agape in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr.60 Notwithstanding this notable exception, however, one is left with the impression that eros dominates the feminist theo-ethical discussions, and a brief review of the more mainstream literature only confirms this impression. The tone of much of the orthodox literature that does consider other-regarding love is marked by either an appeal on behalf of the conceptual uniqueness of agape or a defence of agape against the apparently relentless and misdirected encroachments of a secular eros that has been

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60 In critiquing Niebuhr’s work on agape, Plaskow draws out the gender implications of his failure to recognise that the burden of human freedom carries a twofold temptation: the temptation to see ourselves as gods, i.e., the temptation of pride, as well as the temptation to immerse ourselves in the creaturely and sensual, and thereby reject God in denying that we are the image of God. Plaskow concurs with Saiving here that self-sacrifice is an appropriate corrective for pride but that Niebuhr, like Nygren, conflates male sin with human sin. It is immersion in the creaturely, the sensual realities of living through and for others that characterises the feminine for Plaskow. As a consequence, Niebuhr’s commitment to the destruction of the self fails to recognise the twofold burden of human freedom, which in women typically takes the form of an absence of self.

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Feminist theology: for the love of God resoundingly bolstered by the Enlightenment discourses of subjectivity. The Enlightenment’s privileging of the notion of an authentic self in possession of itself and responsible for itself necessarily signals a significant obstacle to traditional interpretations of agapic love, where it is self-interest that represents the greatest threat. It is somewhat ironic to hear the reverberations of Nygren’s anxiety about the conceptual uniqueness of agapic love reappear in a late twentieth-century theological debate on sexual difference. Colin Grant, for example, seems to have found himself engaged in a very similar structural enterprise to that of Anders Nygren. Grant bemoans the perceived assault on agape from feminist and liberation theologians who reject the notion that love of self precludes a genuine and divine love of the other. Consider the way he opens his article, ‘For the Love of God: Agape’: Pleasure, plurality and patriarchy have caught up with the distinctive Christian understanding of love. Emphasis on the uniqueness of agape is questioned today because this understanding neglects more immediate physical, erotic love, obscures the mutual love of friendship, and perpetuates the male sense of hierarchical superiority. (1996: 3)

For mainstream Protestant theology in particular the stakes are high. Agape has historically been understood as the sine qua non of Christianity, the thing that makes Christianity Christian. To reiterate Nygren’s apparently definitive position in this regard: Agape comes to us as a quite new creation of Christianity. It sets its mark on everything in Christianity. Without it nothing that is Christian would be Christian. Agape is Christianity’s own original basic conception. (1982: 48)

Yet it would seem that, for many feminist theo-ethical scholars, the move to selfsacrificial other-regarding love as the essential identity of Christianity is neither necessary nor the point. On the contrary, they consistently argue that in order for any notion of love to be truly Christian it cannot be implicated in the perpetuation of injustice, discrimination, or oppression in the world. Christology is therefore central to many feminist theologies, for it lends itself to the discourses of justice. In the figure of Jesus can easily be read a rejection of all forms of oppression, including gender oppression. Moreover, in many of the parables feminist theologians find the demonstration of equality as a material practice in the world. Agape as selfless love, however, has historically been implicated in the oppression of women, and this oppression derives almost exclusively from one of its defining characteristics: the demand for self-sacrifice, and the gendered nature of the way this demand has been given expression in the world. As we have seen in the previous chapter, in order for agapic love to be genuinely other-regarding, and thus to be an agent for the love of God, the self must be all but eliminated, and with this elimination goes the possibility of a love constituted as reciprocal

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The subject of love or mutual.61 The direction of agapic love is always one-way. Agape is always God’s love, even when it is given human relevance in the commandment to love one’s neighbour. It is not we who love our neighbours: it is not our/selves who are engaged in a process of loving that mimics God’s love of the world. Rather, it is God loving through us. Any return, assuming love invokes a return, is a return to God, albeit an unnecessary one from God’s point of view. For feminist theologians who reject agape in favor of eros, or who refigure agape in the direction of mutuality, there is considerable theological justification for doing so. Again, stemming from the socio-cultural climate of the 1960s, much of the theological debate has concerned the apparent disparity between the ideals of Christian love and the appalling conditions of many people’s lives in the world.62 Christian love, understood in terms of self-sacrifice, has done little to address the injustices of the world. Rather, it has largely served patriarchal ends that privilege the elevation of a few at the expense of many. Whether in the forms of the enormous disparities created on the basis of wealth, race, sex, or ability, these injustices are the issues that many liberation theologians feel are in most urgent need of address, both at the level of theological or textual exegesis and at the level of praxis. To the extent that Christianity is implicated in furthering these injustices it cannot be understood to be ‘genuinely’ Christian. A theology of love that cannot embrace difference in a positive way cannot address these very pressing, ‘real-world’ concerns. Thus, much of liberation theology, including feminist theology, relies on the epistemological category of experience that has been further inflected with analyses of power relations.63 Power and experience, together, have formed a theoretical matrix through which to assert that a love relation that is truly divine is one that must be understood as mutual. Mutuality is thought to offer a dynamic of intersubjectivity in which all parties to love relations equally expose themselves to the risk of otherness. Only then can the

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61 As noted in the previous chapter, it is to philia, the love of friends, that thinkers have historically turned in theorising a love based on mutuality. The assumption relies on the notion that friendship is generated from the recognition of sameness rather than difference. Friends are friends because they share the same interests, and, typically, a similar relation to power mediates the relation of friends. Friendship is the province of equals in terms of class, power, and ideology. 62 Irrespective of Reinhold Niebuhr’s problematic understanding of agape, he nonetheless shared with many feminist theologians an abiding concern with questions of social justice. Again, in this respect his work can be distinguished from Nygren’s. 63 The post-structural work of Michel Foucault has been influential in this regard. Foucault argues that power is best understood not as a thing, something that one or other party has or doesn’t have, but rather as a relational concept. Power is produced in a dynamic matrix of relations and any shift in relations is necessarily a shift within the distribution of power. Power is both a social and historical phenomenon rather than a divine or malign spirit. While Foucault has been criticised for not applying his own insights to gender relations, his work has nonetheless been very influential to many feminists interested in reconfiguring the structure of power relations between the sexes. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality (1978). For feminist uses of Foucault see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990), and Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, Feminism and Foucault (1988).

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Feminist theology: for the love of God apparent tension between self-interest and self-sacrifice be overcome. Thus, mutuality is offered as a corrective to the exclusive, singular direction of orthodox configurations of agapic love, which permit the love of an other only through the abandonment of the self. In recent years, a number of writers have emerged in feminist theology whose work significantly addresses the question of the difference that sexual difference makes in thinking about agapic love. In the work of Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, for example, the concept of mutuality is read back through the orthodox configuration of subject/object relations that have typified theological writings on agapic love. Mutuality is understood to displace the oppositional structure between self and other on which the notion of self-sacrifice rests. More importantly, however, mutuality is thought to address the feminisation of sacrifice that has been attendant on agapic love. For Andolsen, an understanding of the gendered nature of power relations is essential to an understanding of traditional agapic love; just as it is essential to how that tradition might, in the light of a gendered analysis, then give rise to a divine love that is not predicated upon the subordination of women. Sally Purvis’s article ‘Mothers, Neighbors and Strangers’ (1991) raises the issue of maternal love as a metaphor for agapic love. Taking issue with the orthodox insistence that agapic love is necessarily disinterested love, Purvis offers a reading of particular loves, the particular loves of mothers, that themselves function as a passage to the universal. Implicitly, Purvis is deconstructing the passive/active and universal/particular distinctions that agapic love has historically relied upon. In this respect, her work resembles the work of Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray, all of whom have similarly looked to the maternal metaphor to reconsider women’s relations to self-sacrifice and divinity, and indeed to subjectivity more broadly configured. As is true of her continental colleagues, Purvis’s work is positioned as a critique of the Enlightenment implications of autonomy and independence that underpin oppositional structures like activity/passivity, autonomy/dependence. And, like Cixous, Purvis recognises that oppositional structures have relied on an illusory conceptual discreteness that denies their interdependence upon each other, and that therefore denies an understanding of relationship that is not constituted hierarchically around a subject/object distinction. Thus, recognition of categorical interdependence or co-constitution opens up the possibility that the particular can and does function as a passage to the universal. Finally, the work of the feminist theologian Carter Heyward offers the most radical revisioning of agapic love and the one to which orthodox thinkers, like Colin Grant, find themselves most strongly opposed. Insisting on an interpretation of divine love that is deeply rooted within Christian theology, Heyward endorses the centrality of the concepts of mutuality and relationality. However, she looks to a radically immanent, sexualised reading of eros, in place of the abstracted and

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The subject of love transcendent spiritual love of orthodox agape, to find the kind of mutuality that, at its heart, can be thought of as reflecting equality, and thus as opening on to the divine. Mutuality and equality – Barbara Hilkert Andolsen As we have seen, self-love, sacrifice, and disinterest are the key terms that animated and dramatised the twentieth-century debates concerning agapic love. From an assumption that human nature is inherently self-interested, both Nygren and Niebuhr asserted that Christian love, that is, agape, ‘does not recognise selflove as a legitimate form of love’ (Nygren, 1982: 217) in any social relation. In the interpretation of Jesus’ apparently willing self-sacrifice upon the Cross – the Atonement – we find the ultimate theological justification for sacrifice to become normative in relations of love. In the apparently disinterested nature of Jesus’ sacrifice on behalf of all, we find a model of divine love that is realised solely through a kind of other-regard that can arise only in the annihilation of the self. Nowhere in either Nygren’s or Niebuhr’s theologies of agape is there room for a love relation in which other-regard can be thought of as mutually beneficial. The assumption that the self may derive any benefit from its relations to others is proof, rather, of the failure of agape. It is evidence of the ‘natural’ love of eros, and any benefit to others is really only an incidental by-product of advancing the interests of the self. Yet in her article ‘Agape in Feminist Ethics’ (1981) Barbara Hilkert Andolsen’s64 engagement with the traditional readings of agape is motivated by tracing a genealogy for the idea of a mutual love that can be understood as agapic and thus as Christian, but that also supports feminist ideals of equality between the sexes. She notes that, in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1930s, mutuality emerges as the ethical norm where agape fails, for, as we have already seen, mutuality does not escape the problem of self-interest. For Niebuhr, however, for whom the tensions between the interests of individuals and the interests of social groups was a significant preoccupation, the ethical principle of self-sacrifice finds itself most realisable in the individual and thus in relations mediated by individuals, i.e., familial relations (1932: 266). From the perspective of society the highest moral ideal is justice. From the perspective of the individual the highest ideal is unselfishness. Society must strive for justice even if it is forced to use means, such as self-assertion, resistance, coercion and perhaps resentment, which cannot gain the moral sanction of the most sensitive moral spirit. The individual must strive to realise his life by losing and finding himself in something greater than himself. (1931: 257)

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64 Dr Barbara Hilkert Andolsen is the Helen Bennett McMurray Professor of Social Ethics and Co-Director of Gender Studies at Monmouth University in New Jersey.

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Feminist theology: for the love of God Agape, Niebuhr felt, had difficulty crossing over between the private and the public and was perhaps most fully effective only in intimate and personal relations (1932: 266). In public life, characterised as he saw it to be by the competing interests of subunits each pressing their own advantage, a more calculative form of justice rather than agape was a more appropriate model (1932: 272). Clearly then, an agape that is constituted through the ‘refusal to exert pressure on one’s own behalf’ (Andolsen, 1981: 71) cannot be an appropriate norm in the social context. While Andolsen does not draw out in the following terms the public/private, individual/social distinction that runs throughout Niebuhr’s work, I take her to be identifying an opposition between sameness and difference that is implicitly operating. Niebuhr’s distinction rests upon an assumption that personal relations, as opposed to social relations, are founded upon principles of sameness, social relations on principles of difference. Hence, there is a need to distinguish between the different ethical norms that are appropriate to each; self-sacrificial agape between individuals, and an albeit imperfect other-regarding justice for social relations. Yet, in effectively limiting agape to the private sphere, Niebuhr unwittingly renders moot the very notion of self-sacrifice that he wants to privilege precisely in that domain, for relations in the private sphere, he effectively implies, are ordered from the outset by the denial of difference. Difference is projected into the public sphere. The paradox of an agapic love that is expressed as sacrifice, however, is that it requires some acknowledgement of difference in order for there to be a sacrifice made on behalf of the other. Within economies of sameness where difference is thoroughly denied, so too is the possibility of a sacrifice on behalf of the other, for to all intents and purposes, effectively, there is no other. Without some notion of sameness and difference within relations between individuals, Niebuhr cannot justify agape as the operating norm. Interestingly, when he does turn to the public sphere and thus to engaging questions he has already identified as questions of difference, the ethical principle he finds normative is one that preserves alterity. In wanting to grant some integrity to the claims of all the competing subunits within public life – for Niebuhr was committed to social justice – he resorted to the notion of a kind of justice that is defined by mutuality precisely because it can strike an appropriate balance between equality and freedom where agape fails to do so. But he clearly does not recognise this ‘mutual’ relation, which is constituted in the name of freedom, as agapic love. Indeed he acknowledges that ‘there is not enough imagination in any social group to render it amenable to the influence of pure love’ (1932: 272). Andolsen claims that Niebuhr’s concern with the problem of self-assertion as a cultural and institutional phenomenon, the problem of competing subunits each pressing their own advantage, compelled him to ‘reduce agape to a remote star’ (1981: 71) that functions as little more than an ethical horizon. But, notwithstanding the contradiction, Niebuhr would continue to assert that the ideal of sacrificial love was nonetheless the ideal of the highest moral value.

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The subject of love

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In an important sense Niebuhr’s work offers an opportunity that Nygren’s did not. In reflecting on agape as a practice that is both constrained by, and has effects in, the world, he opens the door to considering the material conditions through which agape might be given expression. Moreover, his bifurcation of the public and private spheres supports feminist claims about the gendered nature of agape. If indeed agape is an operating norm that applies only to the private sphere, and women have historically been associated with the home, it is no surprise, then, that it is women, as Andolsen emphasises, who ‘become the persons called to a life of perpetual self-giving’ (1981: 76). Moreover, as she goes on to suggest, this results in a further irony for men, for whom agape is, at least in principle, a supreme virtue. They find themselves ‘condemned to spend a major portion of their lives in a public world where Christian values such as agape seem to have no place’ (1981: 76). Nonetheless, in seeking a model of agapic love that can embrace the notion of mutuality, and thus can avoid the wholesale condemnation of self that has defined Protestant theologies on the basis of the doctrine of Atonement, Andolsen finds the Trinitarian focus of a number of Catholic theologians more in sympathy with feminist concerns. In the work of another theologian, Martin D’Arcy, she finds promising his emphasis on striking a balance between self-respect and selfgiving for thinking about women for whom self-sacrifice has been defined as normative. For D’Arcy the extraordinary level of self-abnegation demanded of orthodox readings of agape represents a harm as significant as that of excessive self-interest. ‘One can lose oneself in the other and to do so is just as wrong as to remain totally self-centred’ (D’Arcy in Andolsen, 1981: 72). D’Arcy’s work resonates with a similar concern held by Judith Plaskow regarding Niebuhr’s emphasis on the sin of pride and his neglect of the corollary sin in which the absence of self must also be considered a refusal of human freedom (Plaskow, 1980). D’Arcy’s reasoning is also reflected in Valerie Saiving’s recognition that ‘contemporary theological doctrines of love have been . . . constructed primarily on the basis of masculine experience and thus view the human condition from the male standpoint’ (Saiving, 27). If self-sacrifice is to be understood as a corrective to self-love or pride, and these are qualities considered to have material and concrete effects, then we must acknowledge that sexual difference does indeed make a difference to this assumption. As Saiving notes, self-pride is not the sin of women whose material lives have been characterised by the reverse, by a significant lack of self-assertion (37). Saiving thinks that, if women are to be identified at all with sin at the level of subjectivity, then their sin is precisely that of ‘giving too much of [themselves] so that nothing remains of [their] own uniqueness; she can become merely an emptiness, almost a zero, without value to herself, to her fellow men, or, perhaps, even to God’ (37). By attending to differences arising from the gendered nature of ‘human’ experience, Saiving lays

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Feminist theology: for the love of God an important foundation for subsequent critiques of agape in gendered terms. Moreover, like D’Arcy, she inflected the discussion of divine love with a social and political context. For D’Arcy, the doctrine of the Trinity offers a way out of the trap of excessive self-sacrifice that has characterised orthodox readings of agapic love, for in it he finds a model of mutuality that balances the oppositions between giving and receiving. ‘[I]n the mutual love of the Trinity all is given without loss, and all is taken without change, save that a new Person is revealed in this wondrous intercommunion . . .’ (D’Arcy in Andolsen, 1981: 73). When Andolsen turns to the defence of mutuality that distinguishes some of the work of feminist theologians like Margaret Farley and Beverly Wildung Harrison, D’Arcy’s suggestion that the Trinity is illustrative of agapic love proves to be significant. Andolsen notes the importance of Farely’s critique of traditional theological readings like Nygren’s, in which the active/passive distinction has been the dominating model for understanding human relations and also for understanding the human/divine relation. ‘Theologians have mistakenly asserted that God is totally active; the Christian, totally passive. They have assumed that the Christian is completely active on behalf of the neighbor; the neighbor, completely receptive’ (1981: 77). In assuming an extreme opposition between an active giver and a passive receiver, traditional theological readings have left little room for a mutual intersubjectivity. Yet, in the absence of mutuality, it is clear that inequality and injustice have dominated the gendered experience of Christian love. Thus, for Farley there is a need to recognise that the passive/active distinction has been misunderstood. In constituting the receiver as wholly passive we misunderstand the dynamics of what it means to receive. Andolsen illustrates Farely’s point by noting the active posture that is assumed by one who ‘receives’ a guest (1981: 77). In her effort to disrupt the hierarchical economy of binary relations that has historically dominated gendered discourses on human interaction, Farley’s work echoes the work of Hélène Cixous which we will be considering in detail in the following chapters. Like Farley, Cixous recognises the importance, and indeed the active structure, of receiving gracefully. ‘Giving requires no courage, but to receive love so much strength, so much patience, and so much generosity must be extended’ (Cixous, 1991a: 105). For Farley the very act of receiving love is an act of recognition that celebrates the ‘goodness and beauty of the other’, and ‘giving and receiving are but two sides of one reality’ (Farley in Andolsen, 1981: 77). While Cixous might not endorse Farley’s underlying appeal to unity, she would, nonetheless, sympathise with the spirit of Farley’s goal: to open a space for thinking differently about the self/other relationship. For Hélène Cixous, as we will see in detail in the next chapters, the challenge for the self in a relation of giving and receiving gracefully revolves around a notion of self-surrender that itself is derived from an active posture. What this is not, however, is simply another story of self-loathing masked in an insistence

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The subject of love on self-sacrifice. At base in Cixous’ reflections on the self/other relation, especially as it pertains to love, is an ethics of intersubjectivity that will allow both self and other to survive the encounter. In order for the self and other to meet in their differences in Cixous’ understanding, the self must be understood as embodying and expressing what amounts to a different relationship to subjectivity. We must actively refuse the impulse to grasp on to our own awareness of ourselves. We must surrender that impulse in order not to impose the self on the other if both self and other are to survive the encounter, let alone to potentially open the encounter to something sacred. But while this can indeed be read as a story of selflessness, of self-surrender, it is certainly not one of self-sacrifice in any traditional sense. The self is not precisely abandoned in Cixous’ work. Rather, in a willingness to live a different relation to itself, the self becomes in and through the very immediacy of being with the other as other. The relationship of opposition between self and other no longer holds meaningful significance as a hierarchy, for the self that becomes beyond and elsewhere to a grasping attachment to itself is not in a position to ‘press its own advantage’. Andolsen also notes that the work of Beverly Harrison reflects similar concerns to those of Margaret Farley. I would suggest, however, that Harrison’s attention to the vulnerability necessitated by mutual love has even stronger affiliations with Cixous’ work.65 Harrison takes issue with the typical theological critique of mutuality that has focused on the benefit to self that is potentially derived from an encounter with the other. Mutuality, she believes, ‘is so radical that most human beings are unable to maintain the openness and vulnerability that this love demands. It is not just self-giving which humans find difficult, but also receptivity and dependence upon love from others’ (Harrison in Andolsen, 1981: 78). Harrison’s invocation of the notion of vulnerability as the core of mutual love implies that the challenge for any subject is the challenge of relinquishment. The subject must be willing to be moved by the other, to let the other in, and a subject fully immersed in its own awareness of itself as a subject is unable to achieve this kind of openness to alterity. To encounter the other from a position that privileges self-consciousness is to encounter a binary relation in which the self constitutes itself against the other. Such is the typical understanding of the relationship between the sexes where woman is other to man, and the exchange is inevitably structured by inequality.66 Andolsen’s reflections on agape provide the occasion to consider rival theological accounts of its symbolisation. If agape is to be grounded in the sacrifice of Christ, its conceptual parameters are firmly set to exclude a notion of love as mutual. Only in an act of total selflessness can the other be the subject of this love. But

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65 See Beverly Harrison’s ‘The Power of Anger in the Work of Love’ (1984) for a more detailed engagement with her theorisation of mutuality and eros. 66 See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1974) for the first feminist account of woman as ‘other’, particularly ‘Introduction’, pp. xxiv–xxv.

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Feminist theology: for the love of God in locating authority in the model of the Trinity, as Farley notes, there is the possibility of identifying mutuality as the most appropriate conceptualisation of agapic love, and thus there is the possibility of ameliorating the hostility to self that has characterised orthodox Atonement interpretations. the First Person and the Second Person are infinitely active and infinitely receptive, infinitely giving and infinitely receiving, holding in infinite mutuality and reciprocity a totally shared life. (Farley in Andolsen, 1981: 79)

Clearly the feminist investment in mutuality is significant. Because the mutuality of the Trinity offers a glimpse of equality, at the same time as it circumvents the demand for self-sacrifice, it does seem to suggest a new way of thinking about agapic love. But, as Andolsen notes, for women a number of other concerns arise: namely, that the Trinity does not, in any obvious sense, proffer a model of divinity that includes women (Andolsen, 1981: 78–79). The extent to which the Trinity can be read as embodying feminine ideals of relationship is significantly eroded by its figuration in masculine terms: the First and Second ‘person’ remain God the Father and God the Son. Moreover, Farley’s suggestion that modern biology’s acknowledgement of women’s active role in reproduction can be used to endorse a conception of God as Mother stretches to the imaginative limits the Christian logos. And this is not even to mention the dangers inherent in even attempting to use biological arguments as a foundation for equality. Biology has typically been no friend of women. Yet, in the absence of a divine imagined in their own corporeal likeness, as Luce Irigaray pointed out, women are fundamentally excluded as representatives of the divine. Moreover, as Andolsen astutely notes, without a thoroughgoing feminine expression of divinity, men are prevented from the corollary experience women have long endured, the ‘chastening experience of being unlike the Goddess’ (1981: 80). Andolsen’s review of agapic love further gives rise to questions concerning the status of mutuality. She notes that, for Beverly Harrison, the model of friendship or philia remains one of the most powerful exemplars of mutual, and thus equal, relations (1981: 78). Yet philia is typically understood as the love of sameness. Relations of affinity that are produced under the circumstances of likeness have historically defined our understanding of friendship. Friends are those who have things in common: shared worlds, shared values, and shared ideals. The question of whether a concept of mutuality that is modelled on friendship can embrace relations that are defined by difference remains to be fully explored. But perhaps the most significant silence in Andolsen’s overview of the literature on agape is that concerning the qualities of spontaneity, abundance, or generosity. Harrison’s subjects of a mutual vulnerability are perhaps the closest any of the theorists here reviewed come to proposing a model of love in which spontaneity remains central. Her model of vulnerability suggests a certain generosity of self, but it fails to embody the excessive generosity that agapic love has, at least in principle,

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The subject of love gestured towards. Perhaps it is in this sense that mutual love, thus far considered, fails to reach divine horizons. The problem of particular loves – Sally B. Purvis The central concern of Sally Purvis’s engagement with the concept of agape, and thus with other-regarding love, revolves around the orthodox assertion that it must of necessity be disinterested love. Again, the underlying issue is ultimately with the role that self-interest has historically been thought to play in particular loves. The traditional Nygrenian model holds that agape ‘is responsive to generic rather than to idiosyncratic characteristics of persons. In other words, persons are recipients of agape not based on who they are but only on the fact that they are’ (Purvis, 1991: 21). Hence, God’s love is selfless and disinterested otherregarding love in the purest sense because God loves universally, irrespective of particularity or difference. For Purvis, Søren Kierkegaard provides expression in extremis of this ideal of agape in his suggestion that ‘the work of love in remembering one who is dead is thus a work of the most disinterested, freest, the most faithful love’ (Kierkegaard, 1962: 328). In remembering and loving the dead, there is no possibility of reciprocity. The lover can expect no return for their efforts in love. Moreover, in the physical absence of the beloved, and with no hope that the beloved will ever be physically present again, it cannot be anything per se about the dead beloved that calls love forth: If pushed to its logical limits, agape as ‘equal regard,’ the love that emphasises ‘generic characteristics’ in impartial and totally other-regarding attitudes and activity, the love that makes no distinction and accepts no reward and that eliminates as illegitimate the lovableness of the object, may be perfectly experienced only when the object of the love is utterly inaccessible and thus functionally irrelevant. (Purvis, 1991: 22)

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As Purvis observes through Kierkegaard, the current of radical equality that potentially supports the notion of a universally directed love ironically ‘ends up by erasing the persons that are supposed to be beloved’ (1991: 22). Not only does this traditional interpretation of agape exclude the subject of love, so too it would seem, it ultimately excludes the object of love. Kierkegaard’s proposition is thus a paradigmatic example of a gift that has escaped a debt economy, but only to the extent that it reveals the impossibility of the gift in life. For Hélène Cixous, as we will see in later chapters, Kierkegaard’s position merely extends still further the masculine affiliation with a notion of divinity that is beyond life. By contrast, her concerns regarding economies of love and the gift begin with the question of life. Can we, she asks, escape the seeming hegemony of masculine economies of debt in life? As a normative feature of human relationships, disinterest speaks to the masculine priority of the rational over the emotional, which, when taken to its

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Feminist theology: for the love of God logical conclusion, underscores the gendered opposition between spirit and body that has characterised one aspect of the opposition between masculinity and femininity. Betraying intimate ties to the subject of modernity, ‘the emphasis on autonomy and detachment from specific features of specific lives brings with it a concomitant de-emphasis on relationality and particularity’ (Purvis, 1991: 22). As Purvis notes, the detached man of orthodox agape ‘is brother to if not identical with the liberal man’ (1991: 22). Yet for Purvis, the very feminine and very particular experience of mothering, she argues, is one of the most cogent models of a love that can be thought of as unqualified and other-regarding, and it is her experience of this love that she takes to be authoritative. Purvis accepts the feminist proposition that women’s experience is meaningful, noting that ‘[f]eminist methodology exposes the standpoint-dependent nature of all knowledge and explicitly develops the centrality of women’s experience for our reflections’ (1991: 19), in contradistinction to the abstract, disembodied autonomy of the Enlightenment subject. While Purvis is not arguing that mother-love is sui generis with agapic love, she is suggesting that the qualities of mother-love substantially reflect the qualities typically thought to define agape in human relations, that is, agape according to the commandment to love one’s neighbour. It is worth quoting Purvis at length here: First, mother-love is inclusive. It is dependent upon the mother-child relationship but is independent of the specific characteristics of the child . . . Her regard for the child is both predicated upon the child’s uniqueness and unmediated by the specific qualities of that child . . . Second, the love is both intensely involved and other-regarding. At times there is no clear line between the needs of the lover and the needs of the beloved . . . the mother’s actions with regard to the child are primarily and fundamentally responsive to the child’s needs, though she may initiate activities. She is acting largely on behalf of the other in response to the other’s signals of need . . . Third, mother-love is unconditional. It is not dependent upon nor can it be cancelled by the behavior of the child . . . [Yet] the love is not ‘located in the agent’, as Kierkegaard’s account would have it; it remains intensely other oriented. It is that child with all the joy and the pain that is the focus of the love. (1991: 26–27)

As we can see, throughout Purvis’s account of mother-love she refuses the necessary association of other-regard with non-particularity. Indeed, she underscores a both/and structure to the character of mother-love wherein the either/or structure of oppositional relations is displaced. Mother-love is both particular and non-particular, simultaneously. Because Purvis derives her account of agape from her own experience of mothering she brings with her a central commitment to the quotidian. In doing so she adds a conceptual component to agape that I will later argue is central to Hélène Cixous’ understanding of other-regarding love: the relationship of agapic love to time. While the experience of mothering in all its diverse expressions has

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The subject of love a durational quality, the experience of mother-love that Purvis is suggesting as a model for agapic love is necessarily experienced as a moment in time. It is not the experience of mothering per se that offers a model for agape but only the motherlove which in my case undergirds the practice and explodes with intensity and clarity only sporadically in the midst of so much else. (1991: 25)

In many respects I take Purvis’s implicit recognition of the significance of the momentary nature of mother-love to be of greater significance than she does. Her reliance on the category of experience permits her to bring to the fore an aspect of the human relationship to agapic love that is noticeably underemphasised in much of the theological literature up to this point. Constituted as a moment, rather than as a state, Purvis’s mother-love divides between an attitudinal precondition that is not agapic, but that might be thought of as on a path towards agapic love, and an epiphanous realisation that is agapic, and that is necessarily beyond the control of either the lover or the beloved. Indeed it might well make this distinction, at least for a moment, meaningless. Her agapic mother-love emerges spontaneously in a moment that eludes the oppositional structure of a divided subject of desire for it eludes the will of the subject of love. The very structure of lover and beloved, self and other, is thus displaced, for the mother herself cannot claim to be the subject of the very love by which she too has been taken. In acknowledging the temporal quality of mother-love, Purvis implicitly offers us a new way of thinking about the role of self-interest and self-sacrifice in the structure of agapic love, for the self that is the subject of its own interests is not the self that defines her understanding of mother-love. While the maternal experience of agape is in many respects central to Purvis’s argument, her concern is sharply focused on mother-love as an experience of particular loves that, contrary to orthodoxy, do give rise to a genuine expression of agape. Her most powerful argument in favour of the theological misunderstanding of particular loves lies in her rereading of the Gospel account of the Good Samaritan, itself typically taken to be the scriptural authority for agapic love as disinterested love.67 She notes that what the Samaritan account actually does is to reconfigure the traditional understanding of the concept of neighbour. The neighbour of Hebrew tradition has typically been understood in geo-social terms: one’s neighbour is one who is nearby, the stranger who crosses our path. But for Purvis, the very point of the Samaritan story is to reveal the extent to which the notion of neighbour must now be determined attitudinally and behaviourally. In the figure of the Samaritan the older understanding of ‘neighbour’ is imported with new meaning. One is constituted as a neighbour not by virtue of one’s social location but by virtue of how one behaves towards the other: ‘a neighbor is 67

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The story of the Samaritan is taken to be the defining account of neighbour love. It arises from Jesus’ response to the question, Who is my neighbour? and is thus seen as the most cogent exemplar of the second commandment. The narrative is told in Luke 10:29–37.

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Feminist theology: for the love of God someone who acts like a neighbor’ (1991: 30). To demonstrate her point she asks if the Samaritan in fact fulfilled these behavioural expectations of neighbourly love, and in what ways. Purvis reorders the historical emphasis of the parable, noting that the Samaritan did not simply respond to the immediate needs of his neighbour. He did not merely bind his wounds and deliver him to an inn where he could be cared for (1991: 30). The Samaritan ‘stayed overnight at the inn with him, gave the innkeeper money to cover what had already been spent, and promised to pay whatever additional expenses the wounded man incurred, without limit’ (1991: 30). The Samaritan could not be thought of as responding to his neighbour in any commonsensical understanding of the term ‘neighbour’, which then raises the question of the structure of agapic love that is being demonstrated in the story. So generous was his fulfilment of the other’s need, so excessive and beyond expectations was it that it actually takes on the qualities of extravagance that have typically defined erotic lover relations. The neighbour behaves like a lover, and, as we know, lovers are very particular about their loves. For Purvis, it is a mistake to understand the Samaritan as standing for disinterested love. On the contrary, he signifies a very particular interest that exceeds the bounds of particularity in its very excessiveness and generosity. Moreover it is this generosity towards the other which Purvis characterises as ‘overfulfilment’ (1991: 30) and that has been understood theologically as characteristic of particular loves, that is the point that the parable is making about agapic love for the other. While Purvis offers a compelling account for the inclusion of an otherregarding love that has typically been excluded from agapic love on the grounds of its particularity, her account of mother-love surprisingly lacks a significant gender analysis. Rather, mother-love is conceptually anchored in Purvis’s own experience, and it is the category of experience that she is claiming to be authoritative. The significance of sexual difference in general, and the sex of mothers in particular, has only an implicit presence in her analysis. While Purvis acknowledges that the mere invocation of a maternal metaphor runs the risk of essentialism, the lack of a serious gender analysis is a weakness in her argument on behalf of the agapic quality of particular loves. Purvis even goes so far as to suggest that women who have not been mothers in all likelihood would not derive heuristic value from the model of love she is describing (1991: 33), thus reinforcing an essentialised notion of mother-love.68 Severing the body of woman 68 Given the tenacity of the association of mothering with love, Elisabeth Badinter’s essay ‘Maternal Indifference’ (1987), while not being without problems from a feminist perspective, nonetheless offers an important challenge to patriarchal assumptions about the supposed naturalness of mother love. Badinter’s study of motherhood and maternal feeling from the eighteenth to the twentieth century firmly locates maternal behaviour, if not maternal feeling, in a social and political context. Moreover, the very horror that is evoked, in even the most gender-savvy of readers, through her detailed account of the effects of abandonment and wet-nursing, itself stands as testament to the tenacity of the myth of the naturalness of maternal love.

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The subject of love from the love of the mother, Purvis ultimately leaves us with a very familiar aporia even though she does provide something of a feminine account of abundant, particular love that opens on to the universal. Perhaps Purvis’s most significant contribution to this discussion lies in her insight into the momentary nature of agapic mother-love. In implicitly refusing the atemporal construction of divinity that has typically characterised non-mystical Christian discussions of divine love, Purvis provides an account of divine love that is resolutely located within the province of human experience. The resurrection of eros – Carter Heyward From the patriarchal Western metaphysical traditions Carter Heyward69 believes we have inherited a conception of both humanity and divinity that is deeply unjust. The structure of domination and subordination that typically define social relations, and in particular gender relations, has found its ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ in the Western, Judaeo-Christian logos. However, the hierarchically structured categories like man and woman, self and other, heterosexual and homosexual, black and white, God and humanity that find their ultimate authority in the Genesis accounts of Creation rely on an implied stability and discretion that Heyward finds not to be borne out in phenomenal experience.70 As with the other feminist theologians thus far considered, Heyward also refuses to accept a binary distinction between knowledge and experience, asserting that ‘all constructive theology is done in the praxis of life experience’ (1984: 227). Thus, she draws extensively on her own life experience, and thus shares with Hélène Cixous a commitment to the idea ‘that the general rises out of the particular’ (Heyward, 1984: 227). I do not understand myself primarily in categories that suggest that anything about me is static, unchanging, finished. Even those categories that most of us assume to be basic – such as female or male gender, such as racial identity, such as Homo Sapiens species itself – seem to me more elusive, less static, than we often assume. (Heyward, 1984: 293)

Yet, for all that Heyward eschews the implied permanence of identity categories, she nonetheless arrives at, or begins from, an important presupposition about human and divine nature that she does take to be stable, which is the experience of love. ‘And yet there is something basic among us . . . I am speaking of the 69

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Carter Heyward is a lesbian feminist Episcopal priest and theologian, whose early work focused extensively on developing a theology of mutuality, in contradistinction to the dualistic worldview of much of orthodox theology. 70 While Genesis actually provides two accounts of Creation, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, and there are important differences between them, especially from the point of view of gender equality, they nonetheless have in common a binary structure. See Kristen Kvan et al. (1999) for a detailed account of the way each of the three monotheistic traditions interprets differently the Genesis Creation and Fall narratives and, in so doing, arrive at very different stories about the implications of sexual difference.

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Feminist theology: for the love of God human experience, and perhaps also the experience of other creatures, of love – or, of our human experience of God in the world’ (1984: 84). If there is an ‘essential’ category that is presumed to be descriptive, then the category that most aptly describes human nature, she believes, is that of lover (1984: 84). It is in being lovers that we experience God. In this sense, Heyward too subscribes to a theocentric commitment to the notion of God as love. It is important to recognise, however, that the concept of God frequently takes the verb form in Heyward’s theology, thereby displacing transcendence in favour of immanence. The activity of loving thus becomes the activity of ‘godding’ in the world. As such, her understanding of love, and, in particular, of a love that reflects the love of God and can therefore be understood as redemptive, is consequently limited by a notion of justice understood as ‘right-relation’. Heyward goes so far as to say that ‘[a]s a feminist theologian, [she] grants justice a normative status in theology’ (1984: 227). Only in relations that eschew oppression, discrimination, and unequal expressions of power will love be derived from a principle of rightrelation. Only then will love border on the divine, because in Heyward’s theology that is what the divine is – right-relation. I believe that God is our power in relation to each other, all humanity, and creation itself. God is creative power, that which effects justice – right-relation – in history. God is the bond which connects us in such a way that each of us is em-powered to grow, work, play, love and be loved. God makes this justice, our justice. God is not only our immediate power in relation, but is also our immediate re-source of power. (1982: 6)

Heyward’s conception of the relationship between love and God is inflected with her dual commitment to feminist and liberation theologies. Because her theology is grounded in the material conditions of the world, the issues of social inequality, injustice, and oppression become the primary horizon to which genuine theological activity should be oriented. Heyward positions herself somewhere between Mary Daly’s radical call to abandon the Church as hopelessly patriarchal and misogynist, and Rosemary Ruether’s refusal to accept misogyny or patriarchy as the final word within Christianity (Heyward, 1984: 55–68). She acknowledges the value of Daly’s revolutionary re-visioning of a woman-centred spirituality that is positioned ‘beyond’ patriarchy, but she finds Daly’s epistemological idealism ahistorical, and in that respect deficient, as a transforming practice of social justice. Ruether’s materialist understanding of dualism as the paradigm of oppression within history affords Heyward a more pragmatic orientation that echoes her own concern with the ways in which the institution of the Church has sustained and encouraged the discriminatory and oppressive treatment of women. In thus seeing the political and spiritual potential of reinterpreting scripture from a gender-sensitive perspective informed by justice, like Ruether, Heyward has struggled but remained within the institution of the Church. She has chosen to challenge and transform from within the misogynist practices that

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The subject of love have perpetuated inequality, but she nonetheless takes very seriously the spirit of Mary Daly’s emphatic critique of the ‘phallic cult of Christendom’. Heyward holds a further assumption about humanity that is essential to her theology of love and that reflects a significant feature of her concept of rightrelation. In opposition to modernist theories of subjectivity, which she takes to be wholly masculine in character, subjectivity, she says, must be understood as both a relational and a religious concept. [T]he experience of relation is fundamental and constitutive of human being; it is good and powerful; and it is only within this experience – as it is happening here and now – that we may realise that the power in relation is God. (1982: 2)

In one blow she deals with the masculinist fantasies of autonomy and independence that she believes have given rise to a theological failure of empathy towards human relations, and she reorients the theological enterprise from an otherworldly afterlife to the contradictory and paradoxical realities of human experience in the present. Inasmuch as humans can experience divinity, the present is the meaningful site of that experience for Heyward, for whom God is in the world. A God or divinity that is set apart from the reality of human life, a God that is wholly other, she suggests, is of no use to us. It is a conception of divinity that functions merely as an agent for oppressive power. Such a ‘God’ is a destructive controlling device – manufactured in the minds of men who have bent themselves low before ideals of changeless Truth, deathless Life, pure Spirit, perfect Reason, and other qualities often associated with the patriarchal ‘God’. (1982: 7)

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Moreover, it is this very patriarchal construction of divinity that has given rise to a conception of love, agape, which is wholly removed from human love. ‘Divine love is qualitatively, quantitatively, essentially, and morally superior to human love, which is believed to be in need of redemption, or the spiritual transcendence of flesh, body, human being, and the world’ (1982: 7). Such a configuration of love precludes the possibility of a divine–human interrelation as surely as it denies the value of human love relations. For Heyward, however, the very notion of relationship that she takes to be determinative of human subjectivity itself displaces the structure of possession that has seen traditional agape attributed to God alone. Genuine relationships belong to neither one nor other party but rather are constitutive of the ‘we’: ‘we are created in relation, immediately and intimately bound to “something” that is neither our possession as individuals nor our capacity apart from others’ (1982: 8). As James Lassen-Willems remarks, in Heyward’s conception of subjectivity ‘Human beings are no longer described as discrete individuated selves. Rather, “person” is understood as a social relationship which may be located in a particular bodyself, but whose identity is always to be understood as socially or relationally mediated’ (Lassen-Williams [sic] 1990: 347). Even ‘God’ is a concept that presumes relation. As Heyward

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Feminist theology: for the love of God notes, without a relation to Creation, without a relation to humanity, God and divinity are merely speculative hypotheses (1982: 9). Having reconstituted subjectivity and divinity as relational concepts, Heyward is not denying that the intersubjective experience can be one of inequality. To this extent, she retains a notion of individual identity and personhood. Hence, the relationship that she privileges is one of right-relation, modelled primarily on the figure of Jesus, and anchored in a theory of justice that centres on mutuality. Justice, she says, is a ‘relation of mutual benefit, created by mutual effort and directed towards human well-being’ (1984: 227). Inasmuch as mutuality signifies equality, however, she privileges substantive rather than formal equality. Heyward is at least nominally aware of the trap of reducing difference to sameness that seems to more generally accompany the notion of mutuality (1989: 34). ‘In the beginning is the relation, not sameness. In the beginning is tension and turbulence, not easy peace’ (1989: 100). Just relations are not relations of sameness per se; rather, they are relations in which the ‘tensions and turbulence’ of intersubjectivity are embraced and valued rather than negated. Where there is recognition and even welcoming of interdependence, the antagonism of dualist configurations of subjectivity which inevitably generate inequality is displaced. Mutuality is thus understood not in terms of quid pro quo but as ‘a sharing of power in such a way that each participant in the relationship is called forth more fully into becoming who she is – a whole person with integrity’ (1989: 191). Just as the notion of person is bound to the personhood of others, so too does the notion of personal integrity embrace the individual’s relation to others. For Heyward, persons with integrity are those who understand power as a relational concept and who willingly engage in a mutual sharing of power to the advantage of all, rather than in a competitive contest that sees one party advantaged at the peril of another. ‘By “integrity” I mean a personal sense of being not an autonomous individual but a participant with all of creation in life’ (1996: 24). While Heyward’s focus on human relations has led to the charge that she is in fact a ‘radical humanist’ rather than a theologian, she nonetheless consistently anchors her concept of mutuality as power sharing within both a theocentric and a Christocentric framework.71 In fact, a radical Christology forms the very foundation of her claims in defence of mutuality, and her suspicion of orthodox readings of agape. Throughout Heyward’s work, Jesus stands as an exemplary figure of just relations. His radical concern for the well-being of others derives not from a rejection of self, she thinks, but from the recognition that self and other are 71 The Journal of Religious Ethics, 24:1 (Spring 1996) published an exchange between the orthodox theologian Colin Grant and Carter Heyward concerning this very issue. Grant charged Heyward, and a number of feminist writers engaged in a process of re-envisaging the theology of love, with having lost sight of theology in favour of humanism. Heyward rejected this charge, asserting that her interest in the erotic and in mutuality derives explicitly from her understanding of God as the ‘One’, that is, the source of transcending the self/other oppositional structure.

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The subject of love intimately and inextricably connected. ‘Jesus’ engagement with those around him . . . was of such intensity that the boundaries which commonly separate people, which divide one person’s self-interest from another’s, were shattered’ (1984: 237). Contrary to orthodox readings, what Jesus models is not sacrificial love but an empathic or compassionate love that is grounded in a willingness to feel for the other – something that is wholly different from incorporating the other into oneself, or even from projecting oneself into the other. Moreover, the basis of this openness to the other, according to Heyward, is Jesus’ own very particular experience of personhood as fully embodied. The historical emphasis on the spiritualisation of the incarnate form of Christ is itself an effect of patriarchal investments in dualism and hierarchical power. For Heyward, if the Incarnation is to have any meaning at all, then it is as a fully embodied, fully human experience of subjectivity that it is made meaningful (1982: 7). This is something that she understands patriarchal theology, with its emphasis on the death rather than on the life of Jesus, to have profoundly misunderstood. Heyward makes no apologies for the transformative direction of her theology, nor for her unorthodox Christology; thus, when it comes to the question of Christianity and its engagement with love, she affirms the radical nature of her intentions: I am not attempting simply to rearrange the traditional christian categories of love. I am suggesting that these distinctions represent a radical misapprehension of love, which is at once divine and human. (1989: 98)

The disinterested, disembodied, wholly other construction of agapic love that characterises orthodox Christian theology fails to honour the Incarnation in all its complexity. Agapic love effectively denies the very conditions that ‘God made flesh’ was thought to transform. In this respect, Heyward, like Purvis, refuses to accept the distinction between the particular and the universal, interested and disinterested love; instead she sees it as a legacy of classical dualistic assumptions about the nature of the world. Jesus was not a model of disinterested love, and, in this respect, Heyward takes his historical particularity, and the Incarnation, as authoritative. On the contrary, Jesus symbolises a universal love that is also very particular – expressive of his own very particular subjectivity, which itself is grounded in and through the particular subjectivity of others i.e., in relationship. ‘Jesus acted as if every person mattered, as if every life were as deeply rooted in divine soil as every other human life, including his own’ (1984: 237). In Heyward’s Christology, Jesus stands as a symbol of intersubjective relations wherein subjectivity itself cannot be thought to exist outside of relationship with the other. EROS AND MUTUALITY

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Heyward’s concern with the implications of orthodox theological dogma in the perpetuation of injustice and inequality clearly leads to her rejection of agape as

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Feminist theology: for the love of God a thoroughly patriarchal and unjust conception of love. Its affiliation with dualist assumptions that privilege spirit over flesh, the eternal over the temporal, God over humanity, and the impersonal over the personal, limit its conceptual parameters to such an extent that Heyward finds it almost impossible to reconfigure within her conception of justice in right-relation. Despite the fact that she repeatedly asserts that eros, philia, and agape are simply ‘different words for a single act of love’ (1982: xix; 1984: 99), it is to eros and philia that she turns in seeking a model of love that is better able to express mutuality. Having so resoundingly failed the test of mutuality, agape as such is but a shadowy presence in Heyward’s theology of the erotic. In contrast to traditional Christian readings of eros, Heyward’s erotic assumes that the embodied experience of human subjectivity is also the inescapable site of subjective and intersubjective relations, including the experience of mutual love. As she notes, The traditional christian understanding of love fails to value adequately the embodied human experience of love among friends and sexual partners because it assumes the negative, dangerous, and nonspiritual character of sensual erotic and sexual feelings and expressions. (1984: 99)72

For Heyward, it is as perceptual, affective, relational, and embodied beings that we exist, and she simply rejects as misogyny the exclusion of sexuality and sensuality from the Christian logos. The traditional emphasis on abstract, disembodied spirituality serves only to deny the otherwise self-evident extent to which human subjectivity, including the aspects of rationality and spirituality, are necessarily mediated through a nexus of embodied affectivity, irrespective of gender. Moreover, the realities of sexual violence and sexual oppression that have historically been the overwhelming experience of women are unconscionably buttressed by the selective emphasis on only certain teachings or interpretations of foundational thinkers like Augustine and Tertullian, who have associated embodied desire with female sin. By extension of course, sin itself is feminised. For Heyward, this negation of a significant aspect of human existence, along with the relentlessly negative association of sexuality with the feminine, attests to patriarchal anxieties about women. It is not as theology but as misogyny that such teachings are promulgated for Heyward. Inasmuch as her goal is right-relation, its achievement is precluded by relations based upon denial and negation, for they reflect not mutuality but the power 72 James Lassen-Willems raises an important question with respect to the exclusions from Heyward’s construction of Christianity as wholly hostile towards sexuality. He notes that her failure to engage with the mystical tradition reflects her theoretical privileging of an interrelational understanding of subjectivity. This intersubjective emphasis then obstructs her from reflecting on the human experience of introversion, for to do so would return her to the discourse of individuality. ‘She seems to have missed the significance of introversion in human experience, except to label it a perversion (Lassen-Williams [sic] 1990: 352). Thus, she fails to attend to the significance of the mystical traditions within Christianity.

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structures of oppressive hierarchies. In contrast she proposes that the erotic should be understood as ‘the divine Spirit’s yearning, through our bodyselves, toward mutually empowering relation, which is our most fully embodied experience of God as love’ (1984: 99). The erotic is the source of our capacity to live in relations of equality, and, for Heyward, inasmuch as eros is directed towards the mutual empowerment of each person in relation it carries the promise of an immanent experience of justice and divinity. In this respect, Heyward’s erotic is considerably more reminiscent of Freud’s libido than it is of Plato’s vulgar eros, for it is conceived as a life-sustaining resource that is directed towards mutual creation. Clearly Heyward’s erotic is not the eros of either licentious, untrammelled desire or a self-interested avaricious soul, both conceptions of which have haunted certain Christian teachings concerning the appetites. When she is thinking of a divine erotic, she also excludes something like untrammelled desire, but not because it is sexual, and nor because it bespeaks of a lost battle between sacred spirit and profane flesh. If untrammelled desire is to be excluded from calling forth the divine it is because it cannot embrace the notion of right-relation. Inasmuch as sexuality has been a prominent feature of Heyward’s work, it is so in the context of its relationship to discourses of power. Thus, she shares the traditional theological concerns regarding the relationship between desire and self-interest, but only to the extent that relations dominated by self-interest are one way of living in unjust relations with others. For Heyward, sexuality is as open to abuses of power as any other aspect of human interrelation, and what she wishes to affirm in her constitution of eros is a relationship between self and other that is mutually empowering. In many respects, Heyward’s neo-Marxist, feminist concerns with the material conditions of oppression and inequality in the world do determine and shape the direction of her theology. Moreover, the influence of secular feminist work on questions of embodiment, femininity, and eros have undoubtedly left a definitive imprint on her reconsideration of eros as a form of love that can express justice. The eros that she privileges is one that, as Anne Gilson notes, ‘holds the power to connect, to transform, to liberate’ (1995: 82), and the appetitive desire that is typically attributed to eros is reconfigured as a sacred yearning for mutuality, justice, and equality in relations. Essentially, these moments of living in right-relation reflect the heart of divine Christian love for Carter Heyward. While Heyward’s theology of love is perhaps the most attuned to issues of gender equality, her materialism serves to emphasise the ethical dimension of her theology. With a view to mutuality as the essence of right-relation, which is itself the expression of divine love, Heyward directs much of her work to revealing the extent to which the discriminatory and patriarchal practices of the Church neither reflect this conception of right social relations nor support a genuinely Christian theology of love. In focusing her critique on institutional reform, to redress the injustice of the Church’s own discriminatory practices, however,

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Feminist theology: for the love of God Heyward’s theology of just, mutual love is surprisingly lacking in the spirit of excessive abundance and generosity that even Purvis’s mother-love was able to retain. It is as if Heyward’s critical recognition of the embodied dimension of love that initiates her return to eros, along with her attention to the relationship between power and love, actually impedes her ability to conceive of a love relation as springing from excess or abundance, and that could also be an achievable ethic in the social world. Mutuality, as one answer to the dilemma of self-interest and other-regard, ends up being a surprisingly rational, non-mystical, non-spiritual concept, which, at some level, relies upon the conscious intentions of individual persons. We must recognise that power can be lived differently, and we must apply that recognition if mutuality is to be instantiated. Thus, while Heyward’s attention to subjectivity as a relational concept does function to displace the subject/object, passive/receptive dichotomy that typifies discourses of love, her notion of mutuality ends up being somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, it undoes the notion of autonomous, individuated selves, while on the other it relies upon the same individuated, autonomous self to recognise its profound interdependence on and with others. Despite the fact that Heyward prioritises human experience as the site of all knowledge, including the knowledge of God or the sacred, her conception of divine love subordinates experience to the ethical principle of right-relation, thus leaving us with a moral imperative rather than a phenomenal experience of just love. While mutuality does address the ongoing dilemma of self-sacrifice that has plagued conceptions of other-regarding love, the possibility of a love that arises from excessive generosity or abundance remains elusive in Heyward’s ethical theology. French feminisms and the divine horizon How should we think of divinity in the work of those who are typically thought of as secular feminists? We assume their orientation and commitments are not the same as those of feminist theologians for whom religion is, in some respects, the ‘object’ of their inquiries. Yet even a cursory familiarity with the work of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous reveals the extent to which religious symbolism has been a consistent feature of all their writing.73 From Irigaray’s persuasive call for a divine in the image of woman, to Julia Kristeva’s very personal engagement with maternal divinity; from Cixous’ consistent reference to the myth of Eve, to her messianic and prophetic literary voice; in one 73 While the dialogue between French feminism and feminist religious writers has in fact been under way for some time, until the very recent publication of two collections by Morny Joy, Kathleen O’Grady and Judith L. Poxon, French Feminists on Religion: A Reader (2002), and Religion in French Feminist Thought: Critical Perspectives (2003), the collection of essays by Maggie C. W. Kim, Susan M. St Ville, and Susan M. Simonaitis, Transfigurations: Theology and the French Feminist (1993), was one of the few book-length contributions to this area.

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The subject of love way or another, divinity has played a very significant role in all their work. The question to be asked, then, is in what sense? Given that the work of Hélène Cixous is the subject of the remaining chapters, my focus here will be primarily on Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.74 Each of these writers has been acutely critical of the effects of the institutionalisation of Western religions upon women, and they have not hesitated to underscore the extent to which the religious symbolism of the West has been the symbolism of men. In this respect they would substantially agree with much of feminist theology. Yet, beyond critique, they each continue to invoke the language and tropes of the same religious traditions that have been heavily implicated in the failure of the very task with which each of them has at some time found herself vitally engaged, albeit differently: the ‘achievement’ of subjectivity for women.75 While they do so in substantially different ways, each of these writers continues to attribute significance to religion in their writing on subjectivity. However, in institutional terms, they would undoubtedly be positioned on the secular side of the secular/theological divide. For feminist the philosopher of religion Grace Jantzen, whose recent work entails a significant engagement with that of Luce Irigaray, the very question of a secular/theological opposition raises important questions about dualism. The historical situation that has seen the secular constructed in opposition to the religious is itself a product of modern, hence masculine, reasoning. As Jantzen notes: Ever since the ‘sacred canopy’ of the medieval world was shattered, secularism and religion have often defined themselves over against one another; yet they are deeply implicated in each other in the discourses of modernity, especially obviously in the technologies of power surrounding gender, ‘race’, colonialism, and sexuality. (1999: 8)

As is the case with all the binaries that have been determinative of Western metaphysics – being/becoming, appearance/reality, man/woman to name only a few – what is suppressed in oppositional relations is the extent to which each side relies upon the other for its identity. Jantzen is not alone in proposing that

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74 In this section on divinity and French feminism, and particularly on Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, I am indebted to the writing of three thinkers to whose reflections and insights I am unable to do adequate justice, but upon whose wisdom and perspicacity I am unquestionably reliant. I refer especially to Grace Jantzen’s Becoming Divine (1999), Morny Joy’s ‘Equality or Divinity: A False Dichotomy?’ (1990), and Penelope Deutscher’s ‘The Only Diabolical Thing about Women . . . : Luce Irigaray on Divinity’ (1994). 75 As noted in the previous chapter, there has been considerable critical attention to the tendency to connect these three thinkers under the single mantle of ‘French feminists’, thus making any attempt to elucidate a shared project a treacherous one. At the risk of understating their differences, I would nonetheless assert that each of them is concerned, in different ways, with thinking through the difference that sexual difference makes to questions of subjectivity. Though, for each of them, their work has undergone significant changes in the twenty to thirty years they have been writing, they each remain interested in an overarching question concerning what I would call an ethics of intersubjectivity.

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Feminist theology: for the love of God Derridean deconstruction has provided a critical tool through which we can acknowledge this interdependence, not with a view to destruction, as is so often the charge against deconstruction, but rather with a view to destabilising the unity that has prevented different ways of thinking about all relations (1999: 8). If we are to accept the deconstructive ‘revelation’ regarding binary relations, as do all of these thinkers, then the presumed opposition that would distinguish their work from that of many feminist theologians is misguided. To continue to differentiate them along the lines of institutional boundaries seems to do little more than create a further obstacle to women’s engagements with each other, which is something that feminists have long noted to be a strategy that primarily only serves the interests of patriarchy. For Irigaray, Kristeva, and Cixous the ontological question of the existence of God or divinity seems not to be the primary issue that concerns them in terms of their engagement with religious discourses. Nor do they share with analytic philosophers of religion an over-concern with the problem of ‘true’ or ‘justifiable’ belief. Rather, in keeping with their respective commitments to a post-structural understanding of the symbolic as it functions epistemologically, phenomenologically, and psychologically through language and culture, they approach divinity by assuming its significance, if for no other reason than, as Jantzen notes, ‘the Western imaginary, irrespective of religious observances, is saturated with images, values and symbols derived from the Judeo-Christian heritage’ (Jantzen, 1999: 14; Irigaray, 1993b: 23). Thus, the questions that run throughout their varying critiques of patriarchal religion concern the effects of this masculine divine on the cultural imaginary and especially on women, for whom it has offered fewer positive representations. In what ways has this masculine divine been pressed into the service of patriarchal ideals? What does it make possible? What does it preclude? Conceived as an omnipotent and omniscient male, whose creative potential is self-generated, the Judaeo-Christian divine is, and has been, used to serve many functions. But its most significant ‘function’ for these thinkers is in its relation to subjectivity, where it has offered exclusively to men an ontological horizon of perfection. Bringing both post-structuralism and gender to Feuerbach, Irigaray notes that ‘[t]o posit a gender, a God is necessary: guaranteeing the infinite’, and ‘[i]n order to become, it is essential to have a gender or an essence (consequently a sexuate essence) as a horizon’ (1993c: 61). Thus, inasmuch as subjectivity is an achievement, and not a given, it is a process of infinite becoming and not being. God, then, has served men as the horizon of that becoming, reflecting back to them an idealised image of themselves, while women have served as the negative other that completes the circuit. Woman is what men are not, while gods are what they strive to become. The suggestion that the divine functions as a horizon of perfection that draws the human subject into the future is not a new one, nor is the suggestion that the divine is frequently constituted in the likeness of its worshippers. Feuerbach

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was long preceded by Xenophanes, who, even in the sixth century BCE, was well aware of the extent to which each society serves its own ends by producing a divine in its own image. What is ‘new’, then, in the thinking of writers like Irigaray, Kristeva, and Cixous is the connection between sexual difference and divinity and the consequences this implies for becoming a subject. For Irigaray, the implications of this gendered horizon of divinity are clear. If, as Feuerbach suggests, God is the mirror of man (and, as Irigaray adds, through this mirror, man becomes man), then the monosexuate culture of Judeo-Christian divinity has meant that woman has no mirror through which to become woman. If indeed having a God and becoming one’s gender go hand in hand (Irigaray, 1993c: 67), and the only role for woman that has been afforded any divinity is that of mother, then the infinite of woman’s becoming has been paralysed. Giving birth to God the Son, whose ‘alliance is with the Father’ (Irigaray, 1993c: 62), is not enough to open on to the horizon of women’s subjectivity. Should the divine continue to function as a symbolic archetype of subjectivity that is conceived in gendered terms, and should it continue to function as the authority for freedom, autonomy and sovereignty, then, according to Irigaray, the lack of a divine that is conceived as female will inhibit, if not prevent, the freedom, autonomy, and sovereignty of women qua women. ‘If women have no God, they are unable to communicate or commune with one another’ (1993c: 62). Without a God, women ‘lack an ideal that would be their goal or path in becoming’ (1993c: 63–64). For Irigaray, this is an argument about justice and a kind of equality many feminists would think of as substantive rather than formal. Irigaray repeatedly distances herself from the notion of equality per se, fearing its neutralising tendencies. Increasingly, she has privileged the difference that sexual difference signifies, noting that for her it is perhaps the ultimate symbol of difference in our time (1993b: 15). Moreover, she has been sharply critical of ‘certain feminists of our time’, who, in the tradition of modernism, call for the neutralisation of sex in the spirit of equality (1993b: 12). For Irigaray, the risk of this kind of call to equality is the risk of still further entrenching the masculine economy of sameness. Thus, in advocating a divine imagined in the likeness of woman, she is not seeking to replace the divine of masculinity as if it were a matter of either/or, but rather to assert the need for both/and . . . In providing a telos for the subjectivity of both sexes, the divine horizon of becoming becomes for Irigaray a horizon of becoming differences. Towards the conclusion of ‘Divine Women’ (1993c), the essay from which most of the above is drawn, Irigaray interestingly connects the question of divinity to love. God, she says, ‘conceives and loves himself’ (1993c: 68), and, to the extent that women are not a part of God’s conception – of the Father’s conception of the Son – women are denied the possibility of loving ourselves. And without self-love, how can we love God as we are enjoined in the first commandment to do? ‘Love of the other without love of self, without love of

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Feminist theology: for the love of God God, implies the submission of the female one, the other, and of the whole of the social body’ (1993c: 68). In a haunting echo of Nygren she then adds that, without love of God, we cannot love our neighbours, for ‘love of neighbor is an ethical consequence of becoming divine’ (1993c: 68). But, contrary to Nygren, Irigaray is unapologetically pragmatic here. She notes that the exclusion of selflove from divine love is ‘an idealistic and utopic hypothesis that brings in its wake physical and psychic misery’ (1993c: 68). Men, she says, lack the necessary generosity to care for the good of another without caring for their own (1993c: 68). Love of God, then, is the path to a more perfect becoming that ‘marks the horizon between the more past and the more future’ (1993c: 68) and that enables a generous love of the other as other. While it is not made explicit in the language Irigaray uses here, I take her to be engaging in a critique of the traditional configuration of agapic love that has considerable sympathies with feminist theological critiques. Self-love ceases to be reducible to the narcissistic concern with one’s own interests and becomes instead the very foundation of a subject for whom it is possible to love God, to love one’s neighbour, indeed, to love at all. Thus far I have indicated that Kristeva, Irigaray, and Cixous share a conception of divinity as a horizon of becoming for subjectivity. While I would stand by this assertion at the most general level, Julia Kristeva’s more thoroughgoing investment in Lacanian psychoanalysis gives rise to qualification, for it is less apparent in her work that woman as a ‘speaking’ subject is even possible let alone a divine configured in feminine terms. Kristeva has not gone the route of Irigaray in explicitly proposing the need for a feminine conception of the divine, although she has focused extensively on the kind of divinity that has been afforded women within the symbolic order of masculinity.76 Her remarkable essay ‘Stabat Mater’ (1987b) is exemplary in this respect, particularly in its attention to maternal signification, for which she has in turn been variously hailed and condemned by feminist commentators.77 Through her dialogic reading of her own experience 76

As a number of commentators have recently noted, Kristeva, more than either Cixous or Irigaray, explicitly explores the role of religion in Western culture and Western subjectivity. See for example the collection of essays in David Crownfield (ed.), Religion, Women and Psychoanalysis (1992). Grace Jantzen (1999) provides a useful summary of relevant texts. On religion and sacrifice see Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language (1984 [1974]); on her elucidation of courtly love in medieval Christendom see Tales of Love (1987a [1983]); on psychoanalysis and faith see In the Beginning Was Love (1987c [1985]); and on the Biblical sacraments see New Maladies of the Soul (1995 [1993]). I would also add that Kristeva’s theory of abjection is not without its religious dimension, thus making Powers of Horror (1982) another important text. 77 As with Irigaray, and Cixous, Anglo-American feminists have expressed concern about the essentialist tone of Kristeva’s use of the maternal metaphor. Her tendency to valorise motherhood and the implicit heterosexism that accompanies this, along with her broad commitment to Lacanian psychoanalysis that accepts the symbolic as both necessary and masculine, has made her work problematic from many feminist perspectives. See for example, Domna Stanton, ‘Difference on Trial’ (1986); Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions (1989); and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990). Nonetheless, Jantzen, for example, finds Kristeva’s maternal emphasis useful as a metaphor for natality or birth that might subvert the masculine subject’s affinities with death.

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The subject of love of mothering, and her analysis of the figure of the Virgin Mary – the archetypal Western symbol of ‘maternality-for-the-other’ (Edelstein, 1992: 29) – ‘Stabat Mater’ textually performs the dynamic intersubjective or intertexual relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic, which has been the theoretical linchpin of her work, and about which I will say more shortly. Though Kristeva has been a critic of such postmodern practices as écriture féminine,78 the dialogical structure of ‘Stabat Mater’ that is in part expressed in the division of each page into two columns strongly invites precisely this kind of reading. On the left, in bold, is Kristeva’s account of her own experience of mothering, which is written as fragments of lyric prose, emphasising the embodied experience of the birth and early infancy of her son. This is the semiotic. On the right is a more masculine literary voice, albeit one that offers a ‘feminist’ reading of the agony of the Virgin Mary at the crucifixion. This is the symbolic. However, as the literary voice of each column inevitably shifts – the left towards a more rational discourse, and the right towards a more metaphorical and allusive discourse – Kristeva demonstrates by performance the ruse of binary relations (Edelstein, 1992: 35–36; Jantzen, 1999: 202–203). Divided yet inseparable, the text defies a final unity, and in so doing it reverberates with Kristeva’s understanding of the dialogic relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic. Kristeva’s well-known postulation of a maternal semiotic chora is the foundation of her privileging of the body as the originary chaotic site of ‘non-meaning’ from which subjectivity is born in the inauguration of language. This is the Lacanian moment of the child’s entry into the masculine symbolic that is language; a moment of abandonment and sacrifice as the child gives up the maternal body in favour of the Law or language of the Father. Yet, for Kristeva, all language emanates from and through the pulsating rhythms of the body, of which, she reminds us in the left-hand column of ‘Stabat Mater’, the maternal body is

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A term originally coined by Hélène Cixous in her essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1980), écriture féminine is perhaps best translated as ‘writing in the feminine’. The provenance of the term is to be found in Cixous’ recognition that language at the level of grammar and syntax is itself structured according to the logic of phallogocentrism. As with Irigaray and Kristeva, Cixous draws on the insights of Saussure and Lacan but rejects the binary logic of their analyses that inevitably position woman as other, lack, excluded. Écriture féminine thus emerged for Cixous in particular as a strategy through which woman could disrupt the binary, masculine structure of writing or language and write herself into ‘herstory’. Writing in the feminine privileges the unconscious, experience, and the body as sites of knowledge and thus, to my mind, it also privileges affect. Écriture féminine is now a term more widely used in literary theory to designate any text which disrupts the patriarchal phallogocentric tendencies of masculine writing. Hence, its application here to Kristeva’s ‘Stabat Mater’, a text which in its very structure is disruptive in precisely the ways écriture féminine is imagined to disrupt and despite what might be the objections of the author to this description. Importantly, écriture féminine is not, and indeed never has been, a writing exclusively limited to women. Indeed, Cixous’ canon of writers who exemplify écriture féminine and whose work she consistently returns to and draws upon are mostly men: Shakespeare, Heinrich von Kleist, and Dostoyevsky to name only three.

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Feminist theology: for the love of God the origin. Thus, the semiotic is necessarily feminine in Kristeva’s thinking, and it is this feminine other that is repressed and denied in Lacan’s story of subjectivity. Women have no option but to enter the symbolic, and the symbolic is masculine. Thus, according to Lacan, woman’s presence in the symbolic in fact marks her absence: absence as woman. Yet, for Kristeva, the physicality of the semiotic and all it stands for – drives, desire, the unconscious – indeed everything that cannot be coded into the rational order of the symbolic, and this necessarily includes love – can never ultimately be transcended. As she points out, language is ‘spoken’ through the body. ‘The semiotic, as physical, is therefore “a psychic modality, logically and chronologically prior to the sign, to meaning, and to the subject”: without this bodily basis there could be no symbolic web, no language, no culture’ (Kristeva in Jantzen, 1999: 195). Yet the dialectic movement that constitutes the semiotic relation to the symbolic, and against which Kristeva writes, is founded upon the denial of this very interdependence: order with disorder, rationality with irrationality, and the semiotic with the symbolic.79 Where patriarchy is invested in dialectical relations that understand the symbolic in opposition to the semiotic, Kristeva, via Bakhtin, is seemingly more attuned to the dialogic, which privileges relationship and intersubjectivity; notwithstanding the fact that she often refers to this as dialectic.80 As Marilyn Edelstein notes in her essay on the maternal metaphor in ‘Stabat Mater’, Kristeva considers the two modalities of the semiotic and the symbolic as ‘inseparable within the signifying process that constitutes language’. Moreover, Kristeva seems especially sympathetic to the dialogic notion of ‘another logic . . . the logic of distance and relationship’, the logic of ‘analogy and nonexclusive opposition’, as opposed to the monologic of being and identifying determination (Edelstein, 1992: 32, citing Kristeva, 1980: 71–72). The semiotic in fact routinely transgresses the borders of the symbolic, which becomes apparent for Kristeva in the excessive signifying possibilities of, for example, poetry, art, music, religion, and even childbirth, all of which push the limits of signification towards the horizon of non-meaning. She sees these discourses as welling up from, and symbolically representing, the semiotic within the symbolic, and being granted a certain strategic legitimacy in doing so. The very notion of a ‘welling up’ carries with it an important connection back to the trope of abundance, generosity, and excess with which this book is ultimately concerned. As the site of both religion and love, Kristeva’s excessive semiotic, at least in principle, shares with agape the possibility of a non-sacrificial way of configuring love. Again, in ways that are significantly distinguished from the work 79

Kristeva, like Cixous and Irigaray, writes against the Hegelian dialectic which understands the construction of woman as either immediately universal or ‘merely different’, immediately particular, but never singular. See ‘Stabat Mater’ (1987b), pp. 172–173. 80 For a fuller account of Kristeva’s use of Bakhtin see Marilyn Edelstein, ‘Metaphor, MetaNarrative, and Mater-Narrative in Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater”’ (1992: 31–32).

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The subject of love on agape and eros of the feminist theologians that we have just considered, Kristeva’s semiotic has the potential to conceive of a love that is embodied, particular, and abundant. Moreover, in addition to the disruption to the symbolic afforded by the signifying excesses of the semiotic, there is the further possibility of disruption that is found in the potential that this disruption will instigate the flow of jouissance.81 For example, Kristeva sees the avant-garde texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as being ‘catalysts of social upheavals [which] induce crises of representation, expressing and liberating the otherwise unarticulated jouissance of the semiotic’ (Grosz, 1989: 55). So excessive to the signifying order are these avant-garde texts that they render problematic the very concept of identity. As Kristeva says, ‘Th[eir] musical rhythm bursts out in laughter at the meaningful and demystifies not only all ideology but everything that aspires to be identical with itself’ (Kristeva cited in Grosz, 1989: 56). However, it is more often the case that the potential for semiotic disruption is subject to the disciplinary regimes of the ‘Law of the Father’ whereby the feminine threat of jouissance is actually obviated and ameliorated. Needless to say, the Law of the Father nonetheless has considerable trouble regulating these discourses, yet is heavily invested in doing so. A brief return to ‘Stabat Mater’ provides an illustration of Kristeva’s point here. In describing Christianity’s domestication of the maternal semiotic through the doctrines of Immaculate Conception, the Assumption, and the Virgin Birth, which necessarily construct the archetypal mother as indeed ‘alone of all her sex’,82 the rational, masculine discourse of theology ‘defines maternity only as an impossible elsewhere, a sacred beyond, a vessel of divinity, a spiritual tie with the ineffable godhead, and transcendence’s ultimate support’ (Kristeva, 1980: 237, cited in Jantzen, 1999: 199). As a consequence, traditional Christianity is ‘able to take up the maternal body and with it the semiotic, and by the ‘wiles of theology’ make it serve the masculinist symbolic (Jantzen, 1999: 198). Yet, following Derrida, this ‘taking up’ of the semiotic is never quite complete, the domestication never finally achieved, for the semiotic and the symbolic are understood not as states but rather as dynamic matrices of psycho-social interaction, in which there is a ceaseless production, transgression, and renegotiation of boundaries. 81

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Jouissance has no direct equivalent in English. In part, its usage derives from Roland Barthes’s distinction in The Pleasure of the Text 1975 [1973], between ‘plaisir’, which he associates with the enjoyment derived by the ego in conforming to culture, and jouissance, which disrupts ego identity and is the occasion of a dissolution of established boundaries. Feminists have taken up jouissance to signify a female sexual pleasure that is disruptive of the phallocentric order, and this is the sense in which Kristeva largely uses it. However, her emphasis is on disruptions to, or transgressions of, the symbolic by the semiotic, which reveal the fallacy of unity. The term has been further associated with écriture féminine, as a literary practice that privileges the relationship between bodies and texts. 82 Kristeva acknowledges that ‘between the lines’ her reading of the Virgin Mary in ‘Stabat Mater’ is heavily indebted to Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex (1976).

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Feminist theology: for the love of God The semiotic is thus an ever-present threat to the symbolic, and the threat is that of feminine jouissance. For Kristeva, the semiotic expression of religion, and again I would add love, signals the possibility of jouissance, and in this regard I see her providing a phenomenal or social account of divinity, which differs in emphasis, if not in substance, from Luce Irigaray’s theo-ontological engagement with divinity as the condition of becoming. Kristeva’s early work on religion focuses on a critique of Western Christianity’s preoccupation with the notion of belief and its justification, which have had the concomitant effect of ensuring that religion remains in the intellectual domain of the masculine symbolic, where, as Jantzen notes, it serves to underwrite and reinforce the domination of the phallus (1999: 197). However, Kristeva is more attentive to believers, and to the psychological and material bases out of which certain beliefs arise, than she is to the object of belief (Jantzen, 1999: 197). Hence, she recognises the semiotic presence in religious discourses, in the hymns, iconography, liturgy, art, and ritual which are so central to the ongoing attraction of religion, and that have become the focus of her recent work. Yet the disruptive force of jouissance is not without complexity. It also carries with it an implicit quality of violence that Kristeva understands as a central aspect of the semiotic. Jouissance announces itself in the violation of boundaries, erupting in a way that shatters the ‘order of things’, and it has the capacity to dissolve, if only momentarily, the binary structures that define the social order: body/soul, self/other, male/female, rational/irrational. Is this not the echo of transcendence, displaced into the immanent horizon of human experience? While it is outside the scope of this project to truly do justice to this connection between violence and the semiotic, it is nonetheless important to note that this relation is suggestive of the complexity of Kristeva’s understanding of divinity.83 We cannot assume that the divine potential of Kristeva’s maternal semiotic will necessarily map neatly on to our Judeo-Christian assumptions about the beneficent nature of divinity. As she enigmatically announces in ‘Stabat Mater’, ‘a mother is always branded by pain’ (1987b: 167). Because the remainder of this book focuses on the divine in Hélène Cixous’ work, I will limit my comments here to highlighting what I take to be an important aspect of her engagement with the debates on sexual difference that provide a necessary background to her conception of divinity. As with Irigaray and Kristeva, I see Cixous’ use of the religious symbolic as a means of thinking through the problematics of gendered subjectivity. She too recognises religion as something like a horizon of becoming; hence, in a recent interview, she describes God as a synonym for the future that leads us towards the infinite (O’Grady, 1996–97). 83

See Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982 [1980]). See also Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions (1989), for a more comprehensive analysis of the relationship between violence and the semiotic in Kristeva’s work, especially pp. 55–57.

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But, of the three writers I have considered here, Cixous is perhaps the most resolutely allusive and indeed, elusive. Rarely is religion per se the explicit subject of her writing. Committed to subverting the masculine relationship to correspondence between meaning and word, she continues to employ literary strategies that not only defy transparency but also stage the very impossibility of modernist fantasies of direct correspondence. Even when her writing conforms to the literary conventions of essay prose, it is rare for it to be other than allusive and poetic. In light of her extraordinary productivity, this makes the task of singularly representing her views on religion an almost impossible one. Yet it can be said that, from the outset, her work has always been saturated with a divine imaginary as she struggles to explore the place of the absolute in Western consciousness and Western subjectivity. Perhaps the most significant difference I see between Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva pertains to Cixous’ use of the terms masculinity and femininity. These concepts have always stood for two different signifying systems in her work, two different ‘libidinal economies’ that privilege different things. Inasmuch as her work is engaged with contemporary debates on sexual difference, however, she has and continues to acknowledge a pragmatic concern with the institutional or ideological subordination or negation of women. For many critics, particularly those focused on her work between 1975 and 1985, this attention to the pragmatic tended to have the effect of reattaching her otherwise fluid conception of masculinity and femininity on to the corporeality of men and women, and therefore led directly to the charge of essentialism. More recently, commentators have begun to note that, particularly in her work for the theatre, they can detect yet another shift in emphasis, this time away from an interest in sexual difference and towards an interest in a broader category of ‘human’ concerns. Attendant on this observation is an implicit suggestion that Cixous has abandoned her interest in the discourses of sexual difference, yet this interest has in itself always been simultaneously anchored to an underlying critique of binary power relations. To the extent that there might be an underlying trope of oppositional relations in Cixous’ work and sexual difference constituted in apparently binary terms is one example of this, I would argue that Cixous’ ultimate concern is not with the differences between masculinity and femininity per se, as it is in Irigaray’s work, but rather is to be found in the difference between systems and relations oriented towards life and those oriented towards death. Undoubtedly this sensitivity to the boundary between life and death was inaugurated through her personal experience of the death of her father when she was a child, about which she has written extensively. Throughout much of her oeuvre there is a recurring concern with the inescapable, yet incomprehensible, nature of death. Perhaps in having been so deeply and immediately affected by the experience of death, Cixous is particularly alive to the many ways in which death is given expression and therefore ‘lives’ within culture. To attempt the impossible then and to encapsulate

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Feminist theology: for the love of God her poetico-philosophy in a mere few sentences, I would suggest that it is in response to her ‘non-knowledge’ of death, to the limits in signification that death invokes, that we find the source of Cixous’ passion for thinking through the possibilities of a non-oppositional discourse on life and love. Cixous is, of course, in agreement with both Irigaray and Kristeva that the masculine is intimately affiliated with death, although the discourses of life are in fact, uniquely the subject of her work. For Cixous, inasmuch as the feminine signifies, it signifies life rather than woman, per se. Although she does acknowledge that, in a patriarchal context, woman may well have a privileged relationship to the feminine, morphology is not the determinative principle. As Verena Conley notes, the force of Cixous’ writing is endowed from her understanding of the feminine ‘as the living, as something that continues to escape all boundaries, that cannot be pinned down, controlled or even conceptualised. It is a drive to life – always related to otherness, which though it may begin in death, tends towards life’ (Conley, 1991: xii). As the focus of Cixous’ writing is increasingly on what makes it possible for ‘us’ to live as humans, as communities of men and women, and consequently on what prevents living, she has indeed concerned herself with the realm of the human. Yet the conditions for the possibilities of living have not wavered from her conception of the feminine as an economy of relations that is directed towards life. When, in one of her plays, she speaks of the failure of justice in the atrocities of Cambodia (Sihanouk, 1994c), for example, she refers to the exclusion of the feminine from the political landscape. When she laments the social or institutional structures that permitted the contamination of thousands of haemophiliacs with the AIDS virus in another of her plays, The Perjured City (2004b), she does so through the figure of a mythic mother whose sons were victims. This mythic trope of the maternal, again, refers to and stages the effects of the exclusion of the feminine; and, when she calls for justice for this archetypal mother, she does so by invoking Aeschylus’ Furies. Again, it is uniquely through a feminine trope that she makes her appeal to an immanent justice. And when she wants to conceive of a love relation that calls forth the divine, she does so through the figures of not one but two women, as we will see in my reflections on The Book of Promethea in Chapter 5. Cixous has long rejected the essentialist charge that would have her speaking of women and men when she refers to the masculine and feminine. What she has explicitly affirmed, however, is that the masculine functions to condense the signifiers of economies affiliated with death, while the feminine gestures towards the signifiers of life. From the outset, it has been towards living that Cixous writes. Concluding remarks In reviewing the work of a number of feminist theologians who have engaged the notion of other-regarding love through the lens of sexual difference, I have

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The subject of love attempted to draw out some of the central themes as well as the strengths and weaknesses of their respective projects, in the context of their implications for subjectivity. In reviewing the divine in the work of Irigaray, Kristeva, and Cixous, I have attempted to sketch a broad context in which to place the following discussion of divinity and love, specifically in Hélène Cixous’ writing. I do not mean to undermine the differences between these writers. Echoing Cixous, it is difference that gestures towards life, and in this spirit I find myself drawn to a productive engagement with the resonances between the concerns of many feminist theologians and the work of Irigaray, Kristeva, and Cixous. In the following chapters, I will be sketching a genealogy of other-regarding love specifically in the work of Hélène Cixous and suggesting that inseparable from her conception of divinity is her conception of feminine subjectivity. Many feminist theologians who have been critical of the androcentrism of JudeoChristian religions have employed the neologism thealogy to describe the spirit of their work. It is in the spirit, if not the letter, of thealogy that I take Cixous to be writing, not of a divine Goddess but of a divine feminine.

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CHAPTER 3

Hélène Cixous’ subject of love

True love for the other, religious without any specific denomination, brings about modes of exchange that are outside of any reversal. (Conley on Cixous, 1992: 100)

In an interview in 1996 with Hélène Cixous, Kathleen O’Grady broke something of a critical silence regarding the subject of Cixous’ relationship to religion. To the question of her personal relation to God, Cixous describes herself as ‘religiously atheistic’ (O’Grady, 1996–97). The statements that frame this disclosure, however, provide a context in which to read just what it is that she is implicitly distancing herself from and, more importantly, what it might be within religious discourses with which in practice she aligns herself. In the preceding sentence she said of God something she has said many times throughout her career: ‘For me, the signifier Dieu . . . is the synonym of what goes beyond us, of our own projection toward the future, toward infinity’ (O’Grady, 1996–97). God cannot be understood as a supernatural entity in such a statement that tends to locate the divine as an aspect of the human experience of time. This god is apparently not the wholly other God of the monotheistic Jewish or Christian logos. Like Carter Heyward, Cixous’ God is considerably more verb than noun. But in the sentence that follows her claim to being religiously atheistic, the instability rendered by her initial assertion of disbelief, and the constitution of God as a way of signifying the unthinkable limit, is paradoxically reinscribed at the same time as it is undone in the flight to enigma. Cixous goes on to say: ‘Ultimately I think that no one can write without the aid of God, but what is it, God?’ (O’Grady, 1996–97). By virtue of its positing, the very question reopens the status of the belief from which Cixous initially distanced herself. To ask what God is is firstly at least to imagine the possibility of divinity. Furthermore, the association of God with writing, which in itself has been one of Cixous’ most central theoretical concerns, reverberates with allusions to the divine relation between God and word that has defined patriarchal Jewish and Christian authority. As with much of Cixous’ work, then, we are left with a productive and intriguing ambiguity, calling us forth into her textual world.

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The subject of love Divinity, if not God per se, clearly lies somewhere near the heart of Cixous’ concerns. In one form or another, the divine has had a central place in her writing since she published her first collection of stories in 1967, bearing the title Le Prénom de Dieu. What remains fascinating about Cixous’ statements concerning religion, then, is the subject of the belief that they convey. It seems apparent that, while God is neither subject nor object of her belief, something divine is. Hélène Cixous believes: she says as much. The question is: in what? For it is clear that her engagement with religious discourse is no way entangled in the concerns regarding justifiable belief that are held by so many analytic philosophers of religion.84 Given the frequency with which Cixous invokes notions of the sacred, and divinity, her somewhat paradoxical relationship to religious discourses invites further consideration of the role the divine plays in her work. Is God simply a convenient signifier, invoked and mobilised at times when she wants to move both towards, as well as beyond, the limits of other signifiers, when she wants to work on what she calls the infinite? If it were solely the case that the divine is a semantic device that somehow names the unnameable by virtue of a literary flourish, it is hard to account for the sheer volume and complexity of her allusions. There are classic religious references in almost every Cixousian text. Moreover, it is not the case that Cixous simply refers to religious traditions and texts, nor that she simply exploits the semantic ambiguity of religious language. Cixous’ texts themselves frequently take on the quality of prophetic utterance. As noted by the Cixous scholar Verena Conley, who is more than familiar with Cixous’ post-structural commitments to the displacement of the religious space of the absolute that has always sustained the conception of God, ‘[a]n almost messianic tone pervades all these writings and goes directly against declarations by recouping origins, truth and essence’ (Conley, 1992: 108). While commentators on Cixous’ work have long taken up her concern with sexual difference, for in some sense this has been the favoured interpretative position particularly in North American scholarship, few have recognised the intimate relationship between these concerns and her tendency to work through them via a lexicon of religious signification. Although her recent writing seems to indicate that her religious imaginary has extended to include Eastern religions, Buddhism being the most obvious example, most of her religious allusions continue to derive either from the mythic traditions of classic Greek antiquity or from the Judaic and Christian traditions. Clearly Cixous does not envisage her use of religious references in the same way as those working within the domains of Jewish and Christian feminist theology. Yet, in her commitment to rethinking gender relations, and to thinking through the conditions of subjectivity that might sustain and support a 84

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Grace Jantzen’s Becoming Divine (1999) provides a critical account of the differences between the concerns of French feminist writers like Cixous, with respect to religion, and those of analytic philosophers of religion.

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love genuine meeting between self and other, she shares with many feminist theologians a parallel concern with the role that religions play in perpetuating injustice. Situating the divine in Cixous’ work is not, as I have suggested, simply a matter of finding God or divinity being invoked at the limits of language. With her attention sharply focused on an ethical understanding of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, Cixous returns to a certain invocation of the divine, again and again, when she wants to create the space for a ‘new’ or different way of understanding the kind of self–other relation that escapes the impulse towards negation and appropriation of alterity. The quality of this space, and what it permits Cixous to say about subjectivity, returns us to questions of the nature of divinity. Why is this space so frequently constituted through a symbolic suggestive of divinity? What are the conditions of this divinity which she so clearly values and offers to her readers as a moment outside of the relentless grasp of the antagonistic, dualistic subjectivities, something that has been a central concern of her work more or less since she began writing? While she may not ‘believe’ in ‘God’, it seems clear that Hélène Cixous is not lacking in a belief in the significance of the divine. As I hope to show, this belief seem to centre on her understanding of the virtue of a specific kind of relation to and with love, a love that is predicated on a feminine relation to difference at the level of subjectivity, and that, as a consequence, opens the self/other relation to a calling forth of divinity. The remainder of this book explores the relationship between Cixous’ conceptions of feminine subjectivity, love, and divinity as she continually traverses the possibility of an other-regarding love that is, indeed, other-regarding. However, in this chapter, we will first consider the background of Cixous’ engagement with the debates on sexual difference because they provide the resource for her conception of feminine subjectivity. We will then consider her early vision of the transformative promise of love, which appears towards the end of one of her most well known texts to Anglophone audiences, ‘Sorties’, from The Newly Born Woman (1986a).85 Relocating Cixous In recent years, commentators on and critics of Cixous’ work have attempted to make sense of it by dividing it temporally into distinct stages that correspond to 85 ‘Sorties’ appeared with an essay by Catherine Clément, ‘The Guilty One’, and a dialogue between the two authors, entitled ‘Exchange’, in La Jeune Née, in 1975. Some eleven years later, La Jeune Née was translated into English by Betsy Wing and published in 1986 as The Newly Born Woman. ‘Sorties’ has since been the essay to which many European and American feminists consistently turn as an example of the early theorising of what has come to be known, outside of France, as contemporary French feminism and écriture féminine. Throughout this book, I refer to this essay as ‘Sorties’ rather than as ‘The Newly Born Woman’ which has regrettably become the customary practice in Anglo-American feminist criticism. I wish to distinguish Cixous’ work from Clément’s, but also to acknowledge that The Newly Born Woman is not synonymous with Cixous. It is indeed a cowritten text.

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The subject of love her exploration of different genres.86 The apparently radical changes of form that her work has undergone over the course of the almost forty years in which she has produced a significant publication at least once per year perhaps encourages such an organising strategy. Yet the imposition of a concomitant temporal and taxonomic order can function to veil the ongoing thematic continuities of Cixous’ work. Cixous has always been an experimental writer who has self-consciously engaged with questions of genre. While it is possible to say that in recent years she has emphasised her work for the theatre – something she herself does not deny – I would argue that it is not in fact the case that her fundamental theoretical interests have also profoundly changed. She would not deny that the structure of writing within different genres imposes its own constraints and enables different possibilities of representation. For example, she distinguishes the ‘voice’ she may have in her dramatic writing from the ‘voice’ of her critical essays (Fort, 1997: 428). However, it may be more meaningful to enter the Cixousian thematic world in order to understand these shifts rather than to appeal to categories like novel and essay, or theory and fiction. Following Susan Rubin Sulieman who also underscores the difficulty of attributing genre to Cixous’ work, Lynn Penrod notes that ‘the boundaries between [her] works are virtually nonexistent’ (Penrod, 1996: xiii; Suleiman, 1991: xi). Hence, we can better understand the eclecticism of Cixous’ writing as lending itself to her unique affirmation of plurality, and to how this affirmation is intimately woven through her ongoing questioning of subjectivity. While the expressive vehicle has undoubtedly changed, Cixous’ concerns have largely remained the same. As Penrod explains, ‘Cixous’ texts in the final analysis are all intimately concerned with a thematics of life-affirming, love’ (1996: 12), and it is in respect of this life affirmation, this generativity, that I see divinity as one of the most consistent themes in her work. ‘The questions of who loves, who gives, and who celebrates life are constantly posed, never answered; love, passion, and a deep sense of seeking a connection between “life” and “art” haunt all Cixousian texts’ (1996: 12). 86

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This is particularly, if inadvertently, true of the intellectual biographies of the 1990s, and is perhaps an unavoidable feature of that genre of writing. Given the relative silence with which much of Cixous’ more recent work has actually been received by Anglo-American feminists, as opposed to that of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, it is somewhat surprising then to find that she has been the subject of a significant number of substantial studies. To Verena Andermatt Conley’s reprinted and revised biography of 1984 (reprinted in 1991) must be added Morag Shiach (1991), Lynn Penrod (1996), and Susan Sellars (1996), and, still more recently, Ian Blyth and Susan Sellers (2004). While reflecting different concerns, perhaps we should also include Jacques Derrida’s homage to their forty-year conversation, H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . (2006a [2000]) and his celebration of what he considers to be the genius of Hélène Cixous, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres & Genius: The Secrets of the Archive (2006b [2003]). Derrida’s texts can certainly be distinguished from the others however, in defying the biographer’s tendency to impose a kind of predictable order to life and text. And finally, since the publication of her genre-defying ‘autobiography’, Rootprints (1997 [1994]), co-written with Mireille Calle-Gruber, perhaps Cixous herself should be added to this list although her own autobiography very definitely refuses any predictable or recognisable autobiographical literary form.

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love Cixous’ diverse writing life has, more or less from the outset, been distinguished by a constant traversal of genre that nicely parallel the dynamic shifts that characterised her conception of feminine subjectivity. Her first play, La Pupille (1971), thus far never performed, was derived from an earlier fiction, Révolutions pour plus d’un Faust, and was completed in 1971. Portrait of Dora, perhaps her most widely known play in the Anglophone world, was written in 1976, around the same time she was publishing ‘Sorties’, the first of her polemical essays on sexual difference. In the 1980s she wrote three plays, La Prise de l’école de Madhubaï (1984), L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk Roi du Cambodge (1985), and L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves (1987). And, in the same years, she published six ‘fictions’ and three critical collections of essays including the ‘fiction’ which will form the basis of the analysis of love in Chapter 5, The Book of Promethea. The same diversity of form and genre continues to characterise her current output as she has returned in her prose fictions to the Algeria of her childhood and to reflections on her family of origin – mother, brother, and, as always, her father – to pose the perennial questions of differences born in and surviving through antagonisms marked by cultures of death. One could say the same concerns with cultures of death underpin her most recent plays as well, including the 1999 Tambour sur la digue (Drums on the Dyke), an epic puppet play inspired by Asian theatre techniques which in content hauntingly prefigures the very similar issues of justice surrounding Hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2005. Tambour is loosely based on an incident in China in 1998 which saw the deliberate flooding of certain areas in the country, without sufficient warning to the people who lived there, to control the swelling rivers and thereby to protect strategically what were seen to be the more economically significant areas. And in 2006 Cixous again collaborated with Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil to produce Le Dernier Caravansérail (The Last Caravan Stop), a play which again draws on the events of recent history, this time the plight of global refugees as they dramatise the implications and cruelties of exile.87 While Cixous herself claims that her writing for the theatre and her ‘fictions’ represent two different worlds, I want to reiterate the point that despite, or perhaps alongside, those differences is an extraordinary consistently of theme: the relationship of life to death; the place of love in self/other relations; the notion of justice beyond the law; and the effects of sexual difference upon knowledge practices.88 87 All of Hélène Cixous’ plays since the early 1980s have been written specifically for, and indeed with, the avant-garde left-wing French theatre company the Théâtre du Soleil. Under the direction of Ariane Mnouchkine the company collaborates extensively at all levels of each production. Where typically Cixous will initially work closely with Mnouchkine on developing the idea and script and then radically revise it in collaboration with the actors during rehearsals, Le Dernier Caravansérail marks a departure in being considerably more collaborative from the beginning. Much of the script itself was actually drawn from direct testimony gathered from interviews with refugees. 88 Lynn Penrod’s intellectual biography Hélène Cixous (1996) provides a thoroughly rigorous bibliography of Helen Cixous’ work. While she has limited her actual analysis to only exemplary texts, she has nevertheless cited all of Cixous’ work up to the date of publication.

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The subject of love

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Characterising the working through of all of these themes is an expansive lexicon of religious language, references, and concepts most of which return her and her reader to an abiding ethical concern with the self/other relation. There is something curiously consistent about the way Cixous’ writing resists the classificatory systems of literary criticism, especially given her interest in écriture féminine and the subversion of precisely that kind of tendency towards masculinist categorisation. Such resistance speaks to the impossibility of boundaries wherever they may be found. It also gestures towards the notion of excess which is itself a notion that is central to my overall project here of considering the way Cixous’ writing on love is important precisely because of its excessive possibilities which can be put into conversation with a revisioned agapic love conceived on a model of abundance. In a similar way, Cixous herself, or, more accurately, Cixous the author, resists the kind of linear narrative often imposed on the subject of biographies by their biographers, even intellectual biographers as rigorous and thoughtful as Cixous’. There is a noticeable tendency nonetheless to impose on her a kind of narrative of maturation which seems to posit her early work implicitly as somehow less formed and less sophisticated because it was more focused on the self and her later work as more mature, more developed because apparently it is more other-regarding. For example, both Lynn Penrod and Susan Sellers have suggested that Cixous’ work has developed from a ‘narcissistic preoccupation with self, i.e., herself,’ in her early fictions towards a later concern with intersubjectivity and sexual difference in the mid-to-late 1980s texts like The Book of Promethea and La Bataille de Arcachon. Cixous’ recent writing for the theatre then apparently caps off this linear biography of maturation through the suggestion that her attention is now clearly other-directed and focused on global concerns (Penrod, 1996: 1–13; Sellers, 1996: xi–xvii). Consider Penrod’s remarks on this ‘progression’. ‘[H]er creative writing, like her theoretical writing, has undergone a certain evolutionary process, a cheminement, which has seen the work move from what might be described as a narcissistic, inner-directed fiction to a much more other-directed kind of writing (mostly for the theatre) – writing that encompasses the great human questions of history’ (1996: 39). In the face of Penrod’s remarks I find myself immediately wanting to ask, are these ‘great human’ questions not also the ‘great human questions’ of religious traditions? – the very same questions that have always preoccupied Cixous irrespective of whether her subject is the individual, the parent, the couple, or the nation? What is the nature of life and death? How does death participate in life? How can we love in the face of our knowledge of death? What is the nature of a just relationship between sameness and difference? In many respects, I think the recognition of the consistency of the ‘religious’ dimension to Cixous’ writing and thought is helpful in this regard for it allows us to avoid the imposition of a certain kind of linearity where there is little to be gained by so doing. As I and others have already noted, Cixous has always written simultaneously across multiple genres. Furthermore,

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love another reason I find myself resisting this kind of categorisation of Cixous’ work concerns the way it seems to preclude the very kind of study I am doing here, one which focuses on a selection of texts from a very specific period of her writing. While I have good reason for having chosen these texts – not the least of which being that they uniquely serve my specific interest in thinking through the kinds of subjectivities that might open to relations of love marked by the qualities of excess and abundance – there is nonetheless a tendency, albeit I think a mistaken one, to view such projects as somehow dated as if only the most recent work is a true and accurate reflection of Cixous’ thought. Perhaps Cixous’ own theoretical reliance upon psychoanalysis, with its tendency to impose linearity on a life seen as always in some sense in development, is also part of what might contribute to this tendency amongst those engaging with Cixous’ work to impose a similar kind of linearity on her oeuvre. Yet, at the very least, such strategies risk the perhaps unanticipated effect of foreclosing on instability, plurality, and excess, something that presumably Cixous herself would resist. Furthermore, and in the same vein, it is often noted that Cixous’ early literary preoccupations derive from her very personal experience of the death of her father when she was eleven years old, and to which she has frequently attributed her passion for writing as a passion for writing life/living.89 Cixous acknowledges the astounding significance of this event. However, it could equally be argued that, in the death of her father, Cixous encountered a kind of radical otherness that, when combined with her own experience of marginalisation or otherness as woman, Jew, exile, and immigrant, produced not a passion for her self per se but a passionate understanding of the relational possibilities between the self and the unknowable other. It should come as no surprise then that, in the early work that is apparently ‘preoccupied with herself’, the subject of the death of her father is continually accompanied by questions about God, the very archetype of unknowable otherness. Even in The Book of Promethea (1991a), a book centred on the exploration of a relationship between passionate love and presence, we can see the traces of this ongoing affiliation as Cixous invokes her dead father in the same breath as she invokes God. ‘I myself don’t believe in God and my belief is as strong and deeply rooted as yours. And what remains of my father? I believe absolutely in 89

Interestingly, having for many years said she would never write about her mother, while seemingly never ceasing to write with and about her father, some of Cixous’ most recent writings, which take the form of something more like memoir, are significantly engaged with questions about her relationship with her mother and the implicit role her mother has played as the source of her writing. See especially Osnabrück (1999), Reveries of the Wild Woman (2006a [2000]), and The Day I Wasn’t There (2006b [2000]). At different times, she has made a similar claim about her animals as the source of her writing, in particular her first dog Fips and her beloved cats. See for example, ‘Stigmata, or Job the Dog’, from Stigmata: Escaping Texts (1998) and Messie (1996). For all that they are rooted in the very particularity of each of these relations, the claims have in common an ongoing reflection on the self/other relation and in particular on the way differences oriented towards life permit a kind of loving or living in the present.

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The subject of love his desolate bones; I believe his existence persists as it has moved into my present thought’ (1991a: 190). As with so much of Cixous’ poetico-philosophy we are left with questions rather than answers. Are we to assume that the radical divide between life and death is momentarily overcome in the present thought of the dead loved one, in the spirit of Kierkegaard’s most divine and perfect love of the dead? Perhaps we are to suppose that the radical divide between God and humanity is overcome in the same way? Or does the death of the father also mark the death of God, the desolate bones of one signifying the desolate bones of the other? Perhaps it is no surprise that Cixous might prefer to see her work as a continuing exploration of an ethics which is constantly informed by her commitment both to difference and to poetics rather than as a progressive journey of maturation. Notions of progress tend to carry with them associations with linearity and by extension, then, masculinity, both of which Cixous might want to complicate. She has always been deeply opposed to notions of arrival, with their attendant implications of closure, preferring instead to invoke the signifying openness of journeying. As Conley recognises, ‘Journeys, traversals, are the very stuff of all her writing’ (1992: 58). It seems likely that, while Cixous might recognise the possibility of reading her work in and through the lens of maturation, she would and does resist claiming such stories as ‘her own’. In her own words in relation to the question of her writing of both ‘fiction’ and for the theatre: ‘There is no political or ethical rupture among my activities, but my fiction and my plays are two worlds or two continents with completely different formal and aesthetic laws’ (Fort, 1997: 427). Sameness and difference are in tension here as Cixous distinguishes between a form that changes and a content that remains consistent at the level of the ethical. In the spirit of this ethical – and I would add political – continuity (although Cixous herself rejects the political) that multiplies rather than resolves contradiction, I turn to questions of divinity in Cixous’ work. What concerns me are the multiple ways in which divinity is invoked throughout her writing life, and the ‘work’ which divinity does, quite specifically, for the claims she makes with respect to subjectivity. Why does she evoke the divine when she wants to engage the possibility of a different economy of subjectivity, and what is the nature of this evocation? How, for example, should we understand the notion of soul that she says marks the uniqueness of each of her plays, so concerned as they are with questions of human relations at a global level? ‘For me, each of these plays is different, unique, and I do not think of it in a globalizing context, but as having a specificity, as a singular soul’ (Fort, 1997: 429). Cixous is by no means alone in this kind of invocation of divine signification. As we have seen in Chapter 2, it is equally, if differently evident in the work of Luce Irigaray, particularly in her most recent writings. Similarly it is also apparent in Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of maternal/feminine jouissance.90 However, it

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See the section in the previous chapter, ‘French feminism and the divine horizon’, pp. 83–93.

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love is important to remember that, while all these theorists engage the divine, they do so, by and large, in the service of different projects from those of feminist theologians. Divinity, particularly in their collective work of the last fifteen to twenty years, is typically invoked, and in some sense assumed rather than considered a subject of inquiry in itself. In this regard, all three thinkers fit well within the trajectory of what is being termed by some as the ‘re-turn to religion’ which has defined so much of post-structural continental thought in recent years – disciplinary and even national borders notwithstanding. The very content of much of Cixous’ writing provides good reason to reject commentaries that suggest she has ‘matured’ from a concern with self to a concern with otherness. It seems far more consistent with an overall Cixousian project to suggest that she has always concerned herself with questions of the relations between self and other. Given that her work is equally informed by an ongoing, if until recently somewhat submerged, dialogue with Jacques Derrida and the work of deconstruction, Cixous can be understood as beginning her exploration of subjectivity from a position that assumes that the subject is dispersed rather than unified.91 Thus, it is to questions of becoming that she turns, rather than to the modernist and masculine preoccupation with being. As Verena Conley says, ‘In place of the bourgeois subject, she constructs a multiple being in perpetual metamorphosis’ (1992: 31). Cixous’ ‘multiple being’ offers a sometimes trenchant, but more often than not a subtle yet sustained, critique of Enlightenment discourses of subjectivity that esteem the masculine notions of an autonomous, singular and rational subject, and against which she proposes a fluid and dispersed feminine subject of the moment. To this end, much of her earlier, ‘theoretical’ work seems to be informed by her initially qualified and allusive conceptualisation of feminine dispersal as the defining quality of a ‘new’ conception of subjectivity, a conception that lends itself to sustaining difference. This is particularly the case in so far as this early, speculative work takes shape as a counterpoint to her critique of both Hegelian and Freudian notions of subjectivity. However, by the early to mid-1980s much of the explicit voice of the critic of patriarchal logocentrism gives way to the more 91 It was not until 1998 with the French publication of the co-authored Voiles (translated into English and published as Veils in 2001) that Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida appear in print together. Both, however, long acknowledged the profound influence they had on each other’s work. Since the publication of Voiles in 2001, Cixous has written an homage to Derrida entitled Portrait de Jacques Derrida en Jeune Saint Juif (translated into English as Portrait of Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint in 2004). In 2002 Derrida’s homage to Cixous was published as H. C. pour la vie, c’est-à-dire (translated into English as H. C. for Life: That Is to Say and published in 2006). In 2003 Cixous published a selection of her own dreams under the title Rêve, je te dis (translated into English and published in 2006 as Dream I Tell You). The ‘you’ of the title is Jacques Derrida. In 2006 the Journal New Literary History (37:1) published a special issue on the work of Hélène Cixous and many of the articles address the intellectual conversation between Derrida and Cixous. There is also in this volume an interview with them both.

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The subject of love speculative voice that seems to derive from Cixous’ investment in the socially subversive potential of écriture féminine. Her encounter with the work of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector clearly marks a shift from a certain critique of what is, that is, patriarchy and hierarchical opposition, to a speculation of what might be, that is, dispersal and equality in difference. Lispector’s influence on Cixous also marks a significant shift in her theorisation of subjectivity. At this point she abandons her overt dialogue with Hegel and Freud on questions of subjectivity and turns to a more thoroughgoing engagement with the feminine as a principle of what she refers to as a different economy of exchange. In the context of her implicit engagement with divinity, unsurprisingly perhaps, she also moves away from an overt critique of patriarchal religion, which is so evident in essays like ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1980 [1975]), ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ (1981 [1976]), and ‘Sorties’ (1986a [1975]). The responsive tone of these works shifts to an affirmative envisioning of what may be possible in a meeting between self and other, and with this shift comes a less constrained and more speculative invocation of the divine. In the context of her theoretical, rather than her literary, allusions, she turns to Heidegger and Nietzsche, albeit obliquely, in her later writings which concern themselves so much more overtly with what the conditions of such an affirmative intersubjectivity might permit. In works like The Book of Promethea and La Bataille de Arcachon, for example, we find Cixous exploring a love relation in which it is radical alterity that provides the occasion of a calling forth of divinity, a becoming divine. While Cixous’ project of exploring ‘new’ or other possibilities for understanding subjectivity can be easily situated in philosophical debates, the language she uses and the metaphors and allusions she relies upon speak to themes that are also germane to the discourses of theology and religion. Indeed, particularly when she is writing of love, her rhetorical style is often extraordinarily evocative of both the Jewish prophets and the Christian mystics.92 This is especially the case 92

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Cixous has consistently noted that she is ‘not religious’ and that, while she is Jewish by ethnicity, the family was certainly not orthodox in terms of practice. Nor either, however, was the family without rituals and traditions that do find their source in Judaic worship. Cixous makes the point that, though at the time she deeply experienced these rituals in connection to family, they felt unanchored from any systematic sense of Judaism. Thus, she claims not to have been left with an abiding sense of the family as religiously Jewish (personal conversation, Paris, May 2004). Given the centrality of the ‘feminine’ spaces of family, home, and food to the quotidian experience of Judaism, perhaps Cixous underestimates somewhat the religiosity of her own family as well as the influence of this ‘religious’ experience in the later formation of her thought. Moreover, the influence of her Jewish textual and cultural heritage including her oft-observed love of the Hebrew Bible and especially the Pentateuch, along with her formative experiences of anti-Semitism, cannot be underestimated. Surely they too are profound influences on the formation of what I am here arguing is an essential aspect of all her writing, her desire for a loving, non-exclusionary, love of the other. While I think the question of the relationship between Cixous’ ideas on love and difference as they bear specifically on the influences of Judaism would be an important and revealing study, it is not one with which I am engaged here. Specifically, and to reiterate, my interest is limited to the way Cixous’ writings on feminine economies of

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love in The Book of Promethea where, in her theorisation or exploration of an escape from antagonistic dualism, her subjects can be explicitly understood as encountering divinity, although the nature of that divinity often remains ambiguous. Consider, for example, the tone and language of her description of just such a moment from The Book of Promethea. [I]f I get ready to embrace Promethea – and every time it is as if I were embracing the world, it is simpler and simpler and more and more religious, because from that moment on rarely does the kiss remain one between the two of us; it is scarcely given before it calls the whole universe to celebrate, in an infinitesimal and incredible celebration, genesis fills the air we breathe – so I have scarcely bent to kiss her before I see the earth quiver, the oak tree three steps to the right of Promethea suddenly lights up, all the leaves catch, and the tree goes deep into my soul with Promethea’s eyes forever. Yes, the whole world is stricken with my amazements. Thousands of ecstasies come over it. I had heard about this. Now I have seen it. (1991a: 52)

Unlike The Book of Promethea, however, ‘Sorties’ is not a text that immediately evokes questions about divinity. Yet its central place in Cixous’ thinking about feminine subjectivities invites us to reflect upon what might be thought of as the antecedents of a trope which I am arguing becomes increasingly pivotal in her later writing, divinity. ‘Sorties’ can, and most often is, described as an essay that reflects a period in Cixous’ work in which she was explicitly engaging with issues of sexual difference. Yet what is equally apparent in this text is the overarching trope of a kind of divine justice that informs her analysis, including her call for women to be liberated from beneath the oppressive constraints of a patriarchal law which has been buttressed by a patriarchal notion of God. It is in the context of this spirit of something like divine justice that Cixous calls upon women to ‘write themselves’, to write the embodied experience of woman, and by whatever means, to break through the oppression and silence of the patriarchal logos. To write – the act will ‘realise’ the un-censored relationship of woman to her sexuality, to her woman-being giving her back access to her own forces; that will return her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her vast bodily territories kept under seal; that will tear her out of the superegoed, over-Mosesed structure where the same position of guilt is always reserved for her (guilty of everything, every time: of having desires, of not having any; of being frigid, or being ‘too’ hot; of not being both at once; of being too much of a mother and not enough; of nurturing and not nurturing . . .). Write yourself: your body must make itself heard. Then the huge resources of the unconscious will burst out. Finally the inexhaustible feminine Imaginary is going to be deployed. (1986a: 97) difference make possible a meeting in love between subjects where love itself is configured as abundant, excessive, generous, and potentially divine. It is this specific configuration of love that Christianity has claimed as uniquely its own. Challenging that claim, while a worthy and important project, is not mine here. However, I do briefly make mention of what I consider to be the Jewish origins of agape in Chapter 3, p. 111, footnote 98. To the extent that Nygren identifies the act of creation in Genesis as the first demonstration of the agapic nature of God, he is inadvertently affirming its Jewish origins.

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The subject of love Cixous is clearly making a connection here between the ‘over-Mosesed’ structure of patriarchy, i.e., a connection between Moses, Law, and God ‘the Father’, and woman’s displacement from her self as woman. I would also add that the religious dimension of this observation cannot be thought of as incidental to Cixous’ claim most especially when it is constituted as the ground of the very structure that inaugurates woman’s inevitable guilt and responsibility. When Cixous calls for the deployment of a feminine imaginary she is calling for it against this singularly masculine conception of divinity. The remainder of this chapter takes up the spirit of Cixous’ call to women to write themselves, but is more explicitly focused on her conception of feminine subjectivity, for ‘Sorties’ is the first of her essays to offer a sustained and explicit engagement with this topic. Because so much of the essay is constituted as a critique of institutionalised patriarchy, it also offers us the opportunity to reflect on Cixous’ understanding of the place of the Jewish and Christian God(s) in patriarchal logocentrism. This, then, provides a background for reflecting on what I am suggesting is her own invocation of divinity, specifically a feminine divine which I take up in Chapters 4 and 5. However, and importantly from my point of view here, in the final third of ‘Sorties’, Cixous develops and extends her preceding discussion of subjectivity through a more speculative engagement with the relationship of the feminine to love. Through a rereading of two mythical tales of love, Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesileia and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, she inquires into the conditions of what is clearly an amorous love relationship that, on Cixous’ reading, seems to encounter divinity. In both these readings, she is speculating about an idealised love between two subjects who have escaped, if only momentarily, the culture of ‘death’ and negation that she sees as being aligned with Hegelian subjectivity and sustained by the oppositional structure of the Jewish and Christian logos. In paying close attention to the language and imagery she uses, we can begin to glean something of the way she perceives this kind of feminine love as one that in its openness to difference momentarily calls forth the divine. Through her ongoing engagement with ‘philosophies’ of alterity as they bear on subjectivity in the subsequent chapters I will be following the way Cixous’ ‘evolving’ discourse of love functions to offer a certain materiality to her affirmative vision of a feminine economy of exchange between subjects. However, for now, as we will see, the moment of divinity is short-lived, particularly in Penthesileia, and in part this is because the dualistic and indeed binary paradigm of lover and beloved, self and other, that defined eros in Plato’s Symposium and agape in Nygren’s Eros and Agape,93 is not sufficiently disrupted. As we will see in the next two chapters, the trope of feminine love becomes increasingly difficult to 93

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See Chapter 1 for a full account of both Plato’s Symposium and Nygren’s Eros and Agape. See Chapter 2 for a sustained engagement with the feminist theological interventions around the binary structure of love implied in agape in Nygren’s work.

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love separate from divinity, and the affiliation returns us to the initial question of the structure of the divinity which Cixous comes to rely upon. Central to this structure will be the way Cixous’ feminine love is constituted elsewhere to binary logic, elsewhere to the dualisms of lover and beloved. Theorising sexual difference ‘Sorties’ begins with Cixous’ understanding of logocentrism as constructed through a binary logic, which, when coupled with phallocentrism, necessarily positions woman or the feminine as the negative side of an oppositional structure based on sameness.94 This structure does not amount to men and women, culture and nature, day and night. Rather, it amounts to men/not-men, culture/not-culture and day/not day.95 Binary logic is thoroughly saturated with a hierarchical value system that has always excluded the possibility of equality and/in difference, and, in so doing, it comes to produce a desire that is based on the appropriation and/or negation of the difference of the other. For Cixous, this relation, which is turned towards death, is epitomised in the Hegelian dialectic. She says, It is true that recognition, following the phallocentric lead, passes through a conflict the brunt of which is borne by woman; and that desire, in a world thus determined, is a desire for appropriation. . . . Where does desire come from? From a mixture of difference and inequality. No movement toward, if the two terms of the couple are in a state of equality. It is always difference of forces which results in movement. (1986a: 79)

Appropriation, then, is the fulcrum around which the self/other relation turns within patriarchy. Difference is not simply refused; it is subsumed, annihilated, and erased. Like many feminist theorists, Cixous has found Hegel’s master/slave dialectic a strategic and productive metaphor for thinking about the relations of sexual difference in Western culture.96 Logocentrism and phallocentrism come together in the Hegelian dialectic with the ironic force of ‘the natural’ driving their claims to truth (Cixous, 1986a: 65). But it is the very ‘naturalness’ of this coupling that Cixous wants to disrupt, for it papers over the universalising grasp 94

See note 5 on the issue of Cixous’ use of the terms masculine and feminine, woman/man. While there has been a significant contribution from feminist writers on the question of binary logic, Elizabeth Grosz’s Sexual Subversions (1989) provides a concise account in the context of ‘French feminism’ and Derridean deconstruction. See in particular pp. 26–38. 96 Like many of the French theorists of the post-1968 period, Cixous’ intellectual milieu was such that she would have been exposed to Alexander Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel. Kojève’s emphasis of the master/slave dialectic as a defining feature of the journey to self-consciousness has led to ample controversy in recent years. Hegel’s own position did not assume that the master/slave dialectic was other than simply one stage on the path to self-consciousness. It was by no means the defining feature of the self/other relation. Nonetheless, within the context of certain feminisms, the master/slave dialectic provides a compelling account of the intersubjective relations that have defined sexual difference. Elizabeth Grosz provides a detailed account of the influence of Kojève’s reading of Hegel, in Sexual Subversions (1989). See in particular pp. 2–6. 95

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The subject of love of a history which has never included women. The subject that is Hegel’s subject is sexed: male.97 While ‘History’ is indeed the history of this struggle for the appropriation of difference, ‘Sorties’ can in part be read as a deconstructive challenge to such a history, which offers instead, a herstory of History. By highlighting the aporia of sexual difference within History, and heretofore challenging the naturalness of the universal subject, ‘Sorties’ makes possible the notion that things could be otherwise. As Cixous says: One could, in fact, imagine that difference or inequality – if one understands by that noncoincidence, asymmetry – leads to desire without negativity, without one of the partner’s [sic] succumbing: we would recognise each other in a type of exchange in which each one would keep the other alive and different. (1986a: 79)

But this is not his/story, at least not yet. History, according to Cixous, is marked by a masculinity which produces otherness as a paradox in which the other, of which woman is an archetype, ‘is there only to be reappropriated, recaptured, and destroyed as other’ (1986a: 71). It is no other at all, for the conditions of meeting are structured dialectically in such a way as to make the possibility of a non-sacrificial encounter barely imaginable. But what if a feminine relation to difference could inaugurate a non-sacrificial economy of desire? As we will see both in the later part of ‘Sorties’ and more explicitly in my analysis of The Book of Promethea in Chapter 5, a feminine economy of desire offers one way of thinking about a positive exchange between subjects for whom difference is the occasion of becoming, not annihilation. Difference, then, becomes a calling into birth, not death. As Morag Shiach says of The Book of Promethea, it ‘dramatises the possibility of a relationship of intersubjective identification that is not a relationship of negation and death’ (1991: 96). As noted previously, the explicit references that Cixous makes to religious questions in ‘Sorties’ are actually relatively few. Those she does make are primarily threaded through her critique of the structure of patriarchy. Yet, particularly from her engagement with Freud’s account of the rise of patriarchy, we can nevertheless get a sense of why she so vehemently rejects the notion of God as it pertains to both Judaism and Christianity. For Cixous, the God(s) of the Judaic and Christian traditions are firmly tied to phallocentrism, and thus, ironically, to the perpetuation of injustice. At one point in the essay – which is illustrative of the way Cixous is so allusive in her engagement with institutional religion – she lyrically sings the transgressive possibilities of Freud’s Dora, whose hysteria, she says, is the embodied, feminine, and sexual subversion of Freudian, phallic, and Mosaic law. And to signify still further the very material connection between patriarchy, religion, and the oppressive discourses of power, she notes that this feminine

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97 See Genevieve Lloyd’s groundbreaking Man of Reason (1984) for an account of the phallocentric history of philosophical discourse. On Hegel see particularly chapters 4–6.

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love embodied disruption that Dora signifies, this jouissance, is in fact the disruption of a Bibliocapitalist social order (1986a: 95), i.e., a disruption of the economies of God, the disruption of the marriage of God and capitalism. In the Dawn of Phallocentrism, a subsection within ‘Sorties’ that we will be considering shortly, Cixous can be seen as elaborating on her sense that the Jewish and Christian God/(s) are born of a masculine imaginary. In the interstices of a changing social order, the maternal – ‘for reasons which remain “historically” unknown’ – apparently could no longer guarantee life, and she, this divine mother, thus gives way to the rise of a monotheistic paternal God. Against this context of what amounts to a patriarchal will-to-divine power we must, I think, take seriously the positioning of Cixous’ later discussions of divine love as it emerges in Penthesileia and Antony and Cleopatra for it is with these stories of amorous love that she closes ‘Sortie’, her apparently incendiary manifesto on sexual difference! Psychoanalysis and the gods of men Drawing on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939) and Aeschylus’ founding myth of patriarchal law, the Oresteia, as reference points for her critique of patriarchy and its affiliations with a masculine religious imaginary, Cixous begins by engaging with Freud’s assertion that patriarchy represents a ‘triumph of the spiritual over the sensory’ (Freud in Cixous, 1986a: 101). Freud considers that a socio-cultural shift from the mother to the father, albeit a mythic one, is a step forward in civilisation. He justifies his claim by reinscribing the binary opposition between mind and body and ‘reasons’ that, ‘since maternity is proved by the senses whereas paternity is a surmise based on a deduction and a premise’ (Freud in Cixous, 1986a: 101), the maternal represents a more primitive relationship to being. Freud is relatively silent on the more obvious association of paternity with faith because the opposition that he assumes or constructs between feminine corporeality and masculine spirituality, female immanence and male transcendence, is indebted to classical Greek assumptions about a privileged relation between masculinity and reason. In his mythico-psychoanalytic account of ‘human’ origins and the rise of the patriarchal God(s), Freud determines that patriarchy is derived from an unconscious anxiety that is provoked by the psychological uncertainty of a man ever really knowing that he is the father of his own offspring. What is at stake here is a battle over the power of generating life. As Cixous says, ‘Filiation through the mother cannot be denied, but who is sure of the father?’ (1986a: 111). Obviously, there is no equivalent anxiety for the mother, and thus for women. As I noted in Chapter 1, in the context of the story of agapic love as generative but apparently exclusively Christian love that the Protestant theological Anders Nygren tells, there is an interesting tension between the Jewish and Christian Gods which is further inflected in Freud’s story of the emergence of patriarchy. Nygren’s assertion that ‘genuine Christian’

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The subject of love

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agape finds its expression in the Creation, Incarnation, and crucifixion but its fulfilment only in the crucifixion actually charts something of a complex transition from a Jewish, creative God of abundance (the God of early Genesis) to a Christian God of Creation and abundance (the gifting God of the Incarnation), to a sacrificial God in the crucifixion (the God who expresses the highest ideal of other-regarding love in dying). Prior to this last move, both the Jewish and Christian Gods can be read as remarkably feminine in their attributes, taking on precisely the tropes of generative maternity which one might say, characterised the divine maternal. Yet the move to sacrifice seems simultaneously to map the move from the feminine to the masculine, the same move, arguably, that Freud is charting in the move to patriarchy. It is the patriarchal God, emptied of his maternal significance and generative now only in terms of an abstract and disembodied rationality, who now guarantees life. In the most basic terms, the either/or structure of Freud’s cosmogony, where we are clearly confronted by an either/or opposition, reflects precisely the kind of binary logic Cixous opposes. The power of the maternal role in reproduction, conceived in religious terms as a divine, creative, maternal principle, is translated, in Freud’s story of the rise of patriarchy, into the symbolic power of a paternal principle that is disconnected from the materiality of reproduction, and disconnected from the world. Thus, the generative, immanent Goddess of life, whose power derives from her body, becomes the generative, transcendent Word of God, whose power derives from abstraction and symbolic representation. In this ‘newly born’ binary symbolic world, the masculine divine has no need of a female consort to stimulate his generativity. On the contrary he is the selfsubsistent, self-same source of all that is, and he then functions as a teleological horizon of transcendence against which the inspirited subject – i.e., the masculine subject – measures his own being. Unsurprisingly this masculine symbolic power is constituted as altogether ‘other’ to the materiality of the maternal or feminine body which then displays the double-bind of otherness in becoming the archetypal measure for all others. From an unconscious reproductive anxiety that effectively amounts to a ‘lack’ in the male body – the lack of being able to guarantee paternal certainty – man as father imagines himself as man, the Father. He thereby projects for himself what Luce Irigaray calls a ‘divine horizon’ against which he can measure his own perfection and power. Moreover, in asserting a monotheistic divine, and rational, principle – for the Gods of both Judaism and Christianity have remarkable affinities with the Greek tradition – man fully excludes the feminine from what is now a divine, fecund, masculine logos. Finally, this spiritual circuit that parallels men’s relations to their progeny is completed through the first sacred commandment of the Father: You will love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind. As Cixous notes, the ‘always uncertain father must be recognised’ and the first ‘spiritual’ process is to love him (1986a: 111). ‘It is the son

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love or daughter who affirms the father’s paternity’ (1986a: 111) and they do so through a love that, rather than being freely given, is demanded.98 We are certainly a long way here from the conditions of agapic love grounded in notions of spontaneous other-regard! As the clearly somewhat spiritually reductive psychoanalytic account goes, the Mosaic God is little more than a sublime defence mechanism against an anxiety concerning man’s own origins, his unconscious recognition that he too derives from, and depends upon, the maternal body. Cixous is reminded by Freud’s account of Nietzsche’s infamous assertion that God is little more than the elevation of the ‘thinnest’ to the position of the ‘highest’, and she notes that God and man are in a symbiotic relation of reflection, with each protecting and authorising the power of the other. Following James Joyce, she adds that ‘God is men’s secret,’ a secret in which the lack of being which is paternity, passes itself off as truth (1986a: 101). The patriarchal divine with its accompanying story of divine love, for Cixous, is saturated in gender-blindness, ruse, and obscurity. It has done little more, she thinks, than buttress women’s subordination, exclude their embodiment, and deplore their fecundity (1986 passim) while simultaneously making them ‘guilty of everything’ (1986a: 97). And it is from beneath this ‘superegoed, over-Mosesed structure’ (1986a: 97), that Cixous exhorts women to escape and to make their bodies heard. There is, in fact, little ambiguity in Cixous’ condemnation of Freud’s masculine God, or indeed of all of history’s masculine gods. To the extent that they sanction the negation of woman and the feminine, the refusal of a subjectivity understood in both embodied and relational terms, and the impossibility of an intersubjectivity which truly recognises alterity, they are no Gods for women. On the contrary they are the transcendent Gods of death, the Gods who simultaneously authorise a binary distinction between life and death and then reverse its polarities. The life that is truly worth living in this patriarchal version of the Christian logos is the life after death. In this story of the sacred, there really is no room for a divine embodied love of the other in life. In the spirit of ‘the newly born woman’, Cixous published her roman, La, in the year following ‘Sorties’, 1976. In La she again focused on the significance of the sacred by taking The Egyptian Book of the Dead, and, according to Verena Conley, writing a feminine bible of the body that concerns itself with birth (Genesis) and life, beyond the death orientation of the masculine gods (Conley, 1992: 61). 98

Cixous appears to be drawing a connection here between divine male power and filial love, which resonates specifically with allusions to the Judaic God. Love, here, is a response to the Law and in this respect it is distinguished from the Christian love of agape. As previously noted, however, this is an overly simplistic reading of Judaic love, but it has, nonetheless, been a tenacious one. I have alluded to the ways in which we must take seriously even Ander’s Nygren’s recognition that the first symbol of God’s agapic love is the account of Creation. To that end, even Nygren cannot erase the Jewish origins of agape.

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The subject of love Noting again that paternal authority is largely derived from a usurpation of the maternal relation to life, that then inverts it in being orientated towards death, Cixous calls upon women to ‘rid ourselves of the dead, of the gods and the men who act like mothers’ (Cixous in Conley, 1992: 62). While, at this point, much of Cixous’ focus is on women’s need to escape from the binary structures that position them as lack, the sheer ebullience of her prose uncannily positions her as a feminine prophet, thus again, underscoring the diversity of the religious dimensions of her work. Come! This night is our day. We are at the angle of the known and the unknown, to the left, the city is cracking and spouting, to the right, I have not the least idea of what is awaiting us. We do not know what space reserves for us, if there is space, if there will be. What joy! Not to be preceded by anything. To go, there, up there, if there is, there [la] to be born absolutely. Come! We will, if there is room, give the day to another world! At night, there is a day that does not wane. There is a life that does not set, that diffuses and puts in the world. Who does not give birth! (Cixous in Conley, 1992: 61)

The gift, the maternal or feminine, and the subject of love Cixous seems to be largely in agreement with Irigaray on the point that the masculine conception of divinity affords women nothing but a non-identity as lack or absence. In the masculine divine logos, there is no place for a feminine subjectivity that is constituted on its own terms, let alone a feminine divine. Yet despite the fact that ‘Sorties’ seemingly narrates the fate of the maternal or feminine as tragedy, we are left with the sense that it continues to function as a metaphor for a relation to otherness that cannot finally be co-opted.99 In the manner of the supplement, there is always an excess. For Cixous, the maternal or feminine, then, continues to signify an/other way of being with the other. Hence, her text, La, is written not in the name of the Father but through the body of the mother, and it attends to the pulsating rhythms of drives and desires as they are translated into words in the closest possible relation to immediacy. Cixous’ mother symbolises the passage to life, in and through love. She is the mother-lover, who gives birth to the other (Conley, 1992: 60). As many feminist commentators have noted, however, there are inherent dangers in the use of the maternal as a primary metaphor for a feminine relation to alterity. The risk that is run is that its metaphorical value will be subsumed beneath the claim of the ‘real’ to truth. This is a point not lost on Cixous. She notes, however, that to see the maternal as ‘an agent who is more or less the accomplice of reproduction: capitalist, familialist, phallocentric reproduction’ (1986a: 89), as has been the tendency in a certain

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Cixous’ use of the term maternal does not designate the actuality of a woman’s production of children. The maternal, like the feminine, is equally available to man in so far as it functions as a metaphor or model of an/other way of approaching alterity, a way marked by generosity.

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love branch of feminism, is to succumb to a form of repression which is itself already immersed within the patriarchal logic of either/or. The maternal is metaphor for Cixous. It stands for a different economy of desire, a feminine economy that via a relation to love that is generative is oriented towards keeping the other alive. While the maternal trope functions as something of an archetype in Cixous’ theorisation of a feminine economy of exchange between sameness and difference, and it also functions as a model of a feminine relation to subjectivity, I want to emphasise its illustrative rather than its determinative value. Through it, Cixous explores her thinking about the possibility of love as a gift that gives without necessarily taking, and her thinking about gift relations becomes an integral part of her conceptualisation of feminine subjectivity. The maternal, in its metaphorical embrace of the notion of ‘giving birth to the other’ whose very otherness is essential to life, functions as a trope of a feminine structure of gift relations that do not necessarily invoke debts. The gift, like love, implies questions of relationship, just as, historically, it has implied a subject/object dichotomy. There are those who give and those who receive, and Cixous, like Derrida,100 has been tantalised by the question of whether a gift can be unconditionally given. The issue is ultimately whether the relationship between giver and receiver can ever escape an economy of exchange that inevitably signals debt, an economy that itself is indebted to a subject/object dichotomy. For Cixous it would seem that much of the theoretical conversation about the gift has taken place in the absence of any critical engagement with the possibility that a serious consideration of sexual difference might actually make a meaningful difference to our understanding of the structure of gifting relations and especially to be ways in which gifting inaugurates certain kinds of debts. By contrast, then, rather than taking for granted a supposedly universal subject who in actuality turns out to be a masculine subject, Cixous’ reflections on the gift begin from a position of thinking the gift through sexual difference. Hence the maternal metaphor becomes one signifier of the difference that sexual difference makes. She suggests that we might think of two economies of giving, one masculine and one feminine.101 From a consideration of these differing economies we can begin to get a sense of what she means by a feminine relation to desire, and, hence, a feminine subject of divine love; for the question of the gift that is unconditionally given can be thought of as another face of the question of otherregarding, agapic love. 100

See Jacques Derrida, Given Time (1992) and The Gift of Death (1995). See also the collected papers from the 1998 Villanova Conference on Religion and Postmodernism, John Caputo and Michael Scanlon, eds, God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (1999). 101 While Cixous herself uses the language of economy to describe an alternative to gift relations which invoke or rely on debts, the very structure of her feminine giving seems definitively aneconomic. It is precisely against economic relations that she writes. Indeed, she herself rejects the language of economy as is evident in the quotation on page 115.

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The subject of love Cixous’ analysis of the gift in ‘Sorties’ begins with Freud’s enigmatic and indeed misogynist question of ‘what it is that women want’. Refusing his specific question, she reconfigures its centre of emphasis and poses to both men and women the question: ‘When one gives, what does one give oneself ?’ (1986a: 87). Within the confines of a phallocentric masculinity that is constructed around the fear of still having something to lose – castration anxiety – the question of what ‘he’ gives is clearly defined by what ‘he’ gets back: profit. What does ‘he’, the ‘traditional’ man, want in return, Cixous asks? The answer can only be more of the same: [W]hat he wants, whether on the level of cultural or of personal exchanges, whether it is a question of capital or of affectivity (or of love, of jouissance) – is that he gain more masculinity: plus-value of virility, authority, power, money, or pleasure, all of which re-enforce his phallocentric narcissism. (1986a: 87)

Thus, the masculine gift is inevitably a gift to himself. Man’s gift is conditional. While Cixous is willing to concede that a ‘free’ gift may be illusory, she is reluctant to accept that the masculine relation to ‘spending’, defined as it is by the laws of return, is the only possible gift ‘economy’. What remains to be asked, she says, is the how and why of giving that are reflected in ‘the values that the gesture of giving affirms, causes to circulate’ (1986a: 87). What kinds of profit does one draw from the gift, and to what uses are these profits put? (1986a: 87). Such questions do not yield the same result for woman as they do for man. In posing to woman, then, the question of what she gives herself through the gesture of giving which, to reiterate, could as easily be replaced with the gesture of loving, Cixous affirms that there can be no equivalent return to self as there is for man. Inasmuch as woman is man’s other in phallocentric discourse, woman has a very different relation to her self, to otherness, and to profiting. But, like her male ‘counterpart’, woman cannot simply escape the phallocentric economic implications of the gift or love. She too gives for. Like man, woman gives herself ‘pleasure, happiness, increased value, enhanced self-image’ (1986a: 87). But, unlike man, woman does not attempt to ‘recover her expenses’ (1986a: 87). In being constituted in opposition to the static unity of man’s abstracted self, woman’s self is an embodied plurality, always shifting and dispersed. In the face of this dispersal, to what would woman return? To which ‘self’ would the woman who ‘gives’ or loves attribute the recovery of her expenses? If, as Cixous indicates, woman’s self ‘doesn’t revolve around a sun that is more star than the stars’ (1986a: 87), then woman’s self cannot be lived under the static sign of phallic unity. The gesture of giving, and indeed of love, thus becomes an occasion is for feminine becoming that is directed towards ‘keeping the other alive’ (1986a: 79), rather than masculine being with its implicit affiliation with the death of the other.

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She alone dares and wants to know from within where she, the one excluded, has never ceased to hear what-comes-before-language reverberating. She lets the other tongue of a

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love thousand tongues speak – the tongue, sound without barrier or death. She refuses life nothing. Her tongue doesn’t hold back but holds forth, doesn’t keep in but keeps on enabling. Where the wonder of being several and turmoil is expressed, she does not protect herself against these unknown feminines; she surprises herself at seeing, being, pleasuring in her gift of changeability. (1986a: 88)

Unlike man, the trajectory of woman’s subjectivity is oriented towards the future. Without a desire to profit from experience by returning experience to her self, woman literally finds her/self, variable and changing, in an endless movement towards the other. Thus, as Cixous emphasises, inasmuch as we can speak at all of a self that might be proper to woman, ‘it lies in [her] capacity to depropriate herself without self interest’ (1986a: 87). But, this willing depropriation is not to be mistaken for either passivity or selflessness. What is ‘depropriated’ is not a self that pre-exists the moment of its encounter with another but rather a possessive relation to self that would necessarily order the encounter around a subject/object dichotomy. But I am speaking here of femininity as keeping alive the other that is confided to her, that visits her, that she can love as other. The loving to be other, another, without its necessarily going the rout [sic] of abasing what is same, herself. As for passivity, in excess, it is partly bound up with death. But there is a nonclosure that is not submission but confidence and comprehension; that is not an opportunity for destruction but for wonderful expansion. (1986a: 86)

For Cixous, I believe it is a mistake to read woman’s refusal to be in possession of her self as self-sacrificial. On the contrary, woman’s non-possessive relation to subjectivity is the very occasion of her encounter with the other as other, the occasion of a wonderful, mutual, plural expansion of subjectivities. In escaping the reflective grasp on to one/self that underpins the ‘principles of unity’ that have shaped masculine discourses on subjectivity, Cixous’ dispersed feminine subject reconfigures the subject/object structure of the gift relation, and indeed the love relation, as it has been typically been configured in dialectical terms. Hence, she reopens the question of the genuine gift or love just as she reopens the question of other-regarding love. The dispersal and fluidity of a feminine subjectivity that is oriented towards becoming rather than being forecloses on the inevitability of the return of the gift or love to one/self for it has already decentred the origin of the gift or love; the unified subject. She doesn’t enter where history still works as the story of death. Still, having a present does not prevent woman’s beginning the story of life elsewhere. Elsewhere, she gives. She doesn’t measure what she is giving, but she gives neither false leads nor what she doesn’t have. She gives cause to live, to think, to transform. That ‘Economy’ can no longer be expressed as an economic term. Wherever she loves, all the ideas of the old management are surpassed. (1986a: 100)

Thus, in a feminine relation to giving or loving, an intersubjective space of invitation to the other is opened rather than a gesture of self-assertion, however

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The subject of love benevolent, enacted. Cixous is aware that ‘if there are traces of origin, of the I give, there is no gift – there is an I-give’ (Conley, 1991: 159). A gift that is pure gift must be like grace; ‘it must fall from the sky’ in the manner of a blessing (Conley, 1991: 159). By extension, then, a love that is all loving, a love that is abundant, excessive, generous and thus, as I am suggesting here, agapic, must also be like grace; there can be no trace of I love. Throughout the reading of The Book of Promethea in Chapter 5 we will see that the very possibility of a truly other-regarding love that is agapic precisely to the extent that it emerges from abundance is predicated upon this dispersed, feminine relation to one/self. In it, Cixous finds a place for a love that is other-regarding without being self-sacrificial. In it, I think, we find the humanly, femininely, divine. The maternal or feminine, then, is less about women who are mothers than it is about an embodied relation to otherness that is oriented towards life, towards keeping the other alive. As Conley notes, ‘[t]he maternal is approached as a lifegiving force and affirmation of love, and is not the attribute of the “real” mother, but thought to be outside any social role . . . she accompanies the other and temporarily allows her to have her birth’ (1992: 62). The concept of the maternal allows Cixous to theorise about a relationship to otherness in which the connection between self and other is kept alive. Thus, she refutes the psychoanalytic story, either Freud’s or Lacan’s, where the achievement of subjectivity rests on an absolute cut, i.e., a severance from the maternal body. As she says: In woman there is always, more or less, something of ‘the mother’ repairing and feeding, resisting separation, a force that does not let itself be cut off but that runs the codes ragged. The relationship to childhood (the child she was, she is, she acts and makes and starts anew, and unties at the place where, as a same she even others herself ), is no more cut off than is the relationship to the ‘mother’, as it consists of delights and violences. (1986a: 93)

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Woman is traversed by the other; the other she was, the other she gives birth to, the other she will be. Never finally able to resolve her identity as singular, woman’s subjectivity is dispersed through the other in a constant metamorphosis. She is endlessly engaged in a process of becoming that escapes the telos of masculinity. Unlike man’s assumptions about himself, woman doesn’t become who she is. ‘She is not able to return to herself, never settling down, pouring out, going everywhere to the other. She does not flee extremes; she is not the beingof-the-end (the goal), but she is how-far-being-reaches’ (1986a: 87). From the metaphor of the maternal as it relates to the gift and to love, both in ‘Sorties’ and elsewhere, Cixous can be seen to be beginning to sketch the conditions of what I am throughout identifying as a feminine subjectivity that is a precondition for the emergence of a divine love. Woman is ‘stunning, extravagant, one who is dispersible, desiring and capable of other, of the other woman she will be, of the other woman she is not, of him, of you’ (1986a: 89). Woman cannot

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love constitute the other in a dialectical relation, the result of which is death. Nor can she constitute her ‘self’ as singular, exclusive, and autonomous, for it is the other who calls her into becoming. Cixous is suggesting, then, that, in woman, the impulse to an autonomy that is constituted outside of a relation to and with the other would at best amount to something like amputation, and, at worst, the death of her/self. Furthermore, Cixous reminds us of the stakes of this ‘new’ conception of subjectivity when she notes Nietzsche’s assertion that any breaking of the laws of individuation, i.e., the masculine laws of self-identity, have typically signified the ‘privilege of divinatory and magical forces’ (Nietzsche in Cixous, 1986a: 96). Because woman or the feminine stands for excess, immoderate and contradictory depropriation, the laws of the ‘natural’ order (i.e., patriarchal order) are disrupted. As we will see in the next two chapters, woman or the feminine thus becomes the site of a new divinatory possibility that arises in an encounter with an other that is constructed not around the appropriation of difference but rather around a genuine meeting in difference. Feminine subjectivity, understood as dispersed and excessive, permits Cixous to speculate about the nature of an encounter between two subjects constituted similarly, and ‘Sorties’ ends, as I have noted, with her rereading two classic mythical tales of love, Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesileia and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Both texts provide her with the opportunity to theorise about the role of love in a feminine relation to difference, a feminine economy of desire. Although she recognises that the masculine economy of exchange does indeed govern social and cultural life, she notes that, as a system, it has ‘holes’. The fact that she has a desire for an ‘other’ economy reflects the impossibility of containing excess (1986a: 78). While patriarchal interests are served in perpetuating a relationship of antagonism between subjects, there has nevertheless, she thinks, always been space for an/other way of being, albeit a highly restricted and regulated space. As she says: Everywhere I see the battle for mastery that rages between classes, peoples, etc., reproducing itself on an individual scale. Is the system flawless? Impossible to bypass? On the basis of my desire, I imagine that other desires like mine exist. If my desire is possible, it means the system is already letting something else through. (1986a: 78)

As is typically the case with Cixous’ work, literature has a privileged relationship to difference as the locus of a letting through of this ‘something else’. In the context of her intellectual background – the structuralist and post-structuralist fervour of 1970s France – she also sees language and writing as sites of potential social transformation. Hence, literature is one of the ‘regulated spaces’ within the patriarchal logos, which has always had the potential to offer a glimpse of the ‘other’ way that Cixous seeks. Thus, it is no surprise that it is to literature that she turns as she slips from a critique of patriarchal subjectivity towards what I take

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The subject of love to be an implicit hypothesis that a love that derives from/in a feminine relation to desire may well permit of an experience so outside of the ordinary as to be divine. Subjects in love – Penthesileia and Achilles; Antony and Cleopatra A comprehensive analysis of Cixous’ reading of both Penthesileia and Antony and Cleopatra is beyond the scope of this book. For my purposes, it is, nonetheless, important to closely consider a number of examples of her analyses of the conditions of an affirmative, feminine love of the other. They reveal the proximity of her conception of love and her conception of divinity. As I have noted, at the time of writing ‘Sorties’, the presence of the divine in her texts primarily takes the form of an allusive and elusive invocation which relies on a certain intuitive recognition on the part of the reader – something that may in itself function as a commentary upon and simultaneous performance of the religious in Cixous’ oeuvre. In some sense then the very allusiveness of religious signification in Cixous’ writing can be seen to mark a kind of excess, a mysterious surplus that must be experienced rather than strictly understood.102 PENTHESILEIA

Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesileia is a play in which Kleist retells the story of Achilles and his encounter with the Amazon Queen, Penthesileia, during the time of the Trojan Wars. For Cixous, it is also an archetypal metaphor of the battle of sexual difference: Greeks versus Amazons; the laws of masculinity at war with femininity. However, Cixous’ engagement with Kleist’s text is one that draws upon and develops her earlier thinking about differently gendered economies of the gift. What is at stake in this tale is the gift of love, how it is given, how it is received, and, ultimately, how it is also refused. In Kleist’s version, Achilles and Penthesileia fall immediately in love at the moment of their initial meeting, which is during a battle in which they are on opposite sides. What is remarkable about Cixous’ recounting of this moment, given the Greek context of the play, is how surprisingly evocative it is of the description of the love of God or Jesus offered by numerous Christian mystics, Teresa of Avila being but one obvious example. She says: Penthesileia is stricken. Wounded. Opened up to Achilles. Through a wound that will never close, light and life flood into her flesh. Here, at the left breast, is the wound, here is Achilles, here is Penthesileia. In the very flesh, yet, he is over there, going faster than the wind. It is He. Only He, the one Revealed. (1986a: 114)

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102 In the translator’s notes to The Newly Born Woman, Betsy Wing comments that, in all but one instance, she is translating Cixous’ engagement with Shakespeare and Kleist from French Cixous is fluent in German, French, and English so it is quite possible she was reading Kleist in the original German. However, in the absence of either references in ‘Sorties’ or comment from the translator, this question remains unclear. Readers interested in the Kleist texts referred to here will find references to the English translations in the bibliography.

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love The images of light, life, flooding, and revelation in Cixous’ account of this moment of the instant of love superimpose on it the scene of Scripture, something that is not as readily in evidence in Kleist’s original account. This juxtaposition of largely Christian tropes with classical Greek mythology serves I think to announce Cixous’ investment in the divine rather than in the mythic proportions of this story of love. Clearly the reference to the ‘open wound’ of love is not only reminiscent of Christ, it also evokes the idea that there is something feminine about this love for there is something feminine about flesh that is infinitely opened by and to the other. This is an aspect of Cixous’ thinking about love relations that is considerably more developed in her analysis in The Book of Promethea. Cixous makes much of the obvious associations of war with masculinity in Kleist’s play. However, through her analysis we come to understand both Achilles and Penthesileia as counter-intuitive tropes. Achilles, for example, is not, in the end, the archetypal man of war. On the contrary, as she observes, he transgresses the binary laws of sexual difference. He becomes a feminine man, a man who is capable of the infinite otherness of the other, and this is demonstrated when, in the name of love, Achilles returns to Penthesileia, having briefly departed, and allows himself to be ‘taken’ by her. While Cixous’ account of their initial meeting locates the wounding of love on the body of Penthesileia, Achilles’ subsequent surrender, about which I will say more shortly, reveals the extent to which their initial encounter was a mutual wounding, a mutual opening to the infinite otherness of the other. The feminisation of Achilles and the subsequent masculinisation of Penthesileia, something which is true to Kleist’s representation, also stage Cixous’ commitment to understanding the feminine as a way of being, not an essential attribute of either men or women. Interestingly, however, it is Achilles’ transgression that ultimately drives the narrative for it is a man’s assumption of the feminine that violates the Law of the Father and that sees the play turn towards tragedy. Penthesileia’s assumption of masculine attributes, while provocative, is nonetheless understandable within a patriarchal economy. But when Achilles falls in love with his enemy, he inaugurates what Cixous thinks will be the ‘true’ battle between the Amazons and the Greeks, the battle to re-establish the order of sexual difference. Love threatens disorder. In Cixous words: ‘On one side the law comes charging back with its two armies; Greeks and Amazons hurtle onto the love scene and tear it to shreds. The power of love must not start muddling clear oppositions’ (1986a: 120). And indeed it doesn’t, for the sublime moment of that initial encounter in love between Achilles and Penthesileia is displaced by misunderstanding, miscommunication, and a loss of faith that inaugurates the tragedy of love that is actually Kleist’s tale. Penthesileia is undoubtedly a tragedy. The initial moment of meeting in love, a moment foretold by and in fact orchestrated by the Gods, thus giving it an

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The subject of love obvious connection to divinity and which Cixous offers to her readers as an expression of a feminine ‘economy’ of desire, ultimately fails in Kleist’s tale: in the end, the masculine principle is restored, albeit counter-intuitively. As we come to understand in Cixous’ retelling, it is Penthesileia who signals the defeat of a feminine relation to difference although the fault is not entirely hers. At the story’s end, Achilles dies at Penthesileia’s hands. And while his death modifies Cixous’ understanding of Penthesileia’s feminine relation to desire, it cannot erase altogether the calling forth of divinity that is hinted at in their initial meeting. Penthesileia, the Amazon Queen, is the leader of a group of women who have, apparently, chosen the ‘law of the mother’ over that of the Father. They live in a women-only community that perpetuates itself via a conjugal festival known as the ‘Feast of the Roses’. The men, with whom they couple only at this time of the festival, are the men they have captured in battle. But Cixous is anxious to note that, unlike the masculine approach to war, the Amazon women ultimately remain thoroughly on the side of the feminine. Thus, she is not suggesting that they can be thought of as phallic women. Their desire in going to battle is not death or destruction but the reverse, life and affirmation. In commenting on the difference between a masculine, i.e., Greek, approach to war and the feminine approach of the Amazons, Cixous says: He dominates to destroy. She dominates to not be dominated; she dominates the dominator to destroy the space of domination. Because the one knocked down is helped to his feet. And she leads the one who is ‘conquered’ into her world – a world he never dared imagine. There waits a festival: a woman who is not a slave. (1986a: 116)

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The Amazons, in standing for a feminine economy of desire, escape the masculine discourses of death. Their desire is not to kill the other but ultimately to permit the other both their otherness and their freedom. Beyond the Feast of the Roses, the women send their prisoners of war back to their own world, alive; and, of course, it is life that is signified in the Feast of the Roses, for its purpose is generation. Nonetheless, there are distinct rules in the women-only community of the Amazons the goal of which are to regulate the sorts of relationships permitted between men and women. One of the foundational structures of their society concerns the women’s avoidance of the pitfalls of special attachments to any one man: particular loves by any other name! The general qualities of the heroic soldier are what the Amazon women must seek, not the virtuous qualities of the individual man. To fall in love with one man, as Penthesileia in fact does, is to violate the sacred rules of this community. It is to create a disorder that threatens the very notion of a communal body. Love among the Amazons is selfconsciously detached from the particularity of the individual in a way that is not dissimilar to the Christian notion of agape where God loves not because of the individual qualities of any one particular being but because it is ‘his’ fundamental

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love nature to love. There are even echoes here of Plato’s guardian class, as well as the speech of Diotima in the Symposium. Hence, we can also trace this concern with the threat of particular loves to the body politic in the Greek philosophical tradition. Notwithstanding these affiliations, the structure of the society of the Amazon women, with its emphasis on a compassionate, thoroughly embodied feminine love of the other, significantly displaces Plato’s truly dispassionate vision of the challenges of attachment that go with procreation as well as the potential social disorder derived from particular loves At least in part, Cixous would seem to be ambivalent about this aspect of the Amazon vision of love, as indeed is Kleist though perhaps for different reasons. For the tragic element of Penthesileia comes about in the struggle between particular and non-particular love. Having come to love the very specificity of Achilles, a specificity that is ultimately defined by his feminine relation to difference, rather than his generic qualities of masculinity, Penthesileia mistakenly ends up killing him. She misunderstands the seriousness of his willingness to accede to the feminine, and, in this sense, she misunderstands the feminine as a way of being, rather than as being itself. While Cixous recognises the theoretical value of the disruption to subject/object relations that the non-particular love of the Amazons implies, I take her to be baulking at possible implications that this might be a condition of divine love. In Cixous’ description of the moment in which Achilles does accede to ‘his’ love for Penthesileia, and decides to leave his soldiers to rejoin her, Cixous emphasises the corporeal and thus the feminine aspect. Moreover, she returns to the metaphor of the gift, noting that, in order for love to emerge, Achilles must be willing to give him/self: and, remarkably, he is! The fearsome Achilles stays still as a young dove around whose neck a child is tying a ribbon. He gives himself. She wants to take him: he lets himself be taken. She rules. He lets himself be tamed – but this is no longer the space of mastery. It is the ascent toward a new history, where, having exhausted all anguish and returned all war to its sterility, nothing will remain at stake between queen and king except knowing beauty over and over, no other law than body’s insatiable desire. (1986a: 119)

In surrendering him/self to Penthesileia, in letting himself be taken, Achilles breaks with the order of masculinity, and the tradition of finding the divine in a transcendent, disembodied elsewhere. The scene of mastery is reconfigured, however, not because its formal structure changes, i.e., not because it is a woman doing the taking, but because there has been a shift at another level. In surrendering himself to Penthesileia, Achilles surrenders an attachment to living himself as the masculine subject of mastery. But we cannot forget that it is only after a struggle with himself that he ‘lets himself be taken’. This is not a replication of their first moment where there was something like a simultaneity in their meeting. Clearly, Cixous is implying that it could have been otherwise, Achilles

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The subject of love might not have returned to Penthesileia. And indeed, Kleist’s original version significantly builds up the tension precisely around this possibility. Achilles, to all intents and purposes, sees himself as the conqueror of Penthesileia long before he surrenders to conquest. The feminine, it would seem, then, is something one can ‘choose’ if Penthesileia, the text, is in any way exemplary. However, I find Cixous to be ambiguous on this point, at times relying on something like the notion of grace or bestowal to provide the basis of the divinity in that initial moment of love’s emergence between Achilles and Penthesileia, and, at other times, clearly implying that the very possibility of this moment relies upon a kind of conscious agency on the part of the subjects who choose a feminine relation to alterity. Following their initial encounter on the battlefield, where love begins to be the issue that the play is interrogating, Achilles leaves Penthesileia, and returns to his troops. This is the moment of transition in Kleist’s retelling of the myth. It reveals the fragility of the sacred. Penthesileia cannot bring herself to experience Achilles’ departure as anything other than a refusal to remain open to love. Cixous explains Penthesileia’s crisis: When Achilles comes back, against his own people – to return, to give himself back to her, having decided to undo the separation, to overcome the threat of death, to pay history the price it requires, having stripped everything away, ready for Penthesileia as she cannot be – he is already lost from sight, has lost her trust. (1986a: 120)

Penthesileia doubts Achilles, believing that it is the man of war who returns to her and not her feminine lover. A binary structure between self and other is reinaugurated and Achilles becomes the other Penthesileia must annihilate. For both Kleist and Cixous, this is Penthesileia’s mistake. Achilles leaves Penthesileia, only in order to return more committed than ever to his surrender of himself, i.e., his masculine approach to difference. Separation is not the cut of castration in this narrative, but conforms to a more maternal and dynamic ebb and flow of proximity and distance. But it is too late. Penthesileia cannot trust this new moment. Instead she murders Achilles in a horrific scene of mutilation. She sets her dogs upon him and she herself tears at his flesh with her teeth. The divinity of the mutual love that was glimpsed is horrifically eclipsed at this point as Penthesileia fully succumbs to a masculine desire to annihilate the other. From the perspective of Cixous’ engagement with the religious dimension, one of the things that is most interesting about her retelling of the moment of Achilles’ death is how expressive it is of a feminine relation to difference, and how closely it resembles the death of Christ. But also how it simultaneously echoes and reverberates with the first moment of love:

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While the summit reverses into a bottomless pit of horror and pain, already love is struggling against death. Mutilated by dogs – Penthesileia herself a devouring dog – Achilles dies without hate and within Penthesileia; understanding the error, with sympathy for love. (1986a: 121)

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love And, quoting Kleist directly here, Cixous adds: He drags himself through the crimson of his blood, he gently touches her cheek, he calls her: ‘Penthesileia, my betrothed! What are you doing? Is this the Feast of Roses you promised me?’ (1986a: 121)

It is perhaps Achilles’ refusal to hate, his ongoing willingness to surrender to loving the other that is Penthesileia, even in this moment when she too embodies an alienated otherness, that most clearly marks him as both a Christ-like and an agapic figure. Achilles is effectively crucified while appealing to Penthesileia in much the same way as Christ appealed to God at the moment he was ‘forsaken’. Neither however, even when confronted with death, abandons his own surrender and chooses to return to the masculine economy of desire. The feminine, it would seem, remains an/other way of being for them, but, in the absence of a genuine meeting in difference, the relation between Achilles and Penthesileia is no longer divine. Rather the sacrificial aspect of love comes to the fore and dominates. In this respect, this scene is also very evocative of orthodox readings of agapic love that see in the crucifixion, and not the Incarnation, an archetype of agapic love as sacrificial love. Penthesileia’s inability to remain within a feminine economy of desire turns this moment of divine love into sacrificial love. The love of particularity leads to the desire to posses and it loses its ability to move freely between the universal and the particular. Cixous retells Kleist’s story in order to narrate a scene, a moment in which she finds expressed her vision of an encounter between subjects which is characterised by a feminine relation to difference that is expressed in terms of love, i.e., the mutual opening of love to and with the other. What she seems to end up suggesting, however, is that a feminine economy can only ever reach divine proportions when there is a simultaneous willingness to surrender an attachment to a masculine economy of desire. At least one difficulty inherent in the suggestion that the feminine is predicated upon a ‘willing’ surrender is that it relies upon a subject who pre-exists their encounter with the other, thus leaving intact a subject/object binary structure. While Achilles continues to operate within a feminine economy of desire and is thus in a position to disrupt the subject/object structure of masculine desire, Penthesileia’s failure to be in the same place, at the same time, heralds the impossibility of their second encounter calling forth the divine. The infinite divinity of the moment is foreclosed upon in the lack of simultaneity, and the temporal asymmetry signals the absence of mutuality. In her later writing, Cixous considerably develops her conception of the temporal constraints involved in the surrender of ‘self’ that she seems to be suggesting here are a precondition for a divine encounter with the other. She comes to place great significance on the idea that such experiences of the ‘surrendered’ self in love are necessarily constrained by time, and thus, in my reading of her,

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The subject of love that this temporal limitation is an essential condition of a humanly attainable divinity. For Cixous, we have already ‘eaten of the Tree of Knowledge’ and as such ‘we are outside Paradise’ (1992: 37). Any experiences we may have of the divine must take into account the impossibility of a return to a pre-symbolic Eden, with its concomitant implications of a permanent, and thus a static, state of perfection. Nonetheless, while she would argue that we cannot dwell in the divine – this is the patriarchal fantasy of a beyond to death, a return to paradise – we can achieve a kind of ‘second innocence’, albeit an innocence that is markedly different from the first. While Achilles and Penthesileia fail to do more than gesture towards the kind of feminine relation to difference that in Cixous’ work I see as the ground of an opening on to or into the divine, indeed a becoming divine, I think she holds out more hope, although still in a qualified sense, for Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

In the end, Cixous is ambivalent about the love between Penthesileia and Achilles because she considers Kleist to have failed his own insight into the possibility of a love which is in some sense graceful, a love which has escaped the patriarchal associations with death by being anchored in a genuine encounter with alterity. At the same time, however, she also identifies Kleist as an author who is indeed ‘capable’ of the feminine. While Penthesileia undoubtedly offers an instance where the ‘something else’ that she spoke of earlier has indeed broken through the system, it is not finally sustained. The system reasserts itself, and love fails to carry a fully incarnated divinity. Consider her reflection on Kleist’s ‘failure’: And Kleist-also-dies, from being Penthesileia, from not being able to be Penthesileia without dying, as Penthesileia had to die from being too close to the shadow of the law, from having been afraid of the old ghosts, from having seen life itself get by within reach, within sight, from having brushed against it, from having felt the caress of its flaming hair, from not being able to hold onto it. How [does one] love a woman without encountering death? A woman who is neither doll nor corpse nor dumb nor weak. But beautiful, lofty, powerful, brilliant? Without history’s making one feel its law of hatred? (1986a: 122)

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In response to her own question of how to love a woman without encountering death, she offers Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra as a ‘victory of love in history’ (1986a: 122). In the light of her central theoretical concern with an ethics of otherness, it is no surprise that she also notes that such a woman could come only from elsewhere, could only already be other. Cleopatra, the Egyptian Queen, is indeed such an other. ‘She had to be from the Orient to be so lofty, so free, so much the mistress of herself and recognised as such by her contemporaries’ (1986a: 125). Such a woman has no other place than at the psycho-geographical perimeters of a masculine imaginary. As Cixous says, ‘In Rome, the woman, no matter how high above the common, bows her head before the venerable man,

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love as wife or sister of – king, chief, master – and, jealous or devoted, she follows, she serves’ (1986a: 125–126). In Cixous’ reading of Antony and Cleopatra, as is also the case with her reading of Penthesileia, the scene of war functions as a metaphor which simultaneously conceals and reveals the ‘true’ battle that is being staged, the battle of sexual difference. To return to the language Cixous uses throughout the earlier part of ‘Sorties’, we can understand this battle not as one between sexually differentiated bodies, a battle between male and female, but rather as a battle between two very different economies of desire, one marked by a masculine return to the self, the other by a feminine movement towards the other. However, and unlike Achilles and Penthesileia, Antony and Cleopatra signify an economy in which the feminine does not fail. But this is not to suggest that the feminine is somehow a space of transcendent perfection. Antony and Cleopatra’s passion, while being constituted by Cixous in terms I am suggesting invite us to consider the dimension of the sacred, is so only inasmuch as it is capable of accommodating, rather than excluding, the very human – both good and bad. She says: Truly they have discovered how to suckle together at the wonderful resource of sanctity. Not that they are saints, humble and submissive. On the contrary: human, fallible, tormented, often torn, beaten, jealous, violent, excessive; the signs of weakness are not lacking, but they are hollows between the always higher waves. (1986a: 128)

Thus, another distinctive quality of a feminine economy of desire lies in the refusal to exclude the contradictory, and the ability to embrace a cycle of relations that are constituted in movement. Antony and Cleopatra are never static. Their relation is constantly marked by movements, towards, away, and elsewhere. Through her reference to the humility of saints, Cixous again deploys very specific signifiers of the Christian logos. Noting that Antony and Cleopatra share with the saints a certain wondrous resource of sanctity, she displaces the association of selflessness that is invoked by the obvious trope of sainthood in implying that the human qualities that would conventionally be associated with self-interest and certainly not with sainthood – jealousy, violence, excess – do not preclude this encounter with the divine. Cixous is reconfiguring the notion of the sacred here and her reconfiguration functions as a critique of the institutionalisation of submission and sacrifice that have shaped relations of sexual difference in so many Christian cultures. Antony and Cleopatra are not saints, not because they are not in a relationship with the divine – clearly Cixous thinks they are, as I will demonstrate shortly. Rather, they are not saints to the extent that sainthood is so frequently bound up with notions of renunciation, in particular the renunciation of the temporal, erotic body. It is telling that Cixous rarely makes reference to the writings of Christian mystics like Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Bernard of Clairvaux – there are innumerable examples – given that

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The subject of love

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their writings do indeed provide a narrow vein through which Christianity can be seen to have preserved a place for the eroticisation of the divine/human relationship. However, while it is true that much mystical writing reveals a certain trace of the eroticisation of the religious in Western consciousness, much of this material continues to point to the masculine tradition of dignifying abstraction and indeed individuality. The erotic or divine relation of classic bridal mysticism, for example, is so often configured in terms of the solitary human ascetic or ‘bride’ who alone and in spiritual agony experiences intense longing for the absent or distant divine or God as lover. But there remains a very real sense here in which the other as embodied other is in fact absent and the eroticisation is dangerously close to autoeroticism. Throughout her reading of Antony and Cleopatra, Cixous maintains her attention on the possibility of a thoroughly human divinity in which renunciation has no obvious place. She can be understood here to be engaging in a restorative project – without the associations to origins – which would reinvest the embodied love relation with a certain divinity. Again, particularly in its emphasis on the embodied and the erotic, Cixous’ reading of Antony and Cleopatra reverberates with similar concerns to those of feminist theologians such as Carter Heyward, whose work I considered in Chapter 2, and who have returned to the concept of eros in order to rethink the role of love in religious experience. However, as we will see in the next chapter, Cixous’ attention to the notion of feminine subjectivity as defined by dispersal informs a more focused exploration of the ways the self is experienced in the very moments of living love with the other, and this disrupts a straightforward association with the eros of much of feminist theology. Ultimately, what marks Antony and Cleopatra as different from Achilles and Penthesileia is that neither experiences the loss of faith in either themselves or the other which seemed to lie at the heart of Cixous’ analysis of Penthesileia. As such, for Cixous, this means we cannot understand the material deaths of the lovers, at the conclusion of the play, in the same way as we might the deaths of Achilles and Penthesileia. The deaths of Antony and Cleopatra are not a victory for death, over life. At least in some respects, tragedy itself is displaced by the love that Cixous claims on behalf of the lovers. Where Achilles and Penthesileia gesture towards the ‘something else’ that the system is letting through, Antony and Cleopatra more fully stand for it. While the patriarchal backdrop remains – they must contend with Caesar – the reign of the phallus is displaced by a love which is characterised by a mutual erotic abundance, a generosity and excess that is taken not only to the point of death but, Cixous seems to be suggesting, beyond it. The notion of a love that is distinguished by excessive abundance is something to which Cixous will return in The Book of Promethea and here, unlike in Antony and Cleopatra, it will be a divine love fully immersed in life. This notion of a certain exceeding of one/self, to the extent

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love that it is sourced in abundance, I am suggesting, is the meaningful difference between a reinterpreted eros, and something more like an iconoclastic engagement with the selfless, other-regarding Christian love of agape. The key to understanding Cixous’ vision of love in Antony and Cleopatra begins with her interpretation of Cleopatra herself. Cleopatra embodies the qualities of feminine subjectivity for Cixous. Unique, greater than everyone else, for not only is she beauty – that is nothing – but she is also infinite intelligence, completely applied to making life, to making love, to make: to invent, to create, from one emotion to draw out ten thousand forms of beauty, from one joy ten thousand games, from one pain an immense increase of passions. She is life made woman. (1986a: 126)

Cleopatra is an assured, self-conscious representation of feminine subjectivity that is directed towards boundless becoming. Her goal is never a return to herself, but rather is found in an endless journeying that multiplies desire at each moment that it is satisfied. The feisty queen, to whom everything is becoming – scolding, laughing, crying – at every instant another face, at each breath a passion, flesh struggling with a desire for more love, more life, more pleasure . . . She is always capable of more, herself the stir. She is extravagance and abundance. (1986a: 123)

What Cleopatra exceeds are the limits of desire, her own as well as those of her lover. What she gives is not the elusive promise of a seduction made powerful by the impossibility of its fulfilment; in other words, a desire premised on lack or absence. This would be the patriarchal vision of the idealised but inaccessible virgin woman who is divine only in her inaccessible, dispassionate, chastity. Such a figure would be Octavia. On the contrary, Cleopatra’s gift, Cleopatra’s love, is the gift of a passionate becoming, wherein the satisfaction of desire never signifies the end but an opening on to the promise of more. Cleopatra’s love is relentlessly turned towards life, and, in that sense, it is turned towards the future. In describing the effect that she has on those around her, Cixous locates Cleopatra, and, by extension, a love such as hers, at the margins of human time. He who has tasted her, the unequaled one, is forever hungry for her, and she keeps him marvelously, fetes him sumptuously, and every day surpasses the unsurpassable; then there is no longer a place in life for regret. Everything is yet to come, aspiration, vitality. The more you have, the more you give, the more you are, the more you give, the more you have. Life opens up and stretches to infinity. (1986a: 124)

Unlike Plato’s emphasis on desire and love as lack, Cleopatra, as herself a trope of excessive love in Cixous’ hands, stands rather for fulfilment but not for the end of desire. Cleopatra’s love opens life to the infinite of becoming with the other in the present and in so doing she calls forth a kind of divinity that I want to suggest is, in fact, humanly possible.

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The subject of love While the danger of Cixous’ description is that it may simply be echoing what has always been an archetypal description of the figure of the feminine in respect to a masculine economy of desire, i.e., woman as the embodiment of the feminine only inasmuch as she embodies elusive seduction, i.e., absence, Cixous’ commitment to the relational, to intersubjectivity, displaces such a reading. In typically poetic Cixousian fashion, she extols the mutual and significantly embodied nature of Antony and Cleopatra’s love via an association with the maternal/child relation, at the same time as she continues her sharp critique of masculine subjectivities constituted in and through oppositions. She says, Everything exchanged between two boundless lovers is received as the child receives mother’s milk: on Antony’s word, Cleopatra’s ear breakfasts, and that is the right way. We are far from object ‘a’, from the fatality of its absence, from its evasions that only sustain desire by default. (1986a: 127)103

But we are only far away from object ‘a’, and thus from a truly masculine economy of desire, because of the way Cixous interprets the figure of Antony as also giving of himself. Like Achilles, Antony is a feminine man who is capable of the living/loving with and through rather than annihilating the indefinable otherness of the other. Cleopatra’s gift, her uncensored willingness to give of herself, can finally escape the appropriative grasp of patriarchal stereotypes about women and desire only in the event of a partner who is equally willing to surrender themselves to the other, and this is indeed Cixous’ understanding of Antony. She says: And Antony is not left behind. Although he might have a hard time keeping up with Cleopatra in the realm of invention, he wins in another generosity – the one that for a man consists of daring to strip himself of power and glory and to love and admire a woman enough to take pride happily in rivaling with her in passion. (1986a: 124)

As was also the case with the figure of Achilles, Cixous seems to be suggesting that the possibility of a love which transcends the boundaries of the ordinary cannot be found within patriarchal conceptions of love. According to her reading, it is Antony’s surrender of what we can presume to be a patriarchal and thus a hierarchical relationship to power and glory that marks him as a man capable of being open to difference, a man capable of an/other love. Cixous does not extensively narrate the famous scene of Antony’s mid-stream abandonment of battle in pursuit of Cleopatra. Yet it is the scene which may most effectively 103

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Cixous’ reference to ‘object a’ is a critique of the masculine foundations of psychoanalysis in general and Lacanian psychoanalysis in particular, both of which found the achievement of subjectivity on a primary lack or sacrifice on the part of the subject. Object a refers to the principle that all desire is inaugurated by the irretrievable loss of an originary unity, typically envisaged as an originary unity with the mother. In this first state there is no separation between self and other, no sign of the ‘I’ under which a subject can mobilize. Thus, there is no oppositional structuring of desire.

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love condense the metaphorical battle between the masculine and feminine economies of exchange. Paradoxically, the absent presence of this scene has a much greater impact on Cixous’ analysis than is suggested by the few paragraphs that she actually does devote to it. Antony is confronted in this scene with a choice, an archetypal choice. He can remain immersed within a masculine economy, continue to wage war, and add still further to his cache of patriarchal power. Or, like Achilles, he can choose the impossible, the incomprehensible, and abandon the battle to pursue Cleopatra in her seemingly inexplicable flight. Antony chooses to abandon the battle and to pursue Cleopatra, but consider the commentary on sexual difference that is offered by Shakespeare through the characters of Scarus and Enobarbus, two of Antony’s soldiers who are scandalised by his decision. Enobarbus How appears the fight? Scarus On our side like the tokened pestilence, Where death is sure. Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt – Whom leprosy o’ertake! – i’th’midst o’th’fight, When vantage like a pair of twins appeared Both as the same, or rather ours the elder, The breeze upon her, like a cow in June, Hoists sail and flies. Enobarbus That I beheld. Mine eyes did sicken at the sight, and could not Endure a further view. Scarus She once being loofed, The noble ruin of her magic, Antony, Claps on his sea wings, and, like a doting mallard, Leaving the fight in height, flies after her. I never saw an action of such shame. Experience, manhood, honour, ne’er before Did violate so itself. (Antony and Cleopatra, 3.10.8–23)

Scarus and Enobarbus are not alone in perceiving Antony as having betrayed the essence of masculinity. Antony himself laments his inability to recognise himself, so severe a blow is his own behaviour to his perception of himself as a man. But his decision is clearly compelling despite the obvious disincentives. For Cixous, the question of Antony’s response to this moment is central to her understanding of the role of willingness in relation to a feminine love. Antony engages less in a process of decision-making here, a process we might think of as thoroughly self-conscious. Rather, like Abraham in response to God’s instruction to sacrifice Isaac, Antony finds himself taken immediately, compelled into movement, although in Antony’s case, as Cixous notes, there is tension between action and reflection. In Cixous’ words, ‘Because Antony is bound to her, Cleopatra’s flight by sea makes Antony, altering sail, tack and run so that he is nearly dying from

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The subject of love it, being lost and losing her, wanting to hate her, no longer being able to see her’ (1986a: 128). Antony, and perhaps Abraham too, seems to have found himself taken despite himself. Unable to recognise himself as the supreme figure of masculine power that he has been, Antony grieves for his lost identity, his lost sense of self at this very moment when he is in fact living the birth of a very different self, a feminine self. For Cixous, it would seem that the precondition of this different moment of subjectivity is to be found in a process akin to sacrifice but without the connotations of loss. Hence she prefers to call this surrender. What Antony surrenders, then, is a masculine will-to-power that precludes a genuine relationship with alterity. Antony’s ‘choice’ to surrender to the feminine is clearly not the Cixousian equivalent of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth who on the brink of murder appeals to those dark chthonic goddesses, the Furies, to ‘unsex’ her then and there. Indeed, without such a willing surrender to the feminine, a lie would be made of Antony’s opening lines in the play where he indicates that the love he and Cleopatra share is so far above being able to be reckoned that it will require the creation of a new heaven and earth to contain it (Act 1.1.14–16). Moreover, Cleopatra’s investment in love, her willingness to let herself love and be loved to the limits of infinity, to herself accede to the feminine, would be violated by anything less than Antony’s equal surrender of the props of masculinity. Moreover, and by way of clarification, Cixous notes that the abundance and generosity which comes more easily to those with such unparalleled material wealth is not in the end the actual source of the generosity which exists between them. But also, all the splendor of the life that Antony and Cleopatra make together is commensurate with the fabulous grandeur of their investments, material, fleshly, symbolic, spiritual: not only do they have everything, strength, power – almost absolute – but it is nothing. They do not take all this for something, they reduce it with a kiss, to the nothing that it has never ceased to be, save in the eyes of beings who know nothing of love, that is to say, everybody. (1986a: 127)

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So what is it, then, that Cixous is suggesting is the source of the generosity which permits such a love? Undoubtedly, Antony and Cleopatra have indeed discovered a different register of wealth. And it is a register that is located at the heart of a self/other relation that is mediated by a feminine relation to otherness. However, while Cixous indicates the significance of the self ’s relation to its own ‘being’ as a central aspect of this different, feminine economy of desire, her analysis reaches the limits of its poetic extension at this point in ‘Sorties’. Through her reading of Achilles and Penthesileia Cixous establishes some of the conditions upon which a feminine relation to otherness may rest in the context of love. Moreover, she clarifies the importance of her understanding of the feminine as a way of being rather than as the signifier of an essentially sexed body,

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Hélène Cixous’ subject of love hence the examples of male writers like Shakespeare and Kleist, men who she thinks fully accede to the feminine. Ultimately, however, Achilles and Penthesileia merely teeter on the edge of the love that she envisages as truly reflecting a feminine economy in which other-regarding love is possible without an essential sacrifice. In the failure of love to remain open for both parties, Achilles and Penthesileia fail to reach the transcendent heights that await Antony and Cleopatra in Cixous’ pantheon of literary figures. The frailties of sustaining a different relation to self lead Achilles and Penthesileia into confusion and ultimately tragedy. However, as Cixous emphasises, Antony and Cleopatra exist in a dynamic relation of movement that refuses to exclude the human in its ascent towards a ‘new heaven’. At the beginning of Antony and Cleopatra, Cixous identifies the consequences of an intersubjective exchange that is defined by equality and that derives from a feminine relation to difference. ‘The one equal to the other, the one without equal for the other, they have found the secret of embodying Still More’ (1986a: 123). Against this precondition, she is able to refigure what might otherwise be the destructive moments of doubt that punctuate the love scenes. As she says, if Cleopatra bends, ‘he sets her straight; if he gives in, it will not be long before she recalls his greatness to him. Attached, drawing each other up a difficult ascent, uneven but triumphant’ (1986a: 128). And this mutuality is possible because ‘Where love is the only value, as Antony announced with his first words, there is no loss that may not be as quickly reversed in victory’ (1986a: 129). No either/or structure here: the structure of feminine love is both/and. Clearly Cixous’ vision of a love that tends towards exceeding the limits can and must embrace the vicissitudes of what it truly means to be human. Indeed, perhaps more than anything else, the human is what she emphasises in her reading of Antony and Cleopatra. While she acknowledges that, in this ‘[l]ove unparalleled in History, “the” one is the source of the other’, there is no concomitant implication that the one is somehow lost in and to the other. A genuine meeting in difference and mutuality functions as a protection against such a risk in a love that is constituted in both time and difference. I do not take Cixous to sacrifice the vision she has of divine love on the altar of sacrificial love. On the contrary, the wholesale loss of identity that sacrificial love typically requires, at least in terms of orthodox agapic love, is antithetical to what I am suggesting is her vision of divinity, which can be rendered only in a meeting between two subjects who only become as such in and through their meeting in alterity. Such subjects are Antony and Cleopatra and therein lies their divinity. Concluding remarks Although ‘Sorties’ is essentially an essay ‘about’ sexual difference, the history of sexual difference, and how sexual difference can and might be lived in the future, the significance of Cixous’ deployment of language, the terms she chooses, and

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The subject of love the metaphors she draws upon cannot be considered incidental. As Deborah Jenson suggests in ‘Coming to Reading Hélène Cixous’, ‘Cixous is inclined to resurrect terms which in contemporary theory, have largely been relegated to the “metaphysical broom closet” ’ (1991: 189). Rather than avoid the potential confusion that results from her consistent repudiation of institutional religion, and her subsequent employment of the very religious imagery that derives from such institutions, Cixous exploits and multiplies this confusion in a strategy which takes aim at the patriarchal roots of an orthodox divine. Sexual difference is the difference that makes a difference in her refiguration of antagonistic subjectivities. Indeed, through her theorisation of sexual difference she comes to explore the possibilities of a feminine economy of desire, and engages with the possibility of love as a condition for a post-secular calling forth of divinity. Through her analysis of another of Kleist’s texts, as well as through her reflections on the work of Clarice Lispector, I will, in the next chapter, be taking up more fully the question of Cixous’ understanding of this feminine economy of desire as her focus shifts more directly to the phenomenal experience of the subjects of grace and innocence.

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CHAPTER 4

Graceful subjectivities

I insist on the value of movement. One never has grace, it is always given. Grace is life itself. In other words, it is an incessant need, but even if it is given, like life itself, this does not mean that it will be received. To have received grace does not mean to have it, once and for all. Adam and Eve were the only people who ‘had’ it but without knowing. And they were in Paradise at the time when there was no having. We mortals have the chance, the luck of being on the passage of grace. (Cixous, ‘Grace and Innocence’, 1992: 67) We all know how much we hold on to what we know or what we think we know. One has to know how not to possess what one knows. (Cixous, ‘Grace and Innocence’, 1992: 67)

The themes of giving and receiving that underpin so much of Cixous’ analysis of the difference that sexual difference makes in ‘Sorties’ are continued and developed in ‘Grace and Innocence’. However, it is the spirit in which she ended ‘Sorties’, with a disquisition on what we might think of as ‘divine love’, which provides the framework for her new inquiry in ‘Grace and Innocence’. Her earlier reflections on love opened onto a new way of thinking about divinity in the light of her developing understanding of a feminine economy of desire. What is at stake continues to be a reconfiguration of the oppositional structure of self/other relations that has seen difference subordinated to sameness, in favour of a way of thinking about relations of difference that open on to life. Perhaps in this context, then, it is no surprise that Cixous finds herself beginning ‘Grace and Innocence’ by turning to an archetypal story of the gift of life: Eden. In many respects Genesis can be taken as an exemplary inquiry into different economies of the gift and indeed, of love. From life to sexual difference, and from sexual difference to knowledge, Genesis charts the terrain from an unconditional gift – life – to a gift that is apparently so conditional that it has simultaneously become a curse – life plus knowledge equals death. Yet, she says, even beyond this, there is grace – not the kind of grace of Adam and Eve, she notes that in the above quotation – but the kind of grace that we have the luck to be on the passage towards. Against the background of her thinking about sexual

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The subject of love difference, ‘Grace and Innocence’ poses more explicitly the question of the role of divinity in the self/other relation. It leads Cixous initially into a consideration of the concepts of grace and innocence as they occur in the traditional theological context of the myth of Eden. However, in then taking up the problem of the Fall, but rejecting the death economy that it apparently inaugurates, she finds herself pursing the conditions of a grace that is turned towards life, the kind of grace that she suggests we might be on a passage towards. As I hope to show, the grace of what Cixous comes to call a second innocence, this humanly divine grace that is beyond the Fall, is intimately connected to her work on a feminine relation to difference. To the extent that it only emerges in the context of feminine subjectivities, it also provides the basis of an other-regarding, abundant love relation that I am arguing here, in its very abundance, opens to the divine. For Hélène Cixous, the Biblical stories of Creation and the Fall are the ‘fables from which we never escape’ (1991b: 155). Their ongoing claim on us has undoubtedly informed the psychic and social landscapes through which the subjects of Jewish and Christian cultures have been interpolated into a sexually differentiated world.104 But sexual differentiation in and of itself was not all that the Genesis accounts of Creation can be understood to have founded. In being inseparable from the ideologies of phallogocentrism, Genesis also provides a hierarchy of ontological value that emerges in a dualist world, henceforth, organised in terms of binary oppositions. Thus, for example, the corporeal difference between male and female in the first account of Creation in Genesis 1 becomes the symbolic difference between male and not-male by the conclusion of Genesis 3, i.e., in the Fall. To this extent Genesis can be read as an originary account of just how this binary symbolic structure operates in and through the Western imaginary. It is remarkable that there is so little recognition of the fact that Genesis offers us two accounts of Creation, Genesis 1:26–27, and Genesis 2:7–8 and 21–25. Given that their differences, at least superficially, far outweigh their similarities, the interpretative tradition that has seen one suppressed in favour of the other

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As previously noted, there can be little doubt that the moral universe of Christianity has dominated Western culture well beyond the parameters of formal expression through the institution of the Church. Christianity must be understood, in this sense, as a hegemonic sociocultural phenomenon. On the question of sexuality itself, there are considerable differences between the Jewish and Christian traditions as they are derived from the story of the Fall, just as there are within Christianity itself. The very constitution of the Fall as the ‘original sin’ from which we need redeeming is a specifically Christian notion that derives primarily from the early Church Fathers. The Jewish traditions do not include a notion of sin extended over the whole of humanity, and, as such, their focus on Adam and Eve as the subjects of sexual subjectivity must be understood differently. Broadly speaking, within Judaic theology Adam and Eve’s pre-eminent sin is disobedience. Given that in ‘Grace and Innocence’ Cixous is generally working with an account of Genesis that does depend on the notion of a fall from divine grace, she is implicitly working within the context of a Christian rather than a Judaic reading of the Eden myth.

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Graceful subjectivities itself stands as testament to the very relation to difference against which Cixous writes.105 Genesis 1 is the repressed and negated other of Genesis 2. Within the context of the Biblical account of the creation of life, we have two different stories of the relationship between life and sexual difference. In Genesis 1, human life and sexual difference arrive simultaneously, but this is not the case in Genesis 2. Generally speaking, Genesis 1 has lent itself more readily to an equality analysis because of the simultaneity of the creation of male and female in the image of God. But in the patriarchal, Christian logos, it is the second narrative, in Genesis 2, that has held sway. Here, woman is created after man, for man and from man, in what is effectively, echoing Freud, a complete inversion and appropriation of the maternal relation to birth, i.e., to the gift of life. By the second account of creation we have a male God, bringing to life a male human, who in turns brings to life his other, woman! In many respects, the Genesis accounts should actually be read, ‘And God created them man and not-man,’ for, as feminists have shown, the relation between the apparent oppositions of man and woman is in fact organised around a binary logic that negates woman’s positive identity. Genesis 1–3, as the first words of a patriarchal God, have effectively become the soul of a binary system of social and gender relations that has been built upon a binary relation to difference. Thus, the subordination of woman and the feminine to man and the masculine have been granted divine authority. One of the concomitant results of this binary structure, as I noted in Chapter 2, has been that, at best, women and the feminine have been witnesses to, rather than participants in, the divine gift of life: man’s! To the extent that Hélène Cixous continues to invoke and explore the implications of the Genesis Creation myths through the insights of postmodernity, including a sustained consideration of the difference that sexual difference makes, she is engaging in and with the theological in the spirit of a ‘new’ kind of theology. 105 My comments here concerning Genesis are limited to and framed by my assumption that in the popular imaginary the Genesis 2 account of Creation is the one with which people are most familiar. In this account the typical interpretation has it that Adam more or less marks the beginning of Creation and Eve, as something of an afterthought, the ending. In the temporal separation between them we find the interpretative space into which a concomitant difference in value has been imported. First, i.e. male, is best, perfect, the one; last, i.e. female is worst, afterthought, derivative. Despite the enduring popularity of this interpretation, feminist theologians over the past forty years have consistently challenged the legitimacy of this interpretation. With more careful analysis, the second Creation account, they argue, is not nearly as hierarchical, nor as supportive of patriarchy as it might first, if conveniently, have appeared. See for example, Phyllis Trible, ‘Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation’ (1973) and God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (1978), for a feminist analysis of the linguistic, literary, and translation issues that have informed both the hierarchical and the egalitarian possibilities of the Genesis accounts. For a detailed and thorough analysis of the significance of the Creation stories across the three monotheistic religions, see Kristen E. Kvam, Linda S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler’s Eve & Adam: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (1999).

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The subject of love To suggest that Cixous, Irigaray, and others like them, are merely ‘speaking metaphorically’ in engaging with the narratives and concepts of religious traditions is to fail to take into account the extent to which such work is informed by their recognition that there is no literal to which metaphor functions simply as reflection.106 There is no ‘real’ that can be distinguished from representation. Language itself is metaphorical, and, as Cixous says, we are in language: ‘We are human beings, speaking and being spoken’ (1992: 57). In a comment which is appropriately suggestive of Heidegger, given Cixous’ interest in the idea that it is the other that calls forth the intersubjective space, Graham Ward makes a similar point about the status of the ‘real’ versus the metaphorical in his introduction to The Postmodern God (1997). He says that accounts such as Cixous’ ‘call forth the theological’ and ‘we cannot say, then, that they are simply using metaphors but not referring to God or the divine’ (1997: xli). While Ward’s comment begs the question of the nature of the divinity that is called forth – or perhaps ‘produced’ might be a better way of expressing it – he, nonetheless, accurately identifies the impossibility of separating the speaking from the becoming of religious and theological signification.107 In the light of Cixous’ consistent disavowal of any formal religious affiliation, yet in her ongoing invocation of religious tropes, texts, and metaphors, Ward’s comment is a helpful way of taking seriously the theological or religious elements that I am suggesting here are and always have been a consistent presence throughout Cixous’ writing. And this is so regardless of Cixous’ intentionality as author. In this chapter, I take up Cixous’ exploration of the conditions of grace and innocence, and chart their conceptual evolution through her reading of two stories by the eighteenth-century Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist – whose work we also considered in the previous chapter – and another by the more contemporary, twentieth-century Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Following Cixous’

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106 The relationship between metaphor and religious thought has been the subject of extensive consideration in recent theological and philosophical literature. Some of the following represent a fragment of this work. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk (1983), Rebecca Chopp, The Power to Speak (1989); Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology (1982), Models of God (1987) and The Body of God (1993); Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (1985); Don Cupitt, After God (1997); David Tracy, ‘Metaphor and Religion’ (1978); Paul Ricœur, The Rule of Metaphor (1978). 107 One of the most obvious difficulties in associating the work of Cixous with the theological concerns the place of God in her work. Theology has traditionally implied a notion of divinity that centres on a god, gods, or God, and, throughout the Western religious traditions, this notion has been interpreted anthropomorphically. God has been conceived in the manner of personhood. Inasmuch as Cixous is engaging with theology, in and through the discourses of sexual difference, she displaces the anthropomorphic elements of God, and disrupts the referent conceived in such terms. Clearly Graham Ward himself is making allowances for this kind of displacement in acknowledging that not only is God called forth in such work as Cixous’ but so too is divinity. I would argue that, should this be reduced to an equation in the first place, then Cixous’ work is better positioned on the divinity, rather than the theistic side of a God/divine opposition.

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Graceful subjectivities analysis of a feminine economy of the gift in ‘Sorties’, ‘Grace and Innocence’ invites us to consider the affinities between this feminine economy and the conditions of what she refers to in ‘Grace and Innocence’ as a second innocence. We will see that, inasmuch as Cixous’ conception of a second innocence expresses her vision of human divinity, it fundamentally relies on a feminine relation to difference. Thus ‘Grace and Innocence’ develops Cixous’ thinking on sexual difference at the same time as it opens still further the conversation going on about a feminine conception of the divine. In the end, I am suggesting here that it is only in and through a rather subtle appreciation of the connection between divinity and subjectivity, something I think is nonetheless well captured in Cixous’ account of feminine economies of difference, that we can more fully appreciate the way in which her account of the love between Achilles and Penthesileia conveys certain evocations of agapic love. Her reflections on the very structure of feminine subjectivities, which I read as the essence of her essay ‘Grace and Innocence’, provide the necessary bridge to the story I will subsequently tell in Chapter 5 of what I take to be Cixous’ much more explicit account of an unexpectedly agapic, other-regarding abundant love. Eve, knowledge, and the grace of others As with many of Hélène Cixous’ texts, ‘Grace and Innocence’ ‘calls forth’ the theological at the outset through its title (1992).108 But I want to suggest that through her explicit invocation of Eve within the initial pages Cixous confirms the allusive gesture that the title of this essay signifies at the same time as she stages and frames the discussion of the conditions of grace and innocence that follow. On many levels, the figure of Eve raises questions of a radical and incomprehensible otherness, and Cixous initially takes up this concern through the Biblical prohibition regarding the tree of knowledge. She is intrigued by the implications of the Edenic prohibition as it relates to Eve, and she begins ‘Grace and Innocence’ by posing the following question:109 108 Many of Cixous’ texts play on, with and through the language of God. Her first published text in 1967, Le Prénom de Dieu, is a collection of short stories that are woven through the mystery that is God’s name. ‘Un Morceau de Dieu’ (1976), (With) ou l’art de L’innocence (1981), ‘Allant vers Jérusalem, Jérusalem à l’envers’ (1983), ‘Extrême Fidélité’ (1987), Déluge (1992), and more recently Stigmata: Escaping Texts (1996) are only a very small sample of titles of works which clearly evoke if not refer to a certain religious imaginary. 109 It is worth noting that the prohibition appears only in the second creation account and it is proclaimed immediately prior to Eve’s creation. As a consequence, the already largely overdetermined question of what the prohibition is actually prohibiting has been extended to the issue of to whom it was directed. Most traditional interpreters, conveniently, read ‘man’ here as universal. ‘And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”’ (Genesis 2: 16–17)

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The subject of love Where does the other begin? Is it possible to have a relationship with something truly other, something so strange that it remains so? The question can be asked otherwise. For example, what does the sentence ‘If you eat this fruit you will die’ mean for Eve who is in a place where there is no death? That is the very question of theology and philosophy. How can someone who does not know what sin is become a sinner? (1992: 30)

If ‘Grace and Innocence’ can at all be thought to provide an answer to this question of knowledge, this question of how someone who does not know what sin is becomes a sinner, then in part, the answer is ‘by falling into terrifying ruses, the very ruses of God’ (Cixous, 1992: 58). Given that this is the God of the patriarchal logos to whom Cixous is referring, the ruse that operates most powerfully is the ruse of binary oppositions. There is no equality in difference in Eden. The other to whom one has a relation is not ‘truly’ other, rather they are already a negated other, an other-for-me, for the relations most interpretations of Genesis have served best are relations of domination and inequality. It is worth remembering that this is a man’s utopia: Adam is given dominion over those created for him, firstly the plants and animals, and, secondly, Eve. So the question Cixous raises refers to the trap of thinking there is man and woman. In Eden, we are already within the logic of a sacrificial economy: either knowledge or non-knowledge, either innocence or non-innocence, either man or not-man. From the outset it cannot be a matter of both/and. While Cixous has drawn extensively on the figure of Eve throughout much of her writing on sexual difference, ‘Grace and Innocence’ can be considered to be one of her most sustained engagements with the relationship of sexual difference to the issue of knowledge that is signified in the Fall.110 Hence her interest, in the above quotation, is on the meaning of the prohibition. What can it mean to be threatened with death, when the very concept of death is incomprehensible? Death is the unknowable, indefinable other in Eden, and as such

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110 Throughout Cixous’ writing, the figure of Eve has been an important figure of feminine otherness. She has written extensively through Eve in rethinking the relations of a feminine economy of difference. See, for example, her essay ‘The Author in Truth’ in Coming to Writing (1991b), where Eve’s relation to the taking of the ‘apple’ that signifies the forbidden fruit is reconfigured through a feminine relation to pleasure that Cixous understands as a saying ‘Yes’ to life. Cixous focuses here on Eve’s embodied relationship to eating the fruit rather than to the more intellectually oriented aspect of taking it in the first place. The resonances with the name Eve are also personal given that Eve is the name of Cixous’ mother and that, after the death of her father, Eve sustained the family by working as a midwife. As I noted earlier, in her most recent writing Cixous has in fact turned to reflections on her mother, asking as always, questions of sameness and difference, proximity and distance, separation and reparation. The mother who is both self and other simultaneously as I have suggested has consistently been a model for thinking differently about the self/other relation for Cixous. Her recent writing continues this exploration as she explores the ways in which her mother is so utterly different from her, yet there, intimate, proximate, connected nonetheless. And there differences are irreducible. See note 89.

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Graceful subjectivities it raises the issue of our relationship to difference. As I have already suggested, however, Eden is a space in which gender and power have already intersected around the question of difference. Through his dominion, Adam symbolises the binary, masculine relationship to alterity that has already been divinely sanctioned. While the typical misogynist account of the Fall implies that it is in the face of the threat of death that Eve knowingly defies the prohibition, Cixous’ point concerning the incomprehensibility of the prohibition offers us another way of thinking about Eve’s relationship to knowledge. It is in fact the unknowable other that calls Eve into becoming in a relationship to knowledge that cannot be predicated on the subject who recognises and negates difference: there was no death in Eden. Thus, Eve offers us a different picture of both alterity and subjectivity in Eden from that of Adam. Eve demonstrates Cixous’ earlier speculation in ‘Sorties’, that, in a feminine, non-possessive relation to difference, it is the very otherness of the other that draws the subject into becoming. The irony in the Biblical account then is that Eve is called into becoming, which Cixous takes to be a calling into life, by death. Cixous considers the implications of the discourses of loss that are typically at issue in analyses of the story of the Fall, and she too is interested in the opposition between innocence and knowledge. She agrees that the Biblical account charts the loss of an originary innocence, but she is also aware that it heralds the birth not necessarily of knowledge per se but of a very particular relationship between subjectivity and knowledge. Cixous reads into the moment when their eyes were opened and they knew they were naked, a relationship to knowledge that inaugurates a subjectivity that is in possession of knowledge. Given that they were already naked in Eden it cannot be nakedness as such which represents the shift in being that the Fall is indicating. Rather it is their self-awareness of their nakedness that signifies the fall from grace, and which also indicates that their loss also involves the loss of a relationship of immediacy with the present. Knowing they are naked requires a reflective consciousness that makes the past a past present. As such, in her engagement with the Biblical prohibition, unlike many theological commentators, Cixous is not concerned with the object of prohibited knowledge, that is, with what comes to be known. Instead, she focuses on the point at which a certain relation to knowing itself becomes a possibility, i.e., a possessive one, and, in so doing, apparently forecloses upon the very kind of relationship that is signified by Eve’s response to the prohibition in the first place, i.e., a non-possessive one. For Cixous, one does indeed fall from innocence into knowledge, but she understands the loss that is entailed to be better understood as the ‘loss of another, non-symbolic, nonintellectual knowledge’ (1992: 57), i.e., the loss of a feminine, non-possessive relation to knowledge. Given Cixous’ post-structural commitments, she is aware of the trap of the pre-discursive, pre-symbolic implications of paradise where a return to Eden is simply a fantasy of a ‘return’

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The subject of love to an undifferentiated state in which there is no difference.111 In suggesting that the loss of originary innocence is the loss of the non-symbolic she is not offering us a vision of innocence that is predicated on the absence of difference. Rather, in describing the symbolic as also intellectual, she is indicating, by contrast, that the non-symbolic is a knowledge that goes by way of the body and is immanent rather than transcendent. The loss of originary innocence, then, is the loss of this immanent, non-appropriative relationship to the other in favour of a transcendent, symbolic knowledge that arises in a subject who knows they are naked, i.e., a subject who knows they know. At stake in all of this, of course, at least for me here, is the way this story simultaneously charts the conditions through which we lose our connection to divinity, for, in the Jewish and Christian logos, Eden is one of most powerful tropes of the symbolic origin of the human experience of embodied divinity. Thus, our understanding of the subjectivities of paradise provides the context against which to locate Cixous’ second innocence. The Fall from innocence into knowledge, as it is usually structured, thereby heralds the birth of a symbolic intellectual knowledge that is thoroughly structured along dialectical and hierarchical lines. To this extent we can understand that it is Adam’s way of relating to difference that survives the Fall. Moreover, Cixous’ thesis in ‘Grace and Innocence’ is both a demonstration of this binary structure, as it operates in and through the theological concepts of grace and innocence, as well as a reflection of the position she writes against. As she said in ‘Sorties’, it could be otherwise, and in ‘Grace and Innocence’ Eve is the trope of the otherwise through which Cixous’ discussion is framed. Hence, it is, again, in pursuit of that ‘otherwise’ that she undertakes her analysis of the concepts of grace and innocence as she searches for the conditions of living a feminine relation to subjectivity wherein the other remains ‘truly’ other; where difference is not appropriated; and where the humanly divine is called forth. This is what Cixous understands to be a second innocence; the one we are on a passage towards having lost the first. Possessing knowledge, possessing the other, and love Technically speaking, Cixous begins ‘Grace and Innocence’ by announcing that she will be working on love, ‘on who loves whom, not in a kind of way but at the summit, at the apogee, where it is possible to speak of an economy of love in terms of the gift’ (1992: 28). She then goes on to remind her readers of the nature of the gift of love that she values, by briefly invoking two of her exemplary literary couples: Tancredi and Clorinda from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, and 111

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While Cixous’ engagements with psychoanalysis tend to be directly through Freud, the influence of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan can also be seen in her references to the symbolic and the pre-symbolic. Cixous is quite close to Kristeva at this point.

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Graceful subjectivities Achilles and Penthesileia from Kleist’s Penthesileia. For Cixous, these tales of love signify ‘the inscription’, if not the theorization, of femininity (1992: 29). They speak of a moment of love that is lived differently in briefly escaping a narcissistic economy of possession. And they do so because they each narrate an event in which love is the means by which the subjects come to live the knowledge of knowledge, and hence the knowledge of themselves, without a grasping attachment – if only for a moment. In an important sense, the question of the subject that possesses what it knows is the subject both of the Biblical account of the Fall and of the history of Western consciousness, and in connecting this to love Cixous also makes this question of knowledge a question of love. Around this seemingly necessary relation between knowledge, possession, love, and subjectivity Cixous is intervening in ‘Grace and Innocence’. By returning to Eden, she is beginning at the mythico-symbolic beginning of a relationship to knowledge that is managed dialectically, in and around the subject that knows it knows. As I previously noted, in the Fall from grace, Adam and Eve were no longer simply naked, no longer simply living a kind of totalised immediacy with the world and each other. Rather, the Fall marks the moment in which the subject is inaugurated into a transcendent relationship to the self/other relation that is signified epistemologically in their knowledge of their own nakedness. Through her readings of Kleist and Lispector in ‘Grace and Innocence’, Cixous offers a rereading of this apparently foundational subjectivity, in which she nuances the notion of a unified self with the phenomenal dispersedness of lived experience. In so doing, and for my purposes, her rereading invites us to reconsider a kind of selflessness that is not necessarily sacrificial, for, in recognising the diversity that is lived experience, Cixous recognises that there is no unified self preceding experience. This is significant in terms of agapic love because Nygren founded his rejection of the human capacity to truly embody other-regarding abundant, agapic love on his belief in the relentless self-centredness of human beings, the only corrective of which could be total and utter self-sacrifice. The interventions Cixous makes around feminine subjectivities thus allow us to reconsider the question of selflessness from a different vantage point, one in which the self per se is not assumed to be unified, organised, singular, and of course selfish. The feminine ‘self’ in Cixousian terms is constantly constituted in the very flux of living toward the other, neither departing from nor arriving at a position of totality. Inasmuch as we can speak of ‘self’ at all, it is always a conditional speaking, which is not to say that we cannot speak of self. The issue for Cixous is less concerned with being than it is with becoming, and her understanding of subjectivity as being in a constant state of metamorphosis is yet another expression of her commitment to the notion of journeying rather than arrival. Metamorphosis implies movement and, as she notes, ‘[f ]or something to happen there has to be movement’ (1992: 51). Moreover, as she also notes, ‘life itself is in movement’ (1992: 51). The alternative for Cixous, as Verena Conley remarks, is death. ‘To stop is to die.

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All modes of confinement have to be lifted. All has to be traversal and flow. Life is full of bubbling springs; it is made of mystery. Once a mystery or an enigma has been solved, we need to go on to another mystery’ (Conley, 1992: 58). Essential to understanding Cixous’ commitment to feminine subjectivity is the notion that it is dispersed rather than unified. The element of dispersal is the pivot around which I am arguing we can rethink the problem of selflessness that has historically attended on agape. Despite the universalising language through which she often speaks, Cixous does not fall into the trap of essentialism. When she implies, as she does in ‘Grace and Innocence’, that grace is made possible in the absence of self, by the reduction of self to the least that is possible, she could be mistaken for echoing the very kinds of sentiments that have informed traditional theological understandings of agapic love. And, as I noted in the Chapter 2, many feminist theologians have understandably been very critical of this conception of agapic love in light of the fact that the demand for selflessness seems peculiarly gendered. But such a reading would be possible only in misunderstanding how Cixous thinks about subjectivity. To repeat, she is not speaking either ontologically or essentially when she speaks of having the least possible self. She is not assuming that the self is a unified and totalised structure that precedes acting in the world. Rather, she is speaking phenomenologically and in a way that recognises that any such speaking is always subject to the constraints of the temporal world. It is always a speaking of self that is located dynamically between the universal and the particular, and is always, then, a matter of ‘for the time being’. In their non-possessive relationship to themselves as source and telos of knowledge, Cixousian subjects are freed into a relationship of immediacy, a relationship of becoming with the other in the present. Thus, the Cixousian subject relinquishes the need to distinguish between itself and the knowledge it ‘has’. In reconfiguring the seeming inevitability of a possessive relation between subjectivity and knowledge, Cixous displaces the hierarchical structure of the dialectic and foreshadows her understanding that grace will emerge only in an intersubjective context in which the self is dispossessed of itself as the raison d’être of being. From her initial exploration of the structure of grace that emerges from her reflections on Kleist, and her subsequent analysis of Lispector, Cixous takes up the metaphor of what she calls ‘a good distraction’ as a way of thinking through and towards the ‘otherwise’ that marks this different relation to knowledge and difference. The very possibility of human grace or divinity is to be found in a genuine encounter with difference in Cixousian theory, and, in approaching this possibility, the concept of distraction addresses the role of a self that must possess what it knows. As Lispector says, ‘Unless one is distracted the telephone does not ring’ (Lispector in Cixous, 1992: 48). So from what then must we be distracted to truly love the other in their otherness? ‘Grace and Innocence’ suggests that we must be distracted from the domination of the dialectic in which knowledge is the means by we constitute ourselves

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Graceful subjectivities as selves, as unified under the sign ‘I’, and always at the expense of the other. So it is from this grasping relation to the knowledge of knowledge in which the self finds itself, in and through the annihilation of the other, that we must be distracted if there is to be the possibility of grace or divinity. Hence Cixous’ oftrepeated statement that what we must know is how not to know if we are to encounter the other in their otherness rather than to see them merely as the reflection of ourselves. She says, ‘if we humans were not so busy looking into our own eyes, we could see what is happening in the eyes of the other. But generally, we mirror ourselves in the eyes of the other’ (1992: 55). If we are to avoid this narcissistic, masculine economy in which the other is subsumed beneath the self, we must relinquish the grasping attachment to knowledge that anxiously attempts to constitute the ‘I’, the self, as the subject of knowing. In other words, we must relinquish the kind of relationship to subjectivity that has lent itself to a masculine ideal of the self-possessed, self-present subject of knowledge. Inasmuch as we can understand Cixous as speaking of selflessness then, she is actually speaking of a different way of living subjectivity, not of the eradication of subjectivity tout court. Thus, the kind of selflessness she is addressing in ‘Grace and Innocence’ is a long way from the selflessness of orthodox Christian theologies that insist on a radical form of self-sacrifice as a precondition of otherregarding, abundant agapic love. Engaging with innocence While Kleist’s and Lispector’s narratives provide the explicit textual basis of Cixous’ analysis in ‘Grace and Innocence’, it is through a subtle encounter with the conceptual force of the lexicon of divinity, as it circulates through and beyond the Genesis story, that I think we find the substance of ‘Grace and Innocence’. Innocence, grace, sin, paradise, and desire are the symbolic threads that Cixous is taking up through both Kleist and Lispector, and they are the specific threads that we will be pursing in the remainder of this chapter. Cixous’ goal, she says, is to work on what she calls ‘an economy of innocence’ (1992: 31), whereby innocence can be reconceived in terms of the post-fallen condition that is human being. There is something important that can easily be forgotten either through idealism or inattention, that is, that there are two kinds of innocence. There is a first kind of virgin innocence and then there is another, a second innocence, neither pregiven nor paradisiacal but one that has been found again. (1992: 31)

Against the impossibility of originary, virginal innocence, the innocence of a masculine Eden, Cixous’ goal is to uncover a kind of grace and innocence, and hence a kind of divinity, that can bear the weight of human becoming, and is no less divine in being human. Her analysis of the stories of Kleist and Lispector implies

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that the masculine subject of knowledge is weighed down by his need to return to unity, and to constitute himself endlessly through a possessive subjectivity that annihilates alterity and precludes grace. The trope of grace, as it is initially encountered in Kleist’s tale of the grace of a dancing puppet, signals that the metaphor of weight is an important one in Cixous’ theorising about an alternative, I would say, reflecting back to ‘Sorties’, feminine relation to subjectivity. Clearly this economy of the second innocence has much in common with her earlier reflections on a feminine relation to desire, if it is not in fact the same. The freedom to be with the other, to allow the other their otherness is to be found in relinquishing an attachment to the weight of the demand for unity. While Kleist’s narratives provide the basis of Cixous’ exploration of what could be considered to be the theological implications of the relationship between a dialectically constituted subjectivity and grace, her analysis of Lispector more explicitly returns to the Biblical question of what it means to ‘have’ knowledge. Through Lispector, she attends to the concept of movement to inflect her original sense that it is the very fact of a subjectivity constituted in and around the knowledge of difference that signals the impossibility of an immanent, human, and embodied grace. Lispector provides a bridge from a more abstracted philosophical consideration of subjectivity to the order of the phenomenal, where the questions of grace and subjectivity that are raised in her reading of Kleist are then reapproached from the perspective of how they might be lived. Cixous’ analysis of grace and innocence initially relies on a number of vignettes within Kleist’s On the Marionette Theatre (1810). I will be focusing here on Cixous’ reading of just two of these tales. Firstly, I will turn to the dialogue between a dancer and an unnamed interlocutor who are discussing the mysteries of dance as they interrogate whether or not a human dancer could be as graceful as a marionette. Secondly, I will consider the story of a young boy who loses his ‘innocence’ when he gazes into a mirror. Cixous’ analysis of these vignettes offers her readers an opportunity to consider just what it might be that permits, and also by extension what it is that excludes, human grace. Her analysis initially builds upon, and draws out the implications of what is seemingly a secular configuration of grace through the metaphor of the rhythmic and harmonious movements of Kleist’s puppets. But this configuration of grace is soon revealed as being considerably less secular than first appearances imply. Cixous does remark, however, that with Kleist we are dealing with a grace that is already passing away. It is not until she turns to Lispector that she fully engages the lived moment of grace between human subjects. As she says, ‘Clarice describes grace. Kleist describes someone who is already losing grace’ (1992: 40). Nonetheless, Kleist’s account of grace clarifies Cixous’ suspicion that it is a concept that been interpolated into dialectical, binary, and phallogocentric reasoning. Given that it is a concept that is also central to Christianity, Cixous’ analysis functions also as a critique of the Christian debts to a masculine conception of divinity. When she turns to Lispector’s ‘Because

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Graceful subjectivities They Were Not Distracted’, she does so with a view to rethinking grace outside of an economy of masculine reasoning.112 Dancing with divinity Kleist’s story begins with the description of an encounter between the principal dancer of a theatre company and an otherwise unidentified narrator who gives the story its initial momentum. The narrator expresses a kind of moral shock when he finds that the dancer regularly frequents a puppet performance that has recently been established in the local marketplace. Why, the reader is supposed to join him in thinking, would someone as accomplished as this dancer find anything intriguing or alluring about a mere mechanical puppet, something that is generally thought of as little more than a crude and unsophisticated imitation? Kleist’s story begins by staging a seemingly aesthetic, indeed, an almost Platonic, question, but the dancer’s investments in the dialogue are ultimately revealed as being considerably more religious than they are aesthetic. The dancer does not respond to the narrator’s shock. Instead he compounds it by posing a question that, in relying on the notion of grace, foreshadows the religious implications of Kleist’s narrative. ‘He asked me if I hadn’t, in fact, found some of the dance movements of the puppets, particularly of the smaller ones, very graceful?’ (Kleist in Cixous, 1992: 33; hereafter cited as Kleist). By this subtle and indirect means Cixous notes that grace enters Kleist’s text. She remarks that it, nonetheless, does so very slowly and under the cover of the banal, for graces need be understood to be little more than the qualifier of a movement in the context of the dancer’s initial proposal (Cixous, 1992: 33). In this sense Cixous is reminding us of the trap of binary distinctions. The sacred and profane are apparently divided here, with grace functioning as a referent to harmony in movement, a signifier of a certain corporeal beauty that is by no means necessarily divine. Yet, in picking up on the excesses of signifying processes, and in also foreshadowing the impossibility of dividing the sacred from the profane, Cixous also notes that, with the dancer’s reference to grace, ‘the whole semantic field of grace infiltrates the text surreptitiously’ (1992: 33). Given the affiliation of 112

While in this essay Cixous is rarely explicit in terms of her engagement with, and critique of, a certain Christian discourse, there is an interesting tension at work in her use of the concept of grace. Because she begins with Eden, and as such is focusing on a notion of grace that ties it to the gift of life, she is, in a sense, drawing on a Hebrew conception of grace. Yet grace is overwhelmingly a Christian concept. While it appears in the Old Testament it does so around the conception of God as both a vengeful and a compassionate God. Grace appears, then, in the context of God’s compassion. However, grace really takes on its theological significance in terms of the New Testament discourse of salvation where it refers to God’s unwarranted gift of salvation to humanity. The theological debates concerning this gift are complex and for my purposes too labyrinthine to elucidate fully. Suffice to say that the tension arises around whether or not God’s grace, God’s gift, is one that is necessary, or whether it can be refused.

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The subject of love grace with Jewish but more so with Christian theologies, I take Cixous to be referring here to the impossibility of excluding the religious dimensions of grace in any attempt to anchor its excess solely to an aesthetic aspect of corporeality. Cixous’ remark anticipates the direction that she will take in her own reading of Kleist’s tale. The dancer’s reference to grace raises the question of whether grace can ever be understood simply as a secular notion. And if it can’t, what invitation does that pose for thinking about the relationship between grace in its secular guise, versus grace in its sacred guise? Cixous has consistently aligned herself with deconstruction on this question of the signifying capacity of language. As such, she recognises that language is inherently excessive to the intentions of its authors and speakers. Perhaps this is even more the case with the language of religious discourses where the semantic latitude of the lexicon is particularly broad. Notions like grace, fidelity, divinity, truth, God, love, etc., are undoubtedly particularly open signifiers. Indeed, the discipline of religious studies has long recognised this in its struggle to account for the relationship between religious language and its referents.113 To this extent, then, grace can never be limited to its secular context. There will always be an excess. Within the next two paragraphs of Kleist’s story, Cixous notes that this seemingly banal and secular presentation of grace as an attribute of the movement of bodies through space is itself already a notion that is deeply informed by, and is in fact inseparable from, religious ideals. The apparently transparent recognition of grace as simply an adjective to describe a movement such as the puppet’s is revealed to have never been transparently anything, for the corporeal necessarily carries with it, and is inseparable from, the spiritual – at least inasmuch as Cixous is working with binary logic. With Kleist we are in the field of grace. From his text, it is possible to extract a definition of grace in banal terms, as when we say that a person has grace, as well as a quality in the body related to what we could call grace as a spiritual feature. After having been told this, lightly and gracefully but never directly, we have arrived at a point of intersection between corporeal and spiritual grace. The two intersect and one cannot exist without the other. (1992: 34)

Cixous makes a definitive reading of Kleist here. The corporeal and spiritual, like all binaries, are inseparable, and indeed constitutive, of each other. While she might say, as she does just over the page, that there is only one grace, leaving her readers wondering about the extent to which a commitment to the excessive promise of signification really does inform her reading, it is important to remember that

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113 Cixous’ writing is, in an important sense, defined by its transgression of the rules of grammar and syntax. Through her poetico-allusive style, she deliberately stages the impossibility of masculine fantasies of unity that underlie the notion of a correspondence between word and world. Given that the religious traditions of both Judaism and Christianity clearly distinguish them as religions of the Book and thus as religions of the word, Cixous’ endless word-plays function as a direct challenge to the masculine authority that has historically been attributed to these sacred texts.

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Graceful subjectivities Cixous is more than willing to employ universalising gestures. However, in opposition to the universalising gestures of logocentrism and phallocentrism, she does not use the universal as the stepping-off point of an appeal to the absolute. Cixous’ universal, as opposed to the absolute, opens on to movement not stasis. It is never an appeal to an eternity that is outside of human time. Thus, in asserting that there is only one grace, she is addressing the notion that the secular and sacred have been held to be separable. Her interest, however, lies more in the idea that the universal is inseparable from, indeed is defined by, the entre deux, the entre nous. The slippage between the sacred and the secular in Kleist’s account of the grace of the puppet’s movements is an ideal vehicle through which Cixous can work in considering our cultural understandings of grace. By extension, as I have noted, her work reveals the debts to Christian thought that remain implicit in this concept. Yet, even within her reading of Kleist, which must also be seen as a critique of institutional religion, Cixous does not reject the possibility that religions may well be able to tell us something about divinity. Clearly grace is not limited to the Christian logos in Cixous’ work and, in this sense, her work resonates with a kind of ‘post’-religious theology. In terms of her explicit use of the concept of grace, Cixous’ interest seems more firmly located in gaining an insight into just how such an ‘other’, and othering experience, as surely the experience of a grace that arrives in the manner of a gift, must be. Hence she focuses on the conditions of its living in and through human subjectivities. Throughout her writing, Cixous grounds her analyses of human subjectivity in the phenomenal world of experience. From her commitment to rethinking the aporias of binary logic, she embraces a notion of the feminine as a fully embodied experience of the subject in life. So, even when it is to the orders of consciousness that she is attending, as it is here in her readings of both Kleist and Lispector, it is to the phenomenal, embodied experience of the subject that she refers. Consciousness per se is not abstracted from the body in her work any more than it is in life. The ambiguity about the religious stakes of the exchange between the dancer and the narrator over the nature of grace resolved by Kleist when the narrator gives voice to his ‘true’ belief that he could never be convinced that a mechanical puppet could ever approximate the grace of a human dancer. ‘I said that, regardless of how cleverly he might present his paradoxes, he would never make me believe that a mechanical puppet could be more graceful than the human body’ (Kleist, 1992: 32). To this implicit challenge, the dancer provocatively responds that it is only a puppet or a god that can truly embody grace. ‘He said that it would be impossible for man to come anywhere near the puppet. Only a god could equal inanimate matter in this respect’ (Kleist, 1992: 32). For Cixous, the dancer’s claim understandably gives rise to the question of what it might be that is shared by the puppet and a god, and by extension, what excludes the dancer from a similar possibility. As we will see, in her subsequent analysis she comes to recognise that, once again, the problem for human grace goes hand in glove with

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the problem of a subjectivity that is lived through a relation to knowledge that must be in possession of itself, and of what is known. To this end, it is to the role of puppeteer or operator that Cixous finds herself turning in exploring this issue of grace and subjectivity, for, according to the dancer, the grace of the puppet relies on the puppeteer’s ability to eliminate the mediating influence of his own subjectivity: in other words, and to return us to one of the central overall concerns of my reflections here on the possibilities of divine love, it relies on his selflessness. Through the continuing dialogue the dancer provides a detailed account of the operations of the puppet that, in Cixous’ analysis, has the consequence of unbinding the strings that tie it to the direct control of its operator (1992: 33) and thus open it to divine signification. To the narrator’s query about how an operator can manipulate the limbs of the puppet without a myriad of strings, the dancer’s response lays the foundation for his assertion that only a puppet or a god could truly be graceful. In order to produce an ideal, and hence a graceful movement in a puppet, the ideal operator must align the puppet around its ‘natural’ centre. Beyond the alignment the forces of gravity, which are themselves of the ‘natural’, will take over and the puppet will then follow the line of trajectory in complete harmony with external constraints. ‘Each movement has its center of gravity: it would suffice to control this within the puppet; the limbs which are only on pendulums, follow mechanically of their own accord – without further help’ (Kleist, 1992: 33). It would seem that the dancer is implicitly drawing on a notion of God that resonates with classical associations. In finding the centre, the puppet achieves a kind of ‘selfless’ movement that is paradoxically like the pure actuality of God. In the puppet, as in God, there is no internal/ external divide, and in the absence of oppositions grace is called forth. Having initially limited the issue of grace to something about human bodies, the narrator finds himself in a trap, for he recognises that the human body will never be the equivalent of the inanimate materiality of the puppet. He finds himself then invoking the concept of soul to account for human grace. He says, ‘But, seen from another point of view, this line [the line of trajectory] could be something very mysterious, for it is nothing other than the path taken by the dancer’s soul’ (Kleist, 1992: 33). With the grace of human dancers, then, we are in the mysterious territory of a tension between internal and external constraints, the tension between material bodies and immaterial souls, and the point of tension is being mediated through binary logic. Cixous, as I previously noted, does not explicitly take up the opposition between the puppet and the human dancer that Kleist is ostensibly staging, just as she doesn’t take up the object of knowledge in the story of the Fall. Rather, she keeps in mind the respective claims that the dancer and the narrator have made: firstly that the puppet and God are equivalent, and secondly that the grace of human dancers is a matter of the alignment of bodies and souls: and she attends instead to the absent presence of the third term in the discussion, that is, the role of the

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Graceful subjectivities puppeteer. According to the dancer’s account, in order to achieve the perfect balance that will make the puppet graceful, and thereby ensure that it is equivalent to a god, in the sense that it is nothing but pure movement, the operator must also position himself at the centre. ‘The operator, to put his puppets in motion, has to identify with the ideal dancer or with a puppet. He has to remain at the center in order to produce a rhythmic and harmonious pendular motion’ (Kleist, 1992: 33). An operator who can so position himself will thereby free the puppet from the ‘last constraints of human volition’ (Kleist, 1992: 33). It will be in a relation of intense yet weightless immediacy with its surroundings; not constrained by the forces of gravity but rather in total concert with them. Consider Kleist’s attention to the puppet’s relation of intense lightness to all that surrounds it in the following passage. ‘In addition’, he said, ‘these puppets have the advantage of being practically weightless . . . The force which raises them into the air is greater than the one which draws them to the ground.’ . . . Puppets, like elves, need the ground only so that they can touch it lightly and renew the momentum of their limbs through this momentary delay. We need it to rest on, to recover from the exertions of the dance, a moment which is clearly not part of the dance. We can only do our best to make it as inconspicuous as possible.’ (Kleist, 1992: 37)

For Cixous, Kleist’s attention to the immediacy and presence of the puppets is revelatory of his implicit understanding of the operations of grace as well as his recognition that the corporeal and spiritual are inseparable. The puppet, thus having been freed from the puppeteer’s influence, will be fully present to the world having been released from the disfiguring and dis-grace-full influences of human consciousness, which will presumably lead to awkwardness and not grace. Only then will the puppet be grace full and only then will it be the equivalent of a God.114 114 Kleist’s concern with the grace of the puppets versus the grace of human dancers is evocative of Sartre’s distinction in Being and Nothingness (1966), between the body-for-itself and the bodyin-itself. While Sartre’s discussion is located in his concern about concrete relations between self and other, his assertion that the graceful body is the body in which there is no distinction between consciousness, body, and world, i.e., the body-for-itself, has surprising resonances with the grace of Kleist’s puppet that has been freed from the contaminating influences of the other upon whom it depends, the operator. The graceless or obscene body, for Sartre, is the body made flesh as the object of consciousness, i.e., the body-in-itself. Interestingly Sartre also uses the trope of a dancer in reflecting on the graceful body and, from a Cixousian point of view, he offers a challenging reading of the role of movement. He says that even a nude dancer, whose very nudity we would imagine would imply the fleshly, is anything but reducible to the body-in-itself, for the movements of the dancer’s body hide its fleshly being and locate it as a body in situation. In our desire for the other, we attempt to strip the body of its ‘pure contingency as presence’ and incarnate it as ‘pure flesh’ (1966: 505–510). For Cixous, however, Sartre’s distinction between body as flesh, and body as object of consciousness, is untenable, as is his account of desire. In the first instance, he relies on a false dichotomy between mind and body, regardless of how subtle his distinction might be, and, in the second, his account of desire serves only to reinforce a masculine economy of social relations in which the other is inevitably lived as an other-for-me. Moreover Sartre’s understanding of movement gestures towards transcendence rather than immanence and, in this respect, he differs significantly from Cixous.

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The conditions which make possible the grace of the puppet have a familiarly Edenic ring to them; an idealised immediacy that is ‘lived’ as a state of being, a relation of intense lightness with all that surrounds one, thus making one inseparable from, and united in oneness in, God. For the dancer, it is seems clear that the grace of the puppet functions as a corollary for the typical account of the innocence of humanity before the Fall. While Kleist curiously refers specifically to god, and not God, the dynamics of the grace that he narrates appear to be recognisable in Christian terms. Consider again what it is that disrupts the Edenic structure of the dancer’s otherwise graceful puppets: it is the intervention of the subjectivity of the human operator whose very subjectivity necessarily brings with it the possibility of imbalance, the possibility of the Fall, that will preclude the puppet from being grace-full. Thus, the ideal operator in this account needs to be selfless in the same way as Nygren’s agapic lover needs to be selfless. But, as Cixous remarks, ‘even when the operator is experienced and knows how to be situated at the center of gravity’, there is always the threat of the Fall (1992: 34). To the extent that the operator can place himself at the centre and thereby eliminate the threat of his own influence on the movement of the puppet, the operator could be like Eve in the sense in which Cixous reads Eve. He could be in a non-possessive relationship with himself and the other. Yet, in his admiration for the puppet, the dancer betrays an interest in a more orthodox theology of selflessness. The first condition of possibility for the grace that has been the subject of the exchange between the narrator and the dancer is a priori established in the puppet. The puppet is necessarily radically selfless and, in being so, it is already in a kind of symmetry with God. While the Christian traditions have tended to personify God, and in so doing have introduced the question of the nature of God’s ‘self’, the overarching tropes of omnipotence and omniscience as defining characteristics have functioned to displace the concomitant problem to which this gives rise: God’s desire. Given that the puppet is an inanimate object, clearly it has no desire of its own. But, unlike God, in order to move, and to go from the potential of having grace to actually being graceful, the puppet, for the very reason that it has no desire of its own, is dependent upon an other, a mediator. Yet, as Kleist has demonstrated, this is a paradox, for the very presence of desire that makes possible the puppet’s grace, i.e., the desire of the operator, is the very thing that must be eliminated in order for it to be truly graceful. If, then, the ideal relationship between the puppet and its operator is in some sense functioning as a corollary for the ideal relationship between God and man, the desire of the operator in Kleist’s example provides a third term, around which the binary is articulated. It also provides another demonstration of the problem of subjectivity for Christian grace understood in binary terms, for, in the case of the operator and the puppet, the third term marks and defines the threat of subjectivity, i.e., the presence of desire. The conditions of the grace of the puppet

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Graceful subjectivities thus break down into: the operator as empty immediacy, which is the idealised pre-fallen state that is reflected in his ability to place himself at the centre; the puppet as essential immediacy, which is the promise of, and model for, the pre-fallen state; and the desiring self of the operator as the threat of mediation, the threat of the Fall. Ironically, then, the self of the operator is both the engine of the Fall and, in Cixous’ account of a second innocence, the other possibility of grace in the post-fallen state, for it is the operator who must act to place the puppet and himself at the centre and thus who opens the possibility of grace. To reiterate the dancer’s demand of the ideal operator: he must place himself in a mimetic relationship with the puppet, but only in order to remove himself as much as possible from the act of controlling the puppet’s movement. It is a kenotic move. He must empty himself of himself, for it is the intrusion of himself that will preclude the possibility of grace. He must therefore be utterly selfless. On the positive side, Cixous notes that ‘Kleist tries to show difference, rather than sameness’ (1992: 34), and his goal in staging this, as in many of his stories, is to ‘push back as far as possible any control or mastery’ (1992: 37). Kleist, like Cixous, is apparently contra Hegel, and, to a very significant extent, ‘Grace and Innocence’ is a sustained and focused critique of the Hegelian dialectic. Grace and mastery are understood as being mutually exclusive, and human intentionality, human will, which is always in a relationship of tension with mastery, is revealed here once more as the defining paradigm of the loss of grace for humanity. For Cixous, Kleist is restaging the paradox of Eden that is revealed in the tension between Adam and Eve’s very different relationships to constituting themselves as the subjects of knowledge. By an act of intention, the intention of aligning the puppet with the centre of itself and its surroundings, the operator’s job is, paradoxically, to remove desire, the very desire that underpins the intention in the first place. Indeed the task is to remove any hint of mediation as much as possible from the equation. The actual process of the alignment then opens on to the mystical, and thus to the divine, for, in having absented himself from himself, the centre, which was always there all along, seems to find the operator. Human volition is being constituted here as the loss of centre, the loss of what would otherwise be a state of divine grace. Consider the extent to which the dancer believes that the presence of grace is dependent upon the radical exclusion of human desire, something we might think of as being coextensive with human being. ‘And yet he believed that even the last trace of human volition [my emphasis] to which he had referred could be removed [entfernt] from the marionettes’ (Kleist, 1992: 34). For the dancer, the more successful the operator is at removing the traces of human volition from himself, the more graceful the puppet’s movements will be, and the more like Edenic grace his account becomes. Yet the dancer’s understanding of the operations of desire conforms only to Adam’s masculine economy of desire and not to Eve’s. It is only in terms of a possessive desire that the absence of grace in the operator is defined, and, as

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Cixous notes at the outset of ‘Grace and Innocence’, Eve offers a different, nonpossessive, and thus feminine account of desire in terms of her relation to the unknowable other. As the story progresses, the analogy between the puppet and God reaches its zenith in the dancer’s proposition of what he understands to be the defining distinction between puppet and human dancers, which is also the thing that ultimately makes the puppet most Godlike. The puppet, in necessarily being a selfless being, cannot behave affectedly. Inasmuch as it can move, and thus be graceful, its movement is derived from its relationship with external forces, not from its relationship with the inside, with itself, and most especially not from a relation with desire. What does the puppet do in response to the calling of a weight by another weight, Cixous asks? It gives in to them for it has no means by which to resist (1992: 37). Unlike human dancers the puppet can never be affected by its own desires for it can never be affected at all. While Cixous seems willing to concede that a relationship of harmony between the external and the internal may well be a condition of grace – for instance, she does acknowledge that ‘affectation [in human dancers] appears in the soul at a point other than that of the center of gravity or movement’ (1992: 36) – she is clearly suspicious of any notion of grace that is predicated upon the denial or erasure of the inside, of affectation, or of desire. The operator can clearly be understood as paradigmatic of the logic of extreme self-sacrifice that has permeated much of orthodox Christianity, but this selfsacrifice is not a necessary one either to Christianity per se or to the operator. Rather, I would argue, it reveals the intimate relationship between traditional theological interpretations and assumptions about the nature of human subjectivity and patriarchal fantasies of unity. The sacrifice of self that is demanded of the operator is a radical sacrifice, at least inasmuch as the goal is to achieve a state of grace. In order for the puppet to be aligned with the centre, a space, albeit a masculine one, that has symbolically been invested with divine and transcendent powers, the operator must free himself of the corrupting influences of mediation. The self of the operator, understood by Kleist through the motif of human volition, is the mediating influence that prevents a kind of divine immediacy between God and the world, God and the puppet, the puppet and the world. It is only in the radical erasure of that self that grace will emerge. Yet, as we have seen, for Cixous there are other ways of living desire than as a grasping relationship to oneself as the subject of knowledge. Thus, there are other ways of understanding the conditions of grace. While Cixous reads Kleist’s story as a demonstration of the conditions of Edenic grace, her reading discloses the extent to which this story is a masculine one. She returns to the discarded evidence of the dancer’s claims in order to reconsider the fate of the human dancers, and thus of human beings, and begins again with the question of desire. She firstly notes that human dancers do dance. The same could not really be said of the puppet, for to dance is to want to dance.

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Graceful subjectivities Wanting anything puts us in the territory of desire, and synonymous with desire, at least in the patriarchal logos, has been the subject who desires, the ‘I’ that knows, if not what it wants, at least that it is wanting. Echoes of Descartes notwithstanding, Cixous’ point is referring to the question of human subjectivity constituted in opposition to difference. The self/other relation is internalised and we are other to ourselves in wanting to know and in knowing we know. In this relation to knowledge ‘we are beyond Paradise: it is barred, the cherub is behind us’ and there is no ‘going back’ (1992: 38). Yet human subjectivity, read through the metaphor of the Fall, is itself constituted in an encounter with the unknowable other, for in Eden, as we have seen, there is no other that remains other. Thus, for Cixous, it is a mistake to align knowledge and subjectivity in these terms. What matters is not knowledge per se but our relation to knowledge. It is in needing to possess the other via knowledge that we find ourselves locked into binary relations that result in the erasure of difference, the erasure of the other as other, and in so doing foreclose on the possibility of grace. It is in escaping this possessive relation to the knowledge of knowledge, to having to have what we already have, as Cixous describes it, that we approach an encounter in the present with the other in which the other is not erased, and in which grace is called forth. If we take the model of the puppet to be exemplary of the conditions of divine grace, then Cixous’ reading suggests that our attention must go to the operator for it is he who most explicitly stands for the human, all too human, relation grace. Made abundantly evident in Kleist’s text is the notion that it is the presence of the operator’s self, the fact of his having an interior with which to resist external constraints, that marks the difference between the human and the puppet which is ‘like god’. Yet, for Cixous, and perhaps for Kleist, the point remains that there are times when we would, and do, think of the human dancers as ‘grace-full’; those times for instance, when the dancer’s ‘soul’ is aligned with the centre of itself and resistance to external constraint is dissolved. Moreover, the operator can and does place himself at the centre in order to permit the puppet its graceful equilibrium. For Cixous the operator’s ability to achieve equilibrium suggests that there is the possibility of another reading of grace outside the typical discourses of the Fall. In the moment in which the operator places himself at the centre, there is something ‘different’ about his relationship to himself. He has arrived at a place where he knows how not to possess what he knows, where he is not in possession of himself. He is the immanent subject of the present in this moment, and he cannot take himself as the object of his own knowing. To this extent he embodies well the Cixousian notion of a moment of selfsurrender that is related to but precisely not sacrificial in the orthodox sense. For Cixous, the question of what permits grace is a matter of how we are to understand human subjectivity. In being necessarily divided in our selves we are not necessarily condemned to dialectical relationships either to difference or to knowledge. The operator’s capacity to place himself at the centre, and the

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The subject of love dancer’s momentary achievement of harmony, are both evidence of another way, another possibility. Where grace slips away from this moment is when the dialectic returns; when there is a grasping relation to the moment that would paradoxically transform it from the moment that it can only be into a state that it can never be. Human divinity cannot be tied to a transcendent eternity and remain a possibility within life. Human grace is brief, ephemeral, tantalising, and elusive, but it is no less graceful or divine in being so. Cixous is clear that she wants to avoid the trap of originary innocence, the trap of the totalising absolute. We are on the path of a second innocence here. Grace refers to a world, which can be a superior world, where someone decides not on human but on divine grace. I want us to leave the ground but not so as to forget the reality principle, especially the principle of our quotidian reality. I would like to avoid the trap that consists in constituting innocence as an infantile state, where it becomes synonymous with irresponsibility. (1992: 41)

In affirming the aspect of responsibility here, Cixous is affirming that human grace is not about the absence of knowledge as such. A second innocence cannot be constituted in the denial of human subjectivity in relation to knowledge. We are indeed beyond paradise, we are knowing subjects. The question that Cixous takes up in her reading of Clarice Lispector’s ‘Because They Were Not Distracted’ departs from her recognition that grace and mastery, grace and desire, are undoubtedly in a complex relationship. But before turning to Lispector, I will briefly review Cixous’ engagement with Kleist’s tale of the boy who loses his innocence in front of a mirror, for, again, it highlights the relationship between a self-possessive relation to subjectivity and the impossibility of grace.

The mirroring of oneself Cixous’ reading of Kleist’s story about a young man who loses his innocence in front of a mirror is considerably shorter than her analysis of his puppets. For our purposes, it is her use of the psychoanalytic trope of narcissism that is most suggestive, for it goes to the heart of the issue of a grasping relationship to a self that is lived as a unified totality. In structural terms, the story of the young man continues the dialogue between the dancer and the narrator, and is in fact a response to the dancer’s story of the grace of the puppets. It reveals in the clearest of terms that under discussion all along in Kleist’s text has been the tension around grace and the role of an attached and self-possessive relationship to subjectivity. The narrator says:

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I told him [the dancer] that I was well aware of how consciousness could disturb the natural grace of man. Before my very eyes, one of my young acquaintances had lost his innocence, all because of a chance remark, and had never again, in spite of all conceivable efforts, been able to find his way back to its paradise. (Kleist, 1992: 38)

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Graceful subjectivities This story is also an allegory of the Biblical Fall, but the chance remark is not in fact where the loss of innocence begins, contrary to the narrator’s suggestion. In describing this fifteen-year-old, just prior to his ‘loss of innocence’, the narrator remarks that he is a boy in whom only the faintest traces of vanity could be seen. He then goes on to account for this vanity as deriving from the favours shown to the boy by women (Kleist, 1992: 39), from which the reader is led to assume that it is the admiring attention of the other that inaugurates his loss of innocence. Again the stakes seemingly involve an intrusion upon the self from an outside source, by an other whose otherness is corrupting and defiling. Just as ‘his’ other corrupts the innocence of Adam, so too does the boy’s loss of innocence conform to the same structure. Irrespective of where the narrator goes with his tale, the boy is already on a path of loss, for vanity implies the pleasured taking of oneself as the object of desire and thus bespeaks the post-fallen condition. Cixous notes that ‘fatality is already here because vanity is non-grace’ (1992: 39). And in her commentary she also makes two further points. The first is that the story is staging questions of sexual difference in repeating the structure of the Fall. It is woman as other who is really constituted as the difference that makes a difference to the boy’s innocence. The second is that the snake is in view and it concerns the problem of looking that is implied in the boy’s vanity and that is developed still further when the narrator turns to his actual tale which does involve a mirror. Cixous has consistently raised concerns about the dangerous effects of the look, and she invokes her earlier essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1980), when she remarks here that Narcissus and Medusa are in a symmetrical rapport. The look, which goes by way of the symbolic, is more dangerous than touch, which goes by way of the body, for it produces the Platonic dilemma of doubling ‘where everything secondary is always inferior in relation to the primary’ (1992: 40). Yet, it is not the Platonic dilemma that accounts for the boy’s loss of innocence. Rather, as we will see, it is the Hegelian dialectic, where the image triggers the dynamics of reappropriation and overestimation. The tale that the narrator shares with the dancer as evidence of the problem of self-consciousness circulates around a trip to Paris that he took with this young man. While they were there, the young man encountered the famous statue of a boy pulling a thorn from his foot. Some time later when the boy is again in the company of the narrator at some baths, he catches a resemblance of the statue in the reflection of himself in a mirror and he comments upon it to the narrator. The narrator responds by laughing and suggesting that he must be seeing things (Kleist, 1992: 41). This is the remark that for the narrator is allegedly responsible for the boy’s loss of innocence. And Cixous in part agrees, for she understands the narrator’s response to be one of ‘absolute cruelty’. It will push the boy still further along the path of vanity. Vanity is necessarily the opposite of grace, if the implication of Kleist’s graceful puppets is that the conditions of grace are to be found in a self that is dispossessed of itself and is thus open to

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The subject of love immediacy, rather than self-reflection. It is the alienated objectification of self in the mirror that signals the intrusion of a consciousness anxiously grasping on to the awareness of itself as knowing. While the story resembles the Edenic fall, Cixous signals the obvious differences. ‘Eve and young man don’t have the same story. The young man is preoccupied with his foot, Eve with her hand. The object is not the same either. Eve’s is a fruit; the young man himself is an object’ (1992: 39). The scene is one of narcissism and it reflects a loss of balance or equilibrium in the boy. Something that was in harmony with itself and with the immediate has been lost in the encounter with the doubling effects of the mirror. The boy is alienated from himself in seeing reflected not himself, but another whom he tries to emulate. In losing his immediate relationship with the present, a relationship that would necessarily exclude the possibility that he could take himself as the object of his own becoming, the boy is caught in the trap of the dialectic. He is transcending himself. In the subsequent scenes, the boy continues to gaze into the mirror in an effort to reproduce the glimpse of the statue that he had seen. With each inevitably failed attempt he becomes still more ambivalent, and Cixous notes that, while the boy’s loss of innocence is indeed inevitable at this point, there is something of innocence that, nonetheless, remains in his motivation to keep trying. In this respect, the structure of the boy’s loss of innocence is different from that of Adam and Eve. It takes place gradually, by a process of attrition, whereas theirs was one of an instantaneous loss, an immediate severance. Grace, for Cixous can be lost in an instant, but it can also be lost gradually. Grace is not lost all at once. It is on the way to being lost . . . When he discovers in the mirror, not himself but something else that, moreover, is a statue, a work of art, he is already alienated, altered. (1992: 40)

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The fact that it is a statue that the boy is trying to emulate is not incidental to Cixous’ understanding of grace. There is an ongoing allusion to eternity that is conveyed through the work of art, in the same way as originary innocence appeals to an outside of time that opens on to the eternal. However, the point that is ultimately made refers to Cixous’ conception of what she calls a ‘good distraction’. Only within the conditions of distraction, where the grip of attachment to the knowledge of knowledge is loosened, can human grace be present. The ensemble of innocence and paradise is lost to the boy through the intrusion of the effort he makes before the mirror. It is the intrusion of a binary relation to difference. As Cixous notes, ‘Obviously, as soon as one makes an effort, paradise is no longer possible’ (1992: 57). The story of the boy’s loss of innocence inflects still further the dynamics of grace that were explored through Kleist’s marionettes. The issue for grace has become focused on the way in which the subject that aspires to unity becomes

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Graceful subjectivities attached to knowledge. Attachment implies a certain relation to desire, and this relation returns Cixous to the Garden of Eden. In Lispector’s ‘Because They Were Not Distracted’ Cixous will develop still further the issue of attachment as the ‘sin’ of desire, the ‘sin’ of the wanting subject. But her analysis will again suggest that the issue is one not of knowledge per se but rather of knowing. What matters for human divinity is not what counts as the contents of knowledge, but rather the ways in which we live our relation to knowledge. Having knowledge Lightness and grace have been aligned throughout Cixous’ analysis of Kleist thus far. The lightness of Kleist’s selfless puppet affords it a graceful relationship with the ground – its other – as it brushes against it in a continuous and almost uninterrupted, harmonious movement. With no interior to resist the external forces that move it, the puppet is as close to a kind of ‘pure acting’ as it can get. If the intrusion of the operator’s self can be overcome, there will be no impediment to the grace of the godlike marionette. Similarly, the lightness of the boy’s relationship to himself, prior to his encounter, firstly with women, and subsequently with the mirror, allows him a kind of presence in the moment, an immediacy that is not dissimilar to the puppet’s. Prior to the intrusion of the other, the boy is apparently unaware of the possibility of loss. He is as innocent as he is capable of being until the moment when consciousness becomes aware of itself acting, knowing, and being, and, in that awareness, responds by grasping on to that which it knows. In that moment, the boy is lost to innocence. He has lost the relationship of lightness that he had, not only to himself but also to the world. He grasps anxiously on to the knowledge that he did indeed catch a glimpse of that statue in the reflection of himself in the mirror, and, if he caught it once, he can catch it again. But it is already the knowledge of a past having. The boy is slipping between past and future. He has lost the possibility of immediacy and he has lost his innocence in doing so. Ironically, he has also lost something that he actually ‘had’, but without knowing it. In that moment he was indeed like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden who, as Cixous notes, ‘had’ innocence but without ‘knowing’ it (1992: 67). The relationship between grasping attachment and detached immediacy is developed still further in Cixous’ analysis of Lispector’s ‘Because They Were Not Distracted’, where the narrative concerns a moment of grace between two human beings. In addressing a couple, Lispector’s story opens on to an intersubjective space in which it is possible to glimpse the conditions of a kind of love that Cixous believes is informed by a different relation to difference, a relation that cannot be mediated by the dialectic. Lispector’s tale thus makes for an important prelude to the analysis of Promethea where I find many of these ideas come together in a more sustained way around a love relation that I am claiming is in some sense

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The subject of love agapic. Because Lispector’s narrative is quite brief, it is worth quoting in full before turning to Cixous’ analysis of what it means to ‘have’ knowledge. Because They Were Not Distracted There was the gentlest ecstasy in walking out together, that happiness you experience upon feeling your throat rather dry and upon realizing that you are so astonished that your mouth is wide open: they were breathing in anticipation of the air ahead of them, and to have this thirst was their very own water. They walked through street after street, conversing and laughing; they conversed and laughed to give substance and weight to the most gentle of ecstasies which was the happiness of their thirst. Because of the traffic and crowds, they sometimes touched, and as they touched – thirst is the grace, but the waters are the beauty of darkness – as they touched there shone the brilliance of their waters, their throats becoming even more dry in their astonishment. How they marveled at finding themselves together! Until everything transformed itself into denial. Everything transformed itself into denial when they craved their own happiness. Then began the great dance of errors. The ceremonial of inopportune words. He searched and failed to see; she did not see that he had not seen, she who was there in the meanwhile. He who was there in the meanwhile. Everything went wrong, and there was the great dust of the streets, and the more they erred, the more they craved with severity, unsmiling. All this simply because they had been attentive, simply because suddenly becoming demanding and stubborn, they wanted to possess what they already possessed. All this because they wanted to name something; because they wanted to be; they who were. They were about to learn that unless one is distracted the telephone does not ring; that it is necessary to go out for the letter to arrive, and that when the telephone finally does ring, the wasteland of waiting has already disconnected the wires. All this, all this, because they were not distracted.115 (Lispector, 1992: 108–109)

From the question of knowledge that is raised in the Biblical Fall, Cixous refuses the trap of understanding a subject/object, self/other oppositional structure as being necessarily defined by hierarchical binary oppositions. Typically, as I have noted, theological and philosophical readings of the Fall have concerned themselves with either the subject and/or the object of knowledge. What has mattered is both who knows – a question of identity and typically blame – and what comes to be known, in the instant that Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge. These questions circulate around the dilemma of having: of having knowledge and of having being. In orthodox terms this has been the dilemma of sin, the sin of desire. As Cixous says, the temptation of both Judaism and Christianity is the temptation of having, but she adds that this is also the temptation of being the other (1992: 67). Through her reading of Kleist, Cixous has established that a more promising way to understand the Edenic story is not by falling into the trap of negation. 115

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By Clarice Lispector, translated by Giovanni Pontiero, from The Foreign Legion, © 1964 by Rio de Janeiro: Editora do Autor, translation and afterword © 1986 by Giovanni Pontiero. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

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Graceful subjectivities Her attention is on ways of knowing and not on the object of knowledge per se. Her reading of the Fall indicates that, inasmuch as it is a founding story, what is founded is in fact a possessive relationship to knowledge where the issue is on the subject that ‘has’ possession of the knowledge that it encounters. The possibility of recognising an/other configuration of meaning that is not mediated by the intellectual and the symbolic, such as Eve’s response to the prohibition, is excluded, for it displaces the role of the subject who possesses, the subject who has. As a consequence, signifying systems have been homogenised around an intelligible, unintelligible opposition. In Hegelian terms, the other serves the function of providing an impetus for consciousness to reach the next stage on the hierarchical journey towards spirit, subsuming difference endlessly beneath the synthetic and unifying imperative. Yet the Hegelian spirit, while it may well be in harmony with the Christian spirit, is not in harmony with a Cixousian vision of the divine, or of grace, or I would add, divine love understood as abundant and other-regarding. A subjectivity that is not constituted in and through a possessive anxiety around the knowledge of knowledge is opened to a different relationship to ‘having’ knowledge, and hence a different relation to beingfor-itself and to being-with-the-other. In her reading of Lispector, Cixous notes that, like Kleist’s graceful puppets, Lispector’s couple are initially in a relation of ‘extreme lightness’ with all that surrounds them, and lightness is clearly an aspect of a non-possessive, pre-reflective relation to self and, as a consequence to the other. This couple cannot effectively ‘have’ the experience they are having because they are living a relationship to having that is so proximal as to preclude the possibility of taking the immediate as the object of knowledge. ‘They walked through street after street, conversing and laughing; they conversed and laughed to give substance and weight to the most gentle of ecstasies which was the happiness of their thirst.’ This is a grace that is going by way of the body, not the symbolic. Walking, talking, and laughter are the privileged moments in Cixous’ focus on the grace of Lispector’s couple, and, in this respect, her analysis is in accord with the jouissance of Kristeva’s semiotic. Yet Cixous also indicates the absence of binarism here when she notes that ‘everything is happening on the side of the soul, though it is materialised through the body’ (1992: 36). The question of the relationship between bodies, grace, and immediacy remains important and is considerably developed in The Book of Promethea to which we will turn in the next chapter. Cixous is clearly not advocating a spiritual that is won at the cost of embodiment. Were this to be the case, she would be back in the transcendent trap of dialectical relations. The experience that Lispector is narrating is an experience that privileges embodiment. A movement marks her characters that conforms to the structure of both/and rather than either/or. Movement is both literal and symbolic – Lispector’s couple are walking – and, as Cixous has already made clear, grace can be found only in movement. Such an approach to divinity is in significant

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contrast to the Biblical structure where divinity almost always refers to a transcendent absolute. If we are to assume that Adam and Eve were within an eternal realm in being in Eden, then the eternal is configured as a state that is outside of the flux of time. It is the mark of the eternal absolute that characterises the ‘pre’and ‘post’-human states of Christian divinity. We fall from the eternal paradise that is Eden, into life, and we return to eternal paradise through the redemptive power of Christ, at life’s conclusion. But Lispector’s graceful characters are thoroughly immersed in human time, and, for at least a moment, they are gracefull. Their relation of immediacy with themselves and each other defies an easy subject/object distinction, and in that sense they are innocent of possessing the moment. Their grace lies in a distraction from themselves that permits the present to call them forth into the future of each moment. Thus their thirst and dry throats do not signify lack but signify the promise of more. They are becoming in each moment, having relinquished being to the past, at least for the moment. Cixous remarks that the characters are in the lightest relationship possible to a grace, which, here, is the very joy they are experiencing in their thirst (1992: 36). The first paragraph of Lispector’s story is a demonstration of the role of immediacy in grace. Her characters are fully present to the moment until the beginning of the second paragraph when the word until appears. ‘Until everything transformed itself into denial. Everything transformed itself into denial when they craved their own happiness.’ Until is the snake in this Garden of Eden, for it retrospectively introduces ‘time where there was only present and presence’ (Cixous, 1992: 49), where there was only walking, laughing and thirst. ‘Until’ signifies a bridge between a future and past that now bypasses the present, and inaugurates the re-entry of a desire that is ironically lived as a grasping attachment to the present of experience. Grace is lost to the past in this moment. It is lost in the instant that the protagonists arrive at a certain awareness of their experience that simultaneously signals their distance from it. When they want to possess the happiness that they already have, grace is lost. ‘All this simply because they had been attentive, simply because suddenly becoming demanding and stubborn, they wanted to possess what they already possessed. All this because they wanted to name something; because they wanted to be; they who were.’ Cixous remarks that ‘the development bears on the sin of wanting and not on what is happening’ (1992: 36). In the dawning awareness of their ecstasy, as it is presented to consciousness as an object of knowledge, Lispector’s couple slip away from the immediacy of an experience which, until that moment, had not been sharply mediated by the ‘I’ that knows it knows. In the instant where consciousness becomes attached to the already present object of happiness, the relationship to immediacy is lost. In craving their own happiness, Lispector’s protagonists are like Kleist’s boy, endlessly trying to emulate the statue in the mirror, and, with each and every

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Graceful subjectivities attempt, moving still further from a relation of grace. Consciousness is suddenly in a grasping relation to what it already has in the instant where the protagonists crave their own happiness. Always at stake is a fleeting point of equilibrium that is finely balanced between the not enough and the too much (1992: 50). The thirst that is the condition of grace for Lispector’s couple is also the condition of its loss. Vanity appears in this text when the couple begins to marvel at finding themselves together in this experience. According to Cixous, at this moment ‘we are on the side of admiration admiring itself, seeing itself, referring to itself ’ (1992: 51), and everything is transformed by a violent alteration. Communication is cut and the symmetrical rapport of the couple that has signified an extraordinary mutuality is destroyed by the intrusion of a grasping attention. Both Cixous and Lispector have a longstanding suspicion of the veiling, rather than the revealing, nature of naming. Naming is a trap of identity politics and Lispector’s couple have inadvertently fallen into this trap in wanting to name their experience. Names are something that have to be gone beyond if ‘true’ communication is to take place, because the relationship between naming, possession, and the Law of the Father necessarily returns us to a binary relation to difference. By contrast then, in moments of silence we have the greatest communication in Kleist, Lispector, and perhaps also Cixous. As Cixous says, ‘An innocence that wants to be recognised is mad, in a dangerous way. Innocence imposes itself and does not have to be recognised. It has no father. An innocence that wants a father is lost’ (1992: 45). In the moments where the subject surrenders an attachment to knowing it knows it achieves a kind of acceptance of the present that permits of receiving grace-fully. In wishing to name their experience, Lispector’s couple are wishing to communicate through language that which is incommunicable, or that which is best communicated in the silence of the instant. As Cixous says, ‘Speech can cut communication’ (1992: 63). If grace is in some sense a profound moment of acceptance of the world, then the conditions of what it means to achieve this acceptance lie in a kind of active passivity that relates to a subjectivity that is lived in a non-possessive, feminine, relation to itself. This is what I take Cixous to mean when we bring together the two quotations with which I began this chapter: ‘We mortals have the chance, the luck of being on the passage of grace’ and ‘One has to know how not to possess what one knows’. In recognising the phenomenal diversity of the lived experiences of subjectivity that defy the masculine fantasy of unity, Cixous opens the question of subjectivity to the dispersal of a becoming that is oriented towards life and the future, rather than the past. Grace and innocence, then, are a calling forth of the immanent that is made possible in surrendering a grasping relationship to a possessively desiring subjectivity. In her movement towards the unknowable other, Eve demonstrates Cixous’ vision of grace in difference, and she reveals the possibility that Adam’s story is not the only one. Nonetheless, while Cixous’

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The subject of love reflections tell us something about the passage to grace over which we can and do have some capacity to intervene, i.e., by relinquishing a masculine relation to a transcendent subjectivity, grace itself, she thinks, is not an inevitable outcome: grace always arrives unexpectedly and in the form of a gift. ‘One never has grace, it is always given. Grace is life itself . . .’ Concluding remarks While most of my reading of Cixous in this chapter has concerned stories which focus on the relationship between the individual and grace, her engagement with Lispector’s couple signals her interest in a grace that arises in the context of human relationships. In the following chapter, I will turn more fully to this question of the possibility of grace, or divinity, as it appears more explicitly in Cixous’ own ‘fiction’, The Book of Promethea, which is focused exclusively on an extraordinary love between two women. Here, Cixous develops her understanding of the conditions of a love that emerge in the context of a meeting between feminine subjectivities. In so doing she returns us to the overarching question of this book, the possibility of an abundant, other-regarding love that is a humanly possible expression of divinity; one that emerges in an encounter with the other, an encounter that I have suggested is necessarily defined by a refusal to appropriate otherness to oneself. The Book of Promethea, as I hope to show, is a Cixousian poem to this other-regarding, abundant, divine, and graceful love. In other words it is a poem to a humanly possible agape.

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CHAPTER 5

Divine Promethean love

If I get ready to embrace Promethea – and every time it is as if I were embracing the world, it is simpler and simpler and more and more religious, because from that moment on rarely does the kiss remain one between the two of us; it is scarcely given before it calls the whole universe to celebrate, in an infinitesimal and incredible celebration, genesis fills the air we breathe. (Cixous, 1991a: 52)

Locating Promethea in paradise Through the engagement with the work of Heinrich von Kleist and Clarice Lispector, in the analysis of Cixous’ ‘Grace and Innocence’ in the previous chapter, we can see how she can be understood to be reorienting the epistemological concerns of the Biblical story of the Fall through which the text is framed. In so doing, she reframes the way we might think about the notions of both grace and innocence particularly as they bear on the issue of the relationship between subjectivity and knowledge. The Fall, as such, is no longer simply meaningful in the brute dichotomy of knowledge versus innocence. Cixous accepts that there is an ‘accident’ and we fall from what she thinks of as a first, primordial or virgin innocence, into knowledge, that we are part of what she calls the ‘afterward’ of the Book that began to be written in the Fall (1992: 57–8). No longer ‘innocent innocents’ (1992: 57), we have a different relation to innocence and to knowledge than did Adam and Eve. Innocence cannot be a matter of nonknowledge, for, as she says, it is a ‘nonsymbolic, nonintellectual’ knowledge that is lost in the Fall. For humans who ‘speak and are spoken’ (1992: 57), the symbolic is an ineradicable and inescapable part of a post-fallen human condition. Our attempts to find our way ‘back’ to a Paradise that is configured in primordial terms, through the kind of effort that was made by Kleist’s boy in front of the mirror, merely reinscribe our misapprehension of the conditions of human grace and innocence. ‘Obviously, as soon as one makes an effort, paradise is no longer possible’ (Cixous, 1992: 57). Throughout ‘Grace and Innocence’, Cixous explores the relationship between effort and grace, and she alerts us to her principal speculation that what matters

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is not knowledge as such but our way of living knowledge: ‘One has to know how not to possess what one knows’ (1992: 67). In her initial consideration of the grace of Kleist’s puppets and dancer, grace is a matter of harmony in movement. But grace, and the qualities of balance and equilibrium that define it to this point, undergo a transition to a different order of signification in her reading of the boy before the mirror. As signifiers of graceful movement, balance and equilibrium continue to be significant tropes, but they are given a more explicit focus on the internal concerns of divided subjectivity. The inauguration of the boy’s loss of balance that announces his loss of innocence or fall from grace lies less in the moment he searches for the face of the other in his own reflection – although this begins the process – than it does in the effort he makes to recapture the reflection of the other that he had glimpsed. In her analysis of Lispector’s couple, the notion of balance and equilibrium ceased to be a matter of individual subjectivity and became instead a matter of subjectivity in relation. It is at this point in Cixous’ analysis that the balance and equilibrium that have signified the grace of ‘individuals’ in relation to the world become a matter of balance between subjects, and also, I am wanting to suggest, a matter of divinity. Lispector’s couple embody what Cixous refers to as a ‘good distraction’. In their immersion in the present they ‘find’ themselves at the centre of experiencing the moment, and, in this way, they achieve a harmony that is beyond an attachment to themselves as the subjects of that experience. Grace is called forth in the immanence of this distraction, and it appears in the manner of a gift, or blessing. As Cixous says, ‘One never has grace, it is always given’ (1992: 67). With her sights set on a second innocence that is humanly possible in life, Cixous’ analysis in ‘Grace and Innocence’ develops her earlier work on feminine subjectivity that was discussed in Chapter 3, and it draws out the connection between her implicit understanding of divinity and her explicit understanding of subjectivity. A ‘good distraction’ is achieved in a relationship to knowledge, and thus to self, that is dispossessed of a grasping attachment to the unified subject as the site of knowledge. Lispector’s couple literally embody a ‘good distraction’ until the moment they realise they want what they already have. In this moment the immanent and embodied experience of grace is lost, as the subjectivities of the couple are reoriented around a subject/object dichotomy: the knowledge of grace intrudes revealing that it is a thing of the past. To this extent we understand that the subject of a ‘good distraction’ is the antithesis of the masculine subject of modernity whose self-conscious agency is revealed in the desire to be in possession of a knowledge that functions to affirm his possession of himself. ‘He’ is the subject who wants and desires; ‘he’ is the subject of whom Cixous wrote in ‘Sorties’, the masculine subject who precedes himself and the world and who returns to himself the profit of his encounters with the world and others.

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Divine Promethean love Against this background, Cixous’ work on feminine subjectivity in ‘Sorties’ can be seen as foreshadowing her understanding of a self/other relation that opens on to, or calls forth, the divine. Inasmuch as her feminine subject is oriented towards the other and towards becoming, she escapes the cycle of reversal that has defined masculine subjectivity. ‘She does not flee extremes; she is not the beingof-the-end (goal), but she is how-far-being reaches’ (Cixous, 1986a: 87). In becoming how-far-being-reaches, ‘she’ is dispossessed of herself, inasmuch as being in possession of oneself means being, and being one self. Cixous’ feminine subject escapes the economies of one and two. As Verena Conley says, ‘The subject is no longer a fixed entity, closed onto itself, but is, by definition, always in movement toward the other. The limit between self and other is being redefined’ (Conley, 1992: 10). And the place of this redefinition of the limit is the infinite present. Cixous’ feminine subjects are the subjects of a ‘good distraction’, and they are dispersed in the present through each other. To the best of my knowledge, The Book of Promethea and its sequel, La Bataille d’Arcachon remain rare examples of something of a personal foray into reflections on the amorous erotic relation for Cixous, notwithstanding the obvious point that at some level they are ‘fiction’. Nonetheless, for all that she has extensively written similar ‘fictions’ about, with, and in some sense through, her family of origin, and indeed she has written about her own children as well as her animals, she has rarely turned to her own ‘erotic’ love relations in her reflections on the ethics of the self/other relation. Because I am interested in the way her story about feminine subjectivities inflects both her and thus our understanding of the divine possibilities of love relations, I have focused here on texts where this dimension is played out, regardless of whether or not they could be considered ‘personal’. The issue for me is not the personal per se but the subject of love in the context of the amorous couple.116 While some of her most recent reflections on her animals and in particular on her cats are also fascinating studies in love and difference, and I think of them as coming the closest to also reflecting the kinds of love I am interested in here, for the moment, however, I have limited my interest to the divine possibilities of relations between humans. 116

While it is true that Cixous’ text Manna for the Mandlestams for the Mandelas (1994b [1988]) is also one that clearly dramatises the couple relation and in this regard is very much in the spirit of her writing about other famous literary couples such as those I have already considered in Chapter 3, Achilles and Penthesileia and Antony and Cleopatra, less obvious in it is the subject of love per se. Manna is a fascinating Cixousian text in the way it brings together the broader political contexts of the twentieth century that have informed her writing for the theatre with the intimacy of the writing that has characterised her fictions. It is something of a textual bridge between the ethico-poetic and the politico-poetic that in many ways traverses and juggles the challenges of writing the particular and the universal. While it also shares with Promethea a certain mythic context, its positioning in history, and its reach in terms of epic, function to dilute the focus on love that for my purposes is central. Hence, I think Promethea still stands in Cixous’ oeuvre as a text that uniquely offers a sustained engagement specifically with the subject of love, with all the attendant allusions that go with that phrase.

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The subject of love For in some sense, and against the Western history of writing on love, I remain in pursuit of a vision of love between people that flows from abundance, that can be considered to be divine, but that does not require a necessary sacrifice of self for its fulfilment.117 In returning in The Book of Promethea (henceforth Promethea) to one of her central theoretical concerns, the explicit role of love in the self/other relation, Cixous draws together the threads of the conditions of divinity and the conditions of feminine subjectivity that have been scattered through her previous inquiries. The questions she poses circulate, to some extent, around an age-old opposition between sacred and profane love. Yet they do so only in order to disrupt this very distinction. In the figure of Promethea, one of the protagonists of this tale, we find an exemplary trope of Cixous’ vision of feminine subjectivity, and we also find an exemplary trope of what I take to be her implicit conception of feminine divinity. In the narrators, who are also protagonists, however, we find a different, more variable trope of love, one that can sometimes be with Promethea in a feminine relationship that embodies ‘a good distraction’, but one that just as often exposes a more familiar, masculine relation to the other and to love that is marked by a desire to possess the other. Throughout the text Cixous underscores the relationship between Promethea’s feminine divinity and her feminine relation to her self and/with others. Moreover the temporal qualities of the metaphor of a ‘good distraction’ that ambiguously permeate Cixous’ analysis of Lispector’s couple are developed still further through the figure of Promethea. Promethea’s relationship to the present is constantly emphasised throughout this text because Cixous sees it as the site of a calling forth of divinity. ‘Under Promethea’s leadership, we have a taste of God’ (1991a: 185). Promethea, we come to understand, embodies a ‘good distraction’, and this is the ‘leadership’ that she offers. In so doing, she announces the possibility, which is not to be mistaken for the inevitability, of a gift that can be received with grace in the present. ‘Promethea is the astounding Present given me by God. I am astounded. I accept’ (Cixous, 1991a: 91). Through her reflections on Lispector’s couple, Cixous ended ‘Grace and Innocence’ with a brief engagement with the conditions of divinity in the context of an experience of grace that is shared with the other. Promethea, in some respects, can be understood as beginning with this question, even though it is taken up in many different ways throughout the book. Inasmuch as Promethea tells a story, the story it tells concerns an extraordinary love relation in the context of two women who are ‘in’ love. We know that it is an extraordinary love story because Cixous explains that she doesn’t want to tell any more love stories, stories like Penthesileia and Antony and Cleopatra, which she told in ‘Sorties’, ‘because

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117 See note 89 for a more comprehensive list of the texts in which Cixous writes of her animals and in particular her cats.

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Divine Promethean love all the ones I know shut the door that joy came in by, and I don’t know any others’ (1991a: 45). So instead of telling a ‘story’, she says she now wants to tell a ‘true story’, a story that is ‘not made up . . . It is our story, our history. It is us’ (1991a: 45). The text is presented via the narration of ‘one’ of the women, who both is and is not Hélène Cixous herself, and who is represented in the text through two narrative voices, H and I.118 The split narrative voice is significant to Cixous’ exploration of feminine subjectivity for it signifies her rejection of the ideal of subjectivity as a totalised unity, while it also provides an occasion for representing the diversity of phenomenal experience. In this regard it is an attempt to enact in writing her commitment to thinking of feminine subjectivities as dispersed. This is something to which I will return in more detail shortly. The text is also structured around an implicit inquiry that seems to concern the difference between love as assertion or declaration, something that might be captured in a phrase like ‘I love you’, and love as invitation or calling, something that the figure of Promethea uniquely symbolises, particularly in and through her relationship to the present. In love as ‘invitation’ or ‘calling’, Cixous finds a feminine structure of relations that breaks with the conventional subject/object dichotomy of lover and beloved, as the unknowable other calls forth the moment of meeting that expressly signals the arrival of paradise. The trope of paradise that runs throughout ‘Grace and Innocence’ is continued in Promethea, but it is given concrete expression through the dynamics of a love relation. Located at the interstices of many genres, Promethea is simultaneously journal, notebook, and diary, autobiography, biography, fiction, and non-fiction. It is an unconventional text that attempts the seemingly impossible: to convey in writing the very immediacy of love’s presencing. Cixous describes it as ‘a book completely in the present’ that ‘began to be written the moment the present began’ (1991a: 15). As she sees it, the task of this book, which she says derives from love, is to write in the flux of living, to write as closely as possible to a present that is shared with the other, and to ‘translate without translating’ the experiences of the protagonists as love is called forth (1991a: 15–22). ‘I would like everything written as if Promethea wrote herself alive before me’ (1991a: 91). 118

In some respects this is an impossible text to engage without in some way doing violence to the very premise it sets up. My references to the narrative voices of H and I as Cixous (in italics) are an unfortunate matter of coherence, at the same time as they are a measure of the inflexibility of language. When I refer to them as Cixous I inadvertently stabilise the instability that is reflected in the split narrative voice. I unite H and I beneath the sign of Cixous and in so doing, paper over the cracks in the authorial subject. I have seen no obvious way around this problem other than to use italics when I am referring to one or other of the narrative voices within the context of the text. On occasions where it would not interrupt the flow of the text to refer to them as H and I, I do so; however, this is infrequent. In many ways the text is dominated by what we assume to be the voice of I, who, for the most part but not always, speaks about H’s feelings and experiences. I will continue to use Cixous without the italics in all other references.

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The subject of love But the title of the last ‘notebook’ or ‘chapter’, Portrait of Promethea in H, suggests that Cixous recognises both the limits and the dangers of this task of writing love or life with or on the other. In the end this will still be the portrait of Promethea, a portrait that comes from the author(s). Writing Promethea/writing God If the opening pages of Promethea are any indication, Cixous is clearly daunted by the paradoxical task of writing the present of love with an other who remains other. She dreads so much the violence that the singularity of authorship imposes upon herself and upon the other that she hesitates to begin at all for fear that the very structure of the written logos will inevitably privilege her subjectivity. To begin with the first-person narrative voice would be to betray the gift of the love she wants to write or convey, an enabling, feminine love that is able to encounter the otherness of Promethea without then colonising and domesticating her alterity. The challenge for writing, then, is to subvert the tendency to foreclose on meaning, indeed it is to encourage and multiply the excess of signification so that the text is always elsewhere to, and beyond, the writer, and, by extension, beyond the reader. To avoid the imposition of a unified authorial voice upon the text, yet to remain nonetheless in the closest possible proximity to Promethea, Cixous introduces the two narrative voices: H and I. I ask Promethea’s permission to be slightly two, or slightly more, slightly unsettled, as long as I have neither succeeded in living and writing precisely where I live and, hence, succeeded in being myself, the same woman who lives and writes nor openly decided in favor of one of my two possibilities. At the moment I am inclined to favor union. (1991a: 11)

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Moreover, because of the extraordinary nature of this love, Cixous says that love has already reconfigured her self-identity anyway (1991a: 12). Not only is she no longer who she was, who she was no longer interests her. This task of writing in the present of love inaugurates a different relation to herself and to writing, a relation that is located in the tension between an immediate that is lived with the other, and the future. ‘Who I am in the process of being is strange and breathtaking to me’ (1991a: 12). Cixous says she is no longer the same as the author of her previous books and her former authorial identity could not accomplish this task of writing the present of love (1991a: 12). She suggests that the reason for this is because she has always feared representation, and out of respect for both reality and fiction, she has always kept ‘writing at some distance from life itself ’ (1991a: 12). But there is no keeping a distance from The Book of Promethea. Cixous finds herself ‘in the current of an immense river [that] has also swept [her] away’ (1991a: 12), and her previous writing strategy, through which she understood herself as attending to the ‘innermost requirements of the divinity that was to reveal itself’ in her writing, is no longer possible. Worse

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Divine Promethean love still, she wonders whether this divinity might ‘not [be in] need of her services’ (1991a: 13). As Cixous has noted elsewhere, love and writing are inseparable in her work: ‘Because I write for, I write from, I start writing from: Love. I write out of love. Writing, loving: inseparable. Writing is a gesture of love. The Gesture’ (1991b: 42). But so too, as I noted in Chapter 3, are writing and God inseparable. As she also said, ‘no one can write without the aid of God’ (O’Grady, 1996–97: 4). In part this is because writing, love, and the God of which she speaks are all tropes of a gifting alterity that call the subject into a non-self-present present, thereby defying the masculine impulse that underpins oppositional relations. The construction of these feminine tropes, as they circulate in Promethea, have in common a reference to the disruption of boundaries. Indeed, it could be said that the Cixousian God or divine is to be found in escaping, or exceeding, the fixed identities of subjectivities constituted in opposing singularity. God, for Cixous, is that which breaks the subject’s immersion in the past and gives birth to the future: now. Thus to write the present of loving the other, Promethea’s right now, her mystery, before memory, with its embalming, forgetting and storytelling get there (1991a: 91), requires something different on the part of the author; it requires the detachment of a feminine relation to subjectivity that allows her to write from within, rather than about, the divine. Cixous’ use of two narrative voices simultaneously stages and displaces the dilemma for self/other relations that flow from a unified subject. Yet potentially they herald the introduction of yet another binary structure, an internal one. Thus, Cixous extends still further her commitment to the notion of subjectivity as fluid and dispersed by underscoring Promethea’s role in the process of writing: I warn her: ‘I am writing on you, Promethea, run away, escape. I am afraid to write you, I am going to hurt you!’ But rather than run away, she comes at a gallop. Through the window she comes, breathing hard, and alive as can be, she flings herself into the book, and there are bursts of laughter and splashes of water everywhere, on my notebook, on the table, on my hands, on our bodies. (1991a: 15)

Through Promethea’s embodied immediacy in the authorship of the text, Cixous highlights the fact that it is not hers but Promethea’s book, at the same time as she underscores the feminine aspect of this moment by emphasising its corporeality. This is the book of Promethea, written through the visceral experience of being with the other in love, and, contrary to masculine discourses of love, the site of love for Cixous is always the lived body. Consider one of her more provocative descriptions of loving Promethea. ‘I love you with all my corneous parts, with each nail and each hair of my body and each hair of my head, I love you with all my liquids, all my mucous, my saliva’ (1991a: 44). Cixous’ very physical description of loving the other here is evocative of Penthesileia’s wound of love that is opened by and to the other. Love like this is a matter of flesh.

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Questions of possession and ownership of the text are subverted in the split narrative structure as Cixous withholds from the author possession and ownership of her self. ‘[I]t is the book Promethea lit like a fire in H’s soul’ (1991a: 13), and it is the first of Cixous’ works that she understands to not be ‘her’ own (1991a: 13). In contrast to Promethea, whose ‘soul-scale’, she says, so vastly exceeds singularity that she signifies ‘a people’ (1991a: 16), Cixous finds herself needing to be ‘slightly two’, ‘slightly unsettled’ (1991a: 11). As the longstanding Cixous translator and commentator Susan Sellers notes, Cixous has always considered the need for a ‘third term to break the current symbiosis of self/other relations’ (1996: 58), and in Promethea this desire is given expression in the incessant questioning of the singularity and propriety of authorship that runs throughout the text. The immensity of the proposition of both writing the present of love and writing the present of Promethea also provides the occasion for Cixous to continually invoke God in a manner which often implies that God, or the divine, is actually the author of this book. ‘[E]verything that follows has moved through my hand and onto the paper when there was real contact with Promethea. I have often put my left hand between her breasts and with the rapid motions of my docile right hand it was written. I am only a cardiograph’ (1991a: 53). Alternatively, God and Promethea become virtually indistinguishable. As Cixous’ sense of being able to accomplish this task of writing waxes and wanes, she frequently finds herself appealing to the divine. Given her repudiation of the orthodox God(s) of Judaism and Christianity, these appeals have a curious status in the text. At one point, in the name of both loving the other and writing the other, Cixous decides to want the impossible. She says: ‘I want to take the mountain [Promethea] into my arms, enveloping, embracing it, and feel every inch of its flanks be imprinted in my being, on my skin and all the way to the bottom of my belly, I want to know the mountain this very day, this moment with no delay’ (1991a: 100). But she recognises this desire as the equivalent of trying to look God in the face (1991a: 100), and, unexpectedly, it gives rise to a prayer. ‘Oh my God, I must want to want to do what I will not succeed in doing; God make me at least strong enough to reach the foot of the mountain and break there, to wash up in pieces at the edge of the sea’ (1991a: 101). At the conclusion of the prayer, Cixous immediately offers a reflection on her own desire, but in offering an answer, even one that qualifies the inference with a question mark, the subject of the sentence is ambiguous: it could be Promethea; it could be God; they could be the same. Her desire, she says, comes of a desire to climb up her ‘paper ladder towards Your Highness?’ (1991a: 101). Through this exploration of the authorial subject Cixous broaches one of the most important ethical questions of Promethea: who is the subject of a writing or loving that is of, or with, the beloved, as opposed to on, or from, the beloved? Who is the subject of a writing or loving that escapes the impulse to colonise the other’s otherness, for love, as we’ve known it, cannot be presumed to escape the dialectical

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Divine Promethean love legacy of patriarchy? Even the best of the visions of love offered by both Plato (divine eros) and Nygren (agape) leave us caught in the paradigm of lovers and beloveds. Who then is the subject of an enabling love that borders on to the divine? Neither I nor H alone is sufficient for the task; it requires both/and. Clearly the unified category of lover in opposition to a beloved is not enough. Such love invokes and invites the fluidity of a feminine subject who is schooled in the practices of ‘dispossession of one/self’, a subject who finds herself called into the present with the unknowable other. This is not a subject who easily occupies the category of lover or beloved. The goal of Cixous’ writing in Promethea is to move near enough to feel, to brush surfaces with Promethea, but never to get so close as to inscribe her, never so close as to assume her otherness to her self. Self-dispossession – not the sacrifice of either self or other – is to be understood here as the ethical precondition of a divine love with the other that is thoroughly other-regarding. Much of the early part of Promethea is preoccupied with the risk to the other that translation represents: ‘Because I am not Promethea, and I cannot bring myself to act as if I were, I am not a real liar, I cannot ascribe my words to her without feeling that this poisons and invents her’ (1991a: 21). Cixous’ anxiety about translating the other is evocative of her remarks concerning Kleist in ‘Grace and Innocence’. There she again indicates her interest in the immediate by acknowledging a certain sympathy with Kleist’s desire ‘to be able to compose a poem by extracting from his own heart the very “idea” that inhabits him in order to deposit it with his hands into the heart of the other’ (Cixous, 1992: 30). But in Promethea Kleist’s problem is reversed. Cixous would like to eliminate herself from the position of author, to render herself utterly transparent so that ‘the words will not squash what is between the signs’ (Cixous, 1992: 30), that is, Promethea, in her immediacy and in her difference.119 While Cixous’ desire to eliminate the influence of her own subjectivity may be honourable, deriving as it does from a refusal to oppress the alterity of the other that is the subject of love, the very intersubjective nature of this particular love confronts her with the reality that she is also a part of this love story. In other words Cixous is confronted with the experience of her earlier speculation in ‘Sorties’ on the structure of the gift. In this instance love is the gift that neither party ‘has’, nor ‘gives’, but rather that arises, like grace, in the encounter between them, and that itself challenges the very notion of an opposition between self and other. Promethea insists that Cixous note that she too is loved, thus forcing her to reflect, not only on what it means to be a lover but also what it might mean to simultaneously be the beloved. To a significant extent, then, Promethea is an 119

See Cixous’ interview with Bernadette Fort, ‘Theatre, History, Ethics’ (1997: 438), for an account of the necessary absenting of the author from herself in her writing for the theatre. Here she makes a similar point about the absence of the author in the context of writing for characters that she might otherwise find reprehensible. She describes it as a matter of justice that she remove herself as much as possible to allow the voice of the other.

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The subject of love exploration of this simultaneity of love in the present that complicates the very categories of lover and beloved. As is also typical of Cixous’ commitment to working both in a mythic realm that is suggestive of universal concerns and with the seemingly more immediate realities of human individuals, Promethea refuses to transcend the everyday in its reflections on divinity. Throughout the text the simple, quotidian struggles of everyday life provide the occasions of encounters with an immanent divinity. For instance the almost banal gesture of Promethea spontaneously arriving with a gift that is no more than a tray of sandwiches, at the precise moment that Cixous has lost herself in the ‘hell’ of trying to write the present of Promethea, ushers in a quiet experience of divinity as it restores her shaking confidence in her ability to ‘render in writing the infinity that [Promethea] bathes in’ (1991a: 99–100). By returning to the everyday, Cixous offers us a conception of divinity and love that are bound to the temporal complexities of human existence and that are oriented towards life rather than beyond life. She was indeed in hell, and hell was manifest in life before the appearance of the sandwiches, before Promethea’s spontaneous and unasked-for gesture of love enables her to experience, i.e., to receive this as the arrival of paradise in the present. Moreover, the gift of food that inspires this moment is not incidental, and in fact it reflects one of the continuing signifiers of abundance that permeate this text. Interestingly, it also calls forth one of the earliest uses of the term agape as a reference to the communal Christian meals that became known as ‘love feasts’. The trope of paradise in Cixous’ work must be understood as a moment within time rather than a state beyond existence. It is inaugurated in the instant when the subject relinquishes a possessive, masculine relation to itself as the subject of knowledge and thus finds itself called into a relation of non-self-present presence with the other. This is the most provocative and innovative aspect of Promethea: the suggestion that paradise is to be found in the present with the other, a present that is possible only in the abrogation of self-interested subjectivity, i.e., a present that is possible only in the context of ‘a good distraction’. To paraphrase Sarah Cornell’s very gracious explication of this point: if paradise, (which I take to be another signifier of divinity) is something about living the present, then Promethea is about the discovery of the Promised Land as the discovery of an unhoped-for encounter with the humanly divine other in the present (Cornell, 1988: 131).120 120

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Sarah Cornell also notes that the ‘polysemia of Promethea’s name evokes both promise and the Promised land, as well as the Greek “divine” goddess, thea’ (1988: 140n9). I would add to this the obvious evocation of the myth of fire as an originary tale of a mystical exchange between the human and the divine that is oriented towards a valuing of human life. In keeping with Cixous’ recognition of the usurpation of woman’s creative potential that underpins the rise of patriarchy and ultimately the emergence of the God(s) of Judaism and Christianity, she returns and indeed divinises this creative, life-giving potential to woman in converting Prometheus to Promethea. See Cixous’ reading of the ‘Dawn of Phallocentrism’ in ‘Sorties’ (1986) for a detailed analysis of the masculine usurpation of the feminine power of creation (especially pp. 100–104).

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Divine Promethean love Promethean differences Throughout this text, Promethea, in particular, symbolises the dispersal and freedom of feminine subjectivity. The subsequent possibilities this affords her with respect to ‘living’ the immediacy of the present in the absence of self-interest are clearly offered as the key to her divinity, and in this respect Promethea begins to assume some of the qualities of agapic love. In attempting to describe Promethea’s relation to the present, Cixous finds herself subtly invoking Genesis and by implication Eden, which as I have noted is one of the archetypal moments of agapic love understood as abundant and generous in traditional theology.121 She says, ‘what makes Promethea so rare is her way of living every day on nature’s scale, inside the seething of Creation. Every morning, she throws herself out the window into infinity’ (1991a: 156). Promethea has a kind of divine spontaneity that is her immersion in the infinite of each moment, and in this respect she is unmistakably Godlike. Moreover, in contravention of the semantic latitude of poetic signification that runs throughout this book, the final words actually foreclose upon any ambiguity about how we should think of Promethea’s relation to presence, love and God. In a playful exchange over titling the book, the women propose a number of suggestions ranging from the silly – ‘Promethea at the Police Station’, ‘Promethea on Vacation’ – to the suggestive – ‘Promethea Reads the Bible’. In the end, Promethea suggests it should be called ‘Promethea Falls in Love’, and to this suggestion Cixous offers the last words: ‘Falls? – Is’ (1991a: 209). The last word of the book collapses on to the body of Promethea the agapic signification of the Johnanine God that was so central to Anders Nygren’s analysis of agape. Promethea is love; she is synonymous with love, just as God ‘is’ love in the fourth gospel. Through the figure of Promethea, Cixous underscores and develops her thinking on the relationship between presence and subjectivity, divinity, and woman’s capacity to depropriate herself without self-interest, for Promethea’s ability to live ‘on nature’s scale’ derives from her detached, feminine relation to her self. In a play on both the Lacanian pre-symbolic and the Biblical Eden, which also underscores Promethea’s spontaneity, Cixous suggests that Promethea is a ‘survivor from divine times unconscious of [herself ] in the way the earth is unconscious of itself ’ (1991a: 154). For Cixous, Promethea’s lack of consciousness of herself is understood as a form of humility that allows her to be self-giving: it is a quality Cixous thinks of as rare. In a reflexive moment that focuses on the ‘extraordinary arrogance or humility’ that is required in translating the other, Cixous notes that she has neither, but, in Promethea, she thinks extraordinary 121 As noted in the previous chapter, agapic love is typically symbolised through the tropes of Creation, the Incarnation, and the Atonement although, as I have argued throughout, it is really only the Creation and Incarnation that can effectively convey the notion of agapic love as abundant, generous love.

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humility is possible. ‘But translating someone else – that requires extraordinary arrogance or extraordinary humility. Extraordinary arrogance is something I don’t have. And extraordinary humility – I don’t know who has that. Except perhaps Promethea’ (1991a: 21). Cixous seems to be suggesting here that Promethea’s unconscious humility derives from her non-self-possessive relation to her self, a relation that is the source of an abundant, feminine love that does not look to return to itself but rather calls forth a genuine meeting with the other in the present, a meeting which opens on to a mysterious divinity precisely because otherness is not appropriated. Thus, Promethea’s ‘boundless giving of herself’ (1991a: 152–157) is anything but the sacrificial gift of self that underpins the orthodox configuration of agapic love. But, like God, Promethea has nothing to lose. Giving of her self is no more and no less than giving space to the infinite of each moment via a relationship to her self, which, in its detachment from unity, is dispersed in and through the other, becoming itself with the other. Despite the fact that Promethea poses a significant challenge to dialectical relations, both formally through its structure – or lack of structure – and conceptually, in its critical engagement with love, there is no suggestion that the paradise that Promethea calls forth is predicated on the absolute absence of duality. This would be too suggestive of the first innocence of Eden to be able to embrace Cixous’ commitment to a paradise that is humanly possible. Cixous wants to avoid all the traps of relations predicated on the structure of either/or: either the Imaginary or the Symbolic, life or death, either men or women, either masculine or feminine. Throughout this text there is a consistent concern with the differences between oppositional and non-oppositional relations that finds its clearest expression in the emphasis on the differences between Promethea, H, and I. Without fully implying that Promethea is so unique as to be a fantasy, a myth, and notwithstanding the allusions in her name, Cixous, nonetheless, notes that Promethea’s way of living ‘towards life’, her ‘yes’ to life, is quite exceptional. When Promethea is asked by Cixous if she knows how different she is from most, her answer, naturally, is that she doesn’t (1991a: 161): but Cixous does. Despite there being many moments when the boundaries between Promethea, H, and I are almost indistinguishable – such that at one point Cixous says that when she is using the pronoun ‘she’ in her notebooks she can no longer tell to whom it refers, Promethea or herself – Promethea is never wholly synonymous with H and I. ‘Never am I you. That is what is astonishing. That is what is reassuring. That is what is too much for my love. I lick your soul right down to the bone, I know the taste of every inch of your nerves, but you I do not know you I do not know’ (1991a: 65). Promethea’s very unknowability, her indeterminable differences, are ultimately reassuring for they protect against the moments of love that would and do arise from either an ungracious desire to possess the other, or a kind of merging that refers back to a loss of self-identity that we can see in

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Divine Promethean love evidence even in the imaginative longings of Aristophanes’ severed lovers whom Hephaestus offers to reunite. In this respect, Cixous is not offering us a utopian picture of love. We witness the struggle as she just as frequently expresses a desire to be so far inside the other, so far inside Promethea that there seems little doubt that at least at the level of desire she does, at times wish to lose herself. I want this: to slowly sink into her body, slow and breathless to go down inside her heaving breast, to let my soul sink down far from duties, from conversations, far from myself, toward her, far from me toward ‘the’ ‘source,’ far from History, far from weapons, far from sciences, toward she-who-does-not-know-she-knows-more-than-everything. (1991a: 101)

Recognising that love has the capacity to take us beyond our own limits and that this is one of the signifiers of abundant love, I take Cixous nonetheless to recognise also that the ultimate loss of herself would signal a loss of a kind of faith, and, again in the spirit of Aristophanes, it would also signal the loss of the other. I am afraid to go toward you to my farthest limits never meeting any resistance, to the end, to the edge of self, to fall, fall into you, into your delicious cool pit, to fall eternally into you, out of me, and deep within to forget me and forget me, and then with me forgotten, who, deep inside you will remember you? Who will unearth you? What would be able to hold me back? (1991a: 147)

Tantalising as this possibility of loss of self may be, Cixous withdraws from its sacrificial undertone. For she also speculates about the reverse of this desire to lose oneself in the loved one when she invokes Penthesileia’s cannibalisation of Achilles and then muses on what it might mean to actually eat Promethea. ‘Promethea is the only person in my whole life that I would really like to eat. I love her so much that if I had to eat her someday, I know that I would think she was divinely good with every mouthful’ (1991a: 60). It is a shocking metaphor in a text that explores the ethics of a gracious love of/with the other, but Cixous wants to emphasise the ways in which their love is like, but not the same as, that of Penthesileia and Achilles. ‘If there is such a thing as a good cannibalism it is ours – not like Penthesileia and Achilles. Love does that only when there is nothing left to lose. Then it devours itself. Our cannibalism remains unfulfilled because we have not been reduced to the grief of griefs’ (1991a: 59). Cixous explains the difference between Penthesileia and Achilles, and herself and Promethea, as a failure in understanding love. Love, she says, is limited by infinity: ‘One must never stop giving it limits to devour’ (1991a: 120). More often than not, however, the wild consuming desire to have the other ‘inside’, or to lose herself in the other, undergoes a feminine transition to a maternal metaphor of birthing in Promethea, and in this regard it has interesting reverberations that invoke both the speech of Diotima from the Symposium and Sally Purvis’s agapic mother love that we considered in Chapter 2.

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The subject of love She [Promethea] does not resist. Stretched out, voluminous, she does not even surrender. She has already surrendered. Impossible to make war on her. And I, then, finally, defeated, all that is left for me is to submit to reality. Fine. I will not provoke you. I will not kill you. Alas. I will not fall on you and beat you hard with my black wings. Defeated, defeathered, bare-armed, all silk, I am going to cradle you, I accept being separated from you, once again, to separate you from me, to give you a birth. I am going to return anew to life’s entrance. For you, the new first step. For you, I am turning myself into a mother painfully and passionately, since that is what you want, I am coming apart. And now, be born. (1991a: 142)

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In the name of preserving the conditions of a love that is defined by an encounter with alterity, Cixous underscores the differences both among and between them. The maternal metaphor allows her to convey a love for the other that complicates the boundaries between self and other but that is ultimately oriented towards the birth of the other in their otherness for all that the passage itself is shot through with the language of violence and conflict. Clearly this is not a story of easy love. On the contrary, loving the other as other, allowing them and oneself to be born into the present in love is a labour. Again we are reminded that this is not, in the end, a utopian divinity, it is a human divinity. Throughout the text, Cixous recognises that Promethea’s difference is the source of the extraordinary nature of their love. While the maternal allusions also undoubtedly bleed into a discourse of power that in some respects aligns Cixous with the overwhelming power of God, the undertone of narcissism that seems to attend on this potential reading is complicated by the fact that it is actually the other that she wishes to birth and not herself through the other. There is no sign of Hegel here. Love is a complex and shifting motif in Promethea. It not only ‘admits of contraries’, it welcomes them. On three occasions Cixous notes that not all in love is love (1991a: 64, 65, 66), yet she betrays her uncertainty about this claim when she recounts what she, interestingly, refers to as ‘the apocalypse’. In the apocalypse, Promethea and H lose the present of love when they find themselves struggling with the fear of loss and separation: this is what Cixous means by a loss of faith. Moreover, and like Penthesileia, Cixous does lose faith in the present of love and she retreats from the rawness and exposure she feels in loving Promethea in the way she has done. This leads to a cut in communication and the dynamism of their easy transitions between proximity and distance becomes rigidified as Cixous more fully instantiates distance, and they find themselves back in an economy of binary dualism in which self and other, lover and beloved, are constituted in tension and opposition. Cixous is disturbed that their love could include the extremes of horror that this schism gives rise to, and which clearly differentiate this kind of horror from the horror that underpins her cannibalistic fantasies. ‘[I]t upset me to see us turned into wild animals, my claws, my chops, my fangs, disgusted me, to have come to this! That this could really happen to us!’ (1991a: 95). So extreme is this conflict that Cixous can write of it only three

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Divine Promethean love days afterwards, and even then she can only allude to it. This is not a moment in which she is writing along with the present. For her the apocalypse is tragedy, in all its classical grandeur. But Promethea’s response is not the same. Promethea is ‘positive that this rage too was a form of love’ (1991a: 95), hence she was ‘back in the present more and sooner than I’ (1991a: 95). But in the moment in which hope had abandoned Cixous, Promethea’s otherness had become alienating. ‘I considered Promethea as a foreign power, raving on in some other language than mine’ (1991a: 96). The horror defies Cixous’ experience of herself and her understanding of their love, and she resists Promethea’s assertion that ‘this too was love’. But when hope unexpectedly returns two days later and Cixous finds herself back in the present with Promethea, she reflects on the apocalypse and changes her mind. I awoke next to Promethea, Life is so strong when it is given a chance to start up again! With a magical burst of hope everything went back the other way. Ever since yesterday I have been enchanted by things that made me groan in shame, and I delight in it all: both shame and enchantment . . . I admit: love was indeed behind all this. (1991a: 96)

In many ways the apocalypse parallels Cixous’ account of Achilles and Penthesileia from ‘Sorties’. A sublime love is taken to its limits and there is a loss of confidence, a separation, and a cut. In that separation, subjectivity is thrust back into a binary relation of opposition that heralds the arrival of death. The other is no longer an other who calls forth love in her unknowability. On the contrary, her very unknowability gives rise to repulsion, and thus to negation. Yet, in this instance, the cut is not final. Life, in the manner of hope, eventually returns, death is sent away, and tomorrow arrives in the present. In the end Cixous concludes that ‘only love has the power to bring death into the midst of life, to give it orders and counter-orders, to invite it in and send it away just as sincerely’ (1991a: 96). So, what permits Cixous to achieve what Penthesileia could not? While the text is elusive on this question, there is an important difference in the staging of these two love stories. Unlike that of Achilles and Penthesileia, this love story is not set in the context of a conventional battle of sexual difference. As Emma Wilson so acutely notes, The Book of Promethea is inscribing a ‘newly born’ relation of sexual difference where the hegemonic relations of male self to female other are being undone (1996: 121). This is a love story between two women. Nevertheless, H and I find themselves endlessly struggling with the difference that Promethea’s relationship to presence and to love represents. They are painfully aware that Promethea’s way of living ‘towards life’ signifies that she has managed to escape from a certain dualistic paradigm of what could be thought of as identity politics. Hence, in the first pages of the text, Cixous notes that ‘never has Promethea thought of saying: “I am a woman.” (Though she is . . .) No, the truth is: Promethea is. Is Promethea’ (1991a: 8–9). By contrast, the narrator, who in this moment is I because H has been unable to take on the challenge of

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The subject of love beginning this book of immediacy, notes that she ‘is just a woman who thinks her duty is not to forget’ (1991a: 9). But in the face of Promethea’s difference, I recognises that she has been living a besieged existence in which her ego was born shouting itself hoarse: ‘I exist, I am, don’t come near, I have teeth, I have claws’ (1991a: 9).122 And she is tired of it. Her desire is to escape this embattled, patriarchal existence and to embody the kind of freedom she sees in Promethea: I would like to doze now on Promethea’s shore, without weapons, without worry, without memory, without apprehension. I would like so much to be a woman without giving it a thought. I would like so much to be the freest of free women: so free that I would be liberated from the painful sensation of being-liberated. I would like to be so freely free that I would never even think to say to myself: ‘How free I am!’ because it is just something I would be. Purely, absolutely, I would be free, I would be, and that’s all, I would be H, I would be stretched out alongside Promethea, and I would sleep; it would be perfectly beautiful, and I would wake up on Promethea’s shore, and I wouldn’t turn around with a shudder. (1991a: 10)

In suggesting that Promethea simply is, is Promethea, Cixous is not casting her in the role of the Hegelian subject of being. Promethea’s ‘isness’, her beingness, does not stand for the unified subject of self-consciousness that is condensed under the sign of her name. With the emphasis on a particular kind of ‘isness’ and not on naming, Promethea is a subject who is always on the run, always moving, always in becoming. Hence, the primary metaphor through which Cixous understands Promethea is that of a mare but it could also be a unicorn for there are many instances when Promethea’s fluidity suggests flight. Promethea gallops and tosses her mane, appears unexpectedly through the widow and lands on Cixous’ notebooks, takes flight and gallops through the forest back to the Palaeolithic ‘Cave of Mares’ at Lascaux. Inasmuch, then, as Promethea doesn’t think of saying, ‘I am a woman’, we understand that it is because she doesn’t live being as a beingfor-herself. As Conley notes, in the emphasis on movement, Cixous’ subject ‘sets out to undo the narcissism perceived in the concept of a unified subject, a unity linked to death through negation of the other’ (Conley, 1992: 10). Cixous’ ‘affirmative subject’ who is always on the run thus opens a path toward alterity and, in this sense, Cixous is closer to Nietzsche and Heidegger than she is to Hegel (Conley, 1992: 10). Promethea is a woman without having to ‘give it a thought’ because Promethea never stops becoming woman. But ‘becoming woman’ is not then constituted as the telos of Promethea’s becoming. Promethea never stops becoming. By contrast, however, H and I continually move in and out of this feminine relation to self and to other. 122

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While the figures of H and I are often indistinguishable, Cixous does say that H is a more primitive self, a self that is more closely connected to the primordial and the unconscious. She describes her antiquity, as she does with Promethea, by reference to her affiliation with the caves at Lascaux. I, on the other hand, is often associated with worldly considerations like authoring books, dealing with journalists, and teaching classes at university.

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Divine Promethean love Resisting Promethean love As I noted earlier, Promethea raises the question of what it might mean to receive love when she asks Cixous to note that she too is loved, but this clearly presents a difficulty for Cixous. ‘I am a bit ashamed because I feel so much resistance, I disobey her, she has already asked me several times if I really did what she asked me to do. I sort of lied. I said, “I’m getting ready to. I’m going to”’ (1991a: 20). Cixous experiences the request as the equivalent of being asked to ‘caress herself’ and it inaugurates a kind of split between body and mind. Her wrists cramp up, yet she knows the connection she has made is a false one. She knows that, if there is narcissism, it lies not in her failure to write that she is loved, but in her resistance. It is her resistance that constructs this exchange in oppositional terms and that reveals the seductions of the self/other relation when it is constituted in opposition. Promethea’s request, she realises, requires no more than a kind of humility on her part – a kind of self-surrender – but it is a humility she feels she doesn’t have. The more she hesitates yet at the same time reassures Promethea that she is going to fulfil this request, the more she is confronted by Promethea’s trust in her reassurance. A debt economy is being established. For Cixous to make this declaration at this point will require her to make a gift to Promethea that is underpinned by self-sacrifice, for the subject position she is clearly occupying at this point is a masculine one that is deeply configured around the self/other opposition. Cixous has neither the same level of trust in love, or in Promethea, that Promethea has in her, herself, and in the moment. Importantly, I think this difference between them actually reveals the way these different subjectivities do not have the same relationship to time, for Promethea’s ‘trust’ derives from her surrender to the present and her refusal to hijack that present to a future that hasn’t yet arrived, or a past that is gone. In the end the moment is forced when Promethea reads over Cixous’ notebooks and murmurs sadly ‘You never wrote that I love you?’ (1991a: 20). Cixous is witness to Promethea’s sadness and it causes her to reflect on her own resistance and also on the nature of love. And I understood how stingy and cheap and arrogant and ungracious I had been. Because it is easy to love and sing one’s love. That is something I am extremely good at doing. Being loved, letting oneself be loved, entering the magic and dreadful circle of generosity, receiving gifts, finding the right thank-you’s, that is love’s real work. (1991a: 20)

Yet it still takes almost one hundred pages for Cixous to fulfil the promise that she makes to Promethea when she sees the pain that her resistance is causing to the woman she loves. But when she does, as I will shortly explain, it is not in the manner of a gift that invokes debts. There has been a transformation in Cixous as the subject of love. Cixous notes that love is one thing she thought she knew something about (1991a: 104). Indeed she describes herself as a ‘passionate devotee’ (1991a: 104). However, her encounter with Promethea and the difference that Promethea

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represents – Promethea’s ‘yes’ to life that frees her to be in the present and allows her to fearlessly make extravagant, perhaps abundant, declarations of love – forces Cixous to acknowledge the binary constraints of her previous devotions. She has, she realises, always contented herself with loving (1991a: 104). But Promethea insists that, if this is to truly be a book of love, i.e., a book of divine love, Cixous must write that she too is loved. In so insisting that Cixous write that she too is love Promethea provides the occasion for her to reflect on the structure of love, in terms both of reciprocity and of mutuality. As I discussed in Chapter 2, reciprocity and mutuality are typically configured as occurring when two parties engage in loving each other: ‘I love you’ evokes an ‘I love you too’ – no blurring of the boundaries of subjectivity here. But Promethea’s insistence that Cixous write she is loved raises for her the more difficult question of receiving love, not loving. Giving, Cixous says, ‘requires no courage, but to receive love so much strength, so much patience, and so much generosity must be extended’ (1991a: 105). Why would this be the case? Why would receiving love invoke such hyperbolic description? It seems apparent that Cixous is again referring to ways of living subjectivity, namely, to the relational possibilities that a feminine love generates. To receive love, at least to receive it in the way Promethea means, a way that escapes debt economies, requires the willingness to risk moving out of one/self, towards the other. It requires the surrender of one/self, and in Cixous’ understanding of feminine subjectivity, as we have seen, such an act amounts to surrendering an attachment to oneself as the site or source of being. Loving, on the other hand, makes no such necessary demand upon the self. One can love without being loved. One can love that which can’t return love; Kierkegaard’s perfect love in remembrance of the dead, which was noted in Sally Purvis’s reading of particular loves mentioned in Chapter 2, is perhaps one of the most unsettling examples. And Cixous makes a similar point when she notes that she has loved her own father, ‘who was gone’ (1991a: 104). But the love relation that comes to be divine for Cixous is one that is predicated on the acceptance of love as well as the gift of love. In this respect her conception of love is closer to the mutuality that is privileged in much of contemporary feminist theology where the notion of mutuality begins as a relational concept that challenges the subject/object dichotomy by at least insisting on reciprocity. Only then, she says, ‘can love descend upon us the way it wants, in one of its bewitching forms’ (1991a: 105). Only then will love itself emerge in the intersubjective space of meeting. It seems apparent that if one is locked into a notion of subjectivity as singular and unified, the notion of self-dispossession that lies at the heart of what I am suggesting is Cixous’ other-regarding love will necessarily raise the spectre of sacrifice and hence of annihilation. But a feminine relation to self that recognises dispossession of one self, not as sacrifice but as the continual birth of a new self and or with the other, in the present is one that makes possible an

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Divine Promethean love other-regarding love based on abundance and generosity. Hence, Promethea is full of birthing or becoming metaphors. When Cixous does fulfil her promise to Promethea, it arises as an eruption in the text and as something that is beyond Cixous’ will. It literally explodes through the resistance that she has continually reiterated and that she again announces just before she declares ‘I know that Promethea loves me’ (1991a: 103). However, this moment is preceded by a lyrical recounting of a ‘little secret of love’ that Promethea shares with her and that is central to understanding how Cixous comes to make her declaration, or, as is more appropriate to this moment, how this declaration makes itself heard, despite her. Cixous says that she has been the recipient of ‘secret’ knowledge that Promethea transmits to her without constituting herself as the giver of knowledge. ‘So many things I know, but I don’t know how I know them, things Promethea makes me know – the way she has of making me know them without telling them to me’ (1991a: 101). In other words, Promethea gives without constituting herself as the source of the gift, and, in so doing, she makes possible the arrival of the gift without incurring a debt economy. I take this to be a particularly cogent example of feminine gifting as Cixous understands it. In this instance the gift, or the ‘little secret of love’ that Cixous is referring to is apparently an introduction to feeling the wonder of the softest skin in the world, the skin of a horse’s nose and lips (1991a: 102)! The metaphorical allusions to what has never been overtly expressed in the text, i.e., lesbian eroticism, seem particularly apparent in this ‘gift’ that Cixous says ‘triggers in her a revolution of sensuality’, for throughout the text Promethea has been figuratively described as a horse!123 Now I understand. I see the world in a whole new way, my sensuality is savoring a revolution. Is this a little secret? For love it is a very important secret: because if you have ever touched the ultimate softness, afterward you feel your love relaxing and extending, and you feel love spreading all over the earth, through every species, and it becomes more open and more than human and therefore more human as well. It is hard for me to explain, because I have barely started learning how to know by touch, using my hands. But this little secret about nostrils is also a key for entering the world through the door of Promethea: and then you come to somewhere I have never been. And yet it is still the same world, but now it seems free of old evil spells that make us see it as dark, silent, dirty, sad, and cynical. It is our first world, the new world, eternally new, resounding with energies and sympathies; the wondering world filling us with wonder; the world a child again and again and again. (1991a: 102)

Promethea inaugurates this moment of rediscovering the world anew, i.e., a second innocence, by opening a door to a sensual, body-oriented, and eroticised knowledge that ‘knows’ how not to possess itself. The result is an abundance of 123 For a detailed account of the lesbian structure of Cixous’ feminine erotics, especially in The Book of Promethea, see Emma Wilson’s ‘Hélène Cixous: An Erotics of the Feminine’ (1996).

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The subject of love love, an excess of love that spreads all over the earth. This is a love that springs from the generosity of a gift that is given without being given, and the generosity is multiplied as this love increasingly takes on universal and divine proportions, spreading through everything, becoming more than human, and thus becoming more human as well. The trope is reminiscent of the Gospel injunction: freely ye have received, freely give (Matthew 10:8), but without the paradox of having been commanded. Against this background of the expansive generosity of love, Cixous moves quickly to her ‘announcement’ that she is loved by Promethea and, in the following explanation of how she knows this, she underscores the shift in the site of knowledge that has been prefigured by ‘the little secret of love’. But what astonishes me most, and so often astonishes me least (and I still wonder how to speak of it if I decide to try), is that Promethea loves me and I know it. More precisely, this is how it goes: ‘I know that Promethea loves me.’ It is not love that astonishes me, naturally Promethea loves, loves me, loves you, has loved. What is astonishing is that in spite of all my ordinary and extraordinary, old and well-founded resistances with regard to any such conviction, I could not deny that it has taken root inside me, with no shadows, no doubts. (1991a: 103)

Even though this description does apparently privilege Cixous as the subject of knowledge – through the emphasis on the I that knows she is loved – Cixous displaces the modernist, masculine undertones of self-possessive subjectivity by locating the site of this knowledge in the eroticised body and outside of any notion of will. This is a knowledge that has taken root inside her despite her resistance i.e., in spite of her more masculine relationship to desire. This is a feminine, embodied knowledge that emerges out of an encounter with the infinite generosity of the other, Promethea. But Promethea is the source of this love only to the same extent as she is the ‘source’ of the gift of the ‘little secret’. Her feminine relationship to her self, and also to gifting, precludes this gift from incurring the kinds of debts that arise when one is in receipt of a gift from a subject who gives, knowing that they are giving. Promethea’s gift of love is inseparable from Promethea herself, thus again invoking the relationship between Promethea and divine agapic love. But Promethea’s love has something in it, some chemical, or else some grace that is very active, acting gently but urgently: I know, I cannot not know, Promethea’s love puts up with no uncertainty. This is not a matter of advertisement, assertion, announcements. I said ‘chemical’ on purpose: it is almost purely internal – a blood knowledge that I felt mingling with all my substances. I am infiltrated, I am loved. It is a new feeling. I feel marinated . . . Let us be ruthless: I am loved by you, Promethea. And it is love to say that. I love you, Promethea. This is how it is, so immodest and so unmerciful, love. What a hard time I had getting up the courage to accept! (1991a: 103–105)

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Cixous is opened to the other at the level of flesh in this ‘acceptance’ of a love that thrusts her into the abundant present of love with the other and that

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Divine Promethean love heralds the arrival of the paradise of the ‘first world’, the world anew. But unlike the ‘first world’ i.e., unlike Eden, Cixous knows that ‘we’ are ‘made for fragments of eternity cut to our size’ (1991a: 87) because the infinite is difficult for us to bear. Arriving in paradise does not signal arrival tout court. Living alive in paradise requires superhuman (maybe even angelic) effort. The truth is that the process of arriving in paradise is pure paradise. Then if one wants to stay everyday one must accomplish the impossible again. No free apples these days. (1991a: 60)

If paradise is the present that calls forth love with the infinite other, then living alive in paradise is the willingness to remain open to the infinity of the other, to remain open to the indefinable otherness of the other. In a social world that continues to structure the self/other relationship around a subject/object dichotomy that privileges one term over the other, the threat of the annihilation of either sameness or difference is an ever-present threat. Resisting this threat is, in part, what underpins the ability to live alive in paradise, i.e., to live a love divine. Resisting the masculine economy of death that turns the gift and love into a gift that takes involves something like a refusal to submit to an economy of relations that privileges the self that precedes the moment and precedes the other. Such a subject has been displaced in the kind of feminine, embodied becoming that is demonstrated by Promethea, and ultimately, briefly, by Cixous as well. By locating so much of this discourse of love at the level of corporeality, Cixous offers us a different way of thinking about love, and of thinking about the structure of desire. Promethea’s feminine relationship to herself, which is her unattached relationship to becoming rather than to being, provides the occasion for a gift that can be received with grace, for it locates her in a present in which she is not in possession of the gift that ‘she’ gives. In this respect we could say that, like God, Promethea gives because it is her ‘nature’ to give. When Cixous notes elsewhere that ‘[o]nly when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way’ (1991b: 39), I take her to be referring to the very structure of desire that is made possible in a non-possessive, feminine relation to difference. Only when we are lost to ourselves, to the extent that being a self means being one and unified, are we opened to the possibility of a becoming that is expansive, abundant, and opened to the indeterminable difference of the other. Only then can love descend upon us the way it wants, in one of its bewitching, magical, and divine forms. I want to briefly return to the question of reciprocity and mutuality before turning specifically to the issue of the agapic nature of the love that I have argued is at the heart of Cixous’ account of love in Promethea. I previously indicated that I thought that the structure of reciprocal love does little to displace the subject/ object dichotomy that threatens to make the love relation one that conforms to model of sacrificial rather than abundant and divine love. In reciprocal love, a certain kind of simultaneity and parallelism offers an equality where each party

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finds themselves equally exposed to the risk of love: ‘I love you’ is balanced by an ‘I love you too’. But if the risk of love is the risk of opening to the difference of the other, the risk that is so acutely captured in Cixous’ anxiety about receiving Promethea’s love, then the notion of reciprocal love serves only to privilege and protect the risk to self that exposure to the other apparently represents. Hence, it is the ‘I’ in the phrase ‘I love you’ that is the focus of concern and not the ‘you’. Indeed, in many respects I think the ‘you’ is virtually erased in this encounter where what is at work are two masculine subjectivities which are consolidated in their reliance upon and implicit invocation of the subject/object, self/other distinction. Underlying this conception of love, nonetheless, I think is an insight into the possibility that love can wound, for it is this very possibility that reciprocity is thought to manage. Yet reciprocal love serves only to manage the risk of the potential for love to open to the other rather than to facilitate it. Interestingly, reciprocal love relies on the dichotomy of lover and beloved but manages it by defraying the threat of non-reciprocity in denying the beloved side of the opposition. In the end, it is lovers without beloveds that are in fact the outcome of a love that is organised around what amounts to a denial of difference. Hence, reciprocal love conforms to a very masculine, and indeed a very modernist, conception of love. Inasmuch as it gestures towards equality, it does so only in terms of a homogenising formal equality that is predicted on the denial of difference. While the notion of mutual love does differ from reciprocal love, and in that difference provides a way of rethinking the subject/object, lover/beloved, dichotomy, without a significant reinvestment in signification, there is nothing necessarily suggestive of a break with the subject/object dichotomy in the notion of mutuality. In the work of a number of the feminist theo-ethicists that I considered in Chapter 2, we can see the beginning of just this kind of reinvestment. In particular, Carter Heyward’s oft-repeated assertion that subjectivity is, from the outset, a relational, and therefore a mutual, notion goes a long way towards making the point that what underpins and limits our thinking about love is something to do with our thinking about subjectivity. Yet I would argue that her notion of erotic love as a love that is mutually empowering cannot in itself effect the kind of displacement that her insight into the relational constitution of subjectivity implies it might. Where her work is most suggestive of a different conception of subjectivity lies in her understanding of the erotic as something that itself calls forth mutual empowerment. However, her tendency to locate this erotic impulse towards justice, as external to, rather than arising out of, an encounter between the parties, leaves us with a notion of divinity as elsewhere to human beings, even if human beings find themselves participating in it. Inasmuch as we might say, then, that Cixous is also talking of mutuality, for example in the love relations in Promethea, mutuality becomes a concept that is displaced from the ‘knowing’ subject, i.e., a subject like Heyward’s, that must know and choose to partake in a mutual sharing of power. What is at stake in

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Divine Promethean love Cixous’ conception of a love that calls forth the divine is a subject that has achieved a kind of ‘not knowing’, for therein lies her conception of a love that leads to abundance and excess. It is in abundance and excess that Cixous finds divinity. As can be seen from her explorations of grace and innocence discussed in the previous chapter, what is at stake in human innocence is a non-possessive relationship to knowledge, and thus a non-possessive relationship to subjectivity that orients the notion of subjectivity towards the future in an endless process of becoming, rather than being. Cixous’ feminine subjects of innocence and grace are in a non-possessive relationship to themselves and to the other, such that self and other are dispersed in the present. Moreover, as we have seen above, the site of love is displaced from both the subject that loves and the subject that is loved, as Cixous focuses on the wound of love that is inscribed in and through the body and that remains open to the other as indefinable in their otherness. Hence, Cixous does not know Promethea even though she has licked her soul down to its bones. Hence, love is called forth in the very space of a meeting in alterity that is configured around a feminine refusal to annihilate the otherness of the other. In this respect, as I noted in Chapter 2, Cixous’ work is closer to Beverly Harrison’s, whose subjects in love are the subjects of vulnerability. Yet Cixous’ passion for love is a passion that is consistently oriented towards life, and thus towards generativity, and this is an aspect of love that I find to be curiously noticeably absent in much of the work of feminist theology. In many respects the notion of mutuality does serve to address the scene of inequality, and thus to address the sacrificial aspect of other-regarding love that has been an obstacle to reconceptualising agape. But the problem of inequality is oriented elsewhere in Cixous’ conception of love. For Cixous, inequality arises in a relationship between self and other that is configured around the need to return the abundance of the gift to oneself: a masculine relation. The gift of love becomes sacrificial to the extent that it is given only on the condition that a part of it will be returned. Cixous addresses this problem when she notes that the hardest thing about receiving love, i.e., the hardest thing about receiving, period, is finding the right thank-you’s. Yet what is markedly absent from Cixous’ account of finally coming to accept the gift of being loved by Promethea is that there is no hint of a thank-you in sight. Promethea’s love in no way invokes a return. This is what I take to be the mercilessness of love to which Cixous refers when she notes that it is love to say that she is loved. In this feminine economy of desire in which Cixous finds herself ‘marinated’ in love, the boundary between the self that loves and the self in love have been exceeded. The self as subject of love is no longer recognisable as such for she is constituted in the very immediacy of love with the other in the present. Only to the extent that she continues to achieve the impossible, i.e., only to the extent that she continues to refuse a grasping relationship to herself as the subject of

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The subject of love love, will she continue to find herself called into a paradise with the other that requires no thank-you’s. Agapic abundance and Promethean love

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As I noted at the outset of this book, the ways in which Cixous’ conception of feminine love differs from agapic love may be so vast as to render the comparison a tenuous one indeed. And this may be all the more the case if we take seriously the very masculine character of agapic love as it has been understood in much of the feminist theological literature. I am certainly not suggesting that Cixous is writing about agapic love per se, at least not explicitly in those terms. Nor am I suggesting that the feminist analyses of traditional interpretations of agapic love that have elucidated its investment in masculine conceptions of subjectivity and masculine conceptions of the self/other relation are deficient. What I have suggested, however, is that, in being a conception of love that is focused on otherregard and that derives from a spontaneous abundance, agape offers a certain genealogy of the notion of generous love, albeit a troubled one from the perspective of feminism. However, it is over the very issue that has given rise to so much concern on the part of feminist theologians, the self-sacrificial demand of agapic other-regarding love, that I find Cixous’ work on abundant love most promising, at least in spirit. Like agape, Cixous’ conception of generous love is antithetical to a notion of self-interest but this is primarily because her work on love intervenes at the very point that we might think of the self in the first place. To the extent that selfinterest is an issue, it is so from the point of view of reflecting a specific economy of desire that constitutes the self as both the point of origin and the telos of being, and, in so doing, renders moot the very possibility of other-regard, as other-regarding. As I have emphasised throughout, this is an economy of desire that, for Cixous, is exemplified by a masculine relation to the gesture of giving, but this is not the only possible relation to giving. In the model of a maternal relation to difference, Cixous began her explorations of a different relation to spending, one that is oriented towards the other, towards life, and towards becoming; one that just might be other-regarding without being self-sacrificial. From this metaphor she developed her thinking on a feminine ‘economy’ in which the very otherness of the other calls forth the meeting of a relationship in difference, a meeting that takes place in the present but is oriented towards the future. Moreover, given the frequency with which Cixous recounts the moments of exchange that derive from a feminine relation to desire, in and through the language and tropes of religious discourse, we can understand this exchange as one that heralds divine possibilities. I want to briefly return to Promethea to draw out still further the qualities that I think invite us to take seriously the agapic signification of Cixous’ generous, graceful love.

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Divine Promethean love Having noted that arriving in paradise is not in itself the end of the story, Promethea continues to chart the vicissitudes of the love relation that Cixous and Promethea share. Towards the very end of the text, when Cixous is long beyond the moment of surrendering her resistance, she recounts an event that confirms Promethea’s relationship to the feminine while it simultaneously charts her own more troubled relationship to this same possibility. On an important level the event that she narrates is banal and even ridiculous, especially given the magnitude of the upheaval it signifies. Moreover, Cixous is aware of this, and, in making the point, she illustrates that she is a long way from being in the present of love with Promethea in this moment. ‘That is why it is so hard to tell. Because the smallness of the cause is so disproportionate to the cosmic devastation of the effect’ (1991a: 177). As is also often the case with the ridiculous in Cixous’ writing, this scene invites a kind of horrified amusement on the part of the reader who I suspect is otherwise in danger of identifying too closely. In the unselfconscious fashion that has typified her throughout the text, Promethea announces that her three nephews are coming to visit. And in the choice of words, but especially in the building metre and tempo of the writing as Cixous describes this moment, we can hear the beginning of the doubts that will inaugurate a cut in communication. The fight began when Promethea apparently unsuspecting calm Promethea, normal it would seem, Promethea like always, Promethea without treachery or suspicion it seemed, her breath even and eyes bright as ever, or eyes maybe a little brighter, a little more burning it seemed, but her mouth apparently confident, her lips firm and facing straight ahead, without warning, Promethea suddenly announced the visit of her three nephews, and so – So? (1991a: 175)

This is the only moment in the text in which the personal and intimate space of love between these women has been even remotely threatened by the intrusion of a different kind of other, and it leads Cixous rapidly on a torturous psychic descent into jealousy. To this extent she is still thoroughly immersed in the present, but it is a present that becomes alienated from the other, even though it initially arose out of her very openness to the other, to Promethea. Knowing that three is more than they have beds for, Promethea ‘innocently’ says that she will sleep with the ‘Extra’. Before she can stop herself, Cixous is lost in imagining Promethea sleeping with her young nephew and the scene begins to look a lot like Penthesileia and Achilles. Again, the confidence of a love taken to its limits is being threatened. She saw: a little dwarf man climb a mountain soft as butter leaving his footprints and handprints all over her buttocks, on her belly, on her thighs, trampling, polluting, plunging his hands into the cream and licking his fingers. And she saw: the mountain just letting it happen, asleep? Seemingly asleep. (1991a: 177)

When Cixous does respond out loud to Promethea, despite herself, and knowing how unreasonable she sounds, she nonetheless says she doesn’t want any

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The subject of love human to ever touch Promethea. Promethea is astounded that she could be jealous over a child. But she is, and what’s more, she finds a delicious enjoyment in unleashing what she recognises as being a rampant and primitive egotism in the form of a struggle for possession of the loved one who has become an object. But she also knows that this signifies the loss of paradise and the pain that it inaugurates is the pain of knowing that Promethea will not join her in hell. Promethea will not lose paradise. Promethea is indeed innocent. But Cixous is not. What sent her hurtling from her jungle into hell’s cauldron, was that Promethea did not see the wind from her words bend her soul to the ground, did not see the flames consuming her bones, at the idea that a little dwarf man would eat her butter and drink her milk and press his little lips and his little penis on her mountainsides and even, maybe, make her quiver with tiny pleasures? (1991a: 179)

In the face of the threat of this other, this little dwarf man, who is one of only two male references in over two hundred pages of text (not including God of course!), Cixous finds herself thrust back into an economy of desire that constitutes Promethea as the object of love and herself as the subject, i.e., a masculine economy of desire. The feminine space of mutuality has been intruded upon and it leads Cixous to think that she could never have enough of Promethea, that she loves her illegally, truly, too much (1991a: 180). Confronted with the difference that the little boys represent, Promethea’s very willingness to give herself so wholly and fully leads to a desire in Cixous to not just to be the recipient of love but to take more than is given. ‘I want more. I want what you do not have the power to give me, I want to extract your secrets, things you don’t know’ (1991a: 180). The threat of sexual difference cannot be ignored for it is this event that specifically inaugurates Cixous’ return to a binary, masculine relation to difference. It is this very specific event that forces Cixous to acknowledge that the abundance of Promethean love that she has revelled in derives from a non-exclusive generosity, and that she is not the only beneficiary of Promethean love. Promethea can and will love the nephews; she can and will give of herself in the same way she does with Cixous, and in this sense Promethea condenses the symbolic attributes of agapic love: in this sense Promethean love is universal love. Cixous is forced to acknowledge that for her the paradise of generous love is vastly more challenging than it is for Promethea. But she nonetheless recognises and is grateful for the fact that Promethea loves like God.

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I don’t love Creation, including all its creatures. God’s love is indifferent. Mine is a narrow, elective passion. Thank God you are more the sort of divinity in love with Life, all of Life, all its races, its colors, its species, its filth, its odors. Love for me, Promethea. Love what I don’t know how to love. Kiss the little boys for me: I would really love to love them more than myself, but I can’t. Love illiterate souls for me, the way I sincerely desire to love them with an immediate, wise, wordless love, the naked love that is beyond my scope . . . Kiss everyone for me with love that fits each of their sizes perfectly, with the

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Divine Promethean love supple and deft love I do not have, I whose myopia makes me see all people as strangers, all of them different from what I am and surely from what they are, I who, from behind my myopia, astigmatically, carefully, grope with my love, I who prefer not to risk love except in places where they speak my language. (1991a: 185–186)

Promethea does indeed love like God to the extent that her love is otherregarding, non-exclusive, spontaneous, and generative. However, her love is not indifferent in the sense in which indifferent implies abstracted. On the contrary, the emphasis throughout the text has been on Promethea’s thoroughly embodied particular relationship to herself, to the world, and to the other. Moreover, the love that Promethea calls forth is also thoroughly embodied, hence, so much of the anxiety that Cixous expresses in her imaginings of Promethea sleeping with her nephew, are given expression in sexual or erotic terms. But paradise lost does not ultimately conform to the same structure as the Fall from the first Paradise in the Cixousian construction of divine love. Her emphasis on the dynamism and movement of the intersubjective space permits the ever-present possibility of refinding paradise, a second innocence, and, in this respect, Cixous continues to underscore the difference between the love she and Promethea share and the love of Achilles and Penthesileia. As the upheaval of Promethea’s announcement subsides and Cixous finds herself on the other side of a realisation and an acceptance that she can achieve only occasionally what Promethea seems to be able to achieve more consistently, she finds herself returning to the grace of the open wound of a love that is inscribed in her flesh. ‘[D]eep in the heart of the excited universe, lies a little land of flesh, a little kernel of sweet mellow permanent warmth, the immortal animal, love: this body that is attached to this body, this body that pursues itself in the other body. I am attached to you through your organs, your body is part of my body, my flesh is necessarily graced with your flesh’ (1991a: 181). Cixous is loved, not exclusively, but gracefully, and she loves, exclusively and with fierce passion. Throughout her writing she has continually reiterated that only in and through the particular can we know the universal, and I am reminded of her earlier statement that under Promethea’s leadership we have a taste of God. Promethea is a trope of universal love but she is the particular love of Cixous. Under her leadership, that is, her ability to accede to a feminine relationship to difference, Cixous finds herself called into a relationship in the present in which the very boundaries of the particular are so vastly exceeded that they open on to the universal and she finds her/their love spreading over the whole earth. But as she says, in the end, we who are truly human are truly made for fragments of eternity cut to our size. Concluding remarks To the extent that the problem of self-sacrifice is what marks the rejection of agapic love in much of feminist theology, I have argued throughout that Cixous’

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The subject of love conception of divine Promethean love addresses this issue at the level of the structure of subjectivity itself. The very notion of self-sacrifice, I suggest, is dependent firstly upon a notion of self that is indebted to largely Enlightenment, hence masculine, ideals about what a subject is in the first place. Cixous acknowledges that, in a patriarchal world, we continue to be interpolated into the discourses of subjectivity that privilege notions like individuality and autonomy and that assume the subject as a self-subsisting phenomenon. In her attention, however, to a feminine relation to difference I find an attention to another way of thinking about subjectivity. If the masculine subject is constituted against the threat of difference, Cixous inscribes in feminine flesh the possibility that this is not the only possible relation to difference. In a feminine relation to difference, we find the possibility of living a dispossessed, rather than sacrificial, relation to self in which otherness becomes the occasion of a generous, excessive, abundant birth into life and love.

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Conclusion

Presenting graceful abundant love Question of the time of mourning: I do not cry in advance – I do not precede – Feeling of grace stronger than everything with me – In the combat between joy and mourning. (Cixous in Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1997: 98)

With the jointly authored publication of Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing Hélène Cixous and Mirielle Calle-Gruber have constructed a thoroughly postmodern textual engagement with the concept of writing the self. This apparently autobiographical text on/by Hélène Cixous gives concrete expression to her earlier statement in Promethea, that her ‘I’ is never the subject of autobiography. Rather, inasmuch as the signifier ‘I’ signifies at all for her, it signifies freedom: ‘When I say “I,” this I is never the subject of autobiography, my I is free. Is the subject of my madness, my alarms, my vertigo. I is the heroine of my fits of rage, my doubts, my passions. I let itself go. I let myself go. I surrenders, gets lost, does not comprehend itself’ (1991a: 19). Cixous, as writer and as subject of writing, mine and others’, demonstrates especially well I think her own insights into the dispersed nature of feminine subjectivities which exceed all efforts in containment. She continually escapes, exceeds, and is elsewhere to this text that is apparently ‘hers’. Rootprints is a series of reflections and memories, interviews and engagements, dialogues and photographs. It is drawn from a vast array of sources: Cixous’ family photograph album, her published and unpublished work, and, perhaps most interestingly, the notebooks and journals that she confesses she is never without, and which form the raw material of her published work.124 Throughout the body of the text of Rootprints, the pages are punctuated by boxed extracts from those notebooks and journals. At times the content of these boxes appear like a narrator, offering a glimpse of what we as readers, either consciously or unconsciously, desire to be the ‘truth of the text’, the ‘truth of Hélène’. Thus, 124 Cixous’ notebooks have since been edited and translated by Susan Sellers and published in a bilingual edition entitled simply Writing Notebooks (2006c).

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The subject of love the very structure of this text simultaneously provokes and displaces the willto-truth tendencies of its readers and, in so doing, illuminates a more important question about the ways in which we ask for, expect, and produce narratives of self unity. But in reality, whatever truths these narratives yield, they do so in a way which positions them far more closely to the unconscious of the text. They are in an elusive, enigmatic, and tangential relationship to the body or consciousness of the rest of the book. No truth of the self is to be found in either, Rootprints seems to be saying. But perhaps even more important than exposing the will-to-truth fantasies of readers and writers, what we do find with these raw and unrefined musings and jottings that accompany Cixous in the very stream of living is that they reflect a kind of writing in the present that is not unlike the writing to which H and I aspired in Promethea. This is a writing that is as close to living as it is possible to get and it is a writing that traces the contours of subjectivity not as unified but as utterly dispersed and fragmented. The quotation with which I introduced these concluding remarks is one such moment from Cixous’ notebooks and it is found in a discussion between Calle-Gruber and Cixous where Calle-Gruber alludes to the presence of the author in her texts. Calle-Gruber describes this presence as ‘catching a glimpse of you in a certain present of writing, “sticking out your neck” ’ (1997: 90). Cixous distances herself immediately from the symbolism of heads that is implied in the metaphor of sticking her neck out, and she reclaims for herself what I take to be the feminine space of the body and soul. She responds: ‘Not the head. The body. The entrails. Of the soul also’ (1997: 90). And goes on to say that, unlike Jacques Derrida, she lacks a sublime physicist’s intelligence for a curiosity about primitive scenes that elude us. She is not motivated by the desire to fully reveal to herself or others the mysteries of self that elude her, the sources of self that formed and continue to form her. Indeed such desires for unity foreclose for Cixous on the possibility of living in the instant. ‘What Derrida expresses at times is a vital curiosity with respect to those types of primitive scenes that elude us, and that have caused him. I think that I do not have such a vast desire or project in me. I do not have that sublime physicist’s intelligence. Which is to say that it is less the “enigma of myself”; it is rather the thirst for the phenomenon of an instant’ (1997: 90). And in the quotation from her notebook that accompanies this exchange about the conditions of writing the self, we find Cixous again, if seemingly indirectly and incidentally, reiterating and affirming that grace, and thus I would add divinity, lies in the present. Precariously positioned between the dualism of that which precedes and that which follows, the divine arrives somewhere in the space of the instant between joy and mourning.

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Question of the time of mourning: I do not cry in advance – I do not precede – Feeling of grace stronger than everything with me – in the combat between joy and mourning. (1997: 98)

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Conclusion Throughout the Cixousian texts I have considered here, and indeed throughout many of her texts, can be found this recurring motif of the relationship between subjectivity, grace, and the instant, all of which I, and others, have suggested are central concepts in Cixous’ poetico-philosophical ethics of otherness. Life, love, self, and other continually converge on the instant in her textual explorations of and reflections upon feminine subjectivities. What I have endeavoured to contribute here to the rich engagements others have had with Cixous’ work, however, is the way in which this convergence is so often configured as a kind of phenomenology of divinity, rendered always in and through a language that invites us to consider the sacred dimensions of such encounters, the religious dimensions. In none of Cixous’ work do we find a genuine meeting between self and other, a meeting that preserves alterity and refuses to annihilate the other, configured as other than a moment of divinity punctuating the stream of life. To meet the other in their otherness, as do Lispector’s walking couple, is to be living the moment in its immediacy and in joy. But to know this moment and to want it is to already be beyond it, to be on the other side of grace and to be in mourning. We lose ourselves and we lose the other in the urgency of grasping that which by definition cannot be grasped, that which cannot be held still. Grace lies in movement and in Cixous’ account of feminine subjectivities such grace is the path of our becoming, a becoming that is indeed, as she has often noted, well beyond Eden. We are those for whom the paradise of that eternity can only be marked by mourning, for our joys lie not in the still life that is Eden but in the movement towards living that is our perpetual yet fragmented immersion in the present we share with others. Only in this movement towards living and towards other will we or can we find the eternity that Cixous so poetically notes is fitting for us who are beyond paradise, an eternity ‘cut to our size’, a divinity, I would add, through which we can become divine. While Cixous’ theorization of feminine subjectivity is configured as a moment in which self and other converge on the present, and in so doing somehow exceed the categories of self and other and find themselves bordering the divine, I have not taken her to be espousing a version of Eastern religious discourses which predicate divinity or ‘enlightenment’ on the wholesale dissolution of subjectivity. There are undoubtedly very interesting reverberations between Cixous’ critique of an ego-based desire to be in possession of oneself, as in Kleist’s boy before the mirror, and a Buddhist identification of ego as that which prevents a kind of sublime unity with the cosmos. Equally, Cixous’ self and other who meet in the conditions of a ‘good distraction’ are also a very long way from the pre-Edenic fantasies of unity that inform more Western understandings of selflessness. The affiliation of a totalised unity with the Absolute always precludes the unified from being ‘redemptive’ in Cixousian terms for it is an orientation towards the transcendent as an elsewhere to life, a beyond to life, and the Cixousian subject is nothing if not a subject of life. Hence, Cixous’ feminine subjects are always

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The subject of love thoroughly located in a dynamic of movement that is the very heart of living, and her subjects in love uniquely express that movement in and through an excessive abundance that is plunged into the depths of the present, thereby punctuating the flow of time with the divinity of the instant. In the context of the love that has been the subject of this book – an abundant, generous and therein divine love – the boundaries of self and other in the stories Cixous tells of encounters which open on to the divine are not so much dissolved in the instant as they are exceeded. Love is the very ground of becoming in a world in which the traditional notion of self-sacrifice has been rendered unintelligible as an expression of divine love, yet other remains essential. If the other does not remain other there is no space for what I am here suggesting is Cixous’ agapic love, no space for becoming in difference with the other and, thus, no divinity for Cixous’ subjects of love. Are we not then being offered a picture of love here that looks utterly reminiscent of the agape of Anders Nygren that we considered in the first chapter, a love that is spontaneous, other-regarding, generous, and creative, albeit a love that is now expressed in fully human terms? Moreover, I do think that Cixous is also offering us a very different picture of the subjects of divine love from that which derives from the concept of mutuality that is currently favoured in many feminist theologies. While, as I have noted, mutuality undoubtedly challenges the underlying hierarchical power structures that have informed intersubjective possibilities within patriarchal cultures, it nonetheless retains a commitment to dualism that undoes the very assertion that subjectivity itself is a relational concept. On the other hand, Cixous’ attention to the epistemological conditions of subjectivity, that is, to the relationship between knowledge, self, and other, and to the phenomenal conditions that open the category of knowledge to ways of living, provides an alternative foundation for rethinking the structure of self/other relations. For Cixous, as I have suggested, everything happens in the instant, and it is in a feminine approach to the instant that we find the passage to divinity that is truly paved with the love of the other as other. Because we cannot not love when we live. It is our motivating force. That is what living is: the search for love. And its substitutes. Because we also discover how few possibilities there are to exercise love. The scarceness, incidentally, is related to the scaredness: the fear everyone has of losing. Of losing oneself. I also ought to say, counseled by human prudence: we cannot not be tempted to love. Most people flee the temptation. Some do not flee, knowing, as does everyone, that love is dreadful. As dreadful and desirable as God. But no one chooses: the two possibilities – to flee, to succumb – carry us off. It is stronger than we are. We are all subjects of the fortune called grace. (Cixous in Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1997: 113)

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INDEX abundance 16, 27, 30, 38, 38n.34, 40, 45, 55, 62, 71, 83, 89, 100–101, 110, 116, 126–127, 130, 134, 166, 172, 181, 185, 186, 188, 194 Achilles 118–126, 128–131, 137, 141, 165n.115, 175, 177, 187, 189 affective relations 28 agape 6–8, 8n.11, 9–13, 13n.15, 15–16, 22, 27, 37–38, 38n.34–36, 39, 39n.38–39, 40, 40n.41, 41–47, 54, 55, 60–64, 64n.61, 66–69, 71–74, 78–81, 89–90, 105n.92, 106, 106n.93, 110, 111n.98, 120, 127, 142, 162, 171–173, 185–186, 194 alterity 1, 11, 13n.15, 14, 17, 25, 37, 48, 67, 70, 97, 106, 111–112, 112n.99, 122, 124, 130, 131, 139, 144, 168, 171, 176, 178, 185, 193 gifting 169 radical 2, 104 Amazons 118–121 Andolsen, Barbara Hilkert 61–62, 65–66, 66n.64 appetitive relations 28 appropriation 107, 135, 155 alterity 97 difference 5, 13, 21, 32n.31, 108, 117 feminist 40, 61 Aquinas, Thomas 14, 39n.38 Aristophanes 31, 31n.30, 51, 175 Augustine 28n.27, 39n.38, 40, 81 authenticity 59 Avis, Paul 46n.46

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Badinter, Elisabeth 75n.68 Badiou, Alain 8n.11 balance 164 Barthes, Roland 53n.50, 90n.81 beauty 25, 27, 29, 32–34, 51, 69, 121, 127, 145, 158 Beavoir, Simone de 49, 70n.66 becoming 2–3, 2n.1, 6, 8n.11, 9–10, 16, 18, 21, 29, 32, 37, 42, 50–51, 53–54, 79, 84n.74, 85, 87, 91, 96n.84, 103, 104, 108, 110, 114, 115–117, 124, 127, 136, 139, 141, 143, 156, 158, 160, 161, 165, 174, 178, 182–183, 185–186, 193–194 being 1–4, 2n.2, 5n.5, 6, 9–10, 16, 21–23, 24–25, 29, 31, 51, 54, 71, 81, 84, 85, 89, 103, 105, 106, 109–112, 114–125, 128–130, 139, 141–142, 149n.114, 150, 152, 157–160, 165, 168–170, 178–180, 182–183, 185–187

Bible Abraham and Isaac (story of the sacrifice) 129, 130 Adam 151, 158 Assumption, the 90 Atonement 41, 66, 68, 71, 173n.120 Creation 38, 41, 45, 47, 60, 76, 76n.70, 79, 105n.92, 110, 111n.98, 134–135, 135n.105, 137n.109, 172n.119, 173, 173n.120, 188 Cross, crucifixion 7n.7, 12, 25–26, 41, 43, 45, 47, 66, 88, 110, 123, 125 Deuteronomy 39n.37 Eden, Edenic 20, 124, 133–134, 134n.104, 137–143, 145, 145n.112, 151–153, 156–160, 173–174, 183, 193 Eve 9, 133–141, 137n.109, 138n.110, 150–152, 156–160, 161, 163 Eucharist 26 Fall, the 19, 19n.23, 20, 28, 134, 134n.104, 138, 138n.110, 139–141, 148, 150–151, 153, 155, 158, 163, 189 Genesis 19n.23, 76, 76n.70, 105, 105n.92, 110–111, 133–134, 134n.104, 135, 135n.105, 137n.109, 138, 143, 163, 173 Good Samaritan 74 Immaculate Conception 90 Incarnation 26, 40–41, 45, 80, 110, 123, 173n.120 Jesus 6, 7n.7, 12, 25–27, 39n.37, 42, 43n.43, 44, 46, 57n.52, 58n.56, 63, 66, 74n.67, 79–80, 118 John 38, 38n.36, 41, 41n.42, 173 Leviticus 10, 39n.37 Mark 39n.37, 182 Mary 56, 57, 57n.52, 58, 88, 90n.82 Mathew 39n.37 Paul 8n.11, 38n.36, 41, 43 Resurrection 40–41, 45, 76 tree of knowledge 124, 137, 137n.109, 158 Virgin Birth 90 binary, binaries active/passive 14, 57n.53, 65, 69, 71, 161 being/becoming 3, 29, 84 either/or 5, 46–47, 50, 73, 86, 110, 113, 131, 159, 174 logic 5, 37, 47, 88n.78, 107, 107n.95, 110, 135, 147–148 logic of exclusion 52 mind/body 24, 24n.25, 25, 27, 30, 47, 53, 88n.78, 109, 149n.114, 179 public/private 67–68

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Index self/other 5, 13, 28, 69–70, 79n.71, 91, 97, 99, 100, 101n.89, 107, 107n.96, 130, 133, 134, 138n.110, 141, 153, 158, 165–166, 169–170, 179, 183–184, 186 Blyth, Ian 98n.86 bodyselves 78, 82 both/and 5, 46, 50, 73, 86, 131, 138, 159, 171 Butler, Judith 64n.63, 87n.77 Bynum, Carolyn Walker 58n.57 Calle-Gruber, Mireile 18n.19, 98n.86, 191–192, 194 caritas 40 castration anxiety 114, 122 Chopp, Rebecca 136n.106 Christ, Carol 58 civilisation 109 Cixous, Hélène agapic love 11, 73, 131, 141, 162, 173, 184–186, 194 time and 73 becoming 9–10, 54, 104, 141, 161, 178, 185, 193 Book of Promethea, The 162, 166, 168–190 ‘Castration or Decapitation’ 18n.19, 104 difference(s), sexual difference 5, 5n.5, 13–14, 17, 27, 86, 92, 96, 99, 108, 117, 122, 132, 137, 138n.110, 139, 161, 172 divinity, divine love, divine feminine 6, 10, 14, 19–21, 40, 83, 85, 87, 91, 94, 97, 102, 104–107, 110, 116, 119, 123–126, 162, 165–166, 169, 171–173, 176, 180, 185, 188–189, 193–194 écriture feminine 88n.78, 100, 104–106 Eve 59, 83, 150, 156 gift of love, the 4–8, 7n.9, 9–11, 18–19, 44, 113–116, 118, 181, 185–186 grace, receiving gracefully 19, 69–70, 122, 124, 145–154, 156, 159–160, 164, 180, 186, 189, 191, 194 ‘Grace and Innocence’ 19, 19n.22, 20, 132–134, 134n.104, 135–138, 140–144, 151–152, 161, 163–164, 166–167, 171, 185 innocence, second innocence 20, 134, 137, 140–143, 151, 154, 156, 157, 161 instance 119, 156, 176, 192–194 knowing, knowledge 133, 152–153, 155, 157–161, 182, 184–185 ‘Laugh of the Medusa, The’ 18n.19, 88n.78, 104, 155

life 72, 92–93, 98, 100, 112, 133, 174, 193 masculine and feminine 92–93, 107 metaphor 136, 142 other-regarding love 20, 73, 112, 123, 126, 137, 180 paradise 163–164, 167 religious symbolic 91–92, 95 sacred, the 96, 125 ‘Sorties/The Newly Born Woman’ 4n.5, 18, 18n.19, 19–20, 97, 97n.85, 99, 104–109, 111–112, 114–118, 118n.102, 125, 130–131, 133, 137, 139–140, 144, 164–167, 171, 172n.119, 177 subjects, subjectivity 10, 16–21, 48, 65, 97–99, 105, 116–117, 126, 130, 141–142, 148, 169, 185 theology 136n.107, 147 theo-poetic 9, 98, 102, 146, 193 writing 4n.4, 6, 7n.9, 9, 16, 18n.19, 22, 27, 44, 84n.74–75, 88n.78, 92–98, 98n.86, 99–104, 101n.89, 104n.92, 105, 111, 117–118, 123–126, 136, 138, 138n.110, 146n.113, 147, 165, 165n.116, 166–172, 171n.118, 172, 177, 186–187, 189, 191n.123, 191–192 Clément, Catherine 97, 97n.85 Cleopatra 106, 109, 117–118, 124–131, 165n.115, 166 Conley, Verena Andermatt 19n.22, 93, 95, 96, 98n.86, 102–103, 111–112, 116, 141–142, 165, 178 Cooper, Lane 51n.48 Cornell, Sarah 172, 172n.119 Crownfield, David 87n.76 Cupitt, Don 3, 3n.3, 46n.46, 136n.106 Daly, Mary 61, 61n.59, 77–78 D’Arcy, Martin 68–69 Davidson, James 34n.33 death becoming and 2, 114, 117 beyond 124 birth 108 the body and 26 cultures of 99, 106 Derrida 17n.18, 113n.100 experience of 92 of God 1, 2, 2n.2, 5, 11, 102, 111–112 Irigaray 92–93 Jantzen 87n.77 Jesus, Christ, crucifixion 27, 47, 80, 122–123

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knowledge 133, 138–139 Kristeva 87n.76, 93 life and 17n.18, 26, 78, 80, 92–93, 99–100, 102, 111–112, 115, 117, 120, 126, 174, 177–178 love, eros, lovers and 6, 14, 22, 25, 100, 124, 126 movement 141 Plato 30–31, 34–35 religion and 4 signification 93, 174 Socrates 26–27 see also Achilles; binary, binaries; Cixous; Conley; death; difference; economy; Heyward; Nygren; surrender: Antony and Cleopatra Derrida, Jacques 2n.2, 17n.18, 48, 90, 98n.86, 103, 103n.91, 113, 113n.100, 192 desire appetitive 82 attachment 157 beauty 32–33 becoming 127 body 25, 26, 32, 47, 105 divinity 29, 123 embodied 25, 30–31, 37, 81, 178 erast¯es, er¯omenos 35 eros for something 32, 50 ethics of intersubjectivity 13 excessive 13, 14 grace 154, 160 Kristeva 89 love 15, 188 movement 107 other 13, 14, 29, 31, 33, 35, 104n.92, 107–108, 112, 115, 117, 120–123, 128, 128n.103, 149n.114, 152, 166, 171, 174–175, 192 particular 33, 123 Plato, sexual 28, 29n.28, 29–37, 31n.30, 50–51, 127 possession 36, 151 power 82 sexual 38 sin 158 structure of 19n.21, 50, 183 subject (ivity) 38, 74, 161 wanting 153, 164 see also agape; Cixous: ‘Grace and Innocence’; feminine; Kliest; life Deutscher, Penelope 84n.74 dialectical 23, 32, 37, 50, 89, 108, 115, 117, 140–141, 144, 153, 159, 170, 174 Diamond, Irene 64n.63

difference alterity 1–2, 11, 13n.16, 14, 17, 25, 67, 111, 131, 176, 193 appropriation of 5, 13, 21, 97, 107–108, 117, 140 becoming 14, 17, 54, 108, 139, 183, 194 divinity in 6, 14, 19n.20, 27, 142 equality 14n.16, 22, 104, 107, 138, 184 grace 9, 17, 161 knowledge and 142, 144, 153, 156 movement 16 mutuality 71, 131, 184 other 1–2, 5–6, 11, 13, 17, 70, 107, 128, 167, 183–184 Promethea 173–190 passim sameness and 2, 14n.16, 22–23, 52, 54, 64n.61, 67, 71, 79, 86, 100, 102, 107, 113, 133, 138n.110, 151, 183 sexual 5, 5n.4, 9–10, 14, 14n.16, 16n.17, 17–18, 18n.19, 28, 31, 40, 49, 62–65, 68, 75, 76n.70, 84n.75, 86, 86, 91–93, 96–97, 99–100, 105, 107, 107n.96, 108–109, 117–119, 125, 129, 131, 132–133, 134n.104, 135, 136n.107, 137–138, 155, 177, 188 subjectivity 17, 22, 84n.75, 153, 190 subordination of 23 theology of 64 see also agape; alterity; Cixous; Girard; Irigaray; Kristeva; life; love; Nygren; Plato; Wyschogrod disorder 25, 89, 119–121 divine 39n.37, 51, 56, 58n.56, 59, 59n.58, 66, 71, 77, 81–87, 91, 93–97, 102–104, 102n.90, 106, 110, 118–119, 121, 123–126, 134–137, 151, 159, 165, 169–171, 172n.119, 185, 192–194 alterity, radical 104 beauty 33, 145 beyond life 72 body, embodiment 27, 30, 71, 82, 121, 140 command theory 57n.52 eros 10, 35, 38, 50, 60, 171 erotic 25, 82 feminine 58n.57, 106, 113, 116, 118, 166 generosity 28, 33, 40, 48 goddess 58n.56 grace 10, 14, 134n.106, 142–143, 151, 153–154, 159, 162, 166, 192 human 7n.8, 26–27, 38, 39n.37, 51, 57n.63, 69, 76, 78, 80, 95, 126–127, 134, 137, 140, 142, 154, 157, 165, 172, 172n.119, 176, 184

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Index immanent 172 Judeo-Christian 85, 160 justice 82, 105 masculine 57, 85–86, 106, 110, 111n.98, 112, 144 other, other-regarding 5–6, 8–9, 11, 14, 16, 19, 27–28, 44, 63, 66, 162 power, will-to- 78, 109 reason 2–3 right-relation 77, 82 sex-specific 58 signifier, signification 1, 102, 146, 148, 172 subjectivity 20, 66, 79, 86–87, 94, 102, 116, 164–165, 169 symbolic imaginary 27, 92 vulgar 16, 50 women, woman 58–60, 65, 71, 83, 86 see also agape; becoming; Cixous; Cixous: innocence, second innocence; difference; gift; Irigaray; Kristeva; love; Plato; Promethea; time Dover, J. K. 34n.35 dualism 25, 27, 77, 80, 84, 105, 107, 176, 192, 194 economy, economies 82, 93, 99, 102–104, 104n.92, 109, 113, 113n.101 death 134 debt 5, 72, 113, 179–181 of desire 52 of exchange 18–19, 129 feminine, gift, love 15, 18, 19n.21, 29, 33, 37, 93, 106, 108, 113, 114–115, 117, 123, 125, 129–133, 137, 138n.110, 140, 165, 176, 185 gendered 5, 5n.5, 33, 118 of ideal love 46 of innocence, second innocence 18, 143–144 libidinal 92 masculine, possession, profit, desire 11, 18–19, 23, 37, 50–51, 69, 72, 113–115, 117, 119, 123, 128–129, 141, 143, 145, 149n.114, 151, 164, 183, 188 non-sacrificial economy of desire 108, 120 sacrificial, Eden 138, 186 of sameness 67, 86 écriture feminine 88n.78 elsewhere 18, 70, 90, 107, 121, 124–125, 168, 184, 191, 193 embodiment, embodied 8, 10–11, 27, 40n.40, 58n.57, 159 desire 25, 30–31, 37, 81 knowing 53

particular love 32, 36, 60, 90 sexuality, sexual difference 9, 10, 24, 51–52, 60, 62, 105, 108–109, 140 subjectivity 9, 16, 25, 36, 80–83, 111, 114, 116, 121, 123, 126–128, 138, 141, 144, 147, 164, 166, 169, 182–183 Enlightenment 3, 8, 10, 14n.16, 54, 59n.58, 63, 65, 73, 190, 193 entre deux/nous 11, 147 epistemology 3, 8, 10, 14n.16, 54, 59n.58, 63, 65, 73, 190, 193 equality 14, 14n.16, 40, 61–63, 66–67, 71–72, 76n.70, 79, 82, 86, 104, 107–108, 131, 138, 183–184 erast¯es 35 er¯omenos 35–36 eros vi, 8–11, 15, 16, 22, 25, 54, 61–62, 126–127 as acquisitive love 40–41, 43 Cupidian 24–25, 34, 41 divine 17, 35, 38, 39n.38, 50, 60, 171 as embodied 62 Heyward 70, 76, 80–83 Irigaray 50–51 Kristeva 90 Nygrenian 45–46, 46n.46, 47, 60 Platonic, Socrates 28, 30–31, 31n.30, 32, 33n.32, 34–35, 37, 39 sexuality and 61, 65, 70, 76, 80 vulgar 30, 34, 38, 82 excess 7n.8–9, 11, 13, 14, 34, 40n.40, 42, 43, 45, 46n.44, 62, 68, 69, 71, 74, 83, 89–90, 100–101, 105n.92, 112, 115–118, 125–127, 145–146, 168, 182, 185, 190, 194 Farley, Margaret 69–71 Feast of Roses 120 feminine 4, 4n.5 imaginary 105–106 and/or masculine 5, 5n.4, 19, 24, 35–37, 47, 68, 73, 92–93, 107n.94, 119, 125, 130, 139, 174, 182 patriarchal discourse and 16n.17, 23, 35, 52, 81 prophet 112 sacrifice, self-lessness 7, 7n.8, 8, 11, 12n.14, 15, 20, 54, 65, 108–110, 186 see also Cixous; Cixous: innocence, second innocence; desire; divine; economy; écriture feminine; er¯omenos; gift; jouissance; love: other-regarding; sameness; sexual difference; subjectivity

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Index feminist theology, theologians 5, 7, 7n.8, 8–11, 13, 15–16, 40, 40n.40, 46n.46, 47–48, 56, 58, 58n.54–56, 59, 59n.58, 60–77, 76n.69, 79, 83–90, 94, 96–97, 103, 106, 126, 139, 184–186, 194 see also Andolsen; Cixous; D’Arcy; Farley; Harrison; Heyward; Jantzen; Niebuhr; Plaskow; Saiving Fort, Bernadette 4n.4, 98, 102, 171n.118 Foucault, Michel 4, 34, 49, 64n.63 Fox, Matthew 46n.46 Freud, Sigmund 48–49, 54, 82, 103–104, 108–111, 114, 116, 135, 140n.111 Furies 93, 130 generosity, generous 7n.9, 11–16, 11n.12, 18–19, 23, 25, 27, 33, 37–38, 41, 44–47, 54–55, 61–62, 69, 71, 75, 83, 87, 89, 105n.92, 112n.99, 116, 126, 128, 130, 173, 173n.120, 179–182, 186, 188, 190, 194 graceful 27 spontaneous 61, 111, 172, 186, 189, 194 gift vi, 4–8, 11, 18, 23–24, 40, 40n.40, 42–46, 46n.44, 47, 56, 61, 72, 110, 113, 113n.100–101, 114–116, 118, 121, 127–128, 133, 135, 137, 140, 145n.112, 147, 162, 164, 166, 168–169, 171, 172, 174, 179–183, 185 gifting alterity 169 given 5, 182 teleology of the gift 23 see also alterity; difference Gilson, Anne Bathurst 61, 82 Girard, René 7n.7, 12–14, 12n.13–14, 43n.43 grace 4–5, 8, 10, 14, 17, 19, 20, 38, 44, 116, 122, 125, 132–137, 139–140, 142–145, 145n.112, 146–166, 149n.114, 171, 183, 185, 189, 191–193 receiving 69 see also innocence Grant, Colin 63, 65, 79n.71 Grosz, Elizabeth 87, 90, 91n.83, 107n.95, 107n.96

206

Halperin, David 28, 29n.28, 31n.30, 32n.31, 34n.33 Harrison, Beverly Wildung 69 Hegel, G. Fredrich 16, 49, 50, 89, 103–104, 106–107, 107n.96, 108, 108n.97, 151, 155, 159, 176, 178 hermeneutics of suspicion 59 Heyward, Carter 47, 62, 65, 76–83, 76n.69, 79n.71, 81n.72, 85, 95, 126, 184

immanence 40n.40, 77, 109, 149n.114, 164 see also transcendence innocence 12n.13, 18, 43n.43, 124, 132, 143–144, 136–137, 137n.108, 143–144, 155, 161 economy of 143 loss of 20, 144, 154–157, 161, 164 originary, virgin 139, 140, 143, 154, 163, 174 second 18, 20, 124, 133–134, 134n.104, 137–138, 140–141, 143, 151–152, 154, 161, 163–164, 181, 185, 189 see also Cixous; knowing; knowledge instantiation, ecstasy 83, 119, 127, 156, 158, 160–161, 172, 176, 192–194 intersubjectivity 2, 5, 6, 8, 12, 18, 36, 64, 69, 79, 81, 81n.72, 84n.75, 88, 89, 100, 104, 107n.96, 108, 111, 128, 131, 142, 171, 194 ethics of 13, 15, 54, 70, 97 space 115, 136, 157, 180, 189 Irigaray, Luce 2n.1, 22, 27, 34n.33, 37, 48–52, 51n.48, 52n.49, 53–55, 59, 62, 69, 71, 83, 84, 84n.74, 85–87, 87n.76–77, 88n.78, 89n.79, 91–94, 98n.86, 102, 110, 112, 136 Jantzen, Grace 84, 84n.74, 85, 87, 87n.77, 88–91, 96n.84 Jenson, Deborah 132 John of the Cross 125 jouissance 22, 90, 90n.81, 91, 109, 114, 149 Joy, Morny 83n.73, 84n.75 Kearney, Richard 2n.2 Kierkegaard, Soren 39n.38, 72–73, 102, 180 Kleist, Heinrich Von 19, 19n.22, 88n.78, 106, 117–118, 118n.102, 119–124, 131–132, 136, 141–149, 149n.114, 150–161, 163–164, 171, 193 knowing 17, 29, 48, 53, 109, 121, 133, 139, 143, 153–154, 157–158, 161, 182, 184–185, 187, 188, 194 knowledge 1, 5, 11, 14, 20, 24, 33, 50, 51, 54, 73, 76, 83, 88n.78, 93, 99–100, 124, 133, 137, 137n.109, 138–144, 148, 151–154, 156–160, 163–165, 172, 181–182, 185, 194 Kojèves, Alexander 107n.96 Kristeva, Julia 12n.14, 27, 48–49, 52–53, 53n.50–51, 54–55, 59, 62, 65, 83–84, 84n.74, 85–87, 87n.76–77, 88, 88n.78, 89, 89n.79–80, 90, 90n.81–82, 91,

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Index 91n.83, 92–94, 98n.86, 102, 140n.111, 159 Stabat Mater 87–91, 88n.78, 89n.79, 90n.82 Kvam, Kristen E. 135n.105 Lacan, Jacques 52, 87, 87n.77, 88, 88n.78, 89, 116, 128n.103, 140n.111, 173 Law of the Father 90, 119, 161 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 12 Lewis, C. S. 23, 23n.24 liberation theology 64 life affirmation 98, 138 beyond 72, 172, 193 birth 112, 190 body, the 26–27, 27n.26, 118, 193 difference 94, 101n.89, 133, 135 embodied subjectivity and 16, 147, 161, 193 generation of 57n.52, 109 Goddess of 110 grace and 133–134, 159–160 imaginary 15 living and 17n.18, 177 mother and 112–113, 115–116, 172 movement and 16, 50, 89, 133, 141, 144, 189, 193–194 opening 126–127, 130, 133 phenomenal 16 public 66–67 signifiers of 93 towards 92–94, 101n.89, 116, 127, 134, 161, 172, 174, 177, 180, 185–186 writing 99, 101–102 see also Bible: Eden; Cixous; death; divine; Edenic; Feast of Roses; generosity; gift; immanence; innocence; love; transcendence Lispector, Clarice 19n.22, 104, 132, 136, 141–144, 147, 154, 157–166, 193 logocentrism 16, 103, 106–107, 147 Lorde, Audre 61, 61n.59 love agapic 6, 7, 7n.8, 8–9, 11, 11n.12, 15, 18, 39, 39n.38–39, 40–43, 45, 46n.46, 61–69, 71, 73–75, 80, 87, 100, 109, 111, 111n.98, 113, 123, 131, 137, 141–143, 150, 173, 173n.120, 174, 182, 186, 188–189, 194 compassionate, empathetic 46, 80 divine 10–11, 15–17, 19n.20, 20–22, 25, 28, 28n.27, 29–37, 40, 42, 44, 45, 48, 56, 63, 65–66, 69, 76, 78, 82–83, 87, 109, 111, 113, 116, 121, 123, 126, 131, 133, 148, 159, 171, 180, 183, 189, 194

erotic 25, 28, 33, 35–36, 63, 75, 165, 184 generous 18, 23, 25, 28, 30, 33, 38–40, 55, 62, 87, 173n.120, 186, 188 life-affirming 98 masculine 35–37 maternal, mother 54, 65, 74, 75n.68 mutual 15, 47, 57n.52, 63, 66, 69–70, 72, 81, 83, 122, 184 other-regarding 9, 12, 14–16, 18–19, 23, 27, 39–40, 44–45, 47, 55, 60, 62–63, 72–73, 83, 93–94, 110, 115–116, 131, 162, 180, 185–186 pure 6, 67, 72, 116, 178, 183 reciprocal 22, 183–184 redemptive 10, 46n.46, 77, 160 sacrificial, non- 7n.7, 11, 14, 21, 30, 40, 44, 67, 80, 123, 131 self 8n.11, 44–45, 46n.46, 55, 66, 68, 71, 86–87, 130 selfless love 6, 8, 11, 17, 46n.46, 63 universal and particular 6, 12, 24–25, 29, 32, 37, 39n.38, 42, 44–45, 47, 50, 58, 65, 72, 74–76, 80, 89n.79, 107–108, 113, 120–123, 137n.109, 142, 147, 165n.115, 171, 180, 182, 188, 189 vulgar 16, 24, 30, 34, 35, 38, 50, 60, 82 see also Cixous; divine; economy; eros; desire; maternal; philia lover and beloved 22, 52, 54, 74, 106–107, 167, 172, 176, 184 masculine 13, 57, 68, 71–72, 107 being 114 divine 9, 85, 110, 112, 106, 110–112, 144, 152 imaginary 5, 55–56, 109–110, 124 knowledge 143 logic, reasoning 52–54, 84, 145, 166, 174 logos, symbolic 47, 55, 87n.77, 88, 88n.78, 89–93, 103, 110–111, 146n.113 mastery, war 120–122 subjectivity 7–10, 15–23, 27, 34–37, 47, 50, 78, 110, 113, 115, 117, 119, 120, 122, 124, 126, 128, 128n.103, 139, 144, 152, 161, 164–166, 169, 172, 179, 182, 184–186, 188, 190 see also divine: power, will-to-, economy, erast¯es; love; power maternal body 88, 109–111 bond 54 /child relations 128 divine 109–110

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Index as metaphor, signification 59, 65, 75, 87, 87n.77, 88–89, 104, 112, 112n.99, 113, 116, 118, 132, 175, 176, 178, 181 model 54 relation to difference 186 relation to life 112, 135 semiotic, chora 88, 90–91, 93 see also love; jouissance Medusa 18n.19, 88n.78, 104, 105 see also Cixous Mnouchkine, Ariane 99, 99n.87 mutuality, mutual divinity, the sacred 15, 123 instantiation of 83, 119, 160–161, 172, 176 love 15, 47, 62, 64, 64n.61, 65–70, 70n.65, 71, 76n.69, 80–81, 123, 131, 161, 180, 183–185, 188, 194 vulnerability 70, 71, 185 wounding 119 see also agape Narcissus 155 Niebuhr, Reinhold 7, 7n.8, 7n.10, 8, 39n.39, 46n.45, 47, 60, 62, 62n.60, 64n.62, 66–68 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 3, 11, 25–26, 45, 48, 49, 104, 111, 117, 178 Nussbaum, Martha 24, 29, 29n.28, 31, 31n.30, 33–37 Nygren, Anders 7, 7n.7, 8, 39, 39n.37–39, 40–48, 43n.43, 46n.45–46, 55, 60, 62n.60, 63, 64n.61, 66, 68, 69, 72, 87, 105n.92, 106, 106n.93, 109, 111n.98, 141, 150, 171–173, 194 O’Grady, Kathleen 83n.73, 91, 95, 169 ontology 10, 59, 59n.58 Osborne, Catherine 38n.35 other see alterity, difference, self

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paradise 153–154, 156, 160, 163, 167, 172, 174, 183, 186–189, 193 paternal authority 112 patriarchy 19n.20, 63, 77, 85, 89, 104, 106–110, 135n.105, 171, 172n.119 Penrod, Lynn 98, 98n.86, 99n.88, 100 Penthesileia 106, 109, 117–125, 131, 137, 141, 165n.115, 166, 169, 175–177, 187, 189 perfection 31, 38, 44, 85, 110, 124–125 phallocentrism 107–109, 147, 172n.119 philia 28, 38, 47, 64n.61, 71, 81 Plaskow, Judith 62, 62n.60, 68

Plato see Symposium, the pleasure 22, 27, 63, 90n.81, 105, 114, 127, 138n.110, 155, 188 poetico-philosophy 4, 4n.4, 48, 93, 102, 146n.113, 193 power 1, 7n.8, 13, 15, 20, 27, 49, 58n.56, 61n.59, 77, 81–82, 109–110, 111n.98, 114, 119, 124, 127–130, 138–139, 152, 160, 172n.119, 176–177, 184, 194 creative 57n.52 discourses of 50, 82, 108, 176 eros and 82–83 hierarchical 80 relations 64, 64n.63, 65, 77–78, 92 technologies of 84 see also Cixous Poxon, Judith L. 83n.73 procreation 51–52, 121 Promethea 20, 93, 99, 101, 104–105, 108, 116, 119, 126, 157, 159, 162–163, 165–173, 165n.115, 172n.119, 177–192 psychoanalysis 4n.4, 15, 48, 52–53, 53n.51, 87, 87n.76–77, 101, 109, 128n.103, 140n.111 Purvis, Sally 62, 65, 72–76, 83, 175, 180 quotidian 2, 24, 27, 46, 60, 73, 104n.92, 154, 172 reciprocity 47, 71–72, 180, 183–184 Reineke, Martha J. 12n.14 relationality 65, 73 sacred 2, 4–5, 12n.13, 15, 58–60, 58n.56–57, 70, 82–84, 90, 96, 110–111, 120, 122, 125, 145–147, 146n.113, 166, 193 sacrifice, sacrificial 6, 7, 14, 17, 18n.19, 21, 25–26, 34, 40, 43, 43n.43, 44–45, 47, 55, 61, 62n.60, 63–71, 74, 83, 87n.76, 88, 110, 125, 128–131, 141, 143, 152, 166, 171, 179, 180, 189–190, 194 love 7n.7, 21, 30, 40, 44, 67, 80, 123, 131 self- 7, 9, 7n.8, 12, 12n.14, 16–17, 21, 40, 47, 63n.60, 63, 71, 83, 87, 141, 143, 152, 171, 179, 189–190, 194 Saiving, Valerie 62, 68, 7n.8, 8–9, 15 sameness 14n.16, 22–23, 52, 54, 64n.61, 66–67, 71, 79, 86, 100, 102, 107, 113, 133, 138n.110, 151, 183 see also difference Saussure, Ferdinand de 48, 88n.78 Schüssler Fiorenza, Elizabeth 58n.56

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Index self 27, 29, 31, 38, 39n.38, 45–46, 63, 70–71, 74 absence of 6, 62n.60, 68, 142, 173 authentic 10, 63 awareness, knowledge of 139, 155–162, 164, 166, 167–194 embodied 37, 114–117, 126 generosity of 71 identity 48, 117, 168 interest 47, 63, 65–66, 68, 72, 80, 82–84, 125, 173, 186 sufficiency 32–33, 35–36 see also binary, binaries; love; sacrifice; surrender Sellers, Susan 98n.86, 100, 170, 191n.123 sexual difference 5, 5n.5, 9–10, 14, 14n.16, 16n.17, 17–18, 18n.19, 28, 31, 40, 49–50, 52–54, 58, 63, 65, 68, 75, 76n.70, 84n.75, 86, 91–93, 96–97, 99–100, 105, 107–109, 107n.96, 113, 118–119, 125, 129–138, 136n.107, 155, 177, 188 see also difference Shakespeare, William 19, 88n.78, 106, 117, 118n.102, 124, 129–131 Shiach, Morag 108, 98n.86 signification 26, 48, 89, 93, 146, 164, 168, 184 agapic 15, 41, 141, 173, 186 of the body 27n.26 divine 5–6, 8, 102, 148 god 95 of Jesus 12n.13, 26 journey 102 maternal 87, 112 poetic 173 religious 1, 12, 14, 95–96, 108, 118 theological, and religious 136 see also Bible: Eden, Creation; economy; grace; jouissance; life; love; maternal: semiotic, sacred; symbolic Sihanouk 93, 99 Socrates 24, 24n.25, 26–27, 31–37, 51, 56 soul vi, 13, 20, 24–25, 29, 31–34, 36, 38, 43, 51–52, 57n.52, 82, 91, 102, 105, 110, 135, 148, 152–153, 159, 170, 174–175, 185, 188, 192 spirit 1, 3, 8–9, 11, 25–26, 27n.26, 32, 41, 45, 47, 51–52, 56, 60, 64n.63, 66, 73, 77–78, 80–83, 90, 109–111, 126, 130, 146, 149, 159 spontaneity, spontaneous 42, 44–45, 57n.52, 61, 71, 74, 111, 172–173, 186, 189, 194

stigmata 7n.9, 26, 101n.89, 137n.108 subject alterity 17, 70, 122, 131, 169 being/becoming 9–10, 86, 108, 110, 139–143, 154, 178, 183 beloved 170–171 Cixous 179, 182, 191 dispersed, affirmative 103, 115, 178 Eve 139, 151 feminine 9, 19–21, 59, 115, 123, 128, 147, 165, 185 grace and innocence 19, 132, 144, 150, 152–153, 156, 161, 164, 194 masculine 16, 103, 108, 110, 113, 115, 121, 144, 164, 188, 190 /object 10, 15, 22, 65, 83, 96, 113, 115, 121, 123, 158–159, 164, 167, 180, 183, 184 paradise 172 unified 2, 115, 164, 169, 178 subjectivity, subjectivities 5–8, 8n.11, 10–11, 13, 14n.16, 15, 18–19, 30, 45–49, 54, 56, 80–81, 87n.76, 92, 94, 101, 115, 143–144, 148, 153, 154, 169, 181 antagonistic 79, 97, 132, 154 becoming and 9, 85–87, 185 being and 9, 85, 141, 159, 185 discourses of 1, 63, 103, 190 expansion of 115 feminine 9, 15–17, 18, 20–23, 27, 57–58, 65, 68, 70, 78–81, 81n.72, 83–84, 84n.75, 88–89, 91, 94, 96–99, 102–105, 112–117, 126–127, 128n.103, 130, 134, 134n.104, 137–144, 161–162, 164–169, 171–173, 180, 184–185, 191, 193–194 grace 133, 144, 147–148, 150, 152–154, 163–164, 193 masculine 17–18, 78, 128, 143–144, 165, 184, 186 paradise of 140 Promethea 169, 171–173, 177, 179–180, 184, 190, 192 see also intersubjectivity Sulieman, Susan Rubin 98 surrender Achilles and Penthesileia 119, 121–123 Alcibiades, Eleusinian mysteries 34, 37 Antony and Cleopatra 128, 130 Eve 161 to God 39n.38, 44–45 Jesus 12, 44 knowledge 161 to the other 54, 128

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Index Promethea 20, 176, 179–180, 187, 191 self- and Cixous 20, 69, 70, 123, 153, 179–180, 187, 191 simultaneous 123 subjectivity 161, 180 symbolic 26, 27, 31, 52, 56, 85, 86, 87n.77, 88, 143, 152, 155, 159, 163, 188 divinity and 86, 97, 140 god, goddess 110 imaginary or 27, 174 knowledge 140 Lacan 140n.111 male and female/male and not-male 134 Mary 56, 57, 57n.52, 58, 88, 90n.82 masculine 88–91, 110 mythico- 141 non- 139, 140, 163 order 87 power 13, 110 pre-symbolic Eden 124, 173 religious 91 semiotic and 88–91, 90n.81 web 89 Symposium, the 16, 23, 24n.25, 25, 27–29, 30n.29, 32, 32n.31, 33–34, 34n.33, 35, 50–51, 51n.48, 106, 106n.93, 121, 175 Agathon 32 Alcibiades 24, 33–37 Diotima 24n.25, 29, 31, 32n.31, 33n.32, 32–34, 36–37, 50–52, 56–57, 121, 175 Pausanius 30 Phaedrus 25–26, 28, 30, 35 Plato, platonic 16, 24n.25, 22–30, 29n.28, 32–33, 33n.32, 36–39, 50–51, 51n.48, 52, 56, 60, 82, 106, 106n.93, 121, 127, 145, 155, 171

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Tancredi and Clorinda 140 Tasso 140 Taylor, Mark C. 2n.2 Teresa of Avila 118, 125 Tertillian 81 time 13, 20, 27, 56, 73, 127, 131, 142, 147, 156, 160, 172, 179, 191–192, 194 agapic love 73–74, 95, 123 space 27, 56, 59n.58 transcendence 25, 77–78, 90–91, 109–110, 149n.114 see also immanence Trible, Phyllis 135n.105 Trinity 49, 71 doctrine of 69, 90 Giver, the Given and the Giving 40n.40 Immaculate Conception, the Assumption, the Virgin Birth 90 truth 1, 4, 24, 26, 29, 36, 39, 47, 48, 50, 57, 58n.55, 78, 96, 107, 111–112, 138n.110, 146, 191–192 Vacek, Edward Collins 57n.53 Vlastos, Gregory 29, 29n.28 vulnerability 70–71, 185 see also mutuality Ward, Graham 136, 136n.107 Webb, Stephen H. 40n.40, 43, 46n.44 Weir, Alison 10, 17 Western metaphysics 3, 12, 15, 22, 76, 84, 87n.76, 92 will-to-truth 29, 47, 57, 192 Wilson, Emma 177, 181n.122 Word of God 57, 110 Wyschogrod, Edith 13, 13n.15, 14 Young, Serenity 58n.54