Abstract
Irigaray’s engagement with Aristotelian physics provides a specific diagnosis of women’s ontological and ethical situation under Western metaphysics: Women provide place and containership to men, but have no “place of their own,” rendering them uncontained and abyssal. She calls for a reconfiguration of this topological imaginary as a precondition for an ethics of sexual difference. This paper returns to Aristotelian cosmological texts to further investigate the topologies of sexual difference suggested there. In an analysis both psychoanalytic and phenomenological, the paper rigorously traces a teleological and oedipal narrative implicit in the structure of the Aristotelian cosmos, in which desire for the mother is superseded by love for the father. Further, the paper argues that this narrative is complicated by certain other elements in the Aristotelian text—aporias involving the notion of boundary and the relationship between space and time, the fallenness of the feminine, and the ineliminably aleatory qualities of matter. The paper concludes that such elements may provide material for disrupting this teleology of gender, opening onto not merely an ethics of sexual difference, but providing space and place for a proliferation of non-normative, queer, transgender and intersex modes of sexed and gendered subjectivity.
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Notes
Irigaray (1993, p. 12).
The paper also responds to Elizabeth Grosz’s call for feminist theory to “explore non-Euclidean and non-Kantian notions of space …. [and] different ‘pre-oedipal’ or infantile non-perspectival spaces [that] may provide the basis for alternatives to those developed in dominant representations of corporeality” (1987, p. 11).
Casey (1997, p. 53). He also says here, “A complete consideration of place will have to take both matters into account: how place is “in itself” and how it is relative to other things.”
Irigaray (1993, p. 39).
Ibid., p. 9. Irigaray's invocation of the chiasmus refers to Merleau-Ponty's treatment of that figure in his essay “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” (Merleau-Ponty 1973). Another essay in Irigaray (1993) entitled “The Invisible of the Flesh,” also subjects Merleau-Ponty's privileging of vision over the tactile to a thoroughgoing critique.
Irigaray (1993, p. 54).
Ibid., p. 54. We should also remember that according to Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium it is love between men that is judged the highest and best, because it is driven by “boldness, manliness, and masculinity, feeling affection for what is like to themselves.” (1993, 192a).
The language of “struggle unto death” is not used idly here. Rubin (1975) has brilliantly demonstrated the socio-political dimensions of the Oedipus complex in its relationship to structures of kinship and sexual difference. Furthermore, although I am unable to develop this here, it is perhaps one of Freud's most significant interventions into the history of Western philosophy that he makes possible a rendering of the Hegelian struggle unto death for pure prestige, and hence for subjectivity itself, in terms that disclose a hidden drama of sexual difference therein—the lord and bondsman are refigured as father and son, and the mother/woman appear as mediating objects of exchange. This drama is not that of Hegel's Antigone, in which the feminine survives only as irony in the life of the community and the masculine law of the polis supersedes all in ethical life (1977, pp. 266–289), but that of Oedipus, in which sexual difference itself is disclosed as fundamental to the reproduction of relations between men, which are sustained by and made possible by the mediation of the intergenerational exchange of women as objects.
Silverman (1992, pp. 192–194) emphasizes that according to Freud's account in The Ego and the Id, for both boys and girls the Oedipus complex can be both “positive” and “negative”—little boys can identify with the mother and take the father for an object, and little girls can also “go both ways.” Freud attributes this to the fundamental bisexuality of all individuals, and this certainly has value insofar as it gives a psychoanalytic account of the possibility of non-normative gender and sexuality; but the process—involving a primary splitting of desire and identification along sexed lines—nonetheless results in a quelling of bisexuality in the name of a fixed homo- or hetero- sexuality, and in early 20th century fashion directly indexes sexual orientation to gender identification. This account would also seem to imply that men are subject to exchange equally with women, which certainly flies in the face of the facts of the matter under patriarchy.
duBois (1988, p. 30). Other than duBois and Irigaray, authors who have put psychoanalytic theory to work to illuminate ancient and classical texts include Jean-Pierre Vernant and Nicole Loraux, though these latter attempt to describe broader formations across multiple genres and disciplines, including literature, anthropology, and history as well as philosophy, that would characterize and diagnose something like “the Greek mind.” The present study is by contrast limited to the philosophical and scientific writings of Aristotle.
Aristotle (1935, 1072b4).
Freud (1960, p. 22).
Silverman (1992, p. 194).
This role-reversal finds a certain prefigurement in Plato’s Symposium. Toward the end of the dialogue, Alcibiades is describing his fruitless attempts to seduce Socrates. Socrates remains resistant and impassive in the face of Alcibiades’ advances, and this resistance combined with Socrates’ inner beauty so frustrates Alcibiades that he claims, “[W]hile deceiving [young men] into thinking of him as the lover, [Socrates] brings it about that he is the beloved rather than the lover” (222b).
It is important to note that while the Aristotelian prime mover is a patriarchal divinity, it is not a demiurge or creator. “Father” in this sense functions metaphorically rather than literally.
Irigaray (1993, p. 35).
Ibid., p. 12.
Aristotle (1929/1969, 211a1–6). Unless otherwise noted, the translation is Apostle’s.
Ibid., 212a20–1.
Ibid., 212a30.
Casey (1997, p. 58). Casey further develops the notion of a double limit in the Aristotelian understanding of place, and argues (p. 63) for a distinction between a boundary, horos, which he says belongs to the place or container, and limit, peras belonging to the contained. The force of this distinction is somewhat vitiated by Aristotle's use of peras to describe the boundary of place in his definition.
Aristotle (1929/1969, 212b9–11).
Ibid., 212a19; Aristotle (1934, 251b28–29).
Derrida (1982, p. 56). The passage discussed by Derrida is Physics 4, 10 218a on the aporiai or difficulties presented by the concept of time.
Ibid., p. 56.
Green (1992) demonstrates the association of the feminine with downward motion across many different texts, including the distinction between ruler and ruled in the Politics. We should briefly also note that contrary to this reading of sumptoma, Aristotle in the Physics explicitly disavows the identification of downward motion with chance: “The up-direction is not any chance direction but where fire or a light object travels, and likewise the down-direction is not any chance direction but where heavy or earth bodies are carried” (1969, 208b20). In De Generatione et Corruptione, however, it is clear that up and down do not carry a simple equal-and-opposite valence, but that up is more noble than down. In a discussion of the nature of the simple bodies or elements he says, for example, that “fire alone—and to a greater extent than the rest—is of the nature of 'form' (tou eidous), because it naturally tends to be borne towards the limit” (Aristotle 1955, 335a18–20). There is a hierarchy of value here along the vertical axis, and downwardness is clearly the inferior direction.
Casey (1997, p. 68).
Aristotle (1929/1969, 215a2–3).
These are discussed as supplementary causes in Physics 2. Bianchi (2006a) gives an extended analysis of chance and spontaneity as feminine symptoms.
Aristotle (1934/1969, 255b14–24).
Aristotle (1942, 767b3–15).
This depiction of such feminine, material motions is reminiscent of, though not equivalent to, Julia Kristeva’s heterodox appropriation of Plato’s notion of chora as a presymbolic maternal dimension of language, that of “rupture and articulation (rhythm), [which] precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality” (1984, p. 26). For a more strictly Platonic account of chora and its wandering feminine motions, see Bianchi (2006b).
See Young (2005) for a key instance of phenomenological work which thinks through sexual difference and embodiment along these lines.
Casey (1997, p. 325).
As Salamon (2004) suggests in the context of a psychoanalytic and phenomenological account of transgenderedness: “[A]rguably psychoanalytic theory’s most important insight about the relation of the subject to his or her body… is that bodily assumption, and hence subject formation itself, is a constant and complex oscillation between narcissistic investment in one’s own flesh and the ‘necessary self-division and self-estrangement’ (to borrow a phrase from Butler) that is the very means by which our bodies are articulated” (p. 119).
Butler (1990, 1993, and 2004) and Grosz (1994)’s stress on the proliferative capacities of both sex and gender is particularly relevant here (Butler emphasizing the performative dimensions of such proliferation and Grosz the corporeal). In a more directly biological register, Fausto-Sterling (2000) presents extensive and exemplary documentation of the many vagaries of becoming sexed, also taking into account the psychical, social, and political phenomena involved in this complex and dynamic process, and arguing for the acknowledgment of an entire spectrum of possible and livable positions beyond the duality of “man” and “woman.”
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Acknowledgments
A version of this essay was presented at the Irigaray Circle, Stony Brook Manhattan, New York, September 2006, and was vastly enriched by the feedback received there. I also thank Katherine Stephenson and an anonymous reviewer for Continental Philosophy Review for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts.
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Bianchi, E. Sexual topologies in the Aristotelian cosmos: revisiting Irigaray’s physics of sexual difference. Cont Philos Rev 43, 373–389 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-010-9149-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-010-9149-2