Nature, Obligation, and Transcendence: Reading Luce Irigaray with Mary Graham

This paper addresses the relation between Luce Irigaray’s work and politics by asking what it means to read her work locally, in place. The philosophical work of Indigenous scholar, Mary Graham, on the law of obligation, serves to ground such a local reading presenting, simultaneously, a case for a uniquely Australian philosophy. By way of suggesting possible connections between the work of Irigaray and Graham, the paper places Graham’s work on obligation alongside Irigaray’s work on the importance of a symbolic re-distribution of value suggested in her philosophy of horizontal transcendence. Such a reading encourages us to consider what it means to engage work, such as Irigaray’s, in a here and now that differs from the European context of her writing.


Introduction
The philosophical work of the Indigenous scholar, Mary Graham, on the law of obligation, serves as a compelling starting point to think through our obligations to recognize the self as nature, enabling us to clarify our obligations to land and country, to others. Graham is I write this as an immigrant settler woman in Australia, born and raised on the lands of the Yuin Nation. This work of research and thinking has been undertaken on Turrbal and Yaegera country. I acknowledge the peoples and traditional custodians of these lands. I thank Mary Graham, Simone Thornton, and Gilbert Burgh (fellow members of the Australian Philosophy Research Group, the APRG) for the past two years of intensive thought and shared and collaborative research into questions of what an Australian philosophy might be, and what it might do. I especially thank Mary Graham for the generosity of spirit and intellect that she has modelled for us (and continues to model for us) during this philosophical journey. The work in this paper emerges from deeply collaborative research, where voices are mingled and interwoven, rather than strictly discreet. a Kombumerri person through her father's heritage, and affiliated with the Wakka Wakka through her mother's people, and her work in this area provides a helpful bridge to consider and extend work in the European tradition that touches upon our ethical obligations. More specifically, Graham's work provides the grounds for what I will refer to here as an edifying conversation between her ideas and those of Luce Irigaray. By way of suggesting possible connections between the two, my intention is to place Graham's work on obligation alongside Irigaray's work on the importance of a symbolic re-distribution of value suggested in her philosophy of horizontal transcendence. What emerges from this coupling is an awareness that if we are to engage in any meaningful way with Irigaray's work, we must situate it, and we have an obligation literally to place it, to think it in terms of our specific place and locality. To read it locally. Graham's work on land and our obligations in her place-responsive ethics allows us to do this. Indeed, it obliges us to do so. And in so doing, it forces us (each and every one) to consider what it means to engage work, such as Irigaray's, in a here and now that differs from the European context of her writing.
To place Irigaray and Graham in conversation, I suggest, is to demonstrate why we need an Australian philosophy, and how we might begin to go about building a methodology to support such a philosophy. A specifically Australian philosophy would help us to consider our commitments and responsibilities to place, country, and people, including descendants. It would provide a place-based, grounded ethic that would help us to acknowledge our fundamental obligations to land as the basis of our fundamental obligations to others. In short, an Australian philosophy acknowledging the law of obligation would offer an alternative to current 'survivalist' systems built on fear of change, and the insecurity resulting from an instrumental view of nature as a hostile resource to be tamed. 1 An Australian philosophy would start by refusing the historical legacy of a survivalist ethic in order to ask 'what if we were to take our obligations to land and country, to others, as the grounding question of philosophy?' 2, 3 Of course, such a philosophy would not be an immediate achievement but, rather, an ongoing process, one oriented toward social stability and flourishing in and through place. 1 Fashioning a specifically Australian philosophy provides us with the opportunity to counter the survivalist ethic by developing a unique philosophical approach, one that we could position as the basis or foundation of newly thought-through social/political systems-practical systems based on ethical considerations of obligation, relation, and care. 2 In conversation, Graham suggests that the subjunctive mood of questions such as 'what if?' or 'perhaps this, perhaps that' can be seen as an Indigenous mode of metaphysical questioning, one summoning the force of the imaginary. To this, Gilbert Burgh responds that in Western discourse 'what if?' is exchanged by 'if this, then that', a series of conditionals, a logic that moves away from metaphysics. The metaphysical question 'what if?' opens up and invites conversation, sparking imaginative and creative response. In his work on the subjunctive mood, Richard Sennett points out that it opens 'a space for experiment', offering 'an invitation to others to join in'. In effect, it opens 'an indeterminant mutual space, the space in which strangers dwell with one another.' The subjunctive mood 'is most at home in the dialogical domain, that world of talk which makes an open social space, where discussion can take an unforeseen direction' (Sennett, 2012: 22-23). 3 The colonial historian, Kiera Lindsey, adopts 'what if?' as an epic form to tell the history of Australian colonization. She suggests that '"what if" scenarios have more than just entertainment value… They allow us space to argue and debate, to imagine ways of thinking and being, to embrace the fact that an absence of certainty about our foundation moment, so unlike what we see in other settler societies like the United States, is an asset that allows us room to grow and adapt and question.' (Lindsey, 2021. https:// www. sbs. com. au/ topics/ voices/ cultu re/ artic le/ 2020/ 01/ 22/ what-if-austr alia-had-not-been-colon ised-briti sh? fbclid= IwAR2 q8Px0 C8JvT 0UoWM UWCrQ HsVwc pTk4g ecXo-kYK1I Fn85V-wKOhV Vu6Nk [Accessed: 30.11.2021]).

Edifying Conversations
Let me turn now to a brief discussion of what I mean by an edifying conversation, because this is, I think, fundamental to what an Australian philosophy might be. Edifying conversations speak not only to how we work, how we do philosophy, butimportantly-to why we work, why we do philosophy, what it means to do philosophy. The term edification comes to us from the Latin noun 'aedis/aedes', meaning 'house' or 'temple', and this provides the root for 'aedificare', the verb 'to erect a house' (to build, establish, take form, grow). By the Late Latin period, this meaning undergoes transformation to gain the figurative sense of instructing or improving (or strengthening) spiritually. After this, the word passes through Anglo-French, until the Shorter Oxford later defines edification as the aim to instruct and improve, especially in mental, moral, and religious knowledge: to uplift, as well as to enlighten and to inform.
From this brief etymology, I gather together the various meanings of the term over time and place to arrive at a local use of the term. Edification is the process of 'suggesting' and encouraging spiritually, or ethically. Edifying conversations, therefore, are encounters that work to promote engagement and exploration, providing opportunities for a responsive and relational ethics. 4 This differs from critique, though it by no means stands in for or displaces it. Critique has its value, but edification provides alternative or additional grounds and starting points for conversation, grounds that are sometimes necessary. 5 An Australian philosophy can (and should, I think) begin in edification-to suggest and encourage ethically-to offer alternative models for public life, for public conversations. We need to go beyond simple negation in order to edify. Edification here might encompass imagination, civility, good manners, and attentive listening. 6 It would also require an appropriate architecture or social space-places encouraging us to sit, talk, and listen, a kind of shared public space or agora which we are in danger of losing in the privatised world of neoliberal capitalism. More significantly (and closer to home), edifying conversations might provide links with Indigenous practices, such as yarning-practices designed to build respectful relationships. In this sense Graham's work on aesthetic distance is helpful. Aesthetic distance, she explains, speaks to the ethical interval necessary to provide a relational space for the existence of multiple views and perspectives, for difference. It is the imaginative space that allows us to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously, enabling us to meander around an issue without seeking to confront a conflict directly, or to conclude an issue prematurely.
Edifying conversations are, then, practical enactments of justice or ethics; encounters or conversations permitting us to listen to and respond to one another. They are, in effect, ethical performances. And this is what I am hoping to establish between the work of Graham and Irigaray. Of course, this means thinking of conversation and encounter in different ways, i.e. in this case as textual rather than immediate. But this is to some extent something Irigaray herself has undertaken in her important early encounters in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984/93). As I have mentioned, my hope is to explore Graham's work on the law of obligation as a way of opening an edifying conversation with Irigaray's work on the importance of a symbolic re-distribution of value and her philosophy of horizontal transcendence.

Mary Graham: The Law of Obligation
For Graham, the law of obligation begins as an obligation to recognize and appreciate the self as nature. In a complex way, this binds us ethically with both the land and with others, grounding being in a relational mode. The obligation referred to here is a law, but one that arguably occupies a different register from how we tend to understand the term in Western culture/s. While law can suggest authority, limit, regulation, control, or prohibition, Graham understands law here in non-hierarchical terms of respect, regard, guidance, and advice. Importantly, what is absent from the law of obligation is any 'hierarchical and disabling schema '. 7 In this sense, the law of obligation relates more directly to our mutual responsibilities and obligations in and through cultural knowledge and community practices, than to laws delivered by the authority vested in either a State or a God. Such obligations take the place of rights, orienting the community toward respect for the self as nature by focussing on our relational bonds with land. This custodial ethic 'is achieved through repetitive action, such that gradually, over time, the ethic becomes the "norm."' 8 From this perspective, it makes no sense to conjure the hostile quality of land typical of a survivalist or colonial worldview. On the contrary, obligations to land are obligations to care for land, obligations capable of resolving or dissolving any neurotic fear or guilt 7 Hélène Cixous's work on law is helpful here. She urges us to "resist the ready-made in a world with its finished laws ordered by a system of moral values, hierarchized into good and bad" (Cixous, 1991, 25): "the law depends on our investment" and, given this, "one can have recourse to another logic altogether" (25). 8 Graham (2008: 2). Graham goes on to identify ways for achieving this custodial ethic via strategies to build a collective spiritual identity. projected onto a seemingly hostile terrain. 9 In terms of governance, this custodial ethic lays out a responsibility to simultaneously acknowledge the self as nature and the self (in community) as custodian of that nature.
Land is, for Graham, literally the ground of any philosophy or ethics. 10 She argues that ourselves are patterned or embedded into the land, just as the land is patterned or embedded into us. 'Ethics is not a choice, but is part of being human. One's humanness and thus ethical conduct is continually affirmed and managed through relations with Country, kin, and ancestor figures.' 11 Unlike colonial peoples, Indigenous people acknowledge that they have not simply 'landed' on our shores. For Graham, we are both embedded and embodied in and through our grounding in land. What is it, she asks, to be a conscious being in such a place? To be conscious is, in part, to be responsive to and responsible for land-to be obligated. Obligations are communal, shared, bringing together different peoples and different groups. Our obligations to land are thus a living thing that binds us with others in a complex network of relations. Practical modes of our responsibility or obligations to land teach us ethical modes of being. 12 Philosophy starts with place, and from this thought emerges. We learn by being obliged, not first by knowing. Being responsible or obligated is literally something we do. In this sense, there are arguably links between Graham's work on obligation and Emmanuel Levinas's work on responsibility and ethics as first philosophy. Just as ethics is prior to ontology, so too is obligation prior to rights. 9 Hostility projected toward land or country is fundamental to the 'survivalist' ethic of the settler-colonist experience in Australia. In a very real sense, the history of colonial settlement demonstrates what Matthew Lamb in conversation has described as a process of un-settling; i.e., this history is one where colonial settlers remain deeply unsettled, precisely because the inherited and imported ways of thinking and patterns of living we have deployed here simply do not fit this land, or this place. At the same time, this unsettled occupation has unsettled Aboriginal cultures and their traditional practices in dispossessing them from their land. In acknowledging the law of obligation, it is this state of 'double-unsettlement' that we need to address. In effect, a relation of obligation brings with it the opportunity to begin, for the first time, a process of real settling-a relational, obliged and shared process of living in this place. Lamb's ideas on settling and unsettling patterns find an echo in Joanne Faulkner's work on the 'miscarriage' of settler-colonial practices (Faulkner, 2019). In a different vein, Aileen Moreton-Robinson uncovers the unsettling of white Australia in and through Indigenous senses of belonging (Moreton-Robinson, 2020). She draws our attention to the guilt and discomfort-the unsettling-of non-Indigenous 'settlers' that is (largely unconsciously) projected toward the land in survivalist or hostile ways. In a similar vein, Mary Graham and Morgan Brigg point to the 'ill-at-ease, imbalanced, and incomplete' nature of the current settler polity (Brigg & Graham, 2020d). 10 'Perhaps the most succinct anthropological definition of Country is "land already related to people." Land becomes related to people through sacralising processes that are original and ongoing' (Brigg & Graham, 2020e). 'The land is a sacred entity, not property or real estate…The land, and how we treat it, is what determines our human-ness' (Graham, 2008: 1). 11 Brigg and Graham (2020b) For Graham, 'the land is the law', the source of all our ethical obligations. 13 Our responsibilities and obligations are custodial and to the land, and yet simultaneously to the collective, the group, the community. Here obligation operates as a kind of first principle opening and forming us in an ethical mode. To be conscious (to be a subject) in such a world is, then, to be obliged, to be and act responsibly, ethically. This obligation pre-dates 'me', forms 'me', brings 'me' into being, and simultaneously into belonging. Obligation grounds me, provides me a place to dwell. It provides, as well, strategic, practical, and ongoing ways of being, ones ensuring long-term and stable ethical relations with person and place. Obligation teaches me how to be in the world, and what relations are for. It teaches me that I am obliged, and that therefore I am-grounded, responsible, present. 14 Obligation grounds or motivates my reflective nature, and this enables me to 'achieve self-regulation through attention to what is appropriate and, crucially, proportional in the circumstances and relations in which one is embedded.' 15 Reflection is a form of 'autonomous regard' 16 or my attentive way of seeing, beholding, regarding, valuing, over and against the unreflective mode of the survivalist ethic-i.e. the mode of the discreet individual that threatens to dissolve an ethical me in an immature sense of 'I fear', 'I want', or 'I need'. As such, obligation teaches me to share the world relationally, ethically, rather than perhaps politically (or only politically). It partakes in a relationalist ethos, an 'abiding attentiveness and responsibility to the patterns, contingencies, and ethical obligations that arise with relations.' 17 In teaching me responsibility, obligation teaches me simultaneously maturity, an openness to difference, change, and transformation. And yet, maturity involves acknowledging that the unreflective mode of the survivalist ethic is somewhat paradoxically contained within the reflective mode of autonomous regard, or the law of obligation. It is not in any simple sense opposed to it. As such, survivalism is part of relationalism, always capable of breaking free, which is why we need to focus on our ongoing and sustained attention to our obligations. 18, 19 13 Graham identifies the following basic precepts of the Aboriginal world view, drawing connections between our obligations to land and all other ethical obligations: 'The Land is the Law' and 'You are not alone in the world'. See Graham (2008. http:// austr alian human ities review. org/ 2008/ 11/ 01/ some-thoug hts-about-the-philo sophi cal-under pinni ngs-of-abori ginal-world views/ [Accessed 17.12.2021]). 14 'Aboriginal selfhood springs from and is bound up with [obligations to] Country (or sentient landscape)… An Aboriginal equivalent to Descartes's "I think, therefore I am" might be, "I am emplaced, therefore I am"' (Brigg & Graham, 2020c). 15 'The reflective task is to understand and adopt measured relationships that secure human socio-political ordering through a relational and custodial ethic' (Brigg & Graham, 2020a). 16 'Autonomous regard serves as a fulcrum for smooth relations-for recognising others (people, diverse beings, entities, and forces) and for weighing and moderating the responsibilities that come with ordered entanglement' (Brigg & Graham, 2021a). 17 Brigg and Graham discuss the relationist ethos in the context of its relation with the logic of 'survivalism.' 'Aboriginal political ordering does not seek to deny or eliminate survivalism. Survivalism can be contrasted to relationalism, but this is a heuristic rather than a categorical contrast' (Brigg & Graham, 2021b). 18 'The starting point for managing survivalism… does not emerge through the positing of relationalism as a moralising framework. It rather lies almost entirely elsewhere, in personal autonomy' (Brigg & Graham, 2021b). 19 Crises such as the 2019-20 bushfires in Australia reveal the importance of a sustained and ongoing relationalism or obligation, rather than a short-term survivalism. Such crises arguably provide the shock required to awaken our ethical obligations to land.
Graham's law of obligation is, then, the obligation to acknowledge all we consider and experience as 'culture' in terms of its embeddedness in 'nature'. It is a custodial or relational ethic that refuses to structure these terms in hierarchical ways. 20 By recognizing the self as nature, we simultaneously recognize our responsibilities and obligations to that nature.

Luce Irigaray: Symbolic Re-Distribution and Horizontal Transcendence
Recognizing the self as nature plays a central role in Irigaray's philosophy of sexual (or sexuate) 21 difference and, specifically, her account of the ethical play between transcendence and immanence in a newly imagined description of the sexual encounter. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference Irigaray claims: The link uniting or reuniting masculine and feminine must be horizontal and vertical, terrestrial and heavenly. As Heidegger, among others, has written, it must forge an alliance between the divine and the mortal. Such that the sexual encounter would be a festive celebration and not a disguised or polemical form of the master-slave relationship. 22 Irigaray's project of thinking nature in non-hierarchal terms celebrates the repressed domain of the terrestrial in its coupling with the heavenly or the celestial. This work challenges the Western metaphysical oppositions of culture/nature, transcendence/immanence, mind/body, and masculine/feminine so as to reincorporate nature into a newly imagined transcendence, one in which the celestial (heaven) and the terrestrial (earth) are in communion, rather than in opposition: The celestial lies not only above our head but also between us. It rises then originally from the attraction existing between woman and man, women and men, and the cultivation of this attraction. No figuration or representation belonging to only one gender will be privileged there, and the relation to nature is never totally overcome. The sky and the earth remain linked… Humans do not discover the 20 'This thoroughgoing relationalism casts humans among the world with human and other-than-human beings, while providing a flexible yet ordered universe for people-an order which is more laterally networked than hierarchical' (Brigg & Graham, 2020f). 21 Rebecca Hill points out that while Irigaray initially refers to sexual difference in her work, that from 2008 she uses the term 'sexuate difference' when speaking and writing in English to distinguish her thinking from simple understandings of the term 'gender', and from social or cultural sex 'stereotypes', and to avoid confusing 'sexual choice' with 'sexuate identity': 'Sexuate difference is the condition for the emergence of sexuate identity, of becoming and being a woman and of becoming and being a man… This partakes of biology but is also cultural and symbolic. Sexuate difference is ontological' (p.396). Hill (2016: 390-401). For her part, Rachel Jones understands 'sexual difference to be that which western culture has forgotten and which Irigaray seeks to recover, while the sexuate involves taking up a positive relation to sexual difference by acknowledging it as the irreducible difference which inflects every aspect of our being' (p.4). Jones (2011). 22 Irigaray (1993: 17). measure of their becoming only in a relation to the celestial but also in the respect of the terrestrial as such. (p. 147) 23 The relation to nature is never to be left behind, surpassed in a form of transcendence in which the sky separates from the earth. As humans, our task is to discover respect for the terrestrial-for nature and for the earth. 24 And we begin this process by recognizing the self as nature. 25 However, Western culture builds itself upon a hierarchy of nature and culture, with a creative culture depicted over and against a debased and inert nature. This symbolic distribution-of nature as an inert material, and culture as transcendent potential-leaves its trace on a series of similar oppositions, amongst these (significantly) the masculine/feminine divide. The work of Western culture distributes symbolic value (and its absence) across this divide, with the result that culture is depicted in terms of transcendence, subject-being, voice, rationality, structure, masculinity (and sometimes divinity), while nature is represented as immanence, materiality, object-being, muteness, irrationality, chaos, and femininity.
The effects of this symbolic distribution are dire, resulting in a (masculine) culture bereft of its own nature, a culture intent on leaving its nature behind. 26 In effect, this establishes a culture of sacrifice and what is sacrificed is precisely nature and nature's fertility. Along with nature's fertility, Western culture sacrifices the feminine-women (who have been left with only the so-called lower functions). 27 As symbolic representatives of immanence and materiality, women's bodies (our bodies) are reduced to mute resource, to the place and possibility of reproduction devoid of any spiritual, ethical, or transcendent value. 28 As a result of what is portrayed as the 'natural' division of the sexes, 29 women are thus de-valued in a culture of sacrifice intent on concealing its nature, its material and physical base. This symbolic 23 Irigaray (2002: 147). 24 In To Be Born Irigaray links earth and life: 'It is life itself which must become the unconditional issue of our decisions and not suprasensitive absolutes that too often are the result of our inability to live' (Irigaray, 2017: 100). 25 In a recent interview, Irigaray calls us to 'a new global politics based on respect for life' (p.8) (Irigaray & Seely, 2018). 26 Irigaray is concerned with a '"worldwide disorder" (désordre mondial), in which money and possessions and conflicts between men have swamped questions of respect for human life' (Whitford, 1991: 97). On this topic of the disassociation from nature, natural time, natural rhythms, and nature's creativity (and its relation to the effects of global capitalism), see also Brennan (2000Brennan ( , 2002 and Boulous Walker (2019). 27 Irigaray argues that relations amongst women (especially the mother-daughter relation) are sacrificed along with fertility more generally. To challenge this sacrificial logic, we need to build and celebrate relations between women, what she refers to as a 'sociality amongst women'. 28 Irigaray writes: 'The use, consumption, and circulation of [women's] sexualized bodies underwrite the organization and the reproduction of the social order, in which they have never taken part as "subjects"' (Irigaray, 1985: 84). 29 Whitford points out that this process of 'naturalization' means that 'the result of this process is presented as if it were natural and inevitable, rather than the product of symbolization' (Whitford, 1991: 95). distribution leads to an aggressive masculinity that results in 'an anti-natural, ecologically destructive culture', 30 where the symbolic values of both mother and nature (mother-nature) are destroyed. 31,32 In response, Irigaray calls for a kind of symbolic re-distribution. 33 As the term suggests, this work re-distributes symbolic value and identity across the supposedly 'natural' divide of masculinity and femininity, of women and men. As a consequence, 'the masculine would no longer be "everything"' or have the right to define every value. 34 Irigaray calls for men to acknowledge their 'nature' and to stop projecting this onto women who currently bear the weight of symbolic materiality for them. By acknowledging themselves as nature, men open a symbolic space for women to assert 'the transcendental functions previously allotted solely to men.' 35 By acceding to their spirituality or divinity (to their subjectivity), women undo the work of sacrifice that positions nature and fertility against culture. 36 They redistribute nature in such a way as to cultivate it. 37 As such, transcendence can be re-imagined as a decidedly sensible transcendental, and this is indeed the term Irigaray creates in part to introduce her notion of a horizontal transcendence, a form of potential or becoming that does not leave nature, the earth, or the terrestrial behind. 38 In Through Vegetal Being (2016), Irigaray writes: 30 Stone (2003: 415). 31 Irigaray argues that the mother-daughter bond needs to be symbolized and restored to its central cultural place in order to counter the destructive effects of those masculine values (violence, aggression, power, wealth) intent on destroying mother-nature: 'To re-establish elementary social justice, to save the earth from total subjugation to male values (which often give priority to violence, power, money), we must restore this missing pillar of our culture: the mother-daughter relationship and respect for female speech… This will require changes to symbolic codes, especially language, law and religion.' (Irigaray, 1994: 112). 32 In Through Vegetal Being Irigaray writes: '[this symbolic distribution] has led to the depreciation of the woman, the one who gives birth with her blood to a being made of flesh and blood. Is not our education based on the scorn for flesh, blood, even blood ties, and the attempt to master them through laws, rules, and discourses arbitrary with respect to life? Which results, at best, in ambivalence toward all that has something to do with living, in us and around us' (Irigaray & Marder, 2016: 91). 33 For a discussion of Irigaray's work on symbolic distribution and re-distribution, see Whitford (1991: pp.93ff). 34 Luce Irigaray (1985: 80). 35 Whitford (1991: 93). 36 Laura Roberts identifies the importance of this in the following helpful passage: 'Because the refiguring of feminine subjectivity, and accordingly sexuate subjectivity, means that each masculine and feminine subject has renewed links with nature and culture appropriate to his or her own gender, the link that reunites the masculine and the feminine is both horizontal and vertical-it is both natural and cultural. This means that women cannot be reduced to object or nature because there is a non-sacrificial relation between nature and culture for both feminine and masculine subjectivity' (Roberts 2019: 93). 37 Martin (2004: 28).
'The elements-air, water, fire, earth-are the most basic thing about which we must care. Even before their specific intervention in the formation of each being, they must be taken into account as the condition for the existence of life and its necessary environment'. 39 Irigaray's sensible transcendental rewrites ethics by providing women with the ability to acknowledge themselves as nature, 40 while simultaneously acceding to their subjectivity or even their divinity. 41 As such, this opens the way for a movement from mute object-being (silent nature) toward voice and subject-being. For Irigaray, this announces the advent of sexuate difference, in that woman is no longer the mute material support of the singular subject, man. In this sense, sexuate difference allows us 'to check the many forms that destruction takes in our world'. 42 For Irigaray, we currently inhabit a culture of sexual indifference, where only men are acknowledged as subjects. This act of erasure claims man as both the subject and the universal, 43 though this is by no means a universal or inescapable reality. For Irigaray, a symbolic re-distribution (brought about in part by the mobilisation of sexuate difference and a sensible transcendental) has the potential to transform our current symbolic or cultural order by restoring what she refers to as the forgotten paths that connect the celestial with the terrestrial-the material with the intelligible. Acknowledging sexuate difference thus goes hand in hand with Irigaray's work on the sensible transcendental that would, she says, provide the 'material texture of beauty' necessary to acknowledge the earth, a kind of permanent becoming that remains in contact with the terrestrial. 44 And while it is a complex term, a sensible transcendental might provisionally be understood as 'a condensed way of referring to all the conditions of women's collective access to subjectivity', to the radical transformations of the symbolic or cultural realm that remain firmly grounded in life and the life-world. 45 In this sense, Irigaray's work on the question of social, political, and cultural justice for women is intimately 39 Irigaray and Marder (2016: 92). 40 For a discussion of the complexity of the term 'nature' in Irigaray's work, see: Whitford (1991: 94). 41 Irigaray explores the process of becoming divine in three of her recent works, Through Vegetal Being (Irigaray & Marder, 2016), To Be Born (Irigaray, 2017), and Sharing the Fire (Irigaray, 2019). She discusses the first two of these in an interview with Irigaray and Seely (2018:1-12). 42 Irigaray (1993, 5). 43 Monique Wittig addresses man as universal, arguing: 'The abstract form, the general, the universal, this is what so-called masculine gender means, for the class of men have appropriated the universal for themselves. The universal has been, and is continually, at every moment, appropriated by men. It does not happen by magic, it must be done. It is an act, a criminal act, perpetrated by one class against another. It is an act carried out at the level of concepts, philosophy, politics. And gender, by enforcing upon women a particular category represents a measure of domination' (Wittig, 1992: 79). Although there are significant differences between Irigaray's work and Wittig's, we might ask whether 'gender' in Wittig's work operates in a similar way to Irigaray's symbolic distribution. 44 Irigaray (1993: 32). 45 Whitford (1991: 47). linked with her ethical call for a resurrected pathway between the material and the intelligible. 46 To resurrect the pathway between the material and the intelligible is to recognise the self as nature, to acknowledge the self as embedded and embodied, as sexed, grounded in bodily being. This materiality is foundational and supports Irigaray's work to develop a horizontal transcendence in communion with her notion of the sensible transcendental. A horizontal transcendence refuses to oppose transcendence hierarchically to immanence, working instead to couple these terms in what we might refer to as an ethical relation of alterity or otherness. Irigaray's understanding of transcendence ensures the self retains its relation with the other, with sensibility, and with the earth. 47 Transcendence bridges the interval between transcendence and immanence, between the material and the intelligible. Here, Irigaray offers 'an ethical attitude of limitation of the self, of 'not being all', of finiteness, which opens the individual to the otherness of the other', 48 while keeping their feet firmly placed on the ground. Transcendence thus occurs in the space or interval between the self and the infinite mystery of the other. This is a kind of transcendence between us, an ethical encounter that takes place in the here and now-not deferred, not displaced. It is a transcendence that changes us, transforms us, without us having to leave ourselves behind. In horizontal forms of transcendence, we remain embodied and always embedded, thus permitting us to recognise ourselves simultaneously as nature, and more.
In Irigaray's account of horizontal transcendence, symbolic values of immanence and transcendence are thus re-distributed equally between the masculine and the feminine, opening the potential for an ethical relation between two subjects, a fully intersubjective relation occurring between the domains of the celestial and the terrestrial. And while she does not oppose this horizontality in any simple sense to vertically, 49 she does differentiate it from a form of transcendence as ecstasy. 50 For Irigaray, transcendence as ecstasy refers precisely to those forms of transcendence we have identified in which the sky separates from the earth, the celestial from the terrestrial. It suggests 'leaving the self behind 46 Rebecca Hill describes Irigaray's sensible transcendental as 'the groundless ground of the nonhierarchical relationship between women" and also as that which is "coextensive with all of life' (Hill, 2020: 77). This occurs in the context of Hill's framing of Irigaray's challenge to instrumental accounts of nature via her work on relations amongst women. Hill finds resonances between Irigaray's work and Alexis Wright's 'Indigenous relational sense of Being' between the women characters in her novel The Swan Book (2013) (Hill, 2020: 74-97). 47 Luce Irigaray (1992: 104f. I Love to You (p.104f)). 48 Annemie Halsema (2012: 130). 49 Irigaray calls for both a horizontal and a vertical transcendence. In addition, she refers to the motherdaughter relation in terms of the vertical axis, and woman-to-woman or sisterly relations in terms of the horizontal axis. For a detailed discussion of the vertical and the horizontal in Irigaray's work see: Gail Schwab (2011: 77-97). 50 Annemie Halsema argues that 'contrary to what one would expect, [Irigaray] does not oppose horizontal transcendence to vertical transcendence, with its diverse connotations, but opposes it to transcendence as "ecstasy" (extase)' (Halsema, 2010: 52). toward an inaccessible total-other, beyond sensibility, beyond the earth.' 51 Horizontal transcendence, as we have seen, refuses this, opting instead for an everyday transcendence between us, an embodied and intersubjective transcendence embracing life. Irigaray's horizontal transcendence, thus 'names the horizon of ideal-images and values that enable humans to "become", to live their life fully… [the] horizon of transcendent values and ideal-images that transcends us individually, and that gives direction to one's development… [the] utopian ideal that stands for what we hope for, what we aim at, what we want to become.' 52 When, in Sharing the Fire (2019), Irigaray urges us to 'wonder about the means of recovering the source of our original energy and of cultivating it', 53 we can think of our obligations to acknowledge ourselves as nature as the transcendent horizon that grounds our very being. For, as she points out, acknowledging and assuming ourselves as nature means acknowledging that 'our existence entails our incarnating such natural determination'. 54

Conclusion: The place of Irigaray's Work in an Australian Philosophy
Graham argues that one of the important roles of an Australian philosophy would be to initiate discussions, conversations, and exchanges concerning how we understand our obligations and responsibilities in both practical and theoretical terms. We live today in the complex space between an ancient culture and a young, emerging one. An Australian philosophy would do its best to bridge the spaces between these cultures and conversations, to suggest pathways or bridges between these worlds and worldviews. For Graham, this involves proportionality, patience, care. It is vital, she claims, that 'young' societies such as 'settler Australia' be introduced to obligation at all levels. Societies, such as ours, need to think about and be guided in what our obligations to land and others are. Here, the question of edification returns. Edification as those conversations suggesting and encouraging spiritually, ethically. Edification, too, in terms of initiating and nurturing the ethical dimension historically missing from encounters between settler-Australians and First Nations peoples.
What I have attempted to do here is to establish an initial encounter between Graham's work and Irigaray's, an encounter motivated by edification, communion, exchange. And I have done so by focusing on Graham's work on the law of obligation and its possible connections with Irigaray's work on symbolic re-distribution, the sensible transcendental, and horizontal transcendence. There is much to be gained, I think, in working between these two worldviews. However, there are-as well-risks and potential dangers, and it is important for us to consider what some 51 Irigaray (1992: 104). 52 Halsema (2010: 70). 53 Irigaray (2019: 2). 54 Irigaray (2019: 81). of these might be. 55 For example, while I have suggested there is value in thinking through these particular aspects of Graham's work with Irigaray's, it is crucial that we do not represent these as the same; i.e., we do not reduce Graham's work to Irigaray's, or vice versa. There is a delicate balance to maintain between Graham's work and Irigaray's-an interval that ensures the ethical integrity of each.
For example, when, in her discussion of the importance of symbolic re-distribution, Irigaray calls for men to acknowledge their nature and to stop projecting this onto women, and for women to assert the transcendental functions previously allotted solely to men, we must ask 'who' is Irigaray addressing? Indeed, we must remember that Indigenous peoples, in colonial settler societies such as ours, carry or bear the trace of a debased materiality and immanence in the Western imagination. Culturally, the re-distribution of symbolic value, in the manner Irigaray identifies, is a task that we as colonizers must attend to. Symbolic distribution always, of course, occurs in place. Irigaray is well aware of this, but it is important for those of us who work with her concepts and analyses to remember this. It is incumbent on us to situate Irigaray's work, literally to place it; to think it in terms of our specific place and locality. To read it locally. As I suggested in the introduction, Graham's work on land and our obligations in her place-responsive ethics allow us to do this. Indeed, it obliges us to do so. And in so doing, it requires of us (each and every one) that we consider what it means to engage work, such as Irigaray's, in a here and now that differs from the European context of her writing. 56 It requires of us that we think through the specificity of the place we call Australia, and what it means (and will mean) to ground this name 'Australia', and ourselves, in place and land. 55 Joanne Faulkner's paper on Irigaray's work in relation to the 'miscarriage' of settler colonialism in Australia, outlines in clear terms the dangers and risks of adopting her work in uncritical ways. Faulkner addresses the limitations of Irigaray's work in terms of questions of cultural difference, acknowledging and building on earlier critiques of Irigaray's philosophy in this regard. Having done this, she moves on, tentatively, to argue that despite this Irigaray's work on the ethical nature of the 'interval' as intermediary or a relational third term provides a starting point for (re)thinking a 'productive relation between coloniser and colonised peoples, so that both traditions may together forge a postcolonial future' (Faulkner, 2019: 139). 56 In an interview in 2018, Stephen D. Seely asks Irigaray: 'Many recent critics… have suggested that we must now turn to non-Western, especially indigenous, philosophies for guidance in responding to the challenges of our time. It seems to me that, perhaps more than ever, it is on the basis of new ontologies of life and nature, perhaps even new cosmologies, that transcultural bridges must be built. What are your own views on the role of sharing between cultures-particularly at a philosophical level -in building this "basic universal link between all living beings"… Do the resonances between your own thought and certain indigenous philosophies interest you?'. After discussing the risks of appropriating the (cultural) other, Irigaray responds that the crucial question here is: 'What does it mean for a living human to be indigenous to earth? We have not yet seriously taken this question into consideration, resorting to various values extraneous to the terrestrial ones. I am afraid that concerning ourselves with new ontologies or cosmologies before lingering on this stage of our becoming may more and more lock us in cultural constructions that cut us off from a return to a universally sharable real and reality' (Irigaray & Seely, 2018: 3-4). I understand Irigaray's concern here with what it means 'for a living human being to be indigenous to earth' to touch upon Graham's concern with our obligations to land. Rather than being Irigaray's task to address Indigenous philosophies, it is the task of those of us who inhabit Indigenous land to think through the implications of being in place. For a helpful discussion of Irigaray's work in relation to intercultural philosophy see Škof (2015) and Škof and Holmes (2013).