Textures of Light

Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau Ponty

Cathryn Vasseleu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134765201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Textures of Light draws on the work of Luce Irigaray, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas to present an outstanding and ground breaking study of the vital importance of light in Western thought. Since Plato's allegory of the cave, light and the role of sight have been accorded a unique position in Western thought. They have stood as a metaphor for truth and objectivity and the very axis of modern rationalism. More recently however, this status has come under significant criticism from continental and feminist thought which has stressed the privileging of subjectivity and masculinity in such a metaphor.

Part I

TRUE LIGHT

1

Introduction

Seeing light

The nature of light and existence are deeply entwined in the history of Western thought. Fundamental to this tradition is an image of light as an invisible medium that opens up a knowable world. In Greek thought visibility represents the ultimate certainty of a reality that must be confirmed visually. Seeing light is a metaphor for seeing the invisible in the visible, or seeing things in an intelligible form that holds all that exists together but is itself devoid of sensible qualities. ¹ By means of this metaphor Plato implies a natural relation between existence and truth, or a concept of reality based on an original selfpresentation of beings which can be clarified through vision.

In his doctrine of anamnesis, or recollection, Plato makes a distinction between eternal Forms and their resemblances in human perceptions. The truth of the Forms is a light that has already been seen by the soul in its divine being, and it is this forgotten conjunction or participation of beings in the Forms which the incarnate soul recollects or is reminded of in the world it experiences through the senses. The union of the soul with the Forms constitutes knowledge, just as the union of the light entering the eye with light emanating from the eye constitutes seeing. Plato dramatizes the soul’s recollection of knowledge in his allegory of the cave, where those who seek exposure to the truth must turn their gaze from the cave’s shadowy and artificially lit world towards the sun as the origin of what can be known. ²

In his study of the significance of light as a metaphor for truth in the Western metaphysical tradition Hans Blumenberg observes that in Plato’s metaphoric usage light differs in nature from that which it evokes, namely the visibility of things (1993: 30– 62). Platonic light is invisible and can only be ‘seen’ as eidos (an idea, or sight with form) in the things that are made visible or brought into existence. ³ Rather than being a component of visibility, light has an originality of its own; it dawns with the appearance of things or the beings that come to light. In Plato’s formulation light is the means of expression of truth’s wholly exemplary nature, or a difference transcending the physical world and its history. ⁴

Blumenberg identifies a change in light’s significance that occurs with modern enlightenment thinking. Included in this change is the emergence of the idea of a history of light, where light’s exemplary nature is no longer guaranteed but must negotiate its passage through darkness or the opaque materiality of sensible being in order to reappear. In this history light becomes either an objective to be accomplished, or an object at the disposal of the subject. Truth no longer reveals itself metaphorically through light. Truth is revealed in the ideal nature of light. Man no longer finds accommodation for himself in the light, or the fixed structure of an objectively perceived world; he himself becomes an emanative force. In modern enlightenment thought light is a realization of man’s own nature that he brings into being in his transformation of the world.

In Descartes’ theory of ‘lumen naturale’, or natural light, natural light has its source in God and possesses a perfect symmetry with the mind: ‘For I have certainly no cause to complain that God has not given me an intelligence which is more powerful, or a natural light which is stronger than that which I have received from Him.’⁵ With the notion of ‘lumen naturale’ Descartes hopes to bypass the vagaries of the senses. His study of dioptrics is based on the claim that a lux of non-sensory divine origin is the cause of movements of the lumen, or the light of the mind. ⁶ Natural light is seen in the action of a camera obscura, where the light coming from external objects can be projected on to a screen within the camera’s dark interior to form an image, albeit with distortions caused by lens or screen. Jacques Derrida comments that for Descartes, while the existence of God is put into doubt, natural light is never subjected to radical doubt but rather is the medium in which doubt unfolds (1982: 266–7).

According to Blumenberg, in his idea of ‘method’ Descartes dispenses with light as an illuminating medium within which phenomena are viewed. Instead he treats light as a tool of reason by means of which phenomena can be subjected to examination, distanced and placed in perspective. The image of light as a tool is one that is prone to technological invasions: ‘light turns into an encompassing medium of the focused and measured rays of “direct lighting”’ (Blumenberg, 1993: 53). Heidegger also identifies a technologized relation between vision and light which he describes in terms of the ordering light of ‘enframing’, as opposed to a former openness of light which he evokes by way of the analogy of a forest ‘clearing’. ⁷

Blumenberg considers that the transition from illumination to idealization or ‘lighting’ culminates in a turn towards an artificial world reminiscent of Plato’s cave. Within the modern technologized lighting of nocturnal spaces, ‘an “optics of prefabrication” is being developed, which eliminates the freedom to look around within a general medium of visibility, and confronts modern man with ever more situations of coerced vision’ (1993: 54). In signalling the possible end to its history Blumenberg articulates a longing and regard for metaphors of light as an elementary expressive mode used since antiquity as a means of tentatively grasping or intuiting⁸ changes and differences in concepts in their unformulated first moments and multiple nuances: ‘From its beginnings, the history of metaphysics has made use of these characteristics in order to give an appropriate reference to its ultimate subject matter, which can no longer be grasped in material terms’ (1993: 31).

Rather than being a means of communicating immaterial concepts, Derrida claims that metaphors of light are constitutive of the language of philosophy. ⁹ Foregrounding the reliance of metaphysics on metaphors of light, Derrida names the metaphor of darkness and light, or self-concealment and self-revelation, as the founding metaphor of Western philosophy as metaphysics: ‘not only because it is a photological one – and in this respect the entire history of our philosophy is a photology, the name given to a history of, or treatise on, light – but because it is a metaphor’ (1978: 27). When Derrida describes the history of philosophy as a photology his emphasis is on light’s metaphoric elaboration. The very condition of possibility of philosophy is metaphor, or more precisely the movement of metaphorization. Derrida argues that this movement is indistinguishable from the movement of idealization, or signification. He describes the movement as a double effacement, involving both the displacement of sensible origin and a forgetting of the metaphor (1982: 211–29).

While philosophy is based on metaphor, the concept of metaphor is itself dependent on metaphysics: ‘Metaphor . . . is included by metaphysics as that which must be carried off to a horizon or proper ground, and which must finish by rediscovering its truth’ (1982: 268). Derrida describes philosophy as a complex interplay of concept-metaphors which, far from being disposable or replaced by something more exact, are instruments that are inextricable from the field of philosophy which they constitute (1982: 228). For Derrida, light is the concept- metaphor by means of which truth can be made to appear or become present to consciousness. This light is conceived in terms of the sun:

The very opposition of appearing and disappearing, the entire lexicon of the phainesthai, of aletheia, etc., of day and night, of the visible and the invisible, of the present and the absent – all this is possible only under the sun. Insofar as it structures the metaphorical space of philosophy, the sun represents what is natural in philosophical language.

(Derrida, 1982: 251)

The structure of the metaphoric space inscribed by the sun is a specular circle or heliotrope. The movement of a heliotrope is simultaneously a movement turned towards the sun and the turning movement of the sun (1982: 251). In turning, the heliotrope returns to itself; it is interiorized without loss of meaning or expenditure. The heliotrope inscribes the law of metaphysics, which operates by reappropriating the conditions of its possibility.

Derrida extends the significance of this economy of metaphor into the philosopheme of heliocentrism which, he argues, characterizes the entire history of Western thought: ‘The sensory sun, which rises in the East, becomes interiorized in the evening of its journey, in the eye and the heart of the Westerner. He summarizes, assumes and achieves the essence of man, “illuminated by the true light”’ (1982: 268). Metaphysics is cast as the ‘white mythology’, which erases within itself the very conditions of its production, or its logos. In so doing, metaphysics not only reflects the culture of the ‘West’, but rises to its own mythological form, which is the universality of Reason (1982: 213). Light is associated with the imperialist cultural aspirations of ‘white’ man, or the man of metaphysical enlightenment for whom all that falls beyond logos is the indeterminate darkness that must be overcome and brought to the truth of a common (sun)light.

The sun is an exemplary natural object, entirely sensible or perceivable. Paradoxically, however, the sunlight of heliocentrism is also always partially artificial. On the one hand, the heliotrope is the paradigmatic metaphor, or model of the sensory sun. Being sensory, the sun is something whose presence cannot be mastered and is always improperly known. On the other hand, the sun is also always metaphorical, being the representative for all that is most natural in philosophical language. The sun is an artificial construction, which is not a bad metaphor, but a mere and infinitely substitutable metaphor of natural light: ‘what is most natural in nature bears within itself the means to emerge from itself; it accommodates itself to “artificial” light’ (1982: 251). As Derrida describes the relationship, by metaphor we make things sensible, that is, both accessible to the senses, and sensible in an abstract sense (1982: 209).

The visible/invisible economy of heliocentrism is drawn by Derrida in terms of a filial relation. The visible sun is the analogue or son of the intelligible paternal sun which, as Derrida describes, is the hidden illuminating source of logos. The law of logos is capable of both blinding and protecting those who look within its scope. ¹⁰ Heidegger also identifies this double illumination in the Platonic redefinition of eidos, or idea. First, rather than the outward visible aspect of things, ‘Plato exacts of this word . . . something utterly extraordinary: that it names what precisely is not and never will be perceivable with physical eyes’. Second, as well as naming the non-sensuous aspect of the physically visible, it ‘names and is, also, that which constitutes the essence in the audible, the tasteable, the tactile, in everything that is in any way accessible’. ¹¹

Derrida argues that light is not just one metaphor used in philosophy, but the metaphor which founds the entire system of metaphysics or metaphoric truth. Luce Irigaray gives another inflection to the significance of light in the history of philosophy in Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a). Like Derrida, in this text Irigaray regards light as the founding metaphor of metaphysics. In ‘Plato’s Hystera’, which is devoted to a discussion of the first part of Book VII of Plato’s Republic, Irigaray considers Plato’s organization of light and space in terms of the photo-logic of heliotropes (1985a: 243–364). However, rather than emphasizing the dependence of metaphysics on metaphors of light, Irigaray’s attention is directed to relations of sexual difference in philosophy, a notion which, as Derrida proposes, sees itself in terms of a metaphorical light. Irigaray argues that the drama of concealment and unconcealment which is played out in philosophy’s metaphoric labyrinth is an elaborate concealment of a maternal origin which is refractory to metaphysical conception. According to Irigaray, the fantasy which heliocentrism upholds is a masculine re-origination, or the appearance of giving birth to oneself – grasped self-reflexively through the mediation of light. By this means, philosophy generates a self-image while excluding any sense of its corporeality. Irigaray calls the light of heliotropes the light of the Same, meaning that difference is ultimately recuperated in the return of light from an intermediary point which is never present in language. Difference, which can only be figured as absence or invisibility, is ultimately reducible to an indiscriminate and overpowering light in which everything appears identical.

Irigaray’s analysis takes up an aspect of metaphor stressed by Derrida; metaphor is both a means of passage to, and an inevitable detour or provisional loss of meaning in the arrival at, a proper meaning. ¹² However, Irigaray places a different emphasis on the detour/passage of metaphor by relating it to the passage between the Platonic cave’s artificially lit interior and the purity of the outside light. It is precisely the metaphoric omission of the passage which allows such movement that Irigaray protests. ¹³ Irigaray calls this avenue of transport the ‘forgotten vagina’, referring to its reappropriation in Plato’s dialectic in an unnameable form. The ‘forgotten vagina’ is the ‘passage that is missing, left on the shelf, between the outside and the inside, between the plus and the minus’ (1985a: 347).

Derrida notes that in the Timaeus Plato nominates this excess as the unspecifiable khora which defies the logic of logos, being neither intelligible nor sensible, yet cannot be separated from it. Khora is an invisible that is devoid of sensible form or presence. While remaining alien to the intelligible, khora both disrupts and participates in its constitution. ¹⁴ Irigaray’s ‘forgotten vagina’ bears on Heidegger’s interpretation of the term: ‘Might khora not mean: that which abstracts itself from every particular, that which withdraws, and in such a way precisely admits and “makes place” for something else?’ (Heidegger, 1961: 50–1, quoted by Derrida, 1995: 147fn.). Irigaray contends that the ‘in between’ has no name in philosophy, which considers only absence or presence in terms of the Same. Plato is unable to speak of shadows inside the cave except as a loss of light in elaborate deflections and photo-plays. The perfect clarity of intelligible light is achieved as a progressive recovery from the displacement of light, which in the sensible realm is ambiguously differentiated from unrepresentable material obstacles, like the tain of a mirror, the bodies which cast shadows, the water’s reflective surface, the cloth divider, or the walls of the cave.

While Irigaray makes much of the fact that Plato’s metaphysics operates within a mythological cave which is analogous to a womb, she notes that various morphological features of a female body, including ‘hymen’, ‘vagina’ as well as ‘womb’, are essential features of Plato’s myth. Of equal importance to Irigaray is the metaphoric re-placement of matter in the space of metaphysics. Although the Platonic drama appears to require no material support, such support is secured, or more precisely swindled, from the body of woman. For Irigaray, sexual difference is disguised by the attention focused on the reproduction of likeness by means of logos: ‘whatever assures the functioning of difference in this way is always already foreign to the multiple action of difference, or rather differences, because it will always already have been wrapped away in verisimilitude, once the neck, the corridor, the passage has been forgotten’ (1985a: 247). It is within this very process of limitation that the metaphor of hystera comes into play, with no representation of the means of passage itself. Metaphor displaces the fact that it obliterates the neck or transition, and the displacement is covered over in a matrix of resemblance.

The displacement of the materiality of the passage is the con...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Truelight
• Part II Carnal Light
• Part III Perverse Light
• Part IV Erotic Light
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index