Engaging the World

Thinking after Irigaray

Mary C. Rawlinson, Mary C. Rawlinson

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781438460291
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Engaging the World explores Luce Irigaray's writings on sexual difference, deploying the resources of her work to rethink philosophical concepts and commitments and expose new possibilities of vitality in relationship to nature, others, and to one's self. The contributors present a range of perspectives from multiple disciplines such as philosophy, literature, education, evolutionary theory, sound technology, science and technology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. They place Irigaray in conversation with thinkers as diverse as Charles Darwin, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gilles Deleuze, René Decartes, and Avital Ronell. While every essay challenges Irigaray's thought in some way, each one also reveals the transformative effects of her thought across multiple domains of contemporary life.

II.

LANGUAGE, ART, AND WRITING

IRIGARAY AND KRISTEVA ON ANGUISH IN ART

Elaine P. Miller

Very often, when looking at women’s works of art, I have been saddened by the sense of anguish they express, an anguish so strong it approaches horror. Having wanted to contemplate beauty created by women, I would find myself faced instead with distress, suffering, irritation, sometimes ugliness. The experience of art, which I expect to offer a moment of happiness and repose, of compensation for the fragmentary nature of daily life, of unity and communication or communion, would become yet another source of pain, a burden.

—Luce Irigaray, “How Can We Create Our Beauty?”

Let’s imagine you suffer from anxiety; this is a pathological state. Or you are no longer anxious and you become a consumer, a totally stabilized individual that can be manipulated like a robot. Midway between these two solutions, lie intellectual works and art. These are the actual sites of this anxiety and revolt. The artist’s goal is to find the representation of this state of anxiety.

—Julia Kristeva, Revolt, She Said

In her discussions of specific contemporary women artists,1 Luce Irigaray laments what she perceives to be their tendency to invert the masculine imaginary by representing the female body in distorted or fragmented form, thereby conveying anguish and horror. Such a representation, she argues, remains within the paradigm that it opposes. If Irigaray respects historical portrayals in art of the idealized woman, such as the Madonna or mythical female goddesses, it is in part because of their serenity, which she believes to be a crucial attribute of a transformed feminine imaginary. Such a new imaginary would be characterized by serenity and repose, and by a harmonious relationship between humans and nature. Even if Irigaray cannot be accused of solely privileging traditional or conservative portrayals of women in art,2 she does decidedly prefer those works by women artists that express their subject in a happy or peaceful disposition.

In Reading Art, Reading Irigaray, Hilary Robinson’s monograph on Irigaray’s aesthetics, Robinson recollects her own disappointment and confusion on reading “A Natal Lacuna,” one of the only essays in which Irigaray directly discusses visual art. This reaction mirrors my own feelings on reading that essay and “How Can We Create Our Beauty?,” from which the epigraph to this article was taken.3 Robinson is concerned with the lack of attention to contemporary artistic practices manifested by both Irigaray and by Margaret Whitford (who commented on the first essay in Women’s Art Magazine), as well as with the implicit privilege accorded by both to literary over visual art (Robinson 2006, 6). Robinson’s book focuses on Irigaray’s philosophy, insofar as it concerns structures of visual representation and the visual production of meaning, to see if using Irigaray’s broader philosophy against her narrower view of women artists can resuscitate an Irigarayan aesthetics that was not expressed by Irigaray herself.

In this article I will consider the content of Irigaray’s specific discussion of women artists, rather than attempt to articulate an aesthetics based on her broader writings, as I have done earlier.4 It seems curious to me that Irigaray would insist that art’s function is to offer respite from the fragmentation of daily life and to provide a caesura in existence that could give rise to calm, happiness, and repose. It seems more intuitive that she would invoke the psychoanalytic discussion of sublimation and consider art an important means for working through (and along the way necessarily expressing) women’s specific experiences of fragmentation, anxiety, and suffering. I think that Robinson is correct that an aesthetics applicable to contemporary women artists’ work (even including art that expresses fragmentation and suffering) can be drawn from Irigaray’s writings; what puzzles me is that Irigaray herself did not think that this kind of aesthetics was possible or desirable. In particular, it would seem that Irigaray’s critique of the historically allotted function of woman—always remaining on the margins—as a mirror for masculine subjectivity would lead her to champion a kind of art that would expose both this mimetic function and this role as remnant. The image of woman as uniquely reposing in happiness would appear to affirm rather than to critique this function, covering over the effective erasure of mother and daughter by presenting them as idealized visual objects reflecting back the projects and aspirations of male subjects.

In “A Natal Lacuna,” Irigaray discusses the German artist Unica Zürn (1917–1970), who had a turbulent sexual relationship with the male artist Hans Bellmer and committed suicide by jumping out of the window of their shared apartment. Irigaray has almost nothing positive to say about Zürn; she emphasizes Zürn’s dependency and depression and the distortion and fragmentation of the body depicted in her art. The essay portrays Zürn’s life and art in the language of emptiness, brokenness, and madness, and explicitly criticizes her art for reflecting this broken existence. In Irigaray’s view, Zürn represents everything that might go wrong when a woman turns to the creation of art.

Margaret Whitford has shown the importance that Irigaray’s interpretation accords to the role of the death drive in creativity (Whitford 1994, 15–17). According to Freud, it is the death drive that allows for the possibility of sublimation by inhibiting the sexual drive and thereby dividing it into partial drives. Furthermore, the death drive, through destruction, breaks up reified symbolic formations, thereby opening up the possibility for the creation of new ones. However, Whitford writes, Irigaray fears that women do not yet possess the adequate symbolic resources to sublimate or deal with the potentially traumatic effect of the destruction of such forms; as a result, women artists have not been capable of creating new formations to take their place. Zürn’s art, on Whitford’s reading of Irigaray’s interpretation, is both self-destructive and destructive of a feminine imaginary, not yet creative.

As traditionally culturally interpreted, woman’s role is always constituted by someone other than herself, and Irigaray argues that until women can find and create their own morphology and aesthetic, their art will continue to reflect this relational role. In other words, if in its creative role the aggressive, destructive force of the death drive is directed toward the rigid forms of culture, then the force of art by women who follow the model of male artists (as, in Irigaray’s view, Zürn followed Bellmer) will be as destructive of women—in their role as an effect of culture—as of other symbolic forms. In the hands of women artists, the death drive could thus potentially become a self-destructive rather than a creative force.

Because Zürn’s art is fragmented and distorted, and her writings primarily concern and manifest her depression and mental illness, Irigaray claims that Zürn fails “to be born” (Irigaray 1994, 13). This is a reference not to physical birth, but to the birth of the girl in her Post-Oedipal Identity, a birth that entails a separation from the mother. It is more difficult for a woman to be “born” in this way than for a man given that she shares the same sex as the mother; the Oedipal crisis is incomparably harder for a woman to navigate because she must shift to the patriarchal symbolic order and affix her desire to a sexual object of a different sex than the mother, who is the primary sexual object of both boys and girls in infancy (Ibid.). Her womanhood, her sexual differentiation, occurs when she, already castrated, must align herself with a symbolic order that not only denies her desire that is not uniquely oriented toward men, but that also fails to symbolically capture her relationship, now forgotten, to a maternal imaginary not mediated by the masculine.

Irigaray writes: “The question which I would put to Unica Zürn […] and to others, is: has she not, have they not, out of the desire for truth, particularly psychic truth, created something ugly, and have they not led to believe, led themselves to believe, that the psyche is ugly, terrifying, frightful, including in its numbers and letters, even though a real or true number may also be contemplated?” (Ibid., 12). Here the “numbers and letters” of the psyche are its appropriation in symbolic representation. As forged in the paternal symbolic order, the psychic truth of the mother-daughter bond is “ugly, terrifying, frightful,” abject, that which must be excluded for the girl to become individuated. A “real or true” psychic “number,” then, would be one that somehow takes up and represents this excluded origin, a “number” that symbolizes and recognizes the genesis of the daughter in a maternal lineage without denying her necessary separation from the mother. Irigaray conceptualizes this alternative maternal imaginary and symbolic order as a harmonious and unified relation to nature.5

Art that is ugly or that manifests suffering portrays only a partial truth, since “truth in its entirety is beautiful or sublime” (Ibid.). Art that portrays flaws and tensions is lost “in the representation of a mirror, a death, already there, immobilized as a mere spectacle” (Ibid.). Zürn exemplifies the feminine’s role in the history of philosophy as the mirror of the masculine, the one who is eventually devoured by and undifferentiated from the other (Irigaray 1993, 49). Since there is no specifically feminine imaginary, woman is put in the position of experiencing herself within the masculine imaginary only fragmentarily, “in the little-structured margins of a dominant ideology,” as Irigaray writes in This Sex Which Is Not One (Irigaray 1985, 30). Zürn’s art seems to enact this claim. It is curious, nonetheless, that Irigaray criticizes Zürn for the representation of this death “already there,” rather than foregrounding death itself as it is manifest in this biographical case—a case that obtains for Zürn through no action of her own, as it does for all women—and its reflection in Zürn’s art. By depicting this fragmentation visually, Zürn brings it to our attention in a way that is analogous to the effect of Irigaray’s philosophy, even if this was not the artist’s intention. Irigaray’s writings bring this unrepresented loss of the mother and the mother-daughter bond, to presence in the written word. Why, then, should we fault Zürn for attempting to bring this same loss to visual representation?

In fact, Irigaray addresses this question in “How Do We Create Our Beauty?” She writes that as far as possible she seeks to avoid writing about things that are wretched and ugly, and when she has to discuss painful realities she does so “in a literary style” (Irigaray 1993, 107). Exposing the negative is a necessary task, since it reveals what has historically been forced into hiding. Furthermore, manifesting suffering and oppression publicly can have a therapeutic effect (Irigaray 1993, 108). Comparing this kind of cathartic expression to the role of women in Greek tragedy, Irigaray nonetheless rejects it; just like women in Greek tragedies, the expression is always either masked or denuded in the process. Women have been “enclosed in an order of forms inappropriate to us,” and it may be that by throwing off these forms we will annihilate ourselves, rather than be reborn (Irigaray 1993, 109–10). Irigaray here follows the Lacanian idea that an imaginary always unifies in fantasy what is fragmented and contradictory in reality.6 Art, like the image in the mirror for the not-yet-subjectified child, should do nothing more than provide a whole and ideal image of what the woman is to become.

Irigaray characterizes Zürn’s art as a violent externalization of an abject bodily interior. Her interiority is vomited out through “fantasmatic orifices of the body,” reified and put on display (Irigaray 1994, 12). In contrast to her early work on the body and on woman’s relationship to herself, here Irigaray contrasts interiority to nature itself, and to the “living, rooted, autonomous, autochthonous other” (Ibid.). To be born, then, would mean emerging as a new self in a new relationship to exteriority, including symbolic life, community, and nature.

In her essay “How Can We Create Our Beauty?” Irigaray explicitly contrasts “beauty” to “distress, suffering, irritation, and sometimes ugliness” (Irigaray 1993, 107). She argues that art should ideally provide “a moment of happiness and repose, of compensation for the fragmentary nature of daily life,” serving as a form of unification and serenity for the artist, rather than manifesting the artist’s pain and doubt (Ibid.). She even articulates the desire to help women whose works express anguish to find a way to exteriorize the “beauty” of which they are capable. For Irigaray, then, beauty and anxiety are incompatible in art, and inasmuch as she believes that beauty is crucial to the nascent feminine imaginary, she argues that women’s art just should not portray anguish.

Both Irigaray and Julia Kristeva concur that anxiety is particularly characteristic of women’s art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Yet Kristeva’s discussions of art, which also take a psychoanalytic perspective as their point of departure, conclude in a different conceptual standpoint from those of Irigaray. In Black Sun, Kristeva’s monograph on depression, she notes that in melancholia the loss of a loved object is commonly accompanied by a “modification of signifying bonds” in which language functions as a source of anxiety, and, in reaction, thinking slows down and the depressive loses interest in communicating (Kristeva 1989, 10). Melancholia or depression, brought about by the loss of a loved object that has been incorporated rather than mourned, thus results in repetitive, monotonously frozen, and ultimately self-destructive drive ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Time, Space, and The Universal
• II. Language, Art, and Writing
• III. Science, Culture, and Technology
• IV. Psychoanalysis in Practice
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover