Helen A. Fielding

Questioning nature: Irigaray, Heidegger and the potentiality of matter

Irigarays insistence on sexual difference as the primary difference arises out of a phenomenological perception of nature. Drawing on Heideggers insights into physis, she begins with his critique of the nature/culture binary. Both philosophers maintain that nature is not matter to be ordered by technical know-how; yet Irigaray reveals that although Heidegger distinguishes physis from technē in his work, his forgetting of the potentiality of matter, the maternal-feminine, and the two-fold essence of being as sexual difference means that his own concept of physis can be understood as another technē. Focussing in particular upon Heideggers interpretation of Aristotles privileging of morphé over hylé as a description of presencing into appearance, I show that for Irigaray the movements of presencing and absencing emerge out of a metaphysics that does not take into account the fluidity, the mixtures and interpenetrations of a nature that is limited by fecundity not by death. Our oblivion to nature is the greatest danger, and thus attending to our embodied and hence sexuate nature holds the promise of a new age, since it is rooted in the possibilities of the flesh revealed through the cultivated perception of sexual difference.

The finitude of nature: Rethinking the ethics of biotechnology

In order to open new possibilities for bioethics, I argue that we need to rethink our concept of nature. The established cognitive framework determines in advance how new technologies will become visible. Indeed, in this dualistic approach of metaphysics, nature is posited as limitless, as material endowed with force which causes us to lose the sense of nature as arising out of itself, of having limits, an end. In contrast, drawing upon the example of the gender assignment and construction of intersexed infants, I want to suggest for bioethics an understanding of nature that arises not from our scientific explorations, but rather from attending to our situated perceptual encounters with the world which underlie such experimentation; these encounters are too easily overlooked, and yet they are crucial for opening up new ways of thinking.

Cultivating Perception: Phenomenological Encounters with Artworks

Phenomenally strong artworks have the potential to anchor us in reality and to cultivate our perception. For the most part, we barely notice the world around us, as we are too often elsewhere, texting, coordinating schedules, planning ahead, navigating what needs to be done. This is the level of our age that shapes the ways we encounter things and others. In such a world it is no wonder we no longer trust our senses. But as feminists have long argued, thinking grounded in embodied experience can be more open to difference; such embodied thinking helps us to resist the colonization of a singular, only seemingly neutral, perspective that closes down living potentialities.

This body of art: The singular plural of the feminine

I will explore the possibility that the feminine, like art, can be thought in terms of Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the singular plural. In Les muses, Nancy claims that art provides for the rethinking of a techne not ruled by instrumentality.2 Specifically, in rethinking aesthetics in terms of the debates laid out by Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, he resituates the ontological in terms of the specificity of the techniques of each particular artwork; each artwork establishes relations particular to its world or worlds. What is at stake in the singular plural is the multiplicity of relations that are lost in the unifying gestures that arise out of radical oppositions. Indeed, it is his critique of oppositions that underlies his refusal to articulate sexual difference. As he explains it, categories such as sexual difference imply a difference between things or substances rather than refer to the rapport between and within them. Sexuality is a differentiating of the self to itself and to others according to multiple gradients and their becomings that we merely represent as masculine/feminine, homo/hetero, and active/passive.3 But these representations do not capture the rapport; they restrict it. Accordingly, there is, for him, no subject, no substance and no limit as such. Indeed, ‘the body’ represents the totality he struggles against4; it is “itself replete with parts, organs – each one discrete and each one connected (by arteries, veins, tubes, ligaments) to the others to make up a system, and in turn, an organism”.5 This means, for Nancy, that sexuate identity subsists only in the relation, in the meaning that is asserted in the in-between, in the relation as the process of differentiation. What I would like to show here is that despite Nancy’s refusal to acknowledge sexual difference as such, the singular plural resonates with, and could guide our thinking about, the feminine. Indeed, since the singular plural refers to being as necessarily a being-with, I want to suggest, drawing upon the insights provided by Luce Irigaray6, that the feminine might be the possibility of the relation itself. Through sketching out my embodied encounter with a particular artwork, I explore here the significance of Nancy’s claim that the work of art establishes an alternate way of relating to techne than that elicited by instrumental means. The encounter with the artwork allows for a rethinking of techne that is rooted in the manifest, and in embodiment and not in the endless reproducibility of the representational. Yet what my encounter with this particular work also reveals is that coexisting with the techne of constructing is that of the cultivating of relations.