Luce Irigaray

Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us

Entering into presence with an other is generally submitted to the rules of a world that is presumed to be neutral with respect to each one and to which each one must conform. Communicating with the other would require the neutralization of the singular belonging from each and the adoption of an artificially neutral attitude that cuts us off from our energetic resources. Our natural energy is not yet educated towards a communication with respect for our difference(s). This energy is left both uncultivated and repressed. It remains in a natural state in which only degrees of intensity exist, an intensity that sometimes needs to be released through acts of instinctive domination or submission, unless it is transformed into a neutral energy that cannot stop increasing and thus it also needs to be reduced.

Coming into the World

Coming into the world initially means coming from an other, leaving a first environment, a first dwelling in an other. There the surroundings were liquid and warm, and the foetus lived in almost weightlessness, beyond the fact that its weight was carried by an other. Air and food were also provided by the other. Giving birth to itself, the new human behaves like a demiurge and takes an incredible risk. It can do nothing else, but such an exploit will prey on its entire existence as an incentive to and an anguish of venturing to attempt the impossible: to live by oneself. Coming into the world amounts to exposing oneself to dying for living.

Ethical Gestures Towards the Other

I have already written a lot about ethical gestures towards the other. More generally, I could say that, from the beginning, the aim of my work is to try to favour ethical relations between human beings. Now this proves to be impossible in a culture or tradition in which the subject appears as neuter or neutral, though it is defined starting from the necessity for man to overcome his natural origin and belonging without cultivating them in an appropriate way. I had thus to start by criticizing a tradition that does not recognize the existence of two different subjects and does not care enough about ethics regarding their relations. Then, I had to propose the means for woman to constitute herself as an autonomous subjectivity, a subjectivity appropriate to her natural belonging. It is in the third phase of my work that I approached the positive definition of gestures that can favour ethical relations between man and woman, this relation representing the most basic and universal place where ethics must be exercised in order that it could become effective in all human relations in difference. I will gather here some conditions or practices that make possible ethical relations with the other. This approach to ethical gestures towards the other has already been developed in some of my books, especially in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, I Love to You, To Be Two, Between East and West, The Way of Love and Sharing the World.