Sexual Difference as Model: An Ethics for the Global Future

Abstract

In Ethique de la diffirence sexuelle (1984), Luce Irigaray targeted language and lovefor her, inseparable from each other-as the two areas of focus for the elaboration of an ethics of sexual difference. The heterosexual couple seemed to have taken on a new, and somehow inappropriately central, importance in Irigaray's thought in the early eighties; however, the projected mutations in language and love theorized in Ethique did not exclusively concern the heterosexual relationship, even though many readers of Irigaray expressed just such reservations about the book. Ethique foregrounded the couple in the love relationship in order to rethink the philosophical basis of ethics in general, to develop new paradigms, beyond or outside of Western totalizing phalloand logocentrism, for human relations-not only relations between women and men, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, relations among women and relations among men. Irigaray carried on this project in subsequent works, in Sexes etparentis (1987), which as the title explicitly indicates, opens up the ethical debate to familial and genealogical issues and broadens her focus to include children and the ethical basis of their relationships to parents and more generally to adults of both sexes, and in Sexes et genres a travers les langues (1990), a cross-cultural report on her empirical studies of gender differences in language usage, which sheds new light on the linguistic and communicational issues she had presented in Ethique and even before, in several seldom read and even more rarely analyzed works of the late seventies and early eighties. J'aime a' toi (ILove to You) (1992) returns specifically to the more traditionally philosophical approach to the problems of language and love and their intertwining, and carries on the work projected in Ethique, but it goes much further in both the theoretical and the practical development of the concept of sexual difference as the foundation for a new ethics, a new culture of universal validity. J'aime a toi can be read as a follow-up to Ethique and as a founding text for the construction of an ethics of difference modeled on sexual difference, an ethics for the future of humanity in all of its diversity.