The Enigma of the Natural in Luce Irigaray

Abstract

Here, I want to take seriously the space that the text The Forgetting of Air1 holds in relation to the others in the Irigarayan corpus. Irigaray herself has emphasized the continuity that the text bears in relation to her later work,2 but Forgetting is most frequently grouped with her earlier writings, and thought of as a close cousin to the earlier Marine Lover.3 Given that it is usually Irigaray's early work that is identified with her mimetic methodology, Forgetting's occupation of the precipice between her earlier mimetic writings and her more recent work is worthy of note. Few philosophers are as closely identified with their method as Irigaray. For this reason, her movement in the last decade into more "concrete" venues-and the consonant transgression of her earlier methodology-may rightfully be eyed by her readers with curiosity, and perhaps even worry. Miming is at once the most irreverent and intimate of strategies when it comes to engaging Heidegger. Although her infamous stylistic strategies-namely, the mimicry and pastiche that became familiar in Speculum and the Marine Lover-are here employed in her negotiations with Heidegger, the book is not itself as mimetic as these earlier texts. Irigaray's position regarding Heidegger in the The Forgetting of Air is important in that it marks a strange tension between what, in her earlier work, was a mimetic engagement with nature, and what will become, after the publication of Forgetting, an increasingly (and problematically so) descriptive and speculative relation to the natural, Often, Irigaray's conflation of the feminine and the natural-largely accomplished in a language that is rife with references to maternity and morphology-has provoked concerns surrounding her alleged essentialism and heterosexism.4 Here I am less interested in the charge that Irigaray is an essentialist-for many critics now realize that this charge is complicated by the manner in which Irigaray tends to occupy those texts she is engaging-than I am in the interrogation of the manner in which "nature" and the "feminine" are bound to each other in the Irigarayan corpus.5 More precisely, I want to suggest that Forgetting betrays a profound and consequential ambiguity when it comes to the manner in which Irigaray engages the figure of "nature." Remembering Marine Lover, there is much in The Forgetting of Air that is familiar. One sees, for instance, a sustained discussion of the gift, and of a mourning that must refuse its true object. Just as she attributed Nietzsche's "abyssal forgetfulness" to his deep contempt for his own nostaligia for the mother (ML, 24), Irigaray notes that Heidegger's depiction of Being as a gift, or propriation, effectively elides and hence forgets that "prior to the gift of appropriation there is the gift of she who offers herself for this move"-a materiality, that is at once infinitely close, and infinitely far, from the representation of Being that it enables (FA, 136). The materiality that enables Heidegger's wonder, like the "other landscapes" that have been subjected to Nietzschean neglect, is the feminine, the maternal, the natural. For Irigaray, our current metaphysics implies a hatred of nature, an abhorrence of the natural, a desire on man's part to distance himself from this primal ground, unable to repay the debt that he owes to the mother who founds his social order despite her invisibility within it (FA, 75/71). Stemming from accounts such as these is the issue regarding whether or not Irigaray's conflation of the feminine and the natural-- which is iterated throughout her corpus-is not deserving of more critical scrutiny. The two are bound in The Forgetting of Air though their mutual predation by a masculine symbolic, which is itself reliant upon an exploitative ontology that renders some things (i.e., man, culture, etc.) intelligible only as others are made to serve as the unintelligible and invisible ground of this coming-to-be. …