The Horror of Language: Irigaray and Heidegger

Abstract

ProQuest Information and Learning: Foreign text omitted. He is a professional. He has read at least ten poems a day for sixty years-that's 220,000 poems and probably a lot more. Not one of them was about breathing. Hayden Carruth Luce Irigaray's work The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger exposes the hidden assumptions in Heidegger's later thought in terms of the forgotten element of woman. As is the case in much of Irigaray's writing, she here draws upon a multilayered symbolic to document the complex nuances of her own thought, as well as that of her interlocutor. Here her work provides us with the challenge of thinking through Heidegger's interpretation of the pre-Socratic Greeks in his later philosophy. It is the symbolic of air, which Irigaray highlights, that offers the passage into Heidegger's thought. Though the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water provide the starting point for pre-Socratic philosophy, Heidegger's reading of the pre-- Socratics fails to fully account for the element of air as both the condition for the possibility of Being, and as the feminine element. Reading with Heidegger and employing his own brand of the phenomenological method, Irigaray exposes the weakness of his thought. While Heidegger revolutionizes our questioning of Being, his lack of awareness of the question of sexual difference makes his thought vulnerable to his own critique; he tells us that we must move beyond the ontological difference to ask the question of Being (a question that he continues to ask throughout his career), and yet he neglects to ask the question of sexual difference, which according to Irigaray grounds the very question of Being. Heidegger views the excess of absence and presence as essential to understanding the movement of Being, and yet it is Irigaray who reveals through the indication of the trace just what this excess is. Irigaray makes this evident not by challenging his method, but by using it herself through a mimetic engagement, and thus pushing Heidegger to a level of understanding that lies implicit in his work, but which he himself never achieves. The aim of this essay is to draw out Irigaray's allusions to language as it concerns her critique of Heidegger. In her text, Irigaray repeatedly refers to the outside of language-air-as a "horror." This horror is an absence (silent and invisible), but one that is a hidden necessity and excess to the dichotomy of absence/presence on which Heidegger grounds Being. My present essay undertakes the work of following how the horror of the silent voice is the seat of excess for Heidegger's understanding of Being. I make explicit those allusions in the text that reveal how Irigaray exceeds Heidegger's understanding of the elemental, disclosing air to be the primordial element of language, the primordial absence. I want to underscore the role of language for both Heidegger and Irigaray. Throughout Heidegger's corpus he understands language to be a central component of our experience of Being. In his later work, language is not only central but the preeminent experience of Being; it is in language that Being envelops us. Language plays a fundamental role in Irigaray's work as well. Irigaray critiques philosophy and psychoanalysis in its use and production of language. She enters into the language of these two disciplines to find that it covers over woman in and of herself apart from the categories produced by the hegemony of the Phallic economy. It is my opinion that we must understand Heidegger's take on language if we want to justly appraise and understand Irigaray's position. Further, it is only with this understanding that the complexity of Irigaray's relation to Heidegger is revealed. Very good scholarship on Irigaray has already pointed us to the impact of Heidegger's early work on Irigaray's thought.1 I would like to continue this examination by turning to Heidegger's later work on language. Irigaray scholars know the centrality of language for her project, but we have yet to realize the many levels of it at work. …