Continental Philosophy Review 36: 353365, 2003. 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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A future horizon for art?

LUCE IRIGARAY translated by Jennifer Matey
Department of Philosophy, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794-3750 USA (E-mail: jmatey@sunysb.edu)

I have already conducted, along with other researchers1 of various cultural and linguistic backgrounds, analyses concerned with the relationship between the sexe or genre of the speaking subject and the constitution of the subjects discourse. This research consists of responses to questionnaires that bear on language and culture which were presented by investigators2 to mixed populations comprised of people of differing social backgrounds and cultures. Results from these analyses have already been published in the following books and essays: Le Temps de la difference, Je Tu Nous, Jaime toi, Le sexe linguistiques, Sexes et genres travers les langues. A trend that appears in the responses, across the mixed populations sampled but with diverse modalities, is the effacement of the mark of the female subjects genre; this trend appears in the discourse of both the men and the women surveyed. Another tendency discovered is for the designation of the female subject and the things which have a feminine gender to be associated with rather negative connotations. Many other characteristics mark the differences between mens discourse [parler-homme] and womens discourse [parler-femme], the discourse-of-the-man and the discourse-of-the-woman. I refer to such observations in the publications already cited. It occurred to me to investigate literary texts to see whether the same tendencies would be present there. I have selected four novelists3 from what I have on hand in my library. I chose: Marguerite Yourcenars Loeuvre au noir. Marguerite Durass Lamour. Maurice Blanchots Larrt de mort. Georges Batailles Le bleu du ciel. First, I counted the number of pages in each novel and divided each in half. Then I selected two pages from the middle and two pages from the beginning

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of each novel, except for Georges Batailles Le bleu du ciel. For Le bleu du ciel, the pages that I chose came from the middle of the text and then from three-quarters of the way through it, but I have verified that these pages are similar in all the relevant ways to the first pages of the novel. This procedure was to verify that the pages I selected were linguistically representative of those novels. Ive included a table with the percentages of all the subjects of propositions at the end of this paper. I was surprised to find that the trends in the representations of subjects from the perspective of genre are similar, or even more accentuated in the passages in these novels than in the speech of the students I previously studied. These results become even more interesting if one takes into account the fact that two of the authors- the women, Marguerite Yourcenar and Marguerite Durashave publicly declared that they were writing as asexuate4 subjects, as if being a writer were divorced from the phenomenon of being a woman. A. In the two sections that I analyzed from Marguerite Yourcenar, the animate human subjects5 are represented as the following: First excerpt: il [he] : 47.06% (= il [he] or homme [man] or mdecin [masculine physician]) elle [she] : 0% Second excerpt: Then for the two excerpts: il : 78.5% elle : 6.45% il : 95.88% elle : 4.12%

No subjects are expressed as je [I] in these excerpts. The natural elements figure as subjects: First excerpt: Second excerpt: Together: 7.84% 2.15% 10.0% : 2 = 5% on average.

B. In the passages from Marguerite Duras, the animate human subjects are represented: First excerpt: il: 90.0% (= il or parts of il : his eyes, his look, his voice, etc.) elle : 10.0% Second excerpt: il : 100% (il = il + parts of il 10%)

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If I add together the results from the two excerpts, I get 95% of the subjects represented as il, and 5% of them as elle. These figures are relative, that is to say, they are an estimation of the total animate human subjects, which are a subset of the larger group of total subjects. In actuality, women represent 6.1%, and men 61.22% for the first passage, and 0% women and 82.69% men for the second passage. So, 6.12% women and 143.91% men, or, on average, 3.06% women and 71.95% men. The natural elements figure at : First excerpt: Second excerpt: Together: 26.53% 11.54% 19.0%

C. In the passages from Maurice Blanchot, the animate human subjects are represented in the following way: First excerpt: Second excerpt: je : 100.00% je : 31.15% il : 11.48% elle : 14.04% For the two excerpts that amounts to: 92.8% masculine subjects (65.5% of which are represented je) 7.2% feminine subjects (as elle) In absolute percentages, using the subset of animated human subjects to gauge the proportion of masculine to feminine, we find that the distribution between the works of Marguerite Yourcenar, Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot to be roughly the same: elle : 4.12% and il : 95.88% elle : 5.00% and il : 95.00% elle : 7.20% and il : 92.80% But: Maurice Blanchot uses je for males in his novel 65.5% of the time. The remaining ils are indefinite plurals. Elle designates a woman with whom the man may potentially become emotionally involved with.

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Marguerite Yourcenar doesnt utilize je at all, the elle is always described through her relationship with a man. Marguerite Duras doesnt utilize je either; il is singular, and elle is used to designate another woman in the context of two men and one woman. D. In the excerpts from Bataille, the animate human subjects are represented as: First excerpt: Second excerpt: il(s) [he, they] : 4.70% Je (masculine) : 54.80% il(s) : 1.38% je (masculine) : 36.11% elle : 36.11% je, tu [I, you] : 6.95%

In the second excerpt, 48.52% of he subjects are elle, they are singular, and they designate either the current sexual protagonist or an elderly maid. When there is dialogue, the feminine use of je[I] amounts to only 1.39% and the feminine tu [you], 4.17%. Thus, elle is used for 42.96% of the subjects and the feminine tu or je is used for only 5.56%. In spite of the more pronounced incidence of the pronoun elle, it is still the case that 37.49 of the je and the tu are masculine. Thus proportionally, the ratio of masculine to feminine subjects is 48.5% masculine in comparison to 30.51% feminine. Among these subjects, 40.45% of the masculine subjects are expressed as je whereas only 7% of the feminine subjects are expressed as je. Elle appears most frequently in Georges Batailles, Le bleu du ciel. But what sorts of female characters does elle refer to? In what light is the feminine subject who is represented here being portrayed? La vieille bonne entra portant sur un plateau le petit djeuner de Xnie. Elle le dposa sur une petite table pied. En mme temps, elle me portait un grand verre de jus dorange, mais javais les gencives et la langue enflammes, javais plus peur quenvie de boire. Xnie versa pour elle le lait et le caf. Je tenais mon verre la main, voulant boire, je ne pouvais pas me dcider. Elle vit que je mimpatientais. Je tenais un verre dans la main et je ne buvais pas. Cetait un non-sens vident. Xnie, lapercevant, voulut aussitt me dbarrasser. Elle se prcipita, mais avec une telle gaucherie quelle renversa, en se levant, la table et le plateau: tout seffondra dans un bruit de vaisselle casse. Si, ce moment, la pauvre fille avait dispos de la moindre raction. Elle aurait facilement saut par la fentre. A chaque minute sa prsence injustifiable. Elle se baissa, ramassa les morceaux pars et les disposa sur un plateau: de cette manire elle pouvait dissimuler son visage et je ne voyais pas (mais je devinais) langoisse qui la decomposait. (1957, pp. 107108)

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[The elderly maid come in, carrying a tray with Xenies breakfast. She set it down on a little stand. With it she brought a large glass of orange juice for me; but my tongue and gums were inflamed, and I dreaded drinking even more than I craved it. Xenie poured out her hot milk and coffee. I held my glass in my hand, wanting to drink and incapable of making up my mind to. She saw that I was getting impatient. I was holding my glass in my hand and not drinking- a palpable absurdity. As soon as she saw this, Xenie wanted to relieve me of the glass. She leapt up but so clumsily that she upset the table and tray as she rose. Everything went down in a crash of broken dishware. If at that moment the poor girl had had the slightest reaction, she might well have jumped out the window. With every passing minute her presence at my bedside was becoming ridiculous. She felt that presence to be without justification. She squatted down, picked up the scattered pieces, ad set them on the tray. In this way she was able to conceal her face; and I did not see (but guessed) the anxiety that was contorting it.] Thus, in these four novels, differences between the sexes of the authors correspond to significant differences in the grammatical expression of the subjects; differences in number, in the manner of representation, in qualities attributed to each of the two genre, in the type of actions that coincide with their presence or representation. This means: 1. That the masculine sex is represented as a subject much more frequently than the feminine sex. 2. That the masculine sex uses the first person je [I] frequently, but the feminine sex is almost never expressed this way, unless in cases of degeneracy or corruption. I offer Marie-Madeleine and Clytemnestre of Marguerite Yourcenars Feux as beautiful examples. These two texts are almost, if not absolutely, the only ones in which the feminine speaks as je [I], but in the instances of prostitution and murder. There are some instances of the feminine use of je in Anna Soror, but even then with regards to incest- in that instance being between brother and sister. The feminine je also exists as a passive site for the reception of a mans actions, especially in the work of Duras. 3. Designating the subject of enunciation [lnonc] as je often supposes the reflexive action of discussing oneself. The subject of the enunciation [lnonciation], or the subject of the utterance, expresses himself or herself as being the agent of the enounced action. Here men designate themselves with je [I], but the women seldom do. The men say je vois ceci [I see this], je fais ceci [I do this], je rencontre tel ou telle [I encounter something or other], etc. 4. Elle is used more frequently in the texts of male authors, particularly in the work of Bataille but also in Blanchot, where elle designates the partner or

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the object of the action of a man who is expressed je [I]. In this case, it is interesting to analyze the qualities of the female characters. In the female authors work, the elle is often veiled under the appearance of natural elements. 5. Il is used frequently in the texts written by women. It is used to designate those by whom or for whom the woman is affected, whether directly, as in the text of Marguerite Duras, or indirectly, as in the text of Marguerite Yourcenar. For instance, in the work of Duras, the il designates the romantic or erotic partner. But she doesnt say, je laime, je le desire, but instead il me prend, il fait ceci, il a ceci. What little action the female may initiate herself, is ultimately perceived as determined by him. Il is always that which affects elle more or less in the present. This doesnt apply to the work of Marguerite Yourcenar, as she is a writer of historic novels. There the il is mediated. The il isnt an immediate inspiration of Yourcenars but a cultural personality that she has recreated. There are passages in her work where the character speaks as a subject in the first person with je [I], but the je expresses Zenon or Hadrien or Alexis; it does not express Marguerite Yourcenar herself, or even a woman (except for Marie-Madeleine and Clytemnestre, elle being utilized in Antigone and Sappho). Sometimes she writes from the perspective of a masculine subject [un style je-homme]. This does not necessarily signify that she is virilode, but that speaking as a masculine subject has been culturally valorized as part of history, whereas speaking as a feminine subject [je-femme] has not. It has been much more difficult in modern cultures to empathize with a female subject [as je-femme] or to imagine elle subjects, than it is to imagine from the masculine perspective, [je-homme] or imagine il subjects. The characters that Marguerite Yourcenar represents in the first person with je, and which she represents as elle, arent historically insignificant characters: Clytemnestre, Antigone, Sappho, Marie-Madeleine;6 these figures are even more ancient than Zenon and Hadrien. It is easy to trace the time in history when the masculine il [he] becomes the generic sign for the general and neuter human race [humain genre]. It is accompanied by mens appropriation of the divine. Man has become God (and God, man), il has become Il. Man, Il, the people of men, abandon the feminine dimension of the divine. They reserve only the virgin-mother so they can signify the necessity of an incest taboo between mothers and sons- between others, and probably also so that the cosmic world can become subject to the social universe. That amounts to subordinating the divine to masculine society and to the mothering of sons. The divine is no longer situ-

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ated in the female lover [lamante]7 of the man as it is in some more feminine cultures. The association of the divine with an incest taboo corresponds to one stage, not the whole of History, and it weighs heavily on the representation of sexuate subjectivity and on the justification for using the masculine form as the universal neuter. This association obviously doesnt correspond to an arbitrary and universal code. The privilege of ilIl [it] is correlated with the fact that the man had had, at one period in his history, a need distinguish himself as separate from the maternal body and from the cosmic universe with which he had associated the worship of maternal bodies. The operation was- and still is- so difficult, that the man, the population of men, have asserted, and still assert themselves to be the paradigm of the human race, the generic of the species, and the woman to be a simple reproductive servant or a sheer mimetic slave. This her-story has, through ignorance and forgetting, been established today as the absolute truth concerning natural and cultural reality- even though it was historically determined for the sake of the following necessities: 1. The man desired to impose an individual and collective identity. Unfortunately, he has imposed his identity as the sole possibility. In doing this, he has destroyed all traces of feminine culture and has named history his-time; Prehistory, chaos, disorder, the time of others. However, womens time has a history, laws, an art, a valuable writing, that it would be prudent to respect, by caring for the culture, and specifically, by caring for the social ethic, for the aesthetic, and for the truth not subjected to sectarian belief. 2. Man needed to create an incest taboo- something which the woman enabled by affirming the value of virginity for herself and among all women, in particularly mothers and daughters. This is the paradigm of their elle, the place of their transcendence. 3. The will or necessity for the population of men to manage society necessitated a system of symbols appropriate to their needs and desires. 4. Men willed or needed to assert their gods as the true gods. These are the cultural matrices of their Il, of their transcendence, since overcoming the maternal meant separating and distinguishing themselves from it. 5. Man had the will to create a second nature more perfect than the first- that corporeal and cosmic universe that he assimilates with the maternal, from which he needed to separate himself. All of these historic decisions, perhaps necessary for the population of men, have brought about a progressive impoverishment of our cultures and have

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made it possible, have even made it necessary, to believe that it has always been this way, and that it ought to be this way. This has destroyed all culture of the sexuate [of sexuality], which is necessarily bipolar, bi-logical, and whose fertility is still manifest in certain cultures. For example, in Indian culture the divinity of the feminine, and of the couple, are celebrated as the perpetual genesis of the cosmic universe and of spiritual time. For us, the habits of discourse, which traverse the results, pose serious ethical dilemmas. In effect, the men are practically the only subjects and the only interlocutors of verbal exchange. To take the womans place as money earner, heads of state and culture, is to be accompanied by an appropriation of their needs and desires through the rules and norms of discourse. This is nothing astonishing. To exchange products, whether cultivated or fabricated, and to govern citizens, necessitates symbolic laws. As the men have traditionally been in charge of these tasks, the laws have naturally been appropriated by them. The assignment of reproduction and caring for the domestic hearth to women didnt demand a very elaborate linguistic code, especially since children began to be educated outside the home, at school. Thus the feminine subjects language was diminished. Women were encouraged to speak of others, men and children, but not of themselves. Their discourse concerned concrete and immediate things; it concerned the preparation of meals and the upkeep of the household for example. In relationships with each other, women concerned themselves with dressing to be seductive and issues dealing with childbirth and childrearing. These dimensions of language are still evident in womens discourse, and they cannot be ignored in a culture where most conversations are no longer rooted in reality because of their repetitions of the past and their abstractions which lose sight of the subject matter and the interlocutor alike. But these facets of language also explain the difficulty that women have with: a) representing themselves b) establishing a dialectic involving themselves as empirical subjects c) respecting their mothers and other women as independent from themselves and autonomous d) giving models, plans, ideas, divinities, etc. . . Most women are not accepting when other women do so. They feel that women should remain empirical subjects, with masculine perspectives, or that women should develop masculine perspectives, unless we stick to an undifferentiated and impersonal on [one, we].8

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A change or raise in consciousness could lead us today to analyze linguistic systems, and not only the content of our discourse, as historically defined norms, not universal or arbitrary, but as susceptible to change, both voluntary and forced. To direct the evolution of language, in view to becoming more subjective, living both historically and divinely, seems to me a goal necessary of a more cultivated world. This subjective change demands a culture of sexuality, in particular, a sublimation of genitality, rather than reproduction, which isnt a true sublimation. This sublimation of genitality, and more generally, of sexuality, requires changes in all the symbolic systems: language in the strictest sense, art and images, religion, civil laws. This has been proven by the results of the linguistic tests, and the fragments of works of art analyzed regarding the representation of the sexuate subject. They both show that women are at best capable of referring to themselves as je [I]; but at the present, the stage of the third person elle, of objectivity of genre- with qualities, ideals, art that are appropriate for them, is outside the reach of women. Womens mark of self-determination, through a neuter identity, is accompanied by an implicit preference of others and their possessions, over the feminine. This tendency then, this mark of self-determination, is hardly enough to allow an ethic or aesthetic to be freely chosen. Acknowledgements The translator would like to thank Hlne Volat for her valuable research expertise. Percentages of all the subjects of the propositions The subjects are calculated after reduction of transformations (cf. Order sexuel du discours in Sexes et genres travers les langues) M. YOURCENAR Oeuvre au noir (Pliade Edition) 1. pp. 704706 (total subjects: 102) 2. pp. 559561 (total subjects: 93) 1) Proper names Il Common nouns On, qui, ils [one, whom, they] Parts of ils 44% 4% 2) 11%

41% 47.06% 7% 11% 2%

78.5%

362 Elle Abstract inanimates Concrete inanimates Natural elements Animal Tout [All] Cela, c [that, this] Il (impersonal)

LUCE IRIGARAY

0% 25.49% 12.15% 7.84% .98% 1.96% 1.96% .98%

6.45% 2.15% 4.30% 2.15% 6.45% 1.07%

M. DURAS- Lamour (Gallimard Edition) 1. pp. 78 (total subjects: 49) 1. pp. 7172 (total subjects: 52) 1) Homme, il, voyageur 48.98% [man, il, masculine passenger] Qui, on, nous (masculine) [whom, one, we] Parts of him Femme [woman] Natural elements Concrete objects or elements Abstract elements

61.22% 12.24%
6.12% 26.53% 6.12%

2) 75%

7.69%

82.69%

0% 11.54% 1.92% 1.92%

M. BLANCHOT- Larret de mort (Gallimard Editions) 1. pp. 78 (total subjects: 53) 2. pp. 7375 (total subjects: 61) 1) Je [I] (masculine) 62. 26% 2) 22.95% 1.64% 6.56%

Qui [who, whom](masculine) On [one, we] (masculine) Personnes, gens, ceux, ils [persons, people, these/they(masculine)] Celui qui [those, the ones]

11.48% 3.28%

45.91%

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363 6.58% 9.56% 13.11% 13.11% 9.84% 1.64%

La personne qui: elle [the person who: she] Animal Concrete inanimates Abstract inanimates Impersonals Indefinites Cela, c [this, that] 5.66%

G. BATAILLE- Le bleu du ciel (Pauvert Edition) 1. pp. 172173 (total subjects: 64) 2. pp. 107108 (total subjects: 72) 1) Je (masculine) 54.8%

Autres [Others](masculine) Elle Je, tu, prnoms, noms [I, you, first names, names] Commons (feminine) Concrete inanimates Abstract inanimates Indefinites Impersonals Notes

4.7%

2) 36.11% 59.5%

1.38%
36.11%

37.49%

12.5%

6.95% 14.% 14.%

48.62%

2.78% 6.94% 4.17% 1.39%

Translation from the French original: Irigaray, Luce. Un horizon futur pour lart? Compar(a)ison 1 (1993): 107116. 1. Irigaray uses both the masculine and feminine chercheuses and chercheurs. For Irigarays critique of the masculine/gendered use of occupational designators, see Thinking the Difference; and Linguistic Sexes and Genders and The Cost of Words, in Je Tu Nous.

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2. 3. 4.

LUCE IRIGARAY

5.

6.

7.

8.

Irigaray uses both masculine and feminine forms: Enquteurs-rices. Again, Romancires et Romanciers. Sexue suggests approximately either sexed or gendered, although, because the boundaries between these two concepts are heavily contested it is preferable not to force a stance on Irigaray which she has not explicitly taken. Some translators (e.g., David Macey) use sexuate, as I have here. In Linguistic Sexes and Genders,Irigaray observes that Living beings, the animate and cultured, become masculine; objects that are lifeless, the inanimate and uncultured, become feminine (Je Tu Nous, p. 70). Marie-Madeleine was a woman who was close to Jesus. Sappho was a poetess from Lesbos. The myths of both Clytemnestra and Antigone have significant value for Irigaray in terms of the institution of patriarchy and womens obedience to feminine or masculine symbolic orders. Cf. Civil Rights and Responsibilities for the Two Sexes, in Thinking the Difference; and The Bodily Encounter with the Mother, The Necessity for Sexuate Rights, and The Female Gender, in Sexes and Genealogies. Elsewhere Irigaray refers to the woman lover lamante where she specifically intends to indicate, not merely a female object of a mans affection, but an equally active subject in love that cannot be reduced to an immediate object of desire. See, The Fecundity of the Caress, in Face to Face with Levinas; and Questions to Emmanuel Levinas, in Re-Reading Levinas. Irigaray has also published this section, beginning from The assignment of reproduction. . ., in Le Temps de la diffrence: Pour une rvolution pacifique. I have consulted Karin Montins translation.

References
Bataille, Georges. Le bleu du ciel. Paris: Pauvert, 1957. Bataille, Georges. Blue of noon, trans. Harry Mathews. New York: Urizen Books, 1978. Blanchot, Maurice. Larrt de mort. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. Duras, Marguerite. Lamour. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Irigaray, Luce. Fcondit de la caresse: lecture de Levinas, Exercices de la patience 5 (1983), pp. 119137. [The Fecundity of the Caress, trans. C. Burke, in R.A. Cohen (Ed.), Face to Face with Levinas. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. Irigaray, Luce. Jaime toi: Esquisse dune flicit dan lhistoire. Paris: Grasset, 1992. [I Love to You: Sketch of a Felicity within History, trans. Alison Martin. New York: Routledge, 1996.] Irigaray, Luce. Je Tu Nous. Paris: Grasset, 1990. [Je Tu Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin. Routledge, 1993.] Irigaray, Luce. (1991). Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love. In Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Eds.), Re-Reading Levinas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Irigaray, Luce. Sexes et parents. Paris: Minuit, 1987. [Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York, Columbia University Press, 1993.] Irigaray, Luce. Le Temps de la diffrence: pour une rvolution pacifique. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1989. [Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution, trans. Karin Montin. New York: Routledge, 1994.]

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Irigaray, Luce, ed. (1987). Le sexe linguistiques. Special issue of Languages 85 (March). Irigaray, Luce, ed. (1990). Sexes et genres travers les langues: lments de communication sexue. Paris: Grasset. Yourcenar, Marguerite. (1968). Loeuvre au noir. Paris: Gallimard.

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