liquid ground

Tag: imaginary

  • With Irigaray: Feminine Imaginary

    How can I speak to you? You remain in flux, never congealing or solidifying. What will make that current flow into words? It is multiple, devoid of causes, meanings, simple qualities. Yet it cannot be decomposed. These movements cannot be described as the passage from a beginning to an end. These rivers flow into no single, definitive sea. These streams are without fixed banks, this body without fixed boundaries. This unceasing mobility. This life-which will perhaps be called our restlessness, whims, pretenses, or lies. All this remains very strange to anyone claiming to stand on solid ground. Speak, all the same. Between us, “hardness” isn’t necessary.1

    Feminine imaginary, the non-identical excess that permeates and escapes the frameworks and formulations of the Symbolic; formless and amorphous.

    Margaret Whitford writes about how the Pythagoreans viewed the world as a mixture of principles that had determinate form (good) and were indeterminate (bad).2 Formlessness and indeterminacy were bad or inferior as they implied irregularity, disorder, and chaos. Whitford draws a correspondence between Irigarayian imaginary that threatens rationality and the ontological categories of the pre-Socratics, opposing to critiques of Irigarayian imaginary and arguing that Irigaray aims to demonstrate patriarchy’s view of women as ‘natural’ and outside history.3

    The constitution of female subjectivity within and transforming the Symbolic order can be viewed as the forefronts of Irigaray’s project but the locus is the feminine imaginary that underlies the Symbolic as it is deeply connected to “the primitive materiality of experience, life and death, kin relationships, and the body.”4 It is also formative of Irigaray’s elemental works which she forms around natural elements -earth, air, fire, water- harnessing the feminine imaginary and embodied knowledge within the dominant structures of rationality.

    1. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Cornell University Press, 1985), 214-15. ↩︎
    2. Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, (New York: Routledge, 1991), 59. ↩︎
    3. Ibid. ↩︎
    4. Ibid. ↩︎
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    liquid ground

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“In me everything is already flowing, and you flow along too if you only stop minding such unaccustomed motion, and its song. Learn to swim, as once you danced on dry land, for the thaw is much nearer at hand than you think. And what ice could resist your sun? And, before it disappears, perhaps chance will have the ice enflame you, dissolving your hardness, melting your gold.

So remember the liquid ground. And taste the saliva in your mouth also—notice her familiar presence during your silence, how she is forgotten when you speak. Or again: how you stop speaking when you drink. And how necessary all of that is for you! These fluids softly mark the time. And there is no need to knock, just listen to hear the music. With very small ears.”

Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche