Breeding Demons Chapter Six: Becoming-woman II. Turn of the screw

There are, as has been seen, connections between Deleuze (and Guattari) and Irigaray: if there were not, the claims of the previous chapter about the rhizomatic nature of machinic production, and of a system in which everything connects with everything else, would be demolished. Both draw on the model of dissipative structures; both address the problem of third things whose effects are crushed between the terms they relate; the rigid hold of the subject on production; the regulation of imagination; the role of the copula in a system which has no place for the copulation, except through the language of law which belongs only to one member. Both look at the function of pain in the constitution of representation, and at the formation of bodies as necessarily mutilated in advance of their entry into its system.

In Speculum, in a piece on Kant called Paradox a priori, Irigaray focuses on gaps within Kant covered over by vague mechanisms which have no proper location in relation to the two stems of knowledge, or fall on one side or the other of the divide between a sensible and supersensible world, or are excluded altogether: schemata and transcendental objects. These are the third things that Kant deploys as means of moving between domains, without considering the nature and effects of that movement except in relation to the two connected terms - in other words, on the confinement of relations within the terms related.

She identifies the function of the schema, third thing between sensibility and understanding, as that of negation: the multiplicity of sensations, of indeterminate matters, all the heterogeneous variations of nature, are negated in the formation of the passage through which understanding/I think draws on material nature and determines it as objective. Her case is illustrated with the example of enantiomorphic bodies, - of ‘differences that are internal as the senses teach’[276] - which are affective, rather than conceptual, and which Kant relates to intuition. The opening quotes of her paper refer to Kant’s theory of incongruent counterparts.[277] ‘I shall call a body which is exactly equal and similar to another, but which cannot be enclosed in the same limits as that other, its incongruent counterpart.’[278] Amongst Kant’s examples are left and right hands and ears, hair whorls, twining plants and the spiral curvatures of shells, but his argument extends to asserting a privilege of the right over the left hand, of the right over the left side of the body in terms of skill and strength, and an advantage of power that the right side of the body has over the sensitivity of the left.

So in terms of affective asymmetry, a body is constructed according to differences weighted with significances.[279] Kant’s solution to enantiomorphic bodies, alike in all properties, yet with unmistakable sensible differences, is to refer the problem to extensity, as a whole, in the form of an extensive magnitude, externalizing the affective differences in a world of constituted objects. Irigaray calls this mechanism of externalization a passage, and the function which she identifies as structuring the re-appearance of sensible differences in extensive space is the transcendental object, which introduces a symmetry into the world.[280] Through this object, the paradox of sensibly perceived and affective differences enter into the symmetries of a space whose planes intersect in the transcendental subject, the correlate of the transcendental object. Whereas the schema is integral to the determination of objects, however, the transcendental object functions regulatively:

In the first Critique Kant wavers, sometimes eliding differences between the transcendental object and the noumenon and sometimes upholding their separation, sometimes referring it to the thing-in-itself, and sometimes isolating it from the material problems implicated by this association. It’s positioning is very similar to that of the schema, both describing an ambivalent and vague distribution between sensibility and intelligibility, one of which is incorporated into the construction of representation, the other of which functions from the outside, as an Idea. Like the noumenon, it is Janus-faced: ‘regarded as the causality of a thing in itself, [Dinges an sich selbst] this object is intelligible in its action; regarded as the causality of an appearance in the world of sense, it is sensible in its effects.’[282]

There is thus an admixture of data compacted in the transcendental object, and it is this that leads to its tendency to collapse into either the thing-in-itself or the noumenon, the former pointing it outside the system of representation, and the latter internalizing it within the subject, as marker of its divided nature. However, it must retain its two-fold function, because, like the schema, it indicates a gap between sensibility and intelligibility that ‘can never be filled’, only gestured at, ‘through the ascription of outer appearances to that transcendental object [Gegenstande] which is the cause of this species of representations’ but ‘of which we shall never acquire any concept.’[283] In its relation to appearance, the transcendental object connects with intuition, and with the framework of limitation time and space become when instituted as axiomatically extensive.

On the side of sensibility, from which it cannot be separated, it tends towards the thing-in-itself, and to the problem of material causality: ‘what matter may be as a thing in itself (transcendental object [Objekt]) is completely unknown to us’[284]. This problem of matter as thing-in-itself, the transcendental matter referred to in earlier chapters, suggests a link between the transcendental object, the concept of reality and intensive magnitudes, since it is the latter, as has been said, which indicate the real in appearances. And Kant writes that transcendental objects ‘in our present state appear as bodies.’[285] Irigaray’s point addresses precisely the problem of what is negated in the movement from transcendental matter, as the intensive stuff of affects, to the transcendental object, whose ‘permanence as appearance can indeed be observed.’[286] What happens to bodies in the movement from intensive matter to appearances whose relations are a function not of the materiality involved but of the ‘present state’ of a subject? The word permanence signals a relation of the transcendental object to substance; to the negation of intensive differences within the substratum of appearances in general; to subjectivety; to the delimitation of sensible intuition as a complex of mobile and differentiated intensive magnitudes to logical time; to causality as a reference to determinate intensive quanta and to matter re-cast empirically, as a state.

Implicated with matter but not apparent, apparently but not cognitively causal, it must therefore be intelligible, although it is not known as an object: the transcendental object is ‘the purely intelligible cause of appearances’, and ‘can alone confer upon all our empirical concepts in general relation to an object, [Gegenstand] that is, objective reality.’[287] In this respect it is related to the principle of convertibility, and Kant allows then it may be called noumenon ‘for the reason that its representation is not sensible.’[288] It’s intelligible function is to ‘leave open a space which we can fill neither through possible experience nor through pure understanding’[289]. In its intelligible form it is the terminus of contingency, a thought-entity without reason which we ‘have not the least justification for assuming.’[290]

Irigaray’s argument is that the schema is a mechanism for disguising the transition from intensive, affective differences to extensive, geometric differences, and that the transcendental object performs a similar function, but this time the transition is between the limits of human knowledge and an intellectual intuition that must be assumed but cannot - like the transcendental object - be known or presumed to be constitutive of experience..

As the schema allows for the reconciliation of sensibility and understanding, so the transcendental object allows for the reconciliation of understanding and reason, since in its intelligible form it serves as the object of a transcendent idea, and can thus be utilized regulatively, thought not constitutively. And Kant does indeed refer to analogies as the ‘only resource’ for making the movement between concepts of experience and ‘some sort of concept of intelligible things’.[292]

Irigaray’s problem is with the nature of time involved in this process, of whose time Kant is referring to, and her question is: what is the time of the mirror? ‘What can be more similar in every respect and in every part more alike to my hand and to my ear that their images in a mirror?’ Kant asks.[293] Irigaray turns the question back on him, however, asking why asymmetry, rather than symmetry should be problematic, and concludes that ‘Un miroir, donc, ici s’avoue comme supportant déjà l’appréhension des objets (already a mirror turns out to support the apprehension of objects)’.[294] This was seen in the previous chapter, in the changing faces of nature according to the change relations amongst the faculties, nature always reflecting the order or chaos of the subject. Why should it be more strange that differences rather than identities are reflected? And does it make sense to speak of differences as reflected, in the absence of a unifying function which could testify to the fact that yes, indeed, those difference reflect these? Irigaray’s argument drives towards the inevitable conclusion that reflection and difference are incompatible, the former belong to the specular economy of rational insight and the latter to an empirical economy of touch, and that attempts at their reconciliation results only in the negation of difference by the cycle of the same particular to reflection.

Kant was concerned, in his argument with Leibniz, not to conceptualize spatial relations, and thus referred the sensible differences amongst enantiomorphs to intuition: Irigaray’s question runs beneath this, and addresses the constitution of symmetry itself, the paradox of a world reflecting the identity of a subject, when it is, as Kant reflects, full of differences. How does the left side becomes collapsed into the right, sensibility into power? In her very different way, she is questioning the relation of synthesis to identity referred to in the previous chapter, and the representation of its products as a reflection of the legislative power of the subject.

Irigaray explores women’s position in Kant in terms of this gap, or mirror, as a surface of reflection presupposed, uncritically, in order to address the problem of enantiomorphs. The time is of the subject, the subject is man, and the mirror a refusal of the blindness which, as the last chapter showed, attaches to imagination and intuition. ‘Aveuglée dans le refus de son aeuglement par tout savoir qui, en son esprit, ne trouverait pas sa cause (In its own refusal of blindness, consciousness is blinded by all knowledge that does not find its cause in the mind itself).’[295] Each third thing, each movement from sensibility to understanding, in the schema, or from the sensible to the intelligible cause, through the transcendental object, reflects a new facet of a single point of convergence, and a different blindness, each of which finds its cure in a different configuration of light, a new image of ‘un Père qui n’existe que dans un désir de tout légiférer librement (a Father who exists solely in a desire to exercise law freely over everything).’[296] One blindness is given up for the sake of another, or one blindness is constructed in order to prove the necessity of another.[297]

Irigaray addresses the same aspects of Kant as does Deleuze, but for strategic reasons concentrates on the internalization of the world within a subject: ‘la scène se passe toujours dans sa maison, son esprit (the action is always inside his house, his mind).’[298] She understands the indispensable nature in Kant of a detour through the world, but attends to the re-formulation of that passage in terms of subjective reflection, the obliteration of a tacit symmetry with a spuriously problematic asymmetry and the representation of the world as mirror which reflects the laws of that subject.[299] She becomes the matter inside the system, but speaking with a foreign tonge, she subverts its order. Women become the carriers of vagueness, of the gap and the mirror, being situated both inside and outside, the material gathered in the detour through the world, a smoked and blackened mirror veiling perception, and the surface inverted in the mirror, a kind of difference which remains unanalyzed. The paradox a priori of Irigaray’s heading is this difference, incongruent and incommensurate with the representation or reflection of objects.

Irigaray draws her analysis through Kant’s theoretical writing and into the aesthetic and the collapse of imagination under the weight of its own inadequacy in the face of reason particular to the sublime, noting that it is the soul to which Kant appeals as a solution to appearance of the infinite and which paves the way to pleasure and to culture. She identifies the over-whelming nature of the sublime with the mother, and the culture which confines the legitimacy of the sublime with a site of learned resistance to and independence of its basis in that nature. Kant becomes caught in a bind, both searching for the presuppositions on which man bases his culture, knowledge, science and art, and simultaneously enclosing himself within a cycle of reflection which obviates the possibility of any real solution to his search.

Irigaray’s claim is that it is precisely this that Kant does allow; whichever way that subject turns, the nut will take the screw, nature will take the laws of the subject. This is the paradox of symmetry, the possibility of a space, or gap, sufficiently plastic to be moulded to the demands of representation, providing its real nature is not taken into account, providing the one difference which cannot be analyzed does not enter the house of the subject on its own terms, unmoulded, rather than as one of the building blocks of its erection. Providing it remains a means to the achievement of a value outside itself. It is the cruelty of this operation she challenges.

Irigaray is a very difficult writer; her language resists the subtractive moves that Deleuze makes on Kant, and in this sense she is entirely successful in producing structures irreducible to their parts. She runs very swiftly over an immense field, racing in the space of thirteen pages through the three Critiques, collecting as she passes snippets from the Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime, and from Kant’s writings on the family, and the rights of its members. This kind of overflight is another feature she shares with Deleuze; rather than picking over the bones of an argument, they catch what is integral to the machines they are building and incorporate it in the mechanisms of her escape. Her “method” - and as with Deleuze, this is a difficult word to use in relation to Irigaray - is to deploy the abstract machine, two lips which are not one, by operating both inside and outside the system simultaneously. However, Irigaray’s escape is less effective than that of Deleuze; her critique does not quite succeed in escaping its negative function of jamming theoretical machinery, and as a result its positive consequences tend towards a valorization of the mysterious and a definition of women in terms of motherhood, or in relation to a female divine and a feminine ethic.

This is extremely problematic at an empirical level. Algerian women are shot in front of the classes they teach, but in Rwanda women have been implicated in massacres: women leave the Philippines for work in Saudi Arabia, but are not paid and beaten, by both men and women, whilst in the U.S. and in England, girl gangs thump their “sisters”, sometimes to death. The dream of women united through their differences is a white liberal construct, and does not take account of the real and extreme range of differences amongst women, deploying, if only implicitly, an appeal to a unified thought of “woman”. I prefer to retain a potential hostility. An image of sex replaces the image of thought and becomes equally restrictive. The only way out of this problem is to characterize those behaviours which do not coincide with the idea of universal sisterhood as produced by men: however, this returns women to the status of victims. Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of a body in terms of the machines it plugs into does not appeal to a base identity in terms of which all relations are understood, and so does not meet with these problems.

Where Irigaray’s critique of Kant is most problematic is in its adoption of his formulation of nature in the sublime as massive, all-powerful and over-whelming, her association of this with the figure of the mother, and of imagination with women. Her mimetic jamming method necessitates this, since it operates by keeping very close to the problems thrown up by a writer, as if both in parallel to him whilst at the same time cutting across and over, exposing incoherencies and logical trickery. She follows the detour of the Kantian subject through the outside, but her method does not allow her to build from the outside and away from the structures she criticizes, and so their ground does not lose its security. It is in this respect that Deleuze’s solution is more effective; by attending to the micro-deviations and molecular disturbances in the ground, and piecing together elements which in turn exacerbate those disturbances whilst at the same time escaping the structures, Deleuze builds a machine, whilst Irigaray constructs an image of women, which does not mirror the subject, but nonetheless remains biunivocally related to it, in that it retains precisely that mystery with which philosophy and history have long attached to the fairer sex. Moreover, by reading relations in terms of sexual difference, she repeats the very problems for which philosophy is attacked by feminism.

[277].The context of Kant’s argument is a debate with Leibniz; for Leibniz,space is an abstract and mathematical description of relations that hold between objects. Kant’s claim is that he is providing the philosophical grounds of the possibility of Leibniz’s mathematical determinations. His solution in Directions of Space is later revised. Using the same example as that in Directions in the Inaugural Dissertation, in the later work he reaches a different conclusion, which heralds the so-called critical turn. In the Prolegomena he writes: ‘What is the solution? These objects are not representations of things as they are in themselves, and as some pure understanding would cognize them, but sensuous intuitions, that is, appearances, whose possibility rests upon the relation of certain things unknown in themselves to something else, viz., to our sensibility.’(K,IV:286) The Newtonian solution of an actual absolute space is abandoned for one arising out of the Copernican revolution, and the reference of sensibility to the pure form of intuition.

[279].And it was from Adam’s left rib, the myth goes, that God created Eve.

[297].The word pupil comes from the Latin pupilla, meaning ‘a little doll’; the Hebrew expression for pupil is similar, eshon ayin meaning ‘little man of the eye’. When looking in the eye of your fellow man, you are supposed to see a doll-like reflection of yourself, a sort of visual homunculus.

[299].The problem is spurious because in the case of a space containing nothing but a single hand, the hand itself may be asymmetric, but it is meaningless to speak of it as either a left or a right hand in the absence of any other structure; it is not merely, as Kant says ‘completely indeterminate in respect of such a property’(K,II:383) but completely senseless to question whether such an object is a right or left hand, because left and right mean, in a Humpty Dumpty way, whatever we want them to mean. Only when a body missing a hand is introduced, the sides of which have already been decided in relation to left and right (power and sensibility, good and evil, Adam and Eve, etc.,), does the question of which hand it is make sense: and then the problem can be resolved by naming the hand right and in turn the side of the body on which it fits can be called right. Only when there are two asymmetric objects present in the same space do the labels applied to each cease to be arbitrary.