From: CPeebles-AT-aol.com
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 09:40:07 -0400
Subject: Re: J'aime a toi


Dear Rita and others,
Yes, I was thinking of what Irigaray has said about the stages of her work so
far (in the Hypatia interview), and also more generally about her attitude
towards both egalitarian and separatist forms of feminism. She has always
placed so much importance on two genders, and the fact that she begins this
text with an biographical evocation of a kind of 'moment' when she
experienced two genders engaged ethically and lovingly (the politcal
exchanges with Renso Imbeni), as well as with the problem of her place always
outside 'feminism' seems to jibe with this.
As for your thoughts/worries:
 "She is 
resucitating, I thought, a Hegelian negative dialectic, in the name of 
transforming, reversing, begining again but not from an 
original/originary position, sexual difference.  I still don't know 
wether to gasp, cry, or laugh at this, if this is what she is up to."
She does speak of reversing, but I don't think she's concerned to reverse a
Hegelian neg. dial., as she puts it on page 108 of the French text:
"[...]Marx renverse Hegel, Nietzsche reverse le platonisme, les
problematiques du retour renversent l'Histoire... Il est donc question de
renverser quelque chose d'exterieur a soi et de deja constitue comme tel.
[...]
"En ce qui me concerne, je me suit plutot renversee moi-meme." [and what
follows]
And she speaks somewhere else of a double dialectic on the level of each
gender to itself, before there can be an ethical relation between the two.
Irigaray IS provoking, I think, with her style, and probably means to be. It
is more and more declarative (one thinks a little of Nietzsche) but it also
always, I think, insists on leaving a space open for the other/reader, as has
been noted of her other texts.
I have to run for now, but I look forward to continuing the discussion.
Thanks for your response.
--Catherine.