Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 13:17:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Mary L. Keller" <mlkeller-AT-mailbox.syr.edu>
Subject: Re: J'aime a toi



Silence, emptiness, and negativity are such complex notions, and I wonder
if part of the trouble in interpreting Irigaray's work is that, whereas a
reader of french feminism might be familiar with "the dialectic" as a
concept with a history and tremendous ramifications given how one reads
the dialectice, "the negative" draws a blank.  An unrelated work which
nevertheless gives specificity and sophistication to the reading of
negativity is Newman Robert Glass's -Working Emptiness: Toward a Third
Reading of
Emptiness in Buddhism and Postmodern Thought-.  I hope that ultimately the
Irigaray and Kristeva scholars who are interested in negativity will
engage this book because it articulates so clearly what is ethically at
stake in notions of negativity, silence, emptiness. I think many feminists
are as skeptical of the Buddhist no-self as they are with with Irigaray's
negative for similar reasons.  Similarly, differance as a network of
forever negative differences is problematic for an ethics of
difference.  Irigaray's notion that the negative can give access to the
other of sexual difference and thereby become happiness without
annihilating is unsatisfying to me in its almost insouciant disregard for
the raced and gendered bodies who will have different modes of agency even
in the space of the negative, unless the negative somehow reduces us to a
common power?  It is unsatisfying as well in terms of a question of
lesbian desire--would it be at a loss in the place of the negative cuz it
wouldn't have a limit to its gender?  For this reason I want to know more
about her field of the negative because that is where the ethical decision
making would come from.  

> On Wed, 24 Jul 1996 CPeebles-AT-aol.com wrote:
> 
> > An ethical encounter between men and women, she writes, would be
> > characterized by the importance of an absolute silence in order to listen,
> > and by the reversal of the negative -- into the possibility of love and of
> > creation -- as the limit of one gender with respect to another gender. 
> 
> Irigaray writes "... the negative can mean access to the other of sexual 
> difference and thereby become happiness without annihilating in the 
> process. Hegel knew nothing of a negative like that. ... The negative of 
> sexual difference means an acceptance of  the limits of my gender and a 
> recognition of the irreducibility of ther other."  Are we on he same page?
> 

Mary Keller, Ph.D. Candidate
Syracuse University