From: CPeebles-AT-aol.com
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 09:48:41 -0400
Subject: Re: J'aime a toi


Mary Keller writes:
"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."
I think your concerns are very important ones, and have only recently begun
to receive attention. But I do have to question whether or not the assumption
of Irigaray's "disregard" is made to hastily. She specifically addresses the
question of racial difference in *J'aime a toi* for example, and the question
of lesbian desire in numerous of her writings, asserting (to be brief)
basically that (only) with the advent of sexual difference can there be a
lived, creative recognition of other differences. Ultimately, I don't think
her negative is a "negative" at all in the sense that she tries to transform
the very thought of the negative (in conjunction with, after Heidegger, the
very thought of being). 
--Catherine