"We are all of us, men and women alike, sexed. Our principal task is to make the transition from nature to culture as sexed beings, to become women and men while remaining faithful to our gender."
--Luce Irigaray (I Love to You 30)

To begin with, I will need to know to what I am to pledge my faith. I am either male or female--this is the logic upon which Irigaray's sexual difference is predicated--and as such it seems my choice is limited, but what does it mean to be faithful to a gender? In other words, of what is that gender composed that I am not to betray? For Irigaray, gender exists in nature, before culture, for we are to remain faithful while moving from nature to culture. Irigaray argues that "sexual difference is an immediate natural given and it is a real and irreducible component of the universal" (47). There is no escaping sexual difference: no escape from gender. Before I enter into any relationship with a universal, I am sexed either/or in a split that cannot be reduced to one. In this sense, it is a condition of my humanity that I am already incomplete, as half of the universal: "Neither you nor I are the whole nor the same, the principle of totalization" (105). Following Irigaray's thought, any philosophy that searches for the unification of humanity as one, as a neutered spirit, cannot recognize or respect the originary point of sexual difference and thus belongs, to borrow Derrida's language, among the "philosophies of violence." Derrida's inquiry refers to the Being of the other in general, but what other does not lie so close to the same of the self while remaining utterly recognizable and marked as other than the other of sexual difference? Philosophies which are "incapable of respecting the Being and meaning of the other . . . would be philosophies of violence. Through them, the entire philosophical tradition, in its meaning and at bottom, would make common cause with oppression and with the totalitarianism of the same" (91). Systems which reject the sexual split which marks each of us would, in Irigaray's eyes, lead only into the violence of authoritarian thought and method.

Although Irigaray argues that the split between male and female occurs before language, before thought, in the body as it is created, male and female, that is not to say that man and woman exist before language, before thought. However, Irigaray does not always make this distinction, at times referring to man and woman as the gender and at times considering them to be socially constructed roles. At this point, the extent to which language obscures the inquiry both hampers and addresses the directive to remain faithful to our gender. I shall use male and female to refer to the gender, while employing man and woman specifically in reference to constructions. This gesture may in some ways imply an over reliance on terminology, or perhaps the creation of a new hierarchy that must now be critiqued, but I see it as the only way to avoid a confusion arising from the interchanging of her terms. Man and woman come to us as roles, developments within discourse, which are what we become as we move from nature to culture: from male to man, from female to woman. So in this manner, we are not called to remain faithful to our roles as man and woman because these roles have in many ways been constructed in order to constrain gender and to establish relationships of domination. Irigaray acknowledges that "to be born a girl in a male-dominated culture is not necessarily to be born with a sensibility appropriate to my gender. No doubt female physiology is present but not identity, which remains to be constructed" (107). Establishing an identity appropriate to her gender is extremely difficult, Irigaray claims, because Western civilization is "without any female philosophy or linguistics, any female religion or politics. All of these disciplines have been set up in accordance with a male subject" (44). So long as the subject or the universal remains male, science and philosophy will direct inquiries toward male concerns, producing a knowledge that is itself sexed rather than the neutral universal which it advertises itself to be.

In the preface to Thinking the Difference, Irigaray takes issue with that blindness as it has affected the way in which society thinks rights and equality:

denying that women and men are different in the name of some hypothetical social equality is a delusion, a bias in favor of a split - an impossible split--between private life and social identity. [...] I have female identity problems that current law does not resolve. I cannot feel that this 'universal' charter [Universal Declaration of Human Rights] includes me unless I renounce my sex and its properties" (viii-ix).

According to Elizabeth Grosz this question may not need an answer, because what becomes important is not the answer but the posing of the question, the very thinking of the difference: "In the case of feminists of difference, however, difference is seen not as difference from a pregiven norm, but as pure difference, difference in itself, difference with no identity" (53). The difference, then, has no meaning except in its being difference. This absence of ur-form conditions the power of sexual difference; as soon as we attach meaning we fall into language. The sexual difference can (or must) therefore exist beyond language as an unexplored and unexplorable possibility at least in regards to identifying the "essence of man or woman." However, this existence seems entirely problematic for any use in the world of "lived reality," which a feminist praxis presumably wishes to impact. If we believe with Derrida "there is no thought before language" (115), then sexual difference is exiled not only beyond linguistic representation, but also beyond thought: it is the unthinkable. We become enmeshed in language at the moment of the thought--we can take the next step to say at the moment of subjectivity--and as such linguistic subjects, there can be no direct access to the pure difference of sex. Irigaray under these conditions calls us to be faithful to a nature we cannot know. To be faithful to the unknown.

Who then knows when we have been or will be faithful? Deeply embedded in Irigaray's critique is the insistence that we have not been faithful, that patriarchal society has stilted not only woman but also man, yet we may be in danger of reinscribing a different sort of violence altogether if we formulate new philosophies based upon a misunderstood sexual difference. I do not feel we should let this fear of misunderstanding close the rupture that thinking difference creates. Rather the important point is that we, in western society at least, currently reproduce cultural forms which prevent us from ethical approaches to sexual difference, regardless of the nature of that difference: "this lack of definition of the alterity of the other has left all thought, the dialectical method included, in a state of paralysis, in an idealistic dream appropriate to a single subject (the male) [...] and has left religion and politics to an empiricism profoundly lacking in ethics when it comes to respect between persons" (61). Our unwillingness to think difference has led, in her mind, to an impasse that cannot be resolved without abandoning the single (male) subject and replacing it with a "definition of the alterity of the other." In other words, to define the difference that exists beyond language. Irigaray may not claim to know the "truth" of our sexes, and she may not describe what she seeks as truth , but her language cannot help but lead the reader in that direction on occasion: "human kind cannot develop a civilization without taking care to represent with validity the two genders it is in reality" (44). With validity, in reality: two difficult phrases for us to deal with in the poststructural moment, but also the constructions we must accept if we are to move toward that ethics of human respect.

The critique of Irigaray may very well be situated in a refusal to ascribe usefulness to a sexual difference that remains inaccessible, indescribable. However, I feel such a critique misses the crucial thrust of her polemic, because to a certain extent it is only in giving up our claims to accessibility without giving up the inaccessible that we can open a relation to the other, be he or she racial, sexual, or "simply" another person. She writes, "I recognize you means that I cannot know you in thought or in flesh. [...] I recognize you goes hand in hand with: you are irreducible to me, just as I am to you" (103). I must recognize you in your difference from me, in that which escapes my understanding or my knowledge. It is a relationship with the unassimilable that patriarchy denies, although, considering Derrida's conception of the encounter with the other, such a relationship is to a certain degree always present, always made absent, in the system: "Doubtless the encounter with the unforseeable itself is the only possible opening of time, the only pure future, the only pure expenditure beyond history as economy. But this future, this beyond, is not another time, a day after history. It is present at the heart of experience. Present not as a total presence but as a trace" (95). The radical alterity of the other lies at the base of our systems which set out to deny such difference and which have such a difficult time in thinking the difference because it requires thinking the origin, an activity that shakes the entire structure in a Derridean analysis: it exposes the contradictions that must be forgotten in order to make the system possible.

Thinking the origin may be an impossible (in the sense of generating final meanings) but altogether necessary task as a reminder that language through the very production of meaning is at base a forgetting of origins: "metaphor would be the emergence of language itself. And philosophy would be this language; [...] philosophy can only speak it, state the metaphor itself, which amounts to thinking the metaphor within the silent horizon of the nonmetaphor: Being" (112). The "beyond language" may very well be unrealizable within language, but the refusal to acknowledge it constitutes language as a totality that is not metaphor but the "real thing." And that is a betrayal. This difference in language that Derrida explores aligns with Irigaray's sexual bifurcation of humanity by insisting on the usefulness--the necessity even--of the irreducible unknown in the other's Being: "permitting to let be others in their truth, freeing dialogue and the face to face, the thought of Being is thus as close as possible to nonviolence" (146). That stretch towards the other which refuses to (attempt to) contain the other makes an ethics of difference possible and desirable as the lessening of violence.

To refuse this opening to the other on grounds of its inaccessibility, claiming that since we are constituted in language, anything "beyond language" is essentially meaningless and therefore unimportant, does not avoid violence and may be in danger of forgetting the strategic aspect of strategic essentialism, albeit in an inverted manner. According to Spivak, strategic essentialism "has to look at where the group--the person, the persons, or the movement--is situated when one makes claims for or against essentialism. A strategy suits a situation; a strategy is not a theory" (4): one occupies an essence productively when one uses it to further his or her escape from an oppressive representation, but it must always be remembered as a means, not as an end, because its rigidity reveals its limits. The inverse would be a strategic antiessentialism that takes itself to be theory and not method: an antiessentialist essentialism that can certainly be as dangerously dogmatic as a strict essentialism. Such a position arrogates to language--to social constructivist theories- a totality that it has been busy dismantling. In bringing the Derridean project into the argument, Spivak reminds us that "the real of deconstruction is neither essentialist nor antiessentialist. It invites us to think through the counterintuitive position that there might be essences and there might not be essences" (10). The deconstructive critique tells us not to place a blind faith in our positions or even the labels under which our positions gather.

The undecidability in language--that "counterintuitive" moment--should not stand as a wall against our moves toward despite the threat of violence which Derrida warns will always attend the encounter with the other: "the necessity of gaining access to the meaning of the other (in its irreducible alterity) on the basis of its 'face' [...] and the necessity of speaking of the other as other, or to the other [...]--these necessities are violence itself, or rather the transcendental origin of an irreducible violence" (128). The step toward that which cannot be known will of course be a mis-step to an extent, but it must be taken nonetheless, "for this transcendental origin, as the irreducible violence of the relation to the other, is at the same time nonviolence, since it opens the relation to the other. It is an economy" (128-9). Thought in terms of economy, violence loses its essence as pure evil because contained within the originary violence of language is the opening to nonviolence. Significantly, Derrida does not forget originary violence, but neither does he halt his project in its face; he grasps toward the other remembering the origin- even as it disappears in the remembrance--that representation and meaning would forget. The escape from the violence of representation consists not in an absolute escape but in the understanding that representation, despite our best efforts, is always already violence.

What opens for Irigaray in the thinking of sexual difference is the possibility for the closest thing to nonviolence, which would allow for history "to get away from master-slave relationships" (62). The step towards sexed human subjectivities overwhelms the inscription of woman as man's lack and forces a re-vision of traditional modes of analysis, including psychoanalytic theory, which must be understood in many, if not all, of its claims to produce culturally specific and not psychologically a priori "truths." Irigaray argues that in any theory in which woman is "the complement to man, his inverse, his scraps, his need, his other [...] she cannot be truly other. The other that she is remains trapped in the economy or the horizon of a single subject" (63). In the face of a radical alterity, woman cannot simply be man's complement because that would subsume otherness under the sign of the same. We must be mindful of the delicate play between same and other that this critique approaches: to be truly other implies an inaccessibility, but at the same time we must respect that inaccessibility because we accord to the other an ego--in other words seeing in the other the same claim to respect that we would make for ourselves. According to Derrida, "to refuse to see in it [the other] an ego [...] is, within the ethical order, the very gesture of all violence. [...] The other as alter ego signifies the other as other, irreducible to my ego, precisely because it is an ego" (125). Seemingly paradoxically, we must recognize the other as irreducible to us because we accord it qualities similar to our own.

This contradiction persists at the root of Irigaray's perception of sexual difference, because faith to our gender demands a "relation between man and woman, men and women, [which] takes place on the grounds of a groundless ground" (107). The "pure difference" that Grosz describes forms a strategic ground which must remain ephemeral; to make of it a grounded ground, a fixity, risks reinscribing the rigidity which Irigaray conceives it to be combating. This paradox may appear to erode the political effectivity from her analysis, but in another sense it may be the very possibility of such effectivity. In the context of language's breakdown in the face of the other, Derrida argues that

this contradiction and this impossibility are not the signs of 'irrationality': they are the sign, rather, that one may no longer draw inspiration from within the coherence of the logos, but that thought is stifled in the region of the origin of language as dialogue and difference. This origin, as the concrete condition of rationality, is nothing less than 'irrational,' but it could not be 'included' in language. (128)

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Irigaray, Luce. I Love to You. New York: Routledge, 1996.

---. Thinking the Difference. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Spivak, Gayatri. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993.

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