To Be Born (2017), Luce Irigaray
This book review discusses Luce Irigaray’s 2017 To Be Born. The text is contextualised within the Continental tradition, and its argument in favour of individual solitude and creativity is read through a clear indebtedness to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885).
Introduction
A highly influential cultural theorist, philosopher and psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray’s (1930 — ) latest offering To Be Born (2017), is a dense, but readable, defence of individuation amidst a culture that fosters conformity. Irigaray’s ‘Continental’ approach — that is, Philosophy as a way of life irreducible to mere formal study — to the questions that she raises is evident from the outset in a cryptic prologue. Thankfully, if/when the reader gets past the initial jargon laden introduction, the main body reads well, and the conclusion follows from the premises outlined beforehand. In sum, Irigaray argues for individual creativity, and notes the paradox of a single human life being the product of the coming together of two. The central strand of the text charts the nurture and socialisation of an individual child within contemporary Western culture as limiting their, hitherto unrealised, potential.
The text is emblematic of Irigaray’s trademark, highly creative, Hegelian-Nietzschean Phenomenology. In other words, she interrogates concepts with an equal amount of scepticism and fascination. The text advocates solitude and a space for individuation amidst an oppressive social totality. As such, echoes of Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as the Critical Theory of Theodor Adorno, as well as Michel Foucault, is apparent. These latter thinkers both investigate ways in which contemporary Western society, especially through culture and education, seeks to mould and control social subjects. The term ‘subject’, popularised by Cultural Theorist Stuart Hall, is itself telling; for under modern social norms, individuation cannot occur. Rather, the individual is subject to myriad forces seeking to control it.
In response to this challenge, Irigaray turns to traditions such a Yoga from the cultural East, as a means of cultivating an individuality through solitude, and inwardness: ‘a cultivation of breathing allows us to assume the solitude of our singularity’ (p.x). As a ‘being determined and limited’ (p.3), Irigaray, after Nietzsche, would have it that we ‘venture beyond what is already experience[d] of life’ (p.7). She acknowledges that challenging norms is not without danger, but that by centring oneself through the cultivation of breathing exercises, for example, that individuals may develop the courage to transcend dominant societal norms.
The three metamorphoses
Echoing Nietzsche, Irigaray argues that humanity as is, ought to be overcome, and that existing socio-cultural mores are ill-equipped to facilitate this:
‘When it is presumed that it has reached being a human, it no longer is, it has become a made product instead of developing into the one it is’ (p.16).
Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885) casts a large shadow over the entire work; it is the only work of his cited in the bibliography, and also the source of the closing line of the text. What is slightly problematic, or uncharitable, depending on how one chooses to read into this, is how Irigaray’s text is essentially an exposition of Nietzsche’s ‘three metamorphoses of the spirit’ as outlined in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, without ever once explicitly acknowledging them.
In Nietzsche’s ‘three metamorphoses’, he dictates how an individual is to transfigure from a burden carrying ‘camel spirit‘, who fosters an understanding of the morality of custom in which one resides, but does not wish to partake in it, to the freedom seeking ‘lion spirit’, who liberating itself from the burdens of the camel seeks to assert its moral agency, to the liberated ‘child spirit’ who is able to create new values. Nietzsche elaborates this through his description of the child spirit as representative of
‘innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes. Yes, a sacred Yes is needed, my brothers, for the sport of creation: the spirit now wills its own will, the spirit sundered from the world now wins its own world’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 2003, p.55).
Building upon this notion of ‘willing its own will’, Irigaray argues that a child ought not be forced to adapt ‘itself to the world’, but instead, ‘transform this world according to its potential and its desire’ (p.28). This is clearly a highly speculative and utopian claim, for it cannot prescribe what such transformation may consist of. There is, indeed, no material grounding to this ‘potential’ and ‘desire’, and it is debatable whether the exercising of such a will can engender socially beneficial outcomes. Also following Nietzsche, Irigaray’s championing of individual creativity amidst, and against, socially sanctioned but repressive norms deems that any such response will necessarily be maligned owing to its very eccentricity. As she notes: ‘important aspiration or creativity is not tolerated’ (p.59).
Language and control
Irigaray, like many of her predecessors in the Continental tradition, not least of all Nietzsche, believes that language limits the potential of individuals, as opposed to giving them the tools to genuinely express themselves. As a performative writer, the hermeneutics of Irigaray need to be acknowledged when reading such a critique; namely, she, like Nietzsche before her, is interested in shaking up what she deems a decadent prevalent discourse in which ‘one wastes away because of ennui, disgust, melancholy and weariness’ (p.27). Pulling the proverbial rug from beneath herself, i.e. using language to critique language, is but another part of this project of ‘shaking up’ norms. Used in certain manner, language offers potential, but not in its current proliferation:
‘At school, in our culture, the child thus learns what is, or would be, the world, but not what or who it, itself is. For teaching it what the world is, teachers first instruct it in using language. It is taught how to speak, to read, to write, as one handles a tool, a machine, not to say a weapon, which it will interpose between the world and itself. Its linguistic performance will amount to dominating the world’ (p.57).
Conspicuous by his absence, Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) has much that is rich to proffer when addressing the problem of linguistic domination of nature. Concerned with combating the tide of positivism, i.e. that language and scientific discovery allows for exact knowledge and control of the natural world, it is through his concept (or rather, non-concept) of ‘non-identity’ thinking, that there lies hope for Irigaray’s utopian aspiration of individual creation without domination. Irigaray’s following observation could have been lifted from the seminal, scathing cultural critique authored by Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944):
‘Various techniques, by substituting themselves for the motion of a natural growth, will paralyze and distort it, and transform human being into a sort of automaton in which a part, determined by culture, exerts control over another part, which remains faithful to nature, in order to master it while exploiting its energy’ (p.15)
Non-identity thinking, then, is Adorno’s response to this challenge, and involves playing concepts off against each other to reveal their internal inconsistency. In doing so, the totality is revealed as false, and there remains a minutia of hope of non-instrumental communication and creation. Emblematising Kant’s notion of ‘purposiveness without purpose’, non-identical communication meets Irigaray’s utopian aspiration that:
‘Henceforth, the matter is no longer one of recognizing what or who appears to us according to the discourse that we have heard about it or them, but of preserving a space for the not-said, not-defined, not-determined in which this other can appear as something or someone, that is not yet known or recognized’ (p.66).
Monkey see, monkey do
Explicitly and implicitly combining these Nietzschean and Adornian lines of thought, Irigaray proposes that it is through solitude and non-dominant communication that individuals can engage in discourse that’s different from that of the prevailing logic. Where she deviates from Nietzsche, and his insistent promulgation of individual ‘higher’ type, is the belief that in taking on ‘the anguish of solitude’ as an individual, that they may distinguish themselves from others so that they ‘become capable of respect for their own being’ (p.42).
Contra the prevailing neoliberal logic of individuation in an age of ‘no society’ only to serve the dominant, capitalist discourse based on competition and the threat of scarcity, Irigaray harnesses Nietzsche’s diagnoses of fin-de-siecle malaise, and rekindles it through a quasi-Hegelian-Marxist lens, to argue that
‘our religious, cultural and political ideals are unable either to secure the safety of humanity or to offer a plan for constructing a future which corresponds to our current necessities’ (p.99).
Irigaray, not shy of exercising her eccentric creativity, responds to critics by asserting that those who laugh at her utopian proposals, contribute
‘only towards wasting the remainder of our living energy for the automation of a world in which people turn into robots — which amounts to the fabrication of monkey-like beings’ (p.103).
Whilst certainly heavy handed, observing much party politics, and the schooling of governing elites, it is arguable that Irigaray’s diagnosis is unfortunately all too prescient.
Sunny Dhillon is unable to read or watch anything without a Nietzschean lens.
A version of this article appeared in Philosophy Now, Issue 128 (October/November, 2018)
