Sharing the Fire

Whilst he broaches the theme of the difference between the sexes, Hegel does not go deep enough into the question of their mutual desire as a crucial stage in our becoming truly human. He ignores the dialectical process regarding sensitivity and sensuousness. And yet this is needed to make spiritual the relation between two human subjectivities differently determined by nature and to ensure the connection between body and spirit, nature and culture, private life and public life. This leads Hegel to fragment human subjectivity into yearnings for art, religion and philosophy thereby losing the unity attained through the cultivation of a longing for the absolute born of a desire for one another as different.

Furthermore, our epoch of history is different from the Hegelian one and demands that we consider additional aspects of human subjectivity. This is essential if we are to overcome the nihilism inherent in our traditional metaphysics without falling into a worse nihilism due to a lack of rigorous thinking common today.

The increasing power of technique and technologies as well as the task of building a world culture are two other challenges we face. Our sexuate belonging provides us with a universal living determination of our subjectivity - now a dual subjectivity - and also with a natural energy potential which allows us to use technical resources without becoming dependent on them.

Auteur

Luce Irigaray is a leading thinker of our age. She has written more than thirty books translated into various languages, the most recent of which are To Be Born (2017), Through Vegetal Being (co-authored with Michael Marder, 2016), In the Beginning, She Was (2012) and Sharing the World (2008). She is also the co-editor of Towards a New Human Being (with Mahon O'Brien and Christos Hadjioannou, 2019), a volume in which early-career researchers and established academics respond to To Be Born, as part of a longer-term undertaking with a view to giving birth to a new human being and building a new world.

Contenu

1. Hypothesis: Longing for another Absolute than Knowledge2. The Desire to Be2.1 Giving Birth to our To Be2.2 Dwelling place opened by desire2.3 The gift of nothing2.4 Assuming non-being2.5 Sexuation as first logos2.6 Infinity arising from finiteness3. Elements of a Dialectics of Sensitivity3.1What mood allows meeting together?3.2Energy as sensitive mediation3.3 About universality of sensitive experience3.4 Here and now in intersubjective relations3.5 The qualitative truth of our being3.6 For me for you; for you for me4. The Absolute after which Desire Aspires4.1 Towards a non-pathological pathos4.2 From subordination to conjunction4.3 Self-affection and self-consciousness4.4 An absolute rooted in nature4.5 Light for which sensitivity longs4.6 Desire as transcendental intuition5. Sketch of a Logic of Intersubjectivity5.1 From subject-object adequacy to subject-subject connection5.2 Nature and freedom5.3 Crucial stage of the relation between two5.4 Sharing the fire5.5 Leading part of touch in fleshly dynamism5.6 Lost of differentiation due to sight5.7 Living individuation shaped by mutual desire6. Provisory Synthesis: Difference Can Overcome Contradiction