To Be Born: Genesis of a New Human Being

by Luce Irigaray

“According to the words of Phaedrus in the Symposium of Plato, Love, sometimes named Eros, has no parents, no age, no history, and its origin remains unknown to anyone. Love, whose destiny is said to be unique amongst the gods and humans, perhaps embodies desire for a conjunction always in search of its happening. Love would represent a dynamism longing for the copula incarnating the transcendence of our being. As such, Love would remain the everlasting yearning for the accomplishment of the ecstatic destiny of humanity.”

 

In this book, Luce Irigaray - philosopher, linguist, psychologist and psychoanalyst - proposes nothing less than a new way of conceiving what a human being is as well as a means to ensure our individual and relational development from birth.

 

Unveiling the mystery of our origin is probably what most motivates our quests and plans. And yet such a disclosure proves to be impossible. Indeed we were born as one from a union between two, and we are forever deprived of an origin of our own. Hence our ceaseless search for roots: in our genealogy, in the place where we were born, in our culture, religion or language. But a human being cannot develop from its own roots as a tree does. As humans, we must take responsibility for our own being and existence without any given continuity with our origin and background.

 

How can we achieve that? First by cultivating our breathing, which is more than a means to come into the world and to exist; breathing also allows us to transcend mere survival to secure for ourselves a spiritual becoming. Taking on our sexuate belonging is the second element which enables us to assume our natural existence. Indeed, this determination at once brings us energy and provides us with a structure which contributes to our individuation and our relations with other living beings and the world. Our sexuation can compensate for our absence of roots too by compelling us to unite with the other sex so that we freely approach the copulative conjunction from which we were born; that is, the mystery of our origin. This does not occur through a mere sexual instinct or drive, but requires us to cultivate desire and love with respect for our mutual difference(s). In this way we can give rise to a new human being, not only at a natural but also at an ontological level. 

Genres: Philosophy

122 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 17, 2017

About the author

Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst and cultural theorist. She is best known for her works Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One. Presently, she is active in the Women's Movements in both France and Italy.

Reviews

[Forrest Kentwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not spend as much time with this set of 18 treatises (short chapters of 4-8 pages each) as I would have liked on the first reading, but it makes me excited to go back to "To Be Born" a second time. Here are some brief thoughts.

Irigaray identifies various ways that Western metaphysics/ontologies (logic systems and cultural practices) deter and frankly disclose our ability to be ourselves. She claims that each human has inside of them a "sexuate" energy directionality that we can actualize to become our truest selves. These selves are not Jungian as in gain in isolation from society and ultimately re-appear as normative social subjects having dealt alone with trauma. These truest selves are grown by critically questioning the ways in which (western) society has limited us and finding our way back to our energy "origins" -- our original way of exploring and learning about the world and thus ourselves. These true selves are intimately created by loving with those around us. The "sexuate" being is not sexual, but more akin to Audre Lorde's notions of the "erotic" (as they also pull from similar notions of eros, but Irigaray stays much closer to ancient Greek philosophical ideas to explore her conceptual ideas).

The book begins by focusing on the ways in which we develop as babies: Crying and screaming are marked as our first iterations, our first "births", giving birth to ourselves. Rather than focus on the melancholy and isolation as many male philosophers do when thinking about leaving the womb, Irigaray claims that we bring about our own birth, it is a 'conscious' decision--we birth ourselves with intention to be human. By watching and articulating the ways in which children engage in all five of their senses to explore the world, Irigaray critiques how western culture has become almost exclusively focused on touch and sight. She continues to ponder childhood development, growing as we grow in life with each chapter. She moves to critique parenthood and the ways in which we try and dominate our children in the west. Constantly placing rules and walls around children. School is a prime social example. Iragaray instead suggests that older humans should act as *guides* to younger humans (and vice versa in a mutual exchange as humans reach 9+). Older humans should guide the energy flow of the younger ones, trying to locate what they innately gravitate towards and trying to help enhance and guide their passions ("sexuate energy"). Eventually, she claims that we-in-the-west have basically lost our sexuate energy flows--for a large variety of reasons i will not explore here--, and that the only way we can be "re-born" is to return to the origins of our energy. The best way we can do that is to develop loving relationships with ourselves and those around us. I think it is chapter 12 that she discusses Love explicitly. It's a beautiful chapter I will not try to recreate here. When I have the book in hand again i will add some quotes about love and sexuate existence here as they are the crucial grounding points of her work.

As a philosopher, Iragaray is working through particular traditions. This is the first book of hers that I have read, so I do not know what her 'usual' approach to topics is, but in this book she focuses mainly on German authors like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, with appeals to the french phenomenologist Merleau Ponty. She has translated many of their books and seems to know them as intimate friends and thinking partners, which makes the text very fluid in a way that is really easy to understand (but reminder this is coming from someone who has studied philosophy at the MA level). But with short chapters her aim is clearly to be as accessible as possible while also playing the philosophy game. She is not purposefully being obscure.

My major critique of this book and the reason it gets a 4 from me, is that she is obsessed with a binary gender system. She continually critiques western "science" and technology generally, but yet she hinges so much of her argument about sexuate beings and how our potential is only realized by intimately interacted in a full away with those of the opposite binary "sex" based on biology. She completely ignores feminist philosophers like Judith Butler in ways that are just confusing at this point in scholarship. Her argument is continually transphobic and does not consider non-binary people, two-spirits, or intersex people (who even fit into her "biological" vibe). I decided when reading to just disregard these ridiculous, ungrounded claims and when she discusses sexuate beings for me this is far more powerful than she realizes. I think the real implications are that biology needs to be broken down in the same way she attacks western science and that we can each develop the various energies within ourselves to move outside of a binary system of sex/gender in our growth as human being.

[Hemani · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will be forever changed by this work and ultimately, by all of Irigaray's treatises.

[Thomas Keulemans · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 / 5 stars.

In this book, Irigaray seems to revisit Nietzsche’s project of finding ways to the Übermensch. Although she explicitly denounces his ways of inquiry, she concretizes, with a heavy Heiddegarian undertone, what could be, according to her, the way to a human being that follows or adheres more closely to its natural inclinations.

Rather than playing out, in ways that many before her have done, the dichotomy between ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ — in which being human is denounced in favor of perpetually becoming — she claims that being is inherently becoming without, however, completely doing away with a certain human “origin” and, in some ways, even essence(s) (even though she mentions the word essence only once and seems to denounce it). This human origin must be found in our sexuate being and becoming that is driven by desire, desire to explore, discover and grow incessantly. However, she claims, our society — including a tradition of metaphysical thinking that has fundamentally shaped our ways of thinking about and relating to the world — keeps on blocking this free and natural desire as it values more and seems to give primacy to modalities of relationality constituted by a subject-object hierarchy. This specific subject-object orientation is what characterizes masculine relationality, which might implicitly explain the way Irigaray considers this society to be patriarchal.

Thus, Irigaray advocates relating to the world independently of “superstructures” that preliminarily define the way we look at and feel with the world, as the sight and touch are considered the primary senses through we (should) familiarize (with) the world. This does not mean Irigaray embraces the primacy of these senses. Rather, she wants us to go back to relating to the world freely, thereby focusing on our growth and child-like exploration of the world. This is possible only if we desire regardless of traditional or preformulated ideas about the world.

Throughout the book it does not become very clear, however, to what extent these ideas about “origin” and essence should be deconstructed or left behind (without being thoughtlessly destroyed as we should be thankful for what has been done and thought throughout history). This is mainly caused by Irigaray’s ambiguous treatment of biological sex and gender. Although Irigaray claims that we should go beyond all that (western) thought, philosophy and metaphysics has given us, she remains caught in the same forms of archetypical reasoning, as she claims the rendezvous between man and woman, as two sexuate beings that unity through loving desire (preferably in a subject-subject form of relationality), is the place where a new human being (that goes beyond the current human being in a similar way but not as the Übermensch) can and will originate. Rather than completely deconstructing western metaphysical, binary thinking she keeps standing the gender binary, claiming that they are biologically fundamental to our natural, sexuate becoming. As such, Irigaray does, in my opinion, still leave no space for a proper (in the sense of the word that signifies that which is closest to oneselves) sexuate becoming that would include all modalities of sexuality, such as non-binary gendered beings and trans-people.

Nevertheless Irigaray’s book can be helpful in generating new ways of thinking about the western metaphysical tradition in a more socio and unfortunately less political way. Her chapter (8) about language as constitutive of our becoming can be a fruitful means of thinking new worlds through creating a new word that is closer to our proper desire and natural becoming. Although there is no mention of poetry in this chapter, i read this chapter as proposing to embrace a poetical (rather than instrumental) “use” of language that allows for new and exploratory ways of relating to the world. Also, parts of chapter 11 lead me to concretely and beautifully understand forms of jealousy caused by a conception and practice of love as a desire to control the other (in a way similar to what bell hooks contributes to toxic masculinity in her The Will to Change) instead of desiring their natural growth and thus letting them be. All in all a good read as part of deconstructing the hegemonic ideas within western metaphysics, a slight feminist revision of old ideas that, however, must not be taken as an endpoint as it remains caught in the same pitfalls it aims to contest.

[Lucia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Di per sé il libro é anche piacevole: scorrevole, armonioso, e di facile comprensione (cosa piuttosto rara nel contesto accademico). Tuttavia, la tesi principale non é né originale né presentata in modo particolarmente convincente: sembra inneggiare ad una sorta di primitivismo pre-sociale difficilmente raggiungibile (e forse nemmeno desiderabile). In generale, penso che nel 21esimo secolo sostenere ancora l'"essere" Heideggeriano sia quantomeno anacronistico. O meglio, trovo il modo in cui Irigaray lo tratteggia- come 'un'essenza ultima' che poco si presta alle sovrastrutture sociali e culturali insite in esso- abbastanza inutile e poco produttivo. La ricerca dell''''''essenza'''' dell'essere non puó prescindere dalla socialitá che lo caratterizza, e che lo rende tale. Riscrivere la storia dell'essere non é un compito impossibile, ma viene reso tale se se ne ignora l'individuazione politica e culturale.

Sulla questione della sessuazione e della reificazione del binario uomo-donna non mi pronuncio nemmeno. Sicuramente non sono resistita alla tentazione di chiedermi se l'autrice abbia letto anche un minimo del corpus di teoria critica e culturale prodotto a partire dalla seconda metá del 20esimo secolo. Non sono tutte allucinate le persone che sostengono che l'eliminazione del genere possa portare ad importanti progressi politici.

[Kamil Dudar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Narodzić się czytałem, mając w głowie porównanie z filozofią Bataille'a w książce Erotyzm i proponowaną przez niego równość narodziny = śmierć. Tutaj, autorka przedstawia zgoła odwrotną teorię, w której to narodziny są początkiem.
Przedstawiona tu analiza procesu rodzenia się, stawania się i dalszych relacji pożądania/miłości, językowej copula jako elementu rozumienia idei narodzin, prowadzi nas, etap po etapie, do poznania, czym jest życie. Irigaray twierdzi ponadto, że dla wielu osób, to be born jest pojęciem, stanowiącym niejako terra incognita naszego życia.
Odwołania do Heideggera i Nietzschego dodatkowo uzupełniają jej analizę, pozwalając na lepsze ukazanie problemu.
Książka niesamowita. 5*

[J.S Tiu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here Luce Irigaray gives an almost mystical take on post-structuralism that can very well be baffling for anyone not intuitively familiar with the movement, and still a little bit of a philosophical advice session seminar for those who are. I find it hard to agree with how she frames everything here, but there are at least some good points she makes about freedom and being that I can resonate with; this almost feels like an easier to understand, more relatable response to Levinas building on Time and the Other. Unfortunately, whatever I liked about this book still doesn't change the fact that I desperately want my philosophy course to be over.

[Valerie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“In reality speech is produced by our body, but we do not use it to develop shapes from our physical belonging, to enable our body to speak. We reduce it to a machine reproducing a learned code instead of learning how our body could take place as the origin of word(s).”

[Sara G]

Still thinking on this one.

[ArdentiCorde · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nie mogę powiedzieć, że ta książka zmieniła moje życie, ale sprowokowała do refleksji, na które sama bym się nie zdecydowała (nie wiedząc nawet, że można myśleć w kierunku obranym przez Irigaray), a tego oczekuję od rozprawy filozoficznej. To pozycja trudna w odbiorze i podejrzewam, że w pełni ją zrozumiem dopiero, gdy zapoznam się z innymi pracami autorki.