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Sharing the Fire: Outline of a Dialectics of Sensitivity
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 aworse 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.
- GenresPhilosophy
122 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 13, 2019
3 people are currently reading
26 people want to read
About the author
Luce Irigaray
66 books371 followersLuce 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 21, 2023
One of the toughest philosophers, Irigaray's book 'Sharing the Fire' amalgamates ontology, logic, ethics and feminist criticism perfectly and goes beyond the Hegelian dialectic by establishing an "other" relationship between logic and being.
August 23, 2022
I love to see a philosopher talking about desire—and not in the ‘rooted in Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic, desire between a subject and an other reduced to an object’ way like 99.99% of philosophy douchebags.
BUT THIS AIN’T IT. I’m so disappointed. Irigaray on Hegel and desire—and hopefully on the Hegel’s ‘Pleasure and Necessity’ chapter in the Phenomenology of Spirit. I was ready to love it!
The first problem: it was on ‘Pleasure and Necessity’ but Irigaray didn’t seem to realize that. She addressed her critiques of Hegel to desire as outlined in the Master-Slave dialectic. But Hegel also critiques desire in that section and proposes desire as pleasure in the later section, P&N—namely, as literal copulation between two subjects as independent self-consciousnesses, what Irigaray also proposes. Even the definition of the Absolute is similar between Irigaray (“the absolute for which we long is our own to be”) and Hegel in P&N (“this primary end is to become aware of himself as an individual”). Her critiques of Hegel didn’t land because she was addressing the wrong section. And there’s Hegel’s critiques of pleasure that she never addressed.
The second problem: it’s where Irigaray and Hegel start to differ that makes me go, “Oh hell, no.” Because for Hegel, it’s the underlying unity between the partners that facilitates their sexual relationship—meaning the logic doesn’t, in principle, preclude queerness (even with my argument elsewhere that the pleasure-seeking consciousness in P&N is gendered male). Irigaray, on the other hand, stresses the dialectical function of the difference (the sexuate difference) of the sexual partners, meaning it’s fundamentally important for her that it is a cis-het sexual relationship (literally called hetero-affection).
This book is, without a doubt, the most hetero-normative work of philosophy I’ve ever read and I can’t understand why it hasn’t been more heavily criticized within philosophy. And I don’t find books defending Irigaray (like Alison Stone’s) convincing; but even so, Stone wrote in 2006 and this book (from 2019) is so explicitly cis-hetero-normative.
What are we supposed to conclude except that Irigaray is trying to distance herself from these defenses of her work?
BUT THIS AIN’T IT. I’m so disappointed. Irigaray on Hegel and desire—and hopefully on the Hegel’s ‘Pleasure and Necessity’ chapter in the Phenomenology of Spirit. I was ready to love it!
The first problem: it was on ‘Pleasure and Necessity’ but Irigaray didn’t seem to realize that. She addressed her critiques of Hegel to desire as outlined in the Master-Slave dialectic. But Hegel also critiques desire in that section and proposes desire as pleasure in the later section, P&N—namely, as literal copulation between two subjects as independent self-consciousnesses, what Irigaray also proposes. Even the definition of the Absolute is similar between Irigaray (“the absolute for which we long is our own to be”) and Hegel in P&N (“this primary end is to become aware of himself as an individual”). Her critiques of Hegel didn’t land because she was addressing the wrong section. And there’s Hegel’s critiques of pleasure that she never addressed.
The second problem: it’s where Irigaray and Hegel start to differ that makes me go, “Oh hell, no.” Because for Hegel, it’s the underlying unity between the partners that facilitates their sexual relationship—meaning the logic doesn’t, in principle, preclude queerness (even with my argument elsewhere that the pleasure-seeking consciousness in P&N is gendered male). Irigaray, on the other hand, stresses the dialectical function of the difference (the sexuate difference) of the sexual partners, meaning it’s fundamentally important for her that it is a cis-het sexual relationship (literally called hetero-affection).
This book is, without a doubt, the most hetero-normative work of philosophy I’ve ever read and I can’t understand why it hasn’t been more heavily criticized within philosophy. And I don’t find books defending Irigaray (like Alison Stone’s) convincing; but even so, Stone wrote in 2006 and this book (from 2019) is so explicitly cis-hetero-normative.
What are we supposed to conclude except that Irigaray is trying to distance herself from these defenses of her work?
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews