The Creation of the Verb
Walking into the space of being with the other, a different way of speaking is required from that which we already know. Demanding that we forget words as previously defined, moving beyond the frontier of the word, and asking language itself how it might accede to proximity.
Making a new way in loving speech cannot go by a history of loves of a whole people, these collective imperatives stretch too far beyond the personal. Rather, indirect ways of advancing might emerge, beyond the interlacings of an existing saying to the unsheltered crossroads where the other awaits, with meaning unknown.
Almost everything must be rebuilt in this relation, and speech can help to change levels both vertically and horizontally. In order to listen to the other, to open one’s heart horizontally, to attain oneself in the springing forth of the intimate without obstructing the path that we might return to source.
Verbs outlay traces, sketch perspectives and broach horizons, both of the subject and in the infinitive, that still undifferentiated, common energy. Active and passive, interrogative and injunctive, verbs build a bridge between two subjects or two moments, or aspects of the self. The verb is the instrument of construction of the subject, of the world, of relation with the other, marking out paths, building scaffolding and transportation.
Every construction is unique, and sets the ground for uniqueness – human consciousness is not awakened nor quenched in speaking ‘like everyone else’. Where a subject does not have within themselves the source of their own movement, and they are locked in descriptors or nouns, they lose their quality as subject, a mechanism pronounced by an energy that is not free.
The substantive, or the noun, can be seen to immobilise time, a kind of ideal in designating, a merging once and for all with an arbitrary sound force and matter. Nouns are not that which corresponds to present meaning for a subject who might utter their own perceptions, affects or desires.
A word can be a treasure, a passing of discovery from one to another. In this way they would not be a communion in the already said, which would rather paralyse in an illusion of speaking, background noise impregnating the flesh of the word. We must learn to speak not from the already-existent, but to succeed in transforming what emerges into saying. It is not possible to learn once and for all how to speak, each moment should be a radical injunction in newness, inventing a new speaking moment to moment, listening with radically new ears.
If the other calls out to me, it is certainly not thanks to naming that I will succeed in entering into relation with him. And it is not a word that will allow me to approach him, especially since the approach must be bilateral, I not only approach you, but we must approach one another. And we risk the noun-word taking away this togetherness, words that both deliver and conceal meaning and do not represent at any rate the attraction or desire, a wanting for which we still have to invent words while continuing to listen to the other.
Letting Be Transcendence
The distance from the other can be considered as an interior space which is available to welcome their words. The distance can never be fully overcome, no matter the clearing of a prioris, freeing from solipsistic certitude or arranging of silence. The interval is never covered, always to be passed through, maintained, and started, anew. Transcendence between us demands an interval woven of air and flesh, fecund in graces. Air rather than emptiness, inhabited by vibration, space to live, grow and speak with modulating sound, crying and whispering. Shouting. Drawing from it what we each need, nourishing as it becomes part of our flesh and the flesh of our words. Air crossing the limits of our different worlds, permitting communion.
To approach each other is not to live in the one neighbourhood but to encounter the diverse alien of the other, no matter the treasure-words and flower-words that might seduce the senses into commonality. Even the unity of the self must be compromised by mediations in order to be constituted, here we can see easily that there is a co-belonging in a whole which maintains togetherness, even in differentiation.
To deeply experience this co-belonging implies leaving representative thought and letting go into the Being which already inhabits us, constitutes us and surrounds us. Difference itself in times provides the necessary mediations to constitute Being, even if we presume to believe we maintain complete stillness. We are always partly open to the world, even where we turn to history as more fixed than God, the divine that guides steps towards difference always without any possibility of completely and actually experiencing it.
The ground of being less admits a multiplicity of interweavings within which man could dwell, both safeguarded and enclosed. Yet the ground may be constituted in relation, an unthought hypokeimenon of the subject, a double ground which the subject does not reach when losing hold, because the constitution of the subjects Being prevents a return there. Yet we arrange subjects in front of ourselves in relation, this is our task. Without our mother, there is no engendering or birth, no awakening of consciousness, her role in Being is not nothing, although it is frequently unthought or unconscious.
‘The end is the beginning’, yes, although this statement forgets the beginning for the end, leaving it in the unthought, and this is an important part of the relation between subjects. Returning to the mother does not permit the reclaiming of Being or the ground, return can only be dialecticised in a different way – an engendering where one emerges from the other and the other from the one in a recovering of all being brought into the world, all coming into the world. The veiling of this difference is the evoking of a will to know nothing of one’s own birth. The origin of Being begins with being in-relation-with and being born-of.
In this primitive moment of consciousness of our substitutive role, we find ourselves unconstituted, unsheltered from constructions, perhaps more alone and naked when others draw near when he steps back too so as to be capable of not assimilating the one who enters his world. The one who arrives is an event on a horizon, for a welcoming to be real one must step beyond one’s own horizon to question the unknown who comes.
No event more unveiling of oneself and Being can happen. To get to the other we must go around our own world which takes us to the return to the origin of our own world, but only in this way can we open ourselves to the other who will never have a site in the origin. The unity of being with the other becomes the unity of relation with the other, which accounts for their difference. A unity that is open and has its own autonomy. The unity is a creation, a work elaborated from an attraction between two, a desire and an already conceived ‘with the other’.
This relation cannot be subordinated to own pleasure, on pain of fragmenting human being, itself. If the Being of only one of the two elements is taken as the only pole of division, relation with the other becomes impossible, an amputated Being, annihilating the other and the virgin space between them. What safeguards a between two is an opening in fidelity to self and other in their irreducibility.
Thought then represents the building of a bridge between two subjects, each bringing a singular contribution proper to oneself and appropriate to the other. You are not empty of content, and the intention which animates us must take account of our relation, constructing the objectivity of our subjectivity in the space with the other, as human/s. Subjectivity is relational. An interior reserve, which permits listening, welcoming and a response which respects the relation can be constructed. Another relation to space and time must be built, space for differences to be transformed in time into a kind of spiritual matter, human being existing only in relational becoming.
The link to Being thus becomes at a minimum, dual, and identity is not an equation between thinking and Being, but rather a known difference between two subjectivities, even if they are internal and not constituted as two distinct humans. Identity takes root in becoming, and is not appraised by similitude but rather is compelled by care of the human, and care of the other.
Identity too becomes the unveiling of a still closed sky, approaching a world of co-belonging, the dialogue between living subjects or subjectivities opening and closing in each moment the question of what Being is. Indirectly we appear to each other in faithfulness to ourselves, always transfiguring in appearance according to an interiority which is invisible but which accounts for you as other. We can never fully say ourselves.
Being in relation with the other
To continue our own human becoming we need to introduce a dialectic in our own subjectivity which examines and sets in place transformation even while we are partially blind to Being. The becoming conscious implicates a turning-back of the subject into the subject, making occasion for an unveiling.
Relation with the other cannot exist without a similar gesture of reciprocal recognition, looking to the space we make available for common mediation between our two subjectivities. We do not start from emptiness or nothing, as we enter this space, in the same way we do not start from emptiness when we re-visit our own history seeking deeper consciousness.
Identity needs to be approached not merely as emerging from same with itself, but as a co-belonging , a being-in-relation. It calls out a new grammar of thinking, going back to the foundations that serve as both a floor and a roof for Western metaphysics. In the old, the world that man constructs exiles him from himself, the little bit of Being that was allowed preserved in a small patch of glimpsed sky in a remote universal.
In the dimension of ourselves where Being still quivers identity is never definitively constituted. Identity is elaborated in relation with the other, a giving and receiving where life is not paralysed in multiple deaths, but is fed back to us in the continual death to the self-that-was, from outside ourselves.
For Hegel the absolute truth is that which knows itself and not that which is thought by a subject who announces that he knows himself absolutely. Being is thought from an exterior, an external perspective, where the task is not so much to ascend in absolute thought without reference to the flesh that is devoted to its service, but rather, to transubstantiate in this relation and in relation to the other the dialectical process, which enriches the becoming of woman, as woman.
Ref: Irigaray, L. (2002). The Way of Love. London: Continuum. 62 - 97.
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