On the way to proximity
Worlds require silence in order that they may say themselves, hear one another and communicate between themselves, and these worlds speak through our lips. Finding words can in this way become an infinite task, and the words do not always refer to things, where they convey toward the other, so that the direction is more important than the thing that is being said. The word becomes incarnate as the body and the flesh of what one wants to say to another, a flesh that goes beyond the body without being part of the body. This flesh being a sign of recognition of the irreducibility we have of and to each other – we encounter colour, a tone of voice, a tactile and poignant choice of word, a simple vibration in this.
An openness is called for where we admit the possibilities that lead to sharing, where, encountering our conversational second, we hold presence with a territory that is still and virgin with respect to meaning, where approach is possible, and where we do not communicate from an already constituted code or meaning. Attending to the other as we speak, adjusting according to whether the signs are perceived by the one to whom they are addressed, we enquire into whether they move him or her more deeply or through to a more blossomed level of Being.
To speak from an already known, a connivance, paralyses the becoming of the one and of the other, saying no longer speaking, but repeating the already dead. Adapted to a past need, these words no longer keep relation with desire which requires a staying in connection with both becoming, and now.
For there to be an exchange, it is essential that the other touch us, particularly through words, in this place we do not know, and where otherwise we have reduced proximity to confusion, to fusion. Holding an attitude of transcendence that surpasses the other, we will have missed the mark, and that distance distances both of us, and destroys that in which we have been touched, all the more so if we have been touched close to the source of our Being. Touching must remain sensuous, join the near, without dissolving it. Remaining as an enfolded opening between, which does not make meaning imperceptible to the other, but reveals it and prepares proximity, between us.
An interval is needed where each can find oneself again while avoiding one simply overturning the other through what is revealed of them. This interval is first of all nature, earth, water, air, fire, light. To go towards one another requires an elaboration of space-times that as Westerners we are ill-prepared for, even phenomenology does not prepare us for an encounter with the other, perhaps even drawing us away from the other, where at the extreme we might designate the other as an equal, a calculating valuation rendering their full approach absolutely impossible.
There is neither a single round dance nor play in the world, but a constitution of subjectivities that dance together through different unfoldings and refoldings. Not a silent constituting pause, appropriating and immobilising meaning. Each subject pronounces a part, each bringing to the sky it’s height and to the horizon it’s vastness, and it is in calling for an alliance that a saying is created in which the silence of the other becomes essential.
No word can name it once and for all, nor be totally foreign from it. Words creep up on the transcendental, if they do not close up upon themselves, dying. Too quickly occupying the silence between two risks veiling the meaning of it; between the two something exists that belongs to neither one nor moreover to any word, always, in some way, remaining indeterminate.
Communicating with the other unwinds from this impossible to say, speech turning toward the other in order to communicate and turning back to itself without having been able to say what it had to say. In turning back, speech attends to what one has learned from the other and to where it failed in communicating, being here dual in nature, and escaping the calculation that dominates our era.
From the multiple to the two
An already closed word, shared, is not a present communication with an other. It can seduce, or become a property or part of a tradition. It is not really shared between the two, with no shared ground of symbolic order, and the becoming of the relation is thus unsecured, a faithfulness that remains the same, no question of becoming nearer to each other, the subjects subject to a code that dominates and regulates.
An intimate communication becomes something other than a speaking appropriately for each other when the becoming of the two subjects testifies to the approach of themselves and to each other. The saying, from then on, no longer belongs to only one, each holds a part of the speech generated and unfolded, a saying starting from two that will not easily be divided again. An indispensible fidelity between the persons has been born, even while meaning quivers and always remains unstable, incomplete, unsettled and irreducible between the two.
In an exchange between two, no one can claim the whole without making exchange impossible. To refrain from a word granted in dialogue is to let an intimacy-between happen, by safeguarding a free space without violating the heart of the one or the other. The clearing of language – that vastness – is then built by two, where intimacy is possible with measure thanks to respect for each other. Encouraging the other to be other, to let them come into presence, even to lead them there, without claiming to be their foundation.
This relinquishing is a recognition and a gratitude.
The philosopher’s partner is speech itself, of which she says that it speaks only with itself – calling speech, but not another subject into encounter, a tautology, neither exchange nor dialogue. Speech as information and information as speech, an inextricable circle already in the past, silence here seeming impossible. This gained silence safeguards the virginity and integrity of the words, becoming a veil of mystery, sheltering the words in their own innocence. This veil of voluntary withdrawal is different from the veil of the language itself, the first veil saving the future to be said later, life and flesh, relation already furrowed and seeded by an always already pre-existing logos. Lost in the already pronounced and programmed, and shut off from that which should help, in becoming human.
To speak of or to speak with
What is sought is an escape from the norms which language would program of us, a necessary creation of a new speaking. Dialogue is limited to a complicity which the poet knows not, where there is no already existing speech, where a monologue entered into as an opening must listen receptively to the other as other, who we cannot appropriate and whose speech may not be appropriated. The gesture is thus appropriation to disappropriation, demanding that the subject turn inward and learn to disappropriate the world. In order to come to a standstill in front of the irreducibility of the other, in the space of a silence which suspends one unfolding to open to another unfolding.
Appropriation then again must take place, of the language, relation to world, relation to other, requiring different proportions, differing actions, different appropriate responses. We need to encounter language not only as a property to express needs, or describe objects, but to transform instincts and needs into shared desires. Beyond the middle stages of language development, a new way to speech may modify its intention and its path in accordance with what the age presents as the task to be accomplished. Bringing about new intimacy, where we might go in search of oneself in relation to the other, in speaking, in proximity. Speech thus would no longer name objects, penetrating into other dimensions of Being, other space and other time where it has to make its way differently.
Another era of speech is opening, the subject a stranger in her own land, turning back to radical disappropriation, keeping the senses awake in a region where the culture is unknown.
Dis-covering again astonishment, contemplation and admiration, a letting-be that is open in oneself and to the other, to unknown speech, and silence.
Ref: Irigaray, L. (2002). The Way of Love. London: Continuum. 13 – 61.
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