Response on Irigaray's "Imperialism"

Yes, when it come to Irigaray, I'm a fan. Yes, there are a number of legitimate criticisms of her work. Nothing's perfect. Irigaray herself insists the work is open and that we who feel the need to should continue on with our interpretations, permutations. But, I have a bug in my pants about this one sort of criticism. The post-colonial criticism that her adaptations of yoga and Buddhism are imperialist, or theory replaying colonization to the benefit of Western women at the expense of their subaltern sisters. Penelope Deutscher (whom I admire Hugely) among others make this point.

Now, here's the thing: Imperialist is too strong a word. Naive, incomplete, mistaken: these might be good words for some aspects of Irigaray's appropriation of these philosophies.

And let's talk about appropriation while we're at it. Click &c.

I have traded email with two or three scholars (in England and Australia) who are very seriously looking into Irigaray's appropriation and adaption of these philosophies. They're looking to fill in the gaps, balance her rather broad brush with fine work. One of them is woman who was going off to an ashram for six months to deepen her study and practice in yoga. Not lightweights. My own engagement with Irigaray's later work (i.e. from Ethics forward, thought these themes are present throughout) led me to read a good deal in and about Buddhism and yoga. The more I read, the more I could see what she left out, where she chose to focus or not, and why.

Did Buddhism and yoga arrive in Europe via the colonialist abuses of the 19th and 20th Centuries? Yes. Yes it did. Before that, some was trickling in with trade routes and alliances, but it was the hard-on-for-turf of the Age of Empire that really did it. Along with gold, tea, silk, coal, laborers, and oodles of bad karma came some knowledge.

However, for a very long time in Europe (see the work of Eliade, Cioran, et alii), and greater frequency and permanence (witness Plum Village and other ashrams and shangas established with permanent homes in France and other parts of EU), with much generosity and love (witness the welcoming of students to India and Tibet in 1960s to the present), Buddhists and yogis have gladly shared their knowledge, thought, and practice with Westerners. Indeed, many have come to the conclusion that many of us Need this learning, and are happy to offer it.

The epithet "imperialist" assumes that a thinker like Irigaray is simply mining the East for its treasure and resources in the same way that colonialist powers did. This is simply not the case. She's student of these schools, perhaps not a devotee, but a student. Her encounter and learning become part of her thought, the aspects of the East that she can incorporate into her thinking on sexual difference she incorporates. On her terms, in her way, and with full consciousness of the aporia between, say, the gender balance of Tantra and the adoration of goddesses in Hinduism, and the very real socio-political abuses of women in the East. The East needs a culture of sexual difference, or being two, as much as the West does: the differences is that in the East the feminine is not so completely covered over as in the West in their philosophical traditions.

Her appropriations of some aspects of these traditions are not perfect, are not fully obedient to these traditions, but then, to what is Irigaray obedient? Her goal is a future fit of living, and to imagine that, to lay some partial foundations for that, one cannot remain obedient to the past, no matter where it originates.

As for appropriation: let's look at what kind of appropriation is going on. When natural recourses of one territory are appropriated by another by force and coercion -- this is clearly bad. When one culture learns from the mistakes and wisdom of another, this is a potentially good appropriate. When the labor of one person is appropriated by coercion by another, this is bad. When I learn French or Theory or write about Stein, I am appropriating, and adapting, and I change, and my way of encountering that knowledge or person or situation changes it too. This is unavoidable. This is learning. A thing learned never keeps the same shape as it had before I learned it.

Colonialism involved a Lot of Bad Appropriation. There is no doubt. But, Western thinkers to explore the thought and practices of East are not necessarily engaging in the same kind of appropriation. Irigaray's thought is meant, if imperfectly, to liberate everyone from cultures of The Same and Masculine Privilege. And who, really, does not live there?

The serious criticism that Deutscher offers is that Irigaray betrays her own project in her encounters with the East. That she does not stay on her side of the interval and leave her other, The East, its own subjectivity and freedom. This is a serious charge. It means that Irigaray is acting like a masculinist colonizer who simply defines and uses the other for his benefit. I don't find this. I find Irigaray doing with the East exactly what she does with the West -- she looks for the elements of these traditions that support a culture of being two, and then modifies and invents the rest. This is a risky project because it engages not only in criticism of what is (that's the easy part) but seeks responses and possible answers to those problems (the hard part, because one can be very wrong).

Her appropriations of various lines of Eastern Thought and Practice are indeed a melange. This is a difficulty, but not necessarily a damnation.

Whew. Ok. Got that out.