Further Response on Irigaray's "Imperialism"

To pick up where I left off with this tangent that doesn't belong in the book. Yogis and bodhisattavas have never expected stasis of their traditions. Dogma, The Law of the Father, as we understand it in the West is not quite the same creature in the East. Traditions, in order to live, to thrive, must adapt. Many Eastern teachers are well of aware of this, and thus, Zen and Mahayana Buddhists do not declare each other's traditions infidel. Wise practitioners and teachers will often point out this strength, that appropriate practice, as wisdom and circumstance require. In short, there's a sense of flexibility there, realism, that is not implied (for instance) in the phrase "being catholic about it."

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Deutscher's questions to Irigaray are asked in respect, from a desire to see a project of sexual difference, or of reciprocal alterity, grow to be a strong and affective as possible. She's not playing Judas here, and I won't treat her that way. Because, while Irigaray is right, frankly, that there is much for Westerners to learn in these traditions, it's not just the breathing.

Irigaray does use phrases like "Indian culture" in Between East and West and The Way of Love. And Irigaray does seem to be a little lite on the nity-grity of The Laws of Manu and the darker contemporary scene in India vis. gender: sati still Way Too Common, the sex trade and the slavery involved, education issues. Irigaray's Pre-Aryan cultures might have some nice Eisler-echoes going on, but there are millions of people in India who, for all purposes, live in the Middle Ages. Life is not idyllic. The kind of hard criticism offered of these practices in books like Femicide and Are Women Human gets to the points I think Deutscher would like to remind Irigaray of. Is she idealizing her other, the East?

That I don't know.

I don't know where Irigaray went in India. I don't know what kinds of pretty pictures she might have been shown. I don't know whether she bothers to read the newspapers there.

This is a difficult point. Does she simply pull a Rousseau here? Painting her noble savages, her enlightened ancients? Or, Does she know good and well that Indians and Indian women can, do, and do very well speak for themselves and describe their own histories and subjectivities, enact their own projects of liberation and legitimation?

Does what looks like an over-simplification and a bad appropriation of the other really just represent All Irigaray Knows For Now, And So, All She Can Say?

If so, then we can hold her accountable for this naivety and insist that our engagements with/from her projects will correct it.

And seriously, after all the critical dynamite of the post-structural critiques of Just These Blind Spots in Humanism --- yes, I wish she had chosen her rhetoric much more carefully.

There is a really amazing difference between yoga, and tantra, and Buddhism and their philosophies and Actual Indian Culture. This is important. The Mahabharata, and many of the stories in it leave to woman the role of Honored Procreatrix (often with deities), Mother or Wife Wronged and Avenged, or Honored Love Interest and Mother of More Heroes. It's the legions of Heroes, who all make Achilles look like a new recruit at boot camp, that move the story and grow and learn in the course of it. It's the enlightenment of these men that we are to be interested in. There are other stories, in which goddesses exhibit oodles of independent and clearly feminine subjectivity, Radha's stories are good examples. Kali is an interesting case. Shakti too. Rakini, do not mess with her. The Indian pantheon and metaphysic have some balance that the West simply does not. But, this doesn't all translate into a happy utopia for concrete individuals here and now. Sloppy writing? Then sloppy writing. And lots of room for good work answering the questions Deutscher raises. They are important philosophically and culturally.

I'm not sure who's going to do all that research.

And did I mention the Laws of Manu. (reeks of paranoid misogyny, basis of a lot of law for a long time)

What's got me, as readers of anything I've published are hip to, is that a culture sexual difference (or something broader than that, which is also currently under development, thanks be) would really Need somehting like the symbolic systems and the philosophical work and the yoga of Tantra. Now, as several dear teachers have pointed out, Tantra Ain't About Sex, it's about transcendence and the loss of attachment to Maya and illusion just like all the other "esoteric" traditions. Indeed. Indeed, tantra is strong juju, and many teachers advise that students embark on this Highest Practice only after mastery in other training. Losing attachment to the illusion of the physical world by work with its greatest seduction and pleasure in order to get to nonattached supra-physical blissed out godhead --- this Deep Paradox is not for beginners. The thing of it is that in the US, we have such an unbelievably adolescent and ambivalent attitude about sex, sexuality, the whole ball of wax, that we need to (pardon the Hegel here) Go Through Sex to get to balance (the idealization of it in romance, the goofiness of it in teen films, the horror and sadness of it in a bajillion internet sites). Tantra can, in modified forms, help with that.

And what then do we owe the people in the cultures we learn from? Listening. Action. They know their difficulties, their contexts, and we are obligated by our learning to render the assistance requested. And to keep doing that. The same thing we owe every other living human everywhere. Duh.

Is Irigaray's engagement with her other in the East really perfect by her own standards?: hard to tell. Her broad strokes may have been a sign of her incomplete grasping of that other, both gestures deliberate. They might have been signs of some totally troubling lapse in adherence to her own thought. ---- What thinker hasn't? And often to good advantage?

In the end, Deutscher's right. I read her, I re-read the Irigaray books, and yep. The concerns Deutscher raises can be justified with the text. But, then so can mine. So, we keep working.

That's the bestest thing about Irigaray readers -- not a lot of whacking each other on the head.