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Alison Martin
The structural basis of Irigaray’s argument is appropriated from Feuerbach’s
The Essence of Christianity? hence it is firmly rooted in dialectical thought
and in his insistence that man has both an inner and an outer life. Yet she
displaces the terms of this within and without from Feuerbach’s sensuous
materialism and his generic notion of species being (genre) to an elemental
materialism and an insistence upon genre as gender.
Religious consciousness, then, is taken as the paradigm of human con-
sciousness. ‘Consciousness in the strictest sense is present only in a being to
whom his species, his essential nature, is an object of thought’, writes Feuer-
bach (Essence, 1). Human consciousness is one that objectifies its own nature
as an object of thought, enabling it to be both self-reflectively self-conscious
and to constitute other things or beings similarly as objects. This process, for
Feuerbach, derives not from the self-differentiation of the concept in Hegelian
terms, such that the other is an ideal construction on the flip-side of the same
concept, but rather from the existential duality of real existent beings. It does
not originate in some scientific or rationalistic understanding, then, but in a
consciousness that has always manifested itself in and through religion, in the
essence of man as will and affection, or in his needs deriving from the reality
of his sensuous materialism, which give rise to the feeling that sustains
religious belief. Such experience becomes uniquely human when recognized
as that of a true other who is nevertheless the same as the self, so that man’s
subjective affectivity acquires an objective form via the other; man is simul-
taneously ‘!’and ‘Thou’. By such a recognition, man is constituted as a species
being or genre, which both forms collective identity and enables individuality
to emerge in that it is the universal facilitating the factor of differentiation. It
is by no means a universal transcending space and time, for man as a species
being has evolved historically according to the nature of his religious projec-
tions, of the divine he has made of his objectivity in a given era. But it is
transcendent and infinite, for while the supernatural quality attributed to this
objectivity has often deluded man into believing that his outside is totally other
to himself (when a non-alienated conception would realize that man is the only
5 Trans. George Elioζ NewYork, 1957.