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(albeit reluctantly). Yet what do such reforms amount to in terms of a
philosophy such as Irigaray ,s? An equalisation to the same, woman speaking
of a sacred order that is his, her will mirroring his because, in projecting his
divine as his own, man has still projected his other as the flip-side of his
conceptual self. He has yet to recognise himself in his own material existence
and to recognise the material existence of his true other—the female genre.
This double existence, this double divine, therefore requires another
materialism and another divine. In making such a shift, Irigaray is following
Marx’s assertion, in the Theses on Feuerbach, that Feuerbach’s conception of
essence is an abstract indwelling of the man who has isolated himself, but this
time he is isolated not from the social as such but from the other sex, from
nature. Despite the apparent materiality of his feelings and affections, the
consciousness to which this gives rise is celebrated by Feuerbach for being on
the side of consciousness, for transcending nature. So human nature produces
a consciousness for which nature is merely the other side of species-conscious-
ness; matter and form are thus always defined by man. Hence, Feuerbach
describes the celebration of communion as a celebration of man’s transcen-
dence of and differentiation from nature. While the consumption of bread and
wine does signal man’s dependency, the true glory lies in man’s consciousness
of his ability to superimpose form and value upon such matter and to be aware
of matter as such; a pure celebration of self-consciousness, rather than, as Marx
would seek, a recognition of the means Oftranscendence found in the product
of social labour.
We might speculate on the meaning of the bread and wine for Irigaray’s
philosophy of sexual difference. Wouldn’t it be a celebration of nature and a
recognition of the collective debt owed to it? Not for the purposes of
differentiating consciousness from nature, nor for reducing nature to a means,
but for the purpose of a physical and spiritual replenishment for the two sexes
by means of Ie corps sexue and sang rouge. In any case, Irigaray seeks to
locate the source of the divine in the passional, material existence of the two