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Alison Martin
Hardly a call to love thy neighbour, then, the divine is the path or way to
self-love which, since it is determined in relation to one’s genre, calls for
respect for the collectivity in the same measure, although this is most emphati-
cally not on the basis of a rather masochistic idealistic concern for the other
prior to the self. Rather than Sacrificially renouncing their own will, women
would be forging a collective will to help them give direction to their own will.
I would interpret such a conception of will as that which would enable us to
tie down disparate wills to something other than individual morality; in fact
by providing a minimalist collective framework for ethical relations based on
respect, women might be freed from the oppressive responsibilities of moral-
ity; the chasm filled, men could no longer fill it themselves with their will,
buttressing their own ethical system by placing the burden of morality upon
women. Men would be forced to take responsibility for their own ethics.
Should the possibility of such a divine ever arise, and therein lies another
paper, it may also be seen as a structural possibility of releasing women from
their function as fetish-objects and the focus for erotic violence. The limit
represented by the female as a gender would be completely different or other
to the one man has created for himself in his systems. It would not be a limit
to transgress if he is to find the jouissance of excess, his return to the same,
his unity with the continuum of material being, or his fusion with mother earth.
Or, in other terms, he would no longer have to break the limit of the hymen in
order to realise its exchange value, to affirm the value of his sacred by violently
debasing it.
For Irigaray, these conceptions all rest on a false premise of primordial
unity which, no matter how allegedly material, is a conceptual absolute,
another mythical origin. Sexual difference she argues is always already in
play, if only man were able to recognise it. Differentiation does not, then,
necessarily ensue from the split between same and other to be overcome,
something man or his reason created in order to propel his dialectic; nor is it
a limit he establishes only to transgress. The limit is given to men and women
in their material sexual difference, which she believes they should enhance
and spiritualise for their respective becoming. They are not same and other,
but other and other—this she posits as their eternal mystery and the motor of