Krzysztof Ziarek

Department of English
University of Notre Dame
Krzysztof.Ziarek.2@nd.edu

 

In Écrits Lacan remarks: “Of all the undertakings that have been proposed in this century, that of the psychoanalyst is perhaps the loftiest, because his task is to act in our time as a mediator between the man of care and the subject of absolute knowledge” (105).¹ These words are quoted at the beginning of Richardson’s 1983 essay “Psychoanalysis and the Being-question,” and taken to mean that, in developing the logic of desire, Lacan attempts to mediate between Heidegger’s critique of the subject, that is, the idea of Dasein as care, and the Hegelian notion of absolute knowledge. Noting Lacan’s proximity to Heidegger in the 1950s and disputing his later assertion that the references to Heidegger were merely propadeutic, Richardson goes on to sketch a Heideggerian reading of some of the key notions in Lacanian psychoanalysis, among them, language, desire, and the Other. He suggests that Heidegger’s redefinition of language underlies Lacan’s reformulation of Saussurean linguistics and ties the notion of desire to the ecstatic temporality of Dasein. In a way what Richardson outlines, although very briefly and not exactly in those terms, is the critical project of rethinking the subject of desire through the ontico-ontological difference, that is, through the unstable and repeatedly erased difference between being as event and beings as things or entities. What Richardson’s essay does not address is the reciprocal effect that the problematic of sexual difference might have on the question of being, on the idea of a “pre-sex” Dasein as the temporalizing structure of the human mode of being. For such a reformulation of the question of being we need to look to Irigaray, whose work should be approached, I would argue, in terms of a double re-reading: on the one hand, in L’oubli de l’air and certain other texts, particularly in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray reconceives the question of being through sexual difference; on the other hand, and this is a point which Irigaray’s reception has almost completely missed, Irigaray revises Lacanian psychoanalysis and the role that sexual difference has played in philosophical discourse, including Heidegger’s own, through the prism of the ontico-ontological difference. What emerges from this criss-crossing critique is a rethinking of love and sexual difference, which reformulates the relation to the other outside the logic of both recognition and desire. As I argue in this essay, Irigaray’s double intervention into psychoanalysis and philosophy shifts the discussion of love and sexual relation away from negation and lack to temporality and embodiment.

 

This reading I am tracing in Irigaray’s work takes Lacan’s remark from Écrits at its word and situates the Lacanian subject of desire between Heidegger and Hegel, or, more specifically, between Dasein’s originary temporality and unhomeness (Unheimlichkeit) and Hegel’s dialectics of recognition. It is important to note that, at the time when interpretations of Lacan concentrate on Kant and Hegel, Irigaray’s work pursues, although critically, a decidedly post-Heideggerian path. Of the many provocative implications of Irigaray’s Heideggerian turning of Lacan, I will focus here on her rethinking of love in the context of the debasement of being and the various forms it takes in Lacan’s Encore: knowledge, truth, certain forms of love, the good, beauty. What this approach makes possible is the articulation of Irigaray’s pivotal move from the critique of the subject of desire to the reformulation of love in terms of temporality and wonder. The significance of this reformulation of Lacan through the prism of Heidegger’s revision of temporality lies in underscoring the openings in Lacan discourse beyond the logic of desire, which remains the focus of contemporary Lacanian readings. Recent innovative approaches to Lacan have tended to elaborate the logic of desire and sexual relation either in terms of the Hegelian dialectic of desire and recognition or by way of the Kantian notion of das Ding. Zizek’s interpretations of Lacan in the context of popular culture and political ideology emphasize the dependence of Lacan’s understanding of desire and the Other on the Hegelian dynamic of recognition. In Tarrying with the Negative, Zizek reads Hegel and Kant through each other in order to emphasize the limit to subjectivation, the unsignifiable real which marks the gap or lack in the constitution of the subject. He illustrates how substance, the Real, and the Thing are mirages instantiated retroactively by the surplus of desire. In another influential reading, Joan Copjec reaffirms and reformulates in “Sex and The Euthanasia of Reason” the Kantian thread in Lacan, explaining the Lacanian formulas of sexuation through Kant’s antinomies of reason in order to illustrate the extra-discursive existence of sex. Although emphatically not prediscursive, sex in Copjec’s argument, like Kant’s thing-in-itself, “is still unknown and must remain so” (234).

 

Irigaray’s work revises these arguments specifically in terms of what Kant’s formulation, at least in Heidegger’s opinion, does not thematize: temporality. For Irigaray, sexual difference signifies the limit of language not in terms of Kant’s thing-in-itself but in terms of the Heideggerian withdrawal of being. The limit then indicates the impossibility of presence marked by the ecstatic character of temporality, by the unfolding of time irreducible to the historicist conceptualization of history. In other words, Irigaray follows neither the Kantian nor the historicist route. Rather, her reformulation of love demonstrates how the logic of desire, which produces the substantialization of the (foreclosed) Real, is itself put into motion by an evacuation of temporality and a consequent “debasement” of being into things, objects, or substances. For Irigaray, the fact that the limit is not the non-signifiable real but futural temporality implies a critical change in the function of the negative: it no longer signifies negation or repression but becomes the marker of transformation, the sign of the possibility of love and ethical relation.²

 

What I am proposing, therefore, is a turn in reading Lacan, which would foreground the issue of temporality and its bearing on the problematics of love, desire, and sexual relation–a turn that might finally open up a constructive and critical dialogue between Irigarayan and Lacanian scholars. Fleshing out the revision of the subject of desire through the Heideggerian rethinking of temporality becomes critical for such a project, because it allows us to open up the space of relating to the Other that “escapes” and revises the logic of desire dominant in current discussions of this problem. Heidegger’s revision of temporality provides a critique of both Hegel’s dialectical conception of history and the Kantian notion of the inaccessible thing-in-itself, and makes possible an important rethinking of the very dynamic of relation to otherness from within the temporal unfolding of being. The approach I outline here underscores the role of temporality and non-appropriative relatedness to the Other which Irigaray reformulates from Heidegger and Levinas. My approach also complicates the relationship between Lacan and Irigaray beyond the current feminist interpretations of Irigaray, which still underplay the importance of Heidegger for her critique. It also calls into question the refusal to engage Irigaray’s reformulations of Lacan on the part of most Lacanian critics, a disavowal that follows in part from the misrecognition of Heidegger’s import for Lacan’s thinking. I argue that the critique and contextualization of desire in relation to the temporality of para-being, which Lacan signals in Encore, makes visible unexplored proximities between late Lacan and Irigaray and allows us to address the multiple points of Irigaray’s engagement and reformulation of Lacan’s work: desire, love, the Other. It highlights the ways in which Lacan’s Encore opens beyond its own formulations of jouissance and sexual relation and points beyond the logic of desire toward the non-appropriative relation which Irigaray redefines in terms of wonder.

 

These revisions underscore the need for an important reformulation of the current discourse on desire and power which characterize many approaches from Lacanian psychoanalysis and readings of Irigaray, to Foucault studies, and cultural and postcolonial studies. The approach that I negotiate between Lacan, Heidegger, and Irigaray, makes it possible to propose a modality of relatedness to the other that eschews the logic of the negative and of constitutive lack. To open up this perspective, desire and its entanglements with power need to be rethought in terms of the event temporality of being, through which Irigaray resignifies relationality into the non-appropriative and transformative wonder. At stake in this critique is the possibility of a relationality that is no longer structured in terms of lack and desire, power and subjection, and that remains “ethical” and non-appropriative. Heidegger sees the possibility of such freedom in the very temporal modality of human being (Dasein), i.e. in its unhomeness, or openness to what is other. The temporality of this openness ruptures the pathways of desire and makes possible an encounter with the other without confusing it with sameness or elevating it into sublimity. This reading of Irigaray’s Heideggerian intervention into Lacan and her Lacanian reformulation of Heidegger’s Dasein enables the reformulation of sexual relation in terms of a future-oriented and transformative being-two, to recall Irigaray’s most recent articulation of the problematic of sexual difference.

 

Drawing on Heidegger’s rethinking of temporality and being, I will explain how Irigaray redefines love beyond narcissism and fusion, and reworks the Hegelian labor of the negative, which remains so pivotal to Lacan’s logic of desire. This redefinition of love, however, can be carried out only in conjunction with the simultaneous reformulation of the question of being through sexual difference. Offering those revisions, Irigaray’s critique of psychoanalysis is never simply negative: it is not criticism and certainly not a rejection of Lacan but is a transformative encounter, a further elaboration of the openings which Lacan himself makes in Encore. The critique of love as a certain debasement of being, as a veiling of the temporality and finitude of existence, is obviously at the heart of Encore. Tracing an historical path from Aristotle through courtly love and the baroque aesthetic to Freud and contemporary linguistics, Lacan’s Seminar XX reappraises the questions posed in the ethics seminar in order to explore the possibility of ethical love differentiated from the ideal of the One in which Lacan sees one of the forms of the foreclosure of both the historicity and the jouissance of being–a collapse or debasement of being’s occurrence into substantiality or ideality. Repeating his own formulas of sexuation, his understanding of the work of desire and of the deceptions of love, Lacan points in Seminar XX toward the possibility of rethinking love in connection with a certain jouissance and in terms of the revised notion of being as para-being. Encore opens a path to thinking the ethics of love outside of the mirroring enclosures of narcissism and the effects of sameness associated with the idea of the One. This possibility pivots on redrawing the very notion of relation to the other into a new, non-appropriative mode of relationality which is not encompassed by desire, narcissistic or fusional love, or the labor of the negative.

 

Recalling de Beauvoir’s hope that the future will bring new, re-imagined relations, Irigaray develops such relationality into a redefinition of sexual difference as a transformative event in which an encounter with the sexed other keeps reinventing difference and thus opens the possibility of a new future. The issues of the debasement of being and the possibility of ethical love are closely connected in Irigaray’s revision of sexual difference and form her response to Lacan’s repeated assertion that sexual relationship does not take place. For Irigaray the failure of sexual relation reflects the effective erasure of sexual difference within the cultural paradigms of sexuation: the figuration of “woman” as absence or the not-whole, as the other to “man”–which issues from the metaphysical desire for sameness and the unity of being–forecloses the possibility of exchange in sexual relation and produces the illusion of unified and universalizable experience. It is only by redefining the relation between the sexes outside of the metaphysical strictures of presence and absence, negation and unity, that it may become possible to rethink the sexuate dimension of being beyond its phallocratic debasement. Considering Irigaray in the context of Heidegger’s thought, I reappraise her redefinition of the relationality of love in terms of a rethinking of Dasein into an ethical, non-appropriative event of being-two. At stake in this redefinition of love as a non-appropriative encounter, as is the case with Lacan’s seminars VII and XX, is also the question of ethics.

 

To illustrate these re-negotiations between Lacan, Irigaray, and Heidegger, I will focus on the implications of thinking the subject of desire as a mediation, a middle link between Dasein and being, on the one hand, and the subject of absolute knowledge, on the other. Lacan’s reading of Freud brings the question of lack and absence, reformulated as the work of the signifier, to bear on the Cartesian subject of certainty and also on the Hegelian idea of history as the manifestation of the subject’s development toward absolute knowledge. It is the structuring and grounding function of lack that dislocates the Cartesian subject and opens it onto the subject of desire, which emerges as another layer of subjectivity, constantly enveloping and fracturing the subject of knowledge. Examining various forms of love against the backdrop of the splits and lack intrinsic to subjectivity, Lacan indicates that love functions as a supplement both to the lack that structures desire and to the failure of sexual relationship. Love takes two primary forms: narcissism, a self-love described by Freud, and the philosophical-theological idea of unity which, as Lacan puts it, has to do with the One, that is, with the ideal of oneness and fusion that can be traced back at least as far as Plato’s Symposium. Against these two dominant forms, Encore (hereafter abbreviated E) signals the importance of rethinking love with respect to the failure of sexual relationship, which, Lacan insists, although articulated as a negation, marks something positive: “Yes, I am teaching something positive here. Except that it is expressed by a negation” (E 59). What fails in sexual relationship is objective; what fails is, in fact, the object or objet a, which the desiring subject keeps searching for and ascribing to the Other. “The essence of the object is failure” (E 58). One crucial historical instance of this failure of the object or of the object as failure that Lacan analyzes in Encore is courtly love, which sublimates the absence of sexual relation into poetic rhetoric. In courtly love, which seems to have had a lasting influence on European conceptions of love, love becomes the symptom of the absence of sexual relation, a compensation for the lack in the double form of idealized femininity and one’s “courtly” relation to it. Lacan’s remark that the failure of sexual relation represents something positive implies, however, that grasping this failure as lack or negativity is already a misinterpretation of the “being” of sexual relation, of the very manner in which sexes relate. It is indeed possible to regard Encore as a series of attempts to signal the positivity of the failure of sexual relation, to open the door to reimagining this failure outside the logic of supplementarity and its tendency toward substantialization of being. I would argue that Seminar XX, though at points hesitant and unclear, can be read in terms of an effort to think difference and relation beyond the various forms of negativity, logical or dialectical, in order to discern the positivity marked in the failure of sexual relation.

 

As supplements to the failure in the “object” of love, the diverse forms of love which Lacan mentions in the course of Seminar XX produce a certain debasement of being, enclosing the subject within narcissistic desire or evacuating the temporality of being into phantasmatic objects or metaphysical ideals. An attempt to counter this “depreciation” of being, Lacan’s comments about a certain positivity manifested in the failure of sexual relationship which does not require supplements allow us to read this failure as opening a path, a different trail, as it were, to the other. These remarks indicate the need for reformulating the discourse of love into a new mode of relationality, disengaged from knowledge and desire. More importantly, they can be read as signaling the critical importance of rethinking relationality apart from the logic of negativity which underpins the metaphysical articulations of being and the cultural logic of sexuation. The ending of Encore expressly dissociates love from the order of knowledge (E 146). Since love may occur only as that something positive marked negatively as the failure of sexual relation, it does not require the support of objet a and, although related, perhaps often inextricably, to desire, does not belong to the same order or operate the same relation. Such “new” love points to a different layer of subjectivity, marked within but at the same time pointing beyond the subject of knowledge and the subject of desire. Lacan does not expand on the possibility of this “may be” of love in Encore, hinting only that it has to do with the body and with a jouissance whose economy “should not be/could not fail to be phallic” or that of the not-whole which Lacan associates with the possibility of feminine jouissance.

 

This jouissance emerging from Lacan’s remarks dispersed throughout Encore marks a certain mode of bodily being, which Lacan associates with the para-being of signifierness (signifiance) and opposes to the substantialized being and its diverse avatars: truth, knowledge, supreme being, soul, etc. (E 71). If the soul unifies the body, jouissance “writes” it, i.e. unfolds the bodily being as a certain drift and a text or texture of experience, irreducible to our knowledge of it (E 110-112). The jouissance occurs in the mode of “failing to be,” that is, it fails to be substantialized, it eschews the substantive and signified forms of being, marking itself as the positivity of this failure. Since it fails to ever be (as substantive), this jouissance cannot be known: it represents an affect or passion of para-being, a passion that has neither the positivity of presence nor the negativity of absence. This is why Lacan refers to it as a “passion for ignorance” (E 121), opposed to the passion for knowledge and working beyond the dialectic of love and hate. If knowledge works within or at least toward the temporality of presence and desire operates the temporality of absence and lack, the passion for ignorance would have to be thought in terms of a different temporality, one that cannot be explained by the logic of progress, negation, or accumulation. It is neither the positivity of the one nor the negativity of the not-whole, with its “failing,” accumulative logic of one plus one plus one. As this mode of being, the jouissance that Lacan is after is also differentiated from objet a and the symbolic, which produce semblance of being and block the path to the other (E 93-94). Such a jouissance is never properly of language (langue) or appropriate to it but, rather, operates as its inter-dit: as lalangue (E 121). Inter-said only in its interdiction, this jouissance of being finds itself prior to signification, prior to the effects of the signifier and its “stupid” logic of collectivization. This jouissance undermines the hold that truth and thought have on being, a hold that debases being into the “stupidity” of the One and the illusory permanence of substantives. As Lacan suggests, this jouissance allows us “to relegate the truth to the lowly status it deserves” (E 108). In a Heideggerian gesture, Lacan opposes to the truth the pathway, the changing and temporalizing path of wisdom offered by Taoism. Finally, since this jouissance is inappropriate for language or truth, it is linked to the fact that sexual relationship fails, that is, fails to be ever constituted. The positivity of the failure of sexual relation has to do with pathways of this bodily jouissance, with the temporality of its being, which prohibits sexual relationship, that is, lets it happen only as inter-dit, as inter-said. Inter-dit marks the different temporality of jouissance, which refracts the logic of presence and absence, and therefore fails to articulate itself in terms of the operations of negation. It is in relation to this different temporality–neither of knowledge nor of desire–that we need to rethink the failure of sexual relation.

 

Irigaray’s Speculum and This Sex Which Is Not One reformulate feminine morphology and the jouissance Lacan discusses in Encore away from the economy of the not-whole and into a new relationality of proximity, based on a critical appropriation, through the prism of sexual difference, of Heidegger’s idea of nearness (Nähe) and Levinas’s proximity, together with their explicit ethical connotations. In an important way, Irigaray’s notions of proximity and wonder, critical to her project in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (hereafter abbreviated ESD) form a response to the Levinasian rethinking of ethical relation as a radical proximity in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, a response that resignifies proximity specifically in terms of sexual difference.³ The notion of proximity developed by Irigaray, delineating an interval which cannot be crossed or thematized, is also evocative in its spatio-temporal drift of Lacan’s inter-dit: the writing in-between words or lines, both prohibited by language and representation and yet marked and thus in some way arriving in the very interdiction that forecloses its expression. Proximity inter-says itself between presence and absence, between knowledge and desire, mapping a relationality that is too close for producing either identification (sameness) or separation (negation). As Irigaray refers to it, proximity is “neither one nor two,” it has to do neither with the One nor with negation. The modality of relation which Irigaray calls proximity provides an alternative to the subject-object relation and its basis in the logic of negation with the corollary opposition between presence and absence. It is a relation that fails to “be,” i.e. fails to identify the one with the other, that, in other words, does not submit to the labor of the negative. Without either becoming present or being simply absent, proximity does not fail to mark difference, albeit otherwise, in its non-substantive, spatio-temporal drift.

 

Lacan’s inter-dit recalls Heidegger’s distinction between logos and glossa from Introduction to Metaphysics, where logos refers to what gets said between words, as it were, and, at the same time, becomes veiled by the play of signs.⁴ This distinction reappears in Heidegger’s 1951 essay “Logos,” which Lacan translated into French: “Thus, the essential speaking of language, Legein as laying, is determined neither by vocalization fwnh nor by signifying shmainein. Expression and signification have long been accepted as manifestations which indubitably betray some characteristics of language. But they do not genuinely reach into the real of the originary, essential determination of language, nor are they at all capable of determining this realm in its primary characteristics” (Early 64). There is something of language beyond signification and articulation, beyond the play of the signifier and the solidifying force of the signified. Heidegger claims that signification does not determine the originary realm of language, i.e. that spatio-temporal event which in each moment has always already laid out the relationality within which signification becomes possible. This laying out of a relationality is the meaning of logos as a language “beyond” language: logos is the saying that inter-says itself in the play of significations, both marked and foreclosed by the logic of the signifier. This rethought Heideggerian logos is then non-logocentric and refers to a relationality that, within the spatio-temporal unfolding of being, fails to be either present or absent, and yet marks a certain positivity, a non-metaphysical pulsation of being which cannot be reduced to negation or lack. Still, logos cannot fail but to conceal itself within the negative logic of being, within the opposition between presence and absence. Making a distinction between words and signs, Heidegger remarks that logos is the word marked as erased between signs, the word that sinks down into and becomes concealed in language (Einführung 131). Logos then marks the rhythm in which being lays itself out, its historico-temporal unhoming, that is, its intrinsic openness onto the unheimlich. Reinterpreting truth as aletheia or unconcealment, Heidegger remarks in “On the Essence of Truth” that unconcealment happens in the midst of concealment, within the non-essence (Un-Wesen ) or pre-essential essence (vor-wesende Wesen ) of truth, which is constituted as a Geheimnis, a mystery (Pathmarks 148; “Vom Wesen” 191). The mystery at stake in Dasein is not “mystical,” but rather concerns the unhoming intrinsic to Dasein, its modality of being itself as unheimlich. Playing with Heidegger’s later remarks on the function of Ge- in Ge-stell, or the “enframing” characteristic of modern technology (note to “The Question Concerning Technology”) we could say that this mystery (Geheimnis) or concealment relates the various ways in which otherness and being-outside-itself constitute Dasein into the disclosedness of beings.

 

As inter-dit, Lacan’s jouissance from Encore can be interpreted in terms of the concealing temporality of the logos and its Unheimlichkeit. What interdicts jouissance is its modality of para-being, its concealment from both presence and absence, its neither negative nor positive logic. If this jouissance always fails it is because its positivity has the mode of logos: inscribed into the logic of fulfillment and lack, such jouissance has always already failed. Not because it fails to fulfill the expectation and thus marks a lack but because jouissance’s logos is not of the logic of fulfillment, which presupposes presence and immediately brings with it its negation: lack. Lacan suggests that this inter-dit grants us access to a certain kind of the real which needs to be exposed (E 119), unconcealed in its logos of concealment. At stake in the inter-dit is, therefore, a different logos of relationality, a mode of relatedness that inhabits the real beyond the signification of this logos as having to do with the one, as “sayable” in terms of the metaphysical logic of being and its labor of the negative. The difficulty of exposing this real lies in its refraction of presence, a refraction which, however, cannot be mistaken for the force of negation and subsequently constituted into lack. Such real is not the inaccessible Kantian Ding, separated from language and perception, but is rather the inter-said whose “failed positivity” inlays and de-structures language. While little of this real remains accessible in terms of signification, it is hardly absent from language, continuously inlaying expression.

 

For Irigaray, this real and its different mode of relationality takes place as the event of wonder, constituted as the fluid proximity between the one and the other: “A third dimension. An intermediary. Neither the one nor the other” (Ethics 82). This event where there is neither one nor two, where, in other words, the logic of identity and difference underpinning the subject’s relation to the other does not operate, frames Irigaray’s attempt to articulate new, so far unimagined forms of sexual relations–a new relationality of love. In order to articulate this new relationality more clearly, I will examine Irigaray’s work in terms of the effects that the ontico-ontological difference and the ecstatic temporality it encodes produce on both the subject of knowledge and the subject of desire. Her writings discern a certain parallel between the operations of knowledge and desire with respect to temporality and the ontico-ontological difference: both desire and knowledge end up collapsing the ontico-ontological difference and, thus, conceal the finitude of being. While the subject of knowledge effaces the temporality of being by constituting consciousness into the presence of representations, desire, as a relation structured through lack, clothes the paradoxically constitutive absence into the desired presence of objet a. Both knowledge and desire are structured in terms of the opposition between presence and absence: knowledge as the sublation of difference into presence, desire as lack or the lost presence of primary jouissance. For Irigaray, desire remains coupled with the fantasy of origin, of the original or primary satisfaction, and can only with difficulty be disconnected from the gesture of encircling or taking hold of. It seems that for Irigaray both the subject of consciousness and the subject of desire are still metaphysical, although in different ways. The first one sublates absence into the presence of knowledge and the self-presence of consciousness; the other, in Lacan’s re-reading of Hegel, foregrounds the structuring force of absence, the effect of the signifier, the lack desiring its own perpetuation.

 

These appropriative tendencies in knowledge and desire lead Irigaray to reconceptualize love in a way that calls into question both the subject of knowledge and the subject of desire. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, this critical reformulation is developed through a reading of Descartes’ philosophy of passions, in which Irigaray points out that for Descartes desire remains secondary to wonder (ESD 77) and she comments on the conspicuous absence of wonder in Freud’s theory of passions: “[Descartes] does not differentiate the drives according to the sexes. Instead, he situates wonder as the first of the passions. Is this the passion that Freud forgot?” (ESD 80). Although Irigaray does not develop her comments on the relation between wonder and desire, the direction of her argument is clear: she considers wonder to be the first passion, prior to desire and knowledge, though not in a developmental or linear sense. Wonder can be, then, seen as parallel to that third jouissance, to the passion for ignorance, which Lacan opposes to love and hate toward the end of Encore. Freud forgets this passion because it is covered over not only by knowledge but also by the logic of desire. Preceding desire, wonder functions as the very intermediary of relations, their third term (ESD 82). Irigaray thinks of wonder as the passion in which there is no separation between body and mind, between thought and affect, between thought and action: “A passion that maintains a path between physics and metaphysics, corporeal impressions and movements toward an object, whether empirical or transcendental” (ESD 80). It becomes clear, then, that rereading Descartes,⁵ Irigaray is also reinterpreting the Lacanian subject of desire in relation to the bodily jouissance of being reformulated as admiration or wonder. What this rereading points to is another layer, or better, a different mode of being, beyond both the subject of knowledge and the subject of desire: it is the temporality of wonder in terms of which Irigaray redefines love.

 

To flesh out this opening of the subject of desire onto a new relationality of love beyond narcissism and the idea of the One, Irigaray reinterprets Diotima’s speech from Symposium, not only setting Diotima’s remarks explicitly against the idea of unity but also using them to distinguish between the workings of love and desire. She situates desire in the context of will, intention, and teleology, contrasting it with wonder, which describes a non-appropriative and transformative relation to the other. Tracing this distinction between love and desire, Irigaray remarks that love (eros)–the pathos that guides wonder–has the force of an intermediary but becomes stymied and declines when desires, aims, and objectification set in: “It seems that during the course of her speech, she diminishes somewhat this daimonic, mediumistic function of love, such that it is no longer really a daimon, but an intention, a reduction to the intention, to the teleology of human will, already subjected to a kind of thought with fixed objectives, not an immanent efflorescence of the divine of and in the flesh. Love was meant to be an irreducible mediator, at once physical and spiritual, between the lovers, and not already codified duty, will, desire” (ESD 30, my emphasis). As the passion of wonder, love remains prior to desire, because desire operates on the level of intention and, turning what is desired into an object or a goal, “debases” its being. Elaborating on this critical change in being, Irigaray remarks that, instead of loving one’s lover, one begins to desire one’s beloved: “In the universe of determinations, there will be goals, competitions, and loving duties, the beloved or love being the goal…. Love becomes a kind of raison d’ état ” (ESD 30). When love becomes distanced from becoming, the temporality of wonder, its jouissance, becomes collapsed into goals and reasons: family, procreation, the state, politics, production and so on.

 

Perhaps the most important aspect of wonder is that, unlike desire, it is not constituted through lack. Wonder operates as a transformative interval, in which the other’s difference is encountered in a “positive” way, i.e. it produces a change not simply in the manner of the subject’s being but in the very mode of the relation itself. As Irigaray puts it, wonder is “the opening of a new space-time” and “a mobilization of new energies” (ESD 75). This distinction between desire and wonder is critical for Irigaray, specifically with respect to how the other’s difference becomes manifested and affects the valency of relation. Lack points to alienation; it is read negatively, as a repeatedly missed satisfaction. It could be argued that the logic of lack presupposes the idea of presence: even though lack is the effect of the signifier and the signifier never produces full presence, the very notion of lack becomes accessible via its presupposed opposition to presence. As Lacan points out, access to language is opened through the mastering of the absence of the lost object. But the paradigm of absence/presence already marks a certain forgetting of the temporality of being: the oedipal logic operates as a covering of the originary event-temporality, as a veiling of the para-being (par-être), which Lacan explores in Encore.⁶ If desire owes its dynamic to a lost origin, i.e., to primary satisfaction, then it is put into motion by a (mis)reading of being in terms of possession and lack–a logic that substantializes and objectifies the non-substantive spatio-temporality of being in an attempt to appropriate it. This is why in her remarks on Descartes Irigaray emphasizes the force of motion intrinsic to wonder: this force marks the non-substantive and non-essential modality of being, indicating that being is not about having or losing, since in wonder there is nothing, literally no-thing or object that could be possessed. Wonder is a modality of relatedness that does not transpire in terms of the subject-object relation, it is a disposition in which there are no positions that are proper to subjectivity or its objects. While desire is haunted by the specter of satisfaction, wonder is about jouissance without satisfaction, without objects, real or imaginary.

 

What changes in the turn from wonder to desire is the mode of relating: from non-appropriation and proximity to relation instituted in terms of goals, appropriation, hierarchy, subordination, and command. From the perspective of wonder one could say that desire is a repetition of the missed satisfaction not because such satisfaction cannot be recovered, i.e., because it belongs to a lost past, but rather because being in its temporality is not about satisfaction or having. Lacan’s critique in Encore of the logic of presence and absence in terms of para-being indicates that desire keeps misreading its own dynamic, it keeps missing the way being works only as para-being. As a result, desire keeps knotting being into the cause of desire, a cause that remains without substance, a void. In other words, desire still reads being metaphysically, in terms of lack and absence. Desire feeds on this lack and replenishes it in order to reproduce its own circular or knotting logic. From Heidegger’s perspective, this logic is nihilistic: “In the forgetfulness of being to drive [betrieben] only at beings–this is nihilism” (Einführung 155).⁷ When the force, the pulsation of being becomes forgotten and what is repeatedly belabored, driven at, are objects or beings, nihilism takes over existence. Nihilism is not annihilation of beings or lack of values, but is, on the contrary, the forgetting of being in the fixation on objects, whether real, imaginary, or symbolic. These objects include values, ideas, knowledge, the One of love and the One of knowledge. It is only in relation to such objects that being can be seen as lacking. The fact that being is not and lacks in being an object or a substance to be possessed, brings desire into being–desire that wants to forget being and imagine objects in place of the non-appropriable event. At the same time, the fact that being is not, that it is no-thing, no thing or object, undoes any and all such attempts: no being or entity, because it occurs, because it is in being, can ever be an object and live up to desire. Nihilism produces its own frustration and feeds on its repetition. To undermine the hold of this nihilism, it is necessary to call into question the debasement of being’s historico-temporal event into objects–it is, in other words, to question the logic of desire.

 

In her reformulation of wonder, Irigaray thinks para-being precisely as a counter to the appropriative, nihilistic logic of desire, and to the lack that it marks in being. To explain this, I would need to flesh out in more detail the similarities and differences in Lacan’s and Heidegger’s approaches to language. Let me just suggest here that such a comparison would disclose the possibility of rethinking the logic of the Lacanian signifier from the effect of lack to what, in Heideggerian parlance, might be called an event temporality, which operates beyond the idea of lack and satisfaction. Lacan himself gestures in this direction with his comments on para-being, on the par-être that does not appear. This understanding of temporality underpins Irigaray’s notion of wonder, to which she explicitly refers as an event: an event and advent of the other. To explain the implications of Irigaray’s idea of wonder, I will focus on two of its aspects: temporality and the sense of otherness disclosed in it, and I will do so by commenting on those two facets in Heidegger’s discussion of Dasein in Being and Time. I suggested earlier that Irigaray reads Lacan as diagnosing the “missing” link, the subject of lack, located between Dasein and the subject of knowledge. This reading allows Irigaray not only to rethink Lacan encore, as it were, through Heidegger but also to reconsider Dasein in relation to desire and sexual difference.

 

The term Dasein refers to the specifically human mode of being in its finite temporality. It does not designate the subject but, rather, describes the pre-subjective and embodied mode of being, which comes to understand itself in terms of an open context of relations which make up Dasein’s spatio-temporal being-in-the-world. Those relations include Being-with, or Dasein’s comportments toward other human beings. In the frequently misunderstood remarks about authenticity from Being and Time, Heidegger maintains that Dasein is “authentic” (eigentlich) only in the mode of Unheimlichkeit, that is, uncanniness or, better, “unhomeness.” Dasein occurs authentically only at the moments when the temporalizing force of its finitude undermines the impersonal familiarity of its daily identifications. Heidegger calls these identifications the “they-self,” the self that comprises the realm of language, symbolic and imaginary identities: “It is Dasein in its uncanniness [unhomeness]: originary thrown being-in-the-world as ‘not-at-home,’ the naked ‘that’ in the nothingness of the world” (Being 255, slightly modified).⁸ The term Un-zuhause (not-at-home) makes clear that Heidegger’s notion of Unheimlichkeit places the emphasis on being “un-homed,” understood as the mode of being in which Dasein occurs as “authentic.” To put it differently, Dasein is “authentic” in an originary exposition to alterity, which means that it is its-self as unhomed toward what is other, as divested of stable or substantive identities offered in its culture. When Dasein experiences itself as “at home” in its everyday being, it has forgotten the otherness, the “un-homing” at work in its own temporal mode of being, and has covered over its originary openness to what is other. The originary opening to the other constitutes a temporal event, in which the modality of being is not presupposed or imposed but, instead, brought about and co-constituted in relation to the other. To put it differently, the shape or the form which being-in-the-world takes depends on the modality of relating to the other, on whether one does not forget that the familiarity of everyday being–with its “routine” forms of experience, understanding, and representation–takes place each moment within an originary “unhomeness.”

 

Dasein understands itself without ever being able to articulate this understanding into a knowledge, because this understanding is “practical”: it happens as the activity of being-in-the-world in which Dasein comports itself toward things and others. What is so unhoming in this understanding, i.e. in the human mode of being, is finitude, and the de-substantializing effects of its temporality, which disclose to Dasein the fact that things are not substantive, that they are never objects, that, in psychoanalytic terms, they cannot be satisfactory in the way our desire wants them to be. Heidegger’s rethinking of Freud’s uncanny certainly indicates that the finite temporality of Dasein calls into question the logic of desire, that it forces a rethinking of the dynamic of relation to what is other. That dynamic would have to be rethought from what Heidegger calls the ecstatic temporality particular to Dasein. Heidegger writes that Dasein’s time unfolds as an always momentary complex of the three ecstasies of time: the has been (Gewesenheit or the “past”), the making present, and the coming-toward (Zu-kunft) or the future. For our purposes, what matters in Heidegger’s detailed explanation of the rise of the common concept of time out of the ecstatic temporality of Dasein⁹ is that ecstatic temporality provides a critique of the concepts of time and history grounded in the metaphysical opposition between presence and absence. As the name indicates, ecstatic temporality is the originary mode of being outside itself, that is, of being open to otherness: “Temporality is the originary ‘outside-of-itself’ [Ausser-sich] in and for itself” (BT 377/329 modified). Temporality means being always extended outside itself, beyond what becomes present. Dasein occurs as concerned with the “outside-of-itself,” and this concern or care, as Heidegger refers to it, takes the form, especially in his later writings, of letting-be. In other words, the possibility of letting what is other be as what it is in its difference is linked with the temporal occurrence of Dasein as an originary “outside-of-itself.” What makes Dasein Dasein, that is, what constitutes the human mode of being, is this originary extending or openness toward otherness.

 

Dasein “understands” itself existentially in terms of its project, i.e. as a projection onto its possibilities for being, it sees itself futurally in relation to its power to be. Within this projection, the past is not a matter of re-membering or reconstructing past situations with historical exactness, but of retrieving it “existentially,” that is, as a kind of (self)interpretive acting which always already extends the present’s paths into the future. Therefore, history is primarily futural: its temporalizing matrix works as a disjoining structure, in which historical being orients itself in terms of a sheaf of possibilities. As Heidegger remarks, temporality discloses “the silent force of the possible” (die stille Kraft des Möglichen) (Sein 394) as intrinsic to the dynamic of being. This silent force of the possible indicates that transformation is intrinsic to the very dynamic of occurring: it is tied to the shape which the relation to the other takes.

 

This transformative vector of temporality is of critical importance to understanding Irigaray’s remarks about wonder. In Heidegger, Dasein names a mode of being, which does not have a place but occurs as an interval, as a temporal project, if you will, within which the relation between the subject and the other unfolds. In “On the Essence of Truth,” Heidegger explains that Dasein does not belong to human beings but constitutes a relationality of freedom into which humans can be “released”: “The human being does not possess freedom as property. At best, the converse holds: freedom, ek-sistent, disclosive Dasein, possesses the human being….” (Pathmarks 145). Dasein stands for a relatedness to being in which the human being can participate, a relatedness which is always tuned in a particular way, as the play of concealment and unconcealment. It is the manner in which beings become unconcealed that brings Dasein into an attuning (a Gestimmtheit or a Stimmung) in which it can be free. Stimmung, pitch or mood, cannot be understood here in terms of psychology or lived experience. Instead, it refers to what is best understood as a disposition, a disposing of relations between being, beings, and human beings. The site, the there or the Da of such a disposition is called Da-sein, there-being. Entering into this modality of being, humans find themselves within a certain relatedness where their relation to being and beings becomes disposed into either a disclosive freedom, a non-appropriative mode of relationality, or into a grasping, appropriative relation that obscures the disposition of Dasein. In Heidegger, the non-appropriative and appropriative exist in a tension, which marks the occurrence of the event or Ereignis. The notion of Dasein as a temporal project marked by the transformative force of the possible allows Heidegger to disentangle a mode of being which remains free from the Hegelian dialectic of recognition and its intricate mesh of desire and knowledge. Heidegger shows that, as such a temporal project, Dasein is in each moment “mine”; however, it is “mine” not by way of possession or identity, but is “mine” in its very force to be, in its transformative, futural vectors.

 

I see Lacan’s remarks from Encore on para-being and jouissance as the context that allows Irigaray to introduce into this Heideggerian way of thinking a critical reformulation of Dasein into what Irigaray’s recent writings call being-two.¹⁰ If Dasein is the in-between, the fold from which the relation between subject and the Other emerges, the change Irigaray suggests is that this in-between is itself vectored as being-two. Being-two refers not to the subject’s relation to the other but to a mode of encounter, in which there is no “one” as the subject and no “other” as the object of desire: “one” and “other” only occur in the mode of being two, which does not signify the split or the lack that (un)grounds the subject but the originary openness to otherness as the possibility of the future and transformation. According to Irigaray, prior to the uneasy embrace of the subject of desire and the subject of knowledge, there is a mode of being-two, a mode of being-in-sexual-difference. In this openness constitutive of being two, otherness has the positive valency of the possibility of transformation: it is not a sign of lack or threat but of the possibility of freedom and change as the vectors of the encounter with the other. Being-two thus redefines otherness beyond the subject-object opposition on the level of knowledge, and beyond the subject-Other relation on the level of desire. If Dasein is a temporal project of possibilities-to-be, within being-two, this project is already inflected, asymmetrical; it is transformative by virtue of the other’s singularity. It is in this specific sense that I refer to Irigaray’s wonder as originary: Heidegger’s term ursprünglich, mistakenly interpreted as primordial, does not refer to a past which Dasein would somehow try to repeat or get back to but to the originary force with which each moment opens itself into the futural possibilities for being. To say that wonder is originary does not mean that it refers to an origin, to a primal moment or scene, but that it happens with the transformative force of a future-opened temporal project. If desire operates in relation to a primary satisfaction, to an idea of an original jouissance, wonder sketches a different dynamic of relation, one turned toward the future as the new.

 

Being-two is Irigaray’s way of marking being with sexual difference and also her attempt to rethink love in terms of wonder. As she remarks in Être Deux, “The dualism of subject and object is no longer overcome in the fusion or ecstasy of the One but in the incarnation of the two, a two irreducible to the One….” (108).¹¹ Being-two becomes the figure for a mode of being that bespeaks neither the unity of the one nor the difference between the two (or more, i.e. multiplicity), but refers to an incarnated and concrete mode of being that eschews both monism and dualism. In social and political terms, being-two sketches an economy of relations alternative to the dominant paradigm of sociality conceived as the integration of individuals into a social totality. For Irigaray universality is not produced by sublating particularity into generality but marks itself within the singularity of the event of being-two. Being-two functions an “existential,” i.e. incarnate and concrete, universal from which existence unfolds: “[w]ithout doubt, the most appropriate content for the universal is sexual difference. Indeed, this content is both real and universal” (I Love 47). This revised universality eludes the idea of totality or homogeneity and inscribes, instead, an unquantifiable proximity between the two (sexes) from which social and political relations develop. Such a “universal” remains intrinsically futural: it is not produced as unified totality but remains to be enacted, carried out and decided, futurally, as the transformative and differential event of being-two.

 

Irigaray’s remarks about being-two allude to Lacan’s critique of love in Encore, and try to spell out a new relationality of love as the asymmetrical event of being-two beyond narcissism and the idea of the One. The unhoming (unheimlich) and transformative temporality of this event make it possible to rethink sexual relation in the following way: the failure of sexual relation becomes the mark of its event dynamic, it reflects the fact that sexual relation cannot be written, signified, or substantialized, because it is real. Sexual relation becomes “real” not in any substantive or atemporal, unreachable sense, but precisely by virtue of the silent force of the possible that it literally keeps incarnating in the event of being-two. Rethinking Irigaray’s being-two in the context of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein lets us flesh out the real in terms of its futural temporality and its forces of the possible. Irigaray would say that it is precisely love as sexual relation that enacts, as it were, and keeps incarnating the real as the transformative force of being. In being-two, the unhoming/transformative force of being becomes real. Reformulating de Beauvoir’s “one becomes a woman,” Irigaray would say that love and sexual difference become real with each pulsation of being, and they become real to the extent that the unhoming force of the encounter is not produced as lack but as the force of the possible.

 

Conceiving being-two in futural terms as a transformative relationality can be seen as a response to the problem of the debasement of being, which Lacan’s Encore associates with the logic of presence and absence, with the opposition between being and non-being. What such a “debasement” forecloses is precisely the futural vector of the “silent force of the possible,” to recall Heidegger’s remark from Being and Time. Irigaray rewrites this force of the possible into a relationality of love, into a space of freedom and transformation marked in the proximity of being-two. Irigaray’s wonder disengages desire from the logic of lack and reformulates it in terms of the futural vector of the possible: “Desire would be the vectorialization of space and time, the first movement toward, not yet qualified…. In a way, wonder and desire remain the spaces of freedom between the subject and the world. The substrate of predication? Of discourse?” (ESD 76). Desire thought in the register of wonder has no cause, only a momentum which vectorializes relations without qualifying or substantializing them; it is desire that does not operate on lack and repetition but in terms of excess and the new.

 

Lacan’s Encore reappraises the question of ethical love in terms of jouissance, the body, and para-being as the alternative to the phantasmatic logic of desire and the power of the One. How thin a line separates the possible ethical jouissance of para-being in our relation to the other from the domains of desire and knowledge is staged by the ending of Encore. Staged, not articulated, because Lacan clearly disengages the possibility of the different understanding of love Encore is after from knowledge, from the kind of love that knows the other as the One: “to know what your partner will do is not a proof of love” (E 146). This sentence closes the last page of Seminar XX, the page on which Lacan plays with the idea of encore as both enacting and subverting the logic of desire: “Shall I say, “See you next year”? You’ll notice that I’ve never ever said that to you. For a very simple reason–which is that I’ve never known, for the last twenty years, if I would continue next year. That is part and parcel of my destiny as object a” (E 146). The not-knowing in this remark is part and parcel of the logic of objet a, tempting with the possibility of its own impossible materialization. Lacan positions his discourse as objet a, enticing with the supposed final knowledge, desiring it yet again, encore, and making it still (encore) to come. This doubling encore can be read as the lack constitutive of the nihilistic desire to know or as a freeing encore, liberating the event (of the end of the seminar) from the logic of presence and absence into the event’s possible force of the future to be. One could say that the not-knowing Lacan mentions masks the understanding of how the futurity of being makes desire unsatisfiable; and yet desire cannot help but keep collapsing being’s event into an object. What emerges from Lacan’s performance is a distinction between two senses of possibility. In the first sense, possibility is grasped in terms of the knowledge of what it might be; possibility is either conceived in its deferred presence or enacted in its repeated lack, the two sides of the repetition of absence in desire. In the first sense, possibility is either grasped in terms of the knowledge of what it might be, and thus conceived in its deferred presence, or enacted in its repeated lack, the two sides of the repetition of absence in desire.

 

Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference, seen as a response to Encore, explores the collapse of these two possibilities in terms of the turn from wonder to the logic of lack, lack which desire keeps repeating and knowledge tries to supplement. Both Lacan and Irigaray indicate the difficulty of keeping this difference in play, and both underscore its importance for the possibility of love and ethical relation to the other. To articulate this originary relation of wonder apart from lack and negativity, I have brought together Heidegger’s critical approach to being, more specifically, his reading of being in terms of a futural temporality opened by the critique of the subject in Being and Time, and Irigaray’s appropriation of it in her reformulation of sexual difference. The futural relationality in terms of which Dasein understands itself as being-in-the-world breaks free of the dialectical labor of the negative, at the same time that it does not entail positing the real as unchangeable or inaccessible. Such a futural-transformative modality of relatedness allows Irigaray to articulate the being-two of love as a relation in which difference marks itself neither in terms of negation nor separation but as the transformative interval, as the proximity that keeps reformulating the very parameters of relation and obligation to the other. My tiered reading of Lacan, Irigaray, and Heidegger suggests a new direction for Lacanian interpretation, one that takes neither the Kantian nor the Hegelian route but revises the question of (sexual) relation and love in terms of the Heideggerian rethinking of being through temporality. This perspective reinforces Irigaray’s critique of Hegel’s understanding of love and helps further radicalize her reworking of the labor of the negative in terms of the transformative relatedness of wonder beyond negation. It makes possible fleshing out the problem of love in radically temporal and embodied terms, as the ethical relationality of wonder distinct from the temporal logic of negation and lack. Such an ethics of wonder becomes distinguished in the “positivity” of its transformative event from the labor of negation which underlies the repetitive replaying of the possible as the deferred or missed possibility of actualization. Reading Lacan’s Seminar XX in relation to Irigaray and Heidegger illustrates how love and ethics, always encore, ride on this distinction in the vectors of possibility between lack and wonder.

 

Notes

 

1. I quote this remark in the slightly modified version given by William Richardson in “Psychoanalysis and the Being-Question,” 139.

 

2. This argument underpins Irigaray’s I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity within History; see, for instance, 56-57.

 

3. Irigaray’s first response to Levinas comes in “The Fecundity of the Caress” (ESD 82). In her later “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas,” she underscores the ethical tenor of Heidegger’s work to suggest the possibility of opening ethics beyond the relation to other human beings. The link between Levinas’s and Lacan’s approaches to ethics, at least suggested in Irigaray’s work, is the focus of a recent collection of essays Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter, ed. Sarah Harasym.

 

4. “So finden wir denn bei Parmenides die scharfe Entgegensetzung von logos und glwssa (Frg. VII, v. 3 ff.)” (Einführung 132).

 

5. For Descartes wonder brings with it the possibility of being overwhelmed and crushed by what is other: it marks the anxiety afflicting the subject of certainty who finds itself in the face of what exceeds the grasp of its knowledge. (I would like to thank Dalia Judovitz for drawing my attention to this aspect of Descartes’ theory of passions.) Irigaray clearly reformulates Descartes’ wonder and this revision would have to be explained in the context of her trilogy about the elements, in which one of the organizing factors is the engagement with the pre-Socratic notion of wonder and with Heidegger’s rethinking of it. For Heidegger, wonder pertains to both the affective and the intellectual registers. In What Is Philosophy?, Heidegger regards thinking, passion, and action as the axes of philosophia, whose meaning Heidegger redefines, in the context of Pre-Socratics, as the striving after that which astonishes. “The rescue of the most astonishing thing–beings in Being [Seiendes im Sein] was accomplished by a few who started off in the direction of this most astonishing thing, that is, the sophon” (51). Philosophy is not motivated by the desire to know but names as a certain relatedness or disposition (Heidegger’s term is Stimmung) in which what is astonishes–it is a question of maintaining thought in wonder of what is.

 

6. “What we must get used to is substituting the ‘para-being’ (par-être)–the being ‘para,’ being beside–for the being that would take flight [fuir],” 44; see also 45.

 

7. “In der Vergessenheit des Seins nur das Seiende betreiben–das ist Nihilismus.”

 

8. The original reads: “Er ist das Dasein in seiner Unheimlichkeit, das ursprüngliche geworfene In-der-Welt-sein als Un-zuhause, das nackte ‘Das’ im Nichts der Welt” (Sein 276-277).

 

9. The whole of Division Two of Being and Time is devoted to the discussion of temporality; for Heidegger’s revision of the idea of temporality see, in particular, sections I, II, and III; section VI discusses the “vulgar” concept of time.

 

10. This term is the translation of the title of Irigaray’s recent book Être Deux.

 

11. “Ce n’est plus dans la fusion ou l’ecstase de l’Un que se surmonte alors le dualism entre sujet et objet. Mais dans l’incarnation de deux, un deux irréductible à l’Un…” (my translation).

Works Cited

 

• Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1994.
• Harasym, Sarah, ed. Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998.
• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.
• —. Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy. Trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1975, 1984.
• —. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1966.
• —. Pathmarks. Ed. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
• —. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986.
• —. “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit.” Wegmarken. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978.
• —. What Is Philosophy? Trans. and intro. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde. [NY]: Twayne, 1958.
• Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993.
• —. Être Deux. Paris: Grasset, 1997.
• —. I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity within History. Trans. Alison Martin. NY: Routledge, 1996.
• —. “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas.” The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
• Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan. NY: Norton, 1977.
• —. Encore. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1997.
• Richardson, William. “Psychoanalysis and the Being-Question.” Interpreting Lacan. Ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983.
• Zizek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.