PHILOSOPHY
diprose
corporeal g e n e r o s i t y corporeal
rosalyn diprose
generosity
Rosalyn Diprose contends that generosity is not just a human virtue, but it is an
openness to others that is critical to our existence, sociality, and social formation. on giving with nietzsche, merleau-ponty, and levinas
Her theory challenges the accepted model of generosity as a common character
trait that guides a person to give something they possess away to others within
an exchange economy. This book places giving in the realm of ontology, as well
as the area of politics and social production, as it promotes ways to foster social
relations that generate sexual, cultural, and stylistic differences. The analyses in
the book theorize generosity in terms of intercorporeal relations where the self is
corporeal generosity
given to others. Drawing primarily on the philosophy of Nietzsche, Merleau-
Ponty, and Levinas, and offering critical interpretations of feminist philosophers
such as Beauvoir and Butler, the author builds a politically sensitive notion of
generosity.
“This book is outstandingly original and will have a very significant impact on
contemporary ethical and social theory. It possesses an enviable maturity, dis-
played through the ease with which the author utilizes insights from a variety of
philosophical sources in order to present her own original account of ‘corporeal
generosity.’”
— Moira Gatens, author of Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality
“The topic of generosity, and relating the notion beyond personal virtue to its
foundational place in politics, is both significant and marks an important con-
tribution to ethics and politics.”
— Agnes B. Curry, Saint Joseph College
ROSALYN DIPROSE is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of New
South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of The Bodies of Women: Ethics,
Embodiment and Sexual Difference.
A volume in the SUNY series in Gender Theory
Tina Chanter, editor
rosalyn diprose
State University of New York Press
www.sunypress.edu
SUNY
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Corporeal Generosity
On Giving with Nietzsche,
Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas
SUNY series in Gender Theory
Tina Chanter, Editor
CORPOREAL GENEROSITY
ON GIVING WITH NIETZSCHE,
MERLEAU-PONTY, AND LEVINAS
ROSALYN DIPROSE
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Published by
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS,
ALBANY
© 2002 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic,
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without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, address
State University of New York Press
90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207
Production, Laurie Searl
Marketing, Jennifer Giovani-Giovani
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Diprose, Rosalyn.
Corporeal generosity : on giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and
Levinas / Rosalyn Diprose.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in gender theory)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-7914-5321-9 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-7914-5322-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Generosity. 2. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. 3. Merleau-Ponty,
Maurice, 1908–1961. 4. Levinas, Emmanuel. I. Title. II. Series.
BJ1533.G4 D49 2002
179'.9—dc21 2001049421
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Introducing Generosity 1
Part I Giving Identity and Difference
1 Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance 19
2 Giving Sexed Corporeality before
the Law 45
3 Performing Body-Identity through
the Other 59
Part II Generosity and the Politics of Affectivity
4 Erotic Generosity and Its Limits 75
5 Affectivity and Social Power:
From Melancholia to Generosity 95
6 Sexuality and the Clinical Encounter 107
Part III Generosity and Community (Trans)Formation
7 Thinking through Radical Generosity
with Levinas 125
8 Truth, Cultural Difference, and
Decolonization 145
9 Generosity, Community, and Politics 167
v
vi Corporeal Generosity
Conclusion 189
Notes 197
Bibliography 213
Index 221
Corporeal Generosity vii
Acknowledgments
Some of the material in this book has been revised from the following
original publications: “Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance,” in Paul Patton,
ed., Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory, London: Routledge, 1993; “Giv-
ing Corporeality against the Law,” in Australian Feminist Studies 11:24 (Oc-
tober 1996) (http://www.tandf.co.uk); “Performing Body-Identity,” in Writings
on Dance, 11–12 (summer 1994–1995); “Generosity: Between Love and Desire,”
in Hypatia 13:1 (1998), Indiana University Press; “Sexuality and the Clinical
Encounter,” in M. Shildrick and J. Price, eds., Vital Signs: Feminist Reconfigura-
tions of the Bio/logical Body, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998;
“What Is (Feminist) Philosophy?” in Hypatia 15:2 (2000), Indiana University
Press. I thank the publishers and editors for permission to use revised ver-
sions of this material here.
The research and writing of chapters 4 and 5 were undertaken with
the assistance of Australian Research Council Small Grants, chapter 4 while
I was a Visiting Fellow in the Philosophy Department at Warwick University.
The completion of the book was made possible with the assistance of a
Humanities Research Program Writing Fellowship from the University of
New South Wales (UNSW). I am grateful to these programs and to my own
School of Philosophy at UNSW for granting me the time and space to
undertake this work. In particular, I would like to thank Tina Chanter, the
series editor, for her friendship, and her and Jane Bunker and Laurie Searl
at State University of New York Press for their advice and support during
the publication of this manuscript. The advice of State University of New
York Press’ anonymous readers has also been very helpful in the final revi-
sion of the manuscript.
vii
viii Corporeal Generosity
This book has been written over a number of years and has undergone
a number of revisions. During that time, my research has benefited from the
inspiration, support, and guidance of a number of friends and colleagues,
including Keith Ansell-Pearson, Barbara Baird, Christine Battersby, Jennifer
Biddle, Constantin Boundas, Penelope Deutscher, Rachel Jones, Paul
Komesaroff, Alphonso Lingis, Genevieve Lloyd, Kelly Oliver, Linnell Secomb,
Cathryn Vasseleu, and Ewa Ziarek. Less visible but no less important has
been the input of friends from outside of academia, those whose provoca-
tions grace the pages of this book. Good-humored debates with postgradu-
ate students, especially Anne Gearside, Erika Kerruish, Matthew Paull, Thomas
Martin, Karen Williams, and Sarah Rice, have often made me think again.
For their ongoing intellectual generosity and friendship, I particularly want
to thank Robyn Ferrell, Moira Gatens, Paul Patton, and Nikki Sullivan, who
contributed to this book from beginning to end in ways beyond my ability
to recount. Special thanks to my family, who continues to provide the
inspiration for my writing, even though they may not recognize themselves
in it. This work was always too late, though, to properly acknowledge the
gift of friendship given me by Megan Fisher. It is in retrospect that I
dedicate this book to her.
Introduction
Introducing Generosity
GENEROSITY WOULD SEEM to be in short supply these days, the
occasional acts of virtuous individuals notwithstanding. In the late 1990s we
witnessed, throughout the Western world, a resurgence of conservatism in
government and an intolerance of different ways of being in social and
interpersonal relations. A graphic example of this, with which I am familiar,
is the recent birth and rapid growth in Australia of “One Nation.”1 One
Nation is, at the same time, the name of a political party and an expression
of dissatisfaction with the status quo. The source of this dissatisfaction seems
to be primarily economic, issuing as it does from people (primarily farmers,
small business proprietors, and the elderly) who describe themselves as “or-
dinary, hard-working Australians” who have fallen on hard times through
what they feel is neglect by successive governments to look out for their
economic needs. There is also a personal element to this dissatisfaction.
Government is not only accused of economic neglect, it is also accused of
forgetting the contribution these people have made, and continue to make,
to the well-being of Australian society. The charges of neglect and failure of
recognition may well be valid, expressed as they are through a level of
passion that is difficult to ignore. While the depth and breadth of that passion
is disturbing enough, the remedy proffered by One Nation is of greater
concern. While the slogan “One Nation” suggests aspirations for social unity
through a kind of communal spirit, in reality it offers a program of social
1
2 Corporeal Generosity
division and intolerance. As an antidote to the economic hardship and loss
of status its supporters experience, One Nation targets groups that it claims
have benefited too much from government policy, primarily welfare recipi-
ents, single mothers, Aboriginal Australians, and Asian immigrants. Through
a “what about me” attitude, people who may at other times be generous
would take from groups who could ill afford the loss. Such intolerance of
difference and lack of generosity are not peculiar to Australian politics, nor
to the present era. But that parsimony seems so endemic to the political
rhetoric that supports economic rationalism, and a laissez-faire economy
merits some attention, which, in turn, raises the question: Is there a connec-
tion between generosity and aspirations toward social justice?
The claim underlying the analyses in this book is that generosity is not
only an individual virtue that contributes to human well-being, but that it
is an openness to others that is fundamental to human existence, sociality,
and social formation. Usually the former understanding of generosity, as a
socially beneficial virtue, is said to exhaust its definition. Following Aristotle’s
discussion of magnanimity in Book IV of his Nicomachean Ethics (1975,
hereafter referred to as NE), generosity is taken to be a habituated and
cultivated character trait that guides a person toward giving to others beyond
the call of duty. Provided that the person gives by “deliberate choice” (NE
1105a, 17–18), according to “right reason” (1138b, 18–21), that is, appropri-
ately according to his or her means and the circumstances and without self-
serving motives so that the act is neither wasteful or mean (1120a, 25–30),
not only do the recipients benefit through an enhancement of their well-
being, but so does the one who gives through the pleasure that this brings
(1097b–1098a, 20, 1120a, 25–30). Without wishing to dismiss the value of
generosity so understood, the emphasis on utility within contemporary social
relations tends to reduce the gift to a calculable commodity (money or
goods) and generosity to the logic of an exchange economy (“I will give
you this in exchange for that”). The effect of this reduction is that, in the
absence of agreement on how to measure the extent of the giver’s means,
the nature of the recipient’s circumstances and the giver’s motives, what
seems generous to some, may, paradoxically, be parsimonious to others.
That generosity is difficult to distinguish from parsimony when under-
stood in terms of an exchange economy where virtue is subject to calcu-
lation is no more apparent than in Tibor Machan’s discussion of “Politics and
Generosity” (1990). Machan argues that generosity, which he defines in
Introduction 3
keeping with Aristotle’s model of virtue, can only flourish, or indeed can
only be possible, within a libertarian political system as opposed to a welfare
state. His point, put simply, is that “there cannot be any generosity involved
in a polity in which one is forced to share one’s wealth” (Machan 1990, 61).
Giving through duty to people whose circumstances one does not know
may be philanthropic or humanitarian but it is not generous, because gen-
erosity requires choice on the part of the giver and deliberation about the
appropriateness of the circumstances. Machan effectively supports generosity
as a “good trait” that makes us “better human beings” (63) in order to argue
for the unequal distribution of wealth, or at least to argue against any
systematic, state-directed sharing of commodities. This argument would be
appealing to the supporters of One Nation, with whom I began, but it does
seem decidedly mean. Generosity, in Machan’s argument, would seem to run
counter to social justice.
Machan is right to suggest that generosity as an individual, habituated
character trait is impossible, by definition, in circumstances where one is
obligated to give. And it should not be surprising if relying on individual
magnanimity in a laissez-faire economy would not result in social equity
given that, as Lester Hunt argues, generosity is not the same as justice (1975,
241–42). Justice is about fair outcomes and, in a social economy based on
the exchange of commodities, ensuring a fair outcome requires calculating
the value of what is given and assessing the benefit to the donor and the
recipient. While Aristotle does evoke “the right reason” in his model of
generosity (the generous person “will give to the right persons the right
amounts at the right times” (NE, 1120a, 26)), and so seems to tie generosity
to calculation and attention to outcomes, bringing about a fair outcome is
not a central feature of generosity. To be generous an act “must be done tou
kalou heneka, as Aristotle says [NE 1120a, 14], because of the [noble] value
of the act itself, rather than for some other good it will bring us in return”
(Hunt 1975, 235). What makes an act generous is not the value of the gift
or the consequences of giving (in terms of either any benefit to the giver
or to the recipient). Rather, as Robert Bernasconi suggests, generosity de-
pends on the noble proairesis of the giver (1997, 267). Proairesis refers to the
deliberate choice of a means toward an end (rather than “intention,” as it
often is translated) that places an act in the realm of morality. Or, as Aristotle
defines it, proairesis is “a desire, guided by deliberation, for things which are
within our power to bring about” (NE 1113a, 11). “[I]f one’s proairesis is
4 Corporeal Generosity
noble (kalon), then one seeks to give more and without measuring this more
by reference to what has been received. In other words the gift . . . has the
character of an excess (hyperbole) such that it cannot be measured by any
calculation of its value” (Bernasconi 1997, 267). Noble “desire,” without
calculation or expectation of return, is the basis of generosity; a fair outcome
that can be measured, is necessary for justice, and neither can be reduced to
the other.
If generosity is not reducible to justice and, indeed, if we take Machan’s
line of argument, if generosity would only flourish in a polity not intent on
achieving social and economic equity, then why might it matter? Answering
this question requires moving away from the model of generosity under-
stood simply as an individual character trait that inclines one to give to
others as a result of choice guided by deliberation. The problem with this
understanding of generosity is that it assumes that the individual is already
constituted, prior to the act of giving, as a reflexive, self-present self separate
from others. Machan, for example, not only assumes this but insists that
individual sovereignty and the right of private property are basic rights that
must be in place before generosity is possible (1990, 65). Giving, according
to Machan, is exercised subsequent to individual sovereignty and property
ownership as part of the means for establishing communal relations of con-
tract and exchange (65, 68). Paradoxically, perhaps, Machan, in his discussion
of the conditions under which generosity is possible, assumes the very con-
ditions he is arguing for: a libertarian polity guaranteeing individual prop-
erty rights and individual freedom of choice to give to others. Yet these are
the conditions that are least likely to produce generous dispositions and are
most likely to foster a “what about me” attitude and the kind of calculation
of benefit that, as Bernasconi suggests, giving exceeds.
The idea of generosity offered in this book challenges the individu-
alism apparent in Machan’s account as well as the economy of contract and
exchange that he insists is not only the basis of social relations but is
characteristic of generosity itself. Generosity, on the contrary, is not reducible
to an economy of exchange between sovereign individuals. Rather, it is an
openness to others that not only precedes and establishes communal rela-
tions but constitutes the self as open to otherness. Primordially, generosity
is not the expenditure of one’s possessions but the dispossession of oneself,
the being-given to others that undercuts any self-contained ego, that under-
cuts self-possession. Moreover, generosity, so understood, happens at a
Introduction 5
prereflective level, at the level of corporeality and sensibility, and so eschews
the calculation characteristic of an economy of exchange. Generosity is
being given to others without deliberation in a field of intercorporeality, a
being given that constitutes the self as affective and being affected, that
constitutes social relations and that which is given in relation. On the model
developed in this book, generosity is not one virtue among others but the
primordial condition of personal, interpersonal, and communal existence.
And while understanding generosity as a prereflective corporeal openness to
otherness may not guarantee social justice, it is a necessary move in that
direction.
This idea of generosity, underlying and developed in the analyses here,
has a history informed by my reading of Jacques Derrida on identity, dif-
ference, and the gift. While Marcel Mauss’ The Gift (1967) is credited for
initiating the idea that giving, rather than commodity transactions, estab-
lishes communal relations and the social identities of the parties concerned,
it is, as Alan Schrift suggests, Derrida’s discussions of the impossibility of the
gift that have prompted much of the current interest in the topic (Schrift
1997, 1).2 The paradox I pointed to in Machan’s discussion of generosity, that
the conditions he assumes are necessary for generosity to be possible are the
conditions that may make it impossible, is not peculiar to his account. This
paradox, according to Derrida, is the aporia of the gift.
Derrida, in a way I discuss in more detail elsewhere, criticizes Mauss’
idea that giving establishes reciprocal relations of obligation (Diprose 1994,
ch. 4). Mauss (1967) finds that beneath the artifice of free and equal con-
tracts between self-present sovereign individuals lies a social economy based
on the gift. Insofar as a gift is of the order of a “potlatch” (to nourish or
consume), its circulation determines the social rank and identity of a society’s
members. It bestows prestige on the one who receives it and, more impor-
tant, a moral obligation toward the giver, which cannot be repaid in ways
other than by maintaining a social bond (Mauss 1967, 6). The power of such
gifts to constitute a social bond lies in their spiritual status: transfer of a
possession can only establish a social relationship between persons if that
possession carries the significance of being part of the personhood of the
giver (10). While social contract theorists also assume that part of one’s
personal property is exchanged through contract (with the state in exchange
for protection or with another in exchange for financial reward), according
to Mauss, if the gift has the power to establish a social relation it is because
6 Corporeal Generosity
it remains part of the personhood of the giver, so that its circulation is one
that seeks a return to the place of its birth (19). So, contrary to Machan’s
model of social economy, a social relation is not constituted by the exchange
of commodities deemed separate from the self but through the gift of part
of oneself to another. The identity of the giver and the recipient is not given
in isolation prior to the giving of the gift. As what is given is in essence part
of the substance of the giver and, as the social identity and status of the
recipient is enhanced by the gift, then, contrary to the logic of identity in
Machan’s model of social exchange, what is constituted through the gift is
the social identity of each in relation to the other. Finally, contrary to the
contract model of social exchange, where the giver pledges obedience to the
state with this gift in exchange for its protection, the debtor in this relation
is not the giver but the recipient. The gift constitutes the social identity of
the parties and an enduring social bond that obligates the recipient to the
donor.
While departing to some extent from Machan’s model of social rela-
tions that supports his idea of generosity, Mauss does treat the gift as a
commodity, separable from its donor through an act of will and returned
through a bond of obligation. Insofar as he does this, Mauss, according to
Derrida, remains caught within the logic of exchange and contract (Derrida
1992, 24). Within this logic, which is also Machan’s logic, the gift and giving
are impossible. Generosity is impossible because, under the logic of contract
and exchange, the gift is recognized as a gift (it functions as a commodity)
and, once recognized, the gift bestows a debt on the recipient and is an-
nulled through obligation, gratitude, or some other form of return (12–14).
Contrary to Machan’s thesis, that only in a polity of sovereign property
owners is generosity possible, Derrida’s analysis suggests that it is precisely
this economy of contract and exchange between self-present individuals that
makes generosity impossible. The gift is only possible if it goes unrecognized,
if it is not commodified, if it is forgotten by the donor and donee so that
presence (the gift as (a) present and the presence of both the donor and the
donee) is deferred (23–24).
This aporia of the gift would not matter much if it was not for the
way Derrida, following Heidegger, ties the gift to the gift-event of Being:
Being gives itself in the present on the condition that it is not (a) present
(Derrida 1992, 20, 27). In deference to this qualification I read Derrida’s
account of the gift as a version of his account of the constitution of self-
Introduction 7
identity and difference: like différance, generosity describes the operation that
both constitutes identity and difference and resists the full presence of meaning,
identity, and Being so that the self is dispersed into the other. Derrida
defines différance as
the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of
the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other.
This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive . . . production
of the intervals without which the “full” terms would not signify,
would not function. (Derrida 1981, 27)
Self-identity, a manner of being, cannot be constituted without a production
of an interval or a difference between the self and the other. No self-present
identity, no relation to Being, is generated without this relation to the other.
However, as identity is produced through the other, the “full” terms so
constituted cannot simply refer to or signify themselves. While this produc-
tion of intervals constitutes an identity as present by separating the present
from what it is not (from its other), the
interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token,
divide the present in and of itself, thereby also dividing, along
with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the
present, that is, in our metaphysical language, every being, and
singularly substance or the subject. (Derrida, 1982, 13)
As one’s identity and social value are produced through a differentiation
between the self and the other then the identity of the self is dispersed into
the other. Différance, like giving-itself, describes an operation that both con-
stitutes identity and difference and resists and disorganizes the totalization or
full presence of meaning, identity, or Being. It is the operation of différance
that insists on the gift: the ultimate dispersal of all identity within the event
of its constitution. Giving is that which puts the circle of exchange in
motion and that which exceeds and disrupts it (Derrida 1992, 30). And this
impossible structure of the gift is such that if self-present identity is claimed
in being given to the other, a debt to the other is incurred.
Only in invisible silence does generosity do its work of personal and
social formation, and then only by maintaining an openness to others that
8 Corporeal Generosity
is its condition. Only on the condition that a sovereign subject is neither the
agent nor product of generosity does it do its formative work. Moreover, the
movement of generosity is such that, if self-present identity (individual sov-
ereignty) is claimed, something has been taken from the other without
acknowledgment of the accompanying debt to the other incurred. Under-
standing generosity in terms of Derrida’s analysis of the impossibility of the
gift helps locate the parsimony endorsed by other accounts such as Machan’s.
Machan’s claim that individual sovereignty and property ownership come
before generosity overlooks the possibility that in claiming freedom and
property as one’s own, something has already been taken from others. The
generosity of the individual property owner who gives his or her acquisi-
tions, which is the only generosity that Machan recognizes, is built on the
generosity of others that Machan would rather forget. The same theft and
forgetting uphold the platform of One Nation. In staking their claim that
their gifts need greater recognition by devaluing or forgetting the gifts of
others they consider less worthy, the supporters of One Nation would build
the value of their own gifts through the theft of others.
In suggesting that generosity is infected with a selective forgetting, I
have already added to Derrida’s analyses of the impossibility of the gift, at
least by insisting on a different emphasis. By tying the gift to its radical
forgetting and its operation to the deferral of self-present identity, Derrida’s
account may help expose the individualism and parsimony of Machan’s and
One Nation’s positions, but it also invites interpretations of his work that are
no more concerned with social justice than Machan or One Nation seem
to be. Critiques of individualism and its metaphysics of presence can and
have lead to (postmodern) claims, although not by Derrida, of the death of
individual sovereignty in favor of the dispersal of identity and meaning.
Emphasizing the way that the gift does its work only by being forgotten and
then through the dispersal of presence overlooks how, in practice, the gen-
erosity and the gifts of some (property owners, men, wage earners, whites)
tend to be recognized and remembered more often than the generosity and
gifts of others (the landless, women, the unemployed, indigenous peoples,
and immigrants). It is in the systematic, asymmetrical forgetting of the gift,
where only the generosity of the privileged is memorialized, that social
inequities and injustice are based. In attending to the connection between
generosity and social justice, which is the aim of all the analyses in this book,
it is necessary to shift the emphasis away from, while keeping in mind the
Introduction 9
aporia of the gift to consider how, as Bourdieu puts it, “the disposition of the
habitus, which is generosity [. . .] tends, without explicit and express intention,
toward the conservation and increase of symbolic capital,” with the effect of
maintaining relations of domination and dependence (Bourdieu 1997, 233,
239). Or, as I would rather put it, it is necessary to address the question of the
systematic but asymmetrical forgetting of the gift that allows the generosity of
the forgotten and the parsimony of the memorialized to constitute hierarchi-
cal relations of domination within economies of contract and exchange. The
analyses in this book therefore borrow from Derrida’s account of the impos-
sibility of the gift in his critique of presence, while attending more centrally
to the asymmetrical distribution of the effects of its operation.
Besides this shift of emphasis toward questions of social justice, the
second way my analysis of generosity moves beyond Derrida’s early work on
the aporia of the gift is in its emphasis on the corporeal dimension of giving.
Attending to the corporeal dimension of generosity matters for three rea-
sons. First, if generosity can only do its work if it goes unrecognized, then
it is not governed by conscious intention, deliberation, or reflection, at least
not primordially. Generosity operates at the level of sensibility (carnal per-
ception and affectivity). The openness to otherness that characterizes gen-
erosity is, I will argue, carnal and affective, and the production of identity
and difference that results is a material production. Second, the asymmetrical
forgetting of generosity at the foundation of social injustice depends on the
asymmetrical evaluation of different bodies. Some bodies accrue value, iden-
tity, and recognition through accumulating the gifts of others and at their
expense. Hence, not only is generosity most effective at a carnal level, rather
than as a practice directed by thought or will, but the injustice that inflects
its operation is governed by the way social norms and values determine
which bodies are recognized as possessing property that can be given and
which bodies are devoid of property and so can only benefit from the
generosity of others, and which bodies are worthy of gifts and which are
not. Third, this social discrimination and normalization operates through
bodies and impacts on bodies. Judgments that would efface or devalue
differences arise just as much within the affective and transformative dimen-
sion of intercorporeality as any generous welcoming and production of
difference. Accounting for the corporeal dimension of generosity allows the
possibility of better locating the operation of social injustice as well as the
openness to others that would enhance its overcoming.
10 Corporeal Generosity
One predominant form in which the systematic asymmetrical forget-
ting of the gift takes place is in the social constitution of sexual difference,
and this is the focus of the analyses provided in chapters 1 and 2. As Schrift
points out, the question of gender in relation to social exchange has been
the other development, besides Derrida’s account of the aporia of the gift,
“that has brought the problematic of the gift to the center of critical atten-
tion” in recent times (1997, 2). In his own analyses of generosity, Schrift
highlights the work of Hélène Cixous (with Nietzsche) in articulating the
relation between generosity and sexual difference. According to Schrift,
Cixous differentiates between “masculine” economies of contract and ex-
change based on the possession of property and “feminine” economies where
giving is truly generous, occurring “without expectation of return” (Schrift
1997, 11). As giving must exceed any expectation of return in order to do its
work of personal and intersubjective formation, a “feminine” economy, ac-
cording to Cixous, promotes the “establishing of relationships” whereas, be-
cause men fear the openness to the other that generosity brings, they “wish
to annul that openness by returning the gift as quickly as possible” (Cixous
1981, 48). While applauding aspects of Cixous’ analysis, Schrift remains uneasy
with the distinction between “masculine” and “feminine” upon which it relies.
I share this concern and do not hold to this division between the “masculine”
and “feminine” insofar as it might create the impression that women are
essentially more generous than men. But what Cixous’ analysis points to that
is consistent with those I provide in the opening chapters is not just the
productive dimensions of generosity but that in an economy such as ours,
where property and value accrue toward men, women’s generosity in the
constitution of intersubjective relations is likely to be disregarded at their
expense. It is this emphasis, on the injustice arising from forgetting the gifts
of women while memorializing those of men in an economy of contract and
exchange, that guides my analyses of the gift and sexual difference, rather than
any claim that the economy of the gift is “feminine.”
While the injustice arising from forgetting the gifts of women is
highlighted in chapters 1 and 2, the other aim of these chapters and of
chapter 3 is to begin to develop a picture of the operation of generosity by
elaborating the giving of corporeality to and through the bodies of others
as a model of the social constitution of identity and difference. While this
ontology is developed initially by addressing the constitution of sexed iden-
tity and difference, the analysis is broadened, in chapters 1 and 3, to consider
Introduction 11
the constitution of identity and difference in general terms. In the process
of building this model, attention is given to the way an ontology, based on
the idea of giving corporeality, shifts our understanding of the nature of
social discrimination and injustice. Injustice, as I have suggested, is located
in the way that normalizing social discourses, in commodifying the gift,
forget or devalue the generosity of women and others. This is illustrated
most graphically in chapter 2 through an analysis of the contemporary moral
and legal discourses that govern the buying and selling of sexed body “prop-
erty.” The ontology of the gift is also developed by contrasting it to the
contract model of social relations (chapter 2) and to proposals for an aes-
thetics of self as a means of redressing social discrimination and normaliza-
tion (chapter 3).
The philosophers used for developing this ontology are primarily
Nietzsche (chapter 1) and Merleau-Ponty (chapters 2 and 3), with some
reference to the work of Derrida, Foucault, and Butler. Nietzsche’s philoso-
phy has been interpreted, notably by Schrift (1994), as promoting a social
economy based on generosity rather than revenge, where self-overcoming
involves the noble gift-giving virtue, and intersubjective relations are no
longer creditor-debtor relations; an economy where “gifts can be given
without expectation of return, and debts can be forgiven without penalty or
shame” (Schrift 1994, 35). However, it is not so much in this promise of an
economy based on generosity as a virtue that I find Nietzsche philosophy
useful but in the ontology underlying it. Self-overcoming, I argue in chapter
1, is a process of production of self in relation to others that involves the
generation of distance (or division) within the self and distance (or differ-
ence) between self and others. While self-overcoming appears to be an
individual enterprise based on an abundance and a generosity of the noble
self, Nietzsche’s model of the self as a corporeal cultural artifact normalized
through moral evaluation (as a mode of “will to power”) and his under-
standing of the self-other relation as a creditor-debtor relation point to how
self-overcoming takes place through the other’s proximity and within a
social milieu. The production of distance (difference) is therefore an
intercorporeal event governed by will to power as interpretation. While the
event involves giving by the “noble” self, it also relies on the other’s gen-
erosity (particularly a woman giving of herself), a generosity that is denied,
to the other’s detriment. It is in this subliminal account of the constitution
of identity and difference through intersubjectivity that I find a giving at
12 Corporeal Generosity
work, a giving exploited and effaced by claims that generosity belongs to
one kind of virtuous individual.
While Nietzsche’s ideas of the self as a body, self-overcoming, and will
to power point to an understanding of the production of identity and
difference in terms of giving corporeality, it is with Merleau-Ponty’s phi-
losophy that this understanding comes to fruition. Merleau-Ponty rarely
speaks of generosity or gift giving and is not concerned with virtues. How-
ever, his thesis that perception, agency, and subjectivity in general take place
as a body opened to the bodies of others lends itself to an account of
corporeal generosity that is my aim to develop. Also, his suggestion that
personal corporeal styles undergo “sedimentation” through a social history
of encounters with other bodies is useful for accounting for the limits of
generosity and for locating parsimony in interpersonal relations. Hence,
Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of human existence in terms of inter-
corporeality begins to figure centrally in the analysis from chapter 2 on.
Nietzsche’s philosophy, however, is not abandoned. The individualism appar-
ent in his philosophy gets some further critical attention in chapter 3 and,
more positively, his account of the relation between truth, language, and
cultural and self-formation is borrowed and developed in an analysis of
generosity and cultural difference in chapter 8.
After developing an ontology in terms of giving corporeality in the
first part of this book, the chapters in the second part focus on the affective
dimension of interpersonal relations by positing and elaborating the claim
that affectivity arises through and inspires the generosity of intercorporeal
existence. Both erotic life (chapter 4) and affects in general (chapters 5 and
6) are framed in terms of arising within giving corporeality through the
other’s body, a generosity that gives up any assumed integrity to the self but
that also transforms existence. While delineating affectivity in terms of cor-
poreal generosity, two further concerns regarding social justice are addressed:
the conditions under which erotic relations could be productive and those
under which they may involve parsimony and a violation of being (chapter
4), and how social ideas and norms condition affective life (chapter 5). The
conclusions are laid out and illustrated in more concrete terms through an
analysis of the clinical encounter (chapter 6), taken as paradigmatic of a
carnal encounter between strangers. Here the proposed relation between
affectivity and corporeal generosity is used to account for the affectivity
experienced in the medical examination and for how discrimination and
Introduction 13
social normalization of bodies operate at an intercorporeal, prereflective
level, beyond the terms of the “normal” body of medical discourse. Inter-
pretations of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy (both his earlier work on “body-
intentionality” and his more mature model of perception and intercorporeality)
provide the basis for these analyses in conjunction with aspects of the work
of Sartre, Beauvoir, Butler, and Foucault.
The chapters in the third part of this book focus on theorizing the
relation between corporeal generosity and the formation of community. This
is done by developing the suggestion, raised in Part II, that the generosity
of intercorporeal existence is such that our relation to existing ideas that
govern social relations and social constitution of the body is ambiguous and
open. Here the focus is on examining, through critical engagement with
Levinas’ work, how, given this ambiguity and in the interests of attaining
social justice, ideas and the community they govern may be transformed
through the generosity of intercorporeality. The thesis developed is that
existing ideas and the sociality they support are opened to new paths of
thinking and modes of living through a generous response provoked by the
other’s alterity. This generosity involves a dispossession of self and is born of
an affective, corporeal relation to alterity that generates rather than closes off
sexual, cultural, and stylistic differences. The thesis is elaborated through an
account of the generosity of critical thinking (characterized by feminist
thinking) that transforms existing ideas (chapter 7), an examination of what
might consist in a generous response to cultural difference manifest in the
expression of ideas that contests those that support one’s own culture (chap-
ter 8), and a general account of the relation between generosity and com-
munity formation that draws together the relevant points from previous
chapters (chapter 9). What emerges is an understanding of community for-
mation and social relations that, by the idea of corporeal generosity, bases
community formation on the production and transformation of differences
rather than on assumptions of commonness or on ideals of One Nation.
The philosophy of Levinas, rather than of Merleau-Ponty, is drawn on
extensively throughout the analyses in Part III. Levinas, more explicitly than
either Nietzsche or Merleau-Ponty, describes subjectivity in terms of gen-
erosity as I understand it. His work lends itself to a philosophy of the gift,
insofar as he bases a sociality that does not absorb difference on giving to
the other without expectation of return. Subjectivity, for Levinas, is the
passivity of exposure to another, a giving of oneself without choice, a
14 Corporeal Generosity
movement toward another arising from a disturbance of the self provoked
by the other’s alterity. Moreover, this being-given to another is sensibility,
being affected, and this carnal offering to another is inspired by alterity. This
carnal generosity is also a being-put-into-question that makes me respon-
sible for the other that moves me. And so with this understanding of gen-
erosity provoked by alterity, Levinas puts ethics, as “other-directed” sensibility,
at the foundation of social existence.
While integral to the idea of corporeal generosity that I expand upon
in Part III, there is a limitation with Levinas’ account of subjectivity and
alterity. He tends to locate this generosity of subjectivity, opened by and to
another, prior to and as a precondition of both ontology and politics, and
not the other way around. For Levinas, a politics of conscious, volitional acts
effects an ontological closure to the other, who would otherwise be wel-
comed in the passive being-given to the other that characterizes the ethical
relation. While suggesting that, whatever is said and done, I cannot help but
be opened to and responsible for another is important for restoring gener-
osity, intercorporeality, and difference to their central place at the foundation
of human existence and social relations, it also implies that what I do or say,
the nature of social relations of domination, and how I am constituted
within them make no difference to the response to alterity that I “am.” In
order to maintain a focus on the connection between generosity and social
justice, it is necessary to contest this tendency in Levinas’ work to render
questions of social justice and ontology secondary to ethics (understood as
radical generosity). I do this in the analyses in Part III, particularly in chapter
9, by suggesting, through reconsideration of Levinas’ critiques of Merleau-
Ponty’s ontology of intersubjectivity, that politics and ontology are inseparable
from ethics and by retaining relevant aspects of the work of Nietzsche and
Merleau-Ponty for this purpose. While this revision of Levinas’ ethics im-
plies, in keeping with the aporetic structure of the gift, that unconditional
generosity is impossible, this impossibility is not a license for either political
passivity or institutionalized parsimony. On the contrary, locating generosity
within an ontology of corporeal intersubjectivity that is not reducible to
either volitional acts or an affectivity that exceeds them grounds a passionate
politics that aims for a justice that is not yet here.
The picture of corporeal generosity built in the pages that follow is
developed and examined from three general perspectives: in ontological
terms, as the realm of the social constitution of identity and difference; as
Introduction 15
the domain of affectivity, inseparable from but not reducible to social norms;
and as the means of community (trans)formation. The structure of this book
is such that it also traces the evolution of an idea. The first two chapters
draw on papers written around the publication of The Bodies of Women
(Diprose 1994) and highlight the ontology of giving corporeality, a theme
present in germinal form in that book but undeveloped there. The chapters
that follow not only develop the idea of corporeal generosity further but
also mark a shift in emphasis beyond exclusive attention to the issue of
sexual difference to consideration of the production and effacement of other
differences. There is also a shift through the book in the philosophical
framework used for elaborating the idea of corporeal generosity from the
work of Nietzsche and Derrida to Merleau-Ponty and then Levinas, a
theoretical development designed to be cumulative rather than substitutive.
The critical engagement with the work of these philosophers, and the
subsequent revision necessary to imagine a politically sensitive notion of
generosity, is mediated throughout by the work of feminist philosophers
including, and most directly, Beauvoir, Butler, and Gatens. Aside from pro-
viding interpretations of these and other philosophers in developing the
concept of corporeal generosity, the analysis maintains a focus on the theme
of social justice by framing the development of the concept of corporeal
generosity in terms of particular social issues and political problems con-
cerning sexual difference, sexuality, and cultural difference. This development
of the idea of corporeal generosity, then, is at the same time an exploration
of the role of intercorporeal relations in the social production, maintenance,
or effacement of differences with the aim of promoting ways to foster social
relations that generate rather than close off sexual, cultural, and stylistic
differences.
Part I
Giving Identity and
Difference
blank 18
One
Nietzsche and the
Pathos of Distance
JEANETTE WINTERSON, in her novel Sexing the Cherry, describes the
city of Jordan’s dreams. A city
whose inhabitants are so cunning that to escape the insistence of
creditors they knock down their houses in a single night and
rebuild them elsewhere. So the number of buildings in the city
is always constant but they are never in the same place from one
day to the next.
For close families, and most people in the city are close
families, this presents no problem, and it is more usual than not
for the escapees to find their pursuers waiting for them on the
new site of their choice.
As a subterfuge, then, it has little to recommend it, but as
a game it is a most fulfilling pastime and accounts for the ex-
traordinary longevity of the men and women who live there. We
were all nomads once, and crossed the deserts and the seas on
tracks that could not be detected, but were clear to those who
knew the way. Since settling down and rooting like trees, but
without the ability to make use of the wind to scatter our seed,
we have found only infection and discontent.
19
20 Corporeal Generosity
In the city the inhabitants have reconciled two discordant
desires: to remain in one place and to leave it behind forever.
(Winterson 1989, 42–43)
This is a postmodern city. It is built on the recognition that one’s place
within a political and social space rests on unstable foundations. Places can
change. This instability arises from the complex creditor/debtor relations
that characterize subjectivity: the self only gains a place in the world through
the other’s proximity, making self-present autonomy, freedom from debt to
one’s creditor, difficult, if not impossible. The best that one can hope for is
a reconciliation of the desire for stability, for proximity to oneself (and hence
to one’s creditor), and the desire for change, distance, difference.
Winterson’s city encapsulates Nietzsche’s philosophy of self—a
philosophy that sits uneasily between two streams of thought in Anglophone
philosophy. On the one side is social contract theory and liberal individu-
alism which, in the name of stability and sameness, assumes that society
consists of relations of contract and exchange between free and equal, au-
tonomous, and self-present individuals. On the other side is the declaration
that self-mastery and self-identity are dead, along with the ideal of uniform
social relations that these notions of self support. Rather than a society
consisting of unified individuals governed by a common good, this alterna-
tive position variously posits a self dispersed into a multiplicity of differences,
and it promotes a distant respect for difference (not othering the other,
letting the other be) over universal values or a common good that is said
to be both invalid and oppressive.
Nietzsche’s aesthetics of self has more in common with this latter
position than it does with the self-presence underscoring the contract model
of social relations. However, the reading of his philosophy that I offer below
cautions against simple declarations of the death of self-presence that assume
the ability to promote change and difference by declaring the dispersal of
identity and by distancing oneself from others. My aim is to explore Nietzsche’s
contributions to an understanding of the social production of identity and
difference (including sexual difference) as the “problematic of the constitu-
tion of place” in relation to others in terms of a giving of oneself to and
through the other.
There are at least two aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy that I will
highlight that warn against the form of postmodernism mentioned. The first
Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance 21
is his analysis of the self as a corporeal cultural artifact, which suggests that
any change in self involves a material production rather than a change of
mind (or a simple declaration that the self is dispersed). Second, while
Nietzsche’s project for self-overcoming reads at times like an escape from
others, there is much to suggest that the other, through her generosity, is
deeply implicated in this process of self-formation. His philosophy of the
body, his understanding of the self/other relation as a debtor/creditor rela-
tion, and his concept of will to power (understood in ontological terms) all
draw on a concept of distance as a process of production of a division within
the self and difference between the self and others. This is a distancing that
is infused with proximity, a production of identity and difference through
the other’s generosity, so that denial of the trace of the other in the self ’s
overcoming, whether through respect or arrogance, incurs an unacknowl-
edged debt to them. This understanding of the operation of distance in
Nietzsche’s philosophy has important consequences for rethinking sexual
difference within the context of a postmodern aesthetics of self.
THE BODY AND ONE’S PLACE IN THE WORLD
For Nietzsche, the problematic of the constitution of place is a question of
the social constitution of a body. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he claims that
“body I am entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something
about the body” (1978, 34). In contrast to the assumptions that the self ’s
identity can be reduced to consciousness, and that the mind directs the body,
Nietzsche claims that the body is what compares and creates, and that
thought and the ego are its instruments. This body, however, is not an asocial
fact. Like any “thing,” a body is the sum of its effects insofar as those effects
are united by a concept (1967, 296). The “body is only a social structure
composed of many souls” (1973, 31), where “soul” refers to a corporeal
multiplicity or a “social structure of the drives and emotions” (25). So, for
Nietzsche, one’s place in the world is built through the concepts that govern
the social world and sculpt the body—a body that is a “unity as an orga-
nization” and therefore a “work of art” (1967, 419).
How the corporeal self is constituted as a social structure of drives and
emotions is first a question of how the body is unified through social
concepts. Second, and related to this process of unification, is the question
of how thought and the ego are instruments of the body. The body is the
22 Corporeal Generosity
locus of pleasure and pain (which are always already interpretations), and
thought arises from and is a reflection on pleasure and pain (a point I
develop further in chapter 7). To quote Nietzsche:
The self says to the ego, “Feel pain here!” Then the ego suffers
and thinks how it might suffer no more—and that is why it is
made to think.
The self says to the ego, “Feel pleasure here!” Then the ego
is pleased and thinks how it might often be pleased again—and
that is why it is made to think. (1978, 35)
Thought, then, is about the projection of bodily experience into the future;
the conscious thinking subject is an effect of temporalizing the body.
The target for much of Nietzsche’s critical attention is the manner in
which experience is unified and the body is temporalized in the social
relations of modernity. Here the embodied self is constituted by social con-
cepts and norms that discourage difference, inconsistency, nonconformity,
and change. His account in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals
begins with the idea that the unification of any body relies on the operation
of memory and forgetting. “Forgetting” is the incorporation of bodily affects
before they become conscious and a making way for new sensations by
allowing one to “have done” with the old (1969, 58). But while this not-
remembering is necessary for the constitution of any self as present, the
making of the modern moral subject, the individual who is responsible for
his or her acts enough to enter social contracts, requires a faculty that
opposes forgetting—memory.
Nietzsche describes how the social and moral discourses of moder-
nity constitute a particular kind of memory, a memory that unifies a
selection of activities, events, experiences, and effects so that they belong
to one person (1969, 58). This memory makes the self constant and ap-
parently unchanging through time by projecting the same body into the
future. The operation of memory and forgetting unifies experience in
another sense—it makes different experiences the same. What is remem-
bered is not just an experience but a socially prescribed mode of interpret-
ing that experience. As Nietzsche explains in Twilight of the Idols (1968,
50–53), effects and events are incorporated by interpretation using prevail-
ing moral norms and the concept of cause. Unpleasant feelings are said to
Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance 23
be caused by actions considered undesirable. Pleasant feelings are said to
arise from good or successful actions (52). Hence, “everything of which we
become conscious is arranged, simplified, schematized, interpreted through
and through . . . pleasure and displeasure are subsequent and derivative
phenomena” (Nietzsche 1967, 263–64).1 So even forgetting as having done
with an event involves first, dividing effects into those that are written into
the body and those that are not. Second, events which are incorporated
and upon which one reflects are divided into a cause and an effect, where
the effect is pleasure or displeasure and the cause is interpreted according
to social moral norms. Then, when encountering a new event or effect, the
memory “calls up earlier states of a similar kind and the causal inter-
pretations which have grown out of them” (Nietzsche 1968, 51). New
experiences are subsumed under habitual interpretations, making every
experience a fabrication (Nietzsche 1973, 97).
The individual is not the author of this dutiful memory—it is created
through what Nietzsche calls the “mnemotechnics of pain” (1969, 61): tech-
niques of punishment that carry social norms and moral values. “Body I am
entirely,” insofar as my conscience, sense of responsibility, and uniformity, is
created by an ordering of sensations and by projection of the body into the
future through a social disciplinary system. This ensures not only that my
experiences are consistent over time but, as we are subjected to the same
moral values, we will have “our experience in common” (Nietzsche 1973,
186). Forgetting in conjunction with a selective memory becomes a social
instrument of repression against the dangers of inconsistency and noncon-
formity. A society that favors consistency and conformity discourages us to
leave our place behind.
Contrary to social contract theory and liberal individualism, Nietzsche
proposes that the individual is a culturally specific corporeal artifact whose
existence is a product of the exclusion of other possibilities for one’s em-
bodied place in the world. But this account leaves Nietzsche with a problem
shared also by those who find the assumption of self-presence and ideals of
universal values oppressive: how can change be effected given that the self
is the result of a socially informed material process of production? How can
different possibilities for existence be opened, how can one leave one’s place
behind, without assuming the possibility of stepping outside of either one’s
present body or one’s social context? It is Nietzsche’s concept of a distance
within the self that addresses this apparent impasse.
24 Corporeal Generosity
DISTANCE AND SELF-OVERCOMING
The body that conforms to a uniform mode of subjection is one that acts
out a social role imposed upon it.2 In contrast to this actor, Nietzsche, in The
Gay Science, privileges a process of self-fabrication with the artistic ability to
stage, watch, and overcome the self according to a self-given plan (1974,
132–33). He draws on two features of art and the artist to characterize self-
overcoming (163–64). The first is the suggestion that the self, like any
artifact, is an interpretation, a perspective, or a mask. Second, the relation
between artists and their art illustrates the point that creating beyond the
present self requires that we view ourselves from a distance in an image
outside of ourselves. Leaving behind the influence of social concepts that
restrict our place in the world requires treating one’s corporeality as a work
of art.
The distinction that Nietzsche makes between the self as artist and the
image or spectacle of the self staged beyond the present body could imply
a unique, extra-social invention. But at a less ambitious level it suggests that
one is never identical with oneself. Nietzsche sometimes refers to this dif-
ference within the self as the “pathos of distance,”
that longing for an ever increasing widening of distance within
the soul itself, the formation of ever higher, rarer, more remote,
tenser, more comprehensive states, in short precisely the eleva-
tion of the type “man,” the continual “self-overcoming of man,”
to take a moral formula in a supra-moral sense. (1973, 173)
What Nietzsche is suggesting here is that the ability to move beyond oneself
hinges on a distance within the soul (where the soul is something about the
body). A distance or difference within the self, between the present self and
an image of self toward which I aspire, is necessary for transformation of the
corporeal self. We should not confuse the artist and his work, says Nietzsche,
“as if [the artist] were what he is able to represent, conceive, and express. The
fact is that if he were it, he would not represent, conceive, and express it”
(Nietzsche 1969, 101). The self as a work of art is never the same as the self
that creates it, not because the self as artist is the true or essential self in
contrast to a false, unique, extra-social image projected, rather, the image the
artistic self creates is a moment beyond the present self that creates it. The
Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance 25
difference, or distance, between the two is a precondition to self-formation
and transformation.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche accounts for this distance within
the self in terms of a process of self-temporalization of the body that sub-
verts the notion of linear time assumed in normalizing social structures.
Unlike the “last man,” who views himself as the essential, unchangeable
endpoint of his history (Nietzsche 1978, 202), the overman views himself as
a moment. He risks his present self or, as Nietzsche puts it, “goes under”
(14–15). But unlike the “higher man,” who, in a manner not unlike the
“postmodern” self, affirms the future by negating the past and skipping over
existence, thereby changing nothing (286-95), the overman risks himself by
“willing backwards”: “To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate
all ‘it was’ into ‘thus I willed it’—that alone I should call redemption” (139).
Moving beyond the present self is not a matter of declaring oneself born
again by simply reaching for a new part to play: it requires working on
oneself. The overman then is the self that is a moment that temporalizes
itself by recreating its past as a way of projecting itself into the future. This
self-temporalization produces a distance or difference within the self.
The idea that the corporeal self is reproduced differently as it is
temporalized through the production of a distance within the self would
seem to be at odds with Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence. Problems
arise if we accept eternal recurrence as either a cosmological hypothesis,
where the world repeats itself infinitely (Nietzsche 1967, 521), or a psycho-
logical doctrine, where self-affirmation involves the desire for the self to
recur eternally the same (Nietzsche 1978, 322). However, as David Wood
(1988) has demonstrated, interpreting the doctrine of eternal recurrence
exclusively in either of these ways is ultimately untenable.3
Nietzsche’s presentation of the doctrine in “The Vision and the Riddle”
in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1978, 85–87) suggests another interpretation. Here,
eternal recurrence is presented in terms of a further revaluation of linear
time that suggests that there is always difference in repetition. Here, Zarathustra,
on a “bridge across becoming,” recounts his vision of climbing a mountain
while carrying on his back his “archenemy, the spirit of gravity.” Zarathustra
is attempting to climb toward the future, but the spirit of gravity, of which
man suffers if he cannot go beyond himself, threatens to drag him back
toward himself. “You threw yourself up high,” says gravity to Zarathustra,
“but every stone must fall . . . the stone will fall back on yourself ” (156).
26 Corporeal Generosity
The spirit of gravity is suggesting a notion of return that is cyclic: you
cannot escape what you are; you will always return to yourself the same.
While Zarathustra affirms this notion of repetition of self (“was that
life? well then! once more”), he goes on to reinterpret it. He points to a
gateway called “the moment,” claiming that from this moment a path leads
backward to eternity and another contradictory path leads forward to eter-
nity: the future contradicts the past, and both the future and the past lead
out from the present moment. Zarathustra then goes on to suggest that all
that leads backward from the moment, all that has been, has been before, as
has this moment. And because all things are knotted together, then this
moment draws after it all that is to come. Therefore, he asks, must not all
of us have been at this moment before, and must we not eternally return?
What Nietzsche seems to be suggesting is a return of self involving a
temporality where the self does not seek to escape the past (linear time) nor
simply to repeat it (cyclic). By describing time as emerging out of the
moment, Nietzsche is suggesting, in keeping with his notion of self-
overcoming, that one temporalizes oneself. The self recreates the past (or
what one has been) at every moment as it projects itself toward a future. The
future is also created out of the present. The contingent future, governed by
others, is made one’s own through the present, where the present is a
reconstitution of the past. And by making the present moment its own, the
self also distances itself from a necessary past and future.
At the same time, according to Nietzsche, each moment eternally recurs
and contains every other moment that constitutes the temporalized self. As
Zarathustra suggests, there is no outside the moment that is the present self:
“how should there be an outside-myself? There is no outside” (217). This is
not to say that the self is transcendental or unchanging. On the contrary, to
recreate the past, or one’s “it was,” by making it “thus I willed it” is to give
birth to the self anew. But while the self is different at every moment, these
different moments are not self-contained. There is no outside the self in the
sense that the moment, which is the present self, contains traces of its relation
to a past and future that are different. The structure of the moment is one
where the self exceeds its present self rather than one where the self is self-
present and self-identical. Man is “an imperfect tense” (Nietzsche 1983, 61):
his past is never complete in relation to his present.
The distancing effected by making the moment one’s own is not a
state of mind: it “creates a higher body” (Nietzsche 1978, 70)—the overman
Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance 27
“begets and bears” (Nietzsche 1973, 113) a future corporeal self that is
beyond and different from himself. The pathos of distance within the self,
generated by making the moment one’s own, allows the self to remain in
one place while leaving it behind forever. But this is not a simple rejection
of one’s embodied place in the world. Nietzsche’s formulation of a distance
within the self reopens what is denied by social discourses which, in assum-
ing an unchanging subject over time, assume that “what is does not become”
(Nietzsche 1968, 35). This assumption of sameness is an “escape from sense-
deception, from becoming, from history” (ibid.). The history that conformity
disavows is the process of incorporating new experiences and shedding the
old, reconciling conflicting impulses, the ongoing process of corporeal self-
fabrication, according to concepts that one has inherited and cultivated
(Nietzsche 1973, 96–104; 1974, 269–71).
DISTANCE AND THE CREDITOR/DEBTOR RELATION
While Nietzsche’s understanding of creative self-fabrication allows a recon-
ciliation of the discordant desires in Winterson’s dream, it remains an uneasy
formulation with respect to justice and the other. Nietzsche often speaks as
if the distance within the self effected by making the moment one’s own is
generated by the self alone; in Nietzsche’s work, self-overcoming is often
presented as an autonomous, self-contained project. Yet in Untimely Medita-
tions (“Schopenhauer as Educator”), for example, Nietzsche suggests that
rather than finding ourselves within ourselves, we are more likely to find
ourselves outside of ourselves, that is, in our effects, in “everything [that]
bears witness to what we are, our friendships and our enmities, our glance
and the clasp of our hand, our memory and that which we do not remem-
ber, our books and our handwriting,” in the objects we love (Nietzsche
1983, 129). In other words, the self is not just divided between the remem-
bered and the forgotten, the future and the past, but between the self and
the other. There is something about our relation to others that mediates the
place we occupy within social relations. Hence, contrary to some postmodern
formulations of a dispersed self who does not “other” others, creative self-
fabrication, changing places, implicates others in some sense. The distance
necessary to self-overcoming is given in proximity to others.
Nietzsche’s genealogies of justice and punishment typically reveal the
ways others are involved in the constitution of one’s place in the world.
28 Corporeal Generosity
These genealogies contain a tension between understanding the self/other
relation in terms of a contract between creditor and debtor and understand-
ing it in terms of a gift of being. The most fundamental social relation is,
Nietzsche claims, the creditor/debtor relation, where “one person first mea-
sured himself against another” (1969, 70). Inflicting pain on another was
“originally” a way of recovering a debt rather than creating the memory
necessary for conformity. And this involved evaluating different parts of the
body to ensure that the pain inflicted was equivalent to the debt owed (62–
65). Under such a system, evaluation is of the body and operates by mutual
agreement. Debts can be repaid through the body via a contractual arrange-
ment between creditor and debtor. If the relation between self and other can
be said to involve a contract, this contract is written in blood, and the status
of the creditor is built from the flesh of the debtor.
But what is the nature of this debt that is supposedly repaid through
corporeal measurement? As determining values, establishing and exchanging
equivalences is the most fundamental social arrangement, it is not just a
question of commodity exchange. A precondition to such exchange of gifts
and commodities is evaluation of one’s own body in relation to another, a
process of evaluation that is constitutive of one’s place in the world. While
Nietzsche sometimes speaks as if there is an original difference between
debtor and creditor, the self only becomes different, a distinct entity, by
distancing itself from others. This distancing itself is a mode of production
involving measurement and will to power, whereby identity and difference
are given.
The relation between self and other is governed by will to power: by
language as an expression of power, by the use of concepts to measure,
interpret, and draw distinctions. According to Nietzsche, if we eliminate
concepts that we impose, such as number, thing, activity, and motion, then
no things remain but only dynamic quanta, in relation of tension
to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation
to all other quanta, in their “effect” upon the same. The will to
power not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos—the most
elemental fact from which a becoming and effecting first emerge.
(1967, 339)
To say that will to power is pathos refers us to the distinction between ethos
and pathos that Nietzsche evokes elsewhere (1974, 252). Ethos is usually
Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance 29
understood as a way of life, of one’s habits and character, whereas pathos is
the condition of transient affectivity. While we think of our way of life as
a given and an enduring ethos, our life, Nietzsche argues, is really pathos, a
dynamic process of changing affective experience. Will to power is pathos:
it is the movement by which experience is constituted and entities come
into being so that they are in relation and can be affected and can affect.4
Will to power as interpretation operates within intersubjective rela-
tions where, as Nietzsche claims in reference to love, “our pleasure in our-
selves tries to maintain itself by again and again changing something new
into ourselves” (1974, 88). Measuring the other is a way of enhancing our
own form, capacities, and effects. But again, neither the self nor the other
(whether the other is another person or a “thing”) exists in essence apart
from this relation, that is, apart from “the effect it produces and that which
it resists” (Nietzsche 1967, 337). In other words, individuals, and the differ-
ences between them, are not given in themselves. They are an effect of
creation and imposition of forms . . . [within] a ruling structure
which lives, in which parts and functions are delimited and co-
ordinated, in which nothing whatever finds a place that has not
been first assigned a “meaning” in relation to a whole. (1969, 86–
87)
Will to power is this process of the constitution of identity and place, of
delimiting one from another, through the assignment of “meaning” to effects
and their interrelations. So any difference between parties to a contract is an
effect of will to power as productive interpretation by which entities are
constituted in relation. This distance/difference between self and other is
predicated upon measurement: the credit of identity and difference is ex-
tracted in proximity to the other in a process where debts may be incurred.
Justice, for Nietzsche, is the constitution of identity and difference
without debt. In an exchange economy, justice would be reciprocal ex-
change, exchange without loss or without a debt being incurred by either
party. One way Nietzsche puts this idea of justice within an exchange
economy is, as Schrift points out (1994, 34), in terms of giving with an
expectation of equivalent return:
Justice (fairness) originates among approximately equal powers. . . .
[T]he initial character of justice is barter. Each satisfies the other
30 Corporeal Generosity
in that each gets what he values more than the other. Each man
gives the other what he wants, to keep henceforth, and receives
in turn that which he wishes. Thus, justice is requital and ex-
change on the assumption of approximately equal positions of
strength. For this reason, revenge belongs initially to the realm
of justice: it is an exchange. Likewise gratitude. (Nietzsche 1984,
64)
That giving would be reciprocated in equal measure, without debt or loss,
and so that justice could be achieved, assumes the parties involved are
already of “approximately equal power” (1969, 70; 1984, 64). At one level,
“approximately equal power” means that both parties have the power to
enforce their own evaluations. But in the context of Nietzsche’s understand-
ing of will to power as production of identity through measurement, “ap-
proximately equal power” also means a balance in the distribution of
productive power. The possibility of justice, that mutual understanding nec-
essary for return of gifts and equitable exchange without loss or debt,
assumes that the selves involved are already constituted by the same mode
of evaluation. That is, justice in an exchange economy assumes that will to
power as interpretation operates uniformly to produce all bodies as the same.
As Nietzsche puts it in Beyond Good and Evil:
To refrain from mutual injury, mutual violence, mutual exploi-
tation, to equate one’s own will with that of another: this may
in a certain rough sense become good manners between indi-
viduals if the conditions for it are present (namely if their strength
and value standards are in fact similar and they both belong to
one body). (1973, 174)
Belonging to one social body, within which it is possible to settle one’s debt to
the other, to give without loss, and to refrain from taking from the other,
assumes a shared mode of evaluation by which the corporeal self is constituted.
But the possibility of such mutual understanding is at best limited in
Nietzsche’s model of self-fabrication. A social body may share a language, a
mode of interpretation and evaluation, and a mode of self-creation. But self-
evaluation occurs in relation to another, and there is always a disjunction
between how one evaluates oneself and how one is evaluated by another.
Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance 31
Interpretation of the other is a translation that as a “form of conquest”
(Nietzsche 1974, 137) reduces the tempo of the other’s style (Nietzsche
1973, 41). The style projected becomes overlaid by other masks constituted
through misunderstanding. The constitution of identity is dissimulation where
one’s absolute identity is deferred:
Every profound spirit needs a mask: more, around every pro-
found spirit a mask is continually growing thanks to the con-
stantly false, that is to say shallow interpretation of every word he
speaks, every step he takes, every sign of life he gives. (1973, 51)5
Further, while one’s identity is a self-fabrication of the body using concepts
that one inherits, there is always a disjunction between the social concepts
we share and how each person embodies them:
Ultimately, the individual derives the value of his acts from him-
self; because he has to interpret in a quite individual way even
the words he has inherited. His interpretation of a formula at
least is personal, even if he does not create a formula: as an
interpreter he is still creative. (1967, 403)
What Nietzsche exposes in his genealogy of justice and the creditor/
debtor relation is that justice, giving with expectation of equivalent return
and hence the exchange of equivalences, already assumes sameness. And
second, insofar as the parties involved are only at best approximately the
same, then evaluation involves some subtraction from the other to the ben-
efit of the self. Social exchange does not begin with a contract between
independent individuals (1969, 86). It is always a matter of will to power as
self-constitution, and insofar as this exchange is “successful” or “just,” it
assumes and promotes sameness. Yet in assuming that the other is the same,
one reduces the other to the self, one takes from the other, and “deliberately
and recklessly brush[es] the dust off the wings off the butterfly that is called
moment” (Nietzsche 1974, 137), that contradictory moment that is the site
of self-overcoming and the production of difference.
Despite indications that one’s identity and place in the world can
never be reduced to another’s, the discourses of modernity assume sameness
and encourage the desire to stay in one place. Law (which embodies notions
32 Corporeal Generosity
of just and unjust) reflects a community’s customs in the sense of a mode
of evaluation and interpretation (Nietzsche 1969, 71–76; 1984, 219). While
some law may be necessary to preserve a style of life against difference and
transgression, Nietzsche objects to laws (moral or secular) that impose ab-
solute values equally upon all. In this, the notion of justice changes from one
that explicitly assumes sameness to one that attempts to achieve sameness of
outcome through the production of a corporeal memory, discussed above.
Yet what is good for one another is “a question of who he is and who the
other is” (a question of identity as measurement) and, as this question cannot
be answered (identity is dissimulation), then, “what is right for one cannot
by any means be right for another” (Nietzsche 1973, 132, 139). The change
in the meaning of justice to equal rights for all is, therefore, the beginning
of injustice. “For, to me justice speaks thus: ‘Men are not equal’ ” (Nietzsche
1978, 101). “ ‘Equal rights’ could all too easily change into equality of
wrongdoing,” because it legislates against anything rare, against self-overcoming,
against the ability to be different and the need for independence (Nietzsche
1973, 125; 1978, 101). “Equality” legislates against the possibility of the
production of distance necessary for changing places.
Relating Nietzsche’s notion of will to power as the productive mea-
surement involved in self-constitution to his claim that equality is only
possible if equality is already actual suggests that democratic institutions only
achieve equality of outcome, and then only approximately, through taking
from, negating, or expelling difference. A community, for example, that
maintains itself by uniform laws and expects conformity from its members
“stands to its members in the same vital basic relation, that of creditor to
debtor” (Nietzsche 1969, 71). This is a society that assumes a contract with
its members where, in exchange for giving protection, the community ex-
pects its members to conform to its laws in return. An expression of non-
conformity is taken as a hostile act, a refusal to return the gift. A debt is
incurred by the lawbreaker and the “community, the disappointed creditor,
will get what repayment it can” through punishment or expulsion (ibid.).
This expectation of the return of the gift and the negation of difference
involved is not only true of the constitution and maintenance of a uniform
community but also of the individual who inhabits it. The democratic,
“selfless” individual constitutes its place in the world by negating the value
of the other’s difference:
Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance 33
Slave morality says No to what is “outside,” what is “different,”
what is “not itself ”; and this No is its creative deed. This inver-
sion of the value positing eye—this need to direct one’s view
outward instead of back to oneself—is the essence of ressentiment;
in order to exist, slave morality always needs a hostile external
world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in or-
der to act at all—its action is fundamentally reaction. (Nietzsche
1969, 36–37)
The democratic, consistent self who can make promises and so enter into
contracts is produced and maintained through the operation of will to
power as evaluation, by exploitation and appropriation, and through the
imposition of a particular form and through the exclusion of others.
Even that social body of equal and harmonious forces, where one can
safely assume the return of gifts in the interests of justice, exists as such by
marking itself off from an “outside” to which it is hostile:
Even that body within which, as it was previously assumed, indi-
viduals treat one another as equals—this happens in every healthy
aristocracy—must, if it is a living and not a decaying body, itself
do all that to other bodies which the individuals within it refrain
from doing to one another: it will have to be will to power
incarnate, it will want to grow, expand, draw to itself, gain ascen-
dancy—not out of any morality or immorality, but because it lives,
and because life is will to power. (Nietzsche 1973, 175)
In the context of the reading of will to power that I have provided, what
Nietzsche is suggesting here is that even within the pretense of equality,
whether within a “healthy” aristocracy or a nihilistic democracy, the self, or
the complex of selves rendered equal, maintains itself by marginalizing oth-
ers deemed inappropriate to the system. Prior to the mutual exchange of
gifts that characterizes justice within an exchange economy, something has
already been taken from or given by the other in the constitution of the
“difference” between them.
Nietzsche insists that the “overman” is not guilty of this parsimony
that misappropriates the other. Self-overcoming, he claims, is not built upon
34 Corporeal Generosity
the assumption of sameness or the negation of the other’s difference but
upon a mode of self-affirmation that seeks the other after the event, that
“seeks its opposite only so as to affirm itself more gratefully and trium-
phantly” (Nietzsche 1969, 37). Self-overcoming and the overcoming of jus-
tice based on the expectation of the return of gifts belong to those
communities and individuals who, as Schrift suggests, have the power to
forgive transgressions of their laws and values, who have been delivered from
revenge (1994, 34–35). Schrift also suggests that Nietzsche, through his ideas
of the “overman” and the overcoming of justice based on the creditor/
debtor relation, points to an economy based on generosity. “In this economy,
gifts can be given without expectation of return, and debts can be forgiven
without penalty or shame” (Schrift 1994, 35). Translating this suggestion into
ontological terms of the production of identity and difference through will
to power, if there is a difference between a generous and a parsimonious
relation to the other, it is that creative self-fabrication, rather than negating
the other’s difference by reducing the other to the self, constitutes a distance,
as difference, between self and other. This ability to create distance, to bestow
value and meaning, through abundance of power rather than revenge against
difference, requires the “gift-giving virtue,” or more correctly, it involves the
self giving itself without expectation of return (Nietzsche 1978, 74–77).
However, while the self that overcomes itself may not expect or ac-
knowledge a return for the difference it generates, it gets a return through
the other anyway. Despite Nietzsche’s occasional claims to the contrary, the
self cannot give itself without the giving of an other. The pathos of distance
within the self, necessary for self-overcoming, is, as with democratic normal-
ization, predicated upon the production of a distance or difference between
self and other. Nietzsche admits as much in the same passage describing the
pathos of distance within the self, referred to at the beginning of the pre-
vious section on self-overcoming:
Without the pathos of distance such as develops from the incarnate
differences in classes, from the ruling caste’s constant looking out
and looking down on subjects and instruments and from its equally
constant exercise of obedience and command, its holding down
and holding at a distance, that other, more mysterious pathos
could not have developed either, that longing for an ever increas-
ing widening of distance within the soul itself. (1973, 173)
Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance 35
So the distance within the soul, within that social structure of drives and
emotions that is the self and by which the self transforms itself, is generated
through the production of another distance. The eternal return to self in-
volved in making the moment one’s own is a return through and from the
other. That the overman, in applauding his own generosity, forgets this
passage through the other and the giving of the other involved may absolve
the other of any debt, but it is a forgetting allowed only by the other’s
generosity, by the other’s capacity to forgive and forget debts, a generosity
denied in the self-overcoming that memorializes itself by claiming the moment
as its own alone.
This other distancing, necessary to leave one’s designated place behind,
has its productive effects and so requires further consideration. It is a pro-
duction of distance that applies not only to relations between classes (as the
quote above points to) but also to relations between the sexes. It is to the
operation of distance between the sexes, its effects on women, and the
possibility of women’s artistry that I will now turn.
WOMAN AND ACTION AT A DISTANCE
Just as will to power as measurement is involved in the constitution of any
self separate from another, Nietzsche suggests that men create an image of
woman in order to shore up something about themselves (1974, 126). In
particular, the democratic man who conforms to an unchanging image of
himself requires a certain construction of the other to affirm and maintain
the appearance of self-consistency and autonomy. This reactive, parsimonious
approach to the other does not have to be explicitly denigrating. A man can
maintain himself by constructing an ideal and essential image of woman that
is simply complementary to himself yet designed for his consumption. This
image still serves to affirm the self as unchanging: it silences the noise of
other possibilities, the “noise” of the “forgotten.” As Nietzsche puts it in The
Gay Science:
When a man stands in the midst of his own noise, in the midst
of his own surf of plans and projects, then he is apt also to see
quiet, magical beings gliding past him and to long for their
happiness and seclusion: women. He almost thinks his better self
dwells there among the women. (1974, 124)
36 Corporeal Generosity
The truth of woman, the eternal feminine, promises to affirm an unchang-
ing self. But as identity is constituted in relation, the self that posits itself as
autonomous and transcendental is not complete without incorporation or
negation of what is other: man’s desire is to possess this image of woman
that he has constituted in relation to himself.6
To those who seek possession, Nietzsche issues a warning:
[Man thinks] that in these quiet regions even the loudest surf
turns into deathly quiet, and life itself is a dream about life. Yet!
Yet! Noble enthusiast, even on the most beautiful sailboat there
is noise, and unfortunately much small and petty noise. The most
magical and powerful effect of woman is, in philosophical lan-
guage, action at a distance, actio in distans; but this requires first
of all and above all—distance. (1974, 124)
Possessing the image of woman as other to the self does not bring the
omnipotence or self-completion promised. If woman was the complemen-
tary image man constructs, possessing this image would bring a kind of
death to the self. It would efface the distance within the self necessary for
self-overcoming.
While conformity relies on constituting and possessing an image of
woman, under the pretense of autonomy, self-overcoming relies on main-
taining a distance from this image. Leaving one’s place behind requires sexual
difference: a “noble” mode of valuation, a self giving itself, a spontaneous
mode of self-affirmation “seeks its opposite only so as to affirm itself more
gratefully and triumphantly” (Nietzsche 1969, 37). But in distancing himself
from woman, the generous, creative man still incurs a debt to her. In the
definition of active self-evaluation just given, Nietzsche implies an original
distance between self and other. Yet as I have argued, he also acknowledges
that even in creative self-fabrication the “pathos of distance” involved is
located at “the origin of language itself as an expression of power” where
the “noble” spirit names itself, gives itself identity and value “in contradis-
tinction to all the low, low-minded, common, and plebian” (1969, 26).
The distancing/differencing effected by will to power in self-overcoming
materially constitutes woman as other to the aesthetic self. While the key to
self-overcoming lies in maintaining this distance from the image of woman
so constituted, something remains to be said about its effect on women.
Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance 37
Nietzsche not only claims that the creative man must distance himself
from the image of woman he necessarily constitutes, he also claims that
“woman forms herself according to this image” (1974, 126). This suggests
that women are only artistic insofar as they are actors of a role imposed
upon them. For women to be artistic in the proper sense would require the
ability to overcome oneself according to one’s own plan. This requires dis-
tance within the self between the present self and the concept or image
toward which one aspires which, in turn, is predicated upon a distance
between self and other.
In the extract given above from The Gay Science, there are two modes
of self-constitution apparently open to women in relation to men: proximity,
resulting from possession by a man, and action at a distance. The first, from
a woman’s perspective, requires her unconditional submission to the concept
of unfathomable depth that man has of her. In obeying man in this way,
women think, according to Nietzsche, that they will find “depth for their
surface” (Nietzsche 1978, 67). But in submitting to men’s needs, women
reduce the distance between themselves and the other and hence the dis-
tance within themselves necessary for self-overcoming. Nor do they find
depth for their surface. Like the actor, they reflect forms not their own,
merely repeating themselves according to an image provided by others.
Submission results in the constitution of woman’s bodily self as a
calcified image of shame, calcified because submission collapses the differ-
ence between her appearance (surface effects of will to power which, to
recall an earlier point, is the pathos “from which becoming and effecting first
emerge”) and the concept of unfathomable depth that man has of her
(Nietzsche 1974, 125). Such a woman is the concept, the truth of woman,
fetishized. Submission brings shame in two senses. It involves being sexually
possessed by a man, and connected to this is the shame involved in the
revelation through submission that woman is not the profound, unfathom-
able depth, the mysterious eternally feminine, which man’s desire seeks. In
submitting to man’s desire, in giving up everything that she could be, woman’s
shame is constituted in revealing herself as surface (which is all there is to
existence). The shame deals a double blow when, having accepted her gift,
man loses interest. Again, to quote Nietzsche:
There are noble women who are afflicted with a certain poverty
of spirit, and they know no better way to express their deepest
38 Corporeal Generosity
devotion than to offer their virtue and shame. They know noth-
ing higher. Often this present is accepted without establishing as
profound an obligation as the donors had assumed. A very
melancholy story! (1974, 125)
The second mode of self-constitution that Nietzsche attributes to
women is action at a distance. From a woman’s point of view, this involves
maintaining one’s virtue where virtue means both distance from man’s desire
as well as maintaining one’s difference (the image of her that man’s desire
constitutes). This woman maintains the appearance of being unfathomable
depth over the shame of being a surface effect of will to power. Or, as
Nietzsche puts it:
[O]ld women are more skeptical in their most secret heart of
hearts than any man: they consider the superficiality of existence
its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them merely a veil
over this “truth,” a very welcome veil over a pudendum—in
other words, a matter of decency and shame, and no more than
that. (1974, 125)
Action at a distance requires that woman maintain the profound image of
difference that man has of her. Woman’s virtue, her gift-giving virtue, is to
not reveal this image as fraudulent, not to expose how man’s desire, and so
his self-overcoming, is dependent on this image. But the sexual “difference”
so constituted is in accordance with a concept given by man. It is in man’s
interest, rather than woman’s, that this distance, as antithetical “difference,” is
maintained.
Action at a distance, in “philosophical language” (as Nietzsche stresses),
does not bring autonomy. Action at a distance is defined philosophically (in
the language of Newtonian physics) as the idea that one body can affect
another without any intervening mechanical link between them. The bodies
are separated by empty space, yet when one moves so does the other.
Woman is still moved by man’s desire: a kind of mimicry is implied where
woman is changeable, only to the extent that man’s interpretations move her.
This “action at a distance” does not distance woman from the other, nor
does it allow the distance within herself necessary for her self-overcoming.
In fact, the mimicry implied in woman’s virtue of living up to the image
Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance 39
that man has of her is similar to Dionysian experience described by Nietzsche
in the Twilight of the Idols. Here,
the entire emotional system is alerted and intensified: so that it
discharges all its powers of representation, imitation, transfigura-
tion, transmutation, every kind of mimicry and play-acting, con-
jointly. The essential thing remains the facility of metamorphosis,
the incapacity not to react (in a similar way to certain types of
hysteric, who also assume any role at the slightest instigation). . . .
[The Dionysian individual] enters into every skin, into every
emotion; he is continually transforming himself. (Nietzsche
1968, 73)
This kind of changeability is creative, and Nietzsche explicitly ties it to a
feminine disposition of dissatisfaction (1974, 98–99) and histrionics (317).
But it is only a precondition to change. To be productive, the immediacy of
mimicry must be offset by the distancing within the self necessary to stage
and overcome the self. This distancing is the effect of the Apollinian world
of images and language, that is, will to power as interpretation, where the
self is constituted as separate from another. But, as I have argued, what
woman becomes through this action at a distance is in accordance with a
concept provided by man. So neither in submission to the democratic man
nor at a distance from the artist do women embody the kind of aesthetics
of self enjoyed by Nietzsche’s “overman.” Contrary to the assumptions of
some postmodern aesthetics, it would seem that man’s desire to create him-
self anew is satisfied only if woman remains in one place forever. Self-
overcoming relies on woman giving herself on man’s terms, a giving denied
by any claims that self-overcoming is an autonomous project and a giving
from which she does not benefit.
Nietzsche is not insensitive to the difficulties faced by woman as the
object of man’s desire. The imperative placed on women by men is to hold
together a contradictory image of both virtue and shame, distance and
submission, depth and surface. He claims that the comedy of love (1974,
125–26) and the impossibility of harmonious relations between the sexes
(1969, 267) are based on the contradictory nature of man’s self-constitution:
the requirement of both distance and proximity in relation to the other. He
also suggests that woman’s skepticism, about her role in relation to man, and
40 Corporeal Generosity
in the assumption of an essential self, is founded on the impossibility of
being the contradictory double image of virtue and shame that man re-
quires. On the effect on women of this requirement, Nietzsche observes:
Thus the psychic knot has been tied that may have no equal.
Even the compassionate curiosity of the wisest student of hu-
manity is inadequate for guessing how this or that woman manages
to accommodate herself to this solution of the riddle, and to the
riddle of a solution, and what dreadful, far-reaching suspicions
must stir in her poor unhinged soul—and how the ultimate
philosophy and skepsis of woman casts anchor at this point!
Afterward, the same deep silence as before. Often a silence
directed at herself, too. She closes her eyes to herself. (1974, 128)
OTHER PLACES FOR WOMEN
Woman’s solution to the riddle of a femininity constructed by man is to
“close her eyes to herself.” This closing is an opening in its suggestion of
other possibilities for self-formation aside from conforming to an impossible
image of the feminine posited by men. Man’s dependence upon women
conforming to an image of the feminine, as well as other possibilities for
women, is suggested by Nietzsche in the following passage:
Would a woman be able to hold us (or, as they say, “enthrall” us)
if we did not consider it quite possible that under certain cir-
cumstances she could wield a dagger (any kind of dagger) against
us? Or against herself—which in certain cases would be a cru-
eler revenge. (1974, 126)
As man’s self-overcoming depends upon woman’s conforming (whether in
submission or at a distance) to an image of her that man has constituted for
himself, then if woman does not conform to this image, she effectively
wields a dagger against his notion of self. That woman can wield the dagger
suggests the possibility of nonconformity, the possibility of artistry, the pos-
sibility of being-given that opens possibilities for her own existence.
Several modes of revenge are open to women, several ways of distanc-
ing themselves from the concept “woman” and recreating the self differently.
Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance 41
One possibility that Nietzsche mentions, in the context of woman closing
her eyes to herself, is that she can find “atonement” for her honor through
bearing children (1978, 66; 1969, 267; 1974, 128–29). However, as Alison
Ainley suggests, Nietzsche tends to place a lower value on pregnancy in
women than he does on the “spiritual” pregnancy of the overman (1988a).7
A second mode of revenge is feminism of equality, but as my discussion
above indicates, Nietzsche does not approve of this option: “equality” amounts
to turning women into men and is therefore not a distancing at all.8
The possibility of woman’s creativity comes uneasily from Nietzsche’s
uncertainty about distance. In submission or at a distance, woman is not
what she promises to be or what man thinks she is (“even on the most
beautiful sailboat there is a noise”). The metaphor of noise suggests that
women exceed the concept “woman” that man posits. That women may
change places rests on what Nietzsche means by noise, and this calls for a
further reassessment of the notion of “distance” in his philosophy.
Jacques Derrida suggests, in his reading of Nietzsche, that perhaps
woman is distance itself (1979, 49). Perhaps, but this needs qualification.
Woman, operating at a distance, is the complementary image or the differ-
ence that man posits in constituting himself as present. But the “empty
space” between them is effected by will to power as interpretation by which
borders are established, bodies constituted, and identity and difference given.
Distancing, will to power as the measurement of woman, is the difference
that precedes, exceeds, and constitutes the distance within the self and be-
tween man and his “other” woman. Given the necessity of this other dis-
tancing, woman cannot be possessed—she exceeds the difference or distance
over which man reaches for her or, more exactly, for himself. In proximity,
or when possessed, woman will be noisy—there will be excess information.
A woman is more than the concept that man has of her. Her truth or
identity, and therefore his, is deferred and sexual difference, as distancing, is
always already maintained.
If the truth of woman is to work for man, he must turn away from
her—he cannot live with this concept, but he cannot live without it. But
not only does the creative man turn away from the truth of woman that he
has constituted, so does the creative woman (“she closes her eyes to her-
self ”). Nietzsche says of truth as a woman: “Certainly she has not let herself
be won” (1973, 13). Women do not become this essential image, even in
submission. As Nietzsche puts it:
42 Corporeal Generosity
Reflect on the whole history of women: do they not have to be
first of all and above all else actresses? Listen to the physicians
who have hypnotized women; finally, love them—let yourself be
“hypnotized by them”! What is always the end result? That they
“put on something” even when they take off everything.
Woman is so artistic. (1974, 317)
Even when forming herself by submitting to the concept of “woman” that
man projects, woman is acting as something other to both this concept and
to herself.9
So woman’s artistry lies in her power of dissimulation, and her power
of dissimulation is based on the idea that, as absolute identity is always
deferred, the uncovering of the veil that is the surface of woman reveals not
the truth of woman nor therefore man’s self-presence but further dissimu-
lation. This “putting on something” even when they take off everything is
not necessarily a deliberate resistance to subjection. It is a feature of inter-
subjective evaluation: “Around every profound spirit a mask is continually
growing thanks to the constantly false . . . interpretations” (Nietzsche 1973,
51). Man’s evaluation of woman, whether active or reactive, creates the mask
that is woman’s socially inscribed difference in relation to him. But the
distancing and giving involved in the constitution of woman’s difference in
relation to man ensure that the distance between them cannot be effaced—
something will always be “put on,” which maintains a distance or difference.
Men may assume that they can capture the dangerous plaything they need
to discover the child in themselves (to create themselves anew), but the old
woman’s advice to these men is: “You are going to women? Do not forget
the whip” (Nietzsche 1978, 67).
It is one thing to conclude that “woman” is distance (or distancing)
and, therefore, that women do not coincide with either the surface as fetish
or with the truth of woman beneath. It is another to suggest that the
concept of woman that man forms for himself has no effect on women.
Derrida, for example, following Nietzsche, appears to risk this conclusion:
That which will not be pinned down by truth is, in truth—
feminine. This should not, however, be mistaken for a woman’s
femininity, for female sexuality, or for any other essentializing
fetishes which might tantalize the dogmatic philosopher, the
Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance 43
impotent artist, or the inexperienced seducer who has not yet
escaped his foolish hopes for capture. (Derrida 1979, 55)
and,
Because a “woman” takes so little interest in truth, because in
fact she barely even believes in it, the truth as regards her, does
not concern her in the least. It rather is the “man” who has
decided to believe that this discourse on woman or truth might
possibly be of any concern to her. (Derrida 1979, 63)
It is necessary to qualify Derrida’s distinction between the “feminine” and
an “essentializing fetish.” Women may not coincide with either, but the
distance/difference between female sexuality (the surface that is a woman at
any particular moment) and the feminine (the undecidable concept of woman)
is what constitutes women—at least insofar as women are artistic. Even in
“overcoming” themselves, women rely on concepts that they have inherited,
whether or not they may interpret these differently from men or differently
from each other. Women are not outside nor completely inside the feminine
as the truth of woman. But the truth of woman, as elusive and as changeable
as it is, is a name, and as the opening discussion of the social constitution
and normalization of the corporeal self suggests, “what things are called . . .
gradually grows to be part of a thing and turns into its very body” (Nietzsche
1974, 121–22). Even if what things “are” can never be decided, concepts of
“woman” have their material effects in the constitution of the “social struc-
ture of drives and emotions” that is a woman. Woman may not believe in
man’s discourse on her but, given the constitutive effects of this discourse
on woman’s difference, to imply, however carefully, that it does not concern
her at all is a little hasty.
Nietzsche’s understanding of the “pathos of distance” not only exposes
that normative discourses assume a male subject but also that they rely on
constructing woman in a certain way. Man creates an image of woman as
other in order to secure his corporeal identity. At a distance, woman’s “dif-
ference” is complementary and promises to affirm man’s self-presence; in
proximity, her “sameness” heralds the death of the self. There is no exchange
between man and his creditor, woman. Rather, woman’s “gift” to man is his
(impossible) self-certainty; the “return” for her investment is a contradictory
44 Corporeal Generosity
corporeality—suspended between virtue and shame. Insofar as women fulfill
this impossible role as man’s other, they uneasily embody these contradictory
concepts without a place of their own. But, as I have argued, the operation
of will to power is such that the corporeal self that is a woman also remains
open to possibilities aside from those that position her under man. The
embodied meaning of “woman” is dispersed beyond virtue and shame,
beyond the riddle of femininity that Nietzsche tends to uphold.
If there is a limitation in Nietzsche’s approach to the problematic of
the constitution of place, it is in the suggestion, apparent at times in his
work, that an aesthetics of self can avoid incurring a debt to the other. This
assumption is amplified in some postmodern claims that we can simply
declare an end to self-identity and its attendant commodification and nega-
tion of the giving of others. To deny that an aesthetics of self involves the
other is merely a disavowal of the giving of distance and, hence, of differ-
ence, involved in the constitution of one’s embodied place in the world. As
I have argued, Nietzsche’s idea of the “pathos of distance” suggests the
impossibility of such an uncontaminating space. Further, that action at a
distance, in its simplest formulation, still relies on keeping woman in her
place is testimony to the dangers lurking in any claims to the possibility of
leaving one’s place behind forever.
Two
Giving Sexed Corporeality
before the Law
THE ANALYSIS in chapter 1 of Nietzsche’s idea of the production of
distance in the social constitution of identity and difference, particularly
sexual difference, points to a domain of giving, a kind of generosity not
subject to deliberation and choice by an individual and overlooked and
forgotten by normative discourses that frame social relations in terms of
commodity exchange. This is not to suggest that corporeal generosity lies
outside of the normative production of identity and difference. The evalu-
ation of bodies involved in this production is an operation of power that not
only mediates the creditor/debtor relation but constitutes it by determining
the value and identity of what is exchanged as well as the value and identity
of the parties to the transaction. The productive generosity that is not subject
to deliberation, choice, or “consent” does not lie outside of this normative
operation of power but precedes and exceeds its terms.
That there is a generosity that conditions and disrupts the normative
discourses that govern social exchange is made apparent in the following
analysis of contemporary moral and legal discourses that mediate the buying,
selling, and donation of sexed “body-property.” Here a nonvolitional giving
of corporeality is considered in terms of a critique of these discourses, a
critique not only of how they constitute sexed identity and difference to the
45
46 Corporeal Generosity
disadvantage of women but particularly how they determine consent and
coercion in relations between the sexes. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the
intercorporeal basis of identity provides a way of elaborating the giving that
precedes and exceeds the terms of these discourses. Also his idea that cor-
poreal styles of being undergo a process of “sedimentation” in their social
constitution suggests a way to understand coercion and parsimony in rela-
tions between the sexes beyond the usual terms.
The practice of transferring cells, fluids, and organs from one body to
another, via some kind of storage facility, is considered one of the wonders
of modern medicine. But what also provokes wonder are the legal and moral
questions evoked by this practice. Questions such as: Who owns the cell line
produced from someone’s pancreas or the zygote held in storage after its
genetic parents become estranged? What moral status does the zygote itself
have? Who has ultimate claim over the fetus in a surrogacy arrangement?
Does a sperm donor have any claim to, or responsibility for, the product of
his ejaculation? Should the product of that event have the same rights to
know his or her genetic origin as an adopted child? Should a person
be permitted to sell his or her blood or kidney to the highest bidder? And
so on.
Such questions, and the legislative responses to them, share a problem-
atic assumption: that the corporeal substances at issue are someone’s property.
In keeping with an economy based on social contract theory and liberal
individualism, it is taken for granted that the human body is owned by the
particular self to which it is attached, as is that part of “nature” transformed
by the body’s labor.1 Accompanying this is the assumption of natural free-
dom and autonomy: the equal right of individuals to be free from interfer-
ence, and the right to do with one’s body what one will, providing that this
does not harm others.2 The property status of the human body and this idea
of freedom as autonomous self-government lead to something of a paradox
in social relations. On the one hand, insofar as the body is considered part
of the person, the idea of freedom renders the human body inalienable.
Possession of this body by another would at best commodify the person; at
worst, it would reduce the person to a slave. On the other hand, insofar as
the body is considered a person’s property, the right to do with it what one
will should allow its alienation within an exchange economy. It is given to
the law to resolve this paradox. In an exchange economy, the law’s raison
d’être is to protect this property from unwelcome possession, right down to
Giving Sexed Corporeality before the Law 47
the smallest cell, and to ensure that the disposal of it, and the access of others
to it, is just.
Two alternatives have emerged in moral and legal discourses that aim
at determining to what extent and under what conditions body property
can be justly alienated: either the transfer of body property is allowed under
the terms of a contract, in which case money can exchange hands, or it is
only allowed in terms of a gift. I argue that neither alternative guarantees
justice, particularly when the body involved is sexed. Justice is only possible
if the giving of corporeality is understood beyond these terms of relations
between self-present, autonomous property owners. Yet, as I will suggest,
such an understanding challenges the very foundation of the law and its
assumption of personal property rights.
Underlying the battle between contract and gift as paradigms for the
biomedical alienation of body tissue is, as I have suggested, a paradox: the
desire to avoid commodification of the person (which, it is said, would
negate his or her “natural” freedom) warns against the exchange of body
property, while the desire to preserve the individual’s autonomy as sover-
eignty over his or her body (the right to use the body as he or she will)
works to endorse such an exchange. This paradox seems to be resolved by
giving legal status to the transfer of body tissue to another in terms of a
contract, providing that the contract is understood to be governing the
provision of a service. Under the conditions of a service contract, it is
assumed that my autonomy is preserved if I have consented to relinquish, to
another, the control I am said to have over my body. And commodification
of my person is apparently avoided: the corporeality being transferred is
viewed as the product of work done (in the service of transforming “nature”
through the body’s labor) rather than part of the personal substance of the
worker. Hence, under a service contract, I can receive payment for the service
(rather than for part of my personhood), and I do not incur any personal
loss in the transaction.
Or so the story goes. On the basis of this model of contract, it is
possible to sell my blood in some democracies and my organs in others. But
not all bodies or body products are given the same moral weight within this
schema. While there has been a lucrative and apparently unproblematic trade
in some body products for centuries, such as hair for the production of wigs,
and while the sale of blood and organs does occasionally pose legal and
practical difficulties for some,3 the exchange of sexed body property under
48 Corporeal Generosity
a service contract, for procreative purposes or for pleasure, has proven to be
particularly and consistently controversial. The surrogacy contract, for ex-
ample, generates far more bad press than the sale of hair. Examining why this
might be the case exposes some problematic assumptions at the heart of the
service contract.
The notorious case of Baby M (in New Jersey in 1987) illustrates the
difficulties. The case involved a contract between “intending” parents, Eliza-
beth and William Stern, and a “surrogate,”4 Mary-Beth Whitehead. In ex-
change for a fee, Whitehead agreed to carry a fetus to term and to relinquish
the child to the Sterns after birth. However, Whitehead struck a blow against
the foundation of contract by breaking her promise to give up the child.
Also up for challenge, at least potentially, in the legal battle for Baby M that
followed was the property status of the human body and the products of its
labor, the individuation of persons and the corporeality said to pass between
them, and the assumed linearity of corporeal exchange.
Even if we grant that cells and tissues are owned by someone and can
be alienated in terms of a service, who provided the service for whom in
this case was, to say the least, ambiguous. A child was given a world by a
body, blood was transmitted to and enhanced a zygote, a gamete was trans-
ferred from William Stern to Whitehead, her gamete enveloped his, and so
on. Determining a singular outcome and its proper owner in such a process
of production is frustrated by the indeterminate constitution and multipli-
cation of cells, the formation, transformation, and crossing of borders, and
the fluidity of identity and difference. However, the surrogacy agreement,
like all service contracts, effectively constitutes the uniform, intentional,
linear transmission, through objective time and space, of a corporeal unit
originating in one atomized, static individual and arriving in another. And
the presiding judge in the case of Baby M removed any further ambiguity
by ruling in favor of the Sterns. He argued, among other things, that this
was a service contract between the genetic father and Whitehead, a contract
that she, as the provider of the service, was obliged to honor. In effect, this
determination commodifies the surrogate’s body by reducing it to a storage
facility, and it secures the genetic father as the origin and destination of
procreative property.5
The surrogacy contract, upheld by this and similar judgments, has been
widely condemned as unjust, particularly by defenders of women’s rights.
There have been two common arguments posed against it. First, it is said
Giving Sexed Corporeality before the Law 49
that the surrogacy contract extends patriarchal control over women’s repro-
ductive bodies because the surrogate loses control of her body for the
duration of the contract (Dodds and Jones 1989, 7)6 and because upholding
the contract amounts to the extension of paternity rights (Pateman 1988,
217). Second, it is argued that the surrogacy contract is unjust because a
woman’s decision to enter into it is not autonomous. This criticism is based
on the claim that a decision is only autonomous if the person making it is
fully informed of its consequences for her future well-being and an “intend-
ing surrogate” cannot know in advance what traumas her decision may
bring (in giving up the child, for example).7 This objection implies that the
intending surrogate is subject to some kind of coercion, even if she actively
seeks the arrangement. The types of “coercion” cited include the undue
influence of economic need upon the intending surrogate’s decision and the
social imperative to procreate.
Without denying the importance of these objections, one immediate
problem with them is that they are, for the most part, just as applicable to
other service contracts but are raised as if they are not.8 Am I, for example,
any more in control of my body than the surrogate, given that I am not
allowed to smoke or drink alcohol at work? Is economic need a form of
“coercion” peculiar to surrogacy, or does it also inform decisions to enter
into other work contracts? If the social imperative to procreate compromises
the autonomy of an intending surrogate, can this also be said of all women
involved in procreation? Despite the wider applicability of these objections,
their use against the surrogacy contract is rarely accompanied by arguments
against other work or service contracts (such as those for selling blood) and
never directed against procreation in general. In raising these problems I am
not endorsing the service contract as a model for the alienation of body
property. I am suggesting that these objections to the surrogacy contract fail
to locate why such contracts may be unjust. Indeed, by relying on the model
of autonomy as control over one’s body property and by restricting the
charges to some sexually specific contracts, these kinds of arguments risk
reinforcing a tradition that excludes women from social exchange on the
basis of the sex of their bodies.
I suggest that the injustice of the surrogacy contract lies neither in an
extension of patriarchal control over women’s reproductive bodies nor in its
failure to uphold women’s autonomy understood in terms of informed
consent. If the law fails women in the surrogacy contract, it is for the same
50 Corporeal Generosity
reason it fails in all service contracts: it is based on a contradiction. As I have
argued, while the law exists to preserve autonomy and freedom (the inde-
pendent self-government of personal property) within social exchange, so-
cial exchange rests on the negation, by “consent” of the same autonomy and
freedom, as they are understood within this paradigm. Based on this model
of social relations, the feminist demand for justice is impossible: I can only
be fully autonomous and free if I keep my body to myself (an ideal that
warns against social relations), and my consent to lend my body to others
(a practice necessary for social relations) can only be fully informed (and
therefore autonomous) if I have already lived through that experience. The
injustice of surrogacy and other service contracts can be located not in the
law’s failure to guarantee these impossible conditions but, as I will go on to
argue, in the law’s determination of embodied identity and difference both
through and apart from the biomedical alienation of body property.
This determination by the law proceeds by the partitioning of bodies.
As I have indicated in the discussion of the case of Baby M, in determining
who transfers what to whom, the service contract reduces the ambiguity of
body intersubjectivity by atomizing and commodifying corporeality. In doing
so, it also determines the identity of the corporeal units constituted (the
“buyer,” the “seller,” and the “item” exchanged) and their position within
social exchange. Second, the law, in determining which forms of corporeal
exchange can be governed by contract and which cannot, effectively deter-
mines simultaneously which bodies so constituted accrue property and value
and which do not. In both of these ways, the law constitutes identity and
difference and distributes property according to norms about what is proper
to bodies. And here I evoke a familiar theme: when dealing with sexual
difference, the norm around which corporeal property is distributed is male.
Either the law treats sexed bodies as if they are identical in their difference
and, as in the case of Baby M, upholds a contract which, while apparently
sexually neutral, deems the male body to be the origin and destination of
procreative property, or in determinations intended to redress this injustice,
women’s bodies are considered other to what is the proper subject of social
exchange, and they are excluded accordingly.
It is also here, within the determination of sexed identity and differ-
ence, that the law determines consent and coercion. In partitioning bodies,
the law also designates what is proper to each, so that the attendant accu-
mulation of property by the body said to be its proper owner seems to occur
Giving Sexed Corporeality before the Law 51
by the consent of the other; the subtraction of property from that which is
said to be its proper place is held to occur by coercion. So, for example, if
the law allows women to enter the procreative market, and if the law
assumes that procreative property belongs to men, then its arrival at this
destination appears to be with the consent of women. Under similar con-
ditions, the law has had difficulty recognizing rape: “no” cannot mean “no”
if it is assumed that what is extracted by men from the sexed bodies of
women is destined for its proper place. What is at stake in these encounters
between the sexes is not so much a woman’s control over her body or her
informed consent. Prior to such considerations is the legal determination of
sexed identity and difference, whereby men accrue property and therefore
identity through an almost invisible theft of the corporeality of women.
This kind of determination of sexed identity and difference is no less
apparent when women are excluded from social exchange, but rather than
building consent into the terms of the contract, the coercion of women
becomes the grounds for their exclusion. For example, those who oppose
sex-specific contracts only, on the grounds that within them women lose
control of their bodies, often justify singling out these contracts from other
service arrangements by the claim that the relation between a woman and
the body tissue involved is more intimate and less separable from her
personhood than that implicated in other service contracts. Carole Pateman,
for example, singles out both the surrogacy and prostitution contracts for
criticism on these grounds. The surrogacy contract is wrong, she says, be-
cause it illegitimately separates the fetus from the surrogate’s selfhood (Pateman
1988, 215).9 The prostitution contract is wrong, says Pateman, because a
woman is involved in the sex act more directly than “the involvement of the
self in other occupations” (207). So while some would allow the alienation
of women’s body property for exchange on the market, Pateman, among
others, would prevent the way this property gravitates toward men by ar-
guing that it belongs to the personhood of women. For Pateman, the con-
sequence of legally endorsing economic contracts involving such personal
corporeality is the commodification of the woman herself and her subse-
quent reduction to an object of exchange between men.
The immediate problem with arguing that the fetus or the sex act are
inseparable from a woman’s personhood is that it leaves little room for
claiming, as Pateman would like, that surrendering a child for adoption is
less wrong than surrogacy, or that a woman is less commodified in sex for
52 Corporeal Generosity
pleasure than she is in sex for profit. A possible way to avoid this kind of
difficulty is to suggest that insofar as a corporeal substance is thought to
belong to someone’s personhood and yet is alienable in theory, it should
only be alienable in practice as a gift. While I will entertain this line of
thought for awhile, I want to suggest that the gift, so understood, is no less
problematic than contract in its determination of sexed identity and difference.
This paradigm of the gift for the transfer of body property is favored
in Australia over contract for its apparent legal, practical, and ethical advan-
tages. An apparent legal advantage is that in giving away (rather than selling
or exchanging) an organ, a body product or part, the original “owner”
cannot be held legally responsible for the quality of the product, nor for any
consequences after it reaches its destination. So, for example, under relevant
legislation in Australia (the Artificial Conception Acts [New South Wales,
Western Australia, Australian Capital Territory], the Status of Children Acts
[Victoria, Queenland, Tasmania, Northern Territory], or the Family Rela-
tionships Act [South Australia]), donors of gametes used in various reproduc-
tive technologies have no legal rights or responsibilities in relation to any
children resulting from such arrangements (although this lack of responsi-
bility also is true of the service contract, depending on where one is posi-
tioned within it). An apparent practical advantage of the gift as a model for
governing the alienation of body tissue is that it reduces the temptation to
give too much of one’s body away, to the detriment of one’s physical well-
being. On the basis of such considerations, it is illegal in Australia to sell
one’s blood and organs, although one is encouraged to give them away. An
assumed moral advantage is that allowing the gift rather than the sale of
body products seems to minimize the commodification of the body and
hence the potential dehumanization of social exchange.
On the basis of these perceived advantages, the gift is the model used
currently in Australia for legislation in relation to surrogacy insofar as it is
allowed at all. In terms of the Surrogacy Contract Act 1993 (Tasmania) (the
only legislation I know of in Australia that allows surrogacy in any form),
private, “voluntary” surrogacy is permitted, while commercial surrogacy
contracts are not. One real advantage of this legislation, beside the apparent
ones mentioned, is that it allows the surrogate to change her mind about
giving up the child (as no contract can govern the arrangement, the surro-
gate cannot be held to her promise). While the legislation seems reasonable,
given the objections to the surrogacy contract, it is, upon closer scrutiny,
Giving Sexed Corporeality before the Law 53
merely the reverse side of contract and hence does not guarantee justice. The
reasons for recommending prohibiting a surrogacy contract, while allowing
private surrogacy, retain all of the assumptions of atomized individualism
upon which contract theory is based: upholding the right of an intending
surrogate to “use and control her body as she sees fit” while avoiding doing
harm to the surrogate by “the breaking of the mother/child bond which
develops in utero” (NBCC 1990, 27–28).
If the law says no to the surrogacy contract and yes to the gift while
remaining faithful to the concept of autonomous self-present identity, then,
as in Marcel Mauss’ (1967) paradigm of the gift, discussed in the Introduc-
tion, a problematic determination of womanhood has been made. The con-
tract is negated either on the grounds that another contract has been formed
with a child in utero (in the case of the Tasmanian legislation) or on the
grounds that the fetus is proper to a woman’s personhood and hence in-
alienable (to take part of Pateman’s argument). If giving a child to another
is disallowed on the basis that this involves breaking a maternal contract,
deemed different to the surrogacy contract only in being more essential,
then the “surrogate,” while no longer legally culpable for breaking her word
to the “intending” parents, would be morally culpable for keeping it. Or, to
follow part of Pateman’s line of reasoning, if “surrogacy,” or the giving of
sexual pleasure, is criminalized on the grounds that maternity, or something
called “female sexuality,” is assumed to be proper to the woman’s personhood,
then we may circumvent the tendency for procreative or sexed property to
accrue toward men, at least temporarily. But while the giving by women of
this property is no longer conceivable in terms of automatic consent, it starts
to look like surrender under duress. The assumption that giving what is said
to be proper to women must involve coercion accounts for the widespread
opposition, among feminist theorists, even to “noncommercial, voluntary”
surrogacy. Similarly, arguing that sexuality or the sex act is inseparable from
a woman’s personhood risks reducing all heterosexual sex to rape (or it at
least implies that explicit consent should be given for every sexual encoun-
ter).10 And, in a context where some sexed body property attracts value,11
to rule that women can only give away what is deemed proper to them
amounts to allowing a man’s body to accrue value without responsibility but
not a woman’s. When the gift is understood to be the other side of contract,
the determination of sexed identity and difference is no less problematic: a
woman is free only if she gives nothing of herself away, and a norm of male
54 Corporeal Generosity
body property is both produced and maintained by holding that women’s
body property lacks currency within social exchange.
If, however, we grant that identity and difference are produced through
the giving of corporeality rather than before it then an altogether different
picture of justice in the flesh emerges. Based on Merleau-Ponty’s model of
the constitution of embodied identity, for example, the emergence of a body
I can call our my occurs not prior to but through the “alienation” of
corporeality (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a).12 In this scheme of things, the distinc-
tion between self and other is neither original nor final. Prereflective “rec-
ognition” that one’s body is an object for the other constitutes a difference
between the two. But this bodily distinction from the other cannot be
absolute. Through prereflective perception that, as a body, I am perceived by
another, a system of indistinction is established between my body as I live
it, my body as the other sees it, and the other’s body as I perceive it. This
tripartite system is one of “syncretic sociability”: that is, the self is produced,
maintained, and transformed through the socially mediated intercorporeal
“transfer” of movements and gestures and body bits and pieces. Just as
through the look and the touch of the other’s body I feel my difference, it
is from the same body that I borrow my habits and hence my identity
without either body being reducible to the other or to itself.
This brief account of intercorporeal existence raises a number of
points against the idea of autonomous self-presence underlying the way in
which the giving and selling of body property are usually conceived. First,
insofar as I am a self, the giving of corporeality is already in operation. While
the self is constituted through the building of a partition between one body
and another, it is also by this differentiation that my corporeality is given to,
and takes place in, the world of the other’s body as it lives from and with
me. It is not the case that I first exist in control of my body then decide
to give my body away. Rather, it is because my body is given to others and
vice versa that I exist as a social being. Hence, corporeal identity is never
singular, always ambiguous, neither simply subject nor object. Second, it is
through this ambiguity of bodily existence that new possibilities for existing
are open to me. Whether learning a new skill or inheriting someone else’s
kidney, my possibilities are borrowed from the bodies of others, always with
an incalculable remainder. Hence, my “freedom” to act in becoming what
I am is compromised rather than guaranteed by keeping my body to myself.
Finally, as the “alienation” of corporeality grounds rather than follows after
Giving Sexed Corporeality before the Law 55
the constitution of self, then the difference between consent and coercion
is at best indeterminate. For the most part, I do not choose, and so neither
consent to, nor are coerced into, the process of corporeal generosity that
makes me what I am. For the most part giving corporeality happens without
any thought at all.
On the other hand, while freedom is the capacity to remain open to
the bodies of others, my freedom to give and receive corporeality in becom-
ing what I am is not absolute. Bodies, as they are lived, are socially consti-
tuted, built from an intertwining with others who are already social beings.
So while my “freedom” is not limited, in the first instance, by others taking
over control of my body, it is limited by “the lessening of the tolerance
allowed by the bodily and institutional data of our lives,” as Merleau-Ponty
puts it (1962, 454). That is, my tolerance to embodied projects, and hence
what I tend to do and become, is limited by the style of my embodied
existence. This style, one’s capacities and characteristic gestures, is subject to
“sedimentation” in the operation of giving. That is, through habit and in
accordance with the institutional setting in which my corporeal identity is
constituted, I develop a pattern of existence that leans toward certain prac-
tices and that cannot tolerate others. So the ethics of giving blood, gametes,
sexual pleasure, or children to another is not decided on the basis of whether
these gifts are alienable, unconditionally and universally, and therefore whether
giving them puts one’s freedom at risk. Rather, our freedom to give in any
of these ways is limited by the habits and capacities we have developed as
well as those of the bodies with whom we dwell, limits guided by the social
significance of the corporeality in question. More generally, insofar as we
tend toward sex-specific projects, any consent or coercion involved is grounded
most fundamentally in the social constitution, through the law in all of its
forms, of differences between sexed bodies.
There is another way to put this “on the one hand”/“on the other
hand.” On the one hand, giving corporeality is not the province of a singular
sexed subject but the realm of an ambiguous relation to the world of the
other, the open possibilities inherent in dwelling-with, the realm of indeter-
minate sexual difference. And if the gift opens possibilities for existence, then
its operation rests on not determining anything about who gives what to
whom ahead of or during an encounter. Or, as Derrida would have it, for
there to be the gift it must go unrecognized and radically forgotten because,
if the “donor” or “donee,” in his or her assumed self-presence, recognizes the
56 Corporeal Generosity
gift as separate from him or her then either a debt will be incurred (and the
gift is no longer a gift as such) or the gift will be annulled by some form
of return (Derrida 1992, 12–14). Insofar as the law (and I include within this
the feminist opposition to surrogacy and prostitution discussed earlier, what
Moira Gatens has called “justice feminism”)13 commodifies sex-specific gifts
and determines their point of departure, arrival, and return in ways already
discussed, it also determines sexed identity and difference in such a way that
women seem incapable of giving anything except that which already be-
longs to someone else or that which must be extracted by force. It is
through these kinds of determinations that injustice is done: the gift of an
incalculable sexual difference is effaced, and woman is constituted as the
second sex.
On the other hand, while injustice is perpetuated through the law’s
determination of who gives what to whom in its constitution of sexed
identity and difference, it would be a mistake to assume that justice can be
restored through lawlessness, through forgetting the gift entirely, if by this we
mean that other possibilities for existence would emerge from the free play
of the gift after suspension of the law’s determinations.14 While Merleau-
Ponty, for example, sometimes implies otherwise, the ambiguity of body
interlacing, that is the domain of generosity, is not temporally prior to or
separate from the process of socio-legal determination that would reduce
ambiguity and so close off possibilities for existence. Giving corporeality is
opened through the same law that governs the commodification and deter-
mination of sexed bodies. (To take the simplest of examples, the legal de-
terminations in the case of Baby M raised as many questions about who
gave what to whom as they answered.) Further, nothing much would change
if the law were suddenly suspended, because the determination of sexed
identity and difference is not confined to explicit laws; it proceeds through
those bodies that the law constitutes. It is not that the law should be
suspended nor, therefore, that the determination of the gift should be for-
gotten. Rather, what should be remembered is that the giving that is more
often than not forgotten by the law is woman’s, and the gifts that the law
more often than not remembers are man’s.
The possibility of justice then rests with the law’s ability to remember
this giving of women’s corporeality without naming or determining the
lived body that “is” a woman. This is not the same as giving women equality
with men before the law. Such a stroke of the pen does not remedy the
Giving Sexed Corporeality before the Law 57
unjust determination of sexed identity and difference under discussion. The
injustice needing remedy is that which Drucilla Cornell, following Lyotard,
defines as “damage accompanied by the loss of the means to prove the
damage” (1991, 110). That is, in a sociality where autonomous identity is
assumed and woman is defined as other to the proper subject of social
exchange, womanhood is damaged in the constitution of sexed identity and
difference. In such a culture “scarred by gender hierarchy,” as Cornell puts
it, a theory of justice that seeks sexual neutrality ignores the damage done
to women in the production of this scar and doubles the injustice by
insisting that this damage be translated into the terms of a system that does
not recognize it (Cornell 1991, 110, 114). (The rulings over Baby M and
the difficulty in proving rape are cases in point.) Rather than equality alone,
justice requires the interrogation of this system of injustice, a questioning
that opens up the operation of generosity, that irreducible production of
possibilities for existence inherent in body intersubjectivity. Or, as Derrida
puts it, justice is not a matter of neutralizing differences but, rather, it
requires us “constantly to maintain an interrogation of the origin, ground
and limits of our conceptual, theoretical, or normative apparatus surrounding
justice” (1990, 955).
So where does this leave the law on surrogacy, rape, prostitution, in-
vitro fertilization, or any other form of “alienation” of sexed corporeality,
medically assisted or not? It leaves the law with the task of remembering
that women already give corporeality to the world in the mode of dwelling-
with that constitutes them as sexed beings in relation to others. Some
women “give” children to themselves, to others, and to the world (simul-
taneously). The difference between this and “surrogacy” is in a name by
which a woman, rather than some other representative of the law, would
attempt to determine the gift and its (interim) destination. Some women
“give” sexual pleasure to themselves, to men, and to other women. The
difference between this and prostitution is that in prostitution the gift is
recognized in terms of an explicit value that the law would rather efface.
This is not to suggest that the “surrogate” or the “prostitute” is above the
law in the embodied living of her projects. Rather, it is to suggest that there
is nothing essentially immoral about “surrogacy” or prostitution that would
not also be immoral about procreation or sexual relations in general. And,
in legislating against these particular forms of giving, while allowing the
practices upon which they are based, the law serves only to uphold its own
58 Corporeal Generosity
authority in the determination of womanhood. It does not serve women or
justice.
While some women give and are already given through sex for plea-
sure and through procreation, it would be unjust to force the gift in either
of these ways. The surrogacy contract is unjust for forcing the gift, as is rape.
And this is not because maternity or something called female sexuality is
proper to woman’s body and therefore inalienable in any essential sense.
Rather, forcing a woman to give corporeality through sex or children is
unjust, first, because it denies the generosity of women while memorializing
that of men. Second, giving involves a metamorphosis, a structuring of a
particular situation through incorporation and corporeal reconstitution, the
possibility of which is dependent upon the tolerance to it allowed by the
lived bodies involved. A woman can say no to giving because her body,
which is her indeterminate self, cannot tolerate the gift; her characteristic
pattern of existence is not open to the project in question. (And, as the
possibility of saying no and meaning it assumes nothing about a proper body,
there is no implication that an explicit yes must precede the gift. Yes is
implied in the giving itself.)
What is being questioned in these suggestions is the authority we
invest in the law (assumed, incorrectly, to lie outside us) to determine the
origin and destination of gifts and, hence, sexed identity and difference. The
direction of the debates and legislation surrounding the medical alienation
of corporeality makes the question more urgent only because of what it
exposes about this authority. It seems that while we can consider giving a
zygote in a test tube the status of a person and have no problem attaching
value to a male gamete, we still render the gifts of women selfless. Some
women disappear, as the invisible becomes real in the interests of someone
else’s autonomy.
Three
Performing Body-Identity
through the Other
IN CONTRAST TO the ideas of atomized identity and body property that
uphold the contract model of social relations criticized in chapter 2, perhaps
life is a dance. Perhaps identity is a performance, the choreography of which
is captured in the following passage from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
entitled “The Other’s Dancing Song”:
Into your eyes I looked recently, O life; I saw gold blinking in
your night-eye; my heart stopped in delight; a golden boat I saw
blinking on nocturnal waters, a golden rocking-boat, sinking,
drinking, and winking again. At my foot, frantic to dance, you
cast a glance, a laughing, questioning, melting rocking-
glance; . . . and my foot was already rocking with dancing frenzy.
My heels twitched, then my toes hearkened to understand
you, and rose; for the dancer has his ear in his toes.
I leaped toward you, but you fled back from my leap, and
the tongue of your fleeting, flying hair licked me in its sweep.
Away from you I leaped, and from your serpents’ ire; and
already you stood there, half turned, your eyes full of desire.
59
60 Corporeal Generosity
With crooked glances you teach me—crooked ways; on
crooked ways my foot learns treachery.
I fear you near, I love you far; your flight lures me, your
seeking cures me: I suffer, but what would I not gladly suffer for
you. . . .
I dance after you, I follow wherever your traces linger.
Where are you? Give me your hand. Or only one finger. . . .
I am weary of always being your sheepish shepherd. You
witch, if I have so far sung to you, now you shall cry.
Keeping time with my whip, you shall dance and cry! Or
have I forgotten the whip? Not I. (Nietzsche 1978, 224–26)
My concern in this chapter is with the performance of identity, the ability
to transform the self through action, or the concept of having one’s ear in
one’s toes, as Nietzsche would have it. This idea of performativity and the
self-transformation it effects is offered by Nietzsche and others as an alter-
native to the model of self that grounds the social contract. While a prom-
ising alternative, the idea that the self is performative raises concerns with
the limitations to this ability to perform oneself differently.
The quote from Nietzsche suggests that the self is transformed and
transported through the toes, through the body. This is consistent with his
idea of self-overcoming, discussed in detail in chapter 1—the idea that the
self is corporeal and open to transformation, is reproduced differently, through
the production of distance within the self. This idea is relevant to the issue
of social justice insofar as Nietzsche proposes self-overcoming as a way of
opening the embodied self to possibilities of existence beyond those nor-
malized through moral systems of evaluation and punishment. But the quote
above also raises the question of the role of the other in the performance
of self. Why, for example, are Nietzsche’s (or Zarathustra’s) toes hearkened
to understand “life”; is the other necessary to prompt him to dance? This
description of the dance of life suggests that identity is not performed or
transformed through oneself but is given through the field of the other. But
if this is the case, if the transformation of identity relies on the other’s
generosity, why then would Zarathustra (representative of creative self-
performance) need to whip the other into submission in order to complete
the dance? Does creative performance, which transforms the self beyond
normalized categories, subject the other no less than the consistency of self
Performing Body-Identity through the Other 61
demanded by contracts? In addressing these questions I will first elaborate
on what I mean by performing body-identity, pointing to the significance
of the idea and integrating Nietzsche’s approach to the subject with that of
contemporary thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. While my
primary concern is with the neglect of the role of the other in the
performativity of self, and with the subsequent lack of consideration of
the limits to performativity, the idea is important for how it suggests that the
performance artist may have something to say to the sociality that lies
beyond the stage.
By performing body-identity I mean that the self does not have an
identity except through action. The deed, act, or performance is the self
actualized. And as action implicates the body, then the self ’s identity is
performed through the body. Self-identity is equivalent to body perfor-
mance. The idea that the self is constituted in the act is at least as old as
Hegel, but it is an idea that has not received much positive attention in the
democracies of modernity. This is because our morality and politics depend
on another idea: that the self ’s identity is located in consciousness, and this
self-reflexive consciousness comes before, causes, and remains unchanged
within the act. The idea that the thinking self or the will causes the body
to act in this way or that makes the self responsible for the act. That I can
be held accountable for my acts is the rock upon which morality and the
law are built. The idea that the thinking self is given before and remains
unchanged through the act and indeed through sequential actions is the
rock upon which the social contract is built. If it cannot be said that the self
remains unchanged through a series of actions, then promises cannot be
made, contracts cannot be signed, no one could be taken at his or her word
and, according to this view of things, social relations would have no basis.
So to say that the self ’s identity is performed and reconstituted within the
act is no trivial claim; it challenges the very foundation of the moral, social,
and political relations of modernity. But why issue such a challenge?
To those who make this claim, to those who claim that the self is
constituted in the act rather than before it, this other self of contract theory
is a fiction—a handy fiction that makes us equally responsible, accountable,
calculable, and consistent through time. In short, it makes us dull. Human
beings suffer from “gravity,” as Nietzsche puts it (Nietzsche 1974, 343).
Under the weight of this view of the self, we are drawn back to whom we
think we are, we cling to our vocations and take ourselves too seriously. To
62 Corporeal Generosity
illustrate what he thinks is our fate under the burden of this gravity, Nietzsche
uses the parable of the tightrope walker who falls to his death when a jester
jumps over him (Nietzsche 1978, 19-23). The tightrope walker dies from his
vocation in the wake of the fool who surpasses him. If we do not lighten
up, remain open to change, and become flexible we will perish. For Nietzsche,
at least, the model of the self that makes us accountable for past acts and
consistent over time is itself responsible for the nihilism of modernity.
Clearly we have not perished, nor has the moral, social, and political
system supported by this model of identity. However, as the analysis of the
surrogacy contract in chapter 2 illustrates, much injustice has been done in
the name of this model of self-identity. This model not only legislates against
change in one self over time but also against difference between selves or,
rather, against transgression of borders of identity and difference. It supports
homophobia, sexism, racism, ageism, and a variety of other “isms” and pho-
bias. How so? The law, moral and secular, is universal and normalizing in
treating us as if we are or should be the same. Or rather, in maintaining our
institutional structures, the law divides us into different categories and regu-
lates our behavior according to what is expected for our proper place. We
are treated well if we have the same identity as that privileged within these
structures. And the law operates with the model of self-identity just outlined:
it assumes that the self is behind and the cause of actions and, on this basis,
the body that acts is reduced to a passive material object that we push or
cart around. The body is thought to signify or represent the self that lies
behind the action. If I cannot live up to the expectations of law, if I am a
body that is different to that assumed by the law, then I will be punished
or disadvantaged on one of two grounds: on the grounds that the self has
been taken over by the body and is no longer in control of and the cause
of its actions, or on the grounds that the self is still the author of its actions
but is itself faulty. So to live up to the law, to reap the benefits of the self
privileged under the law, I have two options: to change my mind or change
my body.
We used to think that to get a better deal under the law, all we had
to do was change our minds; change our attitudes, our desires and beliefs,
our psychic identities to match that desired under the law. But to “pass” you
must have the proper body, the body that signifies the identity desired by
the law. If you are poor do not steal; if you are black, you would do better
to pass as white; if a woman, you would do better to pass as a man; if you
Performing Body-Identity through the Other 63
have a few wrinkles, get rid of them; if you are in a wheelchair, get up and
walk.
That I would need to change my body to live up to the “normal”
identities assumed by social and political institutions suggests, contrary to the
model of identity based on self-present consciousness, that identity has some-
thing to do with body performance. That is, self-identity is not behind and
the cause of the body’s actions but an effect of the body’s performance.
Identity is an effect of body performance in two senses: we attribute an
identity, personality, or set of thoughts and attitudes to another on the basis
of her or his actions. Second, insofar as a body acts consistently over time
and according to a category or an identity proper to this body, this is an
effect not of the doer behind the deed but of disciplinary production by the
law. Let me expand on this second point. According to Nietzsche, Foucault,
Butler, and others, body identity is constituted through a repetition of acts,
through habit formation. Under the guidance of the law and its regulatory
moral and disciplinary mechanisms, bodies are trained to repeat what are
considered good acts and to discard the undesirable. The law is an artist in
naturalizing its categories of identity, in performing them through bodies.
One effect of this disciplinary production of identity is, as I said,
consistent performance. As Nietzsche puts it:
[People] confound themselves with their role; they become vic-
tims of their own “good performance”; they themselves have
forgotten how much accidents, moods, and caprice disposed of
them when the question of their “vocation” was decided—and
how many other roles they might perhaps have been able to play;
for now it is too late. Considered more deeply the role has
actually become character; and art, nature. (Nietzsche 1974, 302)
Besides consistency, the other effect of the law’s performance of body iden-
tity is the artifice of difference. We are trained to perform different body
identities according to that required by the place we occupy within the
social structure.
As Judith Butler suggests, insofar as men are privileged in our culture
and the family is central to the reproduction of our social institutions, then
the disciplinary production of gender difference takes center stage in the
law’s performance of body identity (Butler 1990, 128-41). Our vocation in
64 Corporeal Generosity
this respect is decided on the basis of our genitals or perhaps a strand of
DNA. Around a fold of the skin is built a mask of habits, desires, and gestures
considered proper to that body. Insofar as disciplinary mechanisms are suc-
cessful in reproducing female body identity, this will manifest in a woman’s
desire for men and motherhood and in the way she talks, walks, stands, and
even, as Iris Marion Young argues, in how she throws (Young 1990). Femi-
ninity is a performance that, while a cultural production, takes on the
appearance of nature through both the habit of it all and the fiction that this
performance is caused by a self, soul, or psyche said to lie behind it (Butler
1990, 136).
Besides inconsistency, one thing the law cannot tolerate is ambiguity in
identity, transgression of its categories of identity and difference. Transgression
occurs when the body performance does not match the identity expected of
or assigned to that body. Because it performs femininity across a male body,
male to female transvestism is such a transgression and transsexualism more
so.1 Also transgressive is same-sex desire, the hermaphrodite, the muscle-bound
East German woman athlete (or, more recently, the Chinese woman swim-
mer), and Madonna dressed as a man, gyrating over a submissive Asian woman.2
The law spares no money, time, or energy in its effort to eliminate these
ambiguities and transgressions. The Anglican Archbishop of Adelaide insists
that Madonna’s concert be banned, the Women’s Weekly is outraged, and the
International Olympic Committee wheels out its chromosome and drug tests.
While these are obvious arms of the law, even the most politically correct of
us are equally guilty of policing identity. Because the law performs identity
through us, through our bodies, it does not need to show its hand. It needs
only these bodies for its work to be done. So the sign goes up outside of a
lesbian bar: “Women only; Lesbians only; Women-born women only; genetic
female dykes only; no boys over the age of twelve” (quoted in Zita 1992,
122).3 Or, in The Crying Game, Fergus, despite his best intentions, love, and
pacifism, throws up at the first sight of Dil’s naked male body. And even I am
shocked at Madonna’s dance, not because dressed as a man she seduces another
woman but because the other woman is Asian.
We attempt to keep body-identity in its place, not just because the
categories of difference uphold our social institutions but because, and in
virtue of this, any ambiguity in the other’s difference threatens the security
of our own identity. It is the other’s laughter, the other’s questioning that
prompts Zarathustra’s dance. And only if the other is brought to heel, made
Performing Body-Identity through the Other 65
to cry, and forced to keep time with the whip can Zarathustra rest in peace.
Ambiguity and transgression of categories of body identity are threatening
because they expose identity as art, not nature. If I cannot be sure of
another’s performance, if identity is not natural, then I cannot be sure of my
own. Here I can offer a diagnosis of my response to Madonna’s performance:
my discomfort at watching the Oriental other submit to the time of the
whip reveals my preference for the exotic other remaining untouchable, a
preference equally reductive of the other’s identity as the demand that she
be the same and no less a foundation for my own (Western) self-image. We
avert our eyes or efface that which confounds the assumption that identity
and difference are natural and that everything, including ourselves, is in its
proper place. And not only does the law work through us to keep the other
in place, we also work on ourselves. The surgeon does not force the trans-
sexual to match her genitals with her body performance. The transsexual
presents herself willingly to the surgeon’s knife.
Perhaps none of this would matter if everything ended happily in its
proper place. But as Nietzsche suggests, we confound ourselves with our
“good performance.” There is no more of a secure place for the transsexual
after the operation then there was before. This lack of security is also true in
Foucault’s case of Herculine Barbin, the nineteenth-century French hermaph-
rodite, whose ambiguity was denied not by matching genitals with perfor-
mance but by matching performance with what science determined was the
sex of the genitals (Foucault 1980b).4 Despite the ambiguity of Barbin’s geni-
tals, it was decided shortly after birth that Barbin was more a girl than a boy.
She was raised as a girl, educated in a convent school for girls, and performed
her femininity as well as any female could. However, at age twenty (in what
amounted to a serious failure of performance), she took a woman lover. After
confessing this to her doctor and priest, it was decided on legal and moral
grounds that Barbin was in fact a man. With this she was required by law to
dress as a man and to exercise the political rights and economic privileges
enjoyed by men at the time. After a period of living in anger, misery, and
isolation, Barbin killed herself. Of course there are many more far less dra-
matic instances of the misery that the policing of identity causes. We may not
die of boredom, but we will confound ourselves and suffer from our perfor-
mance for, to a certain extent, none of us can live up to the law.
So how do we deal with the law’s performance of body-identity and
the marginalization of difference and ambiguity it effects? By the same
66 Corporeal Generosity
means—performance. Some would say that the injustices resulting from
policing identity can only be redressed through a particular kind of perfor-
mance; a flexible, self-affirming, lighthearted performance. To quote Nietzsche
again:
Precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human
beings—really, more weights than human beings—nothing does
us as much good as a fool’s cap; we need it in relation to our-
selves—we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, child-
ish and blissful art lest we lose the freedom above things that our
ideal demands of us. (Nietzsche 1974, 164)
To turn nature back into art, we need to give ourselves style against the law.
Or, as Foucault puts it, we need to create ourselves as works of art without
reference to the disciplinary moral code (Foucault 1984, 346). Rather than
securing our own identity by saying no to the other’s ambiguity, we must
practice an “aesthetics of existence” on ourselves or “overcome” ourselves,
as Nietzsche would put it.
The importance of the idea that identity is a body performance and
that this is how the law of identity and difference is naturalized cannot be
overstated. However, I question the extent of the creativity implied in an
aesthetics of existence in our ability to reperform identity against the law.
How we formulate the limits to our creativity depends upon where we
think the ability to dance comes from. If we think that identity is performed
through the body without conscious intervention, if it is a material produc-
tion, then we cannot recreate ourselves by changing our mind. Neither
Nietzsche or Foucault can take this path, given that for them there is no
consciousness separate from, and the cause of, the body’s actions. While
Foucault’s aesthetics of existence may not depend on a presocial mind, it
does seem to depend, as Butler points out, upon the existence of a multi-
plicity of bodily pleasures that have somehow escaped the law’s determina-
tions (Butler 1990, 96–97). It is on the basis of using these pleasures that,
according to Foucault, one can build up a stylistic performance. But he
provides no account of how this bodily multiplicity managed to escape
social production in the first place. Indeed, the very idea runs against his
earlier work on disciplinary power, which implies that no body escapes the
work of the law.5
Performing Body-Identity through the Other 67
Butler provides her own account of the origin and possibility of
stylistic performance. She suggests that we can subvert strict categories of
identity and so add style to our existence, because the production of identity
by the law is itself unstable. Using gender identity as her focus, Butler argues
that because identity is actualized as it is performed, rather than being caused
by an inner essence identity is open to disruption. It is open to disruption
because it is constituted through a repetition of acts; a repetition of public
acts with socially established meanings and a repetition of these imitations
by ourselves over time. Identity is parody or imitation without an authentic
original. And, Butler suggests, there is always difference in repetition, that is,
the repeated act is always slightly different from the prior instance of its
performance because of the different social context in which it is performed.
This disjunction between the meaning of repeated acts means that one’s
identity is always open to change. To quote Butler:
Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus
of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an
identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior
space through a stylized repetition of acts. . . . The possibilities of
gender transformation are to be found precisely in the arbitrary
relation between such acts, in the possibility of a failure to re-
peat, a de-formity or a parodic repetition that exposes the
phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous
construction. (Butler 1990, 140–41)
Butler instances drag as a kind of parody that, through a disjunction between
anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance, exposes gender
identity as a tenuous construction. But she also thinks the mundane can be
disruptive. For her, style or political resistance to the policing of correct
identity comes from the disjunctions inherent in body performance (dis-
junctions between the body and performance and between repeated acts),
not, as Foucault would seem to have it, from a multiplicity of body pleasures
that have somehow escaped the normalizing social code.
While I think Butler’s is an interesting thesis that overcomes some of
the problems of a Foucauldian aesthetics of self, it has itself suffered from
parody. Under the weight of individualism and identity politics her critical
intervention into disciplinary production of body-identity has tended to be
68 Corporeal Generosity
reduced to a superficial pluralism. Jacquelyn Zita, for example, in her essay
“Male Lesbians and the Postmodernist Body,” chastises those she labels
“postmodernists,” such as Butler, for trivializing identity politics by advocat-
ing replacing two sexed identities with many ways of inhabiting a body (Zita
1992). In light of Butler’s kind of thesis, says Zita, the self-titled “male
lesbian,” who is ostracized by the lesbian community for obvious reasons,
would no longer have to claim that his male body signifies a female and
hence a lesbian identity; “he could become a ‘lesbian-identified-non-lesbian-
hating-male’ who loves his own body and acknowledges his heterosexual
privilege” (123). Or, to avoid the hostility a female lesbian could attract
because she has sex with a man to conceive a child, she could claim her
identity as a female-lesbian-gay-male-loving mother.
While I think this is a misreading of Butler’s particular analysis of
performing gender, hers is an account that lends itself to such reductions.
The reason is that, for the most part, there are only two terms in Butler’s
account: the performing body and the law. And as the performing body in
its singularity disrupts its own identity through repetition, then it can be said
to be open to becoming anything at all. With this, there would be, as Zita
suggests, as many identities as there are bodies, and each identity would be
limited only by the acts it could invent or by the different contexts it could
find. However, that performance could be so free is itself suspect, and even
if it were so free, there is nothing to stop another sign going up on the door:
“only female-lesbian-gay-male-loving mothers allowed.” And there is noth-
ing to stop the law from tearing it down. Body performance would be no
more open to ambiguity and therefore no less oppressive in this proliferation
of the law’s categories from two groups to many single bodies.
There is a third term forgotten in this haste to liberate ourselves from
the law. Identity is ambiguous and open to change, not just because of a
deformity inherent in repetition over time but also because body perfor-
mance is never singular. And body performance is never singular, because
between the body and the law is the other. I have already suggested, along
with Nietzsche, that it is the other who prompts the dance. I also want to
argue that, as we dance with the other, identity is not only ambiguous and
open to change, but it is limited in its potential.
For Merleau-Ponty, as mentioned in chapter 2, and in a way that I will
elaborate on in more detail here, body-identity is never individual: it is
fundamentally intersubjective, based on the nonvolitional generosity of
intercorporeality and fashioned with reference to the social and familial
Performing Body-Identity through the Other 69
situation. Further, it is because the body is constituted in relation to others
that it is ambiguous, opened to the world and to others, and so can act at
all. Insofar as any body claims absolute self-identity by assuming an absolute
interval between that body and the body of the other, this generosity is
suppressed in favor of rigid identity and the condemnation of transgression
of singular identity that this entails. In “The Child’s Relations with Others,”
Merleau-Ponty argues, alongside Lacan’s model of the “mirror stage,” that
the self does not carry, in isolation from others, a distinction between the
inside and outside of itself, between the objective body, as it is seen and
touched by others, and the phenomenal body as it is lived, feels, sees, and
touches (Merleau-Ponty 1964a). The distinction between self and other is
based on a difference between the experience of one’s own body and the
body of the other. This experience arises through the condition that one’s
body is an object for another and therefore distinct from the other. However,
the distinction from the other cannot be absolute. Through a perceived
objectification of one’s body by another, a system of indistinction is estab-
lished between my own body as it feels to me, its visual or objectified image,
and the body of the other. Insofar as the child identifies with its image of
the other’s image of itself, it cannot easily distinguish between what it lives,
what the other lives, and what it perceives the other is doing. This tripartite
system is one of “syncretic sociability”: the transfer of socially coded move-
ments and gestures between dispersed bodies.
So my body-identity, while based on perception by and therefore a
distinction from others, arises through the organization of the body given
to and by the corporeality of others. And this constitution of the body
subject through the other occurs not by conscious intervention but by
mimesis and “transitivism”: by identification with other bodies and by the
imitation and projection of gestures. While this indistinction between self
and other is reduced by saying “I,” by taking up one point of view as the
subject of language, the structure of language is such that each person, while
being an “I” for herself or himself, is also a “you” for others (Merleau-Ponty
1964a, 151). The self is a lived body ambiguously caught between subject
and object, inhabiting the world of the other’s body even with a lived
distance between the two. It is because bodies are opened onto others, rather
than being distinct, that we can act, be affected, have an identity, and remain
open to change without conscious direction. The generosity of intercorporeal
existence is not governed by choice but is where agency, perception, affec-
tivity and, combining all of these, identity, are born. Hence, we cry at the
70 Corporeal Generosity
movies, even though we sit apart from the action. And we turn into our
partners, and even our dogs, just by dwelling with them.
There are two points to be made in light of this account of perform-
ing body-identity against tendencies in Nietzsche’s, Foucault’s, and Butler’s
accounts. First, while my identity is constituted through a stylized repetition
of acts, I do not build this body alone: I only have an identity because as
a body I am given to, and take place in, the world of the other’s body. I act
because, as Nietzsche puts it, “my toes hearkened to understand you,” and
my toes hearkened to understand you because it is through you that my
body identity is constituted. It is because my body is always already given
to the world and to the other that the relation between my body, the other,
and the world is ambiguous and hence open to possibilities.
This corporeal opening toward the other and the world has two sides.
I structure the situation by the (prereflective) projection of my body onto
the world. Through movement, I incorporate objects and others within the
situation and resolve it according to the project at hand. I drive a car in this
way; not by consciously calculating the distance between my body, the car,
and the gateway but by the prereflective projection of my body (the gestures
of which have been built up through mimesis and repetition) onto the
world, making it part of my body spatiality. By incorporating the car and
breathing in I might just make it through. I would also perform drag this
way, not by simply donning the garb of a foreign body and playing on the
difference between that performance and the sex of my body but by im-
plicitly incorporating that foreign body, its gestures, movements, and habits,
into my performance.
The other side of the story is that my body identity is transformed in
this performance through the world of the other, and not simply because of
a deformity of meaning inherent in repetition. As performance involves an
opening of the body onto the world of the other, it polarizes and gathers
together the body; its senses and extremities are unified, and certain aspects
are privileged depending on the task being carried out. Method actors will
be familiar with this reconstitution of the body through the other. By the
imitation and repetition of the gestures of a character, I almost become that
character in the way I walk, talk, and stand. And depending on the commit-
ment to the performance and the duration of the play or filming, it can take
some time to undo the changes that performance has effected. Robert De
Niro’s performance in the film Awakenings is exemplary of this phenomenon.
Performing Body-Identity through the Other 71
He played the part of Leonard, a patient suffering from a catatonic form of
parkinsonism. His performance carried so much depth and detail that Oliver
Sacks, the neurophysiologist who supervised the filming and who the film
was about, was concerned that De Niro would contract the disease. Sacks
noted later:
I knew how deeply he might identify with the characters he
portrayed, but I had to wonder now how neurologically deep he
might go—whether he might actually, in his acting, become Par-
kinsonian, or at least somehow duplicate the neurological state
of the patient. Does acting like this, I wondered, actually alter
the nervous system. (Sacks 1991, 383)
That performance could go so deep to effect a body transformation may
explain what puzzled a journalist for the Sunday Times (London) recently
(October 12, 1995): why leads in love stories (from Burton and Taylor to
Firth and Ehle) so often really fall in love.
To summarize the first point: as bodies are constituted and live as an
interworld of potentiality given to and opened onto others, we have no
means of “knowing” or becoming a body other than through a familiar
dwelling-with others in the world. This point, that transformation of identity
is effected through the other, is not necessarily lost on Butler, but it does
tend to be submerged under her emphasis on the arbitrary relation between
acts of a singular body in time. And it is a point lost on some of her critics
and disciples, who pin their hopes for freedom from the policing of identity
on the metamorphosis of a body living in splendid isolation. But, in claiming
a singular body-identity, I not only deny the corporeal generosity of
intersubjective existence, effectively stealing from the other and effacing the
ambiguity of her or his difference in ways already discussed, I also cut off
my own potentialities for existence. For, as Irigaray puts it, “One does not
move without the other” (Irigaray 1981).
The second point to be made about this account of body performance
is that what I can become is limited, not so much by the acts I can invent
but, prior to this, by the social history of my carnal intertwining with others.
As I argued in chapter 2, there is a limit to the generosity by which bodies
are given to each other in the opening of possibilities for carnal existence.
As our potentialities for existence are opened through the bodies of others
72 Corporeal Generosity
who are already social beings, the conducts that constitute our identity and
hence our modes of being will vary depending on with whom we associate
and under what social rules. The law is not a disembodied phenomenon
performing identity directly on bodies; it works through the cultural other
with whom we dwell. So our “freedom” to become what we will is limited
by “the lessening of the tolerance allowed by the bodily and institutional data
of our lives” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 454). Second and related to this, as
identity is constituted through a repetition of acts, our style of existence
then is subject to what Merleau-Ponty calls “sedimentation”: we develop a
bodily “attitude towards the world [that], when it has received frequent
confirmation, acquires a certain favored status for us” (441). So, De Niro may
have become parkinsonian after Awakenings, and Firth and Ehle may have
stayed in love after Pride and Prejudice, except for the absence of a corporeal
history that would favor that development and the lack of sufficient sus-
tained commitment to their new performance. Again, the point about “sedi-
mentation” of corporeal styles is not lost on Butler (1990, 140). However,
in her account, habitual ways of being seem too easily disrupted through a
disjunction between repeated acts. What I am suggesting is that habit is only
overcome, and new possibilities opened, in any substantial way through
another’s body and then only through an acquired familiarity. Or, as Merleau-
Ponty puts it, “As long as we are alive, our situation is open, which implies
both that it calls up specially favored modes of resolution, and also that it
is powerless to bring one into being by itself ” (1962, 442).
While no body engaged in a project simply repeats identity, no body
is free to create itself and its world anew. To claim otherwise, to imply that
I can become whatever I want in my singularity, is to risk repeating the
moralism of liberal individualism which, in denying the ambiguity of iden-
tity and its dispersal in the other, makes me fully accountable for what I am,
on the grounds that I could have acted otherwise. If I could have acted
otherwise, then I could have lived up to the singular, unambiguous identity
assigned me under the law. Suggesting the possibility of freedom in a sin-
gular identity further entrenches the law, the law that cannot tolerate the
dance. “Keeping time with my whip, you shall dance and cry! Or have I
forgotten the whip? Not I!” (Nietzsche 1978, 226).
Part II
Generosity and the
Politics of Affectivity
blank 74
Four
Erotic Generosity
and Its Limits
THE ANALYSIS SO FAR has posited corporeal generosity as the
nonvolitional, intercorporeal production of identity and difference that pre-
cedes and exceeds both contractual relations between individuals and the
practices of self-transformation figured in some postmodern aesthetics of
self. All production of identity and difference is not only social and corporeal
but also passes through the bodies of others, and parsimony and social
injustice rest on memorializing the generosity of some while forgetting the
giving of others.
This chapter begins the task of examining the affective dimension of
interpersonal relations. The understanding of affectivity to be developed
grounds affects in the generosity of intercorporeal existence. Rather than
being an aspect of personal existence that occasionally disrupts the integrity
of the self for better or for worse, affecting and being affected will be viewed
as the basis of the production and transformation of the corporeal self
through others. So understood, affectivity is also the domain of politics. If
the corporeal generosity that accounts for the production and transforma-
tion of the self is grounded in affect rather than conscious reflection, then
so is parsimony and hence prejudice, discrimination, domination, and
75
76 Corporeal Generosity
submission. So in accounting for the generous basis of affectivity, I will also
attend to its politics.
This analysis of the generosity and politics of affectivity begins with
the extreme case: erotics and sexual relations. It is usually within the realm
of eroticism and sexuality that affectivity is viewed as that which either puts
the self most at risk or that which might secure the self ’s liberation from
social constraints. However, both views are based on the same individualism
that haunts the contract model of social relations, criticized in Part I. In the
context of this model, sexual desire is viewed as an exceptional affect that
destabilizes an otherwise self-controlled, self-contained self, and protection
of this self is secured, it is assumed, if desire is accompanied by love under-
stood as a relation of mutual exchange between equals. It is against this
model of desire and love that my account of erotic generosity will be posed.
Radical feminism, for example, is concerned with the harm that sex
seems to pose to women’s physical, psychical, and social well-being through
their sexual objectification and subordination within patriarchy. Protection
from harm can be secured, it is said, through the promotion of more egali-
tarian love relations and through erecting a legislative barrier against prac-
tices, such as pornography, that eroticize the domination and subordination
of women. Concern about the sexual objectification of women is, of course,
as old as feminism itself. What is relatively new is an anxiety among radical
feminists about the way some women, and worse some women who call
themselves feminists, valorize the objectification of women in the name of
women’s sexual liberation. This anxiety is well documented in the 1990
anthology The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism (Leidholdt and
Raymond 1990). Here, Catharine Mackinnon, for example, equates the
opposition to her own anti-pornography campaign by groups such as FACT
(Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force) with the death of feminism as she
knows it (Mackinnon 1990, 9). Such groups, she argues, in thinking that
sexual liberation can be achieved for women by appropriating rather than
opposing the “visual violation” of women, fail to recognize that “misogyny
is sexual, and that sexuality, socially organized, is deeply misogynist” (13).
Sheila Jeffreys, in the same book, defends her ideal of safe sex by
mounting a similar argument, not just against feminist defense of pornog-
raphy but also against practices such as lesbian sadomasochism and butch
femme role playing, which she says eroticize domination and submission
(Jeffreys 1990, 25, 133). Unlike Mackinnon, Jeffreys does not think all socially
Erotic Generosity and Its Limits 77
organized sexuality is deeply misogynist, but she does suggest that insofar as
women derive pleasure from sexual practices that rely on a power imbalance,
this marks the degree to which they have internalized their oppression (133).
So “keeping women and children safe” (25) is not just a matter of erecting
a protective barrier through legislation but also requires working toward a
more egalitarian sexuality in lesbian as well as heterosexual relations. This
can be achieved, she says, by women exorcising from themselves any nega-
tive sexual feelings (those associated with submissiveness in sex) (26) in favor
of positive sexual feelings (134), although the origin of these remains un-
clear. Wendy Stock is also concerned with eradicating any power imbalance
from sexual relations without abandoning sex altogether. Her formula for
safe sex involves therapeutic measures which, by helping a woman “expe-
rience and believe in her own body integrity,” would bring her sexual
pleasure under her control rather than her partner’s and so would achieve
a “sexuality based not on a submission/domination dynamic but on mutual
exchange between equals” (Stock 1990, 152–53).
It is not my intention to repeat the well-rehearsed arguments that
radical feminism tends to rely on a simplistic model of power and an
essentialist model of male sexuality as inherently aggressive and women’s
sexuality as universally positive.1 In any case, the positions just outlined add
a complication to the radical feminism of the 1970s. Safe sex for women,
if it can be achieved at all, not only seems to require protection from men
but also from other women and even from themselves. But perhaps more
problematic is that these radical feminist ideals of safety and mutual ex-
change are shared by the new liberation discourses that they are designed
to oppose. Berkeley Kaite (1987), for example, in supporting pornography
as a means of transgressing restrictive categories of gender identity, relies on
the surprising claim that pornography involves a mutual exchange of looks
between the consumer and the pornographic model. While more sensitive
to the relation between sex and power, Chantal Nadeau (1995), in a critical
appropriation of Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of masochism, bases her qualified
support for lesbian sadomasochism on the claim that it involves a contract
that gives women freedom and control over their sexuality. Rather than
assuming that sexual liberation for women can be achieved by appropriating
the images of women’s sexual subordination and without dismissing the
labor of feminism in exposing and opposing sexual violence against women,
as some of the new sexual liberation discourses (such as Kaite’s) tend to, I
78 Corporeal Generosity
want to take advantage of that labor to question the current discourse of safe
sex in both its liberationary and prohibitive forms. I want to question the
ideals of self-control and a mutual exchange between equals apparent in
both ideals of safe sex, while still accounting for the feminist concern that
sex can be violent and a violation of being.
There are at least two aspects of the modified radical feminist position
that I find disturbing. First, insofar as it is anti-sex (Mackinnon) and/or posits
a genuine love against a sexual desire contaminated by patriarchal represen-
tations, it is thoroughly entrenched in an anti-sex tradition that begins with
Western philosophy itself. Plato, as it is well known, based his epistemology
on privileging spiritual love over physical desire, and a similar valorization
of love over sex can be found in the tradition of egalitarian political phi-
losophies from the eighteenth century until today. This tradition is anti-sex
insofar as it is anti-body, promoting a politics of immunization, through
egalitarian love and friendship, against the threat that the body seems to pose
to freedom and autonomy. But, as I will go on to argue with reference to
Sartre, despite their talk of freedom and autonomy, these anti-sex discourses
are no less anti-women than the sexual libertarianism set up against them.
Second, insofar as radical feminism proposes the possibility of safe sex, through
self-control and body-integrity and/or by erecting a barrier between women
and others, it lacks generosity—not a generosity that would ignore sexual
violence or endorse women giving themselves to others at any cost, but a
generosity foreshadowed in Beauvoir’s anti-individualism, although remain-
ing underdeveloped in her work. This is a generosity of mind and body, of
love and desire that undermines those distinctions and that, by assuming the
ambiguity of existence, views the erotic encounter as one means of extend-
ing one’s own existence through others without entrapment.2
I begin with Sartre because, perhaps surprisingly, his philosophy of
love, desire, and freedom in Being and Nothingness (1989) shares all of the
sentiments of the radical feminism that I have outlined.3 It therefore allows
me not only to indicate the extent to which the contemporary discourses
of safe sex repeat an older logic but also to point to what may be problem-
atic about that logic and its privileging of love over sex. More positively, the
revision of Sartre’s ontology by others in the existential phenomenological
tradition, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty in particular, provides a way through
some of these difficulties by positing an understanding of the affectivity of
sexual relations in terms of the generosity of intercorporeal existence.
Erotic Generosity and Its Limits 79
Sartre’s discussion of love and sexual desire is framed by his concern
with the maintenance of individual freedom. Freedom refers to the human
capacity to constitute existence through practical consciousness, or the for-
itself. Through our conscious embodied projects, we not only constitute
existence outside of us by introducing form, meaning, and our purposes to
being-in-itself, but we also transcend what we are (our being-in-itself) to-
ward future possibilities. This freedom of self-realization is possible because
there is no essence grounding our existence. But absolute freedom is impos-
sible: we can only choose to be; we cannot be the foundation of our own
existence.
If, in considering the relation between freedom and sexuality, we focus
on Sartre’s comments about holes and the slimy toward the end of Being and
Nothingness (Sartre 1989, 600–15), as has often been the case in feminist
scholarship,4 we will encounter the kind of misogyny about which Mackinnon
is concerned. Sartre equates “slime” (that which threatens to engulf the for-
itself) with feminine passivity, and he likens “holes” (that which appeals to
our freedom to fill up existence) with the “obscenity of the feminine sex”
(613). For Sartre, it would seem, women’s sexed bodies both ground and
threaten man’s freedom. However, if we take these comments in the context
of Sartre’s earlier, more considered discussion of the body and sexual desire,
we find something less misogynist and more consistent with the ideals of
radical feminism. There we find that sexual relations are a problem for Sartre,
insofar as they compromise the freedom of both the self and the other,
whatever their sex. It is also on the basis of this concern for freedom that
Sartre condemns both sadism and masochism and that love shines through
as the most likely means by which the freedom of both the self and the
other can be preserved within concrete relations. However, this privileging
of love is supported by an ontology that, while not blatantly anti-women,
is somewhat misanthropic, an ontology where the freedom of the for-itself
seeks protection from the apparent danger of both the freedom of others
and the weight of one’s own body. It is in this ontology, which is both
individualist and anti-body, that a logic of safe sex is grounded.
Sartre’s ontology is not obviously individualist, in that while the self
is for-itself, it is also always for-others: others have the freedom to make of
us what they will. However, our being-for-others is exclusively in the mode
of objectification: “my being-as-object is the only possible relation between
me and the Other” (Sartre 1989, 365). While I cannot know nor therefore
80 Corporeal Generosity
capture the other’s view of me, the other’s look nevertheless has the affect
of transforming my project from being-for-itself to being-for-itself through
the eyes of the other. My freedom is alienated in concrete encounters with
others, and this claim, combined with the assumption that interpersonal
relations are based on objectification, implies an original separation between
two objectifying consciousnesses. So while Sartre is not individualist insofar
as he claims, by occasional qualification, that it is not the case that I first exist
then move toward the other (1989, 363, for example), he is individualist in
the sense that all concrete relations with others are hostile relations of
objectification between centers of an impossible freedom. It is within this
conflict between competing looks that desire and love arise.
Desire—and by desire Sartre means sexual desire—belongs to one of
two general modes of response to the alienation of my freedom in the
other’s look. Through desire I defend myself from the other’s freedom by
objectifying the other in return (Sartre 1989, 363). This desire is of a body
for a body. And just as Sartre is not obviously individualist, he is not obvi-
ously anti-body. Indeed, he devotes a significant proportion of Being and
Nothingness to rescuing the body from its secondary status and givenness in
Cartesian dualism and biological determinism (303–60). In his general dis-
cussion of the body for-itself and for-others, Sartre establishes a model of the
body as a socially situated structure variously lived by oneself and variously
perceived by others depending on the situation and the project at hand. This
has positive consequences for Sartre’s model of sexual desire, to a point. It
allows him to claim that sexuality is an ontological rather than a biological
question (384). This means, first, that sexual desire is not determined by the
body’s facticity (383): it does not originate in an instinct, a sex organ, or an
aim set by the sex of the body. Rather, desire is an embodied project of a
body in situation. Hence, my desire does not depend on any essential mas-
culine or feminine aim but on how I live my embodied projects. Second,
sexuality is an ontological rather than a biological question in the sense that
sexual desire does not arise in a single body that seeks the satisfaction of
pleasure for its own sake (384), but by being a body-for-others. I have
already said that desire arises in the wake of the other’s objectification of me.
The point here is that if desire is my response, what I desire is a body, and
I desire a particular body not because of its facticity (its sex, or what it wears,
for example). Rather I desire a particular body as a body in situation where
its significance for me is given by its attitude toward the world (386) (which
Erotic Generosity and Its Limits 81
would include objectification of me) and by my interpretation of that at-
titude. For Sartre, I have no sexuality outside of this ontological structure of
a lived body-for-itself-for-others. In this way, he gives the body its due in
desire without resorting to a biological determinism that would either privi-
lege heterosexuality or destine men to sexual domination and women to
sexual submission.
However, in the end, Sartre’s model of sexual desire does betray an
anti-body logic: we find that what is wrong with desire is that it is too
embodied. While desire may begin as a body-in-situation, for another body-
in-situation it also begins and ends in trouble. According to Sartre, in desire,
and unlike in any other project, consciousness is “troubled,” “clogged,” or
overtaken by one’s body, and the for-itself, and hence one’s freedom, is
compromised (Sartre 1989, 387–89). The motive of desire is, as I have said,
to protect one’s freedom by possessing the freedom of the other. Desire
attempts to do this by reducing the other’s body, by the “caress,” from a
body-in-situation to “flesh” (390–91). The caress strips the other’s body of
its situation, its meaning, its projects, its future (in short, its social dimension
and its freedom). And the other’s body is reduced to flesh, not just for me
but, more important, for the other. If I am to possess the other’s freedom
and so protect my own, what matters is that, as the result of my caress, the
other lives his or her body as flesh, as inert matter that he or she no longer
transcends toward possibilities. The problem with all of this is that, according
to Sartre, in the process of eliminating the other’s freedom, I sacrifice my
own. I can only compel the other to feel the passivity of his or her fleshness
if I imply my own, if my caress also incarnates my own consciousness,
reduces me to flesh and deadens my possibilities (390, 395).
Sartre’s purpose in describing desire is to show how it fails as a project
of the for-itself to be its own foundation. But, as this failure, for Sartre, is
inherent in all concrete relations with others, it is not my interest here. What
is interesting, and problematic, about Sartre’s view of desire is that in its
consummation in the sexual encounter, it fails to achieve anything at all.
Desire paralyzes, and we are left with mere flesh enjoying flesh, a state of
the human body that Sartre, in his discussion of the body-for-others in
general, reserves for the corpse (Sartre 1989, 344). In comparison to any
other body state, including hunger, desire is deadly: all freedom is lost in
favor of a double submissiveness and passivity. And it is not the case that
Sartre would prefer that one freedom remain alive in the face of the other’s
82 Corporeal Generosity
sexual submissiveness. Such a situation would be either sadistic or masoch-
istic. Sadism is the attempt to possess the other as flesh without returning
the favor (399).5 And Sartre is contemptuous of sadism for its violence, its
nonreciprocity, and the sadist’s self-delusion in assuming a freedom that in
reality is enslaved. Masochism is where I give up my freedom entirely,
allowing the other to make me exist as flesh (377–79). For Sartre, masochism
is the ultimate vice: it is a kind of submission saturated with guilt for the
way the masochist consents to his or her absolute alienation in the other,
allows the other to dominate, is fascinated by his or her own objectness for
others, and loves his or her failure even to achieve these limited aims.
While sadism and masochism are embodied projects that should be
avoided for the domination and submission they promote, desire, because it
is too embodied, is not a project at all. Sartre may have personal grounds for
this belief, but he has no ontological grounds. Within the context of his
general account of the body-for-itself-for-others, the only grounds for as-
suming that sexual desire is any more embodied or any less open to pos-
sibilities than any other project directed toward the world of others would
be if Sartre himself privileged a kind of disembodied consciousness. And this
would appear to be the case. Despite all of his work in arguing that the body
is always lived as a body in situation open to possibilities, his reservations
about desire rest on assuming first, that to the extent that desire is a project
directed toward the other’s body and one’s own body becoming flesh, this
is not a project of self-realization that opens possibilities, and second, that the
freedom of every other project depends on a body that, while a center of
reference for my project, is only a contingency that consciousness transcends.
Or, as Sartre puts it:
In desire the body, instead of being only the contingency which
the For-itself flees toward possibilities which are peculiar to it,
becomes at the same time the most immediate possible of the
For-itself. Desire is not only desire of the Other’s body; it is—
within the unity of a single act—the non-thetically lived project
of being swallowed up in the body. Thus the final state of sexual
desire can be swooning. (Sartre 1989, 389)
Insofar as Sartre is anti-sex, this rests on assuming that the body is inherently
passive and the locus of submission, and that freedom is won only if I avoid
Erotic Generosity and Its Limits 83
the other’s touch so that my own body stays in the background as that
which consciousness transcends.
This fear of one’s own body and the proximity of the other’s body is
doubled by Sartre’s privileging of love over desire. Love belongs to a second
mode of response to one’s alienation in the other’s look. While desire seeks
to protect the self by negating the other’s freedom, love accepts the other’s
freedom but attempts to take it over (Sartre 1989, 364). In love, therefore,
I do not objectify the other but turn myself into an object for the other’s
fascination. Not a fleshy object that would absorb the other’s body but a
center of freedom that would absorb the other’s subjectivity in tact. So, as
the other’s object, I must be freely chosen: as it is the other’s freedom I am
after, this must be preserved (367). And while I am the other’s object, I am
not just any object among others. I demand to be the privileged occasion
of the other’s love, that toward which all the other’s transcending, meaning-
giving activity is ultimately directed (367–68).
While love fails to assimilate the other in this way, for reasons that I
do not have the space to pursue, it does not necessarily fail to preserve
freedom per se, if the other, in discovering the freedom inherent in my
demand to be loved, demands to be loved by me in return (Sartre 1989,
374). In this mutual demand to be loved, each gives himself or herself to the
other (and hence alienates his or her freedom), but only in order to found
the other’s existence (376). Hence, the meaning-giving activity, the freedom
and the otherness of each, is preserved. This, for Sartre, is the basis of the
joy of love (371): one’s own existence is given meaning and value by the
other, while his or her otherness and mine are spared. However, indicative
of Sartre’s anti-body logic, this mutual love of two subjectivities is only
possible if the other, in demanding to be loved in return, presents herself or
himself as a subject rather than a body-object (374–75). As there must be
nothing in the demand to be loved that invites possession, the body (which
by definition invites possession as flesh) must not become an explicit theme.
Sartre privileges a kind of disembodied love, because, while just as in desire
both subjects fail to become their own foundation, in love “at least each one
has succeeded in escaping the danger of the Other’s freedom” by experienc-
ing the other in their subjectivity (376).
With Sartre’s ontology, we would seem to have all of the ingredients
for a radical feminism and its ideal of safety in erotic relations. We have
condemnation of both domination and submission in relations with others,
84 Corporeal Generosity
a distaste for the sexual encounter, insofar as this implies passivity, possession
and a loss of freedom, and a valorization of love as a reciprocal relation in
which freedom is preserved. But all of this is at the cost of appreciating the
subtleties and complexities of our erotic life and of our relations with others
in general. Sartre (and one suspects, radical feminism) begins from the prob-
lematic assumption that relations with others are based on objectification
and that, through our objectification of others and ourselves, either the body
reigns as flesh, in which case domination or submission follows, or con-
sciousness puts its body and that of others at a distance, and freedoms are
preserved. But this love, and its freedom, is fraudulent, however egalitarian
it may appear. And not just because it is based on a dubious individualism
and mind/body dualism but because, to the extent that Sartre’s model of
sexual desire can be considered misogynist, insofar as he associates the pas-
sivity of flesh with the female body and women’s sexuality, his model of love
is also misogynist. Any egalitarian project based on accepting the tradition
that associates the body with passivity, submission, and femininity and that
seeks to distance itself from this body and its associations entrenches rather
than challenges those assumptions. And, as Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of
love suggests, an ideal of love that follows this logic in the interests of
promoting women’s freedom does not even succeed in its aim of protecting
women from domination.
While never confronting Sartre directly and while not without con-
tradiction, Beauvoir challenges the individualism of his ontology, its anti-
body logic, and the ideal of protection that it implies. First, however, her
most obvious departure from Sartre’s existentialism, as others have elaborated
on in detail, is the way in which she adds consideration of women’s social
and economic situation to her analyses of relations between the sexes. And
this is no less true of her accounts of love and desire. But in contrast to a
radical feminist position that includes the same considerations, it turns out
that, for Beauvoir, love, far from being a woman’s answer to her problems,
may in fact be her undoing.
In The Second Sex (1972), Beauvoir suggests that to the extent that
women do not enjoy the same social and economic freedoms as men or, put
in ontological terms, because Man is the Subject and Woman the Other
(Beauvoir 1972, 16), women’s subjectivity or freedom is socially frustrated
or forbidden (641). If denied the possibility of self-realization in projects
directed toward a world, a woman may seek this in love, either through
narcissism, where her subjectivity is directed toward herself, the one self who
Erotic Generosity and Its Limits 85
will not deny it (641), or through a man, whose subjectivity already finds
expression in the world. Hence, says Beauvoir, under conditions of social and
economic inequality, and insofar as love is about preserving freedom in the
wake of the other’s look, women and men approach love differently (652–
53). Man demands to be loved in order to take possession of a woman, and
in this he gives up nothing for her. But a woman, who thinks she has little
freedom to relinquish, will give herself entirely to him in the faith that he
will, through his projects, his freedom, justify her existence. This is a tyran-
nical gift where the woman abandons herself to bodily immanence (or flesh,
in Sartre’s terms) and the stagnation that this implies and demands of her
lover in return that he save her through his power and freedom (666–68).
Women’s love, under such conditions, is a sacrificial generosity born of
desperation, and the resulting love relation merely compounds the inequality
from which it springs.
I can find two paths out of this destructive generosity in Beauvoir’s
work. The first is the obvious one, consistent with radical feminism and with
Sartre’s account of love, although borrowing something from Hegel’s ontol-
ogy. She posits a “genuine love” based on mutual recognition of two free-
doms, where the existence of both is justified through giving the self to the
other while remaining transcendent (Beauvoir 1972, 677). But, she adds, if
this genuine love is to be realized between men and women, it would
require women’s economic independence (678) and that men learn to give
of themselves. While adding these considerations to Sartre’s ideal of love is
important for casting suspicion on the egalitarian aspirations of his account,
Beauvoir’s is no less empty and no less idealistic. “Genuine love” would be
the profit at the end of what seems to be an endless struggle. Not only is
love not part of the struggle but, as Beauvoir herself admits in her discussion
of the independent woman, it is not necessarily won in the end (695–99).
Nor is it clear how one would distinguish between what is genuine and
what is bad faith in love—bad faith being where a woman deludes herself
into taking for love what is in fact a man’s desire (669). Finally, taken by itself
and grounded as it is in the ideal of transcending bodily immanence, Beauvoir’s
genuine love is based on the same kind of anti-body logic and distancing
from the other as Sartre’s, and so it comes with all of the difficulties that that
involves.
There is, however, a second and more interesting path out of woman’s
overly generous love woven through Beauvoir’s analysis. Against the sacrifi-
cial generosity born of women’s social subordination and against the ideal
86 Corporeal Generosity
of authentic love, she proposes a generosity born of flesh. What Beauvoir
consistently objects to about ideals of love (including Sartre’s, one presumes,
and perhaps even her own) is the way they separate consciousness from flesh
and seek to protect the self from the other. Love at a distance is a fantasy,
she says, and it becomes passionate only when carnally realized (Beauvoir
1972, 654). And the problem with man’s approach to desire is that in his
effort to maintain self-control, he asks woman to make an object of herself
while he hesitates to become flesh (413, 423). Woman, on the other hand,
being more often positioned as the body-object as a consequence of man
assuming his autonomous subject position at her expense, is more sensitive
to the fraudulence of separating subject and object, consciousness and body,
spirit and flesh (697). Women, therefore, have less trouble becoming flesh (or
women are more “psychosomatic,” as Beauvoir sometimes puts it).
While it is questionable whether one can confidently distinguish be-
tween men and women on these grounds, at least in any essential sense, it
is reasonable to suggest that insofar as ideals of love (such as Sartre’s) deny
the body and that of the other, this is a denial without ontological foun-
dation. On the basis of the impossibility of denying the body, Beauvoir
moves to a more general formula for the possibility of erotic generosity. By
a mutual generosity of body and soul, I can become flesh through the other’s
body and achieve a dynamic, ecstatic unity where I move beyond myself
without negating the other’s alterity (Beauvoir 1972, 422). By flesh, Beauvoir
cannot mean the corpse-like flesh that Sartre distinguishes from the body in
situation. She does not seem to hold to this distinction. Becoming flesh does
not abolish the situation, nor therefore the social, as it does for Sartre.
Rather, it creates the situation by, as Beauvoir puts it, abolishing the singu-
larity of the moment, of oneself and the other (417).6 For Beauvoir, the
erotic encounter, and its “freedom,” is not about self-control or body integ-
rity. On the contrary, it is about the “body at risk,” as Debra Bergoffen puts
it (1997, 158). The body at risk is a generous body, a body that is opened
to the other. And this erotic generosity is creative in transforming the other’s
embodied situation, and hence existence, through a self-metamorphosis that,
if we set aside Beauvoir’s motif of unity, does not reduce the other to the
self. Becoming flesh is a project directed toward and beyond the other, a
giving without calculation that nevertheless gets something in return through
the future possibilities it opens.
In finding something generous in the erotic encounter, Beauvoir is
gesturing toward an ontology that, while intertwined with Sartre’s, chal-
Erotic Generosity and Its Limits 87
lenges his individualism and anti-body logic. She puts this ontology most
succinctly as follows:
The erotic experience is one that most poignantly discloses to
human beings the ambiguity of their condition; in that they are
aware of themselves as flesh and as spirit, as other and as subject.
(Beauvoir 1972, 423)
While Sartre insists, with little justification, that in my concrete relations
with others I am either flesh, without any possibilities at all, or transcendent
consciousness that leaves its old body behind, Beauvoir, at least here, ques-
tions this distinction. And because, for Sartre, relations with others are based
on objectification, I am only aware of being either an independent subject
or a dependent object. While, strictly speaking, I am always both subject and
object, Sartre’s descriptions of concrete relations suggests that, for him, I
cannot live both at the same time nor can I stand for a threat to my
independent subjectivity. Beauvoir on the other hand, from her discussion
of freedom in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1994), suggest that the posture of
independent subjectivity is not only a pretense lived at the expense of others
upon whom I in reality depend, but also it is a perversion of freedom
(Beauvoir 1994, 63).7 For Beauvoir, I am for-myself as a consequence of
being-for-others, rather than the converse. Hence, the freedom of self-
realization through projects depends on the freedom of others and so must
be directed toward that end (60, 70–72). Therefore, a generous passion does
not belong to one who seeks to protect her subject position, nor can it be
directed toward one who claims absolute independence (66–67). Generosity
belongs to those who would be opened to others without viewing the
other’s alterity, hence their capacity to transform one’s own existence, as
necessarily having “hostile implications” (Beauvoir 1972, 422).
On the basis of the ambiguity of our condition, rather than some as
yet unrealized egalitarian ideal, Beauvoir also questions the assumption that
one is either simply dominant or submissive in an erotic encounter and,
therefore, that one can separate “positive” from “negative” feelings in a way
that Jeffreys would like. In her discussion of masochism and its equation
with femininity, Beauvoir suggests that attributing erotic value to pain does
not necessarily imply submission or a masochistic acceptance of absolute
alienation and servitude (Beauvoir 1972, 418–20). Nor is inflicting pain
exclusively masculine or a sadistic attempt to destroy the other by possessing
88 Corporeal Generosity
the other as inert flesh. Rather, she argues, pain always accompanies “bodies
that delight to be bodies for the joy they give each other” (418). This is the
pain of transfiguration inherent to the generous erotic encounter: the pain
of tearing away from self, as Beauvoir puts it; the pain of moving beyond
oneself through the other and the “bending” (rather than destruction) of the
other that this movement involves. Sex is not safe. Not, as Sartre would have
it, because sex necessitates the subordination of the self to the other, and not
because it shuts down possibilities in the passivity of flesh. On the contrary,
sex is not safe precisely insofar as it opens the self to indeterminate possi-
bilities through exploiting the ambiguity of being a body-for-itself-for-
others.
None of this abandons consideration of women’s social and economic
subordination to men. Beauvoir is aware, for example, that insofar as our
social situation promotes man as the subject and woman as other, a woman
is in danger of feeling herself positioned as object in an erotic encounter
with a man, at the expense of her subjectivity (Beauvoir 1972, 423). How-
ever, “passivity is an equivocal concept” and, provided that the relation is
consensual (understood in terms discussed in chapter 2), a woman always has
the power of retaining the ambiguity of being both subject and object,
however submissive she may appear to the outsider (419). Beauvoir’s second
important qualification about the social objectification of women is the
suggestion that “the very difficulty of [the woman’s socially subordinate]
position protects her from the traps into which the male readily falls; he is
an easy dupe of the deceptive privileges accorded him by his aggressive role”
(423). That is, because a woman, as a consequence of the social situation, is
only too aware that she is for-herself only by being for-others then she is
less likely to be deceived into assuming absolute independence from others.
Such absolute independence is a posture that denies the ambiguity and
therefore the generosity of existence, and in doing so it not only denies the
other’s possibilities but also cuts off one’s own. Beauvoir thinks that just as
it would be a mistake for women to affirm images of absolute subordination,
so it would be an error to aspire toward this deceptive autonomy. While
becoming flesh through the other’s body may be unsafe for the possibilities
of moving beyond oneself that it opens, feigning independence, whether
through a fantastic love or through self-control and body integrity in sex,
would be counter-productive for the possibilities that it closes off.
In presenting the possibility of erotic generosity in this way, I have
skirted around the contradictions and difficulties present in Beauvoir’s account.
Erotic Generosity and Its Limits 89
Hers is plagued by an ambivalence toward the body, particularly women’s
bodies, that, as I have indicated, is present in her idea of “genuine love” and
that, as others have argued, pervades her whole philosophy.8 However, to the
extent that she does point to a generosity of flesh, this indicates an ontology
that departs from Sartre’s individualism and from a Hegelian ideal of unity
and that moves beyond the anti-body logic of both.9 Insofar as she has a
different understanding of alienation and of the role of the body in sexuality
and other relations, Beauvoir does not so much betray a debt to Lacanian
psychoanalysis, as Toril Moi argues, but has some common ground with
Merleau-Ponty.10 While her generosity toward Sartre seems to have no bounds,
in suggesting as she does that everything she says is already in his work, her
generosity toward Merleau-Ponty is of the less sacrificial kind. Both lend to
and borrow from the work of the other in raising the possibility of a
generosity of flesh.
For Merleau-Ponty, this lending to and borrowing from the bodies of
others is a generosity lying not just at the core of the erotic encounter but
at the heart of existence itself (Merleau-Ponty 1962).11 Merleau-Ponty shares
Sartre’s idea that we encounter others as a lived body in situation for-itself-
for-others.12 But, contrary to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, for reasons discussed in
chapter 3, holds that we do not exist as a singular body that has its world
by the objectifying activities of a transcendent consciousness. I am not a
singular body, because I am for-myself by being first of all with and for other
lived bodies. And rather than consciously transcending my body by objec-
tifying the other, the relation between these bodies is one of prereflective
intertwining of body schemas. It is in this intertwining of flesh that Merleau-
Ponty finds the kind of ambiguity of existence upon which I think Beauvoir’s
erotic generosity relies.13
The other is my mirror in the sense that it is through the other’s body
that I am aware of my difference: through the tilt of the other’s head, the
touch of the other’s hand, the look in the other’s eye. But the same mirror
confuses my body and the other’s: by mimesis and transitivism I tilt my head,
touch my hand, and look at myself and cannot easily tell the difference
between what I live and what the other lives (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 145–
48). So, for Merleau-Ponty, I live my body outside of myself through the
mirror space of the other’s body. But in contrast to Beauvoir’s ideal of unity
with the other and without resorting to Sartre’s individualism, Merleau-
Ponty holds that, in this intertwining, neither body is reducible to the other.
“There is thus a system (my visual body [as it appears to others], my
90 Corporeal Generosity
introceptive body [as I live it], the other [as I perceive them]), which estab-
lishes itself in the child, never so completely as in the animal but imperfectly,
with gaps” (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 135). “Syncretic sociability” is what
Merleau-Ponty calls this system of intercorporeal subjectivity “with gaps”
(141).14 It is by this ambiguity of intercorporeality, where alterity is main-
tained and existence is transformed through “syncretic sociability,” that I
affect and am affected by others, that I engage in projects and am open to
possibilities (118). It is also on the basis of this ambiguity of intercorporeality,
where my carnal existence is given to and through the other’s body, that we
fall in love and that existence is given its erotic dimension.
Merleau-Ponty, therefore, unlike Sartre and perhaps Beauvoir, does not
think love or sexual desire is any different in structure to personal existence
in general (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 169). The kind of indeterminate self-trans-
formation through the other’s body that Beauvoir seems to reserve for
becoming flesh in the erotic encounter is, for Merleau-Ponty, common to
all projects.15 I cannot exist otherwise than by risking my body integrity in
an ambiguous situation, and freedom is nothing more or less than this
(Merleau-Ponty 1962, 439–40, 455–56). The pleasure and pain of both love
and the sexual encounter lie in the way that this risk becomes explicit.
While sex may involve being more absorbed in the experience of one’s body
than in other projects, this does not imply a state of objectness that severs
ties with the world, the other, or future possibilities.16 On the contrary, the
corporeal self is opened to a different future through love and sex because
of the ambiguity of being both subject and object, autonomous and depen-
dent simultaneously in relation to the other. Or, as Merleau-Ponty puts it,
both love and the sexual experience play such an important role in human
life, because they provide an “opportunity, vouchsafed to all and always
available,” to acquaint oneself with the ambiguity of existence (1962, 167).
Hence, neither love or the sexual encounter poses a necessary threat to one’s
freedom to constitute existence, and the generosity of both rests on main-
taining the ambiguity of being caught within and opened to the body of
the other without the aim or achievement of unity, entrapment, or self-
possession.17 As intercorporeal generosity maintains alterity and ambiguity in
the possibilities it opens, it is not based on an ideal of mutual exchange
between equals. There is a reciprocity of giving, but not reciprocity in the
content of what is given, and generosity is only possible if neither sameness
or unity is assumed as either the basis or the goal of an encounter with
Erotic Generosity and Its Limits 91
another. In sum, conceiving of erotic generosity requires abandoning the
anti-body logic, the individualism, and the ideal of mutual exchange be-
tween equals (if this implies either unity or sameness) that ground safe-sex
discourse.
While erotic generosity can transform existence, I am not suggesting
that it can liberate us from ourselves or from social representations of sexual
difference and sexuality. Nor am I denying that sex can be violent or a
violation of being. Taken by itself, Merleau-Ponty’s description of “The
Body in Its Sexual Being” does not take into consideration feminist con-
cerns about nonconsensual sex or the effects of the social objectification of
women on the sexual encounter. Taken by itself, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion
of sexuality could be viewed as reproducing rather than accounting for the
relation between the socially based differential treatment of the sexes and the
body in its sexual being.18 However, elsewhere, Merleau-Ponty, in his ac-
count of the social genesis of the body subject, does find fault with the way
the ambiguity, and hence the generosity, of intercorporeal existence is re-
duced through the social representation of sexual difference: through the
treatment of women as absolutely Other in relation to men (an idea he
attributes to Beauvoir), or through the assumption that all individuals are the
same (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 103–06). Such “psychological rigidity” is a
kind of parsimony that closes off the other’s possibilities in direct proportion
to the reduction of ambiguity involved. Through this suggestion, combined
with Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre’s model of freedom, it is possible to
begin to account for the effects of sociality on sexuality, for why the sexual
encounter may transform but not liberate existence and for the circum-
stances under which sex would be a violation of being.
As discussed in chapter 3, for Merleau-Ponty, the corporeal self is
constituted in relation to others who are already social beings (Merleau-
Ponty 1964a, 141-55), and the kind of body conducts we develop undergo
a process of “sedimentation” (1962, 441). Hence, each of us develops a
habitual way of patterning existence, including its erotic dimension, and the
character of this patterning depends on the social and institutional setting in
which our embodiment, and hence our world, is constituted. Insofar as
sexual difference is a body performance and to the extent that women are
socially objectified more than men, this will be reflected in differences in
body comportment and sexuality.19 But given that, in the constitution of the
body-subject, alterity is maintained in the synchronic relation to the other,
92 Corporeal Generosity
women’s erotic styles will be multifarious despite any apparent patterns in
comportment along the lines of sexual difference. And even though women
may be sexually objectified more than men, this does not necessarily destine
women to sexual passivity or submissiveness. The most we can conclude
about the relation between social representations of sexual difference and
personal erotic existence is that while freedom is the indeterminate self-
transformation through a generous relation to the world of the other’s body,
because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world, my
freedom to be open to a particular project, including a particular sexual
encounter, is limited by my social history and, in the wake of this, my bodily
tolerance to the present situation (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 455–56). This his-
tory is what I am in the process of what I become as I plunge into the
present.
While I will take up the issue of the relation between social norms
and affectivity in more detail in the next chapter, there are at least two
provisional points to be made from this account of the relation between
sociality and sexuality. The first is that, contrary to what I have called new
liberation discourses, sex does not liberate existence. While any particular
situation we find ourselves in is ambiguous and open, it will tend to call up
“specially favored modes of resolution” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 441–42). We
cannot escape what we have been altogether because, for Merleau-Ponty at
least, we never leave our old body behind. Second, a sexual encounter can
involve a violation of being if it overruns the field of the other’s freedom.
Sex is never safe if safety means securing one’s body integrity. But then nor
is any project involving a generosity of flesh, that carnal giving and trans-
formation of oneself through the other’s flesh that lie at the foundation of
human existence. Yet to the extent that sex can be a violation of being does
not rest on the degree of domination or submission involved. As Beauvoir’s
discussion of erotic generosity suggests, these are equivocal concepts in
consensual erotic relations. Nor does violation rest on the ratio of becoming
flesh implied. If this were the case, we would, on the basis of Merleau-
Ponty’s ontology, violate the other and ourselves in every encounter. Rather,
whether, how, and with whom we are generous depends on the tolerance
that our carnal style has to the situation and to the body we encounter
(454). What you can tolerate, what you find erotic, the field of your freedom,
is stamped with the social history of your existence, and this may not be to
another’s taste. This history is an indeterminate field that is all too easily
Erotic Generosity and Its Limits 93
overlooked by a parsimonious stranger. Yet it marks what you are, and if
another disregards it, he or she violates your being. That the violator may
not notice or may even deny his or her appropriation of the other is a
function of what Beauvoir would call “the deceptive privileges” accorded to
him or her by his or her posture of independence, a function of what
Merleau-Ponty would call “psychological” and corporeal rigidity. This privi-
lege and rigidity foster a parsimonious relation to the world that denies the
ambiguity of existence in treating the other as being there for the taking in
one’s own terms.
Granting limits to erotic generosity in this way effectively extends the
concepts of violation and nonconsent beyond domination and submission in
sex and particularizes the same concepts in terms of the specificity of a
person’s social, intercorporeal history. This is a necessary move, and not just
because “domination” and “submission” can be consensual and hence with-
out violation. Conversely, it also helps account for why a person can feel
violated to the core of his or her being (through verbal abuse or physical
intimidation, for example) in situations where to others he or she may
appear open to anything at all and hence in situations that an outside
observer may not consider sexual or serious.
By questioning the anti-body logic and individualism of safe-sex dis-
course, it is possible to resurrect the sexual encounter from its negative
philosophical associations without resorting to the rhetoric of liberation or
ignoring the problem of sexual violence. While saying yes to sex does not
liberate one’s existence, the discourse of safe-sex, as I have outlined through
radical feminism and Sartre’s existentialism, is inherently conservative. For
just as violation amounts to reducing the ambiguity and generosity of ex-
istence and hence the other’s possibilities, so does an ideal of absolute
independence, mutual exchange, self-control, and body integrity.
Five
Affectivity and Social Power:
From Melancholia
to Generosity
WE MAY WELL REJECT the old idea of the body as a mechanism that
weighs us down and with it the idea of a natural affectivity that is brought
under the domain of the social through the taming force of reason. But in
the wake of this rejection, the question of the relation between affectivity
and social power remains an issue. In chapter 4, I proposed, through Merleau-
Ponty’s early work, that in the mode of erotic sensibility, affectivity arises
through the ambiguity and generosity of intercorporeality, a generosity that
transforms existence. I also briefly considered how social norms may con-
dition the limits of erotic generosity. Here the aim is to take this consider-
ation farther with reference also to Merleau-Ponty’s later work on perception
and by opening up the consideration of the affective dimension of corporeal
generosity beyond what we usually take to be erotic or sexual. The question
that remains to be addressed is this: If, as I have suggested, the corporeal
generosity that constitutes and transforms personal identity and difference is
not only nonvolitional but also affective, how can the affectivity of
intercorporeality be both conditioned by but thwart the social norms and
prohibitions that subject us and devalue difference? Is this affectivity social
or antisocial, or something in between? This anger that arises from a dark
95
96 Corporeal Generosity
glance of the eye; this sadness that moves me at the center of a joke; this
joy that overwhelms me with the smell of the mundane; this wanting that
holds me to the sound of a voice; this affectivity where I am given to the
field of the other.
If this affectivity were constant and predictable, we might be satisfied
with Foucault’s thesis that social power works through me, disciplining and
shaping carnal existence so that what I feel is an effect of normative mecha-
nisms that regulate all of our lives (Foucault 1979). Or, if this affectivity
would only settle on objects at a distance, we could accept Freud’s idea that
affectivity is the displacement of cathectic energy from a repressed idea to
an external example, a thwarting of the reality principle that has instituted
the unconscious and so my alienation from the world. But in both models,
while granting the body is a social product, affectivity is explained in indi-
vidualistic terms: as a second order vehicle of the workings of social power
that sets the individual in place (in the case of Foucault), or as the adversary
to that process (in the case of Freud). In both models, affectivity extends
across the border that already separates us from our objects to either main-
tain that border in a socially recognizable and calculable manner (in the case
of Foucault) or to partially dissolve it through a slight of hand (in the case
of Freud).
With Foucault and Freud, we can explain how affectivity, as a product
of social power, haunts the way we think and act without us even noticing,
and with Freud, and to a lesser extent Foucault, we can account for those
affective moments when we seem to lose ourselves completely. But it seems
to me that I am hardly ever together enough in the first place to bring off
Foucault’s docility, the not noticing that is the product of a power that
individualizes as it regulates. And I am hardly ever together enough to run
Freud’s object-cathexis, the dissolving of borders that would reduce me to
a melting moment. I could be the exception, but I doubt it. I am patho-
logically punctual, as Foucault might have it, but in a way that sometimes
annoys me; I can go weak at the knees, in Freudian terms, but still grasp at
something to stop myself from falling. For the most part, affectivity seems
to emerge in ambiguous situation, social but casual, neither as a vehicle of
nor a challenge to my individuality, but in strokes, as a corporeality brushes
with a world that it is neither a seamless product of, nor a stranger to.
At issue here, in the relation between affectivity and sociality, is the
extent to which social power, whether through stimulation or repression,
Affectivity and Social Power 97
succeeds in individualizing the body so that affectivity would be understood
as either a product of that process or its undoing. Judith Butler takes up this
issue in The Psychic Life of Power (1997) and, through compelling re-readings
of Hegel, Nietzsche, Althusser, Freud, and Foucault, she settles for both. Of
particular relevance here is the way she combines Foucault’s model of power
with Freud’s model of repression to account for the formation of individual
agents whose desire is at the same time the product of normative mecha-
nisms and the agent of their undoing. While refuting individualism in the
end, Butler does allow it to take hold of her account of psyche formation.
To this extent and insofar as individual sexuality becomes her focus as the
exemplary product and vehicle of power, she misses too much, I will argue,
about the dynamics of affective and social life. While Merleau-Ponty does
not elaborate on an explicit theory of power in relation to affectivity, his
account of body motility and perception in Phenomenology of Perception (1962)
(and his later idea of flesh) does challenge the individuality apparent in these
other approaches.1 For that reason I find that he has something to give an
account of the relation between affectivity and social power, and so he has
something to offer a politically sensitive account of the generosity of
intercorporeal existence.
The sketch I offer begins with the body in its sexual being, not because
either Merleau-Ponty or I think that sexuality should hold the monopoly in
a theory of affectivity, but because Freud and Foucault do. And so, it would
seem, does Judith Butler.
At the heart of her story of psyche formation, in the chapter entitled
“Melancholy Gender/ Refused Identification,” Butler adapts Freud’s concept of
melancholia for an account of social reproduction where loss at an individual
level can be said to result in the formation of “melancholic” sexualities and
identities and in the reproduction of “melancholic” social structures. In “Mourning
and Melancholia,” Freud describes melancholia as a psychic formation, charac-
terized by dejection, self-loathing, and disinterest, that arises as a result of dis-
avowing, and therefore failing to mourn, the loss of either a loved person or an
ideal (Freud 1957). In later qualifications (through “The Ego and the Id”), where
he recognizes the ego as a bodily ego, Freud broadens the application of mel-
ancholia to ego formation in general by suggesting that the lost object is
incorporated as part of the ego, “object-cathexis is replaced by an identification,”
and by noting how “typical this process is” (Freud 1961, 28). Butler takes up
these thoughts and suggests that renouncing or losing a sexual or love object
98 Corporeal Generosity
“becomes possible only on the condition of a melancholic . . . incorporation,”
so that “the lost object continues to haunt and inhabit the ego as one of its
constitutive identifications,” and attachment to the object is retained in the form
of love and aggression directed against oneself (Butler 1997, 134).
Butler is less interested in the constitutive effects of love relations gone
wrong than she is in the operation of social power in structuring individual
identity and agency. Hence, the losses she attends to are not so much those
objects we have had but those possibilities foreclosed by social prohibitions
and conventions. The loss of this kind that she thinks governs our contem-
porary culture is not incestual, as Freud would have it, but the possibility of
homosexual attachment. While retaining her earlier idea that gender identity
is a body performance subject to disruption through reiteration (Butler
1990), which I have discussed in some detail in chapter 3, Butler adds
consideration of how the disavowal and repudiation at the heart of melan-
cholia organize this performance (Butler 1997, 145). She argues that, as a
result of social prohibitions, heterosexual gender identities (and homosexual
identities, for that matter)2 are melancholic constructions.
[A] masculine gender is formed from the refusal to grieve the
masculine as a possibility of love; a feminine gender is formed
(taken on, assumed) through the incorporative fantasy by which
the feminine is excluded as a possible object of love, an exclu-
sion never grieved, but preserved through heightened feminine
identification. (Butler 1997, 146)
Heterosexual gender identities, in short, “form themselves through renounc-
ing the possibility of homosexuality, a foreclosure which produces both a field
of heterosexual objects and a domain of those whom it would be impossible
to love” (Butler 1997, 146). The social prohibition of homosexuality “prompts
a melancholic identification,” so that homosexuality is preserved as it is
renounced (142) through the “internalization of the ungrieved and ungrievable
homosexual cathexis” (139). This renunciation, then, this disavowed repudia-
tion, becomes the vehicle of desire, “becomes the aim and vehicle of satis-
faction” (143), and structures agency in the form of “moral reflexivity,”
self-beratement, and guilt (182).
That melancholia, characterized by an internalized object-cathexis in
the form of a self-berating psyche, could explain the features of a socially
Affectivity and Social Power 99
constituted sexual identity has already been foreshadowed by Butler earlier
in her book. By adapting Foucault’s model of the relation between power
and the body, Butler offers the thesis that subjection to power involves the
internalization of social norms; this process of internalization forms the
psyche (“fabricates the distinction between interior and exterior life”), and this
formation is equivalent to the emergence of reflexivity, the capacity to take
the self as an object, which opposes and transforms the desire, power, and
norms that constitute it (Butler 1997, 19, 22). To this she adds Freud’s model
of repression with the qualification that the agent that emerges from sub-
jection, to social prohibitions on sexual aims and objects, finds satisfaction
in the renunciation of tendencies that had previously brought libidinal grati-
fication, so that “libido is not absolutely negated through repression, but
rather becomes the instrument of its own subjection” (79). It is with this
Foucauldian take on Freud, that melancholia (where reflexivity takes the
form of self-beratement and therefore self-regulation) becomes exemplary,
for Butler, of identity formation in general. And with a Freudian take on
Foucault, social prohibitions on sexuality become the exemplary vehicles, for
Butler, of the operation of social power, and sexual identity becomes its most
notable product.
While retaining the basis of Freud’s model of melancholia as an object-
cathexis internalized through ambivalent identification and repudiation, Butler
departs from Freud’s claim that melancholia consists of a disinterested with-
drawal from the social realm (Butler 1997, 167, 180). On the contrary, for
Butler, melancholia consists of the institution and maintenance of the social
at the expense of psychic life: the power that subjects the individual through
normative conventions is transformed into the power of agency in the form
of renunciation (143); power stimulates as it prohibits; state power in the
form of prohibitions and conventions is rendered “invisible—and effective—
as the ideality of conscience” (191). Social conventions, however, are not
reproduced exactly in this process. Butler applies her idea, developed in
Gender Trouble, that identity is disrupted through its reiteration, to her analysis
of power in The Psychic Life of Power (1997, 12–13, 93, 145–47). Just as
identity undergoes a change in signification through a change in context (a
“perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an
openness to resignification and recontextualization” (Butler 1990, 138)), so
does the power that constitutes identity. Understood in terms of the unstable
structure of reiteration, the power that constitutes the subject is transformed
100 Corporeal Generosity
when “taken up and reiterated in the subject’s ‘own’ acting” (Butler 1997,
12–14). Still, despite this potential for disruption and transformation, the
subject would seem to become attached to the conventions by which she
or he is subjected insofar as psyche formation is melancholic.3 The impact
of the foreclosure of love and sexual objects on personal identity formation
in turn reproduces a culture of “heterosexual melancholy” where hetero-
sexuality, homophobia, and sexism spill out from agents driven by guilt and
self-beratement. Melancholia, as an effect and vehicle of power, characterized
by the disavowal of unlived and ungrieved possibilities for love and sexual
desire, governs our affective life without us even noticing.
Without denying that losing an attachment one has lived through will
impact on the conduct of one’s life, Merleau-Ponty would want to ask how
possibilities that remain in effect unlived could have consequences of such
determinate and tragic proportions. And before this he would ask how
object-cathexis could explain what it already assumes: the formation of an
individual with objects, ideal or real, possible or actual, external or internal,
that it can cathect. While not directly addressing the first question, Butler
does attend to the second by suggesting that the turning away from the
object that initiates melancholia “produces the divide between ego and
object, the internal and external worlds that it appears to presume” (Butler
1997, 170). Still, what is produced is an individual: an interiority with exter-
nal and internal objects and traces of objects (including an ego of lost
possibilities), that are identified with and cathected (173–75). For Merleau-
Ponty, on the other hand, it is because the body is not closed in on itself and
alienated from the stuff of the world that life has its affective dimension. And
the perception that characterizes this corporeal dehiscence of Being, which
is always affective (and sometimes erotic), does not take the form of objec-
tification (neither as object-cathexis or its sublimated forms). Only a body
not caught in its world would have objects to consider, identify with, inter-
nalize, and renounce, but then such objectification by a personal (“autono-
mous”) self would involve a retrospective withdrawal from the interworld of
perception that is its condition (1962, 352–54). And for this body that
attends to objects, the affective and erotic structure of perception would
have been reduced (156).4
Butler does concede, by occasional qualification, that “phenomeno-
logically there are many ways of experiencing gender and sexuality that do
not reduce to” the rigid melancholic structure she proposes (Butler 1997,
Affectivity and Social Power 101
136). She suggests, for example, through Leo Bersani, that perhaps “only the
decentred subject is available to desire” (149) and argues, toward the end of
The Psychic Life of Power, for a more open, intersubjective model of identity:
as melancholia produces interiority through the internalized cathexis of the
trace of the lost object, then the ego is always other than itself and its acts
exceed the bounds of its “autonomy” (195–97). However, she views this
excessive openness not as suggesting a model of the relation between affec-
tivity and sociality that would challenge her own (Freud’s and Foucault’s)
but as a solution to the rigidity of melancholic individualism that she claims
is already in place. Melancholic sexualities and the sociality that sustains
them can be undone, she suggests, by taking advantage of the tenuous and
excessive structure of the melancholic psyche: by avowing rather than dis-
avowing those lost possibilities; by acting out ambivalence instead of sustain-
ing oneself through identification with a particular kind of sexuality (which
would only serve to strengthen the structure of repudiation by reinforcing
the disavowed loss of other possibilities); and “by forfeiting that notion of
autonomy” in remembering the “trace” of the incorporated other in oneself
(150, 196).
This is a big ask for an individual if, as Butler argues, the individual
is formed, sustained, and affectively driven by that which it is asked to give
up. But what if giving up autonomy and identificatory cathexis was not a
solution to melancholy but a primordial condition of sensibility? What if this
giving is not so much an option open to an individual but a generosity that
marks the intersubjective and carnal basis of affective life? What if libido is
not a ball of energy with a definite aim and object that links the other to
me but, as suggested in chapter 4, the expression of a corporeality already
opened to a world? This is how Merleau-Ponty characterizes the body in
its sexual being and affectivity in general: the expressive operation of a body
that knows nothing of a division between self and world or between the
expression and what is expressed.5 For him, sexuality and existence are
“interfused” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 169), and experience is affective, because
perception and motility belong together in an intercorporeal world (1962,
157, 357); existence is endowed “with its degree of vitality” (157), because
“the visible world and the world of my motor projects are . . . parts of the
same Being” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 162).6 Sensibility (perception and affec-
tivity) does not forge a link between the body and its world and indeed
would not be possible if the body was not already caught in the fabric of
102 Corporeal Generosity
the sensible (163). Sensibility would not be possible if I were not already
given to the openness of being and if, therefore, there were not already a
trace of the other in me.
This trace of the other is not left by the incorporation of an object,
nor is the trace of the other something to be cathected in an attempt to
make up for its loss. Interiority, for Merleau-Ponty, is not characterized by
self-reflection, nor by an (unconscious) internalized object-cathexis. Interi-
ority, for Merleau-Ponty, is primordially carnal reflexivity, corporeal self-
awareness that emerges “through confusion” “between the seeing and the
seen, between touching and the touched, between one eye and the other,
between hand and hand” (163). In chapter 3 I discussed this intercorporeal
“confusion” in terms of the constitution of carnal identity and difference.
The point here is that this intercorporeal field is also the “space” of affec-
tivity and perception, of sensibility. I perceive and feel, because I am per-
ceived and felt by the world of the other, because I am given in my
corporeal difference to a common physical and social world of other beings
who see and touch me (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 360). It is in this interworld,
this “open circuit” established between the perceiving body and its world,
this mirror-space of ambiguity, generosity, and intertwining, that the spark
of sensibility, of perception, of affectivity is lit (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 163,
168).7 This body that I am moves, and the world takes a significant shape
as my project establishes an internal carnal echo of the corporeal presence
of things (164). So I feel and see in the space of the mirror that is the stuff
of the world “outside” my body as my carnality moves into it; but, at the
same time, my body is transformed as it assumes segments and gestures from
the world that I perceive (168). And this sensibility is done with style—
“perception stylizes” (Merleau-Ponty 1964c, 54). What I see and feel carries
a trace of prior intertwinings of my body and the world; as an effect of the
“sedimentation,” discussed in chapter 4, what I see and feel is an “emblem
of a way of inhabiting a world, of handling it, and of interpreting it by a
face as by clothing, by agility of gesture as by inertia of the body—in short,
the emblem of a certain relationship to being” (ibid.). The body thus ex-
presses existence through sensibility, not as a sign of an inner (repressed or
conscious) idea, or as copy of an outer (social) idea or thing. The body
expresses existence as it realizes it in the “undividedness of the sensing and
the sensed” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 166; 1964b, 163).
This intercorporeal basis of existence and the stylizing feature of per-
ception also account for any erotic aspect of sensibility. The “paradox of
Affectivity and Social Power 103
expression” is the “labor of desire” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 144).8 That an
experience is erotic is not, for Merleau-Ponty, a sign that libido has crossed
the border of the body to cathect an object, nor therefore is sexuality the
habitual external expression of an unconscious representation, of an uncon-
scious object-cathexis (1962, 168, 413). Rather, as I suggested in chapter 4,
a sexual experience arises from the ambiguous structure of the body in
situation that characterizes perception in general (167). And erotic percep-
tion colors the world in the same manner as perception in general: as it is
colored . . . with style . . . between the constituting and the constituted. So
if I notice, with pleasure, another’s “manner of being flesh” (as a total posture
or as hand touching skin), it is because it strikes my carnality as a variation,
as a resonating echo, of a manner I possess in my incarnate self-awareness
(Merleau-Ponty 1964c, 54). But if the other’s manner strikes me at all, it is
not as a duplication of the carnal style that I already live: there is always a
tension in my experience toward another, and “our situations cannot be
superimposed on each other” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 356).9 The affectivity
that arises as an internal carnal echo of another’s conduct may be realized
in familiar terms, but only because it is the impact of the other’s difference
that strikes me, moves me, inspires my carnality, and sets up a resonance in
my own corporeal style, so that it becomes impossible to distinguish be-
tween what sees and feels and what is seen and felt (Merleau-Ponty 1964b,
165, 167).10 Sexuality, and affectivity in general, is, like painting, an ampli-
fication of tensions, resonances, and metamorphoses that take place in the
generous, intercorporeal world of perception.
As for what makes a perception erotic as opposed to something more
banal, it is almost impossible to tell: “[T]here is interfusion between sexuality
and existence . . . so that it is impossible to determine, in a given decision
or action, the proportion of sexual to other motivations” (Merleau-Ponty
1962, 169). However, prohibitions on sexual conduct, aims, and objects,
along with other social conventions, do play a part in establishing the horizon
of what I see, do and feel. As discussed in chapter 4, because of the
intersubjective and ambiguous structure of existence my carnal style has a
history that consists of borrowing and transforming gestures from the bodies
of others who are already social beings. Hence, my perception is always
cultural, and its meaning is not constituted personally (consciously or indi-
vidually) by me (358). Social conventions and prohibitions, then, do effect
erotic style, but not in the form of abstract laws that capture the totality of
my being. Ideas do not present themselves as objects to be accepted or
104 Corporeal Generosity
rejected in singular determinate conscious acts or as possibilities to be re-
pudiated and repressed as incorporated unconscious representations (162,
362). The body’s relation to the social is inseparable from, and of the same
order as, its relation to the world, not a relation of objectification but of
carnal intertwining prior to any reflexive judgement. What I see, do and feel
is thoroughly saturated by social phenomena that transcend and inform my
carnal style but that “exist only to the extent that I take them up and live
them” (363). Based on Merleau-Ponty’s account, then, prohibitions on sexual
conduct come to me through incarnated fragments in situation; through gestures
that condemn by the curl of a lip or through words that shame by timbre and
tone. To the extent that, through sensibility, I make a habit of making these
gestures and their meanings my own, insofar as they impinge on my life
through the bodies of others, I will develop an erotic style that tends to follow
the expected in the distinctive way I pattern the world.
But there is nothing certain or predictable here. Every situation is
open, and meaning is indeterminate. Meaning is indeterminate for Merleau-
Ponty partly because, following Saussure, he claims meaning arises in the
interval between terms (1964c, 42), and partly because, by the same logic
and in a way I have outlined, existence is indeterminate or ambiguous in
its very structure (1962, 169)—meaning arises and is actualized ambiguously
“between” bodies. So a slap on the wrist may signal a prohibition to the
body that delivers it, but not to the body that receives and thereby lives it,
or it can mean something different to that same body in a different situation.
For a social prohibition of homosexuality, for example, to foreclose the
possibility of erotic perception of the conduct of someone of the same sex,
the prohibition would need to be enacted by other bodies consistently
across every possible relevant situation, and the meaning of the original and
subsequent gestures of condemnation would have to be taken up, by the
body to which they are directed, unambiguously and finally in the terms in
which they were intended. To claim the foreclosure of possibilities through
social prohibitions would require belief in an original moment of repression
precipitated by an unambiguous act of condemnation, or in the idea that the
meaning adhering to gestures is determinate and translatable between bodies
without loss, or in the assumption that all body styles are exactly the same.
But, for Merleau-Ponty, social conventions and prohibitions, while thor-
oughly informing personal existence, do not foreclose possibilities, because
“the meaning of an action does not exhaust itself in the situation that has
occasioned it” (1964c, 72), and because, even if I do turn away from a
Affectivity and Social Power 105
possibility as a result of condemnation, once the possibility has been raised,
I “do not cease to be situated relatively to it” (1962, 362).
That social meaning, including social norms and prohibitions, is incar-
nate, ambiguous, and indeterminate can explain the unpredictable and trans-
formative character of affectivity. It can explain, for example, why even the
most homophobic of us may find a gesture of a body of the same sex
pleasurable or even erotic that would be abhorrent in more familiar sur-
roundings. Or it can explain why a woman who has lived with a man for
twenty years may find one day, or every day during that time, that another
woman can turn her head. In both cases, carnal reflexivity is the locus of
the affect. But the meaning of that affective reflexivity is always ambiguous
and cannot be determined definitively, within the event, as either guilty or
guilt free or even sexual. Self-conscious reflexivity, what Butler calls con-
science, may, but not necessarily, follow the perception. If it does, then it is
a retrospective perception of the perception, and not the perception itself:
“Between the self that analyses perception and the self which perceives,
there is always a distance” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 43). That moment of con-
science may, but not necessarily, be moral, self-berating, and consumed with
guilt. If it is, this may, but not necessarily, be because of a history of encoun-
ters with bodies that would explicitly condemn the pleasurable or erotic
perception at issue. But such self-beratement is just as likely to arise through
reflection on current commitments to other bodies, and on one’s perception
of one’s own manner of being that the erotic perception may threaten. Even
then, even given the distance between the self that reflects (the moment of
conscience) and the self of the erotic perception reflected upon, “[R]eflection
never lifts itself out of any situation, nor does the analysis of perception do
away with the fact of perception. . . . Reflection is not absolutely transparent
to itself, it is always given to itself in an experience” (Merleau-Ponty 1962,
43).11 As an experience, the moment of conscience is, like the erotic per-
ception that it analyzes, informed by a carnal history and its meanings.
Hence, the moment of conscience is steeped in sensibility and is therefore
also open to a world and to the ambiguity that this implies. Sensibility can
and does take on a certain rigidity and defensive manner, as I will demon-
strate in the following chapter. But it is fundamentally open and transfor-
mative of the self, the other, and the social norms that inform it. And
sedimentation of style according to convention is not reducible to a guilty
conscience closed in on its lost possibilities, otherwise there would be no
affectivity, no living of possibilities, that one could feel guilty about.
106 Corporeal Generosity
None of this suggests that losing someone you have lived through will
not be lived as loss. For Merleau-Ponty, losing someone you love, someone
who has been part of the horizon of your affective world, whether through
rejection, prohibition, or death, would be like losing an arm.12 But in such
cases, the loss is not lived as an internalized object-cathexis. A memory, the
past, is not an object (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 364). If a loss impacts on my life,
what is lost adheres to my body as a trace that is present (162, 413). I live
that loss like I live my world, not as a self-sufficient individual in possession
of its objects but a carnal opening to being. As that loss is lived like a
phantom limb, it is lived as loss. And so, even as I live a loss, I never succeed
in cutting myself off from the possibilities opened though the generosity of
intersubjective life.
The sketch I have offered of the sociality of the body in its affective
being is consistent with what Butler suggests about the many ways of
experiencing sexuality and identity that do not admit to the melancholic
structure that she proposes. But accepting the sketch requires forfeiting the
model of the relation between affectivity and social power based on object-
cathexis and repression in favor of an account of existence that admits to
carnal intersubjectivity, ambiguity, and generosity, not as a solution to the
unpleasant effects of the workings of social power but as its very basis. This
not only helps account for the surprising, flexible, and transformative char-
acter of sensibility without recourse to a natural libido, but it also avoids one
problematic consequence of Butler’s account: that, even if the individual
could admit to his or her failure to recognize the disavowal of losses sup-
posedly structuring his or her erotic life, he or she would still be melan-
cholic and therefore deficient on the basis of social prohibitions (such as
thou shalt not kill), which are arguably worth keeping and more fundamen-
tal and dramatic than those against particular forms of sexuality.
Six
Sexuality and the
Clinical Encounter
I ARGUED IN chapter 5 that sensibility (affectivity and perception) takes
place in the intercorporeal world of bodies given to each other. This sensibility
is informed by social norms through their incarnation, but it is also transfor-
mative of those norms and of the modes of being that they infect. This analysis
suggests that normalization (and hence discrimination and prejudice) as well
as “resistance” are effected through sensibility and take place in concrete
relations “between” bodies, “below” the level of conscious intent, and in terms
beyond the explicit ideals of moral and legal discourses. In this chapter I both
elaborate and demonstrate this thesis through an analysis of a particular con-
crete encounter between bodies; an encounter with the body of a stranger in
an institutional setting—the clinical encounter.
The clinical encounter is a curious event. Through it our body and
our life, that which is most intimate and private, is given to a stranger. It
involves an offering that we would more usually reserve for a lover, a
mother, or a friend. And through this encounter, a corporeal itinerary that
is specific to us becomes generalized, subsumed under a medical discourse
known better for its promotion of a universal objective body than for its
sensitivity to different ways of being.1 Given the intimate content of the
event, it should not be surprising if the patient’s sexuality becomes an issue
107
108 Corporeal Generosity
in the encounter. And given the totalizing tendencies of medical discourse,
it should not be surprising that the occasion has arisen for critical exami-
nation of the relation between medical discourse and sexuality. Perhaps more
than any other single health problem in recent times, HIV-AIDS has pro-
vided such an occasion, generating charges of latent prejudices within medical
discourse against homosexuality in particular and calls for a more generous
and sensitive approach to management of sexuality in the clinic.
Notwithstanding the wealth of critical analysis of the relation between
medical discourse and sexuality, not just in the context of HIV-AIDS but
also from feminist and other perspectives, little attention has been given to
the operation of sexuality or affectivity in general in the clinical encounter
itself. It is toward such an account that this chapter is directed. Without
abandoning insights about how discourses of medical science constitute and
normalize sexuality, I will suggest that there are features of the clinical
encounter itself that contribute to the mismanagement of sexuality there.
Understanding the encounter in terms of the giving of one’s body to a
stranger, whose own body seems exempt from scrutiny of the clinical gaze
yet is an agent of normalization, may help explain parsimonious aspects of
the encounter and why better management of sexuality in the clinic is
difficult, despite the best intentions of those involved.
I take sexuality to mean the use (in the sense of both capacity and
practice) of pleasure and pain.2 As I argued in the previous two chapters,
sexuality is not the social expression of a more original biological instinct.
It is the way a person lives her or his pleasure and pain that presupposes a
social existence. Sexuality is not contained within a singular body; it is a
feature of sensibility lived through a body given to and open to a world of
the other. Yet while open to a world, sexuality, as argued in chapter 5, is not
reducible to object-cathexis nor therefore definable in terms of object choice
(as categories such as pedophile and heterosexual would suggest); nor is
sexuality reducible to a single active or passive aim (as categories such as
femme and sadist would imply). While sexuality is indeterminate, outstrip-
ping a singular body with a definite aim and object, it is also inseparable
from social discourses that would constitute and define it in those terms, as
the work of Michel Foucault, among others, suggests.
Foucault’s analysis of the deployment of sexuality, the elevation in the
nineteenth century of the study of sex to a level of a science, points to the
central role that medical science plays in the constitution and normalization
Sexuality and the Clinical Encounter 109
of sexuality (Foucault 1980a). In this by now well-known account, he in-
dicates how medicine, in concert with other circulating ideas about proper
and improper bodies, is deeply implicated not just in the division of bodies
into the healthy and unhealthy but simultaneously into the normal and the
perverse. And we need not go past the discourses on HIV-AIDS to illustrate
the way in which medical science and sexual politics can converge over
bodies to siphon off the guilty from so-called innocent uses of pleasure and
pain.3 But it is important to note that such spectacular connections between
sexuality and health do not exhaust the medical delimiting of uses of plea-
sure. Even my seemingly mundane practice of smoking has been trans-
formed (through the intertwining of medical, legal, and environmental
discourses with the ever-ready pointed finger of the passerby) from a rela-
tively insignificant use of pleasure to an anti-social, immoral perversion. The
work of medical discourse is pervasive, effecting not just who we exchange
fluids with and how, but the course of other pleasures and pains inseparable
from our manners of being.
While seemingly ubiquitous, it would be a mistake to view the rela-
tion between medical science and sexuality as some kind of conspiracy on
the part of the few to control the bodies of the rest. The medical reduction
and production of sexuality is often as unwitting as it is powerful and may
proceed as much by neglect, say by the assumption that the paralyzed body
is devoid of pleasure, as it does by obsessive concern, say for my tar-soaked
lungs. It would also be a mistake to view the recipient of medical attention
as simply a passive body at the mercy of forces that would rearticulate its
pleasures and pains in the interests of propriety. Foucault, through his analysis
of the technology of confession, also points to our own complicity in
constituting ourselves as the subjects of desire in the face of medical dis-
course (Foucault 1980a, 58-70). And this occurs most obviously in the clinic
itself. After all, there seems a no more appropriate place for us to reflect on
our uses of pleasure and to connect these to the pains, leakages, spasms, and
paralyses that seem to overtake our body. In attempting to locate the origin
of disease, asthma, for example, can become, through our own words, a
problem of sexual anxiety. Or, in unfolding our medical history, we may link
this broken leg to menopause and the sexuality and osteopathology that this
now implies.
In this medical examination we are not simply confessing to an already
constituted sexuality and unburdening ourselves of a truth that seems to
110 Corporeal Generosity
infect us. Rather, as Foucault points out, we are constituting ourselves as
subjects of sexuality in the presence of someone with the authority to make
of us what she will:
[T]he agency of domination does not reside in the one who
speaks [the patient] (for it is he who is constrained), but in the
one who listens and says nothing [the clinician]; not in the one
who knows and answers, but in the one who questions and is
not supposed to know. And this discourse of truth finally takes
effect, not in the one who receives it, but in the one from whom
it is wrested. (Foucault 1980a, 62)
The truth of our sexuality is not waiting for exposure in the clinic. Rather,
sexuality is constituted through confession, in the body of the spoken word.4
The clinic, like the confessional in general, incites not just the desire to
speak but desire itself. It is a place where pleasures and pains are articulated,
formed, and transformed; where a self is dissolved, dissembled, and assembled.
And the agent of production is not just the clinician (as some would have
it) who, as the executor of medical discourse, examines and therefore ob-
jectifies and normalizes the body. The agent of production is also the patient
who would have her pleasures and pains represented, to her satisfaction, in
the total picture of her medical life.
Since Foucault and others have pointed to medical science as a place
where knowledge and sexual politics meet a body, it is no longer possible
to simply assume that we encounter medical discourse (whether through
television or in the clinic) with our sexuality entirely intact, or that we leave
it unscathed. In the meeting, sexuality is reconstituted and normalized with
certain uses of pleasure and pain ignored, condemned, transformed, or
abandoned.
This kind of analysis has been with us for at least twenty years and has
certainly left its mark. After at least two decades of feminist criticism of the
medical normalization of bodies,5 of the way women’s health is measured
against a male standard, it is more likely that breast cancer, for example, will
be treated as a serious infringement on a woman’s use of pleasure. And there
is some chance that menopause will not be viewed simply as a failure of
womanhood, as a lack of usable pleasure that could be rectified by anti-
depressants. (Although, as some will be quick to point out, hormone re-
Sexuality and the Clinical Encounter 111
placement therapy, which has superseded antidepressants as the usual treat-
ment for menopausal “symptoms,” does little to shift the old assumptions.)
Or, after at least one decade of criticism of the medical discourse on HIV-
AIDS, particularly from the gay community, there is perhaps a better chance
that a person can live with HIV-AIDS rather than die with the “stigmata
of their guilt,” to coin Simon Watney’s phrase (Watney 1987, 78). In some
respects, twenty years of sustained and vigorous critique of the problematic
assumptions of medical discourse have produced a generation of consumers
and some practitioners attuned to, and critical of, the role that medicine
plays in the production and normalization of sexuality.
Yet despite, and perhaps because of, this heightened awareness, there
is much to suggest that we are far from dealing with sexuality in the clinic
to the satisfaction of all concerned. For the patient, the management of
sexuality in the clinic is at best clumsy and sometimes parsimonious with
the effect that the clinical encounter is often disconcerting and sometimes
alarming. From the patient’s perspective, sexuality can become a problem in
one of two ways. Either the clinical environment is sexualized by the cli-
nician when there seems no need, or the question of sexuality is elided or
evaded when it would seem to matter.
I offer two examples of the first kind of problem.6 In 1975, Jenny
chooses a general practitioner at random to obtain a prescription for her
asthma medication. The doctor, a pleasant enough man around age sixty,
takes Jenny’s blood pressure before returning to his position behind the desk.
He then leans back in his chair and asks her three questions: does she
masturbate, does she sleep with boys, does she sleep with girls. Jenny is so
shocked that the best she can do is squeeze out a “no” in reply to each
question in turn. Satisfied with the answers, and commenting that it is
gratifying to see that a young woman can still be embarrassed in these times
of loose morals, the doctor complies with Jenny’s request and writes out a
prescription.
We could dismiss this example as extreme, as an isolated incident
occurring at a time when liberties were taken that would no longer be
tolerated. However, while unnecessary sexualization of the clinical encoun-
ter may no longer be so crude, isolated cases of sexual assault aside, it is no
less apparent, at least from the patient’s perspective. It is now 1995, and
Claudia enters a clinic seeking a prescription for her asthma medication. She
knows what she needs, and this is all she wants. The doctor, a woman around
112 Corporeal Generosity
Claudia’s age and unfamiliar with her case, asks the usual two or three
questions about Claudia’s medical history before happily meeting her re-
quest. But as she is writing the prescription, the doctor asks if there anything
else that Claudia would like. Even though Claudia replies “no” several times,
the doctor persists: did Claudia realize, for instance, that a simple course of
hormone therapy could eliminate her problem of facial hair. Claudia is as
mortified by this question in 1995 as Jenny was by those asked of her in
1975.
We could give this doctor the benefit of the doubt by suggesting that
she is one of the new generation taught, at our request, to treat, not just the
symptom but the patient as a whole person. Perhaps in her world, facial hair
on a woman is a problem, a source of anxiety about sexuality and sexual
difference. Not in Claudia’s world. She has lived with her hair forever; she
likes it, as does her partner and friends; it is inseparable from her body given
to a world, it is inseparable from her use of pleasure, yet no more relevant
to this visit to the clinic than what she had for breakfast. While deeply
disturbed at what to her is a challenge to her way of being, Claudia mod-
erates her response, saying only that no, her facial hair is no longer a problem
for her, except at times like this, and that the doctor should not assume
otherwise given that, if it was a problem she would have already done
something about it. Rather than conceding the point, the doctor escalates
the stakes, suggesting that, while removal of the hair would normally be
advisable, she would simply note in Claudia’s records her objections to
discussing the issue. Claudia leaves the clinic in despair, regretting her con-
straint in comparison to the doctor, wishing she had said what to her is
obvious: that her own facial hair is no more aberrant than the doctor’s
severely sculptured eyebrows.
The second, and converse, way in which sexuality can become a
problem in the clinic, from the patient’s perspective, is in cases where the
question of one’s own use of pleasure is elided or evaded when it would
seem to be the salient point. In 1980, Jael enters a clinic seeking termination
of her pregnancy. In order to satisfy the law, it is necessary to first show that
continuing the pregnancy would probably result in distress and hardship and
second to accept counseling on contraception to prevent a repeat occur-
rence. Jael can easily meet the first condition and does not need to accom-
modate the second. Her use of pleasure is such that her usual sexual partner
is a woman and in parts of her usual world she would be called a lesbian.
Sexuality and the Clinical Encounter 113
That she finds herself in this clinic of assumed heterosexuality is easily
explained: one sexual encounter with an old and trusted male friend, of no
lasting significance, at least not to herself or the friend. But to tell the full
story, and so properly to prove the need for the termination, would result
in as much distress and hardship to Jael’s partner, her male friend, and herself,
as would continuing the pregnancy. Not only do the relevant facts not sit
well with Jael’s world, they would be also totally foreign to the counselor
she faces. So rather than proving her case beyond doubt, she tells another
story more in keeping with the expectations of the clinic and endures the
advice about contraception with resignation. The individual is preserved
through the art of dissimulation, and she can only be trusted if, to use
Nietzsche’s words, she fulfills her “duty to lie according to a fixed conven-
tion” (Nietzsche 1979, 84).
It is likely that the itinerary of Jael’s pleasure and pain would be just
as transgressive of convention, both heterosexual and lesbian, now as it was
in 1980, and that silence or evasion, both inside and outside the clinic,
would be advisable. But while sexuality may exceed convention in this way,
where convention is given reductively in terms of a consistent object of
desire, it is often not so easy to locate what convention might be, nor
therefore to predict the potential to affront its agents. Hence, as the follow-
ing incident suggests, the impulse to evade, elide, or censor sexuality in the
clinic is contingent and unpredictable, as are the effects of this tendency
toward self-regulation.
It is 1995. Simone has a problem with anal bleeding and is convinced
that she has bowel cancer. But heartened by the discovery, through conver-
sations with friends, that cancer is the unlikely cause, she visits a doctor to
have this conclusion confirmed. In the absence of a regular physician, Simone
chooses a woman with a reputation among friends for having a good “bed-
side manner.” To assist the doctor, who has admitted to not having the
equipment necessary for a proper anal examination, Simone begins to list
factors that she thinks are relevant to the case: a prior history of pain from
a hernia, although no bleeding; a brief period of constipation prior to the
onset of bleeding; no anal penetration. Clearly disturbed at the mention of
anal penetration, and before Simone had exhausted her list, the doctor jumps
up from her chair, overrides Simone’s speech, puts Simone on the table,
rubber gloves on herself, and performs a brief examination. While feeling
slightly humiliated by the time they return to the desk, Simone does not
114 Corporeal Generosity
blame the doctor for her obvious distaste for the procedure. But she is
incensed when the doctor washes her hands, not once but three times, while
reassuring her that she does not have cancer. And, given the nature of the
problem, Simone thinks it strange that a doctor would find mention of anal
penetration so disturbing and inappropriate when to her it seems so apt.
These stories of the problematic operation of sexuality in the clinic
and of the affectivity it provokes are not particularly spectacular but are
noteworthy for that reason. Whether sexuality is evoked unnecessarily or
evaded, dissimulation, “misrecognition,” confusion, and discomfort are so
common that one suspects they are all part and parcel of the clinical en-
counter itself. But why might this be so? These stories do share features that
are consistent with a Foucauldian analysis of the role of medical discourse
in the production and normalization of sexuality. It is clear, for example, that
in each case the clinician is an agency of domination, a deputy of medical
discourse and the conventions it may harbor. As the clinician has the author-
ity to issue a prescription, the knowledge for reassurance and access to
technical procedures, then patients must subject themselves to the clinician’s
questions and interpretations if they are to secure the help they need. And
we may agree with Foucault that this game of truth over sexuality seems to
take effect in the patient more so than in the clinician, who seems shielded
from the medical gaze. Nonetheless, there are indications that disturbing
affects are not restricted to the patient and, even there, they are not exclu-
sively in the mode of unification and transformation of pleasures. What
Foucault’s analysis cannot explain is the extent of dissimulation, agitation,
and friction at play in the clinical encounter, nor the way affects are born,
not just by the body of the patient but at times by the clinician (Simone’s
doctor being a case in point). Based on Foucault’s account, the constitution
of sexuality by medical discourse through the confessional is a much more
harmonious and compliant affair than my examples would suggest. In other
words, in the absence of a coherent account of resistance to normalization
by medical discourse, there is little space for explaining the kinds of colli-
sions that are apparent in the clinical encounter. There also is little space for
explaining the surprising, flexible, and transformative features of affectivity,
discussed in chapter 5.
Foucault does acknowledge resistance to social normalization of sexu-
ality but without explaining its source, except, as I suggested in chapter 3,
with reference to what seems to be a presocial use of pleasure that escapes
Sexuality and the Clinical Encounter 115
normalizing regimes. For example, following is one of the few references
Foucault makes in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 to the possibility of
resistance:
It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we
aim—through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of
sexuality—to counter the grips of power with the claims of
bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their
possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack
against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire,
but bodies and pleasures. (Foucault 1980a, 157)
Foucault does not explain how such “bodies and pleasures,” the “rallying
point” against normalization, have escaped the all-pervasive deployment of
sexuality in the first place.
However, resorting to a realm of pure bodies and pleasures is not
necessary to explain resistance to normalization and, hence, the fractious way
in which sexuality is played out in the clinic. There is still another factor to
consider. In all of this talk about the body of the patient, its docility as the
object of the medical gaze and its stimulation through confession, we seem
to have overlooked the body of the clinician. As I argued in chapter 5, we
do not encounter social norms in the form of abstract ideas or laws. The
clinical encounter is not just an encounter between a singular body (the
patient) and the norms of medical discourse in the form of the ear and the
pen of the clinician. The clinician may be an agent of medical discourse and
therefore an agent of domination, as Foucault suggests, but he or she is also
a body. And if sexuality is understood as the uses of pleasure and pain of a
body open to a world, and if the clinician is a body, then the clinician’s
sexuality is also at issue in the clinical encounter. The clinical encounter is
an encounter between at least two bodies, two uses of pleasure and pain, two
sexualities with different histories. How does the clinician’s sexuality figure
in the encounter? And how can the meeting of uses of pleasure and pain
be better managed?
It does not pay to be coy in characterizing this meeting of bodies:
these bodies, if they meet at all, meet through the touch of the medical
examination, even when the players stand apart. While everything about the
architecture of the clinic (the physician’s dwelling behind the desk, the
116 Corporeal Generosity
patient’s exposure on the table, the location of the physician’s plaque on the
wall) suggests that only one body examines the other, the examination is in
fact contiguous and therefore ambiguous: bodies that touch are also touched.
For every eye or hand on skin, there is skin on hand or eye. Every body,
including the clinician’s, while a subject for itself is also an object for others.
For Merleau-Ponty, for example, the person could not be otherwise: I can
only touch or see, because I am touched and seen (Merleau-Ponty 1968,
133). I exist for myself in the hands of the other. So while the clinician
transforms a de facto situation into medical significance, through examina-
tion of the patient, the itinerary of his or her own body conduct is open
to the other, rendering the encounter indeterminate and ambiguous. For
Merleau-Ponty, this ambiguity, and its attendant affectivity or sensibility, is
the essence of existence, and whatever transformations may occur in an
encounter can never be eliminated (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 169).
While not reducible to personal existence in general, sexuality, as I
argued in chapter 4, has the same ambiguous structure. For Merleau-Ponty,
like Foucault, sexuality is not a pure fact, not a bodily instinct hidden
behind, and driving, existence, nor a conscious representation at its perim-
eter. But nor, as Foucault sometimes implies, are there bodies or pleasures
exempt from passing through the other and the sociality that this involves.
Of erotic perception, Merleau-Ponty says, “through one body it aims at
another, and takes place in the world, not consciousness” (Merleau-Ponty
1962, 157). And, he suggests, sexuality occupies such an important place in
human life, because sexual experience affords an “opportunity, vouchsafed to
all and always available to acquaint oneself with the play of autonomy and
dependence,” with the ambiguity of corporeal intersubjectivity (167). Sexu-
ality, then, differs from other modes of personal existence, not in structure
but in being an explicit indulgence in the pleasure and pain arising from the
uncertainty of being caught in the open circuit of ambiguity, generosity, and
intertwining characterizing existence and from the metamorphosis that this
allows. And, because sexuality shares the ambiguous structure of personal
existence and is inseparable from the distinctive way a person patterns and
gives meaning to his or her world, it is, as I argued in chapter 5, “impossible
to tell, in a given decision or action, the proportion of sexual to other
motivations” (169). At the same time, it would not be inconsistent to suggest
that whether an encounter could be considered sexual would depend on the
extent that sexuality is an explicit theme and on the specific ways in which
the bodies involved have lived their affective patterns of existence as sexual.
Sexuality and the Clinical Encounter 117
The clinical encounter, then, shares with both the sexual encounter
and personal existence in general the same structure of corporeal generosity,
where I am given to the world of the other’s body in an indeterminate,
ambiguous relation. However, the clinical encounter differs from the sexual
encounter in that sexual pleasure is not the dominant theme. As there is no
agreement here to indulge in the pleasures and pains of body ambiguity,
then any sexual aspect of that ambiguity is less preeminent. Yet the clinical
encounter stands out from expressly nonsexual conducts, insofar as the itin-
erary of pleasures and pains of one body—at least—is explicitly given to the
other. And while the other’s body, the clinician’s, may seem exempt from
scrutiny, it is, as I have suggested, implicitly open to the patient. I believe it
is because the clinical encounter stands on the cusp between personal ex-
istence in general and the sexual experience that it is so often alarming. As
I will go on to describe in more detail, it is the opening of one’s body to
a stranger, whose own body, while apparently invisible, is no less in play, that
makes the clinical encounter so often fractious and the play of sexuality
there so open to mismanagement.
I am suggesting in the first place that understanding the clinical en-
counter in terms of an encounter between bodies requires abandoning the
idea that human bodies are singular, self-contained entities standing apart
from one’s agency and apart from others. When engaged in the world, the
person, whether acting, observing, doing, or knowing, is not a disembodied
thinker. Rather, the person is her or his body, its gestures, movements, and
habits, its uses of pleasure and pain. It is as carnal openness to a world that
the clinician and the patient orient themselves, incorporate the surrounding
field, and engage in the situation. The clinician performs the examination
this way. She does not calculate the distance between her body, the stetho-
scope, and the skin of the patient, and then consciously direct her move-
ments. Rather, her body, its gestures, and its spatial orientation are given to
a situation through which the instrument and the other’s body become part
of her body spatiality.
Perception of the other’s body, then, is not the capacity to intellectu-
alize its needs across the gulf that would seem to separate us. All perception,
knowing, and understanding is informed by prereflective intertwining of
corporeality. Or, as Merleau-Ponty puts it:
Whether it is a question of another’s body or my own, I have
no means of knowing the human body other than that of living
118 Corporeal Generosity
it, which means taking up on my own account the drama which
is being played out in it, and losing myself in it. (Merleau-Ponty
1962, 198)
On this understanding of an encounter between bodies, the clinician is a
body given to a world of the other and immersed within it. And just as
sexuality presupposes a social existence and is inseparable from it, being a
body immersed in others is not fortuitous; as discussed in chapter 3, it
actualizes one’s social identity. The capacity to use a stethoscope, for example,
is a skill mimetically borrowed from another body. Similarly, Claudia’s doctor’s
discomfort about facial hair is not an arbitrary, conscious representation of
uniform significance, but an unease belonging to a body with a tradition of
immersion in a world of other female bodies devoid of body hair. In short,
the clinician brings to the present encounter not just an abstract medical
model of a “normal” body but a history of interlacing with other bodies,
skills, gestures, and uses of pleasure and pain, all pregnant with meaning, and
all of which inform her carnal style and hence her perception of the situ-
ation. And, insofar as the clinician is an agency of domination, her percep-
tion of the situation involves living that history through the body of the
patient, imposing that history on the other’s body, and making it familiar and
hence similar to her own.
While as a corporeal subject the clinician operates through the other’s
body with the absence of singularity that this implies, she is maintained as
a separate existence, however, by the feeling of difference from the other.
This difference emerges in the first instance because the clinician, while a
body-subject with the power of perception, is also a nonthematic “object”
for the patient. Through the touch of the patient’s skin, the look in her eye,
through their gestures and speech, the clinician feels the difference in her
own identity. In other words, the constitution of the body subject through
the other, while based on possession of the other’s body, also involves a sense
of a difference between the two. As discussed in chapter 5, this difference
between bodies is irreducible, not because of an original or final individu-
ality but because of the ambiguity of coexistence as I have just described it.
And the difference is irreducible, not because one body has escaped the
deployment of sexuality or the normalizing work of social discourse in
general. Rather, it is because, added to this irreducible difference in the
present, is the condition that the drama played out in the body of the
Sexuality and the Clinical Encounter 119
patient—while perhaps familiar to the clinician in some respects—is of a
body with a different history.
This picture of the clinical encounter suggests two immediate points
about sexuality under clinical management. First, in order to appreciate the
needs of a different body, the clinician’s body must have already lived through
that experience, or must at least be open to it. It is unrealistic to expect that
a particular clinician could be open to every possible body history and every
experience of a particular patient, unless we assume that the clinician is a
god without a body at all. If the clinician is not a god, then her ability to
know the other’s body is limited insofar as her social history, and therefore
uses of pleasure and pain differ from that of the other. It should not be
surprising then that as patients we so often encounter what seems like the
shock of the new. We, like Jenny and Jael, manage this by dissimulation or,
like Claudia, by refusal. This dissimulation is not a mask, deliberately worn
to hide the truth of one’s sexuality, but a refusal to open the indeterminate,
any more than necessary, to the body of a stranger for his or her final
possession. And/or we shop around, but not for a use of pleasure and pain
that matches our own. Carnal style is not open to objective analysis, and no
list of habits, skills, or sexual preferences would give us a match, however
similar to our own that that list of attributes may appear to be. The best we
can do is find someone with whom we feel comfortable for no determinate
reason. But given that oscillation between dissimulation and familiarity and
difference and indistinction is already a feature of the ambiguity of existence,
these contributions by the patient bring nothing new to the management
of sexuality in the clinic. The medical profession could also manage the
problem better by first granting that the clinician is a body. It is this body,
including its uses of pleasure and pain, more so than that of the patient and
as much as the normalizing body of medical discourse, that is generalized
illegitimately in the medical examination with parsimonous effects.
Second, and somewhat paradoxically, while an understanding of the
other implies immersion in her or his body, it is just as critical to maintain
the difference. The indeterminate ambiguity of existence suggests this alterity,
and our ethics demands it. Too much familiarity on the part of the clinician
or the patient may transgress the indistinguishable line marking off his or her
difference, threatening the security of the identities of both. The sexual
encounter may be an opportunity for indulgence in the ambiguity of
intercorporeal existence; the clinical encounter is not. Simone’s doctor, for
120 Corporeal Generosity
example, may have been threatened by the mention of anal penetration in
a context where it seemed appropriate, not necessarily because it fell outside
of her sexual experience, but perhaps because it did not. That is, the problem
may have been that the patient inadvertently sexualized the very part of her
body that the doctor sought to put at a distance. This is how we all deal with
uncertainty in the face of body ambiguity: we build a partition between our
body and the body of the other without any thought at all.
In the end, absolute resolution of the ambiguous relation between
bodies is impossible, unless we assume that all bodies are the same. Hence,
complete understanding of the patient’s sexuality in a clinical setting is also
impossible. A more generous and sensitive approach to sexuality in the clinic
does not require resolution of this ambiguity but recognition that the clini-
cal encounter involves corporeal generosity and an attendant clash and trans-
figuration of uses of pleasure and pain. Rather than attempting to better
manage the patient’s sexuality with the parsimonious incorporation of them
that this implies, perhaps a more constructive starting point would be ac-
knowledgment of the clinician’s sexuality and its constitutive role in the
clinical encounter.
Attending to the dynamics of an encounter with a stranger in an
institutional setting provides us with a case where social norms and conven-
tions are most likely to operate through bodies to efface differences. This, I
have argued, operates at a prereflective, nonvolitional level of intercorporeality.
Here, openness to others, characteristic of corporeal generosity, is mediated
by a closure to the other effected by a body that is a product of convention
and an agent of normalization. However, as I have also suggested, because
social norms are incorporated and perception is intercorporeal, affective, and
ambiguous, it is difficult to locate convention and parsimony, and it is
difficult to predict the circumstances under which convention could be
transformed toward different modes of being. Further, not only is corporeal
generosity indeterminate and unpredictable, it is also impossible. Uncondi-
tional openness to otherness, as the analysis of the clinical encounter sug-
gests, is impossible, given how sedimentation of corporeal style closes off
possibilities for existence for both oneself and the other.
If, as I have suggested, both openness and closure to alterity operate
primordially at a prereflective level, then so does a politics of generosity. That
is, if social ideas and their corporeal instantiation effect normalization and
discrimination at the intercorporeal level, then so would the transformation
Sexuality and the Clinical Encounter 121
of sociality toward fostering different ways of being. But the nonvolitional
and unpredictable character of this operation of generosity raises a number
of questions about a politics of difference. What, for example, is the relation
between intercorporeality and conscious intent, thought, and judgment?
Under Merleau-Ponty’s formulation of intercorporeality, conscious reflec-
tion and intent, while informed by corporeal affective perception, cannot
catch up with the perception it attempts to think. How then might social
norms and consciously held ideas be transformed in a way that is open to
difference? And, related to this, how might the community that this conven-
tional thinking supports be transformed in a manner that fosters different
ways of being? These are the questions addressed in the third and final part
of this book, beginning in the next chapter with an account of the gener-
osity of critical thinking—a thinking that seeks to transform the social
concepts that seem to dictate our modes of existence to the advantage of
some and the detriment of others.
Part III
Generosity and Community
(Trans)Formation
Seven
Thinking through Radical
Generosity with Levinas
The self says to the ego, “Feel pain here!” Then the ego suffers
and thinks how it might suffer no more—and that is why it is
made to think.
The self says to the ego, “Feel pleasure here!” Then the ego
is pleased and thinks how it might often be pleased again—and
that is why it is made to think. (Nietzsche 1978, 35)
WHAT MAKES ME THINK? In particular, what makes me think in a way
that would be critical of existing ideas? If, as I suggested in chapters 5 and
6, existing ideas (including social norms and prohibitions) come to me in
the form of incarnated fragments that color the horizon of what I do and
feel, what opens me to the generation of different ideas and to the trans-
formation of my horizon of being that this would entail? What makes me
think differently and against the conventions that normalize and discrimi-
nate against different ways of being? Nietzsche, in the opening quotation,
suggests a connection between affectivity and thinking. Affects of the self
(which for him is a body) make me think. Something gets under my skin.
Something disturbs me, makes me think in a direction that may not be
altogether different from what I thought initially, but different all the same.
125
126 Corporeal Generosity
The disturbance that has made me think the question of thinking
comes from at least three directions. The first is from the guardians of
economic rationalism in Australian universities who reward the productivity
of an instrumental reason that would teach for vocational purposes in ac-
cordance with student interest and in response to the demands of industry.
The second comes from a current trend of dismissing the ideas of contem-
porary cultural theory (particularly what its critics call postmodern or
poststructural theory) on the grounds of its apparent inaccessibility and lack
of reason.1 The third is a recent attack on academic feminism, especially that
which might be considered “deconstructive” and that which is critical of
scientific concepts, for sacrificing the idea of liberation in favor of seeking
power for itself and for the madness of its method, for its “systematic and
pervasive confusions, logical slides, and the mode of argument which . . .
refuses to meet the tests of genuine reason” (Curthoys 1997, 10).2
What I find disturbing about all three provocations is that they locate
proper thinking and the proper dissemination of ideas in that which does
not disturb, in the domain of the familiar. Ideas and their teaching that are
unfamiliar, that distort the boundaries of existing ideas (particularly those of
classical economics, liberation politics, and the natural sciences), or that are
not immediately and obviously useful to further predetermined ends, are
dismissed as failing to meet the tests of reason. What I will argue in this
chapter, using feminist philosophy as characteristic of critical thinking, is that
it is in the generation of new ideas that thinking is productive in its political
task of transforming both the self and the social realm. While such new ideas
are open to criticism that they may be difficult to comprehend at first, in
the context of long-held beliefs, or that they may not obviously fit the
explicit ideals of a liberation politics, this does not constitute grounds for
dismissal. A second feature shared by these three sources of disturbance, and
a central target of the thinking in this chapter, is that they explicitly or
implicitly hold that proper thinking is an autonomous exercise, carried out
by an independent agent prior to communication to another. It is this idea
of autonomous theorizing that, I will argue, works against the creation and
transformation of ideas necessary to feminist and all critical thinking, a
process that takes place not in isolation but within the field of the other. It
is a disturbance arising within this field of the other to which I am given
that makes me think; the other affects me, gets under my skin, and that is
why I am made to think. Finally, I will claim that this production of ideas
Thinking through Radical Generosity with Levinas 127
against convention involves corporeal generosity, a generosity central to
teaching, learning, and thinking, which seems absent from the ideal of
instrumental, autonomous reason espoused by these provocateurs who have
made me think.
In positing a connection between affectivity and critical thinking, my
aim is to harness an idea raised in Part II for a politics of generosity. The
idea is this: Our relation to existing ideas that govern social relations and are
instantiated corporeally is ambiguous and open so that the transformation of
existing ideas is possible. How though, given this ambiguity and its prereflective,
nonvolitional character, can a politics that aims for social justice be enacted?
To better imagine what such a politics might look like requires arguing
initially, as I do in this chapter, that existing ideas and the sociality they
support are opened to new paths of thinking through a generous response
provoked by the other’s alterity. This generosity involves a dispossession of
self and is born of an affective, corporeal relation to alterity that generates
rather than closes off sexual, cultural, and stylistic differences.
As I take feminist thinking to be exemplary of this generosity, the
work of feminist philosophers who question the maleness of reason provides
the foundation of this account, as do Deleuze’s and Guattari’s thoughts
about the creation of new ideas. However, it is Levinas’ work on the gen-
erosity of sensibility that I find particularly conducive to an account of how
generosity transforms thinking that otherwise would be closed to otherness.
Levinas, more explicitly than either Nietzsche or Merleau-Ponty, bases a
sociality that would be open to difference on giving to the other without
thought of return. And insofar as his work challenges the ideals of instru-
mental reason and autonomy that sustain male domination, it provokes
thoughts about thinking that are consistent with feminist thinking. But
Levinas is equally provocative and disturbing for what he leaves out, present-
ing a strangeness within which new lines of thought will open. As will be
noted toward the end of this chapter, Levinas, unlike Merleau-Ponty, tends
to locate radical generosity outside of ontology and therefore outside of
politics. This is a tendency that inspires some revision of his ideas and is a
problem that will be addressed more directly in the following chapters.
We begin this account of the generosity of critical thinking then with
the claim that feminist philosophy operates through the production of new
ideas. Deleuze and Guattari have argued in What is Philosophy? that what
distinguishes philosophy from other enterprises, namely, science and art, is
128 Corporeal Generosity
its “art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (Deleuze and Guattari
1994, 2). “Philosophy does not contemplate, reflect or communicate,” as
more conventional definitions of philosophy might claim (6). These activities
are “mechanisms for constituting Universals,” not just in philosophy but “in
every discipline” (ibid.). What is more fundamental to philosophy is the
production of new concepts, “singularities,” prior to any universalization (7).
By “concept,” Deleuze and Guattari do not mean a proposition that repre-
sents a thing or state of affairs: representation is the aim of science (23). Nor,
by concept, do they mean a medium for expressing feelings: affective expres-
sion is the work of art (164). Rather, concepts address problems that they
are designed to resolve; they are incorporeal expressions of events; the “con-
cept speaks the event, not the essence or the thing” (21). But the event does
not precede the concept; the event is itself constituted through the fabrica-
tion of the concept, through the “condensation” or gathering together, in a
particular way, of the components of the concept (20). Central to Deleuze’s
and Guattari’s concept of the concept is that it is a “becoming,” involving
realignment of its heterogeneous components and recasting of relationships
with other relevant concepts (21, 18). Through its becoming, the concept
“assigns conditions to the problem it addresses,” tracing “the contour of its
components” in an “undecidable” way (20–21). The resulting condensation
or event is fragmentary, unstable, and subject to transformation.
Just as the event does not precede the concept, nor does the philoso-
pher, at least not in any stable form. The concept is given voice by a
conceptual persona, a philosophical figure, such as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra or
Plato’s Diotima, that is constituted through the speaking. And the concept
emerges in a “plane of immanence” or “image of thought”: a historically and
socially specific milieu of presuppositions about what thought involves (e.g.,
transcendence, universals, discursiveness) that acts “like a sieve stretched over . . .
chaos” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 43). This sieve, this plane or image of
thought, necessitates or motivates the creation of concepts and lays out paths
in which their creation will take place.3 As Paul Patton suggests, along with
the concepts of the conceptual persona and the plane of immanence, Deleuze’s
and Guattari’s concept of the concept generates a model of philosophical
thinking as experimental, “a dice-throw,” concerned with recasting problems
in new and interesting ways with a view for opening new possibilities for
life (Patton 1996, 324–25).
Thinking through Radical Generosity with Levinas 129
Irigaray’s concept of the “two lips,” by now well known, at least in
feminist theory, might serve as a useful illustration of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s
concept of the concept (Irigaray 1985). The problem that Irigaray addresses
through this concept is the way in which woman’s social subordination is
supported by dualistic representations of sexual difference so that woman is
viewed as the same as man (a sexed unity or one) or as a lack (none). “Two
lips” does not represent an alternative essence of woman or woman’s sex as
an anatomical thing. Rather, it figures woman as event, a composition of
postures, lines of potentiality. The concept has at least three components:
two lips (although it remains ambiguous which two—whether genital or
oral) and their relation. Other preexisting concepts (equating sexuality with
genitalia, woman with lack) are recast through a condensation of the com-
ponents of the concept so that woman is figured as not one sex, not a lack,
at least two, and maybe more, perhaps genitally oriented, perhaps not.Whatever
you think of Irigaray’s two lips, it is a concept in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s
sense, as is Genevieve Lloyd’s “man of reason.”
Lloyd’s concept “the man of reason” not only illustrates the concept of
the concept but also indicates why the production of new concepts is impor-
tant to feminism. Lloyd demonstrates, through a reading of the history of
philosophy, that philosophical conceptions of reason are male. Not that men
by nature embody reason; rather, men by definition embody reason: “the male-
female distinction has been used to symbolize the distinction between reason
and its opposites,” Lloyd argues, so that “our ideals of Reason have historically
incorporated an exclusion of the feminine, and that femininity itself has been
partly constituted through such processes of exclusion” (Lloyd 1993, x, xix).
The concept “the man of reason” recasts the relation between the male-female
distinction and ideals of reason not to suggest a feminine alternative to reason
nor to reject claims to women’s irrationality on the basis of empirical evi-
dence. What is interesting about the concept “the man of reason” is that it
makes concepts of reason, rather than “woman,” the problem to be addressed,
and it does so by questioning their means of symbolic production and sexually
neutral status. Why such questioning has been necessary is indicated by Lloyd’s
claim, in her preface to the second edition of The Man of Reason, that while
exclusion of the feminine or the female from concepts of Reason is a “con-
tingent feature of western thought, the elusive but real effects [. . .] are still
with us” (1993, x). One such effect is that what a woman may count as a
130 Corporeal Generosity
philosophical problem and the concept that emerges from her exploration of
that problem may be dismissed as irrational, simply because she is a woman
and by definition does not embody reason.
Insofar as philosophy has been a male-dominated enterprise then, it
should not be surprising that the problems addressed in the production of
concepts are those of particular concern to the lifestyles of the men who
address them, and that the concepts that emerge affirm the existence and
status of the men through whom they emerge.4 Even when the conceptual
persona that gives voice to the concept is a woman, Plato’s Diotima, for
example, we find that the concept, in this case a concept of love, not only
speaks little of women’s concerns but is likely to exclude women altogether.
Not only has the male domination of philosophy guided the selection of
problems addressed in the creation of concepts, but the “maleness of reason”
has infected the plane of immanence that lays out the paths of thinking,
favoring the emergence of exactly the kind of concepts it has. Michèlle Le
Doeuff suggests such a relation between a plane of immanence, the particu-
lar social situation of the philosophers who inhabit it, and the type of
concepts likely to emerge. In addressing the sexism of philosophical thought,
she claims that any theoretical enterprise is structured by an “axiology,” a set
of values “concerning that which is or is not ‘done’ in this enterprise, [. . .]
a whole series of theoretical orientations and also the trace left in the
theoretical language by people’s practical and concrete interests” (1991, 11–
12). That the axiology of philosophy (and the humanities in general) has
been infected with male ideals of reason and has addressed problems of
concern to men is not to say that men and women do not share paths of
thinking, or that the problems and interests of men and women do not
overlap, for they clearly do. But there will be problems that some women
would address, including the sexism of a plane of immanence itself, that a
man may not even notice. To address such problems requires new concepts,
concepts that may at first seem foreign to the plane of immanence from
which they emerge; concepts that may seem unreasonable within an axiology
that they will necessarily transform and that may seem obscure to the “man
of reason” whose life they may bypass or whose security they may challenge.
I have suggested that feminist philosophy requires new concepts in
order to address problems that may have been overlooked in an axiology
that has deemed women unreasonable. But how do these concepts arise, and
what motivates their creation? Deleuze and Guattari do not really answer
Thinking through Radical Generosity with Levinas 131
this question, at least not in a way that I find completely convincing. For
them, the concept is produced through a “conceptual persona,” a historically
contingent figure through which the philosopher’s plane of immanence
passes and which, rather than being the philosopher’s representative, is that
which the philosopher is in the process of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari
1994, 63–64). The conceptual persona is the concept’s “friend,” its “poten-
tiality,” the site for the “deterritorializations” and “reterritorializations” of
thought, who emerges with the concept in a field of rival claimants (4–5).
One problem I have with this formulation is that the production of concepts
is described as a solitary affair where the philosopher, or his or her concep-
tual persona, in his or her own isolation, seems to be the only friend the
concept has. Second, and related to the first problem, there is little consid-
eration of how the history of the philosopher’s social experiences (his or her
encounters with other social beings) informs the production of concepts.
While Deleuze and Guattari grant that a conceptual persona is related to the
historical milieu in which it appears, the existential mode and social status
of the philosopher who thinks it has little or no bearing on the creation of
concepts. Rather, according to Deleuze and Guattari, thinking, the creation
of concepts, wrests the thinker from the “historical state of affairs of a
society” and from his or her own lived experience in order to transform him
or her into a conceptual persona on a plane laid out by thought (70). It is
as if the plane of immanence motivates the creation of concepts, irrespective
of the philosopher’s location in it. Without denying that thinking seems like
a lonely venture, and that in it we get carried away by paths of thinking
beyond our control, it seems to me that the creation of concepts has more
to do with the philosopher’s social constitution in relation to others within
a plane of immanence than Deleuze and Guattari allow. The philosopher
needs other friends necessary to the production of concepts. Rivals for sure,
but also companions, mentors, students, lovers, mothers, and brothers might
put us on the path of thinking. I want to suggest that the philosopher’s
specific experiences within his or her social milieu, which includes a plane
of immanence, directly motivate the creation of new concepts; a woman
philosopher’s experiences within a plane of immanence that embodies traces
of the interests of men directly prompt the opening of those paths of
thinking that we call feminist.
Erika Kerruish suggests a connection between a philosopher’s social
experience and her or his response to existing concepts when arguing, with
132 Corporeal Generosity
and against Derrida and with reference to Nietzsche’s theory of affect, that
a woman’s “embodied social history” makes all the difference to how she
will read, accept, and criticize Nietzsche’s ideas on woman (Kerruish 1997,
11). A philosopher’s response to concepts of “woman” found within a plane
of immanence involves an experience that is never as sexually neutral or
interchangeable with the experience of others, as Derrida’s reading of
Nietzsche’s ideas of “woman” suggests. And Genevieve Lloyd points to the
role of such experience in the creation of concepts, such as the “man of
reason”: “[t]o bring to the surface the implicit maleness of our ideals of
Reason [. . .] means for example, that there are not only practical reasons,
but also conceptual ones, for the conflicts many women experience between
Reason and femininity” (1993, xix, emphasis added). There is something, a
conflict, a disturbance, in the female philosopher’s experience of reason and
of other concepts, as they are usually defined, read, and institutionalized in
and beyond a philosophical community that motivates their reconceptuali-
zation. Indeed, Emmanuel Levinas suggests that such an unsettling experi-
ence lies at the heart of the formation of new ideas: this “experience deserves
its name only if it transports us beyond what constitutes our nature. Genuine
experience must even lead us beyond the Nature that surrounds us” and in
which we may normally feel our selves “to be at home” (Levinas 1987a, 47).
Something gets under my skin, something disturbs me, something elates me,
excites me, bothers me, surprises me. It is this experience that sets off a
movement that extends my world beyond the intimate and familiar. A dis-
turbing experience motivates the creation and transformation of concepts.
At the very least then, our relation to ideas is not only mediated by
our corporeal history but is also affective. Levinas describes our primordial
experience of and relation to ideas in terms of “living from . . . ,” just as we
“[l]ive from acts [. . .] we live from ideas and sentiments” (1969, 113). That
we live from ideas does not mean we already exist as a separate being who
uses ideas for some purpose: “what we live from is not a ‘means of life’ ”
(110). Ideas are “not objects of representations” of a self-conscious existence
(ibid). What characterizes living from ideas, acts, bread, and so on is not
impassionate contemplation but enjoyment, where enjoyment refers to sen-
sibility or affectivity in general and so includes joy, pain, and suffering.
Before or beyond reflecting on ideas we live them “as a body that feels itself
affected and affective” (Peperzak 1993, 156). And what “living from . . .”
accomplishes is separation from what one lives from: there is a basic relation
Thinking through Radical Generosity with Levinas 133
to life, including to ideas, by which the self is constituted as separate on the
basis of an affectivity that it cannot share with others.
To characterize our relation to ideas, elements, life in terms of
prereflective sensibility, or enjoyment is to suggest that there is something
that exceeds any act of living that propels the activity; there is an affective
aspect of thinking, eating, sleeping, reading, and warming oneself in the sun,
which nourishes that activity and makes it possible. Enjoyment explains why
we bother at all: we bother to live, to think, and to act, because we enjoy
it and suffer from it. For Levinas, ideas or concepts are not incorporeal
expressions of events, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest; ideas are corporeal
and affective, distinct from our substance but constituting it, contributing to
our becoming and to the worth of our lives by moving us through sensi-
bility (Levinas 1969, 112). And while we live from ideas at the level of
prereflective sensibility, this enjoyment is not presocial. The structure of
Totality and Infinity might suggest otherwise insofar as Levinas discusses
enjoyment there prior to consideration of relations with others, prior to
dwelling, labor, erotics, and the ethical relation. However, he also indicates
that each order presupposes the other (170, 216). In Otherwise Than Being or
Beyond Essence, he removes any doubt that enjoyment, or what he by then
more consistently calls sensibility, is inseparable from sociality. There sensi-
bility is a condition of subjectivity and is exposure to the other in the ethical
relation (Levinas 1981, 50–51). Or, in the terms of Totality and Infinity, our
relation to life is based on an irreducible affectivity without which thinking,
doing, and indeed living would not be possible.
While “living from . . .” or enjoyment may explain the affectivity of
ideas, why we find life worth living, and why we bother with ideas, and
while I have suggested why ideas about “woman,” for example, may affect
some of us and not others, this sensibility, taken by itself, is prereflective,
egoistic, immediate, and fragile. As enjoyment is immediate, self-constituting
gratification, living for and from the moment, it has no past and no guar-
anteed future. Further, enjoyment, as Levinas formulates it in Totality and
Infinity, is always assimilation, consumption, appropriation, and possession of
what one lives from, and while it accounts for the production of a separate
self, this is a prereflective, nonproductive autonomy. If this self-serving ego-
ism alone characterized our relation to ideas, then ideas would be what we
consume, enjoy, and suffer from rather than something we produce. Still, the
consumption and regurgitation of ideas by an autonomous self is what
134 Corporeal Generosity
characterizes the production of knowledge in much of Western philosophy,
with the qualification that, unlike Levinas’ formulation of the egoistic living
from ideas, the usual model of autonomy is given in terms of a reflexive self
without consideration of the affective dimension of ideas. Without this
consideration, along with consideration of the social specificity of one’s
carnal experience within the plane of immanence, there is no explanation
for why some ideas might hold us, bother us, and move us more or less than
others. And while the idea of an autonomous self may account for the
possession and consumption of ideas, it does not account for their produc-
tion, nor therefore, for feminist or other critical thinking. Yet it is this idea
of a self-reflexive autonomous self that dominates thinking about thinking.
Jean Curthoys, for example, supports her charge that the bulk of
academic feminism does not meet the “test of genuine reason” and her thesis
about what should count as proper feminist thinking with such a model of
autonomy. For Curthoys, liberation theorists are exemplary of genuine femi-
nism and are held up by her as the paradigm of wisdom and virtue (Curthoys
1997, 38–54). Liberation feminists are wise, according to Curthoys, because
the concept of liberation that they hold is based on self-knowledge, the
discovery within the self of an irreducible concept of human nature (to be
human is to need recognition as human) (49).5 This wisdom is a virtue in
that the discovery of this concept of human nature within oneself objec-
tively grounds the moral claim that this need for recognition must be
equally met for all humans and leads its discoverer to reject aspirations for
status and power in favor of listening to others and caring for their needs
(45, 50, 53–54). These are worthy ideas that one would certainly be unwise
to reject. It is the means by which they supposedly arise that I find prob-
lematic. Curthoys’ model of the production of ideas is one that, I will argue,
would make no difference to social relations at all and so cannot provide the
basis for feminist or any critical thinking.
Curthoys, by her own admission, holds to a Socratic model of the
production of knowledge, where ethics is based on epistemology (the more
you understand, the more virtuous you are), and genuine knowledge arises
from within the self. The getting of wisdom is based on the doctrine of
anamnesis (recollection), and ignorance and lack of virtue arises from am-
nesia, a forgetting of ideas (particularly the concept of human nature that
grounds liberation theory) that Curthoys attributes to the bulk of academic
feminism. Curthoys’ Socratic model of feminist thinking speaks of a kind of
Thinking through Radical Generosity with Levinas 135
philosophical ideal that Levinas calls “autonomy,” a philosophy that aims to
ensure the freedom and identity of the beings who produce it, where the
knower seeks to understand and integrate his or her external world in terms
familiar to the self (Levinas 1987a, 49). Indeed, Curthoys reserves the word
“autonomy” for such a thinker: the one who, having discovered the idea of
human nature within herself, recognizes her dependence “on the proper
recognition and respect of others” (1997, 53). This knowledge of the human
need for recognition makes the knower autonomous, according to Curthoys,
because it breaks “the link which binds us to others only to seek their
confirmation” (presumably because if you know you depend on another’s
recognition, you will not demand it). And such autonomy fosters generosity
as an individual virtue by allowing one to be more open to the other’s needs
(54).
While Curthoys champions this idea of autonomy, there are at least
two reasons for advising caution. First, this idea of autonomous thinking
ignores the possibility, discussed in chapters 5 and 6, that ideas come to us
not from inside the self but as incarnated fragments through the bodies of
others in an ambiguous, intercorporeal field. Second, Levinas advises caution
against this model of autonomous thinking precisely because concepts dis-
covered within the self would not alter the self or the world. Rather, they
would mediate one’s relation to external being (including one’s assessment
of the other’s needs) by dissolving its alterity (Levinas 1987a, 50). This
meditation of one’s relations to the singularity or alterity of others through
the generality of concepts discovered in oneself is where
every power begins. The surrender of external things to human
freedom through their generality does not only mean, in all
innocence, their comprehension, but also their being taken in
hand, their domestication, their possession. . . . To possess is, to
be sure, to maintain the reality of the other one possessed, but
to do so while suspending its independence. . . . Reason, which
reduces the other, is appropriation and power. (Levinas 1987a,
50)
In this exercise of reason, of power, there is nothing disturbing, at least not
in the end. Hence, there is no teaching or learning, no production of new
ideas, in such a model. One’s mentor, student, companion, or rival is reduced
136 Corporeal Generosity
to an intellectual midwife (through the exercise of maieutics in the name
of virtuous care), someone who merely helps brings to consciousness “the
already-known which has been uncovered or freely invented in oneself, and
in which everything unknown is compromised” (Levinas 1987a, 49). And,
as Norman Wirzba suggests, while in this model the other, through his or
her questioning, may contribute to a change in my understanding, my
understanding only changes “with reference to my prior understanding”
(1995, 131).6 Philosophical autonomy involves a kind of intellectual impe-
rialism that might explain why Curthoys, while offering an ideal of listening
to and caring for the other in her own work, cannot, in the end, hear others’
unfamiliar ideas (particularly those of the academic feminists she censures).
Philosophical autonomy also describes the paradigm of education currently
favored in Australian universities where, under the pressure of economic
rationalism, the teacher and the student are reduced to vehicles for the
consumption and repetition of familiar ideas valued for their utility in al-
lowing easy appropriation of our world. But philosophical autonomy does
not explain how new ideas, central to feminist and other critical thinking,
evolve.
What is it then that disturbs the confidence of autonomy and any
egoism in enjoyment? What experience transports us beyond what consti-
tutes our ways of being and beyond the familiar worlds we inhabit? What
experience sets us on the path of thinking differently? It is not just the
content of what is said, written, or embodied in the institutions I inhabit
that disturbs me; it not just the idea itself that gets under my skin. It is its
saying, the strangeness of the event of expression by someone who remains
beyond my self-understanding and so beyond my attempts at assimilation. It
is the other’s alterity that disturbs me, that difference in proximity generated
by his or her own separation, his or her own sensibility. This alterity implies
not only that the other cannot be possessed, but that her or his presence
contests my possession (not just my possession of things and ideas but my
self-possession). The other’s strangeness, the feeling that he or she cannot be
known, puts my autonomy into question.
Levinas calls this putting into question of autonomy teaching, and he
explicitly contrasts it with Socratic maieutics (1969, 51, 171, 204; 1987a, 49).
The other, through her or his strangeness, teaches me nonpossession, that
there is an element of the unknowable in every known; the other teaches
me alterity, exteriority, or “infinity,” as Levinas calls it. This is a teaching,
Thinking through Radical Generosity with Levinas 137
because it breaks the “closed circle of totality” (Levinas 1969, 171), the
imperialism and violence of self-knowledge that would limit the other
through the imposition of familiar ideas. It is a teaching that opens me to
the infinity or alterity of the other and so “invites me to a relation incom-
mensurate with a power exercised, be it enjoyment or knowledge” (198).
The other’s alterity is also a teaching, because it opens me to think beyond
myself and therefore beyond what I already know. This thinking provoked
by the other’s alterity is not outside of reason; it is its condition. Through
this teaching, “reason [. . .] is found to be in a position to receive” (51), “[i]n
thinking infinity the I from the first thinks more than it thinks” (Levinas 1987a,
54), and “[t]o think is to have the idea of infinity, or to be taught. Rational
thought refers to this teaching” (Levinas 1969, 204).
The other’s teaching opens me to transform what I know by founding
my responsibility, meaning literally the other’s teaching of alterity solicits a
response and is the basis of my ability to respond at all to anything. Through
the expression of alterity another being presents itself not in the “neutrality
of an image,” not as a representation of “an interior and hidden world,” but
as a solicitation, an appeal that “obliges the entering into discourse” (Levinas
1969, 200–01). Accompanying any exercise of autonomy, any attempt to
represent or objectify the other, any feeling or thought that would possess
the other through one’s own ideas, is this disturbing expression of alterity
that solicits one’s response and is its condition and potential undoing. This
“order of responsibility [. . .] is also the order where freedom is ineluctably
invoked” (200), the order that gives rise to my being affected, my agency, my
reflexivity, my capacity to think (and to the egoistic enjoyment and self-
knowledge that would dissolve it). Contrary to the model of difference that
governs liberal individualism, where the other limits my freedom to think
and act, or to Hegelian dialectics, where alterity is dissolved through thought
in the service of totality, the other’s strangeness, for Levinas, is “the first
rational teaching, the condition for all teaching” (203). The other’s otherness
is what makes me feel and makes me think what I feel.
I could respond to this teaching by forgetting the other and seeking
refuge in my own egoism (Levinas 1969, 172–73) (a forgetting of the other
that would ground feminist or any critical thinking in self-knowledge, as
Curthoys does). But there is a moral dimension to my responsibility. Accord-
ing to Levinas, the disturbing experience of the other’s alterity urges me not
to turn my back.7 Certainly I am urged not to attempt to possess the other
138 Corporeal Generosity
through my own concepts. What drives this urge is sometimes described by
Levinas in terms of the naked vulnerable humanity expressed in the other’s
face, the primordial expression “you shall not commit murder” (Levinas
1969, 199), or in terms of the idea that the teaching of alterity is a concil-
iatory rather than a hostile gesture (171). Such descriptions, while meta-
physical rather than ontological (hence, referring to the general and
fundamental basis of responsibility rather than to the content, conciliatory
or hostile, of what I respond to), seem to belong to the experience of a
secure ego unused to hostility and faced by a more humble other rather than
to a feminist philosopher dealing with conflict between her self-possession
and the saying of concepts embodied in a world that would exclude her.
There would be situations, it could be argued, where we would be wise not
to respond to the other at all. In the face of hostility or indifference, it could
be said, we have no ethical obligation to respond and hence no obligation
to think again.
However, Levinas’ point is that even the most secure ego cannot efface
the other’s alterity that is its condition, and even the most fragile ego faced
with the other’s strangeness is nevertheless “autonomous” as a result. Hence,
a feminist philosopher would not differ from any other kind of philosopher
in her self-possession, in her capacity for reflexivity, agency, or autonomy in
Levinas’ sense. Nor, therefore, would she differ in the “structure” of her
subjectivity as a reponse to the teaching of alterity, to the disturbance that
inspires sensibility as a condition of thinking. The content of what is said as
the vehicle of that disturbance, the content of what provokes the response,
will, as I have suggested, have some bearing on the itinerary of her sensibility
and her response. And to consider this content will require moving beyond
the terms of Levinas’ work in ways I will return to. The point I wish to
emphasize here is that the woman philosopher will not differ in the urge
to respond, in the order of responsibility. In accounting for the urge to
respond to the other’s strangeness as a command I cannot escape, Levinas is
gesturing toward the idea that even my turning away from the other, that
is, even the egoism of enjoyment and the self-knowledge and self-possession
of autonomy, presupposes another who cannot be possessed and for whom
my possessions are destined. While “living from . . .” or sensibility is the basis
for separation or interiority, it is given the security of a future through
“recollection” or “habitation,” through incarnate reflexivity. But this with-
drawal from the elemental, this thinking, this acting, this labor of possession,
Thinking through Radical Generosity with Levinas 139
presupposes “a relation to something I do not live from” (Levinas 1969, 170).
This is the relation to the other whose alterity not only puts my autonomy
in question and so solicits my entry into discourse but also welcomes my
possessions. Thinking, subjectivity in general, the gathering and storing of
the fruits of enjoyment, presupposes a social world of others who welcome
me, and to whom I will give what I possess. So while I live from ideas
through sensibility, I only do so because it is for others that I live. Or, as
Levinas puts it in Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, “I exist through the
other and for the other, but without this being alienation: I am inspired. This
inspiration is the psyche,” where the “psyche” is the animated body of
sensibility exposed to the other (Levinas 1981, 114, 70). It is the other
whose alterity, both questioning and welcoming, animates the body as a
precondition to thinking, lifts me above “immersion in the elementary
enjoyment of my surroundings” (Peperzak 1993, 165), sustains “enjoyment
as the body that labors” (Levinas 1969, 165), and gives enjoyment time, a
future. That responsibility in the face of the other’s alterity is an obligation
I cannot avoid rests on the conviction that it is to the other’s alterity, his or
her teaching, that I owe/give my sensibility, interiority, and “autonomy” in
the first place (216).
It is necessary to acknowledge that I have just collapsed two dimen-
sions of alterity that Levinas tends to keep apart in Totality and Infinity: the
alterity of the ethical relation, which I have argued disturbs my complacency
and so inspires creative and critical thinking, and the alterity that welcomes
rather than questions and is a precondition to recollection. This distinction
itself provokes feminist thinking insofar as Levinas describes the alterity that
welcomes as “feminine” in terms consistent with the sexism of the plane of
immanence, and he separates it from the alterity that disturbs and questions
my autonomy by saying explicitly that this “feminine alterity” is not the
alterity of the ethical relation (1969, 155). This, as well as his treatment in
Totality and Infinity of the feminine in the erotic relation, has provoked
charges that Levinas is “masculinist,” and/or that he excludes women from
the both the realm of subjectivity and from the alterity of the ethical
relation that is the condition of that realm (see, e.g., Beauvoir 1972, 16n;
Sandford 1998). Without denying the import of those charges, but in the
wake of the feminist thinking that Levinas’ sexism has provoked, it is pos-
sible, as Tina Chanter suggests, to move beyond that sexism without aban-
doning the idea that alterity might indeed be marked by sexual difference
140 Corporeal Generosity
(Chanter 1995, 207–13) and without abandoning Levinas’ insights about
creative thinking through the field of the other that I am borrowing and
transforming here. Such a move is indicated not only by the feminist think-
ing already done8 but also by aspects of Levinas’ own work with which this
thinking is engaged. First, while in Totality and Infinity Levinas deals with the
face-to-face relation separately to habitation and recollection (allowing him
to posit the two orders of alterity at issue) and apart from enjoyment and
the phenomenology of eros, he also indicates, as I have already mentioned,
that each order presupposes the other. This circularity tends to undermine
the distinction he makes between the alterity that questions and the alterity
that welcomes and any sex specificity tied to that distinction that would
exclude women from either subjectivity or the alterity of the ethical rela-
tion. Second, as Derrida argues, while the order of responsibility that is
subjectivity (and is itself a welcoming of the other) presupposes the other’s
teaching of alterity, the face, which signifies this teaching of the other, is also
a welcoming (Derrida 1999, 23). This suggests that the welcome that re-
sponsibility presupposes is not confined to the silent, discreet alterity of the
Woman in the home, but that this feminine alterity is consistent with, and
perhaps exemplary of, the welcoming of the alterity of the ethical relation.
Third, Levinas abandons the stratified analysis of Totality and Infinity alto-
gether in Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, so that it is clearer there
that all modes of subjectivity (thinking, sensation, perception, eroticism)
consist in a welcome, an openness to the other, a movement predicated on
a relationship with alterity steeped in sensibility that is not sex specific. It
is in the spirit of these considerations that I have described the relation to
the other as consisting of a welcome as well as a contestation by the other,
that I have attributed both subjectivity and otherness to women, and that
I read, retrospectively, Levinas’ thinking on creative thinking as being appli-
cable to feminist thinking.9
To be “responsible,” then, that is, to respond to teaching and therefore
to learn, “I must know how to give what I possess” (Levinas 1969, 171). The
calling into question of my self-possession requires that what I possess is
given to the other, not just the tangible products of my labor, but myself.
And this giving of one’s self-possession amounts to the opening of myself
beyond myself through discourse, conversation, language. Language, or what
Levinas later calls the saying of the said, designates my possession to the
other; it is, in Levinas’ terms, “a primary dispossession, a first donation” (173).
Thinking through Radical Generosity with Levinas 141
Rather than attempting to fit the other into my scheme of things I am put
in question, effecting the transformation of what I enjoy and suffer from
into concepts. This creation of concepts is neither an exteriorization of “a
representation preexisting in me” nor a thematization of the other; it is a
“conversation” where I offer a world put into concepts and “in which at
each instant [the other] overflows the idea a thought would carry away with
it” (174, 51).10 This is a dispossession because, in designating myself and the
world to the other, my egoism, my self-possession, is given over to the other.
It is “radical generosity,” a giving of myself that I do not choose, a movement
toward the other that does not return to itself the same (Levinas 1987b, 92;
1969, 50, 208). And as concepts, while perhaps singularities in their enjoy-
ment, become generalities when speaking the world to the other, my re-
sponsibility effects a gift of the possibility of a common world (Levinas 1969,
173).11 Thinking is a welcoming of the other and a gift, inseparable from
sensibility, an initiative through which responsibility is “exercised” without
choice, and it is motivated by alterity, by both its questioning and welcoming
dimensions (Levinas 1981, 6, 16).
While the other’s alterity transports me beyond myself, this does not
imply that I accept the other’s ideas, the content of what is said. It implies
only that I think again. Just as the other’s teaching sustains rather than
cancels enjoyment, it sustains rather than cancels autonomy. While a condi-
tion of autonomy, the teaching of alterity directs autonomy outward into
modes of living and paths of thinking beyond what I think I am and beyond
what I think I know. And whether the content of what the other says, the
ideas that he or she embodies, is hostile to or happy with the concepts I
offer makes no difference to the possibility that my complacency will be
disturbed. The other’s teaching and its ethical dimension, whatever the con-
tent, initiate meaning: it is the precondition of representation and objecti-
fication, and that which puts this under erasure. Ethics (the interruption of
autonomy and of the imperialism that this implies) is a precondition to
knowledge (the creation of concepts). It is the other’s alterity that makes me
think, rather than ideas I live from and that seem to make me what I am.
It is this alterity that provokes any gesture of expression, is necessary for its
production, and is not subsumed by the incarnate thinking that results.
But why might this experience set me on a path of thinking that is
feminist? As Levinas is concerned with the order of responsibility rather than
with its content, with ethics understood in terms of radical generosity rather
142 Corporeal Generosity
than ontology and politics, it is necessary to move beyond his thinking and
to return to points made earlier in order to answer this question.12 While
what is said is not reducible to the alterity of the saying that is its condition,
the content of what is said by the other matters (whether spoken, written,
or as a corporeal attitude that I perceive). It matters as the vehicle of that
alterity that contests my self-possession and as that which may appear to
absorb the difference by subordinating the saying to its theme (Levinas 1981,
6, 62). Hence, if the saying of the other’s alterity expresses a said that
embodies traces of the interests of men and so exhibits the world in a way
that conflicts with ideas I live from and that contribute to my existence as
a woman, then the path of thinking that this disturbance provokes is likely
to be feminist. Further, whether or not the other, male or female, is hostile
to the ideas I offer in response may make a difference in how I put myself
on the line for his or her sake. While autonomy in general is produced and
put into question by the other’s alterity, a woman who inhabits a plane of
immanence of concepts that denigrate or exclude her would find herself
doubly in question by the other’s expression of these concepts. In the face
of such hostility, there is a necessary limit to her generosity that does not
limit her responsibility of being-in-question nor the thinking that it inspires,
but that would direct what is given in response toward a “third party” as
much as toward the other who solicits it. The other who contests her is in
relation to a “third party” to whom the other is responsible and who treats
her, alongside the other she faces, as someone to be concerned about and
welcomed (Levinas 1981, 161). The feminist thinking that conflicts within
a plane of immanence inspire needs the welcoming of those other others to
be sustained. I cannot help but be given to the other in sensibility, but the
creation of concepts that this opening solicits needs other friends besides
hostile rivals, friends who through their own responsibility and generosity
would welcome those concepts and give them time without assuming that
they emerge from something in common.
To characterize feminist thinking in terms of the creation of concepts
in the face of the disturbing experience of the other’s alterity is not to
suggest that women or women who call themselves feminists are any better
at this way of thinking than anyone else. Rather, it is to say, against those
provocateurs with whom I began who would understand and assemble the
world in a self-serving way, that any philosophy, to be critical, must be open
to the teaching of the other, including the teaching of feminism. With
Thinking through Radical Generosity with Levinas 143
respect to that philosophy we might call feminist, only by responding to the
strangeness of the others with whom we dwell by giving through incarnate
thought can we produce, and indeed have produced, the concepts that
transform not just ourselves but the maleness of the planes of immanence
that we inhabit. To remain living within what we think we know would be
to relive an unproductive autonomy that exhibits the world in a way that
is familiar but doubly contests us and so haunts our lives over and over again.
To open ourselves to thinking through the affective field of the other and
to the transformations that this implies does not lessen that inspirational
sensibility, the passion for thinking, the enjoyment of ideas. But it would and
has given us time to address other problems that touch our lives that may
not be explicitly feminist.
There are countless people who have brought me the teaching of the
other: teachers, students, colleagues (both friendly and hostile), friends, fam-
ily, and children—colleagues (both male and female) without whose interest
or indifference I may not have asked myself the questions: “What is feminist
philosophy?” “What is generous thinking?”; Jean Curthoys, without whom
I may not have thought about the relation between autonomy and gener-
osity and before any of these, the vehicles of economic rationalism in my
own university, who more than anyone else in recent years have set me off
on this path of thinking through their inability to count enjoyment, the
teaching of the other, and responsibility among their performance indicators.
In response to the disturbing experience of these others, my body said to
my ego “Feel pain here!” and my ego suffered and wondered how it might
suffer no more. And that is why I was “made to think.”
Eight
Truth, Cultural Difference,
and Decolonization
IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER I explored the production and transfor-
mation of ideas in terms of what Levinas calls “radical generosity,” the giving
of my self-possession in response to the other’s teaching of alterity. Both the
teaching of alterity and this generosity, this responsibility, are necessary, I
argued, to open modes of living and paths of thinking beyond the imperi-
alism sustained by familiar ideas. In this chapter I explore this relation
between alterity, generosity, and responsibility further toward a politics of
generosity. This involves, first, elaborating in some detail, through Nietzsche’s
ideas of truth and language, how familiar ideas, concepts, and social conven-
tions effect a closure to difference in cultural as well as self-formation. The
imperialism at issue here is the European colonization of indigenous peoples
through “truth,” through the concepts of belonging that sustain the coloniz-
ing culture. That such imperialism is an affront to alterity is manifest, I will
argue, in the “lying” involved in maintaining the “truth” of the colonizing
culture. The teaching of alterity, though, issues from the testimonies of the
colonized that contest that truth. That contestation raises the question of
what this teaching of the other teaches us and how decolonization might
proceed in the interests of social justice. The claim guiding the analysis is
that decolonization, the opening of modes of living beyond the imperialism
145
146 Corporeal Generosity
sustained by the truth of colonization, rests on the ability of the colonizers
to respond to this contestation of their “truth” generously, in Levinas’ sense.
This is a generosity born of an affective corporeal response to alterity that
generates rather than closes off cultural difference. To elevate this generosity
to the status of a politics, however, requires some departures from Levinas’
understanding of radical generosity as passive and unconditional giving to
the other.
I begin with a testimony from an indigenous Australian that contests
the “good” of colonization, in particular, the assimilation policies of the
twentieth century that encouraged the removal of indigenous children from
their communities. The testimony also attests to the lying involved in main-
taining those policies:
So the next thing I remember was that they took us from there
and we went to the hospital and I kept asking—because the
children were screaming and the little brothers and sisters were
just babies of course, and I couldn’t move, they were all around
me, around my neck and legs, yelling and screaming. I was all
upset and I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t know where
we were going. I just thought: well they’re police, they must
know what they’re doing. . . . And I think on the third or fourth
day they [the police] piled us in the car and I said, “Where are
we going?” And they said, “We are going to see your mother.”
But then we turned left to go to the airport and I got a bit
panicky. (HREOC 1997, 2)1
This is part of a testimony describing the forcible removal of an indigenous
Australian and his/her seven siblings from an Aboriginal community on
Cape Barren Island, Tasmania. The eight children were not taken to see their
mother, as the police had promised, but were flown off the island and placed
in separate foster homes. This occurred not in the nineteenth century but
in the 1960s. While the incident was sanctioned by welfare policies that still
seek to protect children from neglect or abuse and under which we are all
in principle equally at risk, it was driven by highly interventionist govern-
ment and missionary policies of assimilation explicitly aimed at absorbing
Aboriginal Australians into the nonindigenous community.2 The case cited
is not isolated, nor necessarily the most disturbing. Between 1910 and 1970,
Truth, Cultural Difference, and Decolonization 147
as many as one in three indigenous children were forcibly removed from
their families and communities and placed in the care of nonindigenous
families or in state- or church-run institutions.3 These children are collec-
tively called the “Stolen Generation,” and the time these children spent apart
from their families has been referred to as the “stolen years.” Not only were
Aboriginal children deprived of their families, suffering from isolation and
sometimes abuse and exploitation with damaging long-term effects (HREOC
1997, 177–211), but the communities from which they were taken were
robbed of the means of cultural reproduction and transformation.4 This was
the aim of forcible removals, and few Aboriginal families and no Aboriginal
communities have escaped the effects of what has been described as cultural
genocide (HREOC 1997, 218).
The National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Children from Their Families was conducted between 1995
and 1997 as part of the process of attaining reconciliation between indig-
enous and nonindigenous Australians. Reconciliation, in general, is defined
as the restoration of harmony and friendship between persons who have
been estranged and, in keeping with this definition, the Council for Aborigi-
nal Reconciliation aims, through the process of reconciliation, toward “a
united Australia which respects this land of ours; values the Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander heritage and provides justice and equality for all”
(CAR n.d., 2).5 Within the eight issues the council outlines as essential to
the reconciliation process, reference is repeatedly made to the need to “share
history,” to bring to light the history of violence, dispossession, and racism
suffered by indigenous Australians and for indigenous peoples to tell their
own stories. This emphasis on testimony, telling the truth about and bearing
witness to the past, is also what shaped the National Inquiry into the
Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their
Families. Following the “van Boven principles” for the restitution, compen-
sation, and rehabilitation of victims of gross violations of human rights and
fundamental freedoms,6 the Report of the Inquiry, called Bringing Them
Home, emphasized the importance of “full and public disclosure of the
truth” about forcible removals (HREOC 1997, 3, 284). Indeed, Bringing
Them Home opens by lamenting over the fact that the Inquiry could only
hear a limited number of testimonies from indigenous witnesses (535), and
its first recommendation is that governments make full provision for the
recording, preservation, and distribution of testimonies from indigenous
148 Corporeal Generosity
peoples affected by forcible removal policies (21, 22). Equally important,
according to the Report of the Inquiry, is that such testimony be met with
an appropriate response, beginning with a formal “apology” to indigenous
peoples from all Australian Parliaments (287).
In this chapter I examine the role of truth, testimony, and apology in
the reconciliation process, although decolonization rather than reconciliation
might be a more appropriate description. It is highly unlikely that recon-
ciliation as defined would ever be fully realized given that this would require
restoration of an original harmony that to my knowledge has never existed
between indigenous and nonindigenous Australians.7 On the contrary, es-
trangement rather than unity characterizes cultural difference, and violence
rather than harmony marks the origin of colonization. Further, reconcilia-
tion based on an ideal of restitution implies what would seem to be impos-
sible: the ability to give back time. As one testimonial in Bringing Them Home
suggests, “[T]he stolen years that are worth more than any treasure are
irrecoverable” (HREOC 1997, 3). Still, if in retrospect we think that colo-
nization is characterized by theft, then decolonization requires that some-
thing be given back if justice is to be realized. The purpose of this examination
into the role of truth, testimony, and apology in the reconciliation process
is to explore the extent of what was taken with the stolen years and to
suggest what form of response, what form of giving back, would foster
a productive operation of cultural difference rather than the continuing
assimilation of the colonized into the cultures of the colonizers.8
That the truth about the past must be told for reconciliation to begin
implies that the history of colonization of Australia, and our present knowl-
edge of it, is based on lies. The principle of terra nullius is arguably the lie
that started it all. Terra nullius: land belonging to no one, the perception that,
with the exception of the coastal fringe, Australia was uninhabited at the
time of the arrival of European colonizers. That this was a land belonging
to no one was a perception that precluded acknowledgment of the land
rights of indigenous Australians for 200 years until the Mabo (No. 2) judg-
ment in 19929 and that justified their dispersal and annihilation. But was the
idea that Australia was a terra nullius really a lie or more a perception based
on historically and culturally specific concepts of belonging? Just as it is still
a common perception that Australia has an empty heart, it is likely that
Joseph Banks, the first European to officially make the judgment, really
could not see anyone or anything beyond the coastal fringe. No life could
Truth, Cultural Difference, and Decolonization 149
possibly be sustained beyond the fringe, it was and still is thought, hence,
Australia must have been a land belonging to no one. Of course, as the
European settlement crept inward, life-forms were encountered requiring
some adjustment to Banks’ initial perception. It turned out that Australia was
inhabited by strange flora and fauna and strange people. While these life-
forms were named, catalogued, and allowed some measure of cohabitation,
their discovery did not weaken the hold of terra nullius. The land was inhab-
ited but did not belong to its inhabitants in a way recognizable to the
European eye. The land was not fenced or cultivated, the flora was not
planted, and the fauna was not bred or tended. To a European sense of
belonging, to European law, there was no law; the land therefore belonged
to no one. Such European concepts of belonging guided not just the Eu-
ropean possession of land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but
also the assimilation policies that justified the forcible removal of indigenous
children throughout the twentieth century. Just as the land did not belong
to its indigenous inhabitants, those indigenous inhabitants, from a European
perspective, did not belong to the land. Living barefoot under bark, sleeping
on the ground ten to a patch, learning from the elements—this was no way
of belonging to those who lived in private houses, slept in single beds above
the ground, and learned from books.
Terra nullius is based on a concept of belonging that is not so much
a lie but a dominant perception. Like every concept, it begins from an
impression and a word for an impression then, through habit where the
word is applied to numerous dissimilar cases, the word for the impression
becomes a convention. At least this is how Nietzsche claims we arrive at
truth. Truth is an agreement between individuals about what word will stand
for the thing: “a uniformly valid and binding designation [. . .] invented for
things” (1979, 81). Or, if we take Nietzsche’s account of the metaphoric
transfer of a nerve stimulus into an image and then into a word, truth, the
word, is a designation invented for an experience, a perception, rather than
a thing (82). The word, an arbitrary designation invented for an experience,
evolves into a concept through repetition and takes on the status of truth
when the history of its invention is forgotten (84).
But if truth is an arbitrary invention, this can only be part of the story;
the arbitrary status attributed to truth does not explain what binds us to it.
According to Nietzsche, what binds us to truth are the “pleasant, life-
preserving consequences of truth” (81). We are bound to truth because we
150 Corporeal Generosity
are bound to a way of life that truth sustains. Truth is more about shared
meaning and hence social identity than it is about “adequate expression:
otherwise there would not be so many languages” (82). Truth is relative not
to an individual but to a culture; more exactly, truth is relative to language
or to the concepts or linguistic conventions that a culture embodies. Lan-
guage, for Nietzsche, is not an instrument for retrieving the truth of an
“inaccessible x.” It is a convention that constitutes and maintains a culture.
Language provides the terms of an agreement between members of a social
group by designating their relation to a world (ibid.). Language gives us a
world by facilitating understanding between members of a social group, by
giving a measure of common meaning to experience. This connection be-
tween language and social identity is echoed in a submission from the
Kimberley Language Resource Center to the National Inquiry into forcible
removals:
Language and identity are closely linked, and for many of us our
language is a symbol of identity central to our self-esteem, cul-
tural respect, and social identification. Our languages provide
more than just a way to talk to each other. They provide a way
for us to interpret the reality we see around us. The words we
use to name things, to describe feelings, understandings, and
each other, carry meanings particular to us. If we lose these
words, we lose part of ourselves. (HREOC 1997, 299)
Truth may be arbitrary, but it endures through the work of fabricating social
life and preserving the individual within the cultural group that that indi-
vidual inhabits. To say one sees otherwise than the majority is to disqualify
oneself, or be excluded, from that way of life.
But this cannot be the full story either. Can truth be constituted
through an agreement between individuals of the kind Nietzsche implies,
where individuals seem to have a choice whether to agree with linguistic
convention or get carried away by their own first impressions? If the im-
pression is not an error and its expression is not a willful lie, if Banks really
saw nothing, if the social workers of the twentieth century really saw pov-
erty, ignorance, and dis-ease among indigenous peoples, rather than just a
different way of belonging, then these perceptions were already informed by
a concept and the ethos to which that concept belongs. We could not be
Truth, Cultural Difference, and Decolonization 151
bound to truth if an impression is separate from its linguistic designation, so
that as individuals we could choose, after the event, which word belongs to
a perception and then which moral value belongs to the word.10 Rather, as
Nietzsche suggests in his later work, the impression, the experience, must
already be informed by the word and the concept and moral value that it
carries. That meaning, embodied in linguistic convention, precedes and in-
forms experience, is why Nietzsche says in his later work: “All experiences
are moral experiences even in the realm of sense perception” (1974, 174),
“everything of which we become conscious . . . [has been] interpreted through
and through” (1967, 263–64), and:
To understand one another it is not sufficient to employ the
same words; we have also to employ the same words to designate
the same inner experiences, we must ultimately have our expe-
riences in common. (Nietzsche 1973, 186)
As I discussed in more detail in chapter 1, it is through the social education
of bodies or through the mnemotechnics of pain, as Nietzsche calls it (1969,
61), that linguistic convention constitutes a shared memory of what an
experience means and so fabricates our experiences in common. However,
it is necessary to add the qualification that while linguistic convention or
meaning may precede and shape experience, the relation between the word
and the experience cannot form a seamless whole. There must be the pos-
sibility of a lapse in memory, otherwise there would not be uncommon
experience, misunderstanding, or transformation of meaning within the same
cultural group. Merleau-Ponty adds this kind of qualification to Nietzsche’s
thoughts on the relation between meaning and experience (or between
meaning and perception, to use Merleau-Ponty’s terminology) by establish-
ing in some detail a model of the intercorporeal world of perception as the
site of expression. As discussed in chapter 5, for Merleau-Ponty, the body,
through the inter-world of motility and perception, expresses both culture
(or meaning) and being. As a consequence, also argued in chapter 5, the
body, while informed by cultural convention, is, through the generosity of
intercorporeal existence, creative in its evocation of existing cultural forma-
tions in its particular assembling of being. Hence, no members of a social
group will have their experiences exactly in common. Still the salient point
here, about the relation between meaning and perception/experience, is that,
152 Corporeal Generosity
unless we are going to conclude that every encounter between indigenous
and nonindigenous Australians in the past 200 years involved pathological
lying, self-deception, and willful violence by the colonizers, then we need
to suggest that nonindigenous Australians not only believed what they saw
but also saw what they believed and, hence, that what they said they saw had
the status of truth.
This is not to excuse the violence that has been done in the name of
truth. Rather, it is to suggest that such violence could have only been done
in the name of truth understood as “honest” expression of socially bound
experience. Telling the truth matters, not because it simply sets the record
straight but because truth is central to cultural formation and self-preservation.
It has been the life-preserving consequences of truth that have allowed the
proliferation of European cultures in Australia and in other European colo-
nies. We nonindigenous inhabitants have built our ways of life under the
shelter of the truth that sustains it. But this brings us to the question of the
cost to indigenous cultures of the truth that drives us. To quote Nietzsche
again:
The importance of language for the development of culture lies
in the fact that, in language, man juxtaposed to the one world
another world of his own, a place which he thought so sturdy
that from it he could move the rest of the world from its foun-
dations and make himself lord over it. To the extent that he
believed over long periods of time in the concepts and names
of things as if they were aeternae veritates, man has acquired that
pride by which he has raised himself above the animals: he really
did believe that in language he had knowledge of the
world. . . . [I]t is the belief in found truth from which the mightiest
sources of strength have flowed. Very belatedly (only now) is it
dawning on men that in their belief in language they have
propagated a monstrous error. (Nietzsche 1984, 18-19)
On Nietzsche’s model of truth, the error of colonization is not so much that
it is based on wrong perceptions but that it is based on the belief that these
perceptions belong to a truth that is found rather than cultural convention,
and that this truth is universal and eternal rather than socially and histori-
cally specific. Put another way, in the words of Levinas, the error of colo-
Truth, Cultural Difference, and Decolonization 153
nization is the belief in a Platonic model of truth: that “the world of
meanings precedes language and culture, which express it; [and] is indifferent
to the system of signs that one can invent to make this world present to
thought” (Levinas 1987b, 84).11 This belief in found truth justifies coloniza-
tion in that, for Plato, there is a privileged culture that has access to the
world of meaning, of truth, and so can bypass historically specific cultural
conventions. This privileged culture is that of Western reason, that of the
lovers and guardians of absolute truth who by their claim to access appar-
ently eternal Ideas win the right to rebuild the world in the image of these
Ideas. But from the perspective of an anti-Platonism, to build a way of life
upon the basis of the assumption that truth is found, eternal, and universal
involves lying. It is this other side of truth, the lying involved, that charac-
terizes colonization, that attests to the alterity that colonization offends, and
that supports the destruction of the cultures of the colonized.
On the basis of a Nietzschean model of truth, there are three kinds
of lying. The first is unconscious lying “according to fixed convention”
(Nietzsche 1979, 84). This kind of lying is central to truth. Being bound to
truth involves lying in several ways: linguistic convention informs experience
by universalizing different perceptions under a single concept; giving the
expressed perception the status of truth involves forgetting that truth is
constructed; and imposing one’s own cultural perspective on others involves
denying the possibility of other perspectives. But this kind of lying is un-
conscious and to a certain extent “innocent.” It proceedes through conven-
tions that one has inherited, and if preservation of social life is the consequence
of truth, then one would have a social duty to lie unconsciously in this way
(ibid). The second kind of lying involves “misus[ing] fixed conventions by
means of arbitrary substitutions or reversals of names” (81). Again, this can
be “innocent,” a matter of just seeing things differently to the majority
because one’s experience is informed by different conventions or is in some
other way uncommon. What Foucault calls “reverse discourse,” where power
and knowledge realign to reverse the value of categories in strategies of
resistance, would fall under this kind of lying (Foucault 1980a, 100–01), as
would the views of the minority of white humanitarians whose voices of
protest, based on uncommon perceptions of the injustice done to indig-
enous peoples, have accompanied 200 years of colonization in Australia—
what Henry Reynolds calls “this whispering in our hearts” (Reynolds 1998).
Or, misuse of convention may be a deliberate misreporting of one’s experience.
154 Corporeal Generosity
In any of these modes, such misuse of convention is destructive of conven-
tion rather than life preserving and, as Nietzsche suggests, a social group will
exclude the liar, the colonizers will revile the humanitarian dissident, not so
much because of the “deception” itself but because of the harmful effects
that such lying has on the stability of the dominant culture (Nietzsche 1979,
81). The third kind of lying, which Nietzsche tends to overlook, is willful
lying in order to preserve truth.12 While it may seem paradoxical to say
preserving truth requires willful lying, it is precisely this kind of lying that
Plato recommends to the guardians of truth who seek to embody eternal
Ideas in the structure of the state. Medicinal or noble lying is necessary to
implement absolute truth in the face of the expression of bodily appetite,
as opposed to “reason” or to counter what is taken to be entrenched opinion
and belief.13
It is this third kind of lying that attests most obviously to the presence
of cultural difference and is perhaps most symptomatic that colonization is
taking place. Bringing Them Home notes the extraordinary amount of willful
lying, sanctioned by law, that was necessary to support the policies of forcible
removal of indigenous children. “We are going to see your mother,” rather
than “We are going to fly you out of here,” “Your parents are dead,” rather
than “I’m not going to tell you where they are,” “Your family is free to visit
you,” rather than “We’ve told them it would be better if they don’t.” In the
mouths of those who are bound by European modes of belonging, such
willful lying is not necessarily designed to harm. Rather, it is designed to
sever others from foreign ways of life deemed harmful to what is perceived
to be the common good. But precisely because the good is not common,
truth is not universal and eternal, such willful lying has been as harmful to
its targets as any “misuse of convention” is to the dominant culture. What
looks, from a European perspective, like medicinal lying to counter mere
opinion, belief, and myth has effectively undermined the threads of truth
that hold together these other ways of life. So while such lying may have
enabled European life, it has served to disassemble indigenous cultures in
Australia through the sense of abandonment it bestowed on the stolen
children and through the doubt, shame, and sense of inadequacy about
indigenous ways of belonging that it has fostered in the communities from
which they were taken.14 In the final analysis, if we admit to more than one
set of cultural conventions, there is little to separate the noble or willful lie
from misuse of convention, insofar as destruction of culture is characteristic
Truth, Cultural Difference, and Decolonization 155
of both; “misuse of convention” undermines the colonizing culture while
the “noble lie” erodes the cultures of the colonized. Finally, such destruction
could not take place if it was not supported by the forgetting characteristic
of lying “innocently” or unconsciously according to fixed convention. Truth
is likely to become more life denying the more it forgets it is convention
and hence the more inflexible it becomes. Belief in found truth involves
absolute forgetting, a totalizing gesture requiring a force of lying and pos-
session so insistent and immoderate that one has to question the strength of
the belief in found truth that underpins it.
Terra nullius, then, while true to one law, is really, as Robyn Ferrell
argues, an “admission of ignorance” of other laws, other truths, other ways
of belonging and, most important, of the aesthetic qualities of the law itself
(1998, 316). And if truth has these aesthetic qualities of establishing, trans-
forming, and preserving social relations, then we need to admit that the
truth of terra nullius has been a judgment that has passed sentence on any
original indigenous cultures, to such an extent that it is hard to tell the
difference any more, at least from the perspective of the colonizers. Beyond
the truth of any pure origin, what has been taken with the stolen years is
the truth of indigenous experiences of colonization, and with this the pos-
sibility of cultural formations emerging beyond poor relatives of the domi-
nant culture. So given the extent of cultural annihilation effected on the
word of terra nullius, what is the point in soliciting and witnessing in the
present indigenous testimonies of their experience of the past? The answer,
as I will go on to argue, lies in a particular understanding of how the present
is tied to the past. With this understanding, witnessing indigenous testimo-
nies about the past in the present would allow us to give back the stolen
years and thus give cultural difference a chance.
The truth of colonization, its social and individual embodiments, has
a history that ties the present to the past. If we consider history to be linear
or horizontal, where everything seems to progress as if the present is a
product of the past, then just as individuals are the result of previous gen-
erations, of their errors, passions, and crimes, so the current state of
Aboriginality as well as the privilege enjoyed by many nonindigenous cul-
tures in this country are the product of the truth of terra nullius upheld by
the related errors of colonization. Moira Gatens (1997) argues, partly on the
basis of this horizontal notion of history, that insofar as the past endures in
the present social imaginary, then we have a collective responsibility for the
156 Corporeal Generosity
past and therefore for any harm to indigenous cultures that endures in the
present. But Gatens also suggests that on the basis that the meaning of the
past is contested in the present, we have a responsibility to engage with these
other self-constituting narratives, these other truths, and to thereby “open
the past to its own latent possibilities for change in our present” (12). That
the way the past constitutes the present could be altered in the present
implies that history is not only linear but also vertical, an idea of history
upon which I believe the possibility of the promise of decolonization rests.15
Behold this eternally recurring gateway called the moment, says
Nietzsche, from which a path leads backward to eternity and another con-
tradictory pathway leads forward to eternity (Nietzsche 1978, 157–58). This
is the idea of vertical history, where the past and future extend out of the
present and where the future contradicts the past. As I argued in more detail
in chapter 1, through this formulation of eternal recurrence, Nietzsche is
suggesting a return to the self, a self-relation, involving a kind of temporality
where the self neither escapes the past (linear history) nor simply repeats it
(cyclic time). By defining history as extending from the present moment,
Nietzsche is suggesting that one temporalizes oneself by recreating the past
in a projection toward a different future. However, the future only contra-
dicts the past, the self only returns differently to itself, if the truth that
constitutes the self and its culture in the present moment is unsettled. This
unsettling of truth involves a reinterpretation of the past that constitutes the
present, and this reinterpretation is mobilized through the operation of
memory and forgetting.
In “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Nietzsche
makes much of how a healthy culture, that is, a culture that is stable but
open to change, needs both tradition (a memory) and forgetting. But he says
little there about the actual operation of forgetting and how, in conjunction
with memory, forgetting could be a positive activity. Contrary to the usual
understanding of forgetting as a passive and negative force where the past
recedes through a loss of objects and images, forgetting along with a selec-
tive memory, as I have already indicated in the earlier account of uncon-
scious lying according to convention, can be understood as a creative activity
that constitutes truth. The idea that present perception involves both memory
and forgetting can also be put in terms of vertical history. To rephrase Galen
Johnson’s account of Merleau-Ponty on forgetting: Remembering is a fig-
uring of the past that includes differentiation of the past from the present,
Truth, Cultural Difference, and Decolonization 157
a differentiation that produces a perception of the past; forgetting is a fig-
uring of the past without differentiation where the past is not lost but
subsumed within the present without being actually perceived (Johnson
1993, 204–05).16 Or, as Merleau-Ponty himself puts it: Memory “spreads out
in front of us like a picture, a former experience, whereas this past that
remains our true present [by adhering to the body through habit] does not
leave us but remains constantly hidden behind our gaze instead of being
displayed before it” (1962, 83). Forgetting by itself may be therapeutic for the
way it allows past meaning to inform present perception and hence cultural
activities without effort. (Forgetting, on the part of the colonizers, allows their
own habitual perception to dominate without noticing and without the pos-
sibility of being open to the new and the different.) And memory, by itself,
may install personal and social stability by allowing perceptions of the past to
reinforce confidence in the present. But, by themselves, memory and forget-
ting are ideal functions that change nothing. Rather, like the relation between
truth and lies, there is a passage between memory and forgetting, forgetting
and memory. Together and in this passage, memory and forgetting enact a
rearticulation of differentiation of the past from the present, altering present
meaning and hence perception, self-identity, and cultural formation.
This suggests that the expression of indigenous memories, testimonies
of their experiences of colonization, does not consist in raking over the past
for its own sake but represents a positive activity of self- and cultural ref-
ormation, a taking back of the stolen years. This is a memorialization of a
past that is forgotten by the colonizers but that contests the truth that holds
the colonizers in their dominant position. But this reinterpretation is occur-
ring in a climate of the absolute forgetting that characterizes colonization.
Either these testimonies are met with denial by the colonizers of this other
past, and with this absolute forgetting there is a “disarticulation of past from
presence” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 197), a closing up of differentiation, so that
the truth of terra nullius informs the present habitual assembling of being so
thoroughly that nothing new can be seen—or, indigenous testimonies are
not disputed but are countered with the memories of white Australians who
remain proud of their own past, their own culture, and who claim a present
supposedly uncontaminated by the assimilation policies that have done dam-
age to indigenous cultures.17
Levinas, like Nietzsche, not only points to the creative aspect of such
a self-serving memory in its constitution of truth and the self, but he also
158 Corporeal Generosity
points to its colonizing aspect. In Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence he,
in a manner not inconsistent with Merleau-Ponty, equates memory with
representation, consciousness, and the assembling of identity in the language
of the said. But in a departure from Merleau-Ponty, Levinas suggests that
memory, caught in the domain of ontology, belongs to a consciousness that
would disclose being by reducing what is other to the same. Time is the
difference between present and past and, for ontology, “time is reminiscence”
(Levinas 1981, 29). Reminiscence is the exposition of being that assembles
“the dispersal of duration into nouns and propositions” (26–27), into the
clarity and security of the said, into themes. While reminiscence is prompted
by an “ex-ception,” a difference in being between past and present and
between the “who” speculating and the “what” disclosed, a “getting out of
phase of the instant” and the “divergence of the identical from itself ” (28),
memory recuperates this difference, gathers the past into the present project,
the other into the same (29). Understood in these terms, the subject of
memory, who is also the subject of truth, establishes itself as an entity (a
“who” that is a “what”), recovers from any “disruption of identity that the
movement of temporalization provokes,” and secures itself in the present of
the said (Durie 1999, 47).18 In such an operation of memory as a response
to indigenous testimonies, nothing about the colonizing subject or his or
her culture is altered or lost in the process: the subject just represents,
rediscovers itself simultaneously with the totality of being, and returns to
itself the same. This subject endures in the self-identity of consciousness and
is closed in on and at home with itself.
I have suggested that in a Nietzschean model of truth, any expressed
perception, any testimony, must be repeated before it can begin the work of
truth and hence the work of cultural formation and self-preservation. And
to be iterable, a testimony, bearing witness, must in turn be witnessed,
acknowledged by others. What is missing from the truth that mobilizes
colonization is a particular kind of strength required to bear witness to
indigenous testimonies, a strength that enables the admission of the new and
the different without violence, a strength born in the passage between
memory and forgetting. Bearing witness in the interval between memory
and forgetting involves being bound to truth in a way “delicate enough to
be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by
every wind” (Nietzsche 1979, 85). For the truth of terra nullius, for this
eternal recurrence of the same, to be unsettled, for the future to contradict
Truth, Cultural Difference, and Decolonization 159
the past, indigenous testimonies must affect the fabric of dominant culture.
Indigenous Australians are creating waves; the rest of us must bear witness
and respond.
Pity, a sympathetic emotion directed toward another’s pain and suffer-
ing, has, along with expressions of regret, been the most common response
in Australia, both official and unofficial, to indigenous testimonies about the
forcible removal of indigenous children. A notable exception is the govern-
ment of New South Wales, on behalf of which the premier, Bob Carr, has
extended a full apology to Aboriginal peoples for its “own role in endorsing
policies and actions . . . [that] continue to inflict grief and suffering upon
Aboriginal families and communities” (HREOC 1997, 287). Other official
responses have tended to express pity and regret without responsibility, ac-
knowledging how past mistakes of governments have adversely affected
Aboriginal cultures and admitting that in taking land and children we,
through ignorance and prejudice, failed to “imagine these things being done
to us . . . [and so] failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us”
(286).19 But this recognition of past mistakes, of a failure of imagination, and
of the suffering that has resulted comes with a refusal to acknowledge
“inter-generational guilt,” as current Australian Prime Minister John Howard
puts it. And it comes with the kind of self-serving memories mentioned
earlier. For the vast majority of us, those indigenous memories do not seem
to intersect with our own: they mark times and places where we were not
present and recount suffering caused by acts that were not our own. More-
over, those acts of theft of land and children sprang from attitudes about
cultural difference that we supposedly no longer hold. In staking a claim for
our own memories against those of indigenous Australians, we are implying
that there are at least two histories, two sets of memories that do not
intersect, at least not any more. To stand accused, to suggest that indigenous
memories do have something to do with me, to apologize for past acts and
attitudes of others, would be to take responsibility for acts that were not my
own; it would be to take a “black arm-band” approach to history, to dwell
in the past of colonization rather than the present of multiculturalism, plu-
ralism, and tolerance of difference. Or at least this is how the argument that
would avoid responsibility proceeds. We are sorry but not responsible.
Martha Nussbaum points out that pity, insofar as it is endorsed as a
beneficial human emotion from the Stoics through the egalitarian thinkers,
such as Rousseau, is understood to rest on three beliefs: that the suffering
160 Corporeal Generosity
of the other is “significant rather than trivial”; that the “suffering was not
caused by the person’s own fault”; and the belief in some kind of commu-
nity or sense of commonness between myself and the other so that the
other’s suffering suggests a possibility for me (Nussbaum 1994, 141–42). It
is this third aspect of pity, that the other is like me, hence, their suffering
could be mine, that perhaps explains why shedding light on the impact of
forcible removal policies on indigenous Australians has touched more
nonindigenous Australians than the issue of land rights has or ever could. (As
we all are or have been either a child or a parent or both, then we can
“imagine these things being done to us.”) But it is this assumption of
commonness that suggests that pity is neither a sufficient nor an appropriate
response. Pity, according to Nietzsche, is the most egotistical and self-serving
of all the human sentiments. Not only is pity of little benefit to the sufferer
but, he says, it is a vehicle of domination and appropriation of the other
(Nietzsche 1974, 175–76). Pity is egotistical, because it interprets the other’s
suffering in terms of one’s own experience and so “strips away from the
suffering of others whatever is distinctly personal” (269). What is distinctly
personal about suffering, for Nietzsche, is that it is, like any self-expression,
an aspect of self-temporalization and, hence, self-reformation: a process of
reinterpreting one’s past, of healing wounds, of shedding the old and open-
ing the new (ibid.). To respond to indigenous testimony of their own suf-
fering with pity and without responsibility, without generosity, would be to
risk subsuming this emerging truth and its accompanying cultural formation
under the truth of the dominant culture. Pity, so understood, is just another
mode of assimilation.
Pity, as a mode of assimilation, exemplifies a self that denies its open-
ness to the other. In pity, the self is disturbed by its own possibilities but
remains undisturbed by any alterity that the other’s suffering might suggest.
Also undisturbed is the self-knowledge, the truth, that holds the pitier in
place. But this denial of one’s openness to the other is just that: a denial. It
is a denial that the privilege and stability many Australians currently enjoy
is based on a history of assimilation and a degradation of the difference of
indigenous cultures. Pity, with its assumption of commonness, along with
policies of land acquisition and forcible removal of children and their as-
sumptions of absolute truth are in Levinas’ words denials of “the trace of the
other in me,” as are those responses to indigenous memories that affirm
one’s own relation to the past and deny any connection to the plight of
Truth, Cultural Difference, and Decolonization 161
others. But of this self-serving memory, Levinas asks: What accounts for the
“getting out of phase of the instant” that provokes the gathering of remi-
niscence in the first place? What disrupts identity and so prompts memory?
Levinas’ provisional answer is that there must be a “temporality beyond
reminiscence,” “diachrony,” an immemorial past, a lapse of time that cannot
be recuperated through memory (1981, 30). That I do reminisce, that I am
out of phase with myself, attests to this past: not to my historical past or to
the historical past of others but to a relation to alterity that has never been
present (24). That I am, that my identity is disturbed, that I reminisce and
speak, attests to the saying that is a condition of the said, to “a being affected
by the other whom I do not know” (25). I am this exposure to and
movement toward the other that cannot be put to rest by the memories, the
said, that it provokes. So while in response to indigenous memories many
nonindigenous Australians would assert their own and so cleanse themselves
of fault, those very responses contain what they would deny: a trace of the
other in me.
This trace of the other, of alterity or irreducible difference, is Levinas’
explanation for how multiple meanings and hence multiple cultures arise at
all. In “Meaning and Sense,” Levinas argues, in an analysis of different models
of the relation between reality and meaning, that it is through exposure to
the other’s alterity that multiple meanings and hence multiple cultures arise
(Levinas 1987b). He poses this thesis about the production of meaning and
culture not just against the intellectualism and its notion of absolute truth
that has justified colonization and assimilation but also against the multi-
culturalism that would now regret colonization and deny responsibility for
it. Insofar as we may now regret the imperialism of indigenous cultures and
the suffering it has caused in favor of cultural diversity and multiculturalism,
then, according to Levinas, we would hold to another model of the relation
between reality and meaning than the Platonic, one more in keeping with
the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. While not addressing
Nietzsche’s anti-Platonism, what Levinas says of the phenomenological model
of the relation between reality and meaning is also true of what I have
discussed about Nietzsche’s model of the relation between reality and truth.
For this anti-Platonism, as with Nietzsche’s, there is no common world, no
prelinguistic reality that would justify the assimilation of different cultures
under the way of seeing and belonging of the colonizers. Language, for
Merleau-Ponty no less than for Nietzsche, assembles meaning and being,
162 Corporeal Generosity
including the being of the one who speaks and is dependent on the
sociohistorical context of the speaker and the listener (Levinas 1987b, 77).
The corporeal expression of meaning is therefore creative of being and
culture. For both Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty, being is thus assembled and
expressed in diverse ways. This diversity of cultural expression, this
multiculturalism, “is not, for Merleau-Ponty, a betrayal of being, but is re-
sponsible for the glitter of the inexhaustible richness of its event” (Levinas
1987b, 83). All of these expressions, all of these cultures, are on the same
plane and equally true, for truth on this account “is inseparable from its
historical expression,” without which it would be nothing (ibid).
Without denying that meaning and culture are created, that cultural
expression is a work rather than a given, Levinas questions the indifference to
cultural difference that he claims this phenomenological model of the produc-
tion of cultural diversity implies. A work, a cultural gesture, does not arise at
random in isolation from others and would not arise at all, Levinas insists, if
there were not an “orientation . . . a leap, an outside-of-oneself toward the
other than oneself” (90). This radical alterity toward which the work is orien-
tated is “not only the collaborator and the neighbor of our cultural work of
expression or the client of our artistic production, but the interlocutor . . . whose
presence is already required for my cultural gesture of expression to be pro-
duced” (95). Without this orientation toward alterity, we would have to assume
that culturally bound meanings arise at random, that different cultures are
incommensurable, and that we are indifferent to cultural difference (88–89).
On the contrary, says Levinas, colonization is testimony to the interpenetration
of cultures, we are obsessed with cultural difference and, as I have argued with
reference to Levinas in chapter 7, the production of knowledge, truth, and
culture arises from our orientation toward it. This alterity cannot itself be
known or eliminated, but it is felt in our experience of the other’s strangeness.
I am, my culture, bears witness to this alterity that disturbs it and without
which I would be nothing. As this exposure to alterity is a condition of self-
constitution and cultural production, there is always a trace of the other in the
work that I am in the process of becoming. And this trace marks a debt to
the other that cannot be repaid (Levinas 1981, 111). White responses to
indigenous testimonies of the past in the present, whether expressing pity or
recalling another more familiar past, are works of orientation toward the
alterity that disturbs and solicits the response.
It can also be argued that those indigenous testimonies would be
nothing without the witness that I am in response. This claim may mark a
Truth, Cultural Difference, and Decolonization 163
departure from Levinas, insofar as he insists that the orientation toward the
other that produces cultural expression is one way and not reversible (i.e.,
the other comes first and is not dependent on my response, and the obli-
gation to respond is not recpirocal). However, without resorting to reciproc-
ity, Levinas does suggest repeatedly in Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence
that while the alterity to which I bear witness “does not show itself to me,
save through the trace of its reclusion, as the face of the neighbor,” it also
“becomes present only in my own voice” (1981, 140). My response matters
for the cultural reformation that these testimonies would effect to find fertile
ground. If decolonization is to proceed, it matters that my response does not
deny the other, even if my voice, and the said it speaks, would attempt to
settle the matter. For, as Derrida argues in exploring the undecidability of
who comes first in Levinas (the other’s face or my welcome as exposure to
alterity), just as there is no welcome without the other’s face, there is no face
without the welcome, without the being-given to the other, without the
witness to alterity that I am (Derrida 1999, 25).
In Levinas’ model of the relation between reality and cultural meaning,
then, beneath what is perceived or said, beneath the categories of language
that suppress and totalize differences in the formation of culture, is the
condition of the said; not a commonness but an exposure to alterity that is
inseparable from articulation of a multiplicity of cultural meanings yet
unsubsumed within them (Levinas 1981, 45–60). That I bear witness to
cultural difference even as I would recover myself through pity, regret, or
memory suggests the possibility that the meaning of terra nullius that secures
my culture and soothes my ego can be unsettled. And I am suggesting that
this disturbance issues from the strangeness of the testimonies of others I
have not literally faced. The content of what is said in those testimonies
matters not in terms of proof, or of evidence, or of the truth of indigenous
experience. In any case, these testimonies cannot be judged in terms of
evidence by a law that has been built on their erasure, or by memories for
which they are out of reach. Rather (although Levinas would not put it this
way), the content of what is said in these testimonies matters as the vehicle
for the contestation of my truth, as the means by which the contestation of
the truth of the dominant culture is effected.
This may mark a second departure from Levinas (or at least from some
of his commentators) insofar as Levinas describes the alterity that calls me
into question in terms of the “nudity” of the other’s face (1981, 140; 1987,
96), and insofar as his commentators describe this in terms of “another’s
164 Corporeal Generosity
looking at me” rather than “any text or work” (Peperzak 1993, 164). This
suggests that the condition for orientation toward the other may be imme-
diate contact with the invisible within the visible of the face rather than
contact with the invisible in words or other vehicles of cultural expressivity.
After all, Levinas insists that this alterity is not a representation of the other
but a “bareness without any cultural ornament,” a surplus that breaks through
his or her form. Still, this alterity is a surplus of form that breaks through
“in the midst of the production of its form” (Levinas 1987b, 96), which can
be said to be in the midst of the production of form through words. While
the “signifyingness of the trace” of alterity is exemplified in a face, Levinas
also admits that it can lie in a cultural form after the face has receded: it “lies
in, for example, the writing and the style of a letter, in all that brings it about
that during the emission of a message, which we capture on the basis of the
letter’s language and sincerity, someone passes, purely and simply” (105). The
other manifests herself to me in divesting herself of form through words by
which she would speak to me. And the other can still divest herself through
words after a face as such insofar as these words have the power to touch
me, in her absence, through the epiphany of the other they carry. What
disturbs is the alterity that is surplus to and the condition of those indig-
enous testimonies. The saying of the stolen generations to which we bear
witness, the strangeness of indigenous testimonies by which I am affected
and that solicit my response, is testimony to the truth of alterity and hence
testimony to my lies, to the way that not everything can be captured in my
present, in my truth, by my memory. That these testimonies solicit a re-
sponse is testimony to an immemorial past, testimony to a difference that
cannot be remembered nor absolutely forgotten (Levinas 1981, 51). The
eternal recurrence that Nietzsche suggests characterizes the self ’s relation to
itself is, for Levinas, the eternal recurrence of this relation to alterity (110–
11). In moving outside myself in the face of the other’s testimony, I return
to myself disturbed; the truth that constitutes my present is unsettled.
Neither pity nor regret for the past mistakes of others allows this
unsettling to take effect in any concrete way. Regret for the acts of others
gives nothing other than a shelter for oneself. For the other’s testimony to
strip our egos of their “pride and the dominating imperialism characteristic
of [them]” (Levinas 1981, 110), we need to accept that the testimonies about
forcible removals, for example, contest our truth, put into question our
affirmation of ourselves and our confidence in our culture. To endure this
Truth, Cultural Difference, and Decolonization 165
contestation without evasion, without denying the trace of the other in
ourselves, requires that we pass from pity for the other’s suffering to ques-
tioning ourselves. This response of being-in-question amounts to responsi-
bility for the other; a being-given to the other without thought of return;
a movement toward the other that answers, without annulling, the debt to
the other incurred in the constitution of oneself and one’s culture.
In Totality and Infinity, Levinas considers this being-given to the other
in terms of apology (1969, 240–47). Based on this, I want to argue that a
full, open apology to indigenous Australians would be a minimal condition
of such a response of being-in-question, an initiative through which respon-
sibility could be enacted. But to say that responsibility could be an initiative
enacted through an act of Parliament risks departing from Levinas a third
time. The apology that Levinas refers to is that characteristic of the self open
to the contestation and accusation issuing from alterity, the self of infinite
responsibility in its apologetic position (ibid). The “I” disturbed by the other
is apologetic because, while it “cannot renounce the egoism of its existence
[that colonizes through the said] . . . the very fact of being in conversation
[of responding] consists in recognizing that the Other has a right over this
egoism” (240). Apology, as Levinas understands it, is a movement toward the
other that, while asserting itself, inclines itself before others that call it to
infinite responsibility, and that would judge it as not the origin of itself but
responsible for others. This apology is a “risky uncovering of the self ”
(Levinas 1981, 48), an exposure to others, that “empties the I of its impe-
rialism” (Levinas 1987b, 97), a witness to alterity that commands me “to give
to the other taking the bread out of my own mouth, and making a gift of
my own skin” (Levinas 1981, 138). But apology is not an attitude I will, a
position I elect, or a response I consent to. This apology, this bearing witness
to cultural difference as the disturbance that I am, this responsibility of
being-in-question, is a passivity, a being affected by the other that I do not
choose. On the other hand, an apology enacted deliberately in the theme
of the said would be, like those self-serving memories discussed earlier,
where consciousness attempts to regain self-control (102), as if to discharge
the debt, annul the guilt, and so betray the apology by which I would
welcome cultural difference.
The difference between the nonvolitional, unconditional apology called
for by the other and the apology elected by me is the difference, remarked
by Levinas, between ethics and politics, where ethics is not reducible to but
166 Corporeal Generosity
a condition of politics (1969, 64). As I will discuss in more detail in chapter
9, politics for Levinas lies in the realm of the said, conscious judgment, and
memorialization that effect an ontological closure to the other. This distinc-
tion between ethics and politics is problematic. Just as there is no face
without the welcome and no surplus of the other’s form without the pro-
duction of form through the words the other leaves behind, there is, as
Bernasconi argues in his account of the “third,” no ethics without politics
and no saying without the said (Bernasconi 1999, 86).20 While Levinas says
that the witness of “bottomless passivity of responsibility” is betrayed by the
said, by thematization in the form of a spoken apology, for example, he also
says that “[t]hematization is inevitable,” and that it is “[i]n the play activating
the cultural keyboard of language . . . [that] witness signifies by the very
ambiguity of every said” (1981, 151–52; c.f. 164). There is no witness to
cultural difference, no apology as responsibility, without the said, without the
act of apology that would betray it. In other words, there is no unconditional
generosity, no being-given to the other that is not also caught in cultural
self-expressions. These expressions are ambiguous and not essentially des-
tined to serve the self to the other’s detriment. The other inspires, provokes,
accuses, and contests, and I cannot help but respond. And while apology as
a political act may risk converting exposure to the other into “egotistical
pride” (142) it would also, if open without expectation of return, dismantle
the shelter to myself and my culture provided by those official expressions
of pity and regret accompanied by self-serving memories.
Such open apology to indigenous Australians would bear witness to
the trace of the other within our cultural formations, without thematizing
what it bears witness to (146). It would put our culture, our truths, our ways
of belonging in question without insisting on controlling where that ques-
tioning would lead. Apology, in other words, is consistent with the radical
generosity discussed in chapter 8: a primary dispossession, a giving back, not
simply of land and children and other acquisitions but a giving of oneself
and one’s culture. This is a generosity provoked by the other, a movement
toward the other that does not return to itself the same. As responsibility of
being-in-question, apology is a “work” that envisages a future without me,
a work of cultural formation for a world beyond one’s own time, one’s own
memory (Levinas 1987b, 92–93). The question remains, though, whether we
are strong enough to endure indigenous memories, whether we are bound
to truth in a way open enough to be carried along by the waves, strong
enough to not be blown apart by every wind.
Nine
Generosity, Community,
and Politics
IF WE TAKE UP one thread of Nietzsche’s thinking, community is a
sociohistorical formation built by truth, by language, which, through the
mnemotechniques of pain, through the discipline of a body-memory, con-
stitutes our experience in common. By concepts we share, those of us who
belong to the one social body will see the same leaf and share an under-
standing of its nature, we will build bridges together and understand their
purpose, and we will look at each other with recognition of the passions and
reasons that drive us. In such a community, the leaf, the bridge, and the
other, no less than the self who perceives and understands them, are cultural
works built from linguistic concepts that we share and that give us our
experience in common. Nietzsche, as indicated in chapters 1 and 8, is not
happy with the exclusion of unique experience that this community re-
quires. He would admit a kind of multiculturalism, a tolerance of difference
based on the generosity of those individuals and communities strong enough
to endure transgression of the concepts upon which their experience and
cultural works are built.
Levinas, on the other hand, thinks that the generosity that welcomes
cultural difference is of a different order, as is the experience that provides the
basis of community formation. He is critical of any conception of community
167
168 Corporeal Generosity
that bases sociality on shared experience. This, he says, grounds our relation to
exteriority in knowledge we already embody, knowledge that strips the other
of its alterity in building a culture in which nothing remains foreign (Levinas
1998, 180). For Levinas, on the other hand, community formation is based on
generosity. But, as we have seen in chapters 6 and 7, generosity for Levinas is
not a virtue belonging to a volitional subject or an excess of power that,
through self-overcoming, enhances the existence of those secure in their form;
generosity is the passivity of exposure to the irreducible difference of the other
that both bases subjectivity in disturbed sensibility and opens that subjectivity
to discourse through which cultural works are given. Beneath the community
of commonness grounded in the said of language is the community of the
saying, of exposure to alterity, or to borrow the words of Alphonso Lingis, “the
community of those who have nothing in common.”
Before the rational community, there was the encounter with
the other, the intruder. The encounter begins with the one who
exposes himself to the demands and contestations of the other.
Beneath the rational community, its common discourse of which
every lucid mind is but the representative and its enterprises in
which the efforts and passions of each are absorbed and deper-
sonalized, is another community, the community that demands
that the one who has his own communal identity, who produces
his own nature, expose himself to the one with whom he has
nothing in common, the stranger.
This other community is not simply absorbed into the ratio-
nal community; it recurs, it troubles the rational community, as
its double or its shadow.
This other community forms not in a work, but in the in-
terruption of work and enterprises. It is not realized in having
or producing something in common but in exposing oneself to
the one with whom one has nothing in common: to the Aztec,
the nomad, the guerrilla, the enemy. The other community forms
when one recognizes, in the face of the other, an imperative. An
imperative that not only contests the common discourse and
community from which he or she is excluded, but everything
one has or sets out to build in common with him or her. (Lingis
1994, 10–11)
Generosity, Community, and Politics 169
How are we to understand the connection between these two communities?
What is the connection, if any, between the community constituted by
shared linguistic concepts that would admit cultural difference only through
the generosity of those who, secured by a cultural identity, can afford to
overlook, and so make good, the disruption that difference brings, and the
other community where generosity, as passive sensibility, is born of that
disruption and is not subsumed in the cultural gestures that are produced as
a result? The connection between the two has been hinted at in previous
chapters but will be addressed more directly here. The question of the
connection between the two is the question of the politics of generosity that
would produce rather than close off cultural difference in the transformation
of community.
Politics, like morality, whether international, national, local, or per-
sonal, is fundamentally about the organization of society for the improve-
ment of human survival (Levinas 1986, 29). It is about the regulation of
differences and of exchange, the prevention of harm from one’s enemies, the
promotion and maintenance of some values over others. Politics therefore
presupposes judgment, decision, and knowledge; judgment about what is
good for one’s survival and knowledge of the other, of the difference be-
tween an enemy and a friend, and of the difference between the source of
harm and good.1 That politics presupposes judgment, decision, and knowl-
edge, and that judgment, decision, and knowledge involve consciousness, is
why Levinas distinguishes politics from the ethical relation to the other and
therefore from the generosity of exposure to alterity. He makes the distinc-
tion in order to save alterity from reduction to the Same that is characteristic
of conscious judgment. The moral-political order is inspired and directed by
ethical responsibility to the other (“the ethical norm of the interhuman”),
and not the other way around (30).
In one of his many formulations of the relation between the political
and the ethical orders, Levinas suggests that it is by the human capacity to
repress the passivity of exposure, nonvolitional generosity, saying, that we are
political:
[M]an can repress his saying, and this ability to keep silent, to
withhold oneself, is the ability to be political. Man can give him-
self in saying to the point of poetry—or he can withdraw into the
nonsaying of lies. Language as saying is an ethical openness to the
170 Corporeal Generosity
other; as that which is said—reduced to a fixed identity or syn-
chronized presence—it is an ontological closure to the other.
(Levinas 1986, 29)
Politics, the organization of society for the improvement of human survival
that presupposes judgment, is an ontological closure to the other, reduction
of difference, parsimony. If politics presupposes withholding oneself in a
moment of judgment, then the politics of generosity, the decision and judg-
ment about whether to welcome the other’s difference, is a suppression of
the generosity of exposure to alterity that I am, despite myself. Just as the
political act of apology, discussed in the previous chapter, risks “repressing”
and so betraying the apology of exposure to the other that is its condition,
so does any generous act risk betraying the generosity that exposes me to
those with whom I have nothing in common. But this separation of politics
and ontology from ethics, the said from the saying, implies that the said of
language that organizes the social and constitutes our experience in com-
mon comes after and does not inform the saying that bears witness to
alterity in my encounter with the other. Similarly, the separation of politics
and ontology from ethics implies that the realm of the said, conceptualization,
knowledge, and judgment comes after, and may be inspired and interrupted
by, the affectivity or sensibility characteristic of exposure to the other, but
does not inform that sensibility. I have already suggested in chapter 8, by
questioning this separation and following Derrida, Bernasconi, and others,
that just as there is no said without the saying, no politics without ethics,
there is no saying without the said. Here I will tackle this question in a
different, although compatible, way by arguing (with reference to Merleau-
Ponty’s ontology) that just as the generosity of exposure in the saying of
alterity inspires and directs the politics of generosity of the said, the com-
munity constituted through the said of the political-social realm informs the
generosity steeped in sensibility, that is, exposure to those with whom we
have nothing in common. The “passive” generosity of exposure is already
active and political, even if the “judgments” made are of the order of affec-
tive sensibility rather than conscious or thematized.
Moira Gatens’ work on “imaginary bodies” is helpful in demonstrating
what is at stake in the question of the politics of generosity. What Levinas
calls language as the said and what Nietzsche calls truth is also what Gatens
calls the social imaginary: “those images, symbols, metaphors, and represen-
Generosity, Community, and Politics 171
tations which help construct various forms of subjectivity” (Gatens 1996,
viii). Included in a social imaginary are not only “imaginary bodies,” ideas
about bodies, but also ideas about the value of these bodies and how they
are or should be related: “the (often unconscious) imaginaries of a specific
culture [consist in] those ready made images and symbols through which we
make sense of social bodies and which determine, in part, their value, their
status, and what will be deemed their appropriate treatment” (ibid.). Gatens
demonstrates in her critiques of various philosophical imaginaries, and of
legal, journalistic, and everyday expressions of ideas about bodies, that the
social imaginaries that organize Western communities systematically devalue,
exclude, and justify violence toward some bodies on the basis of sex, race,
and class. Hence, contrary to the thread of Nietzsche’s thinking with which
I began, insofar as social imaginaries, embodied in our language, laws, and
theoretical and other social texts, construct various forms of subjectivity,
they do not constitute our experience in common. As various analyses in
previous chapters have indicated, we wear these social imaginaries differently
depending on the value and meaning our bodies accrue within our social
context. Nor, therefore, do these social imaginaries realize the organization
of society for the improvement of the survival of all humans equally well.
With regard to ideas about the regulation of the relation between
these bodies, I have suggested, in the Introduction and chapters 1 and 2, that
the idea that dominates Western social imaginaries is contract and exchange
between individuals. On the basis of this idea of sociality, social relations are
subject to calculation and expectation of return in terms of values that favor
the bodies that already dominate the sociopolitical sphere. This is an image
of sociality that does not allow a generosity that would foster multiculturalism,
nor therefore the improvement of survival of anyone other than those bodies
that already dominate. Gatens formulates this aspect of social imaginaries in
a different, although compatible, way. Taking into account that our social
imaginary consists in ideas about bodies that denigrate and exclude different
bodies, then, Gatens argues, insofar as “the modern civil body was instituted
by and for a particular politico-economic group of men and explicitly
excluded women (and others), [t]he historical relation of that body to women’s
powers and capacities [and those of “indigenous peoples, working-class men,
and others”] has been one of ‘capture’ and ‘utility’ ” (1996, 120). In rejecting
this idea of sociality, Gatens argues, with reference to a complex reading of
Spinoza’s ideas of conatus and natural and civil law, which I do not have the
172 Corporeal Generosity
space to do justice to here, that the responsibility for the effects of this image
of sociality lies with the civil body whose laws and institutions, which
embody this image, constitute the bodies of its citizens who then reproduce
it in their behavior (115). The responsibility for changing this social imagi-
nary would also therefore lie with the civil body: rather than blaming the
individual whose violent behavior (against women and others) is consistent
with the idea of “capture” and “utility” embodied in civil law, it is down to
the civil body to become aware of and so to transform its principle of
sociability into one that ensures the safety and security of all of its citizens
(120). To this end, Gatens favors an idea of sociability based not on the
capture and utility of the capacities and powers that have been excluded by
the civil body but on her reading of Spinoza’s principle of ethical commu-
nity, where individuals thrive by combining with those whose capacities and
powers agree with and enhance their own, under conditions where those
traditionally excluded from the civil body are given civil power through this
process of combination (111, 120).
Attending to the politics of generosity is a matter of attending to the
source of any potential transformation of social imaginaries that, as Gatens
has demonstrated, continue to do the damage to difference. Without denying
that the civil body is responsible for the damage, this civil body is inseparable
from the individuals who do its work (a point I do not think Gatens would
deny). Hence, the possibility of transforming social imaginaries rests with the
potential of these bodies who benefit from the ideas and values that struc-
ture the civil body to be open to different ways of being. This possibility
rests not so much with accepting an alternative image of sociality but with
an openness to others already operating within intersubjective relations. It
is within the generosity of intercorporeality, I will argue, that the potential
to open social imaginaries to different manners of being lies. This generosity
is born not so much with the combining of bodies whose capacities and
powers agree but with the possibility of those dominant bodies remaining
open to and transformed by alterity without effacing that indeterminate
difference. Such a politics rests in part on Levinas’ insight that sociality is
based on exposure to irreducible alterity. But it also rests on insisting with
Merleau-Ponty, and contrary to Levinas, on the inseparability of the
politico-ontological from the exposure to alterity of sensibility.
Attending to the politics of generosity that would foster rather than
close off different ways of being in the formation of community involves an
Generosity, Community, and Politics 173
examination of a twofold role that bodies may play in the formation and
transformation of community: how “imaginary bodies” (social ideas about
different bodies and their relations manifest in the political organization of
society) constitute different kinds of subjectivities and, second, how the
generosity operating in relations between bodies can transform those
subjectivities and thus open social imaginaries to new possibilities. My ar-
gument (which proceeds via a comparison of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology and
Levinas’ ethics) is that the two are inseparable, that the generosity of
intercorporeality is where politics (the organization of society for the im-
provement of human survival) takes place.
The political organization of society for the improvement of human
survival proceeds through the constitution of subjectivities by social ideas
and images about bodies and their interrelation. The political is ontological.
But how are we to understand this process of constitution by the sociopolitical
realm, and so how far does the political extend, where does the political take
place? While Levinas tends to restrict politics to the realm of conscious
judgment and knowledge, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology would suggest that
judgment and hence politics takes place where subjectivity is constituted,
i.e., in prereflecitve perception. As I have argued in previous chapters, with
reference to Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on the matter, the ideas embodied in
our laws and social institutions do not constitute us from above at the level
of consciousness. His is not an idealism that would have nonmaterial images
capturing and molding the material; we embody social imaginaries insofar
as we live through the bodies of others who are already social beings.
Subjectivity is constituted on the basis of intersubjectivity, which for Merleau-
Ponty is intercorporeality. I have already discussed in chapter 5 how, for
Merleau-Ponty, subjectivity (which to him is equivalent to perception) as-
sumes that the perceiving body is already caught in the perceived world, and
that this ambiguity of corporeality is such that what is seen and felt is at the
same time a being seen and a being felt. To perceive, speak, or act is to touch
one’s being-touched; the felt is a feeling. Hence, “subject” and “object,”
“culture” and “nature” (although the distinctions are only abstract), are ar-
ticulated together through the perceiving body, through sensibility (Merleau-
Ponty 1964d, 167). I will return to that point of ambiguity, which is also the
point of generosity. The point about perception as sensibility that I wish to
stress initially is that “our perception is cultural-historical,” as Merleau-Ponty
puts it in his notes (1968, 253). So, referring to The Visible and the Invisible,
174 Corporeal Generosity
I perceive red, for example, in terms of “a fossil drawn up from the depths
of imaginary worlds,” in terms of the social imaginary of redness, “which
includes the tiles of roof tops, the flags of gatekeepers, and of the Revolu-
tion, [. . .] red garments, which includes [. . .] the dresses of women, robes
of professors, bishops and advocate generals” (132).2 Perception and, hence,
subjectivity, which takes place in the “interworld” of affective sensibility, is
“cultural-historical,” because “the imaginary [. . .] is in my body as a dia-
gram of the life of the actual” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 164). Hence, judg-
ments and decisions that affect the political organization of society are not
restricted to consciousness. They inhabit the body and so the perception of
the subject. Perception is political, even if the judgments and decisions made
there are not mine. The judgments and decisions made in perception are not
mine in two senses: in the sense that perception is prereflective and therefore
nonvolitional, and in the sense that perception is already informed by social
imaginaries that come before me. Perception is not my doing: “I do not
perceive any more than I speak—Perception has me as has language” (Merleau-
Ponty 1968, 190).
That perception is cultural-historical suggests not only that social
imaginaries that devalue and/or exclude different bodies on the basis of sex,
race, and class operate through the constitution of carnal subjectivities but
also that the judgments and decisions of the makers and guardians of the
laws that regulate society are never abstracted from the imaginaries that are
“in their bodies” and that they live to maintain. Based on Merleau-Ponty’s
model of the sociopolitical constitution of subjectivity, there is no “rational
community” if by this we mean a community of “lucid minds” abstracted
from their bodies, passions, and personal interests. Insofar as the makers and
guardians of the laws are representatives of a “common discourse,” their
judgments and decisions will be informed by that discourse, by the “social
imaginary” that is “in” them and that “has” them through perception. Given
that this discourse is not so much about what we have in common but that
it already devalues and excludes different bodies and ways of being, this
devaluing and exclusion will be prolonged in every judgment made by the
perceiving bodies who dominate in the legal and political realms. The white,
middle-class government official or high court judge presiding over the
granting of land rights to indigenous peoples will see black and white in a
way that depends on the meaning, the imaginary worlds, of black and white
(land and rights) from which his or her perception extends. This perception
Generosity, Community, and Politics 175
is prereflective, affective, and thoroughly corporeal, and while subject to
reflection and modification after the event, the subsequent reflection, as
perception of perception, never lifts itself completely out of the cultural-
historical situation that informs it. Similarly, male philosophers presiding
over the admission of a woman to their field may see “red” and reject her
application in the end, not on the basis of purely “objective” criteria but on
the basis of philosophical and sexual imaginaries from which their percep-
tion and judgment draw. (The philosophical imaginary, as I argued in chap-
ter 7 with reference to Michèlle Le Doeuff, contains ideas and values about
what counts as philosophy, as well as traces of the interests of men who are
its vehicles.) Again, the perception and judgment that it contains can be
“rationalized” after the event (her publications are not prestigious enough,
she will not “fit it”), but such justifications are still bound to the philosophi-
cal and sexual imaginaries that inhabit the initial perception and keep the
subject of philosophy closed to other meanings and values.
So far, Merleau-Ponty would be in agreement with Levinas’ claim that
perception (and its “judgments”) can effect an ontological closure to the
other. But, as discussed initially in chapter 3, for Merleau-Ponty this closure
of perception to otherness is effected not simply through consciousness but
through a cultural sedimentation of corporeal style according to the gestures
and their meanings that one has inherited and embodied through habit. But
as also discussed in previous chapters, for Merleau-Ponty, each perception
and the judgment it contains, however rigid, is infected with ambiguity. Just
as the body realizes “culture” through its expression in perception, percep-
tion also realizes “nature” or the “world” through its impact on the body.
Perception takes place in the interworld of affectivity, “between” body and
world, in the intertwining and reversibility of flesh. This ambiguity of per-
ception is also its generosity where I am given and opened to a world as
it is given to me. The generosity of perception effects a transformation of
meaning and so a metamorphosis of my style of being and the world it
actualizes. So, while “perception has me as has language,” my perception and
my speech do effect a transformation of meaning, insofar as my body, with
reference to the imaginary worlds of meaning from which it draws, favors
a pole of redness, depending on what I am doing and in what context, and
depending on the impact of the world on me in that context (Merleau-Ponty
1973, 131–33). While it is in my own way, with reference to cultural-
historical meaning, that I move and touch “red,” I am also moved and
176 Corporeal Generosity
touched by “it” and, as it is in this ambiguity that “imaginary worlds con-
tinue to make themselves, the red is not finished” (Castoriadis 1997, 292). It
is the impact of the world on me, and the affectivity of that impact, that
lights the spark of perception or, as Merleau-Ponty also puts it, effects the
transgression of the world upon its meaning so that the red is not finished
(this acknowledgment of the impact of the world on me in perception
effects “the ontological rehabilitation of the sensible” (Merleau-Ponty 1964c,
167)). To see things in black and white or red, as if they are finished, is a
denial of the ambiguity of perception, and with this a denial of the impact
of the world on me. More important for my purposes here, the denial of
the ambiguity of perception, and with this the possibility of transforming
imaginary worlds, is also a denial of the other’s alterity who animates per-
ception and who therefore animates subjectivity. This brings me to a second
point about the sociopolitical constitution of subjectivity, besides the point
that perception is cultural-historical.
The second point about the sociopolitical constitution of subjectivity,
and the one toward which the first point has been heading, is that the
relation between the perceiving body and (cultural) meaning and between
the perceiving body and its sensible world is not a private or direct relation.
Rather, perception and language “have me,” my body is only open to the
sensible world, and the imaginary is only “in my body,” because my body
is also open to the bodies of others who are already social beings. Merleau-
Ponty’s answer to his own question, “What is it that, from my side, comes
to animate the perceived world and language?” (1968, 190) is this: “We shall
completely understand this trespass of things upon their meaning [. . .] only
when we understand it as the trespass of oneself upon the other and of the
other on me” (1973, 133). The political is ontological, but only insofar as it
is always intersubjective. The trespass of intersubjectivity that animates per-
ception and language is, for Merleau-Ponty, beneath reflection, the con-
sciousness of the “I think,” and what Levinas calls the “said” of language.
Intersubjectivity, like the perception of the world it animates, belongs to the
reversibility of flesh. While prereflective, this intercorporeality is no less
inflected with judgment, nor therefore politics. Intercoporeality and its
sociability is where the political begins. A further and related point I want
to draw out in what follows is that the intercorporeality at the heart of
sociability and community formation is essentially generous. The closure of
the other effected by the government official who sees in black and white
Generosity, Community, and Politics 177
and the male philosopher who sees red is first of all an offense against the
generosity of intercoproreality, an offense that continues the habit of social
imaginaries that makes refugees of other ways of seeing and being.
The question is, how might the generosity of intercorporeality be
harnessed against this closure to the other that, through a rigid perception,
sees the other as finished? On the way to attempting an answer to this
question, I will consider two ways of understanding Merleau-Ponty’s model
of the trespass of intersubjectivity, insofar as it relates to perception, meaning,
and community formation. The first is the understanding highlighted by
Levinas in his critiques of Merleau-Ponty, emphasizing Merleau-Ponty’s ten-
dency to base intersubjectivity, community formation, and sociability on an
agreement between bodies that share the same language, knowledge, and
cultural world.3 In a paper that addresses Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl
in “The Philosopher and His Shadow” (1964d), Levinas, while admiring the
way Merleau-Ponty accentuates in Husserl’s Ideen II “everything that makes
the relation with others depend upon that carnal structure of sensibility,” is
critical of the way Merleau-Ponty sets up that structure so that intersubjectivity
eliminates anything foreign to it (Levinas 1994, 100). Merleau-Ponty does
this, according to Levinas, by firstly modeling sensibility or perception (where
the felt is also a being felt) on the model of two hands of one body touching
each other (Levinas 1994, 99). This, says Levinas, becomes Merleau-Ponty’s
prototype of intersubjectivity (where “I shake another man’s hand”) so that,
insofar as the meaning of the sensible content of perception presupposes the
constitution of intersubjectivity, this is by agreement between the other and
me where, through the handshake extended from my body to the other’s,
both become elements of a single intercorporeality (100). To put Levinas’
criticism of Merleau-Ponty in terms of the issue I am addressing, while I am
given to and borrow myself, and hence the meaning of my experiences from
the bodies of others and vice versa, while the social imaginary is “in my
body” and “in” the other on the basis of intersubjectivity, intersubjectivity
accomplishes community by establishing common ground between different
bodies, so that they belong to one social body of shared meaning and
knowledge. Levinas summarizes this, his interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s
model of intersubjectivity, as follows:
Intersubjectivity, constituting itself in sensibility, described on the
basis of the “reflected touching” of two hands touching one
178 Corporeal Generosity
another, is structured according to the community between the
“touching” and the “being touched,” “the common act of feeling
and being felt.” It is a community that is affirmed in its agree-
ment about [autour de] being—about things and the world.
(Levinas 1994, 101)
Levinas’ objection to Merleau-Ponty’s model of intersubjectivity (as he in-
terprets it) is that, despite Merleau-Ponty’s claims that this is a “pretheoretical”
structure based on the “I can” rather than “I think,” his model effectively
grounds the constitution of community in “shared” knowledge which is
based on prior knowledge that I already embody. “Thus, sociality does not
break the order of consciousness any more than does knowledge [savoir],
which, cleaving to the known [su], immediately coincides with whatever
might be foreign to it” (Levinas 1994, 101). What this means for the politics
of generosity is that, based on Levinas’ reading of Merleau-Ponty’s under-
standing of the structure of intersubjectivity, there is no room for admitting
difference without erasure in the constitution of subjectivity, nor therefore
in the formation of community. On Levinas’ reading of Merleau-Ponty’s
model of the tresspass of intersubjectivity, the exclusions and valuations of
bodies that Gatens finds in modern social imaginaries are already operating
and are reproduced in the sociality “between” bodies. Decisions and judg-
ments, although prereflective, are made about difference in the formation of
one intercorporeality, so that the reversibility of flesh, that is, perception of
the other, subsumes what is foreign under terms already established in ex-
isting social bodies.
Against Merleau-Ponty’s model of intersubjectivity (as Levinas under-
stands it), based on the transmission of mutual knowledge in the constitution
of one social body, Levinas posits his ethical order of sociality based on the
gift. This has been discussed in chapters 7 and 8 in different terms. In the
handshake, Levinas suggests, there is “a radical separation between the two
hands, which in point of fact do not belong to the same body” (1994, 102).
The other’s “ineradicable difference,” “signified in the nakedness of the face
[. . .] in the expressivity of the other person’s whole sensible being, even in
the hand one shakes,” is what initiates the handshake (ibid.). And the hand-
shake signifies not the transmission of knowledge but the gift of myself for
the other, the saying, “going from myself to the other” with “a certain
indifference toward compensations in reciprocity” (101). For Levinas, only
Generosity, Community, and Politics 179
by understanding intersubjectivity in these terms, in terms of a “spirituality
of the social” “beyond being” (beyond ontology and politics), in terms of a
bond lying in “the non-indifference of persons toward one another,” can we
conceive of a sociality that “does not absorb the difference of strangeness”
(103). This sociality is provoked by the other’s difference of strangeness that
founds my uniqueness as the “here I am” for the other (hence, the radical
separation between two hands). This sociality is manifest in the generosity
of exposure where I am given to the other unconditionally through the
passive sensibility that is the saying of the spoken word, and the difference
of strangeness that provokes my movement toward the other is not absorbed
by what is said as a result.
For Levinas, politics does not extend to this inaugural moment of
sociality, at least not at first glance. This sociality is without politics because,
as Levinas has argued earlier in Otherwise Than Being, it is without problems,
and it is without problems because it is without decision or judgment about
differences (1981, 161). There are no decisions or judgments here, because
the ethical relation to the other is neither ontic or ontological (144): the
alterity that commands me to the other does not appear in the other as a
cultural gesture (there is no significant gesture by which comparisons and
judgments could be made), and the generosity of my response is neither a
cultural gesture nor an act based on a decision or judgment I make (140,
144). The generosity of exposure is a having been given to the other, “not
the generosity of offering oneself, which would be an act” (75); this sociality
of the one-for-the-other is prior to any decision, judgment, and every
(political, moral, and social) position (144), and this sociality precedes the
empirical order of the state (116).
But can this be right? If existing social imaginaries favor the bodies
and modes of being that dominate the social and political sphere, this implies
that the unconditional generosity of exposure is already distributed inequi-
tably by the political organization of society, demanding of the subordinated
self-sacrifice and openness to the privileged who would leave the black,
white, and red finished. Merleau-Ponty has pushed sociality, community
formation, and politics back from the ontic realm of reflection and calcu-
lation (which for him does not exist in any pure form) to the ontological
realm of intersubjectivity where prereflective judgments are made in the
intercorporeal expression of culture that is actualized through that expres-
sion. Levinas, convinced that this understanding of intersubjectivity effaces
180 Corporeal Generosity
difference no less than the ideal of community between rational minds,
appears to take the origin of sociality back even farther to an ethical open-
ness to the other that is no longer political or ontological. While thereby
establishing the ethical and affective basis of sociality, the potential problem
with separating radical generosity from ontology and politics is that who the
other is and what he or she has done (as a corporeal expression of a social
imaginary) make no difference to my responsibility for and openness to him
or her. And it would make every decision, action, and judgment I make, and
every word I utter, equally a betrayal of exposure to the other that precedes
it and is its condition and equally a closure to the other who provokes it. All
acts and judgments (whether despicable or not) of all persons (whether
beneficiaries of current social imaginaries or not) would be equally a closure
to alterity.
But if the ethical relation is really outside of ontology and therefore
the cultural-historical dimesion of perception, what are we to make of
Levinas’ claim that the other’s “ineradicable difference” is not just “signified
in the nakedness of the face” but also in “the expressivity of the other
person’s whole sensible being, even in the hand one shakes”? Does not this
expressivity belong to the ontological expression of imaginary worlds by a
body, and hence to the politics, that ethics is meant to exceed? And if the
ethical relation is really outside of politics, what are we to make of Levinas’
claims that justice (involving concern for all other others, consciousness,
comparison, coexistence, thematization, etc.) “is shown from the first” in the
ethical relation (1981, 159), and that “there is a question of the said and
being only because saying or responsibility require justice” (45). Justice is
always called for in the ethical relation because, according to Levinas, con-
scious judgment, perception, and comparison are there from the first, in that
the other who inspires and accuses me is in relation to a “third party,” to
other others to whom they are responsible and who treat me, alongside the
other I face, as someone to be concerned about and welcomed (161). The
here I am one-for-the-other of radical generosity always also refers to other
social beings and, hence, is mediated by the political, by the organization of
society for the improvement of the human survival, and so by the need for
reflection, comparison, and conscious judgment.4
While Levinas thus acknowledges that the inaugural moment of so-
ciality is perhaps inseparable from politics and justice, he also depersonalizes
politics by assuming it operates only through grand themes and conscious
Generosity, Community, and Politics 181
decisions and judgments. He does not seem to grant that the political is
personal, and that perhaps politics is also inseparable from sensibility, from
the prereflective being-given to the other by whose alterity here I am. If
justice is called for from the first, then this is because other others are there
from the first, not by conscious judgment (to which Levinas reduces politics
and justice) but in the expressivity of the other person’s whole sensible
being, that is, in the ontological expression of cultural-political-historical
imaginary worlds that is inseparable from the nonindifference to difference
of sensibility. This suggestion, that the ethical and the politico-ontological
are inseparable in the formation and transformation of community and that
this does not imply a closure to alterity is indicated in a second way of
reading Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the trespass of one upon the other in
perception, a reading that Levinas’ critiques overlook.
That intersubjectivity conceived in politico-ontological terms remains
indifferent to difference would be a consequence of Merleau-Ponty’s under-
standing of the trespass of intersubjectivity if we accept Levinas’ reading.
Merleau-Ponty does say enough to allow Levinas’ reading, and not just in
“The Philosopher and His Shadow.” In another paper, “Dialogue and the
Perception of the Other” (which has the advantage of not being burdened
by a reading of Husserl’s Ideen II ), Merleau-Ponty seems to confirm Levinas’
criticism of him as follows: “The other’s body is a kind of replica of myself,
a wandering double which haunts my surroundings” (an anonymous gen-
eralized corporeality), and “we encroach upon one another inasmuch as we
belong to the same cultural world, and above all to the same language, and
my acts of expression and the other’s derive from the same institution”
(Merleau-Ponty 1973, 134, 139). But if we follow this paper through, we
find the kind of generosity and nonindifference to difference that Levinas
claims is the basis of sociality: an openness upon and giving to the other,
provoked by the other’s alterity, that is not also a closure to the other. Just
as Merleau-Ponty effects an ontological rehabilitation of the sensible, he
effects an ontological rehabilitation of the other. Levinas misses this, insofar
as he reads a linear progression into Merleau-Ponty’s account of intersub-
jectivity: first carnal reflexivity (my two hands touching and being touched),
then perception of the world, then intersubjective agreement about the
content of perception through the formation of one intercorporeality. Levinas
reads Merleau-Ponty’s account of intersubjectivity as the formation of one
body that “breaks egological isolation” while maintaining the primacy of the
182 Corporeal Generosity
self (Levinas 1994, 101). But, upon close scrutiny, it is not so clear that for
Merleau-Ponty the self as a perceiving body comes before and so dominates
the other.
Having said, in “Dialogue and the Perception of the Other,” that the
experience of the other is of a replica of myself, Merleau-Ponty adds that,
“[I]t is not enough simply to say that henceforth I inhabit another body”
(1973, 135); there is a “mysterious slippage,” a “decentering” of myself, so
that “the other is not I” (134–35). And having said that each body en-
croaches on the other in as much as we share the same language, Merleau-
Ponty adds that “this ‘general’ usage of speech presupposes another more
fundamental practice” (139). The shared gestures that would make us part
of the same intercorporeality and the words (or what Levinas would call the
“said” of language) that provide our common cultural background are built
up through “cultural sedimentation” (141) which, as discussed in Part II,
effects an ontological closure to the other. But accompanying all institutional
language and its corporeal support is an operation of intercoporeality where
the other impacts on me as there is a “catch” of my gestures toward them.
Merleau-Ponty does admit that this “more fundamental practice” attempts to
produce a common culture, but he is less certain of its success. This more
fundamental practice of intercorporeality, “the trespass of oneself upon the
other and of the other on me,” involves being disturbed by alterity. This
disturbance by what my body does not “catch” is what animates perception
and language and, most important, allows for the transformation of meaning
and ways of being.
If the other person is really another, at a certain stage I must be
surprised, disorientated. If we are to meet not just through what
we have in common but in what is different between us [this]
presupposes a transformation of myself and of the other as well.
(Merleau-Ponty 1973, 142)
Merleau-Ponty also suggests in the same passage, and problematically, that,
in this transformation of meaning and being in response to the other’s
indeterminate difference, “our differences can no longer be opaque qualities.
They must become meaning” if the other’s indeterminate difference that
surprises, disorients, and so animates perception is not to be dismissed as
nonsense. The issue is to what extent this becoming meaning through
Generosity, Community, and Politics 183
intercorporeality is a totalizing gesture that subsumes the disturbance of the
other under the social imaginaries that inhabit the bodies that dominate our
culture. The most promising thread of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking here sug-
gests that, in order for the other’s alterity to animate and transform percep-
tion without being absorbed in the process, it is those dominant imaginaries
that must give way. The animation of perception and meaning by the
trespass of the other rests on allowing oneself to “be lead by the flow” of
the other’s discourse, “especially at the moment he withdraws from us and
threatens to fall into non-sense,” so that what does not fall so easily into the
catch of familiar gestures is capable of transforming us into the other and
opening “us to another meaning” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 143). While Merleau-
Ponty also assumes, at least in this paper, a kind of communion between
different bodies as an ideal end point to this intercorporeal relation, it is still
the other’s difference that inspires that attempt at communion, and this alterity
cannot be absorbed. In Merleau-Ponty’s own terms, this disturbing “sponta-
neous” operation of speech (what Levinas might call the “saying” of language),
“the first ‘human’ signification [. . .] surpasses our common prehistory even
though prolonging its movement” (141); this spontaneous power (which is
“not a god”) “pulls significations from us,” “destroys the generality of the
species, and brings [man] to admit others into his deepest singularity” (146).
On the issue of which comes first for Merleau-Ponty, my corporeal
reflexivity, perception of the world, or the spontaneous power of inter-
corporeality, this is equally uncertain. While Merleau-Ponty speaks of “a
carnal relation to the world and to the other” (1973, 139, emphasis added)
that would put perception of the world on the same plane as perception of
the other, either as two examples of the same operation or where the carnal
relation to the other would give sensibility its significant content by agree-
ment after the event, he also says that “the other always slips in at the
junction between the world and ourselves” (138). This suggests that percep-
tion in general and, hence, the disturbance that animates perception and
transforms imaginary worlds is opened by and dependent on the sociability
of intercorporeality. And while it can seem as if my corporeal reflexivity is
already in place before the world or the other, which would allow the
imaginary in my body to dominate, it is also the case that it is the other’s
body entering my field that “multipl[ies] it from within,” and it is through
this multiplication, this decentering, that “as a body, I am ‘exposed’ to the
world” (ibid.). This exposure to the world through the disturbance of the
184 Corporeal Generosity
other’s body “is not an accident intruding from outside upon a pure cog-
nitive subject [. . .] or a ‘content’ of experience among many others but our
first insertion into the world and into truth” (139). In this way Merleau-
Ponty, through his model of intercorporeality, makes prereflective perception
and judgment political without assuming that the politico-ontological effects
a closure to the other.
The importance of Levinas’ claim, that the other’s alterity, the other’s
“ineradicable difference,” is the basis of sociality cannot be overstated. This
bases subjectivity and all cultural works on nonindifference to difference, on
the generosity of being open to the other without seeking compensation.
However, to suggest that this movement toward the other could be outside
of ontology and politics and therefore passive and unconditional is a prob-
lem. It is essential it seems to me to still think of this strangeness that
disturbs, inaugurates subjectivity, and surpasses and transforms existing imagi-
nary bodies, within ontology and therefore within politics, as Merleau-Ponty
does, albeit in the tentative way that he does.5 To do so does not return us
to the idea of sociality reducible to an exchange economy of “rational
minds” where generosity, as a virtue built by habit informed by existing
imaginaries, and justice are subject to calculation and expectation of return
and so would effect an ontological closure to the other. But figuring sub-
jectivity within the politico-ontological in a way that bases the disorienta-
tion of perception and subjectivity on the sociability of intercorporeality,
does point to how and why this exchange economy has persisted with its
parsimonious effects by indicating why the bodies that dominate and extract
privilege in this exchange economy continue to see the other in black and
white and red, as if the black and white and red are finished. Such rigidity
and closure to different ways of being do not need to be a deliberate
withholding of oneself in a moment of conscious reflection (which is the
terms in which Levinas defines justice and politics), although it could also
be that. But, based on Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, such rigidity would first of
all be the effect of sedimentation of the social imaginaries that inform
perception in a way that I do not choose.
While attending to injustice, the ontological closure to the other, at a
prereflective level, Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of how alterity animates
perception also allows for the possibility that this sedimentation could be
disturbed not from outside of the intercorporeal, cultural-political-historical
basis of perception but from within the sociability of intercorporeality, from
Generosity, Community, and Politics 185
the disorientation effected by the other’s body that is the basis of perception.
It is this disorientation that animates perception, inspires subjectivity, is our
“first insertion into the world,” and while therefore prolonging the cultural-
historical imaginaries that have my body in perception, it also surpasses
them. The other’s alterity does not have to become meaning in this process,
in a way that immediately subsumes “whatever might be foreign” under
existing social imaginaries, as Levinas’ reading of Merleau-Ponty suggests.
Rather, the alterity that animates perception allows for the possibility that
the black, white, and red are not finished and so opens my movement
toward the other without promise of returning the same and allows the
other into the singularity of subjectivity that it has inspired. Being “led by
the flow” of this disorientation, toward the other without promise of return,
which would transform meaning and so admit other ways of seeing and
being, is no more or less an act or a gesture subject to choice than the
sedimentation, the return to the imaginaries in my body, that is also inherent
in perception. This disorientation troubles perception and its tendency to-
ward sedimentation from the first. Alterity therefore troubles existing social
imaginaries within every act and gesture (both prereflective and volitional).
Both openness toward the other that transforms meaning and its closure
through sedimentation of imaginaries are prereflective and corporeal, both
are part of the ambiguity of subjectivity that is opened by the other, and
both are manifest only within that subjectivity, its perceptions, acts, and
gestures, that have me and that I am, not by choice but by the grace of the
other’s alterity.
To relegate this disorientation and its ethical import to the realm of
extreme passivity outside of an act, perception, or gesture and therefore
outside of the cultural-political-historical is unnecessary and possibly counter-
productive. If ethical openness to the other is prior to the political as a
passive, unconditional generosity, and if the political is a repression of the
ethical relation, as Levinas sometimes suggests, so that every perception,
action, and judgment is equally a closure to the other that provokes it, then
it is difficult to envisage how transformation of meaning and therefore of
the social could occur in such a way as to remain open to other ways of
being. However, allowing that the ethical relation, my disorientation toward
the other, falls within perception, acts, and gestures does not render alterity
reducible to existing social imaginaries, nor does it cancel Levinas’ important
idea that nonindifference toward others is the basis of sociality. On the
186 Corporeal Generosity
contrary, only if alterity always troubles social imaginaries from within their
expression, through intercorporeal perception, acts, and gestures, could it be
said that these imaginaries and the bodies that gain privilege from them are
open to transformation and to different ways of being.
This does not suggest any particular program of political practice that
could better regulate unconditional generosity, ethical openness to the other.
Rather to admit that alterity troubles social imaginaries within their cultural-
political-historical expression suggests that unconditional generosity, of the
kind Levinas envisages is at the basis of sociality, is never present in any pure
form. As Derrida suggests, “[n]o matter what Levinas might have said, the
determinability of this limit [between the ethical and the political] was never
pure, and it never will be” (1999, 99). To admit this is not to be defeatist
about the possibility of changing what is nor is it to deny that nonindifference
to difference underlies every encounter, every perception, and is the basis of
subjectivity and community. Rather, it is to acknowledge, as Levinas increas-
ingly does, that the “ineradicable difference” that animates and disorientates
me is signified in “the expressivity of the other person’s whole sensible
being, even in the hand one shakes,” and that this expressivity is cultural-
historical so that neither I nor the other is ever innocent or free of the social
imaginaries that already position us, to our benefit or detriment, in relation
to other others and these other others in relation to me. Justice, and there-
fore politics, is called for from the first in the ethical openness to the other,
not just because nonindifference to difference is a precondition to justice (in
being the condition of, inseparable from but not reducible to, every act,
whether “good” or “bad”), but because the ineradicable difference that calls
me to the other is inseparable from the other’s cultural baggage as I feel it
being felt. I will feel the indeterminable difference, the disorientation, ac-
cordingly. So it is no accident that Levinas (and Lingis) do not include the
white, middle-class businessman, the philosopher, or the high court judge in
their list of concrete others who are most likely to signify this alterity that
calls me to the other. These others do not rate a mention, not because they
do not move me (for they do, if I encounter them at all), but because the
expressivity of their sensible being contests less, benefits more from, and has
more in common with corporeal and institutionalized expressions of exist-
ing social imaginaries (including my own) than the “Aztec,” “nomad,” “guer-
rilla,” “refugee,” or “orphan.” Without denying that nonindifference to
difference underlies every encounter and is the basis of subjectivity and
Generosity, Community, and Politics 187
sociality, it makes a difference to the gesture that necessarily expresses or
accompanies that nonindifference if the other, presenting herself for a job in
philosophy or for native title in court, is someone who is already felt to be
out of place within a philosophical imaginary or within the law of the land.
And the cultural-political-historical makeup of those sitting on the selection
panel or on the high court makes a difference to whether they will be “led
by the flow” of the other’s discourse, to whether they remain open to the
other or effect an ontological closure.
That the expressivity of the other person’s whole sensible being and
of mine makes a difference to the nonindifference to difference is not to
return Levinas’ ethics to the realm of existing knowledge, calculation, or the
domain of the “ought.” To admit that the expressivity of social imaginaries
makes a difference to the nonindifference to difference is to admit that
politics makes a difference to any encounter with the other in terms of what
is felt rather than known, and in terms of what my (indeterminate) response
already is in disturbed sensibility rather than in terms of what my response
ought to be. However, if we are serious about our responsibility for the
refugees our social imaginaries continue to effect, then we ought to take
heed of the contestations that haunt us. To grant that “ineradicable differ-
ence” disturbs the political from within and also that generosity of being-
given to the other it prompts is never unconditional is also to admit that
“being led by the flow” of this disorientation is not a question of passivity
prior to any particular act. This is not to deny the aporetic structure of
generosity. Recognizing that subjectivity as sensibility animated by the other’s
alterity is inseparable from the act, from politics, and so from the danger of
doing damage to difference is to suggest that an ethico-politics of sexual and
cultural difference is to be found not in the self-serving collection of debts
nor in an expectation of unconditional self-sacrifice in the service of the
other but in the indeterminacy of generous acts that lie somewhere in
between. That generosity born of exposure to alterity is necessarily also a
closure to the other is not an excuse for inaction or passivity, nor a license
for justifying the most other-denying acts. On the contrary, to paraphrase
John Caputo, this aporia of generosity underscores a passionate politics and
an impatience for justice embodied in acts that risk oneself now for a justice
that is never here.6 To stay open to other ways of being, to see red, black,
and white as not finished, to remain troubled by the other takes work. While
the possibility of being led by the flow of alterity is already there in perception
188 Corporeal Generosity
and in every act and gesture, to make good this possibility would require a
break with old habits, an unsettling of sedimentation, particularly by those
who benefit from existing social imaginaries. The politics of generosity
begins with all of us, it begins and remains in trouble, and it begins within
the act.
Conclusion
WHILE IN THE PROCESS of finishing this book, mindful of the daunting
prospect of writing a conclusion to a topic as impossible as generosity, I was
asked if I would respond to a plenary address at a Women’s Studies confer-
ence. The address in question was to be a joint paper by Helen Keane and
Marsha Rosengarten entitled “The Biology of Sexed Subjects,” and I was
told by the convenors that they were chosen as plenary speakers on the basis
of being relatively new to their field but on its cutting edge.1 I had admired
their work for some time for the way it (separately and differently) addresses
the ambiguities and contradictions of scientific biological discourse—Keane
on addiction (1999) and Rosengarten on blood and other body matter
(2001)—harnessing these ambiguities and contradictions to demonstrate that
even in scientific terms body-matter thwarts our sexed and species bound-
aries and unsettles any attempt to fix our identities in unsavory, discriminat-
ing, and singular terms. At least this is how their work impacts on me. To
respond to such work in the context mentioned provided the opportunity
to think through the possibility of responding generously—in a way that
would be neither self-serving nor patronizing; that would not endorse myself
by finishing them off in passing judgment on their work, but that would
acknowledge the impact of their work on me, while giving it the more
elevated public status, within an academic institution, that I feel it warrants.
189
190 Corporeal Generosity
To take up this offer provided the challenge of practicing the generosity I
write about, but squarely within my own profession. (But already, in saying
that if I had achieved these objectives my response would be generous, I
have failed, as I have, no doubt, throughout this book in responding to
other’s writings on the body.) At the same time, the content of what I was
asked to respond to provided the opportunity to suggest that the matter
Keane and Rosengarten write about (called, variously, blood, hormones,
tissue grafts, neurotransmitters, etc.) is itself generous as is the way their
responses to it, their writing about it, animates it without finishing it off.
It took some time and some other inspiring encounters to make this
connection between concluding by saying what I might mean by corporeal
generosity, the possibility of practicing generosity as a respondent in an
academic context, and the content of what I have been asked to respond to,
the demonstrated generosity of intercorporeality.2 Through a somewhat
convoluted route, part of which I have just relegated to a note, I have settled
on one sentence of Nietzsche’s, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in an attempt
to capture what I might mean by “corporeal generosity.” I say, paraphrasing
Nietzsche, and in response to Keane’s and Rosengarten’s paper, and to all of
the others who appear in and have inspired this book: of all that is written,
I love most what is written in blood (Nietzsche 1978, 40). What I mean by
corporeal generosity, as I have developed the idea throughout this book, is,
in a sense, writing in blood and love of that. Corporeal generosity is writing
passionately in blood, writing in matter that defies the culturally informed
habits of perception and judgment that would perpetuate injustice by shor-
ing up body integrity, singular identity, and their distinctions between inside
and outside, culture and nature, self and other.
But what does it mean to say “I love most what is written in blood?”
I did not say I love what is written on blood, or about blood, but in blood.
So to say that corporeal generosity is writing in blood and love of that is
not to evoke a metaphor of writing or of generosity to suggest that the two
are similar to each other and similar to blood. To say generosity is writing
in blood and love of that does imply something that plays off what I think
is meant by “blood”; it implies that generosity is a kind of life force, a
passionate defiance of corporeal borders in response to being cut, touched,
or wounded, an overflowing that is neither simply active or passive. And it
implies that there might be some violence involved in this generosity. But
the definition of generosity as writing in blood and love of that is just as
Conclusion 191
literal as metaphoric. To understand the word, language, meaning in terms
of a metaphor that stands above, on, or about the work being addressed or
above the body that the work is about is to miss what matters. The word,
and its socially sanctioned meanings (spoken, gestural, or written), is not on
or about its matter, as if separate from it. The word, social meaning, does
come before a particular body, but not to shape it simply into a seamless,
socially recognized whole (which would be idealism, or what I gather some
mean by “social constructionism”—where the body would be a “somatic
fact created by a cultural effect”). And the word does come after a particular
body, but not to describe its truth in commonly accepted terms (which
would be realism or empiricism—where the word and its meaning might
be described as a “cultural fact created by a somatic effect”).3 Rather, the
word, the meaning of my response to the matter that moves me, is also
always of a body, written in blood.
We do not have to write about the body, its gestures, cells, and fluids,
to write in blood. A response to a person in the street, to a picture, a poem,
or to a historical or a political event can also be written in blood. In a sense
we cannot help but write in blood, even the scientist, the lawmaker, and the
judge, although she or he might deny it. We cannot help but respond to the
other in matter that overflows any perceived integrity of the self. And, as in
this response our self-possession is given over to the other, we cannot help
our generosity. If we understand the author in terms suggested in this book,
as animated flesh, fluids, forces, and affects, opened by and to the other’s
palpable difference signified in the strangeness of her or his actions or words,
then the discourse and the actions that the author offers in response to this
strangeness are of that author’s body as a trace of the alterity that provokes
it. We perceive, speak, and write to touch what touches us, to touch our
being-touched. What we perceive, think, or write is written in our blood,
is an affective material offering of our body to the other whose difference
inspires and moves us. And in that blood donation, that perception and its
verbal expression, the skin that holds our self-possession is broken; we can-
not tell the difference between what touches and what is touched. My body,
and its expression, is real-ized, ambiguously and open, in this writing for the
other, between the touching and being touched, between inside and outside,
culture and nature, self and other.
The words and concepts that would express, as it writes, this body that
touches its being-touched in response to another, are cultural-historical for
192 Corporeal Generosity
sure. I do not invent these words or their meanings; these actions and their
morality come before me and are incorporated in the social and political
institutions into which I am born and in which I dwell. And, as I have
argued in different ways, these words and their meanings have my body
through habitual ways of being. Or, to summarize this point again in
Nietzsche’s words, a person has “selected and breathed life into their means
of expression, not by chance but of necessity, in accordance with [their]
morality” (1986, 242). But if that were the end of the story about corporeal
expression in response to another, generosity would be a virtue, a habit
of giving some of what I already have to others in my own terms, a habit
of expressing at the same time as confirming my own socially bound way
of being as if it were finished. However, as I have attempted to demonstrate
throughout this book, such an understanding of generosity (and the relation
between the body and its meaning that guides it) would have us already
secure in our social identities before we encounter another, a security that
would set the meaning and value of the gift, of the donor and of the donee,
and that would thereby prolong cultural-historical conventions and their
favored ways of being. The social imaginaries that have our bodies through
habitual ways of being, and that are called upon in perception in response
to the matter at hand, already memorialize the generosity of the privileged
and forget and do not actively perceive the giving of others. It is this
selective blindness that, for example, affords me the privilege of the position
of respondent at an academic conference, that makes this response seem
generous, and that extends to me the right to judge what I am responding
to, without acknowledging what it may have given me. It is precisely this
kind of privilege, and the way it is generated, that is contested by the
corporeal generosity examined in this book.
While insisting that my response to another is saturated with the
cultural-historical, the writing in blood that describes the generosity of
intercorporeality unsettles the security of those positions and perceptions
that derive privilege from dominant social conventions. This disturbance
arises not from outside but from within the response. Because perception,
and its verbal or written expression, is animated by another body (by the
difference of the matter at hand that touches me by words, gestures, pictures,
events, or whatever), then the meaning of what I write in my blood in
response is opened and transformed by the difference that provokes it. This
generosity of intercorporeality, and the transformation of meaning and being
Conclusion 193
that it effects, is not a purely passive being-given to the other that lies
outside of cultural conventions. It is a prereflective activity mediated by the
cultural-historical that haunts my perception, but an activity that surpasses
that perception and the modes of being it supports. Something that matters
moves me in its difference and, while I find, from within the social imagi-
naries that have my body, the words and prereflective judgments to respond,
I also find that my body, my blood and its meanings, is opened by, and flows
toward, the other, and so is not yet finished. It is this generosity of
intercoporeality, the “unfinishing” of my self-possession provoked by the gifts
of others, that would open and transform cultural conventions to admit
different modes of being.
But then this brings us to a paradox, to the impossibility of writing in
blood and getting it right. This is the impossibility of a generosity that achieves
justice. It is impossible to respond to another matter in a way that finally settles
the differences between us with justice. This failure is not because the body
that writes and the matter responded to are ineffable, as if everything else
could speak for itself and be understood. The intercorporeality of my response
to the other is not outside the meaning that it would surpass. Rather, this
failure to write in blood about another matter and get it right arises from the
way that this writing in blood, as suggested above, is animated by that alterity
that it would write about, the alterity that is a condition of the response it
provokes and that, by moving me beyond what I already perceive, ensures that
the writing is not yet finished. I feel a difference that touches me and compels
me to speak and act, but find I am a bit lost for the usual words that would
confirm my habitual perception and my usual manner of being. But there is
another side to this failure. If I did respond to and write about another matter
and thought I got it right, I would have equally failed to write in blood; I
would, through a kind of vampirism, have effaced the difference that moved
my blood to write; I would have wrapped the other up in my terms as if
my body, its meaning, and the matter that touches me and opens me to
writing are finished. I may open my mouth and speak with confidence
about the matter at hand, only to find I have swallowed it up, quenched my
thirst, but failed to remain moved by the difference. Generosity that claims
to achieve justice, once and for all, is impossible because, insofar as the
response provoked by the other’s alterity opens me beyond myself it is not
yet finished, and, conversely, insofar as the response is finished by passing
final judgment, this effects a violence toward, and closure to, the other.
194 Corporeal Generosity
That it is impossible to write in blood about another matter and get
it right is not, however, a reason to say nothing or to write anything at all
about the matter that moves what matters to us. While it is not easy or
indeed impossible to understand the blood of another or one’s own blood
for that matter, without vampirism, it is this impossibility that inspires the
attempt. The awareness of this impossibility, of the danger of effecting vio-
lence and injustice in every response, inspires a passionate politics that would
work through generosity for a justice that is yet to arrive. For the blood of
another, and the words it writes (whether privileged, autocratic, and dog-
matic or disadvantaged, democratic, and open) only lives if, to paraphrase
Nietzsche again, it is reanimated by my response that it provokes: “it is only
our blood that constrains them to speak to us” (1986, 242). And we honor
the expressions of other bodies “less by that barren timidity that allows every
word . . . to remain in tact than by energetic endeavors to aid them continu-
ally to new life” (ibid., alternative translation).
What is called for by the impossibility of doing justice in response to
another is a corporeal generosity that gives new life to its being-touched.
There are two ways of effecting such a politics that have been explored in
different ways in this book. The first is to admit one’s failure to get it right,
but rather than doing nothing, to write in blood against the discourses that
obviously fail to do so, against those discourses that totalize and normalize
bodies, that hide their own morality (the way that they are written in blood)
behind claims to objectivity and detachment, and that deny their failure to
capture and finish off the other matter that moves them. This would be to
write in blood against those discourses that, as a result of these denials,
would, through corporeal instantiations of cultural conventions, shore up
privileged ways of being, including one’s own, thereby reducing sexed or
cultural identity to isolated, corporeal units, singled out for exchange, usury,
judgment, correction, condemnation, or ridicule. The second way in which
the generosity of intercorporeality would work for justice is if the privileged
were to give new life to their being-touched, by allowing the contestations
of that privilege to move them, without controlling what shape that new life
might have. This kind of response has been asked of a number of privileged
groups through the pages of this book (men, philosophers, clinicians, law-
makers, judges, members of parliament), but this call by the other to give
over one’s self-possession is a call to all of us (including those reading and
writing this book). For while we may claim lack of privilege in some
Conclusion 195
contexts (a woman in a male-dominated profession, to refer to one example
explored in this book), we do enjoy privilege in other situations (a profes-
sional white woman in relation to most indigenous Australians, to recall
another example explored earlier).
Whether responding to discourses that prolong cultural conventions
that totalize and normalize bodies to the disadvantage of some, or respond-
ing to others that contest one’s privilege, the generosity that writes in blood
does so in similar-sounding words to those bodies that they address and that
open them to discourse, but in a way that reanimates the trace of the
difference that would otherwise be denied. Such blood writing not only
demonstrates that the generosity of intercorporeality defies the conceptual
borders that claim body integrity and singular identity and that perpetuate
injustice accordingly, it also performs that defiance. Against a moralizing that
fails its body by finishing itself through the vampirism of others, corporeal
generosity effects an ethico-politics that would not. While necessarily har-
boring a touch of vampirism, this writing is also a blood donation that
would touch and reanimate its being-touched, with its own blood and its
morality for sure, but with a light touch that would feel the difference of
the matter at hand without the certainty of knowing what that difference
is, and so with a touch that keeps open those borders between the inside
and outside, culture and nature, and self and other that cultural conventions
would close. Corporeal generosity is a writing in blood that says this body
carries a trace of the other, so this body and its cultural expression are not
finished, and neither you nor I have the final word.
And that is why I love this blood writing so much. It animates and
touches me rather than finishing me or others off. The provocations, con-
testations, and disturbances to my self-possession that have inspired a
conceptualization of corporeal generosity, and so the writing of this book,
are too numerous to repeat here. Nor is it possible to say exactly to what
extent I have given new life to my being-touched by the blood writing of
others, and to what extent I have failed and left myself and things intact. It
is possible to say, however, that I think politics needs the writing in blood
of corporeal generosity to reanimate and open us, as corporeal instantiations
of our social imaginaries, to different ways of being. It is also possible to say
by concluding that insofar as the writing of this book works through cor-
poreal generosity for a justice that is not yet here, it does so through the gifts
of others. Without being touched by their writing in blood, I would not, in
196 Corporeal Generosity
the end, have heard Nietzsche say, “I love most what is written in blood,”
I would not have taken it so literally and, from the beginning, this book
would not have happened.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. “One Nation” is a political party led by Pauline Hanson that campaigns on
a platform that opposes welfare, Asian immigration, taxation, and most forms of gov-
ernment intervention into social and economic affairs. In the federal elections of 1998,
three years after the party was established, it won 10 percent of the vote overall in
Australia and over 30 percent of the vote in the state of Queensland. The party has not
sustained this level of success due to a lack of substantial policy and internal divisions.
However, that it has commanded the level of popular support it has reflects a level of
division in Australian society and a move toward the right in Australian politics.
2. Schrift has provided an informative discussion of various twentieth-century
accounts of gift and gift giving that, while postdating my interest in the topic, and
especially in Derrida’s account, I have now found useful in organizing my thoughts.
CHAPTER ONE
1. Nietzsche makes a similar comment about the derivative nature of pleasure
and pain in Beyond Good and Evil (1973, 135–36).
2. For a discussion of the problem of the actor in Nietzsche’s philosophy, see Paul
Patton (1991b).
3. Besides the cosmological and psychological doctrines of eternal recurrence,
Wood discusses a third possible interpretation, the “ontological,” which I have found
useful.
4. Nietzsche makes a further connection between interpretation and will to
power as a form giving force in On the Genealogy of Morals (1969, 79).
5. Nietzsche makes similar observations on the disjunction between self-
interpretation and interpretation by another in Beyond Good and Evil (1973, 97, 142).
6. For Nietzsche’s understanding of the different ways a man can possess a
woman and what these say about the man’s self-image, see Beyond Good and Evil (1973,
98–99).
197
198 Notes to Chapters One and Two
7. For another discussion of Nietzsche’s use of the metaphor of pregnancy, see
Paul Patton (1991a, 49–52).
8. I discuss Nietzsche’s opposition to feminism of equality in more detail else-
where (Diprose 1989).
9. Nietzsche’s claim that women put on something when they take off every-
thing has often been interpreted as faking orgasm—woman’s constitution of her own
self-presence when appearing to guarantee man’s. Or, as Gayatri Spivak suggests:
“Women, ‘acting out’ their pleasure in the orgasmic moment, can cite themselves in
their very self-presence” (1984, 22). I take issue with Spivak, only in her claim that
it is self-presence (rather than undecidable difference) that is being cited in woman’s
dissimulation.
CHAPTER TWO
1. The idea that the self owns property in her or his person, including her or
his body and the products of its labor, is usually attributed to John Locke, Two Treatise
of Government Book II, Section 27 (1967, 288). While John Stuart Mill takes issue with
Locke’s contract model of social relations, he does assume Locke’s concept of a person
in his definition of liberty: “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual
is sovereign” (1975, 15). For a critique of this model of a person assumed in contract
theory, see Carole Pateman (1988).
2. See Locke, Two Treatise of Government, Book II, Sections 36 & 54 (1967, 292–
93, 304) and Mill, “On Liberty,” (1975, 16–18).
3. See Russell Scott, The Body As Property (1981, 192–96) for a discussion of the
practical and legal problems surrounding the selling of blood in the United States.
4. I use the term surrogate in its conventional sense to mean a woman who agrees
to gestate a fetus and relinquish the child to another after birth. I am aware that the
term itself carries and determines certain problematic assumptions about motherhood.
These are discussed in the literature and subject to my own criticisms in the remainder
of the chapter. I retain the term for the sake of convenience only.
5. It has been suggested to me that this commodification may have been avoided
if Whitehead had been judged to be the owner of her genetic material when she
entered the contract. Even this determination would reduce her body to a storage
facility, an incubator holding another body for future alienation. All that would change
in this alternative judgment is the designated owner of the body property.
6. I single out this particular analysis from the wealth of literature on the topic
for its systematic presentation of the most commonly held objections to surrogacy.
7. See, for example, Dodds and Jones (1989, 9) and Dr. Diana Kirby’s submission
to the National Bioethics Consultative Committee’s (NBCC) Surrogacy Report 1 (1990):
17).
8. A notable exception is Carol Pateman, whose critique of the surrogacy con-
tract in The Sexual Contract is raised in the context of a thoroughgoing critique of
contract theory in general. Also Dodds and Jones, to whose critique of surrogacy I have
been referring, later modify their arguments against surrogacy to include a wider
critique of contract and the idea of the body as property (1991). However, despite the
broader application of their criticisms to other contracts, I still take issue with these
theorists insofar as they locate the source of injustice of the surrogacy contract in the
control it is said to secure over women’s bodies.
Notes to Chapters Two and Three 199
9. This is only a small part of Pateman’s critique of surrogacy, but the idea that
the fetus is part of the pregnant self (or at least that there is an intimate link between
the two) is shared by other opponents of surrogacy (e.g., Dodds and Jones 1989, 6;
Overall 1987, ch. 6).
10. While to many this determination may be better for women than the reverse,
it tends to trivialize and hide rape, and/or it leads to the ludicrous situation exemplified
by a manual on sexual conduct at Antioch College, Ohio which suggests, according to
the New York Times (reproduced in The Australian, October 6, 1993, p. 26), that “verbal
consent should be obtained with every new level of physical and/or sexual contact or
conduct in any given interaction, regardless of who initiates it” and that “the request
for consent must be specific to each act.”
11. I have already suggested that the male body accrues value through legal
determinations that deem it the origin of procreative property, but there is also the
question of sperm donation which, because men cannot give birth, is the most appro-
priate practice for comparison with surrogacy on the question of what sexed body
property attracts value. While in Australia commercial trade in sperm is against the law,
at least officially, the private sale of sperm (for cash or kind) is widely practiced without
fear of the legal and moral condemnation that the practice of surrogacy attracts.
12. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the intercorporeal basis of identity will be elabo-
rated on in more detail in the next two chapters.
13. Moira Gatens (1995) contrasts feminism based on an ethics of “care” to
feminism based on an ethics of “justice,” arguing that both by themselves are not only
inadequate for dealing with the injustices faced by women but serve to entrench the
dualisms (public/private, culture/nature) that they seek to redress. “Justice” feminism,
for example, in seeking special legal protection for women from men, tends to entrench
the view of women as the weaker sex.
14. This is not Derrida’s position in Given Time (1992). While he suggests that
the question of the gift is prior to the law or the circle of exchange between self-
present subjects (24) and “sets the circle going” (30), he also takes care to point out that
“the overrunning of the circle by the gift, if there is any, does not lead to a simple,
ineffable exteriority that would be transcendent and without relation” (30).
CHAPTER THREE
1. While male to female transvestism is transgressive, female to male transvestism,
within limits, hardly raises an eyebrow, for reasons I do not have the space to properly
explore. One suggestion for this might be that as maleness is the implicit signifier for
the proper body in our culture, dressing like a man is merely reinforcing that norm
rather than transgressing it.
2. I am referring here to a video clip of Madonna performing. “Like a Virgin”
on the controversial Blond Ambition Tour of 1990.
3. Zita refers to this sign in her critique of the “postmodernist” claims of the
malleability of body-identity. I will return to her critique shortly.
4. See Butler (1990, 93–110) for a detailed analysis of Foucault’s discussion of
this case.
5. For a more detailed discussion of the tension between Foucault’s work on
disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish and his “aesthetics of self ” in his later work,
see Diprose (1994, ch. 2).
200 Notes to Chapter Four
CHAPTER FOUR
1. For critiques of radical feminism along these lines see, for example, Ferguson
(1984) and Sawicki (1988).
2. As discussed in the Introduction, understanding generosity as a giving that
enhances the self through the other goes beyond the English meaning of “generosity,”
defined as nobility, magnanimity, or liberal giving. There is also a precedent for this
extended meaning in Descartes’ philosophy. For example, in The Passions of the Soul, he
defines generosity as a virtue based on the knowledge that nothing truly belongs to me
and on the will to do what I judge to be best, a virtue that is the cause of rightful
self-esteem and that prevents feeling contempt for others (Descartes 1985, 384). I am
grateful to Genevieve Lloyd for directing me to this passage.
3. Thomas Martin’s paper, “Sartre, Sadism, and Female Beauty Ideals” (1996), by
using Sartre’s model of sadism to argue against the objectification of women through
beauty ideals, has alerted me to a possible connection between Sartre’s discussion of
love and desire and a radical feminist position. Whilst I depart from Martin on the
question of how useful Sartre’s ontology might be for resolving the issue of the
objectification of women, I am grateful for the way our discussions have renewed my
interest in Sartre’s work in the area of love and sexuality.
4. See, for example, Margery Collins and Christine Pierce (1980).
5. For a more detailed analysis of Sartre’s model of sadism, see Martin (1996).
While Martin does not make this point, Sartre’s condemnation of sadism, like his model
of desire, relies on the problematic distinction between the body-in-situation (which
in his analysis of sadism he calls the “graceful body”) and the body as flesh (or the
“obscene body”).
6. My view that this is a positive move in Beauvoir’s radical revision of Sartre’s
existentialism is not shared by many commentators. Jo-Ann Pilardi, for example, in an
informative analysis of Beauvoir’s account of female eroticism, evidences this passage as
an example of how Beauvoir remains entrenched in the stereotypical view of female
sexuality as a passive mindlessness that pervades the self (Pilardi 1989, 26). While Pilardi,
in her reading of this passage, seems to equate “abolishing singularity” with passivity,
I go on to argue that this abolition of singularity (and of the mind/body distinction)
is neither essentially passive nor peculiar to women but is a feature of the ambiguity
of existence. Beauvoir’s point is that it is this ambiguity that is often denied by men
at women’s expense. Debra Bergoffen (1995, 1997), in her exceptional account of
Beauvoir’s philosophy of the erotic, makes this equation between the ambiguity of
existence and becoming flesh. Also see Sonia Kruks (1990) for a positive interpretation
of this point.
7. Beauvoir bases this claim on the argument that the ambiguity of existence not
only rests on the claim that “between the past which no longer is and the future which
is not yet, this moment when he [sic ] exists is nothing” but also on the claim that as
“an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on
which he depends” (Beauvoir 1994, 7). She also uses the figure of the “adventurer” to
illustrate how independence is a ruse that denies one’s dependence on others (58-63).
For more detailed comparisons of Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s models of freedom, see Sonia
Kruks (1991) and Monika Langer (1994).
Notes to Chapter Four 201
8. For detailed analyses of Beauvoir’s ambivalence toward the body, see Catriona
Mackenzie (1986) and Moira Gatens (1991, ch. 3).
9. For critical accounts of Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel’s philosophy in her
revision of Sartre’s existentialism, see Genevieve Lloyd (1993) and Tina Chanter (1995,
ch. 2).
10. Moi argues, with reference to Beauvoir’s discussions of female sexuality, that
Beauvoir’s departure from Sartre on the structure of alienation of one’s freedom in the
other is due to her “elaboration on Lacan’s notion of the alienation of the ego in the
other in the mirror stage” (Moi 1992, 102). While there is little doubt that Lacan’s
model of the mirror stage does influence Beauvoir’s understanding of female eroticism,
this is more along the lines of Merleau-Ponty’s elaboration of the model (which I go
on to outline) and the understanding of the self-other, mind-body relations belonging
to the phenomenological tradition. Hence, Beauvoir’s understanding of erotic generos-
ity carries traces of Merleau-Ponty’s focus on body intentionality and the ambiguity (of
being both mind and body, subject and object) that this involves. I therefore depart
from Moi’s claim that “by giving her own theory a slightly more Lacanian twist on this
point [about alienation, Beauvoir] would have managed, at least in my view, to produce
a better account of the relationship between the biological and the psychological”
(111). I do, however, agree with Moi, that one problem underlying the difficulties in
Beauvoir’s account of female sexuality is her emphasis on unity with the other (or on
recuperation of one’s alienated image, as Moi puts it, p. 105).
11. Merleau-Ponty deals specifically with sexuality and the erotic encounter in
the chapter “The Body in Its Sexual Being” in Phenomenology of Perception (1962). But,
as he argues there, the structure of the erotic encounter is no different to that of
personal existence in general, which he accounts for in the rest of the book.
12. For Merleau-Ponty’s version of the body in situation for-itself-for-others, see
Phenomenology of Perception, part 1, chapter 3 in particular. For a more detailed reading
of this as well as Merleau-Ponty’s model of intersubjectivity and freedom than I have
the space to provide here, see Diprose (1994, ch. 6).
13. For his account of the genesis of the lived body with reference to Lacan’s
model of the “mirror stage” see Merleau-Ponty (1964a).
14. That for Merleau-Ponty the generosity of corporeal intersubjectivity does
not involve unity with the other, nor therefore the elimination of difference, is central
to the claim that generosity effects a transformation of existence that is open to
difference. This reading of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology is contrary to Levinas’ critique of
him. I take issue with Levinas’ critique in chapter 9.
15. Beauvoir is inconsistent on this point. As I have argued above, for her,
“genuine love,” for example, involves consciousness transcending the body, while erotic
generosity does not. However, Beauvoir implies elsewhere that the structure of the two
is the same by claiming that sexuality “can be said to pervade life throughout” (Beauvoir
1972, 77). Merleau-Ponty explicitly and consistently holds the latter view, along with
the view that living one’s body involves self-transformation rather than objectification.
He claims, for example, that in the case of “ ‘sight,’ ‘motility,’ ‘sexuality’ . . . the body
is not an object. . . . Whether it is a question of another’s body or my own, I have no
means of knowing the human body other than living it, which means taking up on
my own account the drama which is being played out in it, and losing myself in it”
(Merleau-Ponty 1962, 198).
202 Notes to Chapters Four and Five
16. In fact, Merleau-Ponty claims, in direct opposition to Sartre and to aspects
of Beauvoir’s account, that, while I am always embodied rather than consciousness
transcending a body, I can never be reduced to a thing. For example, “Even if I become
absorbed in the experience of my body and in the solitude of sensations, I do not
succeed in abolishing all reference of my life to a world” (1962, 165).
17. Given this suggestion, I am departing from Judith Butler’s claim that Merleau-
Ponty bases his model of heterosexuality on a master/slave, domination/submission
dynamic (Butler 1989, 91, 95–97). While it is true that Merleau-Ponty, in his chapter
“The Body in Its Sexual Being,” does pass through the master/slave model of sexuality,
he revises it (as he does the psychoanalytic model) in favor of his own notion of
ambiguity (of being autonomous and dependent rather than master or slave) (Merleau-
Ponty 1962, 167). Merleau-Ponty also consistently and explicitly refutes the assump-
tions upon which the master/slave model depends: that the other is an object for
consciousness and/or absolutely other (see, e.g., 1964a, 103; 1962, 346–65). Despite my
departures from Butler, her paper is worth noting for the way it takes this aspect of
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy seriously. For another, more recent account of Merleau-
Ponty’s model of intercorporeality that also takes his views on sexuality seriously, see
Grosz (1994, ch. 4).
18. Judith Butler suggests, for example, that to the extent that Merleau-Ponty
does refer to sexual difference in this chapter, he tends to betray a heterosexual bias and,
within this, an assumption that women are objects rather than subjects of desire (Butler
1989, 92–94). While I agree with Butler on this point, I take issue in chapter 5 with
other aspects of her analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s model of sexuality.
19. Iris Marion Young argues, for example, with reference to Merleau-Ponty’s
ontology, that the social objectification of women manifests in a restricted body com-
portment in, for example, the way in which women throw (Young 1990). But as Young
herself admits, it would be wrong to generalize about the relation between gender
identity and comportment as such restrictions would vary with differences in race and
class. I would also suggest that, as alterity is maintained within the synchronic relation
to the other, and as social backgrounds vary in other ways besides race and class,
women’s body comportments would be more multifarious and open to change than
Young’s analysis implies.
CHAPTER FIVE
1. While my reading of Merleau-Ponty on affectivity and sociality centers on the
chapter in Phenomenology of Perception entitled “The Body in Its Sexual Being,” I will
also be referring to aspects of his later work on perception and art, particularly “Eye
and Mind” (1964b). I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics for two reasons: it is where
the question of affectivity arises most obviously in Merleau-Ponty’s later work and,
while he does not deal explicitly with sexuality in his later work, the structure of
affective perception there is slightly different in a way that needs to be taken into
account. One difference is that in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty tends
to lean toward the idea that the body-subject structures its world (through perception),
whereas in the later work perception is more obviously a two-way process of carnal
intertwining and metamorphosis. My aim is to augment the earlier account of the body
in its sexual being with what I think is a more developed understanding of perception
in the later work. There is enough consistency of thought between the two bodies of
Notes to Chapter five 203
work to allow the connection. Finally, it should be noted that Butler does engage with
Merleau-Ponty’s chapter “The Body in Its Sexual Being” in a paper entitled “Sexual
Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s
Phenomenology of Perception” (Butler 1989). While this paper may have been a more
obvious choice for a comparison between the two thinkers, it is not representative of
Butler’s work on the body and social power, and it contains, I think, some problems
in its reading of Merleau-Ponty, which I address briefly in note 4.
2. Homosexuality is melancholic, according to Butler, not because it involves the
disavowal of a possibility (heterosexuality) foreclosed through social prohibition, but
insofar as it involves a disavowal of “a constitutive relationship to heterosexuality . . . [that]
is to some degree an identification with a rejected heterosexuality” (Butler 1997, 148–
49).
3. Indeed, Kelly Oliver, in a detailed and an informative critique of Butler’s use
of the idea of foreclosure, argues that Butler’s account of the formation of melancholic
identity leaves her without an adequate explanation of how performativity (reiteration
and resignification) could be transformative (Oliver 1999).
4. It is instructive, for a comparison between Merleau-Ponty’s model of affec-
tivity and the Freudian model that Butler holds, that Butler seems to misunderstand
Merleau-Ponty on this point. In a critical assessment of Merleau-Ponty’s account of
“the body in its sexual being,” Butler criticizes him for his “masculinist” and hetero-
sexual bias (Butler 1989). This bias is particularly evident, according to Butler, in
Merleau-Ponty’s use of the case of Schneider, whose deficient “sexual inertia” rests in
part, for Merleau-Ponty, on his inability to find anonymous women attractive (Butler
1989, 92–94). On the basis of these sort of comments, as well as Butler’s claim that
Merleau-Ponty holds that sexuality is primordially “natural” and only secondarily social
(90–91), Butler concludes that Merleau-Ponty’s “normal” masculine desiring subject is
a “disembodied voyeur” (faced with an essentially unchanging female body) (93). This
is a curious interpretation that relies on ignoring Merleau-Ponty’s central thesis in
Phenomenology of Perception, about the intersubjective (and therefore essentially social)
structure of perception (and hence erotic perception). First, Butler’s claim that sexuality,
for Merleau-Ponty, is primordially natural rests on incorrectly equating Merleau-Ponty’s
model of perception (which, as I will describe in more detail shortly, is prepersonal or
intersubjective and prereflexive or based in body motility) with the presocial. Second,
Butler’s claim that Merleau-Ponty’s model of normal sexuality is based on a masculine,
disembodied voyeur implies that what Merleau-Ponty thinks is wrong with Schneider
is that he cannot sexually objectify an anonymous woman. However, the reverse is the
case. What he thinks is wrong with Schneider is he can only objectify others and the
world if faced with an unfamiliar situation. This means that the intersubjective, social,
affective, and therefore erotic structure of perception has been reduced in Schneider so
that he finds everything and everyone equally meaningless and unaffective.What Merleau-
Ponty considers “normal” to erotic perception and personal existence in general is
being a body immersed in an ambiguous social situation of the other’s body and the
world. Erotic perception, and perception in general, is not, for Merleau-Ponty, based on
object-cathexis by a natural or an individualized body, and this, arguably, marks his most
obvious departure from more psychoanalytic accounts. Merleau-Ponty may privilege
vision within his account of body intentionality, as Cathryn Vasseleu argues (1998), but
this is not in the order of objectification by a disembodied voyeur. None of this denies
Butler’s more general claim, however, that Merleau-Ponty’s account carries heterosexual
and masculinist biases.
204 Notes to Chapter Five
5. I begin my interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s account of affectivity and sexu-
ality with his discussion of erotic perception in “The Body in Its Sexual Being” from
the Phenomenology of Perception. As I will be dipping into the chapter rather than giving
an exposition of it and as he engages directly with the psychoanalytic model of
sexuality in this chapter, it is worth offering a brief overview of the chapter here as
I understand it. Merleau-Ponty begins the chapter (pp. 154–57) by setting up a com-
monly held conception of affectivity that he refutes, using the case of Schneider (a
person suffering from deficiencies in perception that Merleau-Ponty has interpreted
more fully in an earlier chapter, “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility”).
In this refutation he offers a sketch of his own view of erotic perception, claims some
common ground with psychoanalysis, and establishes the frame for further discussion
of erotic perception in terms of the role of the body in expression of meaning. He sets
up the discussion in these terms in order to (1) continue to refute the common view
that affectivity is the conscious representation (expression) of natural bodily stimuli, and
(2) challenge the psychoanalytic view that sexuality is the bodily expression of a
repressed memory or an unconscious representation. The critique of the psychoanalytic
model dominates the next part of the discussion (pp. 160–64) and is conducted through
a case of hysteria (loss of voice) arising in a girl who has lost her love object through
her mother’s prohibition. In the process of refuting the psychoanalytic interpretation of
this case, Merleau-Ponty begins to build his own view of the role of the body in
expression and hence his own model of the relation between erotic perception and
social meaning. His own view (that the body expresses existence as it realizes it through
the intersubjective world) becomes the focus of discussion from p. 164 to the end of
the chapter. Here he not only distances himself further from the psychoanalytic model
of sexuality but also passes through and modifies the Hegelian master/slave model of
desire (p. 167) or, rather, Sartre’s use of the Hegelian model in his discussions of sexual
desire. It may not be obvious that Merleau-Ponty is criticizing Sartre’s model of desire
in this brief reference: true to the phenomenological method, Merleau-Ponty does not
always signal explicitly or immediately the ways in which he departs from the positions
he sets up. For a detailed discussion of how Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir depart from
Sartre’s view of sexual desire, see chapter 4.
6. While I have begun my account of Merleau-Ponty’s view on sexuality and
affectivity with reference to the chapter “The Body in Its Sexual Being” from the
Phenomenology of Perception, I am making reference here to his later work on perception
and art. See note 2 for a justification of this move.
7. As I also discussed in chapter 3, Merleau-Ponty provides a developmental
account of how this “open circuit” or intertwining between the body and its perceived
world is established in terms of the development of a body image and postural schema
with reference to the mirror image of the other (1964a). With regard to perception, he
argues that perception of others (and the world in general) requires this development
of a system of “indistinction” or confusion between my body as I live it, my body as
others perceive it, and the other’s body (135). While the confusion is reduced as the
child takes up a subject position in language, it remains in operation as the basis of
perception. Hence, perception is always prereflexive inhabiting the space of other
bodies, and vice versa, without either a division or synthesis between the two. See also
Diprose (1994, 119–22) and Weiss (1999, ch. 1) for more detailed accounts of this
development of the body image through the mirror of the other’s body.
Notes to Chapters Five and Six 205
While there are similarities between Merleau-Ponty’s account of the formation
of the body image and Schilder’s and Lacan’s, Merleau-Ponty, unlike the psychoanalytic
interpretation, does not view the “mirror-stage” as involving identification with and
internalization of an ideal body image as the basis of an ideal ego alienated in the other.
Nor, therefore, does Merleau-Ponty hold the psychoanalytic view that the mirror phase
sets the stage for a sexuality based on cathexis of the object to complete one’s ego ideal.
For Merleau-Ponty, the mirror phase establishes confusion between one’s body image
and the other’s as the basis of affectivity and perception, not internalization of the
other’s body image as the deceptive basis of the self and desire. There is a second point
at which Merleau-Ponty departs from the psychoanalytic interpretation. While for
Merleau-Ponty the system of indistinction established between bodies is reduced as the
child becomes a subject of language, this does not involve repression of attachment to the
body of the first (m)other, as it does in the psychoanalytic account. For Merleau-Ponty,
the body image and its intertwinings form the atmosphere of perception rather than
unconscious content. For a detailed comparison between Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation
of the “mirror phase” and the psychoanalytic accounts, see Weiss (1999, ch. 1).
8. The paradox of expression is another way to put the structure of sensibility
that I have just described: that the body expresses, gives meaning to, a world through
the other, a significant world it did not create yet would not exist as significant without
that expression. That this is a labor of desire is because expression takes place outside
the “self ” through the bodies of others and is affective. I will return to the point about
the expression of meaning shortly.
9. “I perceive the other as a piece of behaviour, for example, I perceive the grief
or anger of the other in his conduct, in his face or his hands, without recourse to any
‘inner’ experience of suffering or anger, and because grief and anger are variations of
belonging to the world, undivided between body and consciousness and equally appli-
cable to the other’s conduct. . . . But then, the behaviour of another, and even his
words, are not that other. . . . For him these situations are lived through, for me they
are displayed. . . . Paul suffers because he has lost his wife . . . I suffer because Paul is
grieved . . . and our situations cannot be superimposed on each other” (Merleau-Ponty
1962, 356).
10. The extent to which Merleau-Ponty allows for difference in his account of
perception is debatable. I argued in chapter 4 that alterity is a condition of and is
maintained in perception and will argue further toward this point in chapter 9. For
other discussions of this point, see Dillon (1988, 41–46) and Vasseleu (1998, 32–36). For
a discussion of how Merleau-Ponty’s model of perception can account for disturbances
in the case of a clash of different “sexualities,” see the account of the clinical encounter
in the following chapter.
11. I am grateful to Karen Williams for directing me to this passage.
12. See, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the corporeal effects of losing
a “love-object” through prohibition in Phenomenology of Perception (1962, 160–71).
CHAPTER SIX
1. For critiques of the medical model of the body and discussion of the impli-
cations of these critiques for medical ethics, see the various papers in Troubled Bodies:
Critical Perspectives on Postmodernism, Medical Ethics, and the Body (Komesaroff 1995).
206 Notes to Chapters Six and Seven
2. The definition of sexuality I elaborate here might be broader than expected.
A dictionary definition, for example, would confine itself to sex and/or gender and/
or sexual intercourse. But already such a definition locates and limits sexuality in a way
that does not reflect the variety, richness, and ambiguity of the pleasures that inhabit
people’s lives. (Indeed, the dictionary definition could be accused of the same reduc-
tionism leveled at medical discourse.) Such a definition also presupposes an individualist
ontology that is under attack in this book. The definition of sexuality I offer here is
based on a different ontology, already explored in some detail in chapters 5 and 6. This
ontology better captures the nature of both sexuality and the clinical encounter, and
I will justify it further later in this chapter. For the moment, I am concerned with
including, within a definition of sexuality, three terms: the pleasures of one’s own body,
the other, and the social discourses within which these are embedded.
3. For early discussions of this issue see, for example, Watney (1987) and Diprose
and Vasseleu (1991).
4. Or, as Foucault puts it later in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1,
the notion of “sex” made it possible to group together, in an artificial
unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and
pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal
principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere . . .
sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in the
deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and
their materiality, their forces, their energies, sensations, and pleasures. (Fou-
cault 1980a, 154–55)
5. For a number of such critiques see, for example, papers in Body/Politics: Women
and the Discourses of Science (Jacobus et al. 1990) and in Vital Signs (Shildrick and Price
1998).
6. These two examples and the two I use to illustrate the second kind of problem
are based on reports by friends of their experiences, although I have changed the names
of those involved. While common, at least among people I know, these are the sort of
stories rarely documented in sociological or medical studies, presumably because the
kind of discomfort that their telling generates means that they are usually reserved for
private conversations between friends. I am therefore grateful that I am privy to these
stories and have permission to use them here.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. One of the more infamous of these dismissals is a recent book by Alan Sokal
and Jean Bricmont, Impostures Intellectuelles (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997), in which Sokal
and Bricmont criticize a range of French theorists (including Deleuze and Kristeva) for
distorting and misusing scientific concepts, and for what they take to be their opaque
style and fraudulent scholarship.
2. Jean Curthoys, quoted here, explicitly condemns what she calls “deconstructive”
feminism for seeking rather than opposing power and for promoting “intellectual
confusion” through its irrational methodology. This is one of the main themes of her
book. Her condemnation of academic feminism for transgressing the concepts of the
Notes to Chapter Seven 207
natural sciences is less obvious, emerging more from the choices she makes in the
feminist work she targets (much of which is critically engaged with the natural sci-
ences) rather than from any explicit sustained defense of science from feminist criticism.
Still, at times in the book, the link that Curthoys makes between feminist criticism of
scientific concepts and failure “to meet the tests of genuine reason” is too strong to be
considered coincidental. For example, in criticizing a paper of mine on the operation
of difference in genetic theory (Diprose 1991), I am charged with promoting intellec-
tual confusion by failing to realize that science is an “autonomous enterprise” that
“constitutes its objects internally” and, as such, should only be subject to “intellectually
relevant considerations” rather than “external social/ethical considerations” (Curthoys
1997, 89–90).
3. While this formulation of the plane of immanence tends to imply that images
of thought will determine conclusively what concepts emerge and when, the plane is
as unstable and open to transformation as the concepts that emerge in it.
4. Nietzsche also claims a connection between the type of concept and the mode
of existence of the philosopher who creates it by suggesting, for example, that philoso-
phers who hold the ascetic ideal “see in it an optimum condition for the highest and
boldest spirituality and smiles—he does not deny ‘existence,’ he rather affirms his
existence and only his [. . .] he is not far from harboring the impious wish: pereat
mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus, fiam! [let the world perish, but let there be philosophy,
the philosopher, me!]” (1969, 108).
5. According to Curthoys, this concept of the human is confirmed to its discov-
erer by the observation that the exercise of power, which does not respect the need
for recognition, leads to “distortions” in human behavior (Curthoys 1997, 49).
6. Norman Wirzba’s discussion of philosophical autonomy and its alternative
companion, heteronomy, is an informative and a detailed account of Levinas’ idea of
teaching. In it he makes the observation that the link between maieutics and anamnesis
in Plato’s thought differentiates the Socratic notion of autonomy from the modern idea
of self-legislation. “In the Socratic view the turn inward does not stop with the self.
The self is, as it were, opened to the eidé. . . . In modern philosophy this turn beyond
the self gets cut off ” (Wirzba 1995, n. 4, 143).
7. There is an “inequality” in the relation, so that I am obligated to the other,
and the relation is not reversible. For an account of how this “inequality” allows for
justice through a “third party,” see Chanter (1995, 190–96).
8. See, for example, Irigaray (1988), Ainley (1988b), Chanter (1995, ch. 5, 2001a,
and 2001b), Vasseleu (1998, part 3) and Ziarek (2001a).
9. There is at least one other consideration that allows this, Levinas’ idea of the
“third party,” described as that which opens the ethical relation to the whole of
humanity (1969, 213; 1981, 160–61). While I am obligated to welcome (and so remain
open to) the other who contests me, the other is in relation to a third party to whom
she or he is responsible and who treats me, alongside the other I face, as someone to
be welcomed. By rendering the one who is contested as also one who is welcomed,
the third party not only tempers the “inequality” of the relation to the other without
either rendering the relation reversible or allaying responsibility, it also works against
classifying the alterity that contests and the alterity that welcomes in terms of any class
of human existence, including sex.
10. Therefore, claiming that the disturbance of complacency effected by the
other’s alterity inspires creative thinking and the production of concepts does not
208 Notes to Chapters Seven and Eight
contradict Levinas’ insistence that this exposedness to the other is not “consciousness
of ” or thematization, at least not primordially. For an interesting discussion of how
Levinas’ model of the ethical relation involves a response to alterity that dethematizes
rather than objectifies, see Sullivan (2001).
11. Or, as Levinas puts it, “language accomplishes the primordial putting in
common” (1969, 173). I add the qualification that this putting in common signals only
a possibility of a common world to avoid the conclusion that language overcomes
alterity and achieves absolute cultural commensurability. For Levinas, alterity, and hence
the disturbance that founds responsibility, expression, thinking, and communication, is
irreducible. He elaborates on the relation between alterity and cultural commensura-
bility more thoroughly in “Meaning and Sense” (1987b). I will take up this issue more
centrally in the following two chapters.
12. I will take up this issue of Levinas’ apparent subordination of ontology and
politics to ethics more directly in the following two chapters.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. Confidential submission 318 to the National Inquiry into the Separation of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. The inquiry was
convened by Michael Lavarch, attorney general of Australia, in August 1995, in response
to requests by indigenous agencies and communities. Sir Ronald Wilson, president of
the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), and Mick Dodson,
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, took primary respon-
sibility for conducting the hearings of the National Inquiry. The Report of the Inquiry,
entitled Bringing Them Home, was published by the HREOC and submitted to the
Australian government in April 1997.
2. “Protecting children from neglect and abuse” was often used as a reason to
justify the removal of indigenous children from their families, and the National Inquiry
includes such cases in its terms of reference if removal of children was by compulsion
(HREOC 1997, 10). However, such justification was secondary to the policies of
assimilation that were the driving force behind the large-scale forcible removal of
children from indigenous communities during this period.
3. The actual figures have been difficult to estimate. A national survey in 1989
found that 47 percent of Aboriginal respondents of all ages had been separated from both
parents some time in childhood (compared to 7 percent for nonindigenous people)
(HREOC 1997, 37). But as this figure includes separation due to hospitalization and
juvenile detention as well as removal, the National Inquiry settled for a figure of between
one in three and one in ten to indicate the extent of forcible removal (ibid.). That the
removal of children was forced under assimilation policies is the main criterion in estimat-
ing this figure. The HREOC report defines “forcible removal” as the removal of children
by compulsion (authorized or illegal coercion), duress (involving threats or moral pres-
sure) or undue influence (improper pressure) (HREOC 1997, 5–10).
4. See the HREOC report on the way children, by absorbing the values of a
culture, are necessary for the continuity of that culture (pp. 218–19).
5. Walking Together, pamphlet published by the Council for Aboriginal Reconcili-
ation (CAR n.d., 2). The CAR was established by federal legislation on September 2,
Notes to Chapter Eight 209
1991, comprising twenty-five members, twelve of whom are Aboriginal, two Torres
Strait Islanders, and eleven representatives from the wider Australian community.
6. In 1989, Theo van Boven conducted a study concerning reparation for victims
of violations of human rights on behalf of the United Nations Sub-Commission on
Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. His report, published in
1996, is entitled Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to Reparation for Victims of
Gross Violations of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (HREOC 1997, 280).
7. Perrin and Veitch (1998), for example, point to the difficulty in achieving
reconciliation based on the idea of recovering a past that is irrecoverable and on telling
a truth that is unspeakable. They conclude that the best that can be hoped for is the
promise of reconciliation, by which I presume they mean that reconciliation is an
ongoing process rather than a final settling of a debt.
8. For another discussion of race relations in Australia that argues similarly for
expressions of alterity rather than reconciliation based on commonness and agreement,
see Linnell Secomb (2000).
9. See Reynolds (1987) for a detailed discussion of the effect of the principle
of terra nullius on the history of indigenous land rights in Australia, and see Nettheim
(1998) and Patton (1997) for discussions of the impact of the Mabo judgment on both
the principle of terra nullius and the future of cultural difference.
10. In “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” to which I have been referring
so far in this discussion, Nietzsche holds to a distinction between the “immediately
perceived world” and the world constructed by universalizing these impressions under
concepts (see, e.g., 1979, 84). This distinction between perception and meaning allows
him to claim that meaning, and hence one’s world, can be changed by holding more
to one’s first impressions (89). However, he discards this distinction the more critical
he becomes of Kant in his later work.
11. Levinas discusses the connection between colonization and the Platonic
model of meaning and perception in “Meaning and Sense” (1987b). For a useful
commentary of this discussion, see Bernasconi (1991).
12. Nietzsche mentions this kind of lying in passing in, for example, “On the
Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (1983, 118–19).
13. Plato discusses “medicinal lying” in the Republic (382a–e, 459d–460c) and
what is called the “noble lie” in the Republic (414b–415c). For a recent detailed dis-
cussion of the role Plato gives lying in the Republic, see David Simpson (1996).
14. Bringing Them Home documents some of the effects that policies of forcible
removal have had on the families and communities from which the children were taken
(HREOC 1997, 212–20). These include individual grief, the sense of shame families
members felt for “letting welfare get their children,” a loss of confidence in their own
parenting abilities, and a gradual self-denial of Aboriginality among community mem-
bers, either through shame or to prevent their children from being taken.
15. I have borrowed the term vertical history from Johnson (1993), who uses it
in an account of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of temporality and forgetting.
16. While I have found Johnson’s elaboration of Merleau-Ponty’s account of
forgetting enormously helpful, I do not, as the following analysis suggests, agree with
his conclusion that forgetting allows “me to forget my past which is to forget myself
and stand outside myself and see, really see” (Johnson 1993, 205). For Merleau-Ponty,
as I go on to argue, forgetting involves the past adhering to the body through habit.
210 Notes to Chapters Eight and Nine
One cannot be released from this past, but it can be transformed through an open
relation to the other. Any trauma resulting from this “forgotten” past can also be
similarly transformed through the other. This has been discussed, with reference to
Merleau-Ponty, in some detail in chapter 5. For an account consistent with Merleau-
Ponty’s model of intercorporeality of how a cross-cultural encounter can be traumatic,
in the sense of effecting an ontological closure to the other, see Biddle (2002).
17. Australian Prime Minister John Howard has consistently insisted on taking
a more “positive” attitude to the past than that highlighted in Bringing Them Home,
focusing on aspects of his own heritage and the efforts of his own ancestors in con-
tributing to the prosperity of Australian culture. Celebrating the contribution of Aus-
tralians to the First and Second World Wars and to the defense of Australia in the
Vietnam War has been a dominant theme in this “positive” historical rhetoric in the
years since Bringing Them Home was published.
18. Durie (1999) provides a comprehensive and an informative comparison
between Husserl’s and Levinas’ approaches to temporality that I have found useful in
formulating my reading of Levinas’ account of memory.
19. These are the words of former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating. The
current conservative government, under the leadership of John Howard, has recently
(August 1999) passed legislation expressing the government’s regret for the suffering
caused by forcible removal policies, but this regret denies responsibility of the present
government.
20. For other detailed discussions of the “third party” and justice regarding the
ethical relation see, for example, Bernasconi (1999), Chanter (1995, ch. 5), Thomas
(1999), and Ziarek (2001b).
CHAPTER NINE
1. Derrida discusses the way Schmitt’s concept of the political, for example, is
based on knowing the difference between the enemy and the friend and points to the
impossibility of determining the difference (Derrida 1997, ch. 5). Penelope Deutscher
explores this impossibility, in interesting ways, with immigration policies and the plight
of political refugees seeking asylum (2001).
2. I have compressed here a complex and at times contradictory thesis in Merleau-
Ponty’s work about the relation between the imaginary and the real, the cultural-
historical and the “natural.” For a detailed analysis of this aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s
philosophy, which pays particular attention to his various understanding of “imaginary”
in The Visible and the Invisible, see Castoriadis (1997).
3. Levinas engages directly with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of meaning, percep-
tion, and intersubjectivity in a number of places, for example, in “Meaning and Sense”
(1987b), which I considered in chapter 8, in “The Philosophical Determination of the
Idea of Culture” in Entre Nous (1998), and in “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-
Ponty” (1994), which will be my focus here. I am grateful to Ewa Ziarek (2001b),
whose own work on Levinas and the political, drawing in particular on Levinas’ later
work, has prompted my reconsideration of the issue here, in relation to Merleau-Ponty.
4. Simon Critchley provides a convincing argument toward this claim (1992,
219–36).
Notes to Chapter Nine and Conclusion 211
5. This alternative way of reading Merleau-Ponty’s model of intercorporeality is
not restricted to the paper “Dialogue and the Perception of the Other” (1973). The
same idea pervades all of his work (although arguably is more apparent in his later
work) and informs my analyses in chapters 4 to 6.
6. John Caputo makes a similar point about deconstruction in his excellent
discussion of “The Messianic: Waiting for the Future” (Caputo 1997, ch. 6). There he
says, after noting that justice is never here, that “ ‘undecidability’ and différance do not
imply decision and delay. On the contrary, they serve to underlie and expose postpone-
ment, to make the retardation of justice look bad, to make salient the urgency of
decision. For deconstruction, if there is such a thing, is a passion, an impassioning, an
impatience, for justice” (180).
CONCLUSION
1. The conference was the Australian Women’s Studies Association Annual Con-
ference held at Macquarie University, Sydney, January 31–February 2, 2001.
2. The nodal point around which this connection congealed was “blood” and
everything it may signify to me. Among the provocations that led me to this way of
concluding, besides Rosengarten’s work on blood and Keane’s on other body matter,
included: a conference paper by Jacqueline Scott, “Nietzsche and Mixed Race” (2000),
which takes literally what Nietzsche says about mixed blood being necessary for a
healthy culture; a conference paper by Erika Kerruish, “Moving Words: Nietzsche on
Language and Affectivity” (2000), which contains a quote from Nietzsche about our
blood being necessary to animate the words of others; and a comment from someone
in discussion of the latter, who responded to my interest in the quote with “but surely
there is no need to take Nietzsche’s comments on blood literally.”
3. Keane and Rosengarten (2001) propose these two opposite ways of under-
standing the relation between social concepts and the body, although not exactly in the
way I have set it out here.
Bibliography 213
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Index 221
Index
action at a distance, 38–9 Beauvoir, Simone de, 15, 139; on
aesthetics of self, 40–43, 66–67 ambiguity of existence, 78, 87–88,
affectivity: in the clinical encounter, 114, 200n. 7; on becoming flesh, 86, 88;
116–20; and generosity, 12, 14, 75, 95, on domination and submission, 87,
102–7, 127, 191; individualistic 92, 93; erotic generosity, conception
models of, 96–97, 100–1; of of, 78, 86–87, 201n. 10; on freedom,
intercorporeality, 95, 100–2; Merleau- 84–88; on love, 84–85; Merleau-
Ponty on, 100–6, 118–19; and self- Ponty, relation to, 89, 201n. 15; Sartre,
transformation, 75, 90, 102–5; and critique of, 84, 86–87; on women’s
social power, 95–100; and thinking, sexuality, 84–89, 200n. 16
125, 127, 132–33, 143 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 78–83
Ainley, Alison, 41, 207n. 8 Bergoffen, Debra, 86
Aristotle, 2–4 Bernasconi, Robert, 3–4, 166, 170,
alterity: and cultural diversity, 161–63: 209n. 11, 210n. 20
and generosity, 13–14, 191–93; in Biddle, Jennifer, 210n. 16
Levinas, 13–14, 136–41, 146, 161–66, blood: sale of, 47, 52; writing in, 190–94
172; in Merleau-Ponty, 90, 103, 118– body: discipline of, 21–23, 66, 96, 151,
19, 182–85; and thinking, 136–41; 167; as flesh, 81–82, 86, 88; imaginary,
and transformation of social imaginar- 170–73; and meaning, relation
ies, 184–88; witness to, 162–63, between, 67, 103–5, 133, 151, 171,
165–66 173–75, 182–83, 191–93; as property,
ambiguity of existence/identity, 65–66, 46–47, 49–50; in situation, 80–81, 86,
68; Beauvoir’s idea of, 78, 87–88, 89; sexed, 37, 43–45, 53–54, 56, 63–
200n. 7; Merleau-Ponty’s idea of, 64, 67, 79; as work of art, 21, 24, 66
102–3, 116–18, 175–77 body-identity, performance of, 61–72
apology, 148, 159, 165–66 Bourdieu, Pierre, 9
autonomy: as control over one’s body, Bringing Them Home (HREOC), 146–48,
46–47, 78; critiques of, 49–50, 54, 154, 159, 208nn. 1–4, 209n. 14
87–88; democratic concept, 35–36; Butler, Judith, 11, 15, 61; Foucault, use
Levinas’ conception of, 135–41 and critique of, 66, 97, 99, 101, 199n.
autonomous thinking, 126, 133–36 4; Freud, use of, 97, 99, 101; on
221
222 Corporeal Generosity
Butler, Judith (continued) dissimulation, 31, 42, 113–14, 119
gender performativity, 63–64, 67–68, distance as difference, 21, 24–44, 60
70–71, 98–99; on melancholic Dodds, Susan and Karen Jones, 49,
identity formation, 97–101, 106, 198n. 7, 199n. 9
203n. 2; Merleau-Ponty, critique of, domination and submission, 76–77, 81,
202nn. 17, 18, 203n. 4 84, 87–88
Durie, Robin, 158, 210n. 18
Caputo, John, 187, 211n. 6
Castoriadis, Cornelius, 210n. 2 equality (and inequality), 32–33, 56–57,
Chanter, Tina, 139–40, 201n. 9, 207nn. 84–85, 90
7, 8, 210n. 20 eternal recurrence, 25–26, 35, 156
Cixous, Hélène, 10 ethical relation, 14, 133, 137–39, 141,
Collins, Margery and Christine Pierce, 165–66, 169, 179–81
200n. 4 Ethics of Ambiguity, The (Beauvoir), 87
colonization (and decolonization), 145–66 “Eye and Mind” (Merleau-Ponty), 101–
commodification of the person, 46–7, 51 2, 202n. 5
community formation (sociality), 13,
167–88 Ferguson, Ann, 200n. 1
consent (and coercion), 45–47, 49–51, Ferrell, Robyn, 155
53, 55 Foucault, Michel, 11, 61, 63, 99, 101;
conscience, 99, 105 aesthetics of self, 66–67; confession,
contract. See social contract concept of, 109–110; on disciplinary
Cornell, Drucilla, 57 power, 66, 96, 199n. 5; on Herculin
Critchley, Simon, 210n. 4 Barbin, case study of, 65; on medical
cultural difference: assimilation of, 146– discourse, 109–10, 114; on resistance
49, 157, 160; and language, 150–53, to normalization, 66–67, 109, 114–15,
161–62; and Levinas, 161–64, 167–68 153; sexuality, conception of, 108–10,
Curthoys, Jean, 134–37, 143, 206n. 2, 114–15, 206n. 4
207n. 5 freedom: and autonomous thinking,
134–35; Beauvoir’s conception of,
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 127– 84–88; of body performance, 72;
28, 131, 133 liberal conception, 46; Merleau-
Derrida, Jacques, 11, 15, 210n. 1; Ponty’s conception of, 54–55, 72, 90–
différance, 7, 211n. 6; on the gift, 5–9, 93; Sartre’s concept of, 79–80, 83–84;
55–56, 199n. 14; on justice, 57; on and sexual relations, 76–77, 79
Levinas, 140, 163, 170, 186; on Freud, Sigmund, 98; and affectivity 96,
woman in Nietzsche’s philosophy, 41, 101; and melancholia, 97
43, 132
Descartes, René, 200n. 2 Gatens, Moira, 15, 56, 155–56, 199n. 12,
Deutscher, Penelope, 210n. 1 201n. 8; imaginary bodies, concept of,
“Dialogue and Perception of the Other” 170–72, 178
(Merleau-Ponty), 181–84 gender performativity, 63–64, 67–68,
différance, 7, 211n. 6 70–71, 98–99
Dillon, Martin, 205n. 10 generosity: and affectivity, 12, 14, 75,
Diprose, Rosalyn, 5, 15, 199n. 5, 201n. 102–5, 127, 191; and community
12, 204n. 7, 207n. 1 formation, 13, 168, 176–79; and
discipline/disciplinary mechanisms, 63– decolonization, 146, 165–66; erotic
64, 66, 96 (Beauvoir), 78, 86–87, 201n. 10; as
Index 223
intercorporeality (Merleau-Ponty), 12– social contract theory, 4, 20, 46–47,
14, 68–72, 102–3, 173–78; and justice, 61–62
3–4, 8–10, 184–87, 194–95; and intercorporeality, 12–14, 68–69, 89–91,
politics, 14, 146, 165–66, 169–70, 172– 102–5, 211, 173, 175–78, 181–85
73, 179–81, 184–88; radical (Levinas), Irigaray, Luce, 129
11–12, 140–41, 145–46, 167–70, 178–
79; redefined, 4–5, 75, 190–96; and Jacobus et al., 206n. 5
self-transformation, 60, 71, 75, 90, Jeffreys, Sheila, 76–77, 87
102–5; and sexual difference, 10, 35– Johnson, Galen, 156–57, 209nn. 15, 16
44, 54–58, 85–86; and thinking, 13, judgment: conscious, 169–70, 179–81;
127, 140–43; unconditional, 120, 146, pre-reflective, 173–75, 179
179, 184, 187; as a virtue (Aristotle), justice (and injustice): and exchange of
2–4, 192; as welcoming cultural body property, 47, 49–50; and
difference, 165–68 generosity, 3–4, 8–10, 184–87, 194–95;
gift: aporia of, 5–9; of body-property, and giving corporeality, 56–58; Levinas’
52–53; versus contract, 5–6, 47–48, idea of, 180–81; Nietzsche’s idea of,
171; of corporeality, 54–58; and 29–34; and self-transformation, 60, 66;
sexual difference, 10, 35–44, 85–86 and social contract, 62; and transfor-
Gift, The (Mauss), 5–6 mation of social imaginaries, 184–85
gift-giving virtue, 11–12, 30, 32, 34–35,
37–38, 43, 167 Kaite, Berkeley, 77
Grosz, Elizabeth, 202n.17 Keane, Helen, 189–90, 211n. 2
Kerruish, Erika, 131–32, 211n. 2
history, conceptions of, 155–57, 161 Komesaroff, Paul, 205n. 1
History of Sexuality, Volume I, The Kruks, Sonia, 200nn. 6, 7
(Foucault), 115, 206n. 4
HIV-AIDS, 108, 111 Langer, Monika, 200n. 7
Hunt, Lester, 3–4 language. See also meaning; and
community formation, 167–70; and
ideas/concepts. See also social norms/ experience, 150–52, 158; Levinas on,
prohibitions; creation of, 128–32, 140–41, 158, 161; Nietzsche on, 30–
135–43; incarnate expression of, 72, 32, 149–52, 161–62
103–6, 172–75; living from, 132–33; law: and exchange of body property,
transformation of, 175–76 46–47, 49–51, 56–58; and justice, 32,
identity (and difference), 6–8, 10–12, 45; 56–58, 49–50; and performance of
corporeal (Merleau-Ponty), 54–56, body-identity, 61–64, 68, 72
68–72; disruption of, 161, 164–65; Le Doeuff, Michèlle, 130, 175
Nietzsche on the constitution of, 20– Levinas, Emmanuel: on affectivity, 14,
44; performance of, 60–72; sexed, 10, 132–33, 136, 170; and alterity, 136–
35–44, 54–58 41, 146, 161–66, 172; on apology,
indigenous Australians: apology to, 148, 165–66; on autonomy, 135–41; and
159, 165–66; colonization of, 153–55; cultural difference, 161–64, 167–68;
and forcible removal policies, 146–48, enjoyment, concept of, 132–33, 139,
154, 159, 208nn. 1–4; and language 141; on the ethical relation, 14, 133,
and identity, 150; terra nullius and, 137–39, 141, 165–66, 169, 179–81;
148–49, 155 on infinity, 136–37; on “living
individualism: in models of affectivity, from . . .” ideas, 132–33; on memory,
96–97, 100–1; Sartre’s, 79–80, 89; in 157–58, 161, 166; Merleau-Ponty,
224 Corporeal Generosity
Levinas, Emmanuel (continued) intercorporeality; and Beauvoir, 89–
critique of, 14, 177–78, 181–82, 210n. 90, 91, 201n. 15, 202n. 16; and body-
3; politics, conception of, 127, 165– identity, performance of, 69–72, 199;
66, 169–70, 172–73, 179–81, 184–88; and body-property, alienation of, 54–
radical generosity, concept of, 11–12, 56; and Butler, 70–72, 97, 100, 106,
127, 140–41, 145–46, 167–70, 178– 202nn. 17, 18; and consent and
80, 184; responsibility, concept of, 14, coercion, 55, 92–93; erotic perception
137–41, 165–66, 169, 180; on the (sexuality), conception of, 78, 90–93,
saying and the said, 140, 158, 166, 102–5, 116–19, 201n. 11, 204n. 5;
169–70, 178, 180; on sensibility, 14, Foucault, compared to, 70, 116; on
127, 132–33, 139–40. 170, 179, 181; freedom, 54–55, 72, 90–93; and
on sociality/community, 127, 167–68, generosity, 11–12, 46, 68–72, 78, 90–
178–79; teaching, concept of, 135– 93, 102, 106, 117, 120–21, 173–77;
141; on thinking/reason, 11, 137–41; on incarnation of ideas, 72, 103–6,
the third party, idea of, 142, 166, 180, 173–74; intercorporeality, conception
207n. 9, 210n. 20; on time/temporal- of, 68–69, 89–91, 102–5, 173, 175–78,
ity, 158, 161; the welcome, concep- 181–85; on intertwining of flesh, 71,
tion of, 139–40, 165–66; on woman/ 89, 102–4, 117, 175, 204n. 7; Levinas’
the feminine, 138–40 critiques of, 177–78, 181–82, 210n. 3;
liberation feminism, 134 on meaning, 103–5, 118, 151, 161–
Lingis, Alphonso, 168 62, 175–78, 181–85; on memory (and
Lloyd, Genevieve, 129–30, 132, 201n. 9 forgetting), 156–57, 209n. 16;
Locke, John, 198nn. 1, 2 perception, conception of, 12, 97,
love, 78–79, 83–85, 90 100–5, 117–18, 151, 173–78, 183–85;
lying, 146, 150, 153–56, 209nn. 12, 13 psychological rigidity, definition of,
91; Sartre, critique of, 89, 90, 91;
Machan, Tibor, 2–4, 8 sedimentation, idea of, 12, 46, 55, 72,
Mackenzie, Catriona, 201n. 8 91, 102, 105, 120, 175, 182; sensibil-
Mackinnon, Catharine, 76, 78 ity, conception of, 101–2, 116, 173–
Man of Reason, The (Lloyd), 129–30 75, 205n. 8. See also perception; and
Martin, Thomas, 200nn. 3, 5 sexual difference, 91–93; on the social
Mauss, Marcel, 5–6, 53 imaginary, 173–78, 183–85; style,
meaning. See also language; indetermi- conception of, 55, 102–4, 119;
nate, 103–5, 175–76; and experience, syncretic sociability, idea of, 54, 69,
28–31, 149–51; and multiculturalism, 90; on touch (and being-touched),
161–62; transformation of, 175–77, 115–16, 173
182–83, 185–86 Mill, John Stuart, 198nn. 1, 2
“Meaning and Sense” (Levinas), 161–62 Moi, Toril, 89, 200n. 10
melancholic identity formation, 97–101,
106 Nadeau, Chantal, 77
memory (and forgetting), 8–9, 22–23, Nettheim, Garth, 209n.9
151, 156–58, 161, 166, 209n. 16 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 2–3
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: on affectivity, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 15, 59, 72, 127,
78, 90, 92, 100–106, 118–19, 203n. 4, 197, 207n. 4; aesthetics of self, 40–43;
204n. 5; and alterity, 90, 103, 118–19, on the body, discipline of, 21–23,
182–85, 201n. 14, 205n.10; on 151, 167; and colonization, 145, 152;
ambiguity of existence, 54, 69, 72, 89, and community formation, 32, 151,
91, 102–3, 116–18, 175–77. See also 167; on the corporeal self, social
Index 225
constitution of, 21–27; on the Plato (Socrates), 78, 128, 153, 207n. 6,
creditor-debtor relation, 28–35; on 209n. 13; Socratic maieutics, 134, 136
equality, 32–41; eternal recurrence, politics and generosity, 14, 146, 165–66,
concept of, 25–26, 35, 156; and the 169–70, 172–73, 179–81, 184–88
gift (and gift-giving virtue), 11–12, postmodern subjectivity, 20–21, 25, 44
30, 32, 34–35, 37–38, 43, 167; justice, power: and autonomous thinking, 135;
conception of, 29–34; on language/ imbalance, 77; productive/disciplinary,
concepts, 28, 30–32, 43, 145, 149–51, 45, 66, 96, 99–100, 199n. 5; will to-,
161–62, 167; on lying, 113, 153–56; 11, 28–31
on memory and forgetting, 22–23, pregnancy, 112; Nietzsche’s metaphor of,
151, 156, 158, 167; and performing 27, 41
identity, 60, 61–63, 65–66; on pity, promise/promising, 33, 61
159; and the self-other relation, 27– prostitution, 51, 57
35, 194; self-overcoming, concept of, Psychic Life of Power, The (Butler), 97–
11–12, 24–27, 40–43, 60; on thinking, 101
22, 125; on truth, 36, 42, 145, 149–
52, 158, 170; will to power, concept radical feminism, 76–78, 84
of, 11, 28–31; on woman, 11–12, 35– rape, 51, 53, 57–58
44, 198nn. 8, 9 reason, 126; and autonomy, 134–35; and
normalization, 9, 13, 62–64, 96, 101, infinity, 137; maleness of, 129–30
194; by medical discourse, 107–11, reconciliation, 147–48
119; resistance to, 66–67, 109, 114– responsibility, 172; Levinas’ idea of, 14,
15, 153; of sexuality, 108–11 137–41, 165–66; in social contract
Nussbaum, Martha, 159–60, 209n. 9 theory, 61–62
Reynolds, Henry, 153, 209n. 9
object-cathexis, 97–100, 108; critique of, Rosengarten, Marsha, 189–90, 211n. 2
102–3, 106
objectification, 79, 100; of women, 76– Sacks, Oliver, 71
77, 88, 91–92 safe sex, 76–79, 88, 92–93
Oliver, Kelly, 203n. 3 Sanford, Stella, 139
Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence Sartre, Jean-Paul, 78; on the body in
(Levinas), 133, 139–40, 158, 163, 179 situation, 80–83; on desire, 80–82; on
Overall, Christine, 199n. 9 the feminine, 79; flesh, concept of,
81–82, 83; on freedom, 79–80, 83–84;
passivity of generosity/responsibility, individualism in, 79–80, 89; on love,
165–66, 168, 170, 185, 187 79, 83–84; on sadomasochism, 82,
Pateman, Carole, 49, 51, 53, 198n. 7, 200n. 5; on sexuality, 79–84
199n. 9 Sawicki, Jana, 200n. 1
Patton, Paul, 128, 197, 198, 209n. 9 saying and the said, Levinas’ conception
Peperzak, Adriaan, 139 of, 140, 158, 166, 169–70, 178, 180
Perrin, Colin and Scott Veitch, 209n. 7 Schrift, Alan, 5, 10, 11, 29, 34, 197n. 2
Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau- Scott, Jacqueline, 211n. 2
Ponty), 90–93, 97, 202n. 1, 203n. 4, Scott, Russell, 198n. 3
204nn. 5, 6 Secomb, Linnell, 209
Pilardi, Jo-Ann, 200n. 6 Second Sex, The, (Beauvoir), 84–88
pity, 159–62, 164 sedimentation, Merleau-Ponty’s idea of,
plane of immanence, 128, 130–31, 142, 12, 46, 55, 72, 91, 102, 105, 120, 175,
207n. 3 182
226 Corporeal Generosity
self-fabrication/self-formation, 21, 24– 6, 47–48, 171; individual self-identity
27; and language, 149–51 assumed in, 20, 46–47, 61–62; and
self-knowledge, 134–35, 137–38 justice, 62; Nietzsche’s critique of, 23,
self/other relation. See also alterity and 28, 31; and responsibility, idea of, 61–
intercorporeality; as creditor/debtor 62; service contract 47, 49–50; and
relation, 27–35; objectification in, 79– sexual relations, 76; women, exclusion
80, 87; and perception, 176–77, 182– from, 50–57
84; and self-transformation, 60, 71, 86, social imaginaries, 170–88, 192–93
103–5; and thinking, 134–35, 137–38, social norms/prohibitions: and identity
140–43 formation, 98–100; incarnate
self-overcoming, Nietzsche’s idea of, 11– expression of, 102–5, 115, 120
12, 24–27, 40–43, 60 Sokal, Alan and Jean Bricmont, 206n. 1
self-presence, 6–8, 20, 26, 42, 54 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 198n. 8
self-temporalization, 25–26, 156 Stock, Wendy, 77
self-transformation: affectivity in, 75, 90, Sullivan, Nikki, 208n. 10
100–6; of corporeal self, 24–27, 102– surrogacy, 48–49, 52–54 , 57–8, 198nn.
5; through eroticism, 86–87; and the 4–6
other, 60, 71, 86, 103–5; through syncretic sociability, Merleau-Ponty’s
performance, 61–72 idea of, 54, 69, 90
sensibility, 9, 107; Levinas’ idea of, 14,
132–33, 139–40, 170, 179, 181; temporality: Levinas on, 158, 161;
Merleau-Ponty’s idea of, 101–2, 116, Nietzsche on, 25–26, 35, 156
173–75, 205n. 8 terra nullius, 148–49, 155, 158, 163
sexual difference. See also woman; testimony, 147–48, 155, 157–58, 163–64
constitution of, 10, 35–44, 54–58, 98– thinking: affectivity of, 125, 127, 132–
100; exchange of body-property and, 33, 143; and alterity, 136–41;
45, 53–54; and generosity, 10; autonomous, 126, 133–36; feminist,
Merleau-Ponty on, 91–93; and 126–27, 129–32, 134, 138–39, 141–43
sexuality, 84–88 third party, Levinas’ idea of, 142, 166,
Sexual Liberals and the Attack on 180, 207n. 9, 210n. 20
Feminism, The, 76–77 Thomas, Elizabeth, 210n. 20
sexual liberation, 76–77, 92 Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 132–33,
sexual objectification, 76, 84 139–41, 165
sexual violation, 92–93 touch (and being-touched), 115–16,
sexuality: in the clinical encounter, 111– 173, 177, 191
120; egalitarian, 76–78, 84, 90; as transgression of identity, 62, 64–65, 113,
erotic perception (Merleau-Ponty), 78, 199n. 1
90–93, 102–5, 116–119, 201n. 11, truth: and colonization, 145, 147, 152–
204n. 5; and medical discourse, 108– 53, 158; Levinas’ idea of, 158;
11; melancholic, 97–101; redefined, Nietzsche’s conception of, 149–53;
108; sadomasochism, 76–77, 82, 87– Platonic model, 153; of/and woman,
88; and sexual difference, 84–88; and 36–37, 41–43
social norms/prohibitions, 91–93, 98–
100, 104–5 Vasseleu, Cathryn, 203n. 4, 205n. 10,
Shildrick, Margrit and Janet Price, 207n. 8
206n. 5 Visible and the Invisible, The (Merleau-
Simpson, David, 209n. 13 Ponty), 173–74
social contract, 61; compared to gift, 5–
Index 227
Watney, Simon, 111, 206n. 3 woman. See also sexual difference; and
Weiss, Gail, 204n. 7 creative self-formation, 40–44; Levinas
welcome, the, 139–40, 165–66 on, 138–40; as man’s other, 35–40, 84–
What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and 85, 88, 91; Nietzsche on, 11–12, 35–44
Guattari), 127–28 Wood, David, 25, 197n. 3
will to power, 11, 28–31
Williams, Karen, 205n. 11 Young, Iris Marion, 202n. 19
Winterson, Jeanette, 19–20
Wirzba, Norman, 136, 207n. 6 Ziarek, Ewa, 207n. 8, 210nn. 20, 3
witness to alterity, 162–63, 165–66 Zita, Jacquelyn, 68, 199n. 3
PHILOSOPHY
diprose
corporeal g e n e r o s i t y corporeal
rosalyn diprose
generosity
Rosalyn Diprose contends that generosity is not just a human virtue, but it is an
openness to others that is critical to our existence, sociality, and social formation. on giving with nietzsche, merleau-ponty, and levinas
Her theory challenges the accepted model of generosity as a common character
trait that guides a person to give something they possess away to others within
an exchange economy. This book places giving in the realm of ontology, as well
as the area of politics and social production, as it promotes ways to foster social
relations that generate sexual, cultural, and stylistic differences. The analyses in
the book theorize generosity in terms of intercorporeal relations where the self is
corporeal generosity
given to others. Drawing primarily on the philosophy of Nietzsche, Merleau-
Ponty, and Levinas, and offering critical interpretations of feminist philosophers
such as Beauvoir and Butler, the author builds a politically sensitive notion of
generosity.
“This book is outstandingly original and will have a very significant impact on
contemporary ethical and social theory. It possesses an enviable maturity, dis-
played through the ease with which the author utilizes insights from a variety of
philosophical sources in order to present her own original account of ‘corporeal
generosity.’”
— Moira Gatens, author of Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality
“The topic of generosity, and relating the notion beyond personal virtue to its
foundational place in politics, is both significant and marks an important con-
tribution to ethics and politics.”
— Agnes B. Curry, Saint Joseph College
ROSALYN DIPROSE is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of New
South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of The Bodies of Women: Ethics,
Embodiment and Sexual Difference.
A volume in the SUNY series in Gender Theory
Tina Chanter, editor
rosalyn diprose
State University of New York Press
www.sunypress.edu
SUNY