The End of Phenomenology:

Bergson’s Interval in Irigaray

DOROTHEA E. OLKOWSKI

Luce Irigaray is often cited as the principle feminist who adheres to phenomenology
as a method of descriptive philosophy. A different approach to Irigaray might well
open the way to not only an avoidance of phenomenology’s sexist tendencies, but the
recognition that the breach between Irigaray’s ideas and those of phenomenology is
complete. I argue that this occurs and that Irigaray’s work directly implicates a Berg-
sonian critique of the limits of phenomenology.

In a review appearing in one of the first issues of Les Temps Modernes,

Simone de Beauvoir offers praise for Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. In par-
ticular, she acknowledges him for discerning that, for human beings, existence
is expressed in terms of our embodied spatial milieu, our embodied history
and prehistory, and our faith that perception opens subjects up to the world
(Beauvoir 1945). It should not be surprising, then, that Beauvoir’s The Second
Sex, first published in French in 1949, discusses woman from the point of view
of the phenomenological lived world of the situated woman (Beauvoir 1972).
Yet here, as well as in her account of society and individual transcendence in
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), Beauvoir clearly makes use of the Sartrean
existentialist notion of the absolute freedom of independent subjects who are
in competition with one another. This has the effect of inhibiting any inter-
pretation that might place undue emphasis on the seemingly positive implica-
tions of the phenomenological intersubjective world. In her “ethics,” Beau-
voir acknowledges that some situated and embodied human beings are subject
to a loss of freedom because of the extreme oppression they endure, and in The
Second Sex, she specifies that women are a group with no control over their
bodies and lives; thus their embodiment remains a matter of oppression and
reduction to object status.1

Hypatia vol. 15, no. 3 (Summer 2000) © by Dorothea E. Olkowski

74 Hypatia

It is precisely this line of thought that contemporary feminist philosophers

have followed in criticizing phenomenology in general and Merleau-Ponty
in particular. In her important essay “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenol-
ogy of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” Iris Marion
Young argues that Merleau-Ponty describes the lived body of masculine exis-
tence without the recognition that women have a gender-specific body (Young
1989). Although agreeing with Beauvoir’s assessment that women are defined
by society as mere objects, Young also criticizes Beauvoir for appearing to
blame women’s oppression on their physiology. Judith Butler directs her argu-
ment against Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology for reasons similar to those giv-
en by Young. Butler also, and more narrowly, targets his account of sexuality.
Merleau-Ponty, she argues, does place sexuality in the lived body of experience
and takes it to be co-extensive with existence, yet he does so from an ex-
clusively heterosexual, as well as voyeuristic, point of view that forecloses the
possibility of alternative forms of sexuality (Butler 1989).
Elizabeth Grosz, citing the work of Irigaray, argues that with regard spe-
cifically to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology privileges
vision over all other perceptual relations and tacitly ascribes feminine at-
tributes to the idea of flesh or being even while ignoring all aspects of maternity
(Grosz 1994, 104). Grosz’s argument that Merleau-Ponty fails to provide any
account of women’s bodily experience, yet surreptitiously makes use of “femi-
nine” attributes in concepts, is typical of the critique of phenomenology from
the point of view of feminism. In addition, Grosz cautions that blind accep-
tance of the concept of “experience” as the point of view from which knowl-
edge is constructed is dangerous. This is because the acceptance of experience
as unproblematic criterion for the assessment of knowledge overlooks the fact
that experience is already determined by the cultural and theoretical milieu
and so is not ideologically free. This is no doubt why, as both Grosz and But-
ler have pointed out, rather than taking experience as a starting point for
discovery, too many feminists naively take it as unquestionably true, a kind
of pure, irrefutable truth, no matter how distorted it may be (Grosz 1999; But-
ler 1993, ix).2 In what follows, I will argue that taking the phenomenological
perception of lived experience as the basis of knowledge is even more problem-
atic than Grosz and Butler assert. The difficulties associated with such a move
may in the end help to explain why many feminists vaguely assert an affiliation
with phenomenology but few actually develop one to any great extent.3
Luce Irigaray is often cited as the principle feminist who, although she cri-
tiques certain aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis for fail-
ing to recognize sexual difference, nevertheless adheres more or less to phe-
nomenology as a method of descriptive philosophy. However, what seems to
have happened is that Irigaray’s work is often taken to be descriptive in a
manner that evades not only phenomenology’s ontological commitments but
 Dorothea E. Olkowski 75

any ontological commitments at all. This latter position is especially well en-
trenched in the feminist community. A different approach to Irigaray’s critique
of Merleau-Ponty, as well as to Irigaray’s philosophical work in general, might
well open the way to not only an avoidance of phenomenology’s sexist ten-
dencies, but to the recognition that the breach between Irigaray’s ideas and
those of phenomenology is so great as to constitute two completely different
ontologies. It is my supposition that this indeed occurs, and, for me, the man-
ner in which Irigaray constitutes this difference directly implicates a Berg-
sonian critique of the limits of phenomenology. For this reason, I want to be
able to consider the possibility that Irigaray’s work is not incompatible with a
philosophical ontology other than that of phenomenology, even if she does not
appear to openly declare this in her writing.
Although it is important to pay attention to that critique that Irigaray di-
rectly addresses to Merleau-Ponty, that is, her rereading of Merleau-Ponty’s
The Visible and the Invisible (1968; 1964), I believe that it is equally indispens-
able to reflect carefully upon other aspects of Irigaray’s work. Irigaray’s essay on
The Visible and the Invisible has generally been received as no more than a
partial critique of Merleau-Ponty’s text that could therefore be coupled with an
overall acceptance of phenomenology. However, it is my position that Iri-
garay’s agreement with Merleau-Ponty is superficial to a rather high degree and
that her own interests are much less centered on phenomenology than may
generally be supposed. Much of the assessment of Irigaray’s position arises, I
suspect, from the following type of statement:
We must go back to a moment of prediscursive experience, re-
commence everything, all the categories by which we under-
stand things, the world, subject-object divisions, recommence
everything and pause at the “mystery, as familiar as it is unex-
plained, of a light which, illuminating the rest, remains at its
source in obscurity.” (Irigaray 1993a, 151; 1984, 143)
Irigaray’s statement that we must return to prediscursive experience has gener-
ally been taken as an affirmation of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological meth-
od; yet why should there be any necessity that Irigaray’s recommencement will
bring us to the same point of view as Merleau-Ponty’s, or that the light that
illuminates is for her what it is for Merleau-Ponty? Irigaray begins by revealing
that she wishes to bring the maternal-feminine into language, but she does not
carry this out, I think, at the level of what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the
mystery of language.
Merleau-Ponty has argued that he is seeking an original kind of language
that creates itself in its expressive acts (1973, 10). He believes in the possibility
of grasping language at the moment when the word “takes possession” of the
reader, writer, or speaker, and a new signification is secreted like a bodily fluid
76 Hypatia

(1973, 13). For Merleau-Ponty, just as perceptions take us from our body to the
things themselves, this mysterious kind of language projects us beyond our
ordinary thoughts, steeped in institutionalized, logic-bound language, to the
linguistic body of the other, to the other’s meaning, which is found not in
significational systems but in the “linguistic gesticulation” of the other (1973,
14). Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, expressive language in all its manifestations
arises only out of and in relation to the body; anything else is merely the rep-
etition of learned grammar and syntax and contains nothing creative. I would
argue that the emergence of language as a self-created expression out of the
mystery and silence of the body is not what Irigaray is seeking when she looks
to “living references” to bring the maternal-feminine into language at the level
of theme, motif, subject, articulation, and syntax. The reason for this is that
although the rest of her essay examines Merleau-Ponty’s excessive language of
visibility and seeks to find within it a hidden maternal bodily flesh that must
serve as the presupposition for all of his phenomenological descriptions, a ma-
ternal bodily flesh that he never acknowledges (indeed, is totally unaware of),
there is something more profound taking place as well. Since, for Merleau-
Ponty, speech bears the silence of visibility into sound, from Irigaray’s perspec-
tive his phenomenology of the body makes speech into “an almost carnal
existence of the idea, as well as . . . a sublimation of the flesh” (Irigaray 1993a,
179; 1984, 167).
As I have argued elsewhere (Olkowski 1987), Merleau-Ponty anticipates
that the carnal idea may constitute a kind of “depersonalized I,” that is, “the
capacity to allow oneself to be pulled down and rebuilt again by the other
person before one, by others who may come along, and in principle, by anyone
(Merleau-Ponty 1973, 19). Although I imagine that there are multiple dan-
gers lurking in the notion of being “pulled down and rebuilt again by the other
person,” as Irigaray articulates it the initial problem is simply “catching sight
of each other.” Merleau-Ponty claims that an individual “I” builds up an ex-
pressive organism in its own body. Accordingly, the depths of the body are
transformed into language and inside becomes outside; sentient and sense are
one as speech declares itself in us. Or, as he expresses it in The Visible and the
Invisible, given how the human body sees and hears itself in its reversibility,
“the structure of the mute world is such that all the possibilities of language are
already given in it” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 155; 1964, 203). What remains
quite mysterious here is how that mute world ever receives a structure, that is,
is the body biological or psychological or cultural in its linguistic orientation?
Irigaray indirectly pursues this line of questioning when she asks, how will I
ever catch sight of you, if all the possibilities of language are given? “Within
this world, movement is such that it would take extraordinary luck (hazard) for
two seers to catch sight of each other, find each other on the track of the same
circle and cross paths, or look at each other as they walk in parallel lines”
 Dorothea E. Olkowski 77

(Irigaray 1993a, 182; 1984, 169). But the French word for luck can also imply
risk or danger. What risk or danger is there, for Irigaray, in moving through the
mute world described by Merleau-Ponty?
Glen Mazis has argued that when Merleau-Ponty writes, “My body is made
of the same flesh as the world (it is a perceived), and moreover . . . this flesh of
my body is shared by the world [which is] . . . (the felt [senti], at the same time
the culmination of subjectivity and the culmination of materiality),” he is
rejecting the tradition of “What has been referred to as ‘matter and its qual-
ities’ ” (Mazis 1996, 76). I wonder if Mazis is not too hasty in asserting this.
According to Mazis, when Merleau-Ponty describes the sight of “red,” it is as
a “dimension of our sense” because “Our own body is in the world as the heart
is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive and breathes
life into it and sustains it inwardly” (Merleau-Ponty 1992, 203). Yet, from
another point of view, though Merleau-Ponty professes the utmost care with
regard to the intertwining of subject and world, his subject never really enters
the world because, as Irigaray claims, there is no “spacing or interval for the
freedom of questioning between two” (Irigaray 1993a, 183; 1984, 170). No
spacing or interval; in other words, if Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of visibility
were to hold true for experience, two seers would have to inhabit the same
world in the same way in order to encounter one another; and even if they did,
what would guarantee that the old existentialist dilemma would not reappear
and that one would not overwhelm or destroy the other?
In this sense, Irigaray’s conclusion carries tremendous power, for she asks
if it is possible at all for philosophy to give birth to wild meaning (un sens
sauvage) without first changing the foundations of language. The change of
foundations, let us recognize, cannot be accomplished without what Irigaray
refers to as the interval of a temporal bridge between retroaction and anticipa-
tion (Irigaray 1993a, 176; 1984, 170). In what follows, these terms, retroaction
and anticipation, will be of great importance. Irigaray’s call for a change of
foundations in language is surely more than a phenomenological description
with no ontological commitments. A change of foundations, I would argue,
requires more than a strategy, a tactic, although it may well require that too.
If the phenomenological world view cannot introduce this change, and Iri-
garay is clearly arguing here that it cannot, then something else is called for.
Therefore, it may well turn out that this something else is the retroaction and
anticipation that constitutes the interval, which itself is constituted in the
fluid reality of a new ontology.
Irigaray’s assertion is well known: that in life, language, and philosophy,
women have been women only in relation to the determinations made for
them by men. These determinations can be characterized in terms of a system
of oppositions: “virginal/deflowered, pure/impure, innocent/experienced” (Iri-
garay 1985a, 212). The effect of this system is to displace women from any
78 Hypatia

situation they might establish for themselves in their own terms. In place of the
system of oppositions, Irigaray imagines that there could be some kind of “im-
proper” language that expresses multiplicity and fluidity. The reasons for this
are social and political, but if there is to be such a language, they must be
ontological as well. This seems to me to be strongly related to the fact that
Irigaray urges us to examine the properties of fluids. If we do so, she argues, we
would discover that as a physical reality, fluids resist adequate symbolization
and serve as a constant reminder of the powerlessness of the logic of solids to
represent all of nature’s characteristics. It is exceedingly significant that Iri-
garay characterizes physical reality in a positive manner with regard to fluidity
and negatively with regard to symbolization or logic. This opens the way to
thinking in a manner entirely different from that of symbolic figures and log-
ical syntax. Fluid thinking, or thinking from fluids, is so completely distinct
because, in this reading of Irigaray, symbolic and logical representation are
sites of lack with regard to their representative function. If solids fail ade-
quately to account for fluidity as a physical reality, then there must be some-
thing physically real, and that “thing” must be fluidity, which, as we will see, is
not a thing but a process. Static modes of representation are unable to alter or
reform themselves in order to characterize fluids as fluids. Worse yet, they gen-
erally are completely unwilling to admit that they are inadequate or inap-
propriate to deal with fluidity; thus they have tended to respond to the fluid
features of reality by idealizing them. Idealization of this type creates and
maintains the relationship between objectified rationality and solid mechan-
ics insofar as solids conform to the normalizing and universalizing judgments of
a subject who mathematicizes the idealizable characteristics of fluids, there-
by conferring upon them an approximate relation to reality (Irigaray 1985a,
107, 109).
Mathematicization amounts to conceptualizing fluids as solids. Solids, in
turn, are understood to consist of homogeneous and identical quantities which
are divisible and measurable, and which can be clearly represented in language
insofar as each one is unchanging, identical, and common to all who observe
it. Thus isolated, the object can be named. Those objects whose characteristics
are the most common, in the sense of conventional, among a group of objects
can even be designated as genera; those slightly less common are species.
Aristotle developed a precise schema for differentiating such objects, arguing
that any genus must remain the same for itself (identical) even when differ-
ences modify the subject in its form to constitute species. All differences must
begin with something in common: the genus (Aristotle 1970, book X, sect. 4,
l. 1055a5).4 Even when differences are said of a subject, stability and homoge-
neity reign, since “that which is different is different from some particular
thing in some particular respect, so that there must be something identical
whereby they differ” (Aristotle 1970, book X, sect. 4, l. 1054b25, italics
 Dorothea E. Olkowski 79

added). It is clear as well that this conception of isolated objects must conform
to traditional Aristotelian logic, wherein a subject and a predicate are com-
bined in a sentence which, if it is true, is supposed to represent that object as
a fact in the world.
If Irigaray’s goal is to discover a logic in which there are no metaphysically
valid substances or universals, this is at least in part because fluid reality cannot
be posited in terms of substances or universals. Furthermore, since the latter
are solids, we cannot hypothesize that anything like the deconstructive slip-
page that makes language ambiguous or nonsystematic is part of her plan.
Marjorie Hass has elaborated this point by arguing that Irigaray opens the way
to a systematic critique of modern symbolic logic when she posits negation
as limit, not contradiction. That is, for symbolic logic, negation is reversible
because the negative is only a structural position; but, as Hass argues, for Iri-
garay, according to the demands of sexual difference, one’s sexual limits (or
differences) cannot be overcome by adopting the structural position of the
other sex; difference is not interchangeability, negation is not structural (Hass
2000).5 Something else must be operating. Irigaray concludes that functional
analysis—as much as propositional logic—does not succeed (no doubt never
sought to succeed) in symbolizing the properties of real fluids (internal fric-
tions, pressures, movements, and their specific dynamics): “Considerations of
pure mathematics have precluded the analysis of fluids except in terms of
laminated planes, solenoid movements, . . . spring-points, well-points, whirl-
wind points, which have only an approximate relation to reality” (Irigaray
1985a, 109). In this, claims Irigaray, what is silenced is fluidity, which is the
language women speak. For Irigaray, when woman speaks, she does not do so as
identical with herself (as substance) or with any other standard, so she does not
speak as a formal subject, but as fluid. From this point of view the problem of
language is to know how to speak and how to listen to what is fluid, continu-
ous, compressible, dilatable, viscous, conductible, diffusible, to what does not
participate in good form(s), but which is physically real and which can be
expressed as real though perhaps not as an actual object (in space) (Irigaray
1985a, 109, 111).
The place to start, however, is not with perception, perhaps not even with
a body, or not a body in the (phenomenological) sense of a symbiotic relation
between inside and outside (Mazis 1996, 76). The place to start, according to
Irigaray, is not a place at all; rather it is a kind of sensibility that I would call
affectivity. “Be patient,” she cautions, and “begin with what you feel, right
here, right now” (Irigaray 1985a, 212). This is not simply the body. Affectivity,
what you feel here and now, is not a standard conception of the body either as
a subject or as an object, nor is it the phenomenological body of perception as
Merleau-Ponty understands it. Perhaps, in a certain sense, if we begin with
affectivity there never is a body insofar as there are always new affections,
80 Hypatia

linked in particular ways. And this may be why Irigaray suggests to women,
instead of a body, a “morpho-logic” appropriate to affectivity, a morpho-logic
that is not the logic of perception (Irigaray 1993b, 59). However, if morphol-
ogy refers to structure or form and that structure or form is fluid, then streams
of affectivity (the feeling component of bodies, if one insists on the term) are
not determinable; they are not essential. Streams of affectivity, oriented by
what is singularly here and now, are not genera. They do, however, provide
fluid images of something real (although not actualized in space as an object)
that we may begin to work with in life and in thought. Fluid structures are not
lacking in relation to actual objects; a fluid affectivity that is in some sense a
whole instead produces objects in an ontology of change. How to account for
this paradox?
With respect to women’s affectivity, the relation between fluids and objects
cannot be accounted for without disengaging from the projections and mastery
of the concepts that determine women, as well as the systems of opposition
that constitute women in terms of the idealizations conducive to formalized
metasystems of language and logic. Following the logic of these systems, any-
thing which exceeds formalization is rejected as “beneath or beyond the sys-
tem currently in force” (Irigaray 1985a, 212). So “woman,” but certainly not
only “woman,” makes sense only when subject to the idealizing intervention of
a system in which whatever pertains to her can only be characterized nega-
tively. So, the virgin is defined by this idealizing intervention as “not yet pen-
etrated, possessed by them,” and woman remains a “kind of reserve for their
explorations, consummations, exploitations. The advent of their desire, not of
ours” (Irigaray 1985a, 211–12).
This formulation of solids and fluids is central to Irigaray’s critique of phi-
losophy. However, I would argue that it does not obstruct Irigaray’s work, that
it does not lead her to an impasse wherein her only option is a parodying mas-
querade; instead, her rethinking is a disguise that creates new concepts for
philosophy. That is, Irigaray’s critique is not simply a negative or reactive re-
sponse to the harsh reality of women’s daily existence, nor is woman com-
pletely absent from philosophy. Even in Western philosophy, woman can find
herself—not necessarily in the theoretical constructs, but in the conditions
and images which are foundational to all theory. Irigaray writes: “Woman
ought to be able to find herself, among other things, through the images of
herself already deposited in history and [in] the conditions of production of the
work of man, and not on the basis of his work, his genealogy” (1993a, 10; 1984,
17; italics added). Regardless of how philosophy conceptualizes woman, wom-
an lives as folds of affectivity, “our all touching itself . . . [wherein] top and
bottom, inside and outside, in front and behind, above and below are not
separated” (Irigaray 1985a, 213). Such affective-bodily differentiations are not
reflections of the world or the overlapping of body and world. The process that
is ongoing here is an “I feel” that is not without sense, even if it is not ob-
 Dorothea E. Olkowski 81

jectively actualized. Affective bodily connections resonate with one another;

they are not remote from one another, not out of touch; one is not inside and
another outside requiring some mechanism of connection. When the wom-
an’s body is represented, whether symbolically or in logical terms, it is given as
if there were no affectivity. Then it is not touching itself, and woman is exiled
to the outside, where she can only imitate in face, form, and language each new
power that comes to dominate her, each master she perceives. Yet even under
the condition of being subject to mastery, it is possible for her to keep inside in
connection with outside, it is possible to keep the affective connections alive,
since, simultaneous with self-affection, affectivity “feels” the world:
Between us, there’s no rupture between virginal and nonvir-
ginal. No event that makes us women. . . . Your/my body doesn’t
acquire its sex through an operation. Through the action of
some power, function, or organ. . . . There is no need for an
outside: the other already affects you. It is inseparable from you.
(Irigaray 1985a, 211)
In short, the other is not a perception of what is outside my bodily inhabita-
tion; it is first and primarily an affection, which is to say, an invitation to act.
What can this mean?
Irigaray insists that this entire problematic of affection and action be
thought within the framework of “woman’s” body, and this in turn requires
the recognition of sexual difference. As Moira Gatens has argued, without a
theory of sexual difference, it would be all too easy to pretend that “women’s
bodies and the representation and control of women’s bodies were not a cru-
cial stake in these struggles” (Gatens 1996, 17). Sexual difference is a philo-
sophically and politically necessary way to think fluidity. Thinking fluidity
requires a revolution in thought and ethics that involves the reinterpretation
of “everything” concerning the relations between subject and discourse, sub-
ject and world, subject and the cosmic, the microcosm and the macrocosm
(Irigaray 1993a, 6; 1984, 14). And while language and logic are constructed to
eliminate the expression of sexual difference, this may be because there are
factors that Irigaray posits as conditions of even logic and language: “To think
and live through this difference we must reconsider the whole problematic of
space and time” (Irigaray 1993a, 7; 1984, 15; italics added). In cosmogony and
philosophy, the division of the universe into space and time is also the site of
the introduction of sexual difference in accordance with a system of opposi-
tions and separations. In most Western creation myths, the Gods begin by
creating space. The elements are separated into earth, air, fire, water. Time is
introduced only secondarily to serve space, but its origin is in God. God is time,
time is God, who exteriorizes “himself” in the activity of creating space. With
respect to ontology or metaphysics, the subject reenacts and takes up the
activity of temporalizing, ordering the exterior space of objects. Such is the
82 Hypatia

case in philosophy as well. Kant, for example, makes temporality the interior-
ity of the subject and space its exteriority. And with respect to sexual differ-
ence, the masculine is experienced as time, while the feminine is experienced
as space (Irigaray 1993a, 7; 1984, 15). But in relation to what is this gendered
experience generated?
If femininity is not to be defined as a spatial container and masculinity is not
to be identified with the unifying activity that determines time, then Merleau-
Ponty’s insistence on clear perception and assured action in oriented space (in
The Phenomenology of Perception), as well as his certainty that being is synony-
mous with being situated, while freeing him from intellectualist and empiricist
presumptions, nonetheless leads me to ask who is thus situated and what kind
of organization make this situation possible? What are the temporal and spatial
presuppositions of this situated being? Breaking down the traditional assump-
tions about femininity, masculinity, space, and time calls for disrupting pre-
cisely the kinds of assumptions Merleau-Ponty makes about situated being.
Irigaray calls for a transformation of the relation of matter to form and the
interval between them. She argues that there has to be a change in the interval,
which she identifies as relations of nearness and distance between subject and
object, and thus also a change in the economy of desire, a different relation
between man and gods, man and man, man and woman (Irigaray 1993a, 8;
1984, 15–16). That is, in calling on the interval and conceptualizing it as the
moment in which all traditional metaphysical relations are transformed, not
only matter and form but also power, act, force, energy, and desire, Irigaray (or
at least her readers) cannot help but recognize that relations other than those
between man and woman are at stake here too and that the interval is a crucial
element in transforming situated embodiment in a manner that exceeds even
a morphology of the body.
The interval, defined as the moment in which all traditional metaphysical
relations are transformed, has also been articulated as that moment in which
reality is created as unforeseen and absolutely new, such that one can never
speak of the actualization of possibilities but only of the actualization through
differentiation of the virtual, that is, the real but unactualized (in space) mul-
tiplicity. Such a moment arises in Henri Bergson’s conceptualization of the
“interval,” that moment between a received stimulus and an executed move-
ment, that is, the interval of duration between affective excitation and reac-
tion. On Bergson’s account, the interval is the moment between two move-
ments: one, a stimulus received affectively via the sensory-motor perception,
and two, a movement executed in response to the call for action of the stim-
ulus; thus the interval lies between affective excitation and reaction. This
sensory-motor moment is the interval at the intersection of matter and mem-
ory. Its flow of affective sensations constitutes an ontological memory, a world
memory in which nothing is originally separated from anything else, and in-
side and outside are derivative conceptually as well as experientially. As the
 Dorothea E. Olkowski 83

intersection between two contrary movements, the recollections of ontolog-

ical memory must be capable of two simultaneous motions, two kinds of be-
coming. There is a becoming that orients itself toward what is called the
outside, towards matter, perception, and objects, thus toward the spatialized
representation and the actualization of objects, as well as social space, which
is shared. Additionally, there is a becoming that orients itself in accordance
with memory, recollection, and the subject, that is, in accordance with affec-
tivity in its connectedness to the world (Bergson 1988, ch. 1; 1959, 169–222).
On one line of becoming, the affective temporality (called a subject) per-
ceives, that is, pays attention, only to what interests it in the moment of the
interval. On the second line, the subject becomes conscious of an affective
recollection that nonetheless corresponds to its perception and that is adopted
by that subject according to its interests (the first line). Each recollection is
actualized, according to Bergson, not as the past of its own present, but as
freedom, as a new present, a moment of creation, and this takes place precisely
in the interval. Thus, the interval is the moment, the gap, the abyss, between
affective temporality and active extensionality, between time and space. The
interval is a conception of time and space that radically reconstitutes relations
of nearness and distance between subject and object and so effects a change in
the economy of desire, a different relation between man and gods, man and
man, man and woman. As such, the “interval” between perception and mem-
ory, intelligence and social life is decisive for humans, according to both Iri-
garay and Bergson. And if sexual difference is to matter on an ontological
level, it has to be conceived of in relation to the interval.
Merleau-Ponty seems to have little or nothing to say about sexual differ-
ence. Sexuality, he asserts, must lie in relations and attitudes and not in biol-
ogy, in anatomical or physiological conditions. Yet he speaks of frigidity in
exclusively feminine terms as always a refusal—of orgasm, of femininity, of
sexuality—that, in turn, is a rejection of the sexual partner and “his” destiny,
as if femininity were in service to “his” destiny (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 158;
1945, 184). There is certainly no mention of “her” destiny, nor of the interval
in which she acts. No consideration at all of Irigaray’s dismay over formulas in
Merleau-Ponty that lead her to conclude that “woman always tends toward
without any return to herself as the place where something positive can be
elaborated. In terms of contemporary physics, it could be said that she remains
on the side of the electron [a negative charge], with all that this implies for
her, for man and for any encounter between them” (Irigaray 1993a, 9: 1984,
16). What is missing in Merleau-Ponty’s account is the woman’s own affective
temporality and thus the kind of active extensity (action or objects generated
in the interval on the basis of affective life) which would exclude woman’s dis-
integration and decomposition and which makes everything possible: speech,
promises, alliances.
In fact, it is clear that in the chapter titled “The Body in its Sexual Being,”
84 Hypatia

the body in question is the body of a man; perhaps it is even inscribed with the
name of the author of The Phenomenology of Perception. As Merleau-Ponty
writes, “Insofar as a man’s (sic) sexual history provides a key to his life, it is
because in his sexuality is projected his manner of being towards the world,
that is, towards time and other men” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 158; 1945, 184).
Judith Butler has pointed out that at least Merleau-Ponty does not reduce
sexuality to a mode of existence, and neither does he appear to reduce sexuality
to organs and desire to instinct, so that all existence could only be made sense
of through its sexual substructure. Yet examine Merleau-Ponty’s account of
destiny: for an embodied being whose place is defined according to a system
of possible actions, an open field of corporeal possibilities, thus a space that
survives even the disorganization of appearances, a manner of being is pro-
jected. This manner of being pivots from spatiality to temporality, from what
Bergson would call the representation of isolated objects that are perceived,
that is, represented and objectified as solids solely in accordance with spatial
corporeality’s interests, and so are cut off entirely from the temporal flow of
becoming. The elimination of affective temporality and all it brings would be
the elimination of the qualitative and heterogeneous coloring of every affec-
tive sensation, every motion and rhythm coming from things in the world to
the body as the body affects itself in pleasure or pain. What would also be
eliminated is the interval. For the body of perception is directed by and toward
its interests in the world, and it perceives those interests as solid objects to be
acted on, while the body of affection is fluid ontological memory. This memory
can offer to perception something totally new, the fluidity of qualitative affects
in the flow of duration. Without the interval, that gap between what is per-
ceived and felt and what is acted, no new memory images will ever arise to join
perception, and no new acts will ever occur.
In Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of a young woman’s hysteria, she is perceived as
having no time of her own, and thus no place—no envelope, as Irigaray calls
it. The young woman’s mother forbids her to see the man she loves. She stops
eating, sleeping, and talking. She enacts an oral fixation that manifests itself
as a refusal of communal existence. She breaks with life; she is unable to
“swallow” food, unable to swallow her mother’s dictum (Merleau-Ponty 1962,
160–64; 1945, 187–91). Nothing positive, nothing creative is attributed to
her. There is no insight that perhaps this action was chosen in the interval
between recollection and perception, or that it could emerge from the inter-
section of mind and matter. She is understood to have surrendered to the
negative that she “is” and is thereby shut off from her own time, her own future,
as well as from the outside. If she is discussed at all, it is only through the rep-
resentation of her as an object from the point of view of the interests of the
perceiver.
In fact, it is not simply the young woman who is subject to this kind of men-
tal or psychological alienation that manifests itself in a return to mute stasis.
 Dorothea E. Olkowski 85

For Merleau-Ponty, all psychological disturbances are explained by means of

this spatial paradigm. Nor can he generate affective becoming out of static
spatiality. Cut off from the future, from time, such a situation “sets bounds
. . . to the immediately available mental field. . . . [W]hat collapses is the whole
field of possibilities” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 162; 1945, 190). Merleau-Ponty
provides numerous descriptions of this collapse into muteness: “when the hys-
terical fit has reached its climax . . . even if the subject plunges into it as a
place of refuge . . . with every minute that passes, freedom is depreciated and
becomes less probable” (1962, 163; 1945, 190). Psychological disturbances
represent “a refusal of the future torn from the transitive nature of ‘inner
phenomena,’ generalized, consummated, transformed into defacto situations”
(1962, 164; 1945, 191). And the patient-victim’s own body participates in this
double-cross; the body transforms the inner phenomena, the temporal delin-
eations, into a de facto situation. In and of itself, the body-matter is factualized
even if not fully reified. It is without act, interval, energy, or desire; it is mute.
Traditionally, Irigaray argues, woman represents a sense of place for man.
She becomes a thing and she is also used as a kind of envelope to help man set
limits to things. In Aristotle, Irigaray finds the following: “for the natural
substance of the menstrual fluid is to be classed as ‘prime matter’ (proto hyle)”
(Irigaray 1985b, 160). While, for Aristotle, each living being finds its speci-
ficity in the form given to it by the male parent, the first matter, the body of the
mother, and the “becoming flesh” within the body of the mother have no form.
Any such “bodilyness . . . has no movement of its own, has yet to divide up time
or space, has, in point of fact, no way of measuring the container or the sur-
rounding world or the content or relations among all these,” and even its ele-
ments are not defined; same and other have not yet been separated out (Iri-
garay 1985b, 161). It is boundless, eternal, and perfect. The activity of the form
located in the being of the father is constituted as plentitude in action so as to
require no movement, no extension that might somehow entail its bodily
relation to mother and matter.6 The first matter, while radically lacking all
power or logos, radically mute, nonetheless serves as the absolutely necessary,
thus all-powerful, soil upon which logos grows (Irigaray 1985b, 164). This is
why Irigaray thinks it is dangerous for there to be no third term, no interval,
act, force, or desire enveloping temporality, matter, and form, a limitation of
matter from within matter that can be transposed into a formalization of the
mode of expression.7
As it stands in philosophy, woman’s own development has only been named
by an other who possesses a logos, an other to whom mother-matter (woman
perceived from the outside) affords the means to realize “his” form in time. The
problem, for Irigaray, is that given this conceptualization, “theoretically there
would be no such thing as a woman” (Irigaray 1985b, 166). For, following Berg-
son’s critique, we find ourselves at the point where philosophy imagines that
matter is cut up along the lines of action, yet it is simply deducing a priori the
86 Hypatia

categories of thought. In this schema, if woman can be pointed to or differ-

entiated (theoretically), she is simply in the gaps between beings, that from
which beings have taken care to detach and separate themselves through the
realization of their form. In this sense, writes Irigaray, if woman exists at all, she
undoes the work of the philosopher by distinguishing herself from both the
envelope and the thing. But remembering that woman can and ought to re-
discover herself precisely in the images of herself in history and in the con-
ditions of the production of philosophy, remembering that woman can be re-
born from the traces of culture and works produced by the other, we can follow
Irigaray in finding the place of the woman in the gap, the so-called void where-
in she has been placed, a place that is, of course, no place, insofar as she serves
as the unrecognized foundation for the other who cannot separate himself. It
is in this gap that she would create her sexual difference, her salvation on
an intellectual level, “distinguishing herself from both the envelope and the
thing, ceaselessly creating there some interval, play, something in motion and
un-limited which disturbs his perspective, his world, and his/its limits” (Iri-
garay 1993a, 10; 1984, 17). A complete change in our conception of space and
time.
This is the interval. This power, in the sense of act, is desire, what Bergson
calls “life,” the necessities of living, that is, acting. The interval is a dynamic
force whose form changes and so cannot be predicted. Such a dynamic force
carries its own formalization along with it, a dynamic potential that would
replace the separation between negatively charged matter with no place of its
own and positively charged form that acts by refusing the positing of space as
the container within which one acts. The interval is a double-desire. In the
history of philosophy, the positive and negative poles have, according to Iri-
garay, divided themselves among the two sexes “instead of establishing a chi-
asmus or a double loop in which each can go toward the other and come back
to itself ” (Irigaray 1993a, 9; 1984, 16). Each side of the loop is both positively
and negatively charged. If positive and negative elements are not chiasmatic,
one remains in motion and has no place of its own, and the other will always
serve as the pole of attraction.
It is, of course, Merleau-Ponty who introduces the notion of the chiasm in
The Visible and the Invisible, though he previously spoke of carrefours, the inter-
section, and of doubled crossings over. Merleau-Ponty calls forth this concep-
tualization not in the context of the body and its sexual being, but in that of the
intertwining of visibility and tangibility. He writes, “[t]here is a double and
crossed situating of the visible in the tangible and the tangible in the visible;
the two maps are complete and yet they do not merge into one. The two parts
are total and they are not superposable” (1968, 134; 1964, 177). Chiasm is also
the relation between or the orientation of seer and seen, touching and being
touched, such that these lived experiences are no longer taken to be negative
 Dorothea E. Olkowski 87

and positive poles. Instead, a seer is also looked at by the things she sees; the
toucher feels herself being touched by things. To accomplish this, Merleau-
Ponty posits a flesh, a thickness between or among seer and seen and the re-
verse: seer becomes seen, seen becomes seer. “It [flesh] is their means of com-
munication” (1968, 134; 1964, 177). What is crucial here is that flesh does not
simply unify. The body is not a thing, but a sensible for itself. The body is not
an envelope, but a connective tissue. But, as Merleau-Ponty also realizes, the
problem is, how can the body be thought?
I would say that Merleau-Ponty’s formulation of bodies is caught up in the
spatialization of the body that I have critiqued, a spatialization that material-
izes the body to the point of objectifying it. Otherwise thought, the problem
could be expressed differently: how can a discourse emanate from each bodily
point of view, how can each one speak and act? Gail Weiss has problematized
this in a manner that I think is hopeful and indicative of where phenomen-
ology needs to go in order to remain a viable methodology. In “Context and
Perspective” (1992), she points out that the gestalt is absolutely central to
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology but that the figure-ground relation is under-
stood by Merleau-Ponty as a primarily spatial phenomenon. Weiss suggests
that the gestalt be rethought in relation to the idea of context and perspective,
which she defines as the relation of memories to expectation. In fact, as Weiss
argues, it is the temporal aspect of context-perspective that makes it possible
for us to transcend the spatiality of the figure-ground relation even while it
provides the continuity between different perspectives, a continuity derived
from similarity of context. That is, while the figure-ground relation is per-
ceived at the level of individual, meaningful gestures by means of which we
communicate with one another, it is perspectives that tie these gestures to-
gether into meaningful wholes, even while the scope and relevance of a par-
ticular perspective shifts over time. Thus Weiss concludes that the past and
future dimensions of the perspective-context horizon show how one can in-
habit a situation, yet be absent from it insofar as the context of significance
projects beyond the situation at hand. Likewise, Merleau-Ponty is right that
we need to re-examine the cogito. There must be a gap or interval in which a
choice is made and action taken, in which their relation to one another is
chiasmatic. These contractions of time in memory and their commensurate
expansions into the world meet and intertwine to the point of being, at times,
indistinguishable, even while remaining particular in themselves and retain-
ing their own integrity.
Perhaps Merleau-Ponty is right to say that seeing and being seen, touching
and being touched are like two mirrors facing one another, an indefinite series
of images set in one another, a couple more real than either. Yet this descrip-
tion remains too much from the point of view of an original subject. Even
Merleau-Ponty notes that the mirrors must be slightly decentered with regard
88 Hypatia

to one another, but will this guarantee anything more than an infinite horizon
of repetition? What is needed is a schema according to which the seer is not
just being seen, but the seer is the sight from the point of view of other seers,
other worlds: sexual difference, salvation on an intellectual level. This is the
gap, the necessary interval, the third thing between woman and man. In this
sense, the chiasm is not narcissism, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, for that comes
too close to eliminating difference, unless narcissism can be radically refigured
as something creative.
Language at the origin is the residue that Irigaray insists upon. The sexual
act consists not in the consummation of space by time, its total division and
subjection to control. Since woman and man cannot stand in for one another,
since they are incommensurable (each one being but one angle of the chiasm)
woman and man differ. The gap between them, sexual difference, which is not
simply a void, does not and cannot seize something as its object but is the site
of life and language. That we do not yet have such a conception of sexual dif-
ference is evident even as we look for its “strange advent.” Or as Irigaray writes:
But, in order for an ethics of sexual difference to come into be-
ing, we must constitute a possible place for each sex, body, and
flesh to inhabit. Which presupposes a memory of the past, a
hope for the future, memory bridging the present and discon-
certing the mirror symmetry that annihilates the difference of
identity. (Irigaray 1993a, 17–18; 1984, 24)

Sexual difference remains in reserve, but at least with a conception of the

interval as positive, creative act, such a point of view can be generated as a
moment of freedom for each sex, each body, and each flesh.

NOTES

1. It is well known that translation errors, deletions, and alterations have made
access to The Second Sex quite difficult for English-only readers. Anna Alexander has
pointed specifically to the obliteration of Beauvoir’s philosophical positions, both phe-
nomenological and existential, in the translation (Alexander 1997, 112–22).
2. This is what I take Butler to be implying when she writes: “Theorizing from the
ruins of the Logos invites the following question. . . . ‘What about the materiality of the
body, Judy?’ I took it that the addition of ‘Judy’ was an effort to dislodge me from the
more formal ‘Judith’ and to recall me to a bodily life that could not be theorized away”
(Butler 1993, ix).
3. Several years ago, I was asked to write an encyclopedia article on phenomenol-
ogy and feminism. To my surprise, I found that while a great many feminists declared
themselves to be phenomenological, few explained in any philosophical detail what
 Dorothea E. Olkowski 89

this might be (Olkowski 1998). Earlier versions of the attempt to make sense of Iri-
garay’s relation to phenomenology appear in my book Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of
Representation (1999).
4. Gilles Deleuze discusses the difference between difference thought on the basis
of substance, that is, as participating in a single substance, and difference thought dif-
ferentially such that each difference exists with no characteristics in common with any
other difference (Deleuze 1994; 1968).
5. I am thinking here of Derrida’s attempts to assume the feminine structural
position. Majorie Hass reinforces the point by arguing that in modern symbolic logic
“P can represent either ‘the cat is on the mat’ or ‘the cat is not on the mat’ and in either
case -P will represent the negation of the statement. But on Irigaray’s model, revers-
ibility is not possible in that the two poles of difference are not interchangeable.” This
argument must also have profound implications for Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility the-
sis. Following Hass’s argument, reversibility would have to be part of a masculinist
Imaginary (Hass 2000).
6. Irigaray makes a related point in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. She challenges
Aristotle regarding the apparent non-existence of what does not have a place, insofar
as this would appear to include women. This is because women are characterized by
philosophy as place, but not as having a place of their own (Irigaray 1993a, 35; 1984,
41). Aristotle particularly affirms that the interval is not place, while, as we have seen,
Irigaray maintains that “the interval would produce place” (Irigaray 1993a, 348; 1984,
53). Chanter also comments on this in terms of the suppression, in the history of meta-
physics, between women’s place as first place, the place of birth, and her place as last
place, her relation to the infinity of God (Chanter 1995, 151–58). That she is the fluid
place for man and child disqualifies her from any more spiritual role, that of accompa-
nying cosmic time (Irigaray 1993a, 53; Aristotle 1970, 57).
7. I do not mean to overlook Irigaray’s critique of Merleau-Ponty for privileging
vision over the tactile; however, as it is not my main point I am not discussing it here.

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