Between East and West: From Singularity to Community

Recently, in the context of a colloquium, I was explaining the necessity of refounding the family on a more conscious and more civil alliance between man and woman. A man intervened, saying that the family began with three and not with two. I am not in agreement with such a position. In my opinion, a family is born when two persons, most generally a man and a woman, decide to live together on a long-term basis, to “set up a home,” to recover an old expression that, deep down, is beautiful.

To start a home and family is to set up a new dwelling, a new house, in particular around a center, often likened to the domestic hearth: a place that is used for eating, for warming oneself, for gathering. It was this way in ancient Greece; the mother carried a flame from her own hearth in order to light the domestic fire of her newly married daughter.

In reality, the family is not founded on three, but on two. To make it begin with three is to reduce it to that undifferentiated unity described by Hegel, a unity in which the man, the woman, and the child or children lose or alienate their own identity in a whole cemented by naturalness, but an already abstract and neuter naturalness that erases the physical, psychological, or legal singularity of each person.

In this type of family organization, the commitment made between an adult man and woman to live together on a long-term basis, in mutual respect, becomes blurred in the face of the subjection of the man, the woman, and the child to the necessities of natural reproduction, itself subjected to the imperatives of the reproduction of society, of the State.

In this case the family no longer represents a privileged place of love and spirituality but a more or less unified whole, dominated by procreation, genealogy or filiation, parental authority, particularly paternal authority, and the possession of goods.

Such a family order is now in crisis, and its organization does not resist the culture of our age. From all sides, families are exploding: mother on one side, father on the other, children who come and go between them. This breaking down of family unity leads to pain, confusion, despair: for everyone, parents and children. Symptoms of repression also appear, as if it sufficed to intervene with a little authority in order to reestablish a past stability, and why not a traditional number of children.

This solution appears at once impractical, ineffective, and undesirable. In fact, the chances of a future for humanity exist in moving away from belonging to the animal world toward the conquest of a more accomplished human identity. The possibilities of a future for the human species do not reside in a return to a simple natural identity, neither for the individual nor for the family, and even less so because the family obeys socio-cultural imperatives that have already perverted the relation of each person to a singular nature. The family, then, is founded on a lack of real education about sexuality for each person, desire being left or maintained there at the level of instinct and/or perversity, both of them justified by a parental abnegation in the service of the State and, in a different way, of religious communities.

Such a socio-cultural organization supposes a human immaturity, framed by habits and rites related to those of the animal world, including the behaviors that we consider to be the mark of an accomplished generosity.

Such an order also implies a system of rules and norms defined outside of the relation between man and woman, rules and norms that the legislative and executive powers of the State, and, in a different way, of Churches, take the liberty of decreeing and sanctioning even in the most intimate aspects of the carnal relation, preventing this relation from being lived between the two. The relation between two would be forbidden without the intervention of a third: of a natural, religious, or civil nature.

Does this imperative of the presence of a third mean that the relation between two does not yet exist? Or does it have for its goal the prevention of its coming to pass?

And why appeal to human or divine law of obligation or of prohibition where this relation is trying to find itself or is coming about? To remind humans that they are humans? Why, in this case, in the name of the most physical aspect of the flesh: reproduction? In the name of what is also going to confuse the two with one, reducing to a single flesh—already abstract unless it is that of the child—the bodies and the desires of those who love each other: man and woman?

All that does not seem a good sign for the human family, reduced in this way to a reproductive tribe subjected to the authority of a father-head.

Many no longer want this authority.

First the women who refuse henceforth to be considered as a simple reproductive ground, who demand the right to speech, to desire, to liberty, to the “soul.” This does not mean that they no longer want children, but that they want to be able to say “yes” to engendering in themselves, that they want children born of flesh and speech, and not according to the traditional modality where the mother remains the body impregnated by the spirit of the father. Women want to co-create with man through body and speech, and not only to passively and silently welcome the masculine seed, whether it be material or spiritual. Women lay claim to deciding, in the name of their nature to be sure, but also in the name of their spiritual abilities. They refuse to be subjected to paternal or marital order, be it private or public. This chapter of patriarchal history seems to be disappearing, whatever the current regressions or convulsions. The work of women’s liberation movements certainly contributes to its passing, but the psychoanalytic culture as well, which, while it still expresses itself too often in terms of patriarchal laws, makes the individual consciousness of the woman grow, inciting her not to accept as destiny suffering, privation of joy, the reduction to corporeal and affective passivity.

Children also criticize paternal authority. And, if they have not yet discovered a guaranteed way for a new becoming, they refuse nevertheless to bow to the old patriarchal rules and norms. At best, parents are tolerated by them as friends, as confidants.

The time of the father’s sacred authority appears past. To be sure, we are witnessing heightened movements of regression—as is happening with women—and requests for an absolute authority. Times of transition are subjected to oscillations where the best and the worst can appear: for example, a beginning of a cultural revolution can be followed by a formalistic repression more terrible than that which preceded the insurrection.

The authority of the father is thus challenged, in the family strictly speaking but also in diverse forms of political or cultural families. And it is not with patriarchal repression that the family will be saved or restored. Nor does the return to matriarchy seem the best solution, even if it is generally accompanied by a less abstract relation to the natural world.

Before taking the time to reflect, some men or women will say that it has always been like this. But this is not true. Years ago, the hand of the daughter was granted to the suitor by the father, and the man accepted the daughter as wife on the condition that this choice was accompanied by a dowry, whether it be a matter of money, of real estate or lands, of name, etc. The love between those engaged was thus subjected to patriarchal rites, which considered it not as an adult engagement between a man and a woman but as the occasion of a contractual alliance between families, possible thanks to certain conditions.

There remain numerous traces of this historical stage, notably in legislation. Thus, in France, the legal age of marriage is eighteen for a boy and fifteen for a girl, in other words the age of civil majority for the one and the age of natural maturity for the other. Not yet of age, a girl needs parental consent if the marriage is to be valid; she thus passes in some manner from the authority of the father to that of the husband without first attaining civil majority as a woman. Another example characteristic of the majority of the most evolved civil codes: the sharing of parental authority between the father and the mother is legally recent. And it is in the neuter or in the masculine—as “breadwinner”—that the woman can exercise it, and not as a woman.

There is not yet a civil identity in the feminine. One of the symptoms of such a deficiency is that the State and religious communities have the power to legislate upon the body of the woman, on her pregnancies for example.

Another sign: seduction or violence toward the woman, toward the feminine body, always appears as a social fact, a customary right as it were, on the subject of which the State and the Churches generally remain silent. Woman still seems a private or collective good over which the father, the husband, the citizen have rights without the interested party having her say. And, according to certain penal codes, it is supposedly only toward his conscience, or toward God, that the man would be guilty if he sexually assaulted a woman, but not toward her. How could she herself be offended? She does not exist as civil person. She is a body-nature that is available to masculine sexual instinct, to the desire or need for a child, etc.

Sometimes this body-nature cries, cries out, claws or bites, really or symbolically, but that does not yet amount to becoming a civil person. Certain men and women attempt to console her, to heal her, with private or public advantages, with kind or pleasing words. But that does not transform her into a civil person.

In order to attain the status of civil person, woman must pass from natural identity, especially an imposed natural identity, to civil identity. Her most radical and indispensable (r)evolution is situated there. It is not only a matter, for her, of criticizing the patriarchal world, of asserting herself outside of it, other than it. She cannot limit herself to becoming conscious of this historical universe in order to pass beyond its horizon. She must become aware of herself as woman. The task is extremely difficult. Whoever has long remained reduced to a natural identity or to a slave consciousness cannot give themselves overnight a consciousness of their own. Taking charge of one’s own nature, giving it positively an end, a goal, an orientation, a “soul,” does not happen in one day.

And, if the diverse movements of women’s liberation have accomplished extraordinary things in several years, they have not for all that reached this stage. A certain group of women generally limits itself to critique, to opposition, to the constitution of a world parallel to the masculine world; another group contents itself with obtaining equality with men, in particular through the acquisition of social advantages. Both have often affirmed a difference solely at the affective, subjective level without asking for or constructing an objective dimension that assures them an identity of their own and allows them an alliance with the other half of the sky and the earth.

To this civilly autonomous feminine becoming, the State and religious communities are often opposed, but so are women themselves. They often remain at the age of puberty or prepuberty, in opposition to the adult world of today, which they imitate and reject at the same time, without attaining a real human maturity. They can give birth, to be sure, but there is nothing particularly human about that. They nurture, certainly, but a child or an adolescent can do that. And the same goes for keeping house. The sign of human maturity for woman would be to remain woman without being subjected to the masculine world or to her own nature. It would be a matter, for her, of escaping from the simple submission to nature without for all that renouncing it: being able to choose love, being able to choose motherhood.

That seems simple in words. In fact, such choices do not go without saying. It is complicated to remain autonomous in desire without wounding the desiring, the desired, or the desirable. That necessitates the construction of an interiority that is still lacking for us. This interiority may represent for women access to a transcendence of their own. It implies respecting the other and respecting oneself while assuring bridges between two irreducible worlds.

If such a task is entrusted only to natural identity, to reproduction, to the parental function, the union between man and woman does not reach human maturity, and the singular identity of each one disappears in the family unity. A family then represents a horizontal link of an institutional organization in the present, and a vertical link in genealogical ascendance or descendance and the development of History. The family does not correspond to the place of accomplishment of human maturity. It remains a more or less animal tribe.

The path for realizing human identity would be found, not in the renunciation of carnal love, in a privative chastity, but rather in a carnal sharing capable of passing beyond instinct—including at the level of procreation—appropriation, possession; a carnal sharing also capable of going beyond the regression or disappearance of consciousness in a return to a so-called natural order that ignores all difference and all transcendence.

Carnal sharing becomes then a spiritual path, a poetic and also mystical path, a path of chastity in a more rigorous sense than a pure and simple renunciation of the flesh that is not yet a renunciation of its fantasies, of its illusory or ideological productions, that often abolish the dimension of intersubjectivity.

Carnal sharing becomes the discovery of a measure, an experience of the realization of self in the consciousness of a limit, and of a complicity with the other to respect. Love comes about with two, thanks to opening to the other as other, to his or her irreducible being, thanks to the renunciation of being the whole all by oneself. Love takes place in the opening to self that is the place of welcoming the transcendence of the other. In this case, there is nothing of a fall or lapse; it is rather elevation, Jacob’s ladder, transubstantiation or transfiguration of the flesh.

The path of such an accomplishment of the flesh does not correspond to a solipsistic dream of Luce Irigaray, nor to a fin-de-siècle utopia, but to a new stage to be realized by humanity. It alone seems to be able to refound the family in the direction of a historical progress that manifests itself both as a more real democracy at the political level and, at the religious level, as a new “sacramental” union—even if it is celebrated only by a civil marriage—that those who love each other confer on themselves, a conjugal “sacrament” that has no reason to envy the priesthood, a more social and collective ministry than marriage is.

At a time when sexuality has lost part of its secrets and taboos, to make of carnal sharing a spiritual way, a way of “salvation” for solitary desire, opens a beautiful horizon for a refoundation of the family. It becomes the place not of a repression or of an exploitation of the flesh but of a poetic, even mystical, progression of love, a path of renunciation of absolute love of oneself with a view to carry out love with the other in the giving up of both self and other, emotionally as well as intellectually. Sexuality no longer contents itself with blind perversion, with nihilistic seduction, or with the production of a more or less abstract energy; it does not claim to dominate or to subjugate through a technique. It becomes abandonment to the opening of self and other toward wisdom still unknown.

Everything thus finds itself modified: the mode of perceiving, of touching, of speaking. Everything takes place and is carried out by two, in the respect for the other whose irreducibility is transformed into a mystery that illuminates.

Nature then is no longer subdued but it is adapted, in its rhythms and necessities, to the path of its becoming, of its growth. Caressing loses the sense of capturing, bewitching, appropriating that this gesture keeps in the discourse of certain recent masculine philosophers: Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and even Levinas, for example. The caress becomes a tactile word, which recalls that we are two, I and you, which awakens each one to self and to other, which invites abandoning the clarity of judgment in order to rejoin a more nocturnal light, that of sensibility, that of the flesh, that of the soul perhaps. Caressing is no longer limited to being a maternal consolation, an alleviation of suffering, nor does it invite falling back into infancy, animality, bodily unconsciousness. The caress becomes a means of growing together toward a human maturity that is not confused with an intellectual competence, with the possession of property—among them the bodies of the beloved and of the children—nor with the domination of the world, beginning with the little world of the house, of the family. Love, including carnal love, becomes the construction of a new human identity through that basic unit of the community: the relation between man and woman.

Engendering will happen of its own accord when the overabundance of love wants fruits other than the becoming of man and of woman. But generation ought not be imposed as an a priori limit of love on pain of mutilating the identity of the man, of the woman, and of the child.

It does not seem that a possible future for the family is found in its natural character considered as “sacred,” as John-Paul II has again written recently to all the heads of state, on the occasion of the Cairo Conference, invoking, in order to support his words, article 16(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirming that the family is “the natural and fundamental element of society.”¹ Such words seem to be the inheritance of a rather naive paganism, and they annul the development of History, particularly Christian history.

It is not the reduction of the family to its natural dimension that can assure it a future but a cultivation of the union between man and woman in the respect for their differences, which implies that nature becomes consciousness. In order to be and to remain two in love, including carnal love, it is necessary, in fact, that the body become flesh awakened by consciousness. It is necessary that the man and the woman enjoy an equivalent dignity and that they discover together how to combine nature and spirituality across their differences of body and subjectivity.

There is no doubt that, if they carry out their union in this way, man and woman will become citizens prepared for the democratic sharing of community life: they have in effect already crossed over the most difficult stage to reach there.

Such a loving journey will also lead the man and the woman to acquire a possible parental identity. The horizontal coexistence between the sexes, the most necessary coexistence, the most desirable but also the most difficult to realize, leads naturally and spiritually to the respect of ancestors and to hospitality toward future generations. But it is not appropriate to impose as imperatives or obstacles before what will come to pass on its own after.

The first and principal task in order to found or refound a family resides in the work of love between a man and a woman, a woman and a man, who, in the name of desire, intend to live together for the long term, to combine, in them and between them, the moment of the birth of attraction with the perpetuation of love, the instant with eternity.