We have been educated to make our own all that was pleasing to us, all that we admitted into our proximity, into our intimacy, all that surrounded us.
On the level of consciousness, on the level of feelings, we make our own what we approach, what approaches us.
Our manner of reasoning, even our manner of loving, corresponds to an appropriation. Our culture, our school education, our cultural formation want it this way: to learn, to know, is to make one’s own through instruments of knowledge capable, we believe, of seizing, of taking, of dominating all of reality, all that exists, all that we perceive, and beyond.
We want to have the entire world in our head, sometimes the entire world in our heart. We do not see that this gesture transforms the life of the world into something finished, dead, because the world thus loses its own life, a life always foreign to us, exterior to us, other than us.
Thus, if we precisely grasped all that makes the springtime, we would without doubt lose the wondrous contemplation in the face of the mystery of springtime growth, we would lose the life, the vitality, in which this universal renewal has us participate without our being able to know or control where the joy, the force, the desire that animate us come from. If we could analyze each element of energy that reaches us in the explosion of spring, we would lose the global state that we experience by bathing in it through all our senses, our whole body, our whole soul.
We sometimes, at least partially, find this state again, I would say this state of grace, in which the spring puts us, when we are immersed in a new landscape, in an extraordinary cosmic manifestation, when we bathe in an environment that is simultaneously perceptible and imperceptible, knowable and unknowable, visible and invisible to us. We are then situated in a milieu, in an event that escape our control, our know-how, our inventiveness, our imagination. And our response to this “mystery” is or could be astonishment, wonder, praise, sometimes questioning, but not reproduction, repetition, control, appropriation.
THE IRREDUCIBLE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE YOU
The state that springtime, certain landscapes, and certain cosmic phenomena provoke in us, sometimes takes place at the beginning of an encounter with the other.
It is in the first moments of drawing near to one another that the other moves us the most, touching us in a global, unknowable, uncontrollable manner. Then, too often, we make the other our own—through knowledge, sensibility, culture. Entering our horizon, our world, the other loses the strangeness of his or her appeal. The presence of the other included us in a certain mystery, communicating to us an awakening that is both corporeal and spiritual. But we reduce the other to ourselves, we incorporate the other in turn: through our knowledge, our affection, our customs. At the limit, we no longer see the other, we no longer hear the other, we no longer perceive the other. The other is a part of us. Unless we reject the other.
The other is inside or outside, not inside and outside, being part of our interiority while remaining exterior, foreign, other to us. Awakening us, by their very alterity, their mystery, by the in-finite that they still represent for us. It is when we do not know the other, or when we accept that the other remains unknowable to us, that the other illuminates us in some way, but with a light that enlightens us without our being able to comprehend it, to analyze it, to make it ours. The totality of the other, like that of springtime, like that of the surrounding world sometimes, touches us beyond all knowledge, all judgment, all reduction to ourselves, to our own, to what is in some manner proper to us. In somewhat learned terms, I would say that the other, the other as other, remains beyond all that we can predicate of him or her. The other is never this or that that we attribute to him or her. It is insofar as the other escapes all judgment on our part that he or she emerges as you, always other and nonappropriable by I.
To recognize the you as irreducible to us, unknowable and imperceptible by us in his or her totality, is not our habit. Our culture has generally entrusted this you to God, what is more, to God-the-Father. Our habits of thought, our ethical or political habits toward the other who is present to us or with us here and now—carnally, bodily—go rather in the direction of reducing the other to ourselves, to our own, or of transforming the other into a he, sometimes into a she, in some way reduced to an “object” of knowledge or an “object” of love.
In this way, never without doubt has an age spoken so much of the other as ours does, globalization and migrations requiring it. But, too often, this other is reduced to an object of study, to what is at stake in diverse socio-political strategies aiming in some manner to integrate the other into us, into our world. Thus we avoid the problem of meeting with the stranger, with the other. We avoid letting ourselves be moved, questioned, modified, enriched by the other as such. We do not look for a way for a cohabitation or a coexistence between subjects of different but equivalent worth. We flee dialogue with a you irreducible to us, with the man or woman who will never be I, nor me, nor mine. And who, for this very reason, can be a you, someone with whom I exchange without reducing him or her to myself, or reducing myself to him or her.
The transcendence of the you as other is not yet, really, part of our culture. At best, the other is respected in the name of tolerance, is loved in God, is recognized as an equal or a fellow human. But that does not yet amount to perceiving and respecting the irreducibility of the other, to recognizing the irreducible difference of the other in relation to me.
This letting go of the subject, this letting be of the I toward what it is, knows, and has made its own, this opening of a world of one’s own, experienced as familiar, in order to welcome the stranger, while remaining oneself and letting the stranger be other, do not correspond to our mental habits, to our Western logic. Dominating, controlling has been taught to us as the realm of reason more than accepting our limits, in order to live together, to coexist, to co-create even, with who or what exceeds us, extends beyond us, remains irreducibly exterior and foreign to us.
We have learned to think starting from a certain number of dichotomies between sensible and intelligible, nature and spirit, body and soul, subject and object, etc. And we do not know how to transform such categories in order to attain a culture of alterity, of relation with the other as such, of acknowledgment of the other as irreducible to us, in order to make an alliance with him, or with her, in the respect for our respective values and limits.
At best, we are sometimes good patriarchs or good matriarchs. But this genealogical behavior, implying nature and hierarchy, still avoids the meeting with the other: the man or woman that I must horizontally recognize as equivalent to me, in the radical respect of his or her difference(s).
Two events of our time compel us to rethink our relation to the other as other: 1. the blending of races and ethnicities that is now a part of our daily landscape, 2. the recognition of the importance of gender from a cultural point of view. One could add here a certain coexistence of generations that does not allow genealogy to retain its past function.
In fact, we are entering a new age of generalized mixing, and our mental or community habits founded on self-identity, the proper, the similar, the same, the equal, and their reproduction, risk being incapable of harmoniously resolving the problems of difference that we have to manage.
To make the Black equal to the White, the woman equal to the man, is still to submit them, under cover of paternalist generosity, to models put in place by Western man, who resists living together with the different. He even accepts becoming a little Black or a little female rather than going through a revolution of thinking that is today unavoidable. All the strategies of integration—with more or fewer reversals of hierarchy, blendings and pluralities of culture, of language, of identity—yes, but not the gesture that recognizes that the subject only exists thanks to limits and that, before the universe and especially before the other, the subject is structured not by mastering or dominating but by accepting that the subject is not the whole, that the subject represents only one part of reality and of truth, that the other is forever a not I, nor me, nor mine, and not a: not yet I, not yet mine to integrate into me or into us.
SEXUAL DIFFERENCE, THE FOUNDATION OF ALTERITY
For this revolution of thought, of ethics, of politics, of which we have to take charge today, sexual difference represents the most interesting question.
First, this difference is universal, and it allows us, as such, to define a model of global community.
Next, it is often the manner of treating this difference—in the sexual relation or in the genealogical relation—that is at the origin of differences of tradition, of culture, manifesting itself notably in common law. To find it a democratic regulation would help the coexistence of cultures.
Moreover, this difference is the one that can bring together the most natural with the most cultural, by requiring us to take a new step in the construction of a civilization.
In fact, in our cultures, woman still often remains the natural pole of a masculine culture. If each gender assumes, in itself and for itself, the specificity of its nature and works out its cultivation, a new type of civility will be put in place in which the duality of the genders will become, thanks to their differences, culturally fertile, and not only naturally fertile as it still is too exclusively today.
To refound society and culture upon sexual difference is also to radically put back in question the notion of the proper, of propriety, of appropriation that governs our mental and social habits. It is to learn, at the most intimate, at the most passionate and carnal level of the relation to the other, to renounce all possession, all appropriation, in order to respect, in the relation, two subjects, without ever reducing one to the other.
To affirm that man and woman are really two different subjects does not amount for all that to sending them back to a biological destiny, to a simple natural belonging. Man and woman are culturally different. And it is good that it is so: this corresponds to a different construction of their subjectivity. The subjectivity of man and that of woman are structured starting from a relational identity specific to each one, a relational identity that is held between nature and culture, and that assures a bridge starting from which it is possible to pass from one to the other while respecting them both.
This specific relational identity, one’s own relational identity (the word is used now in another sense, not of possession but of subjective or objective determination), is based on different irreducible givens: the woman is born of a woman, of someone of her gender, the man is born of someone from another gender than himself; the woman can engender in herself like her mother, the man engenders outside of himself; the woman can nourish with her body, the man nourishes thanks to his work; the woman can engender in herself the masculine and the feminine, the man, in fact, intervenes as man above all in the engendering of the masculine.
The first relational situation is thus very different for the girl and the boy. And they build their relation to the other in a very different way. The girl immediately finds herself in a relation between subjects of the same gender that helps her to structure a relation to the other, which is more difficult for the boy to develop. On the other hand, the girl, the woman is made fragile by the intervention of the other in her: in love, in motherhood.
The construction of subjectivity for the woman implies that she comes out of an exclusive relation with the same as herself, the mother, and that she discovers the relation with a different other, while remaining herself. Egalitarian or separatist strategies cannot resolve such a problem. What can assist the woman in becoming subject is the discovery of the other, the masculine, as horizontally transcendent, and not vertically transcendent, to her. It is not the submission to the law of a Father that can permit the woman to become herself, corporeally and culturally, but the conscious and voluntary recognition, in love and in civility, of the other as other. This cultural becoming of the woman will then be able to help the man to become man, and not only master and father of the world, as he has too often been in History.
It seems that the woman must give birth to the man not only bodily but also spiritually. Certain religious traditions have sometimes clearly expressed this reality.
The assimilation or integration of the feminine into the masculine world represents therefore a real danger for private or collective relational life. That does not mean that the woman must remain the guardian of love in the traditional sense, but that she must be the one who initiates relational life and who safeguards it in private and public life.
