What Mood Allows Meeting the Other?
The other cannot be reduced to an object. Thus in order to be capable of meeting and taking into account the other, our consciousness must modify its traditional way of functioning. It no longer has to relate as a whole to an object; in other words, it no longer corresponds to the totality of the relation of an I, or a self, to an object, notably because it does not know such a totality. For this totality to come to appear as the one it is, the subject must have a relationship with a subject different from the one who he or she is by nature. In order that such a relationship should occur without losing one’s self, this, from the very beginning, must be subjected to a negation—the frame which makes possible to meet the other as other is: I am not you. Subjecting our own being to a negation gives rise to the mood which enables us to deal with alterity. The absolute, then, is no longer merely intuited or projected, it is recognized as the reality to which it corresponds. Such a recognition allows me to aim at the absolute that I am without this absolute being for all that the absolute of the absolute. The other corresponds with an absolute too, on the condition that he or she takes on the non-being that they are. Taking on such a negative, or a negation, allows a becoming other to oneself which is not mistaken for becoming the other. A structure exists which permits us both to relate to the other and to return to ourselves. Hence, I know the experience of the absolute from the very beginning, and relating to and with the other will allow me to cultivate this experience while preserving an absolute founded in nature.
‘I am not you’—differently from ‘I do not know you’—anticipates all the relativity which will happen in the relationship to and with the other, and prevents this relation from an indefinite drift or dissolution in the relative. Such a negative makes also possible that the difference remains qualitative, because the experience of the absolute then exempts our difference from being quantitative in order to resist a lack of differentiation. The absolute character of the negation preserves the living qualities of our being as an effective, and especially affective, part of our entire being.
This part is also the one which concerns the energy which underlies and keeps going the motion of becoming. And such an energy, or such a will, cannot be limited to a will to know. It involves a more comprehensive will—a will to live or a will to be. However, such a will cannot be fulfilled only from and by oneself, it needs to be accomplished with the other, which requires another logic. Beyond the fact that the negative, then, does not refer to a contrary or to an opposite, there is no longer a question of overcoming a presumed contradiction because the negative at stake is henceforth unsurmountable—to be will for ever be accompanied by a not-being. To be will also mean becoming oneself through a becoming the other, not only of the self but of the other.
Not being the other does not prevent us from experiencing something of the other, which alters us as a reality and a truth that we must recognize. Nevertheless, this reality or truth has become so intimate with our self that it is not certain that this self can ever be merely ours. Being oneself means agreeing to be also with the other, a being-with in which we must constantly assess what belongs to our being and to out non-being in order to safeguard our relation to the absolute regarding both life and transcendence.
Could this mean regarding life as transcendence? Not simply. No doubt we experience life as transcendence when we live it as an absolute. However, we have not yet defined or identified the frame which allows us to experience life as such towards its cultivation. Hence the referral to an absolute beyond life itself.
In order to cultivate the absolute that life represents, we must approach the nature of the finite and the infinite without losing ourselves in this distinction. All by myself I can experience the absolute, but this needs me to be limited in order to be kept alive while evolving. And it is an other who can provide me with both limit and limitlessness, an other who allows me to experience my life as finite but destined to develop thanks to relating to the infinite. The other who is capable of making me experience both my finiteness and infiniteness is above all an other who is differently sexuate. Indeed, this other reveals to me that my being is particular, thus finite, but it invites me to overcome such finiteness through the infinite to which desire summons me.
Such a call opens up the path towards the becoming of my being, a becoming which never will surmount the distress resulting from the irreducible dependence on finiteness. If such a distress compels me to live with wisdom, it also corresponds to what permits me to remain alive, that is, always in becoming—a becoming which must take into account sensitivity as a passage from empirical to transcendental. In other words, desire has not only to provide energy for the motion of becoming, it has also to provide a sensitive content capable of evolving.
In order to cultivate the relation of our sensitivity towards the absolute, self-affection seems to represent a way, or a method, of which self-consciousness would be only a stage. Self-affection provides us with a more comprehensive structure which allows us to dialectize a part of our being that self-consciousness is not able to take into account—as is the case in the Hegelian dialectics. Indeed, consciousness, as it is conceived by him, needs object(s) to experience itself, whereas self-affection can happen without any object and permits a further cultivation of subjectivity, notably at the sensitive level.
Cultivating intersubjective relations needs us to work out, and even to subject to a dialectical process, our sensitive experience. One could say that fulfilling our being cannot happen without us considering this part of ourselves, which moreover cannot be overcome by the objectivity of spirit. Life, its growth and its sharing require us to cultivate our sensitivity. Neglecting it or subjecting it to intelligibility do not allow us to achieve the potential of our being. Internalization and relationship to and with the other, in particular the other as a living being, necessitate the preservation and the transformation of our sensitivity not only as a medium and a mediation but also as a crucial aspect of our being. Our self cannot be limited to self-consciousness of a spiritual nature. It must remain sensitive and ensure the passage between our fleshly and our spiritual living being.
If the coming to itself of the spirit runs the risk of sinking down into monotony and uniformity it is because it neglects to take into account our sensitive part. The cultivation of our spirit must consider the aim and the development of this part of our being in order to take place without tediousness.
Desire must remain qualitatively sensitive if it intends to retain its connection to the absolute—in reality favouring quantity destroys this relation. Furthermore, if our desire strives to overcome the negation constitutive of our concrete being, it cannot achieve such a wish because the desire for the other cannot correspond to the absolute desire for oneself, or the desire for oneself as the absolute. What is more, desire must keep a relation to immediacy in order to have energy that it needs for its becoming—a mediation radically extraneous to an immediate experience would destroy the nature of desire. And removing the negation, or the negative, as far as desire is concerned, also amounts to destroying it.
Desire as desire for the absolute gets involved in a complex evolution between progression and going back. It must renounce any resort to the use of the desirable as a mediation aiming at abolishing alterity, without for all that giving up the desirable as a way to transform the natural energy. It must return to the source of its motion, and rediscover a path towards the absolute through experiencing a natural immediacy in order to work it out towards an absolute which takes into account the relationship with the other as other.
Henceforth, the mediation that is necessary is different from the one which is needed by a consciousness relating merely to itself. Desire asks us to renounce a mediation resorting only to object(s) and discover a mediation suitable for a relationship between subjects, with a sharing and not an appropriation or adequacy in mind. If desire was in search of an absolute knowledge, especially relative to our self, uniting with an other different from ourselves requires us to give up aiming at such an absolute. Longing for the absolute now necessitates the maintenance of the effectiveness of the negative and of a worry that nothing can soothe in an absolute way. Hence the endless motion of our becoming.
Energy as Sensitive Mediation
In reality our first desire does not long for knowledge but for a union with the other. We have then to deal with a double immediacy: one in the perception of the other, the second in the perception of the relation itself. The process of mediation is thus quite different from the Hegelian one. I cannot make the other appear only by myself, and I do not even have the measure and the terms which would allow me to discover its truth. The other cannot simply appear to me and, furthermore, it gives truth to itself.
I can make room for a horizon inside of which the other can appear without renouncing the immediacy of its sensitive life. As far as I am concerned, I must give up mediating all by myself the presence of the other through helping it to be. The mediation, then, results from assuming the negative of a difference which maintains the particularity of the life of each.
In reality, Hegel holds a dialogue with himself. He does not imagine that the knowledge to which he refers, the knowledge of and for himself, always involves also the truth of the other. He approaches truth only through his own way of mediating life. And yet the mediation in relating to and with the other requires us to represent the truth of the incarnation of our own life, including in its relational dimension. This entails our risking being in communication, even in communion, with the other and maintaining an immediacy in this communion, while mediating it in order that it should be in accordance with us as relating to this other. The immediacy of any communing with the other must turn into one favouring the conjunction between two different beings in order that it should end in a union in difference. Our energy can remain a natural energy which ensures the motion, although it is converted into one which makes possible a union with a different energy.
Energy must ensure both motion and mediation, which needs it to combine quality and quantity. In order that the dialectical process should go on, energy must also include a mobility and an intensity which are maintained by longing for the absolute. However, for being able to mediate the relation to the absolute, energy must be modulated by its quality—could I say by its tonality?—it must combine absolute and relative in a qualitative way.
In order that the absolute which corresponds only with one could be united with the absolute corresponding with the other(s), energy must be relativized with respect to one another by a quality other than this, or these, involved in the longing for the absolute itself. Such a quality must lead each from the perception of an absolute, which does not know itself as relative, to the perception of a relativity which discovers its relation as such to the absolute, notably through longing for the other as different. Indeed, in this way each opens up to an absolute more absolute, thus less relative, than the one for which each alone can long.
The necessity for a qualitative determination of our energy in order to mediate between two particular absolutes comes also from the fact that quality allows energy to preserve its immediacy and naturalness. Quality maintains the aptitude of energy for mediating without it being destroyed or transformed in an irreversible way; that is, it permits our energy to keep its sensitivity and its potential immediacy thanks to a transformation which safeguards it as such. This operation can happen only by cultivating energy as a medium which makes possible an experience of the absolute without being itself the absolute.
The dialectical process must thus be applied to the medium itself in order to maintain its ability to let our being be perceived without removing it from its living existence. This requires us to be capable of uniting the here and now of the one who perceives with those of the one who is perceived without cutting either of them off from their becoming absolutely the ones who they are. For the subject–object logic we thus need to substitute—or, at least we need to add on it—a logic regulated by the relationship between living beings, which can be worked out thanks to the mediation and the medium provided by a natural energy humanly cultivated so that it should be shareable. Following Hegel, but differently from him, I could say that the ‘I’ who perceives ‘this’ must receive from such a ‘this’ its this-me as living, which can occur in a meeting with any living being, but can be accomplished in an absolute way only when meeting a human being who is differently sexuate. Indeed, only he or she can give me back to my me as a differentiated this-me able to perceive in an absolute way another living being as the one who it is—a process in which the relative here and now of each is referred to the absolute to which it longs in a specific way.
The work of Hegel lacks a true dialectics of the sensitive knowledge in particular because he conceives it starting from one subject only. Thus he does not take into account the mediation which already exists in the sensitive experience. And this happens at three levels: (1) he does not imagine that the fact of being a ‘this’ capable of sensitive perception presupposes a mediation of life itself; (2) he does not really envision receptiveness and passivity as a means of knowledge; (3) he does not take into account the medium which permits knowledge at a sensitive level.
Probably all these aporias result from the fact that Hegel does not consider enough the experience of sensitivity between two living subjects. He particularly neglects the motion and the mediation already at stake in such an experience. He envisages the sensitive certainty only through apprehending an object already deprived of life by a consciousness which, also, is cut off from life. The ‘this’ of what is perceived, as well as the one who perceives, in fact, are produced by a logic which does not truly care about life itself. And what Hegel calls sensitivity amounts to a sort of physical reaction in a kind of laboratory for experimentation. Immediacy itself is then artificial and, as such, motionless, insensitive or aseptic, thus unable to ensure any mediation.
Through his recapitulation of the history of Western philosophy, Hegel shows how much its manner of thinking has neglected to consider life itself as mediating and mediated in a particular way in/by different living beings. Hence, he needs three absolutes to objectively support the achievement of consciousness: art, religion and philosophy. But Hegel deprives in this way the living beings that we are of a dynamic and shareable connection to the absolute necessary for our becoming. Indeed, immediacy is envisioned by Hegel in the relation(s) between subject and object(s), in which it no longer exists as really alive. It is already subjected to a cultural mediation which determines our consciousness and makes it exist only through a relation to an object and vice versa.
In such a configuration, immediacy already results from a construction and is not truly immediate. Thus the matter no longer consists in the fact that any present experience is only an example of the particularity of a ‘this’ in comparison with that which would be the essence of immediacy.
In reality, experiencing immediacy is now dependent on another logic in which the copula is of use to unite two subjects naturally different instead of uniting a subject with object(s). By favouring the relation to object(s), the subject loses the possibility of experiencing an immediacy founded in nature. This can take place only thanks to the cultivation of an experience of immediacy between two living beings; that is, thanks to the working out of the sensitive experience that a subject lives in meeting with another living subject.
A real immediacy is experienced in an energy communion with another living being in which the immediacy which is experienced by each has already been transformed in order to become shareable. Immediacy can be experienced only as already mediated not through a differentiation between a subject and object(s) but through the natural difference existing between two subjects. As such, it cannot be interpreted as an example of the experience of real life in comparison with an essence but as the return to the universality of life which, as an absolute, can be experienced by becoming incarnate through the difference between living beings.
Hegel produces difference or differentiation instead of acknowledging and mediating a natural difference which already exists. In this way he deprives us of an experience of immediacy as a possible mediation towards our becoming the ones who we are. Hegel, as other philosophers before and after him, creates a differentiation internal to the subject in order not to be confronted with the unsurmountable difference and negative that the natural difference between our sexuate belongings represents. However, this difference could return him to himself as a determined subject who wanted to be, who had to form a world, and even to gain a consciousness, through relating to a subject naturally different from himself.
About Universality of Sensitive Experience
Hegel approaches sensitive knowledge starting from the subject–object relation. Now this way of conceiving the frame for tackling the subject–subject relation looks inappropriate, notably regarding the question of the ‘here’ and ‘now’. The object that Hegel gives as an example is always presumed to be an inanimate object from which the spatiotemporal dimension is assessed. However, in the subject–subject relation, the ‘now’ is not the same for each apart from in an abstract and not universal way. For example, the 31 January at 6.00 p.m. is not experienced in the same way by the one who was born 5, 15, 30 or 50 years ago—and any universal can overcome this difference. The same goes for the ‘here’. The examples set by Hegel determine the ‘here’ starting from a place opposite the subject. And yet we do not each have the same before ourselves when we are opposite each other. And, unless we do not take into account the experience itself, we have each the other opposite ourselves. Hence the impossibility of sharing the same ‘here’.
Thus the point is not to define the sensitive certainty starting from a universal presumed to be common, but to recognize that it must always be extraneous to, and one could say ecstatic with respect to, an eventual presumed universal. And this does not have the same effect at the level of knowledge. My knowledge then remains relative whatever the absolute nature of what I experience. In reality, no object can correspond with the sensitive certainty except this that I made not only through the absolute nature of my knowledge but as its being itself. In this case, is it really a question of a sensitive experience and knowledge?
By subjecting any ‘this’ to universality, especially that of language, Hegel removes it from an immediate sensitive experience. The only common ‘this’ that is truly sensitive is perhaps the one which occurs, or ought to occur, in the embrace between two subjects. Such a ‘this’ corresponds to a potentially universal experience for human beings but not as one being made universal by language—except sometimes by an artistic one?
If embracing is at the real root of our saying, no language, at least already existing, can tell it. Potentially universal, the ‘this’ present in our hugging one another cannot be made universal, and no language, no discourse can pretend to substitute for its particular embodiment. The memory of an experience of carnal embrace is entrusted to the body, and no other language can ensure its durability as such. One could say that such a ‘this’ cannot become a ‘that’ on pain of losing its meaning. It cannot take place or fade away merely as an active production or as passive effects—as works or affects, notably pathological ones—either. This experience must remain as a remembrance which contributes to the occurrence of a future ‘this’ through its transformation into a past ‘this’. Such a working out is complex on several accounts, and we lack mediations to carry it out. We cannot even aim simply at a future ‘this’ because nothing can really guarantee its happening as such.
Desire henceforth is no longer the desire of a subject in relation to an object, but the dynamic opening up to a risky encounter between two longings. If one part of such a meeting, the sexuate attraction, seems to be capable of being universal at the carnal, but not the linguistic, level, the shaping up and the incarnation of the longing can be foreseen with difficulty in their ‘here’ and ‘now’. The two longings must learn how to be dialectized by one another without reducing themselves to one another—something that sexuate difference can grant us thanks to its way of determining our subjectivity.
It is above all sexuation which permits us to dialectize our incarnation. Hence, the dialectical process no longer amounts to holding a dialogue with oneself—as is the case in Hegel’s and even already in Plato’s method whatever appearances—it unfolds through a dialogue with the other. The sensitive experience is then of a quite other nature. First, because aiming at an object and longing for another subject do not obey the same logic. Whatever the longing for the absolute that they inspire in me, I cannot make the other truly mine. Nevertheless, in my desire for him, or for her, they are my wanting and energy which are involved. In my relation to and with the other a ‘mine’ is thus committed. In order not to completely lose this ‘mine’ in the desire that I experience for the other, I must—differently from what is needed by the method advocated by Hegel—renounce making the other mine. In other words, I cannot absolve myself from my desire for the other, because it keeps living my longing for the absolute, including in its immediacy. Such a motion is almost the opposite of that at work in the Hegelian dialectics. Longing for the absolute now requires us to definitively give up making our own, subjectively or objectively, the one who is desired, above all at the level of consciousness.
No doubt something occurs in me thanks to the desire for, and also of, the other. But that which occurs cannot be appropriated by my consciousness on pain of relativizing my desire, of depriving it of its relation to the absolute and its dynamic potential. In order that desire should keep such properties, it cannot be reduced to a conscious process, although it has to be memorized for its becoming. Such memorization must preserve a potential immediacy without thwarting its durability—which is allowed by a physical inscription. This requires a certain passivity, but one to which we actively agree and that we assume.
In order that my desire should persevere in its search for the absolute, I must accept being touched by the other and affected by this other in a lasting way, but with an evolution of myself in mind. Experiencing then does not divide up between feeling and acting, it is a moment of the dialectical motion towards fulfilling desire. And the stronger is my capability for feeling, the stronger also is my longing for the absolute. Obviously feeling in this case cannot mean a mere suffering, as it has too often been conceived in our tradition, but rather a necessary stage towards the fulfilment of our desire. Indeed the latter cannot content itself with activity or passivity—especially when they are distributed between the masculine and the feminine—but it needs a link between the active and the passive in each one, in order that a motion should go from being affected to being willing from each and in each. This ensures the permanence of desire in the motion of each towards the absolute, and a possible sharing, more exactly a possible communion, in such a process.
This too rarely happens for lack of a cultivation of our comprehensive being and a method capable of ensuring such a cultivation. At least two reasons, amongst others, can be put forward to explain this lack: the subjection of sensitivity to intelligibility, and the passage from one to many without consideration for what occurs in the relationship between two. These two characteristics of our tradition bear witness to the importance attached to a making outside of ourselves to the detriment of a becoming of ourselves, and our consequent laceration between diverse realizations.
For example, when Hegel alludes to interiority, it is already to a mental process that he refers, a process which does not take into account a longing for the absolute of our global being, but considers only that of our consciousness. Hence, the fact that the Hegelian dialectics can unfold in spite of a subjection of sensitivity to mind and the passage from one to many without the stage of the relation between two, whatever its crucial importance for our comprehensive accomplishment. Indeed, the cultivation of this relation is what allows us to deal with and to transform immediacy into a means which preserves its immediate nature without bending it to a construction which mediates it in a more or less artificial way.
Here and Now in Intersubjective Relations
Desire, more generally any relation between two naturally different humans, requires, in order to be shared, a deconstruction of the Hegelian dialectical process. It requires us to return to a specific personal experience, to an artlessness liberated from any universalizing elaboration. It needs us to recover the immediacy of a natural perception which still acknowledges difference(s). Such deconstruction, or negative ontology, runs the risk of falling back into a lack of differentiation too, which, then, is due to an attraction which abolishes the duality of subjectivities and identities through a fusion, a domination or a subjection, and even through a communion which amounts to a blind immersion in an undifferentiated whole.
That which has been deconstructed must be re-elaborated starting from the difference of nature existing between the subjects. Any universal construction may neglect this problem and leap over the stage of its possible solution. But the universality does not correspond to the same on every side, and desire, more generally relationship, cannot be put into the neuter without being harmed and even destroyed. The operation which will permit our sharing is a transformation, by each, of an immediacy into another that is more original, more virgin but, nevertheless, not put into the neuter. The important thing is to keep energy alive and shareable as such.
If the motion in the Hegelian dialectics needed the splitting of our subjectivity and the neutralizing, at least partly, of our energy in order that it should unfold, the dialectics suitable for cultivating the relation between two naturally different subjects, needs each of them to beware of being split and to keep their energy unified, the two subjectivities as well as their energies being determined in a different way. Henceforth, it is another process which is at stake, and it is no longer resorting to reflection which can contribute towards its developing. Sexuate difference cannot be subjected to reflection, and when we subject it to reflection it loses its effectiveness because it aims at uniting with the other but not at becoming other in and for each in order to be assumed as a oneself.
The scission which is entailed by sexuation is not one between me and myself, at least it is the case when sexuate difference preserves the absolute that my desire wants to reach. There is then the question of a scission between the other and me, and if unhappiness exists, it results from the separation from one another. This separation is unsurmountable, but it is such a negative, this not being the other, which permits the union between us to keep our desire aspiring after the absolute, and to happen as a non-controllable and imperfect overcoming of the scission with which our being has to deal in an absolute way.
Belonging to only one genus causes both our unhappiness and our happiness in a process in which a definitive reconciliation will never happen. Thus our anxiety will never be completely soothed except by denying our irreducible difference. This can take various forms: confining ourselves to sameness, to equality, to one only identity, but also attributing the negative to the other or charging this other of the negative in an active or passive way, acting and thinking in a supposedly sexless manner, promoting a universal culture lacking in sexuate differentiation, favouring reproduction to the detriment of desire, keeping desire in abeyance by supra-sensitive ideals and so on.
The Hegelian dialectics aims at reducing difference to sameness. However, the difference that Hegel endeavours to overcome is a difference with which he already provided himself and not the difference which really exists between subjects differently determined by nature. And yet if longing for the absolute remains a constituent of our subjectivity, it is because the longing which supports the motion of the dialectical process is itself underpinned by a desire to be more fundamental than the desire to know. This desire to be brings energy to our will to know more about being, and the former is in a way sacrificed to the latter. Nevertheless, the absolute after which this latter aspires cannot be absolved from the absolute after which our desire to be aspires, a desire which continues wanting to develop, and which stops its motion only by splitting itself into aiming at art, religion and philosophy. Maintaining such difference results only from an operation of our subjectivity which does not allow this subjectivity to escape its own fragmentation.
The unity of subjectivity in its search for the absolute can be safeguarded by bowing before a difference that it cannot overcome; that is, by bowing to an unsurmountable negative. And this corresponds to the properly human undertaking that we have to achieve—a task from which humanity never stops shrinking, notably by concealing the negative in diverse forms of absolutes of which we cannot have an experience, such as supra-sensitive ideals and God himself. We have also hidden the negative in a so-called common sense, lacking in differentiation, to which we ought to submit and which is presumed to embody the universality of our condition. But it only represents a partial embodiment of this condition at a given epoch of history.
This is particularly obvious and problematic when it is a question of truth with regard to the other. In order to exempt ourselves from taking on the negative of an insurmountable difference, we perceive this other through supra-sensitive ideals or the neutralization of a presumed common sense; that is, we do not perceive him or her as they are. Their current presence remains hidden from us by various cultural constructions, so that it escapes from our perception and we are led to fragment it for glimpsing something of it. We no longer perceive the being of the other but only some modalities of its embodiment: citizen, worker, family member, sexual partner and so on. We are then allowed to include this other as spare parts within the horizon of our own world without assuming the negative which permits us to meet this other as a comprehensive being. The place thanks to which we could return to one another our own being and seek how to join our two different beings is then taken away from us.
Certainly, the negative cannot be assumed either once and for all or always in the same way. For example, in order to perceive the other as other, that is, as different, I must immerse myself in myself—Hegel perhaps would say that I must sink into myself—but also in the perception of the other and, next, be able to restore the limits of each of us. And it is not a dialectics in which only our consciousness is involved which could carry out such a process. A cultivation of passivity and of its combination with activity, notably at the physical and sensitive levels, is needed in order to recognize the other as other.
The mere acceptance of the difference of the other presupposes that we assume an irreducible passivity accompanied by an insurmountable negative. However, such a passivity, as well as this negative, have a positive function in the constitution of our subjectivity. They provide it with a unity which contributes to gathering other properties which are incapable, only by themselves, of making up such a unity, given their relative lack of significance for one another and in relation to other entities. Thus they could compose a unity only through a co-belonging which lacks necessity and stability or permanence. The potential for uniting needs a more irreducible property, including at the natural level, a property which is not indifferent either to its own unity or to the unities with which it has to deal outside of itself. Sexuate difference corresponds to such a property.
Acknowledging the intervention of sexuate difference in the unification of our subjectivity entails agreeing that the latter is determined in a way that is both particular and not indifferent to the whole that we constitute, as well as not indifferent to the world in which we are, and in particular to the other sexuate being with whom we compose humanity. Besides, this unification of subjectivity through its non-indifference allows the dialectical process to preserve a qualitative element without submitting either to neutralization or to mere quantitative phases towards a passage to the absolute.
The Qualitative Truth of Our Being
Henceforth, opposition is no longer that which can safeguard the qualitative dimension in our aiming at the absolute through overcoming contradictions. The negative no longer operates as a way of determining by excluding. It corresponds to the recognition of the existence of a difference which maintains each one within its limits. Thus it is no longer a question of progressing towards truth or right by dismissing falsehood or wrong, but of not pretending that we are what or who we are not, firstly by nature. Indeed, what is specific to us is originally granted us by nature, and how to perceive and cultivate it must inspire the motion of our becoming.
This requires us to put the stress on the manner of entering into relation with the fruitful respect for our difference(s) in mind, instead of focusing on excluding what is inappropriate. What or who we are exists from the outset. Becoming requires us to embody the ones who we are, but not the one who the other is, while developing the relational properties which are ours through growing by being in relation with the other(s). It is between subjects that the negative must be applied in order to maintain their respective reality, truth and progression towards their accomplishment as different from one another. Desire provides us with a motion the stake of which is not to exclude a presumed opposite in order to become ourselves, but to preserve the/our difference in order that the motion of becoming lives on. No doubt this task is not easy, but it is probably the most distinguishing feature of humanity.
What such an undertaking requires us to carry out is more complex than what is needed by the Hegelian dialectical process. Indeed, if I long for the other it is because I long for him or her as necessary for my own fulfilment. However, the other is not an object and my consciousness cannot act towards him or her as towards an object—the difference between the other and myself is more radically objective though it can be less objectively defined at the subjective level. The other is naturally different from me and I cannot become this other, but my desire for the other makes it subjectively intimate with me. I must preserve the desire for the other as a desire for a beyond that I cannot become, even if it partakes in my being. Instead of excluding the other from myself as an unsuitable object, my desire must aim at rendering mine what of him or her allows me, and even both, to develop towards a more and more absolute union; that is, at rendering mine what favours my perception of and my desire for the other as other. In other words, one could say that I must endeavour to perceive the other not as an object but as a subject, and a subject different from myself—as a necessary partner of my accomplishment. Thus the dialectical process no longer applies to the relation between a subject and an object but to the relation between two subjects objectively different.
As there is then no object at which one aims, that one wants to take and appropriate, or even to which one wants to appropriate oneself, the motion is more complex and may exhaust itself or be dashed in its search for the absolute. Thus it would be useful to sustain its development by qualitative supports, which both temper and keep the motion going without letting the absolute alone be the guarantor of the quality of becoming. Some pauses are necessary too, some moments of embodiment, and also some sensitive perceptions which make possible our aiming at the absolute while taking on the negative, without, nevertheless, being destroyed.
The negative must procure to the living beings that we are a space–time in which to dwell, to open out, to experience ourselves as a flesh and to fulfil the ones who we are. The function of such a negative is not to perpetuate a logic of opposites, of contraries, of exclusion and so on; rather it must ensure a unity in which qualitative properties can be experienced, combine with one another, evolve in order to be able to unite with a different unity, that of the other. The qualitative effect of what is perceived of the other then intervenes as an assessment which substitutes for judgement(s), the criteria of which are more or less overtly quantitative.
Our sexuation allows us to gather various properties of the living being that we are which, for lack of such gathering, would either fragment almost indefinitely or be united by criteria extraneous to life itself, which, as such, would destroy our physical and carnal qualities notably by quantitative evaluations. These could express themselves through domination, competition and so on which would supplant the sensitive experience of quality. In Hegelian terms, it could be possible to say that sexuation permits us to correspond with a universal mediation while keeping this alive and able to evolve. This can occur only by preserving its specificity—in this case, its sexuate character.
Sexuate belonging has a really particular property because the for oneself that it can supply is also a for the other, before any reference to an other or a multiple external to oneself. As such, sexuation can ensure the unity of the subject while opening up this subject to the other, so that each, by becoming oneself, should also become for the other. This aptitude of sexuation is in a way unique: unifying me it also provides me with a mediation to relate to and with the other. Moreover, mediating in this way between us as different, my sexuate belonging puts also the other itself in relation to/with me. The ‘for you’ becomes a potential ‘for me’.
Henceforth, the perception of otherness is no longer based on quantity but on quality: an external quality relative to the being of the other, but also an internal quality corresponding to what my flesh perceives of this other. It is not whatever other that I can perceive as ‘my’ other, but an other who, whilst it remains transcendentally different from me through its sexuation, can also potentially be united with me—one could say, conjoined to me—because it is possible that it would be joined to my being without destroying what this being is truly and can become. Quantity, including quantity of the affect, must remain secondary in comparison with quality. It is the latter which determines the other as being potentially ‘my’ other, whereas the other who appeals to me through quantity falls back into the status of one amongst others, so losing the particularity of its otherness for me—as well as for itself. It, then, too, loses its inherent status of universal mediation.
The potential of sexuation as universal mediation is also unique with regard to the negative. If sexuation contributes to the unity both of the one and of the other, it can act in this way only if each assumes the fact of not being the other—the for oneself for the other that it grants requires the assumption of such a negative. As such it is probably the most specifically human mediation and the only one able to substitute for supra-sensitive ideals in the process of our becoming. Indeed, the mediation corresponding to sexuation needs, in order to be effective, the acknowledgement of an unsurmountable negative, the nature of which is qualitative, whereas the nature of the passage to an absolute depending on supra-sensitive ideas or ideals is basically quantitative, and it can eventually be overcome in another existence. In other words, sexuation asks of us to agree to long for an absolute which is for ever objectively relative.
This sends us back to our condition of living being, for which the absolute remains always particular and must be recognized as such in order to be effective. However, such an absolute is only externally relative, and this relativity allows each of us to come closer to the absolute which corresponds to ourselves through an internal development. It is because I am not the other that I can perceive this other not only as an object of my consciousness but as another living human subjectivity for which I may long. And what I experience at the sensitive level, notably by being in communion with the other, amounts to a stage of my becoming that I must transform as such through a dialectical process.
How can we succeed in that? How can we keep living the negative which maintains the individualization of the one and of the other and gives each of us back to a self-affection which does not preclude hetero-affection? Of what, including dialectical, cultivation of sensitivity—and proprioceptivity?—are we in need to carry out such a process? For lack of it, does not our experience of desire and love run the risk of being reduced to a mere pathology?
For Me for You; for You for Me
Logic is, then, no longer based on an equation such as ‘a’ is equal to ‘b’, at which ‘a’ aims as its objective corresponding, but on ‘a’ is ‘a’ and is different from ‘b’. ‘A’ as equal to ‘a’ is given by nature, but it must come true, and it needs ‘b’, as a different being with which it must be conjoined, in order to be. Thus ‘a’ aims at ‘b’ as a mediation towards the absolute after which it aspires. However, contrary to what occurs in a Hegelian dialectics, ‘b’ is the mere support of a mediation towards the absolute for which ‘a’ longs. Only the embodiment of the mediation itself could correspond to the absolute after which ‘a’ aims, but it is never achieved in an absolute way, at least definitively.
Unlike a logic based on ‘a’ must become equal to ‘b’, the latter being what objectively determines ‘a’, logic is henceforth based on ‘a’ is equal to ‘a’, ‘b’ is equal to ‘b’ but different from ‘a’, and ‘a’ conjoined with ‘b’ is the place where the absolute can take place. It is after the union of ‘a’ with ‘b’, as different from ‘a’, that the desire for the absolute aspires. And yet, the union of ‘a’ with ‘b’ is never absolutely accomplished, even if the absolute can be experienced through it. Hence, we can continue to long for the absolute, because it never becomes definitely embodied, which supports our becoming. This can also correspond to the contribution to a community and to the history of those who work on such embodiment because they so contribute towards the evolution of the question concerning being.
Logic henceforth is based on assuming difference in order to produce or reproduce human being. This needs to resort to a triple dialectical process. Indeed, if ‘a’ is equal to ‘a’, it must also become the one that it is thanks to a dialectical process between a natural given and a cultural development—and it is the same for ‘b’. The fact of not being faithful to becoming the ones that they are leads them to a sort of pathological contradiction which paralyses the motion of their development. Nevertheless, becoming the ones who they are asks them to compromise with the different from themselves. This could also be expressed in the following way: I cannot become absolutely myself without being also with the other. The participation of the other is needed by the motion towards my own becoming.
This puts a further question concerning my longing for the absolute. Such a question cannot be limited to a mere speculative interrogation and cannot be solved—Hegel perhaps would say that it cannot be absolved—at a solely spiritual level. Desire takes root in the body and cannot be completely distinguished from it. No doubt, energy can be transformed, it can become more subtle and more compatible with the nature of the transcendental. However, it cannot become completely incorporeal on pain of abolishing the evolution of life itself and the respect for alterity—something that our tradition mistakenly did. Hence a necessary return to its foundation, its definition of being and its method.
According to our past logic, a subject could decide on its determinations. And yet if we take seriously into account our sexuation, notably starting from our experience but also from scientific experimentations, we must admit that sexuation determines our subjectivity before any determination that we can freely allot to ourselves. Although this is often denied, all of our subjective choices and late determinations will be sexuated. Subjectivity cannot attribute its determinations only by itself, it is also assigned by them. Acknowledging that we are determined by our sexuate belonging grants us a margin of freedom with regard to logical functioning.
This also allows us to recover a dynamism arising from our nature itself instead of it being allocated by understanding. From then on, the logical link as syntax itself will be first concerned with the connection between subjects, and subjects which are different, but not with the connection between a subjectivity and its object(s) or other determination(s). And this frees the copula from its subjection to an objective external estimation and gives back to it an ontological status with regard to the subjects and their relationships.
To be, then, is defined by our origin and our relational belonging, notably in comparison with other subjects, more than by a relation to object(s) on which understanding decides. The absolute is no longer to be sought through reaching adequacy between objectivity and subjectivity, between an external objective aim of the subject and the accomplishment of subjectivity. Rather, the absolute is experienced in an ecstatic relationship between us, as naturally determined subjects, an ecstasy in which our origin endeavours to achieve its finality again. In a way such achievement is unattainable, but we dynamically long for it and this requires a dialectical process which does not implicate only consciousness and speculation but also the body, sensitivity and flesh as such, in accordance with their different incarnations in the one and in the other.
How is it possible to introduce such dialectics? Hegel subjects the sensitive to the supra-sensitive without a dialectical treatment of sensitivity itself. Yet, if understanding begins with phenomena, it subjects them to reasoning, removing them in this way from their sensitive properties. Besides, Hegel thinks little about the fact that the appearing of a living being is not first for an other but corresponds to a stage of its becoming—a flower does not flower for me, but because flowering corresponds to its being a flower.
The matter is that Hegel considers such a flowering to be above all for him, what is more as an object of knowledge. He could live this appearing of the flower at a sensitive level, experience it with his comprehensive being and so transform his mode of knowing, but he does not act in this way. He neither questions nor cultivates the passive receptiveness which takes place when one contemplates a flower and the subjective internalization which can result from such apperception. He leaps over it towards a supra-sensitive level.
And the matter is still more complex when it is a question of a sensitive meeting between two human beings, especially if they are differently sexuated. Indeed, if its appearing is, for each of them, a for-itself—and even an in-itself-for-itself—it can also be a for-the-other. However, this phenomenon must remain sensitive in order for it not to be cut off either from the self or from the other. It must be taken as a sensitive sign towards a conjunction with one another. It cannot be extrapolated from its sensitive nature in order to maintain its own development, and that of both. It is in the relation itself that the motion of becoming must find its impetus, but not through reasoning, rather through a sensitive perception and its evolving by meeting at a sensitive level, especially between two differently sexuated humans. Then experiencing, more than knowing, acts as mediation.
Moreover, one could object to Hegel that conceiving of the absolute as knowledge involves a contradiction, because knowledge seems to solve the question of the absolute, whereas the absolute and knowledge are not situated at the same level. The absolute is that for which subjectivity longs, which underlies the motion and ensures, in various guises, a mediation in the dialectical process. Nevertheless, Hegel intends to stop the motion of this process by assuming that the absolute for which we long is knowledge. However, knowledge does not completely fulfil our desire for the absolute and, for lack of being treated in a dialectical way, this desire risks falling back into the absolute of a sensitive immediacy. Knowledge as such cannot absolve us from our longing for the absolute, because we long for another absolute.
We cannot reach alone, through a mere mediation of spirit, the absolute for which we long. In our worrying search, we often entrust our thirst for the absolute to the other or to the Other, unless we defer it to some supra-sensitive ideal. Searching for the absolute in the other or in the Other, we are not only in search of an absolute knowledge. Rather, we are in search of an absolute of being that we hope we will reach through a communion or a union, which amongst other things approaches the mystery of our origin.
However, the communion or union for which we are longing in an absolute way, after which our subjectivity aspires and towards which it strives as much as is possible, is confronted with the objective partiality of our participation in being—not in a Being more or less differentiated and determined, but in the human being that we differently incarnate, especially according to our sexuate belonging. Hence the necessity for a return to an original pathos instead of suspending it in the various pathological repercussions of the repression of our attractions and desires.