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     Love and the Debasement of Being: Irigaray's
     Revisions of Lacan and Heidegger

     Krzysztof Ziarek
     University of Notre Dame
     Krzysztof.Ziarek.2@nd.edu

     © 1999 Krzysztof Ziarek.
     All rights reserved.
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  1. In Écrits Lacan remarks: "Of all the undertakings that have been
     proposed in this century, that of the psychoanalyst is perhaps
     the loftiest, because his task is to act in our time as a
     mediator between the man of care and the subject of absolute
     knowledge" (105).[1] These words are quoted at the beginning of
     Richardson's 1983 essay "Psychoanalysis and the Being-question,"
     and taken to mean that, in developing the logic of desire, Lacan
     attempts to mediate between Heidegger's critique of the subject,
     that is, the idea of Dasein as care, and the Hegelian notion of
     absolute knowledge. Noting Lacan's proximity to Heidegger in the
     1950s and disputing his later assertion that the references to
     Heidegger were merely propadeutic, Richardson goes on to sketch a
     Heideggerian reading of some of the key notions in Lacanian
     psychoanalysis, among them, language, desire, and the Other. He
     suggests that Heidegger's redefinition of language underlies
     Lacan's reformulation of Saussurean linguistics and ties the
     notion of desire to the ecstatic temporality of Dasein. In a way
     what Richardson outlines, although very briefly and not exactly
     in those terms, is the critical project of rethinking the subject
     of desire through the ontico-ontological difference, that is,
     through the unstable and repeatedly erased difference between
     being as event and beings as things or entities. What
     Richardson's essay does not address is the reciprocal effect that
     the problematic of sexual difference might have on the question
     of being, on the idea of a "pre-sex" Dasein as the temporalizing
     structure of the human mode of being. For such a reformulation of
     the question of being we need to look to Irigaray, whose work
     should be approached, I would argue, in terms of a double
     re-reading: on the one hand, in L'oubli de l'air and certain
     other texts, particularly in An Ethics of Sexual Difference,
     Irigaray reconceives the question of being through sexual
     difference; on the other hand, and this is a point which
     Irigaray's reception has almost completely missed, Irigaray
     revises Lacanian psychoanalysis and the role that sexual
     difference has played in philosophical discourse, including
     Heidegger's own, through the prism of the ontico-ontological
     difference. What emerges from this criss-crossing critique is a
     rethinking of love and sexual difference, which reformulates the
     relation to the other outside the logic of both recognition and
     desire. As I argue in this essay, Irigaray's double intervention
     into psychoanalysis and philosophy shifts the discussion of love
     and sexual relation away from negation and lack to temporality
     and embodiment.

  2. This reading I am tracing in Irigaray's work takes Lacan's remark
     from Écrits at its word and situates the Lacanian subject of
     desire between Heidegger and Hegel, or, more specifically,
     between Dasein's originary temporality and unhomeness
     (Unheimlichkeit) and Hegel's dialectics of recognition. It is
     important to note that, at the time when interpretations of Lacan
     concentrate on Kant and Hegel, Irigaray's work pursues, although
     critically, a decidedly post-Heideggerian path. Of the many
     provocative implications of Irigaray's Heideggerian turning of
     Lacan, I will focus here on her rethinking of love in the context
     of the debasement of being and the various forms it takes in
     Lacan's Encore: knowledge, truth, certain forms of love, the
     good, beauty. What this approach makes possible is the
     articulation of Irigaray's pivotal move from the critique of the
     subject of desire to the reformulation of love in terms of
     temporality and wonder. The significance of this reformulation of
     Lacan through the prism of Heidegger's revision of temporality
     lies in underscoring the openings in Lacan discourse beyond the
     logic of desire, which remains the focus of contemporary Lacanian
     readings. Recent innovative approaches to Lacan have tended to
     elaborate the logic of desire and sexual relation either in terms
     of the Hegelian dialectic of desire and recognition or by way of
     the Kantian notion of das Ding. Zizek's interpretations of Lacan
     in the context of popular culture and political ideology
     emphasize the dependence of Lacan's understanding of desire and
     the Other on the Hegelian dynamic of recognition. In Tarrying
     with the Negative, Zizek reads Hegel and Kant through each other
     in order to emphasize the limit to subjectivation, the
     unsignifiable real which marks the gap or lack in the
     constitution of the subject. He illustrates how substance, the
     Real, and the Thing are mirages instantiated retroactively by the
     surplus of desire. In another influential reading, Joan Copjec
     reaffirms and reformulates in "Sex and The Euthanasia of Reason"
     the Kantian thread in Lacan, explaining the Lacanian formulas of
     sexuation through Kant's antinomies of reason in order to
     illustrate the extra-discursive existence of sex. Although
     emphatically not prediscursive, sex in Copjec's argument, like
     Kant's thing-in-itself, "is still unknown and must remain so"
     (234).

  3. Irigaray's work revises these arguments specifically in terms of
     what Kant's formulation, at least in Heidegger's opinion, does
     not thematize: temporality. For Irigaray, sexual difference
     signifies the limit of language not in terms of Kant's
     thing-in-itself but in terms of the Heideggerian withdrawal of
     being. The limit then indicates the impossibility of presence
     marked by the ecstatic character of temporality, by the unfolding
     of time irreducible to the historicist conceptualization of
     history. In other words, Irigaray follows neither the Kantian nor
     the historicist route. Rather, her reformulation of love
     demonstrates how the logic of desire, which produces the
     substantialization of the (foreclosed) Real, is itself put into
     motion by an evacuation of temporality and a consequent
     "debasement" of being into things, objects, or substances. For
     Irigaray, the fact that the limit is not the non-signifiable real
     but futural temporality implies a critical change in the function
     of the negative: it no longer signifies negation or repression
     but becomes the marker of transformation, the sign of the
     possibility of love and ethical relation.[2]

  4. What I am proposing, therefore, is a turn in reading Lacan, which
     would foreground the issue of temporality and its bearing on the
     problematics of love, desire, and sexual relation--a turn that
     might finally open up a constructive and critical dialogue
     between Irigarayan and Lacanian scholars. Fleshing out the
     revision of the subject of desire through the Heideggerian
     rethinking of temporality becomes critical for such a project,
     because it allows us to open up the space of relating to the
     Other that "escapes" and revises the logic of desire dominant in
     current discussions of this problem. Heidegger's revision of
     temporality provides a critique of both Hegel's dialectical
     conception of history and the Kantian notion of the inaccessible
     thing-in-itself, and makes possible an important rethinking of
     the very dynamic of relation to otherness from within the
     temporal unfolding of being. The approach I outline here
     underscores the role of temporality and non-appropriative
     relatedness to the Other which Irigaray reformulates from
     Heidegger and Levinas. My approach also complicates the
     relationship between Lacan and Irigaray beyond the current
     feminist interpretations of Irigaray, which still underplay the
     importance of Heidegger for her critique. It also calls into
     question the refusal to engage Irigaray's reformulations of Lacan
     on the part of most Lacanian critics, a disavowal that follows in
     part from the misrecognition of Heidegger's import for Lacan's
     thinking. I argue that the critique and contextualization of
     desire in relation to the temporality of para-being, which Lacan
     signals in Encore, makes visible unexplored proximities between
     late Lacan and Irigaray and allows us to address the multiple
     points of Irigaray's engagement and reformulation of Lacan's
     work: desire, love, the Other. It highlights the ways in which
     Lacan's Encore opens beyond its own formulations of jouissance
     and sexual relation and points beyond the logic of desire toward
     the non-appropriative relation which Irigaray redefines in terms
     of wonder.

  5. These revisions underscore the need for an important
     reformulation of the current discourse on desire and power which
     characterize many approaches from Lacanian psychoanalysis and
     readings of Irigaray, to Foucault studies, and cultural and
     postcolonial studies. The approach that I negotiate between
     Lacan, Heidegger, and Irigaray, makes it possible to propose a
     modality of relatedness to the other that eschews the logic of
     the negative and of constitutive lack. To open up this
     perspective, desire and its entanglements with power need to be
     rethought in terms of the event temporality of being, through
     which Irigaray resignifies relationality into the
     non-appropriative and transformative wonder. At stake in this
     critique is the possibility of a relationality that is no longer
     structured in terms of lack and desire, power and subjection, and
     that remains "ethical" and non-appropriative. Heidegger sees the
     possibility of such freedom in the very temporal modality of
     human being (Dasein), i.e. in its unhomeness, or openness to what
     is other. The temporality of this openness ruptures the pathways
     of desire and makes possible an encounter with the other without
     confusing it with sameness or elevating it into sublimity. This
     reading of Irigaray's Heideggerian intervention into Lacan and
     her Lacanian reformulation of Heidegger's Dasein enables the
     reformulation of sexual relation in terms of a future-oriented
     and transformative being-two, to recall Irigaray's most recent
     articulation of the problematic of sexual difference.

  6. Drawing on Heidegger's rethinking of temporality and being, I
     will explain how Irigaray redefines love beyond narcissism and
     fusion, and reworks the Hegelian labor of the negative, which
     remains so pivotal to Lacan's logic of desire. This redefinition
     of love, however, can be carried out only in conjunction with the
     simultaneous reformulation of the question of being through
     sexual difference. Offering those revisions, Irigaray's critique
     of psychoanalysis is never simply negative: it is not criticism
     and certainly not a rejection of Lacan but is a transformative
     encounter, a further elaboration of the openings which Lacan
     himself makes in Encore. The critique of love as a certain
     debasement of being, as a veiling of the temporality and finitude
     of existence, is obviously at the heart of Encore. Tracing an
     historical path from Aristotle through courtly love and the
     baroque aesthetic to Freud and contemporary linguistics, Lacan's
     Seminar XX reappraises the questions posed in the ethics seminar
     in order to explore the possibility of ethical love
     differentiated from the ideal of the One in which Lacan sees one
     of the forms of the foreclosure of both the historicity and the
     jouissance of being--a collapse or debasement of being's
     occurrence into substantiality or ideality. Repeating his own
     formulas of sexuation, his understanding of the work of desire
     and of the deceptions of love, Lacan points in Seminar XX toward
     the possibility of rethinking love in connection with a certain
     jouissance and in terms of the revised notion of being as
     para-being. Encore opens a path to thinking the ethics of love
     outside of the mirroring enclosures of narcissism and the effects
     of sameness associated with the idea of the One. This possibility
     pivots on redrawing the very notion of relation to the other into
     a new, non-appropriative mode of relationality which is not
     encompassed by desire, narcissistic or fusional love, or the
     labor of the negative.

  7. Recalling de Beauvoir's hope that the future will bring new,
     re-imagined relations, Irigaray develops such relationality into
     a redefinition of sexual difference as a transformative event in
     which an encounter with the sexed other keeps reinventing
     difference and thus opens the possibility of a new future. The
     issues of the debasement of being and the possibility of ethical
     love are closely connected in Irigaray's revision of sexual
     difference and form her response to Lacan's repeated assertion
     that sexual relationship does not take place. For Irigaray the
     failure of sexual relation reflects the effective erasure of
     sexual difference within the cultural paradigms of sexuation: the
     figuration of "woman" as absence or the not-whole, as the other
     to "man"--which issues from the metaphysical desire for sameness
     and the unity of being--forecloses the possibility of exchange in
     sexual relation and produces the illusion of unified and
     universalizable experience. It is only by redefining the relation
     between the sexes outside of the metaphysical strictures of
     presence and absence, negation and unity, that it may become
     possible to rethink the sexuate dimension of being beyond its
     phallocratic debasement. Considering Irigaray in the context of
     Heidegger's thought, I reappraise her redefinition of the
     relationality of love in terms of a rethinking of Dasein into an
     ethical, non-appropriative event of being-two. At stake in this
     redefinition of love as a non-appropriative encounter, as is the
     case with Lacan's seminars VII and XX, is also the question of
     ethics.

  8. To illustrate these re-negotiations between Lacan, Irigaray, and
     Heidegger, I will focus on the implications of thinking the
     subject of desire as a mediation, a middle link between Dasein
     and being, on the one hand, and the subject of absolute
     knowledge, on the other. Lacan's reading of Freud brings the
     question of lack and absence, reformulated as the work of the
     signifier, to bear on the Cartesian subject of certainty and also
     on the Hegelian idea of history as the manifestation of the
     subject's development toward absolute knowledge. It is the
     structuring and grounding function of lack that dislocates the
     Cartesian subject and opens it onto the subject of desire, which
     emerges as another layer of subjectivity, constantly enveloping
     and fracturing the subject of knowledge. Examining various forms
     of love against the backdrop of the splits and lack intrinsic to
     subjectivity, Lacan indicates that love functions as a supplement
     both to the lack that structures desire and to the failure of
     sexual relationship. Love takes two primary forms: narcissism, a
     self-love described by Freud, and the philosophical-theological
     idea of unity which, as Lacan puts it, has to do with the One,
     that is, with the ideal of oneness and fusion that can be traced
     back at least as far as Plato's Symposium. Against these two
     dominant forms, Encore (hereafter abbreviated E) signals the
     importance of rethinking love with respect to the failure of
     sexual relationship, which, Lacan insists, although articulated
     as a negation, marks something positive: "Yes, I am teaching
     something positive here. Except that it is expressed by a
     negation" (E 59). What fails in sexual relationship is objective;
     what fails is, in fact, the object or objet a, which the desiring
     subject keeps searching for and ascribing to the Other. "The
     essence of the object is failure" (E 58). One crucial historical
     instance of this failure of the object or of the object as
     failure that Lacan analyzes in Encore is courtly love, which
     sublimates the absence of sexual relation into poetic rhetoric.
     In courtly love, which seems to have had a lasting influence on
     European conceptions of love, love becomes the symptom of the
     absence of sexual relation, a compensation for the lack in the
     double form of idealized femininity and one's "courtly" relation
     to it. Lacan's remark that the failure of sexual relation
     represents something positive implies, however, that grasping
     this failure as lack or negativity is already a misinterpretation
     of the "being" of sexual relation, of the very manner in which
     sexes relate. It is indeed possible to regard Encore as a series
     of attempts to signal the positivity of the failure of sexual
     relation, to open the door to reimagining this failure outside
     the logic of supplementarity and its tendency toward
     substantialization of being. I would argue that Seminar XX,
     though at points hesitant and unclear, can be read in terms of an
     effort to think difference and relation beyond the various forms
     of negativity, logical or dialectical, in order to discern the
     positivity marked in the failure of sexual relation.

  9. As supplements to the failure in the "object" of love, the
     diverse forms of love which Lacan mentions in the course of
     Seminar XX produce a certain debasement of being, enclosing the
     subject within narcissistic desire or evacuating the temporality
     of being into phantasmatic objects or metaphysical ideals. An
     attempt to counter this "depreciation" of being, Lacan's comments
     about a certain positivity manifested in the failure of sexual
     relationship which does not require supplements allow us to read
     this failure as opening a path, a different trail, as it were, to
     the other. These remarks indicate the need for reformulating the
     discourse of love into a new mode of relationality, disengaged
     from knowledge and desire. More importantly, they can be read as
     signaling the critical importance of rethinking relationality
     apart from the logic of negativity which underpins the
     metaphysical articulations of being and the cultural logic of
     sexuation. The ending of Encore expressly dissociates love from
     the order of knowledge (E 146). Since love may occur only as that
     something positive marked negatively as the failure of sexual
     relation, it does not require the support of objet a and,
     although related, perhaps often inextricably, to desire, does not
     belong to the same order or operate the same relation. Such "new"
     love points to a different layer of subjectivity, marked within
     but at the same time pointing beyond the subject of knowledge and
     the subject of desire. Lacan does not expand on the possibility
     of this "may be" of love in Encore, hinting only that it has to
     do with the body and with a jouissance whose economy "should not
     be/could not fail to be phallic" or that of the not-whole which
     Lacan associates with the possibility of feminine jouissance.

 10. This jouissance emerging from Lacan's remarks dispersed
     throughout Encore marks a certain mode of bodily being, which
     Lacan associates with the para-being of signifierness
     (signifiance) and opposes to the substantialized being and its
     diverse avatars: truth, knowledge, supreme being, soul, etc. (E
     71). If the soul unifies the body, jouissance "writes" it, i.e.
     unfolds the bodily being as a certain drift and a text or texture
     of experience, irreducible to our knowledge of it (E 110-112).
     The jouissance occurs in the mode of "failing to be," that is, it
     fails to be substantialized, it eschews the substantive and
     signified forms of being, marking itself as the positivity of
     this failure. Since it fails to ever be (as substantive), this
     jouissance cannot be known: it represents an affect or passion of
     para-being, a passion that has neither the positivity of presence
     nor the negativity of absence. This is why Lacan refers to it as
     a "passion for ignorance" (E 121), opposed to the passion for
     knowledge and working beyond the dialectic of love and hate. If
     knowledge works within or at least toward the temporality of
     presence and desire operates the temporality of absence and lack,
     the passion for ignorance would have to be thought in terms of a
     different temporality, one that cannot be explained by the logic
     of progress, negation, or accumulation. It is neither the
     positivity of the one nor the negativity of the not-whole, with
     its "failing," accumulative logic of one plus one plus one. As
     this mode of being, the jouissance that Lacan is after is also
     differentiated from objet a and the symbolic, which produce
     semblance of being and block the path to the other (E 93-94).
     Such a jouissance is never properly of language (langue) or
     appropriate to it but, rather, operates as its inter-dit: as
     lalangue (E 121). Inter-said only in its interdiction, this
     jouissance of being finds itself prior to signification, prior to
     the effects of the signifier and its "stupid" logic of
     collectivization. This jouissance undermines the hold that truth
     and thought have on being, a hold that debases being into the
     "stupidity" of the One and the illusory permanence of
     substantives. As Lacan suggests, this jouissance allows us "to
     relegate the truth to the lowly status it deserves" (E 108). In a
     Heideggerian gesture, Lacan opposes to the truth the pathway, the
     changing and temporalizing path of wisdom offered by Taoism.
     Finally, since this jouissance is inappropriate for language or
     truth, it is linked to the fact that sexual relationship fails,
     that is, fails to be ever constituted. The positivity of the
     failure of sexual relation has to do with pathways of this bodily
     jouissance, with the temporality of its being, which prohibits
     sexual relationship, that is, lets it happen only as inter-dit,
     as inter-said. Inter-dit marks the different temporality of
     jouissance, which refracts the logic of presence and absence, and
     therefore fails to articulate itself in terms of the operations
     of negation. It is in relation to this different
     temporality--neither of knowledge nor of desire--that we need to
     rethink the failure of sexual relation.

 11. Irigaray's Speculum and This Sex Which Is Not One reformulate
     feminine morphology and the jouissance Lacan discusses in Encore
     away from the economy of the not-whole and into a new
     relationality of proximity, based on a critical appropriation,
     through the prism of sexual difference, of Heidegger's idea of
     nearness (Nähe) and Levinas's proximity, together with their
     explicit ethical connotations. In an important way, Irigaray's
     notions of proximity and wonder, critical to her project in An
     Ethics of Sexual Difference (hereafter abbreviated ESD) form a
     response to the Levinasian rethinking of ethical relation as a
     radical proximity in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than
     Being or Beyond Essence, a response that resignifies proximity
     specifically in terms of sexual difference.[3] The notion of
     proximity developed by Irigaray, delineating an interval which
     cannot be crossed or thematized, is also evocative in its
     spatio-temporal drift of Lacan's inter-dit: the writing
     in-between words or lines, both prohibited by language and
     representation and yet marked and thus in some way arriving in
     the very interdiction that forecloses its expression. Proximity
     inter-says itself between presence and absence, between knowledge
     and desire, mapping a relationality that is too close for
     producing either identification (sameness) or separation
     (negation). As Irigaray refers to it, proximity is "neither one
     nor two," it has to do neither with the One nor with negation.
     The modality of relation which Irigaray calls proximity provides
     an alternative to the subject-object relation and its basis in
     the logic of negation with the corollary opposition between
     presence and absence. It is a relation that fails to "be," i.e.
     fails to identify the one with the other, that, in other words,
     does not submit to the labor of the negative. Without either
     becoming present or being simply absent, proximity does not fail
     to mark difference, albeit otherwise, in its non-substantive,
     spatio-temporal drift.

 12. Lacan's inter-dit recalls Heidegger's distinction between logos
     and glossa from Introduction to Metaphysics, where logos refers
     to what gets said between words, as it were, and, at the same
     time, becomes veiled by the play of signs.[4] This distinction
     reappears in Heidegger's 1951 essay "Logos," which Lacan
     translated into French: "Thus, the essential speaking of
     language, Legein as laying, is determined neither by vocalization
     fwnh nor by signifying shmainein. Expression and signification
     have long been accepted as manifestations which indubitably
     betray some characteristics of language. But they do not
     genuinely reach into the real of the originary, essential
     determination of language, nor are they at all capable of
     determining this realm in its primary characteristics" (Early
     64). There is something of language beyond signification and
     articulation, beyond the play of the signifier and the
     solidifying force of the signified. Heidegger claims that
     signification does not determine the originary realm of language,
     i.e. that spatio-temporal event which in each moment has always
     already laid out the relationality within which signification
     becomes possible. This laying out of a relationality is the
     meaning of logos as a language "beyond" language: logos is the
     saying that inter-says itself in the play of significations, both
     marked and foreclosed by the logic of the signifier. This
     rethought Heideggerian logos is then non-logocentric and refers
     to a relationality that, within the spatio-temporal unfolding of
     being, fails to be either present or absent, and yet marks a
     certain positivity, a non-metaphysical pulsation of being which
     cannot be reduced to negation or lack. Still, logos cannot fail
     but to conceal itself within the negative logic of being, within
     the opposition between presence and absence. Making a distinction
     between words and signs, Heidegger remarks that logos is the word
     marked as erased between signs, the word that sinks down into and
     becomes concealed in language (Einführung 131). Logos then marks
     the rhythm in which being lays itself out, its historico-temporal
     unhoming, that is, its intrinsic openness onto the unheimlich.
     Reinterpreting truth as aletheia or unconcealment, Heidegger
     remarks in "On the Essence of Truth" that unconcealment happens
     in the midst of concealment, within the non-essence (Un-Wesen )
     or pre-essential essence (vor-wesende Wesen ) of truth, which is
     constituted as a Geheimnis, a mystery (Pathmarks 148; "Vom Wesen"
     191). The mystery at stake in Dasein is not "mystical," but
     rather concerns the unhoming intrinsic to Dasein, its modality of
     being itself as unheimlich. Playing with Heidegger's later
     remarks on the function of Ge- in Ge-stell, or the "enframing"
     characteristic of modern technology (note to "The Question
     Concerning Technology") we could say that this mystery
     (Geheimnis) or concealment relates the various ways in which
     otherness and being-outside-itself constitute Dasein into the
     disclosedness of beings.

 13. As inter-dit, Lacan's jouissance from Encore can be interpreted
     in terms of the concealing temporality of the logos and its
     Unheimlichkeit. What interdicts jouissance is its modality of
     para-being, its concealment from both presence and absence, its
     neither negative nor positive logic. If this jouissance always
     fails it is because its positivity has the mode of logos:
     inscribed into the logic of fulfillment and lack, such jouissance
     has always already failed. Not because it fails to fulfill the
     expectation and thus marks a lack but because jouissance's logos
     is not of the logic of fulfillment, which presupposes presence
     and immediately brings with it its negation: lack. Lacan suggests
     that this inter-dit grants us access to a certain kind of the
     real which needs to be exposed (E 119), unconcealed in its logos
     of concealment. At stake in the inter-dit is, therefore, a
     different logos of relationality, a mode of relatedness that
     inhabits the real beyond the signification of this logos as
     having to do with the one, as "sayable" in terms of the
     metaphysical logic of being and its labor of the negative. The
     difficulty of exposing this real lies in its refraction of
     presence, a refraction which, however, cannot be mistaken for the
     force of negation and subsequently constituted into lack. Such
     real is not the inaccessible Kantian Ding, separated from
     language and perception, but is rather the inter-said whose
     "failed positivity" inlays and de-structures language. While
     little of this real remains accessible in terms of signification,
     it is hardly absent from language, continuously inlaying
     expression.

 14. For Irigaray, this real and its different mode of relationality
     takes place as the event of wonder, constituted as the fluid
     proximity between the one and the other: "A third dimension. An
     intermediary. Neither the one nor the other" (Ethics 82). This
     event where there is neither one nor two, where, in other words,
     the logic of identity and difference underpinning the subject's
     relation to the other does not operate, frames Irigaray's attempt
     to articulate new, so far unimagined forms of sexual relations--a
     new relationality of love. In order to articulate this new
     relationality more clearly, I will examine Irigaray's work in
     terms of the effects that the ontico-ontological difference and
     the ecstatic temporality it encodes produce on both the subject
     of knowledge and the subject of desire. Her writings discern a
     certain parallel between the operations of knowledge and desire
     with respect to temporality and the ontico-ontological
     difference: both desire and knowledge end up collapsing the
     ontico-ontological difference and, thus, conceal the finitude of
     being. While the subject of knowledge effaces the temporality of
     being by constituting consciousness into the presence of
     representations, desire, as a relation structured through lack,
     clothes the paradoxically constitutive absence into the desired
     presence of objet a. Both knowledge and desire are structured in
     terms of the opposition between presence and absence: knowledge
     as the sublation of difference into presence, desire as lack or
     the lost presence of primary jouissance. For Irigaray, desire
     remains coupled with the fantasy of origin, of the original or
     primary satisfaction, and can only with difficulty be
     disconnected from the gesture of encircling or taking hold of. It
     seems that for Irigaray both the subject of consciousness and the
     subject of desire are still metaphysical, although in different
     ways. The first one sublates absence into the presence of
     knowledge and the self-presence of consciousness; the other, in
     Lacan's re-reading of Hegel, foregrounds the structuring force of
     absence, the effect of the signifier, the lack desiring its own
     perpetuation.

 15. These appropriative tendencies in knowledge and desire lead
     Irigaray to reconceptualize love in a way that calls into
     question both the subject of knowledge and the subject of desire.
     In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, this critical reformulation is
     developed through a reading of Descartes' philosophy of passions,
     in which Irigaray points out that for Descartes desire remains
     secondary to wonder (ESD 77) and she comments on the conspicuous
     absence of wonder in Freud's theory of passions: "[Descartes]
     does not differentiate the drives according to the sexes.
     Instead, he situates wonder as the first of the passions. Is this
     the passion that Freud forgot?" (ESD 80). Although Irigaray does
     not develop her comments on the relation between wonder and
     desire, the direction of her argument is clear: she considers
     wonder to be the first passion, prior to desire and knowledge,
     though not in a developmental or linear sense. Wonder can be,
     then, seen as parallel to that third jouissance, to the passion
     for ignorance, which Lacan opposes to love and hate toward the
     end of Encore. Freud forgets this passion because it is covered
     over not only by knowledge but also by the logic of desire.
     Preceding desire, wonder functions as the very intermediary of
     relations, their third term (ESD 82). Irigaray thinks of wonder
     as the passion in which there is no separation between body and
     mind, between thought and affect, between thought and action: "A
     passion that maintains a path between physics and metaphysics,
     corporeal impressions and movements toward an object, whether
     empirical or transcendental" (ESD 80). It becomes clear, then,
     that rereading Descartes,[5] Irigaray is also reinterpreting the
     Lacanian subject of desire in relation to the bodily jouissance
     of being reformulated as admiration or wonder. What this
     rereading points to is another layer, or better, a different mode
     of being, beyond both the subject of knowledge and the subject of
     desire: it is the temporality of wonder in terms of which
     Irigaray redefines love.

 16. To flesh out this opening of the subject of desire onto a new
     relationality of love beyond narcissism and the idea of the One,
     Irigaray reinterprets Diotima's speech from Symposium, not only
     setting Diotima's remarks explicitly against the idea of unity
     but also using them to distinguish between the workings of love
     and desire. She situates desire in the context of will,
     intention, and teleology, contrasting it with wonder, which
     describes a non-appropriative and transformative relation to the
     other. Tracing this distinction between love and desire, Irigaray
     remarks that love (eros)--the pathos that guides wonder--has the
     force of an intermediary but becomes stymied and declines when
     desires, aims, and objectification set in: "It seems that during
     the course of her speech, she diminishes somewhat this daimonic,
     mediumistic function of love, such that it is no longer really a
     daimon, but an intention, a reduction to the intention, to the
     teleology of human will, already subjected to a kind of thought
     with fixed objectives, not an immanent efflorescence of the
     divine of and in the flesh. Love was meant to be an irreducible
     mediator, at once physical and spiritual, between the lovers, and
     not already codified duty, will, desire" (ESD 30, my emphasis).
     As the passion of wonder, love remains prior to desire, because
     desire operates on the level of intention and, turning what is
     desired into an object or a goal, "debases" its being.
     Elaborating on this critical change in being, Irigaray remarks
     that, instead of loving one's lover, one begins to desire one's
     beloved: "In the universe of determinations, there will be goals,
     competitions, and loving duties, the beloved or love being the
     goal.... Love becomes a kind of raison d' état " (ESD 30). When
     love becomes distanced from becoming, the temporality of wonder,
     its jouissance, becomes collapsed into goals and reasons: family,
     procreation, the state, politics, production and so on.

 17. Perhaps the most important aspect of wonder is that, unlike
     desire, it is not constituted through lack. Wonder operates as a
     transformative interval, in which the other's difference is
     encountered in a "positive" way, i.e. it produces a change not
     simply in the manner of the subject's being but in the very mode
     of the relation itself. As Irigaray puts it, wonder is "the
     opening of a new space-time" and "a mobilization of new energies"
     (ESD 75). This distinction between desire and wonder is critical
     for Irigaray, specifically with respect to how the other's
     difference becomes manifested and affects the valency of
     relation. Lack points to alienation; it is read negatively, as a
     repeatedly missed satisfaction. It could be argued that the logic
     of lack presupposes the idea of presence: even though lack is the
     effect of the signifier and the signifier never produces full
     presence, the very notion of lack becomes accessible via its
     presupposed opposition to presence. As Lacan points out, access
     to language is opened through the mastering of the absence of the
     lost object. But the paradigm of absence/presence already marks a
     certain forgetting of the temporality of being: the oedipal logic
     operates as a covering of the originary event-temporality, as a
     veiling of the para-being (par-être), which Lacan explores in
     Encore.[6] If desire owes its dynamic to a lost origin, i.e., to
     primary satisfaction, then it is put into motion by a
     (mis)reading of being in terms of possession and lack--a logic
     that substantializes and objectifies the non-substantive
     spatio-temporality of being in an attempt to appropriate it. This
     is why in her remarks on Descartes Irigaray emphasizes the force
     of motion intrinsic to wonder: this force marks the
     non-substantive and non-essential modality of being, indicating
     that being is not about having or losing, since in wonder there
     is nothing, literally no-thing or object that could be possessed.
     Wonder is a modality of relatedness that does not transpire in
     terms of the subject-object relation, it is a disposition in
     which there are no positions that are proper to subjectivity or
     its objects. While desire is haunted by the specter of
     satisfaction, wonder is about jouissance without satisfaction,
     without objects, real or imaginary.

 18. What changes in the turn from wonder to desire is the mode of
     relating: from non-appropriation and proximity to relation
     instituted in terms of goals, appropriation, hierarchy,
     subordination, and command. From the perspective of wonder one
     could say that desire is a repetition of the missed satisfaction
     not because such satisfaction cannot be recovered, i.e., because
     it belongs to a lost past, but rather because being in its
     temporality is not about satisfaction or having. Lacan's critique
     in Encore of the logic of presence and absence in terms of
     para-being indicates that desire keeps misreading its own
     dynamic, it keeps missing the way being works only as para-being.
     As a result, desire keeps knotting being into the cause of
     desire, a cause that remains without substance, a void. In other
     words, desire still reads being metaphysically, in terms of lack
     and absence. Desire feeds on this lack and replenishes it in
     order to reproduce its own circular or knotting logic. From
     Heidegger's perspective, this logic is nihilistic: "In the
     forgetfulness of being to drive [betrieben] only at beings--this
     is nihilism" (Einführung 155).[7] When the force, the pulsation
     of being becomes forgotten and what is repeatedly belabored,
     driven at, are objects or beings, nihilism takes over existence.
     Nihilism is not annihilation of beings or lack of values, but is,
     on the contrary, the forgetting of being in the fixation on
     objects, whether real, imaginary, or symbolic. These objects
     include values, ideas, knowledge, the One of love and the One of
     knowledge. It is only in relation to such objects that being can
     be seen as lacking. The fact that being is not and lacks in being
     an object or a substance to be possessed, brings desire into
     being--desire that wants to forget being and imagine objects in
     place of the non-appropriable event. At the same time, the fact
     that being is not, that it is no-thing, no thing or object,
     undoes any and all such attempts: no being or entity, because it
     occurs, because it is in being, can ever be an object and live up
     to desire. Nihilism produces its own frustration and feeds on its
     repetition. To undermine the hold of this nihilism, it is
     necessary to call into question the debasement of being's
     historico-temporal event into objects--it is, in other words, to
     question the logic of desire.

 19. In her reformulation of wonder, Irigaray thinks para-being
     precisely as a counter to the appropriative, nihilistic logic of
     desire, and to the lack that it marks in being. To explain this,
     I would need to flesh out in more detail the similarities and
     differences in Lacan's and Heidegger's approaches to language.
     Let me just suggest here that such a comparison would disclose
     the possibility of rethinking the logic of the Lacanian signifier
     from the effect of lack to what, in Heideggerian parlance, might
     be called an event temporality, which operates beyond the idea of
     lack and satisfaction. Lacan himself gestures in this direction
     with his comments on para-being, on the par-être that does not
     appear. This understanding of temporality underpins Irigaray's
     notion of wonder, to which she explicitly refers as an event: an
     event and advent of the other. To explain the implications of
     Irigaray's idea of wonder, I will focus on two of its aspects:
     temporality and the sense of otherness disclosed in it, and I
     will do so by commenting on those two facets in Heidegger's
     discussion of Dasein in Being and Time. I suggested earlier that
     Irigaray reads Lacan as diagnosing the "missing" link, the
     subject of lack, located between Dasein and the subject of
     knowledge. This reading allows Irigaray not only to rethink Lacan
     encore, as it were, through Heidegger but also to reconsider
     Dasein in relation to desire and sexual difference.

 20. The term Dasein refers to the specifically human mode of being in
     its finite temporality. It does not designate the subject but,
     rather, describes the pre-subjective and embodied mode of being,
     which comes to understand itself in terms of an open context of
     relations which make up Dasein's spatio-temporal
     being-in-the-world. Those relations include Being-with, or
     Dasein's comportments toward other human beings. In the
     frequently misunderstood remarks about authenticity from Being
     and Time, Heidegger maintains that Dasein is "authentic"
     (eigentlich) only in the mode of Unheimlichkeit, that is,
     uncanniness or, better, "unhomeness." Dasein occurs authentically
     only at the moments when the temporalizing force of its finitude
     undermines the impersonal familiarity of its daily
     identifications. Heidegger calls these identifications the
     "they-self," the self that comprises the realm of language,
     symbolic and imaginary identities: "It is Dasein in its
     uncanniness [unhomeness]: originary thrown being-in-the-world as
     'not-at-home,' the naked 'that' in the nothingness of the world"
     (Being 255, slightly modified).[8] The term Un-zuhause
     (not-at-home) makes clear that Heidegger's notion of
     Unheimlichkeit places the emphasis on being "un-homed,"
     understood as the mode of being in which Dasein occurs as
     "authentic." To put it differently, Dasein is "authentic" in an
     originary exposition to alterity, which means that it is its-self
     as unhomed toward what is other, as divested of stable or
     substantive identities offered in its culture. When Dasein
     experiences itself as "at home" in its everyday being, it has
     forgotten the otherness, the "un-homing" at work in its own
     temporal mode of being, and has covered over its originary
     openness to what is other. The originary opening to the other
     constitutes a temporal event, in which the modality of being is
     not presupposed or imposed but, instead, brought about and
     co-constituted in relation to the other. To put it differently,
     the shape or the form which being-in-the-world takes depends on
     the modality of relating to the other, on whether one does not
     forget that the familiarity of everyday being--with its "routine"
     forms of experience, understanding, and representation--takes
     place each moment within an originary "unhomeness."

 21. Dasein understands itself without ever being able to articulate
     this understanding into a knowledge, because this understanding
     is "practical": it happens as the activity of being-in-the-world
     in which Dasein comports itself toward things and others. What is
     so unhoming in this understanding, i.e. in the human mode of
     being, is finitude, and the de-substantializing effects of its
     temporality, which disclose to Dasein the fact that things are
     not substantive, that they are never objects, that, in
     psychoanalytic terms, they cannot be satisfactory in the way our
     desire wants them to be. Heidegger's rethinking of Freud's
     uncanny certainly indicates that the finite temporality of Dasein
     calls into question the logic of desire, that it forces a
     rethinking of the dynamic of relation to what is other. That
     dynamic would have to be rethought from what Heidegger calls the
     ecstatic temporality particular to Dasein. Heidegger writes that
     Dasein's time unfolds as an always momentary complex of the three
     ecstasies of time: the has been (Gewesenheit or the "past"), the
     making present, and the coming-toward (Zu-kunft) or the future.
     For our purposes, what matters in Heidegger's detailed
     explanation of the rise of the common concept of time out of the
     ecstatic temporality of Dasein[9] is that ecstatic temporality
     provides a critique of the concepts of time and history grounded
     in the metaphysical opposition between presence and absence. As
     the name indicates, ecstatic temporality is the originary mode of
     being outside itself, that is, of being open to otherness:
     "Temporality is the originary 'outside-of-itself' [Ausser-sich]
     in and for itself" (BT 377/329 modified). Temporality means being
     always extended outside itself, beyond what becomes present.
     Dasein occurs as concerned with the "outside-of-itself," and this
     concern or care, as Heidegger refers to it, takes the form,
     especially in his later writings, of letting-be. In other words,
     the possibility of letting what is other be as what it is in its
     difference is linked with the temporal occurrence of Dasein as an
     originary "outside-of-itself." What makes Dasein Dasein, that is,
     what constitutes the human mode of being, is this originary
     extending or openness toward otherness.

 22. Dasein "understands" itself existentially in terms of its
     project, i.e. as a projection onto its possibilities for being,
     it sees itself futurally in relation to its power to be. Within
     this projection, the past is not a matter of re-membering or
     reconstructing past situations with historical exactness, but of
     retrieving it "existentially," that is, as a kind of
     (self)interpretive acting which always already extends the
     present's paths into the future. Therefore, history is primarily
     futural: its temporalizing matrix works as a disjoining
     structure, in which historical being orients itself in terms of a
     sheaf of possibilities. As Heidegger remarks, temporality
     discloses "the silent force of the possible" (die stille Kraft
     des Möglichen) (Sein 394) as intrinsic to the dynamic of being.
     This silent force of the possible indicates that transformation
     is intrinsic to the very dynamic of occurring: it is tied to the
     shape which the relation to the other takes.

 23. This transformative vector of temporality is of critical
     importance to understanding Irigaray's remarks about wonder. In
     Heidegger, Dasein names a mode of being, which does not have a
     place but occurs as an interval, as a temporal project, if you
     will, within which the relation between the subject and the other
     unfolds. In "On the Essence of Truth," Heidegger explains that
     Dasein does not belong to human beings but constitutes a
     relationality of freedom into which humans can be "released":
     "The human being does not possess freedom as property. At best,
     the converse holds: freedom, ek-sistent, disclosive Dasein,
     possesses the human being...." (Pathmarks 145). Dasein stands for
     a relatedness to being in which the human being can participate,
     a relatedness which is always tuned in a particular way, as the
     play of concealment and unconcealment. It is the manner in which
     beings become unconcealed that brings Dasein into an attuning (a
     Gestimmtheit or a Stimmung) in which it can be free. Stimmung,
     pitch or mood, cannot be understood here in terms of psychology
     or lived experience. Instead, it refers to what is best
     understood as a disposition, a disposing of relations between
     being, beings, and human beings. The site, the there or the Da of
     such a disposition is called Da-sein, there-being. Entering into
     this modality of being, humans find themselves within a certain
     relatedness where their relation to being and beings becomes
     disposed into either a disclosive freedom, a non-appropriative
     mode of relationality, or into a grasping, appropriative relation
     that obscures the disposition of Dasein. In Heidegger, the
     non-appropriative and appropriative exist in a tension, which
     marks the occurrence of the event or Ereignis. The notion of
     Dasein as a temporal project marked by the transformative force
     of the possible allows Heidegger to disentangle a mode of being
     which remains free from the Hegelian dialectic of recognition and
     its intricate mesh of desire and knowledge. Heidegger shows that,
     as such a temporal project, Dasein is in each moment "mine";
     however, it is "mine" not by way of possession or identity, but
     is "mine" in its very force to be, in its transformative, futural
     vectors.

 24. I see Lacan's remarks from Encore on para-being and jouissance as
     the context that allows Irigaray to introduce into this
     Heideggerian way of thinking a critical reformulation of Dasein
     into what Irigaray's recent writings call being-two.[10] If
     Dasein is the in-between, the fold from which the relation
     between subject and the Other emerges, the change Irigaray
     suggests is that this in-between is itself vectored as being-two.
     Being-two refers not to the subject's relation to the other but
     to a mode of encounter, in which there is no "one" as the subject
     and no "other" as the object of desire: "one" and "other" only
     occur in the mode of being two, which does not signify the split
     or the lack that (un)grounds the subject but the originary
     openness to otherness as the possibility of the future and
     transformation. According to Irigaray, prior to the uneasy
     embrace of the subject of desire and the subject of knowledge,
     there is a mode of being-two, a mode of
     being-in-sexual-difference. In this openness constitutive of
     being two, otherness has the positive valency of the possibility
     of transformation: it is not a sign of lack or threat but of the
     possibility of freedom and change as the vectors of the encounter
     with the other. Being-two thus redefines otherness beyond the
     subject-object opposition on the level of knowledge, and beyond
     the subject-Other relation on the level of desire. If Dasein is a
     temporal project of possibilities-to-be, within being-two, this
     project is already inflected, asymmetrical; it is transformative
     by virtue of the other's singularity. It is in this specific
     sense that I refer to Irigaray's wonder as originary: Heidegger's
     term ursprünglich, mistakenly interpreted as primordial, does not
     refer to a past which Dasein would somehow try to repeat or get
     back to but to the originary force with which each moment opens
     itself into the futural possibilities for being. To say that
     wonder is originary does not mean that it refers to an origin, to
     a primal moment or scene, but that it happens with the
     transformative force of a future-opened temporal project. If
     desire operates in relation to a primary satisfaction, to an idea
     of an original jouissance, wonder sketches a different dynamic of
     relation, one turned toward the future as the new.

 25. Being-two is Irigaray's way of marking being with sexual
     difference and also her attempt to rethink love in terms of
     wonder. As she remarks in Être Deux, "The dualism of subject and
     object is no longer overcome in the fusion or ecstasy of the One
     but in the incarnation of the two, a two irreducible to the
     One...." (108).[11] Being-two becomes the figure for a mode of
     being that bespeaks neither the unity of the one nor the
     difference between the two (or more, i.e. multiplicity), but
     refers to an incarnated and concrete mode of being that eschews
     both monism and dualism. In social and political terms, being-two
     sketches an economy of relations alternative to the dominant
     paradigm of sociality conceived as the integration of individuals
     into a social totality. For Irigaray universality is not produced
     by sublating particularity into generality but marks itself
     within the singularity of the event of being-two. Being-two
     functions an "existential," i.e. incarnate and concrete,
     universal from which existence unfolds: "[w]ithout doubt, the
     most appropriate content for the universal is sexual difference.
     Indeed, this content is both real and universal" (I Love 47).
     This revised universality eludes the idea of totality or
     homogeneity and inscribes, instead, an unquantifiable proximity
     between the two (sexes) from which social and political relations
     develop. Such a "universal" remains intrinsically futural: it is
     not produced as unified totality but remains to be enacted,
     carried out and decided, futurally, as the transformative and
     differential event of being-two.

 26. Irigaray's remarks about being-two allude to Lacan's critique of
     love in Encore, and try to spell out a new relationality of love
     as the asymmetrical event of being-two beyond narcissism and the
     idea of the One. The unhoming (unheimlich) and transformative
     temporality of this event make it possible to rethink sexual
     relation in the following way: the failure of sexual relation
     becomes the mark of its event dynamic, it reflects the fact that
     sexual relation cannot be written, signified, or substantialized,
     because it is real. Sexual relation becomes "real" not in any
     substantive or atemporal, unreachable sense, but precisely by
     virtue of the silent force of the possible that it literally
     keeps incarnating in the event of being-two. Rethinking
     Irigaray's being-two in the context of Heidegger's analytic of
     Dasein lets us flesh out the real in terms of its futural
     temporality and its forces of the possible. Irigaray would say
     that it is precisely love as sexual relation that enacts, as it
     were, and keeps incarnating the real as the transformative force
     of being. In being-two, the unhoming/transformative force of
     being becomes real. Reformulating de Beauvoir's "one becomes a
     woman," Irigaray would say that love and sexual difference become
     real with each pulsation of being, and they become real to the
     extent that the unhoming force of the encounter is not produced
     as lack but as the force of the possible.

 27. Conceiving being-two in futural terms as a transformative
     relationality can be seen as a response to the problem of the
     debasement of being, which Lacan's Encore associates with the
     logic of presence and absence, with the opposition between being
     and non-being. What such a "debasement" forecloses is precisely
     the futural vector of the "silent force of the possible," to
     recall Heidegger's remark from Being and Time. Irigaray rewrites
     this force of the possible into a relationality of love, into a
     space of freedom and transformation marked in the proximity of
     being-two. Irigaray's wonder disengages desire from the logic of
     lack and reformulates it in terms of the futural vector of the
     possible: "Desire would be the vectorialization of space and
     time, the first movement toward, not yet qualified.... In a way,
     wonder and desire remain the spaces of freedom between the
     subject and the world. The substrate of predication? Of
     discourse?" (ESD 76). Desire thought in the register of wonder
     has no cause, only a momentum which vectorializes relations
     without qualifying or substantializing them; it is desire that
     does not operate on lack and repetition but in terms of excess
     and the new.

 28. Lacan's Encore reappraises the question of ethical love in terms
     of jouissance, the body, and para-being as the alternative to the
     phantasmatic logic of desire and the power of the One. How thin a
     line separates the possible ethical jouissance of para-being in
     our relation to the other from the domains of desire and
     knowledge is staged by the ending of Encore. Staged, not
     articulated, because Lacan clearly disengages the possibility of
     the different understanding of love Encore is after from
     knowledge, from the kind of love that knows the other as the One:
     "to know what your partner will do is not a proof of love" (E
     146). This sentence closes the last page of Seminar XX, the page
     on which Lacan plays with the idea of encore as both enacting and
     subverting the logic of desire: "Shall I say, "See you next
     year"? You'll notice that I've never ever said that to you. For a
     very simple reason--which is that I've never known, for the last
     twenty years, if I would continue next year. That is part and
     parcel of my destiny as object a" (E 146). The not-knowing in
     this remark is part and parcel of the logic of objet a, tempting
     with the possibility of its own impossible materialization. Lacan
     positions his discourse as objet a, enticing with the supposed
     final knowledge, desiring it yet again, encore, and making it
     still (encore) to come. This doubling encore can be read as the
     lack constitutive of the nihilistic desire to know or as a
     freeing encore, liberating the event (of the end of the seminar)
     from the logic of presence and absence into the event's possible
     force of the future to be. One could say that the not-knowing
     Lacan mentions masks the understanding of how the futurity of
     being makes desire unsatisfiable; and yet desire cannot help but
     keep collapsing being's event into an object. What emerges from
     Lacan's performance is a distinction between two senses of
     possibility. In the first sense, possibility is grasped in terms
     of the knowledge of what it might be; possibility is either
     conceived in its deferred presence or enacted in its repeated
     lack, the two sides of the repetition of absence in desire. In
     the first sense, possibility is either grasped in terms of the
     knowledge of what it might be, and thus conceived in its deferred
     presence, or enacted in its repeated lack, the two sides of the
     repetition of absence in desire.

 29. Irigaray's An Ethics of Sexual Difference, seen as a response to
     Encore, explores the collapse of these two possibilities in terms
     of the turn from wonder to the logic of lack, lack which desire
     keeps repeating and knowledge tries to supplement. Both Lacan and
     Irigaray indicate the difficulty of keeping this difference in
     play, and both underscore its importance for the possibility of
     love and ethical relation to the other. To articulate this
     originary relation of wonder apart from lack and negativity, I
     have brought together Heidegger's critical approach to being,
     more specifically, his reading of being in terms of a futural
     temporality opened by the critique of the subject in Being and
     Time, and Irigaray's appropriation of it in her reformulation of
     sexual difference. The futural relationality in terms of which
     Dasein understands itself as being-in-the-world breaks free of
     the dialectical labor of the negative, at the same time that it
     does not entail positing the real as unchangeable or
     inaccessible. Such a futural-transformative modality of
     relatedness allows Irigaray to articulate the being-two of love
     as a relation in which difference marks itself neither in terms
     of negation nor separation but as the transformative interval, as
     the proximity that keeps reformulating the very parameters of
     relation and obligation to the other. My tiered reading of Lacan,
     Irigaray, and Heidegger suggests a new direction for Lacanian
     interpretation, one that takes neither the Kantian nor the
     Hegelian route but revises the question of (sexual) relation and
     love in terms of the Heideggerian rethinking of being through
     temporality. This perspective reinforces Irigaray's critique of
     Hegel's understanding of love and helps further radicalize her
     reworking of the labor of the negative in terms of the
     transformative relatedness of wonder beyond negation. It makes
     possible fleshing out the problem of love in radically temporal
     and embodied terms, as the ethical relationality of wonder
     distinct from the temporal logic of negation and lack. Such an
     ethics of wonder becomes distinguished in the "positivity" of its
     transformative event from the labor of negation which underlies
     the repetitive replaying of the possible as the deferred or
     missed possibility of actualization. Reading Lacan's Seminar XX
     in relation to Irigaray and Heidegger illustrates how love and
     ethics, always encore, ride on this distinction in the vectors of
     possibility between lack and wonder.

                                                 Department of English
                                              University of Notre Dame
                                            Krzysztof.Ziarek.2@nd.edu

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                                   Notes

     1. I quote this remark in the slightly modified version given by
     William Richardson in "Psychoanalysis and the Being-Question,"
     139.

     2. This argument underpins Irigaray's I Love to You: Sketch for a
     Felicity within History; see, for instance, 56-57.

     3. Irigaray's first response to Levinas comes in "The Fecundity
     of the Caress" (ESD 82). In her later "Questions to Emmanuel
     Levinas," she underscores the ethical tenor of Heidegger's work
     to suggest the possibility of opening ethics beyond the relation
     to other human beings. The link between Levinas's and Lacan's
     approaches to ethics, at least suggested in Irigaray's work, is
     the focus of a recent collection of essays Levinas and Lacan: The
     Missed Encounter, ed. Sarah Harasym.

     4. "So finden wir denn bei Parmenides die scharfe Entgegensetzung
     von logos und glwssa (Frg. VII, v. 3 ff.)" (Einführung 132).

     5. For Descartes wonder brings with it the possibility of being
     overwhelmed and crushed by what is other: it marks the anxiety
     afflicting the subject of certainty who finds itself in the face
     of what exceeds the grasp of its knowledge. (I would like to
     thank Dalia Judovitz for drawing my attention to this aspect of
     Descartes' theory of passions.) Irigaray clearly reformulates
     Descartes' wonder and this revision would have to be explained in
     the context of her trilogy about the elements, in which one of
     the organizing factors is the engagement with the pre-Socratic
     notion of wonder and with Heidegger's rethinking of it. For
     Heidegger, wonder pertains to both the affective and the
     intellectual registers. In What Is Philosophy?, Heidegger regards
     thinking, passion, and action as the axes of philosophia, whose
     meaning Heidegger redefines, in the context of Pre-Socratics, as
     the striving after that which astonishes. "The rescue of the most
     astonishing thing--beings in Being [Seiendes im Sein] was
     accomplished by a few who started off in the direction of this
     most astonishing thing, that is, the sophon" (51). Philosophy is
     not motivated by the desire to know but names as a certain
     relatedness or disposition (Heidegger's term is Stimmung) in
     which what is astonishes--it is a question of maintaining thought
     in wonder of what is.

     6. "What we must get used to is substituting the 'para-being'
     (par-être)--the being 'para,' being beside--for the being that
     would take flight [fuir]," 44; see also 45.

     7. "In der Vergessenheit des Seins nur das Seiende betreiben--das
     ist Nihilismus."

     8. The original reads: "Er ist das Dasein in seiner
     Unheimlichkeit, das ursprüngliche geworfene In-der-Welt-sein als
     Un-zuhause, das nackte 'Das' im Nichts der Welt" (Sein 276-277).

     9. The whole of Division Two of Being and Time is devoted to the
     discussion of temporality; for Heidegger's revision of the idea
     of temporality see, in particular, sections I, II, and III;
     section VI discusses the "vulgar" concept of time.

     10. This term is the translation of the title of Irigaray's
     recent book Être Deux.

     11. "Ce n'est plus dans la fusion ou l'ecstase de l'Un que se
     surmonte alors le dualism entre sujet et objet. Mais dans
     l'incarnation de deux, un deux irréductible à l'Un..." (my
     translation).

                                Works Cited

     Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists.
     Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1994.

     Harasym, Sarah, ed. Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter.
     Albany: SUNY Press, 1998.

     Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany:
     SUNY Press, 1996.

     ---. Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy. Trans.
     David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi. San Francisco: Harper
     and Row, 1975, 1984.

     ---. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag,
     1966.

     ---. Pathmarks. Ed. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
     1998.

     ---. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986.

     ---. "Vom Wesen der Wahrheit." Wegmarken. Frankfurt am Main:
     Vittorio Klostermann, 1978.

     ---. What Is Philosophy? Trans. and intro. William Kluback and
     Jean T. Wilde. [NY]: Twayne, 1958.

     Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn
     Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993.

     ---. Être Deux. Paris: Grasset, 1997.

     ---. I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity within History. Trans.
     Alison Martin. NY: Routledge, 1996.

     ---. "Questions to Emmanuel Levinas." The Irigaray Reader. Ed.
     Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.

     Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan. NY:
     Norton, 1977.

     ---. Encore. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1997.

     Richardson, William. "Psychoanalysis and the Being-Question."
     Interpreting Lacan. Ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan. New
     Haven: Yale UP, 1983.

     Zizek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the
     Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.