Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray)

the great canonical meditations on friendship (for example, Cicero’s Deamicitia, Montaigne’s De l’amitié, Maurice Blanchot’s L’amitié) are linked to the experience of mourning, to the moment of loss.

(Derrida, “Politics” [643])

Who is the friend I mourn? Mourning provokes the question of what the other we have lost has been to us. It allows ethical reflection on one’s organization as a cannibal self who appropriates and internalizes the other to the point where a loss of the friend is experienced as a loss to the self. Jacques Derrida’s emphasis on the resistance of the friend to my memory and the inevitable failure of mourning allows a reconsideration of an anticannibal ethics that arises from Luce Irigaray’s recent work, particularly her discussions of love and friendship in I Love To You. Are Irigaray’s politics of mediation overly premised on the cultural threat of appropriation of the other? Does such a politics overly efface the inevitable failure of this appropriation? What light is shed on this by staging an encounter between recent Derridean and Irigarayan discussions of cannibalism and friendship?

I

After the death of Etienne de la Boétie, Michel de Montaigne described their friendship as “complete,” “perfect,” an ideal symmetry, a complete lack of disparity between two selves. “Resemblance and harmony,” he claims, “. . . gives rise to true and perfect friendships” (Montaigne 93). In friendship, two souls are said to travel unitedly together, in complete trust. One knows the depths of the other’s heart as well as one’s own. Such a relationship is extraordinary precisely because two friends are two different selves.

However, Montaigne also de-emphasizes the suggestion that he and La Boétie have been two different selves. “One soul in two bodies” or the “complete fusion of the wills” connotes a different model than consonance of two wills (99). Montaigne suggests that no otherness or boundaries existed between the two friends: “[the friendship] left us with nothing that was our own, nothing that was either his or mine” (98). When I promise to reveal to “no other” a secret, he writes, “I may without perjury communicate [it] to him who is not another-but is myself” (101). They have been as one: “In the friendship I speak of [the friends] mix and blend one into the other in so perfect a union that the seam which has joined them is effaced and disappears” (97). Imagine that my friend helps me. Then it is as incoherent to talk about loving the friend more because of help he gives me, as it is to talk about loving myself more for help I give myself. There is no difference between the friends; the other is myself (101).

There are two refrains in “Of Friendship” relating to sameness and difference in friendship. According to one refrain, the friends are two different, though consonant selves. But according to a second refrain, two individuals constitute one in two separate bodies. The second refrain seems to be the more extreme version, but in fact undermines the first refrain. It is the difference between Montaigne and La Boétie that renders their consonance remarkable.

De Certeau describes Montaigne’s essay as haunted by mourning (23), and Derrida has suggested that the great meditations on friendship are meditations on loss (“The Politics of Friendship” 643). ¹ Faced with bereavement, one question posed by Montaigne is how to mourn, and he responds citing Horace: “What shame or restraint should there be, in mourning so dear a head?” (103). But in his grief, he asks what and who he mourns. He has become “half a man” because in their friendship La Boétie had become half of himself: “I had grown so accustomed to be his second self in everything that now I seem to be no more than half a man” (103).

Horace is cited again: “If a premature death has taken away the half of my life, why should I, the other half, linger on, since I love myself less and have not survived whole?” (103).

A theme emerges about the structure of friendship. Montaigne articulates the identificatory mode in which the other is recognized in the mode of sameness to self. Montaigne also takes for granted that perfection in friendship is the fusion of two subjects as same, rather than resistance, mystery or difference between them. Yet, from the latter perspective, La Boétie is the friend whom Montaigne had assimilated too well, precisely because there is no account of a La Boétie who resists assimilation by Montaigne, the friend I do not know, or do not know how to mourn. There is no question of who La Boétie was. Montaigne is only too sure: his friend was part of himself. La Boétie, as the perfect friend, is described as Montaigne’s only true listener (de Certeau 79). By contrast, I might value in the friend what he or she could least comprehend about me, or I might value their refusal to be my perfect listener. Montaigne’s love for his friend could be designated a cannibal love because of the telling sensation of mourning a half of oneself. If Montaigne has “not survived whole,” had La Boétie been reduced to Montaigne’s (same as) self?

The designation of this friendship as the site of cannibal love subjects it to two possibilities for reflection. From the perspective of Luce Irigaray, the friendship might now be deemed unethical. In recent work, Irigaray has formulated an ethical ideal for love and friendship in which the cannibal becomes the emblem of what she condemns as the appropriative, in which the loved other is transformed into “my property, my object,” s/he is reduced to “what is mine, into mine, meaning what is already a part of my field of existential or material properties” (I Love To You 110). But from the perspective of Jacques Derrida, “On Friendship” can be reinterpreted as an encounter with the inevitable resistance of the friendship to its own cannibalism. Derrida’s ethics, which articulate failure at the site of cannibalism, will allow us to ask if Irigaray’s concern that ours is a culture of successful cannibalisms concedes too much. What are the comparative ethics and politics of these articulations of cannibal success and failure?

II

In his Mémoires: For Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida describes the death of his friend and evokes questions implicit in the work of Montaigne. How to mourn? Who was the friend? What was the friend to me? How to respond to the memory of the friend?

Speaking is impossible, but so too would be silence or absence or a refusal to share one’s sadness. . . . At a later time, I will try to find better words . . . for the friendship that ties me to Paul de Man (it was and remains unique), what I . . . owe to his generosity, his lucidity, to the ever so gentle force of his thought.

(xvi)

The friendship with de Man is described as unique. Nothing ever came between them, “not even a hint of disagreement. It was like the golden rule of an alliance, no doubt that of a trusting and unlimited friendship” (xv). But rather than suggesting that de Man was his second self, Derrida emphasizes the resistance and excess of de Man to his memory. This limit haunts Derrida’s essay and his question of how to be responsible to the friend and the memory of the friend.

Where Montaigne’s mourning of his friend is speakable and namable, Derrida’s is less so: “We know with what difficulty one finds right and decent words at such a moment” (xv). The trusting and unlimited friendship with de Man is described as “the seal of a secret affirmation that, still today, I wouldn’t know how to circumscribe, to limit, to name (and that is as it should be)” (xvi). The friendship is not evoked in terms describable as “cultural cannibalism,” but in terms of a lost exchange. The death of de Man is not the loss of the perfect listener, but the thwarting of the desire to speak “to and with him” (xvi). Instead, mourning forces Derrida to speak of de Man. The friend becomes the object of my memories and my speculation, that of whom I speak but who cannot speak back. In mourning, de Man is reduced to one’s interiorization of him: his voice, his imagined possible response.

Where Montaigne valorizes the reduction of the other to the self in a perfect friendship, Derrida’s grief is precisely at the way death forces just such a reduction of the friend to the terrain of the self (to one’s memory, one’s interiorization of the friend). Cultural cannibalism, to use Luce Irigaray’s metaphor, is the unethical reduction of the other to the status of “me” or “mine,” rather than s/he to whom I make the address, s/he who addresses me, in the “entre deux.” Does mourning involve a necessary cannibalism of the other since s/he is reduced to object of my memory? Is this the immeasurable wound of the friend’s death?

Derrida describes the inevitability of cannibalism. But he also finds the means to articulate its failure and impossibility. We must cannibalize the other. In mourning, the other lives only in us as “image, idol, or ideal” (Mémoires 6). The friend has been reduced to our interiorization of him or her. But we cannot cannibalize the other. Mourning, suggests Derrida, is also impossible. He emphasizes what he can’t know and say of de Man, the friendship “I wouldn’t know how to circumscribe, to limit, to name (and that is as it should be)” (xvi). The other resists my knowledge and memory of him or her:

we know our friend to be gone forever, irremediably absent, annulled to the point of knowing or receiving nothing himself of what takes place in his memory . . . it would be unfaithful to delude oneself into believing that the other living in us is living in himself: because he lives in us and because we live this or that in his memory, in memory of him.

(Mémoires 21)

Invoking the concept of impossible mourning in Mémoires, Derrida makes reference to how the ‘“normal’ ‘work of mourning’ has often been described” since Freud: in terms of “memory and interiorization”:

It entails a movement in which an interiorizing idealization takes in itself or upon itself the body and voice of the other, the other’s visage and person, ideally and quasi-literally devouring them.

(34)

Freud’s work on mourning, and that of certain other psychoanalysts produces a formulation of a subject as always already an interiorization, a devouring of the other. Derrida’s intervention introduces into, or lifts out of these theoretical formulations an ethical interrogation of how our relation to the other may be theorized at the heart of this “eating of the other.”

III

In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud describes the work of mourning as a slow detachment of libido from a loved object. In contrast to this normal work of mourning, a subject might suffer melancholia. Part of the ego is identified with the lost object, and then treated as if it is an external object. Because of the identification of part of the ego with the loved object, “[i]n this way an object-loss [is] transformed into an ego-loss” (249). Unlike normal mourning, in melancholia the lost object is not renounced. Instead, a part of the ego is given over to sustaining the continued direction of libido towards that object through identification with it. ²

In speaking of post-Freudian theories of mourning, Derrida refers often to Abraham and Torok, who accept Freud’s account of normal mourning but build a complex theory around Freud’s indications of how one might think of “abnormal” forms of mourning such as melancholia. Freud suggests that in melancholia a part of the ego splits and identifies with the lost object. Abraham and Torok propose that this be renamed a process of encryptment, one’s psychic encryptment of the other within oneself in a “vault” carved out within the ego. As they write, in “endocryptic identification,” one “exchang[es] one’s own identity for a phantasmic identification with the ‘life’-beyond the grave-of an object lost” (“The Lost Object-Me” 5). The crypt is therefore an apt metaphor because the ego comes to contain and keep alive within itself the “cadaver” of the other. Instead of the cadaver being consigned to a “legal burial place” his or her memory is “entombed in a fast and secure place . . . [through] the setting up within the ego of a closed-off space, a crypt, . . . a kind of anti-introjection, comparable to the formation of a cocoon around the chrysalis” (“The Lost Object-Me” 4).

The lost other persists literally incorporated within my ego, such that I will often give the responses of the other. As Derrida elaborates in his discussion of Abraham and Torok, “[t]he incorporated dead . . . continues to lodge there like something other and to ventrilocate through the ‘living.’ . . . I lose a loved one, I fail to do what Freud calls the normal work of mourning, with the result that the dead person continues to inhabit me, but as a stranger” (Ear of the Other 57–58). For Derrida “the term ‘incorporated’ signal[s] precisely that one has failed to digest or assimilate it totally” (57). In “normal” or “successful” mourning, the dead object is “taken back inside the self, digested, assimilated” (57). “The dead other . . . is taken into me: I kill it and remember it . . . I interiorise it totally and it is no longer other” (58). But in the case of what Abraham and Torok call unsuccessful mourning, interiorization “goes only so far and then stops” (58).

Derrida draws on Abraham and Torok in his evocation of the question of how to mourn, and how to be responsible to the friend one mourns. The otherness of the other seems to be acknowledged in incorporation or encryptment but annulled in the assimilating work of “normal” mourning. Initially, then, it seems that encryptment could be described as more faithful to the lost friend than “successful” mourning. But it is the very distinction between successful and failed mourning which Derrida will question. In moving towards this position, Derrida begins by questioning the way in which, in conjunction with their introduction of the concept of encryptment, Abraham and Torok hold the concepts of introjection and incorporation distinct (“Fors” xvi). Introjection is used to refer to the work of “normal mourning,” whereas incorporation becomes the name for endocryptic identification: “an extraneous or foreign area of incorporation,” where the self identifies with the object it has incorporated (“Fors” xvi). Responds Derrida, “I suggest . . . that the opposition between incorporation and introjection, however fruitful it may be, remains of a limited pertinence” (“Istrice 2” 321).

IV

Why does Derrida resist the opposition between incorporation and introjection? Abraham and Torok’s intervention into Freud does not dispute the concept of successful mourning, in which libido is successfully detached from the loved other and reabsorbed into the ego. Rather, they add to the concept of successful mourning an expanded concept of the abnormal mourning seen in melancholia, where the subject’s ego comes to encrypt or identify with that lost object. Where normal mourning involving the work of introjection is successful, Abraham and Torok find a category for failed forms of mourning in which libido is not detached from the loved object and withdrawn back into the ego.

It is the interiorizing “normal” work of mourning that Derrida marks as the taking within me of the dead other, total interiorization, described with metaphors of digestion and cannibalism: “I kill it . . . and it is no longer other” (The Ear of the Other 58), through the taking within oneself of “the body and voice of the other, the other’s visage and person, ideally and quasi-literally devouring them” (Mémoires 34). By contrast, in encryptment there is an enveloping within one’s boundaries of an other that remains undigested, like Jonah to the whale.

Derrida does not resist the suggestion that psychically different work is involved in incorporation and introjection. But, since Abraham and Torok distinguish these in terms of successful and failed mourning of the other, he poses the question of what successful mourning would be. Can there be a successful mourning? He does not refuse the distinction between introjection and incorporation, so much as suggest that it has limited pertinence. For the pertinent question for him is how to be faithful to the other:

What is an impossible mourning? . . . And as concerns the other in us . . . where is the most unjust betrayal? Is the most distressing, or even the most deadly infidelity that of a possible mourning which would interiorize within us the image, idol, or ideal of the other who is dead and lives only in us? Or is it that of the impossible mourning, which, leaving the other his alterity, respecting thus his infinite remove, either refuses to take or is incapable of taking the other within oneself, as in the tomb or the vault of some narcissism?

(Mémoires 6)

Of course, fidelity to the other implies that one must mourn the loss of the other. Failing to mourn suggests infidelity to the other. But perhaps the failed mourning of incorporation is a greater fidelity to the other? Successful mourning assimilates or digests the other. But in failed mourning, I can not assimilate the other. Derrida converts the issue of mourning into one concerning the ethics of alterity. The issues are: How can one be faithful to the other? What is the other to me in my various modes of fidelity and mourning? In successful mourning, the other is to me digestible and assimilable. But in failed mourning, the other is to me indigestible, unassimilable. Where the other is to me indigestible, the other is to me other, not same. Cannibalism, then, (digestion of the other) would appear to be an ethical miscarriage. But rethought from the perspective of the ethics of alterity, successful mourning fails: “mourning is an unfaithful fidelity if it succeeds in interiorizing the other ideally in me, that is, in not respecting his or her infinite exteriority” (“Istrice 2” 321). Mourning could be said to fail if it is unfaithful to the exteriority of the other, rendering the other entirely assimilable. From this perspective, there is some communication between the cannibal metaphors deployed by Derrida and Irigaray. In the case of Irigaray’s ethics, nondigestion is the emblem of a greater fidelity to the other, a recognition of the other’s difference. For both, digestion represents infidelity to the other.

The introjection/incorporation distinction is said to have limited pertinence, insofar as it represents a distinction between successful and failed mourning. What would a successful mourning be? Derrida exchanges that distinction for a paradoxical formulation in which the success of mourning is said to be its failure, and the failure of mourning, its success:

We can only live this experience in the form of an aporia: the aporia of mourning and of prosopopeia, where the possible remains impossible. Where success fails. And where faithful interiorization bears the other and constitutes him in me . . . It makes the other a part of us . . . and then the other no longer quite seems to be the other because we grieve for him and bear him in us . . . And inversely, the failure succeeds: an aborted interiorization is at the same time a respect for the other as other, a sort of tender rejection, a movement of renunciation which leaves the other alone, outside, over there in his death, outside of us.

(Mémoires 35)

These themes come together in Derrida’s joint declarations: “Faithful mourning of the other must fail to succeed/by succeeding (it fails, precisely, if it succeeds! it fails because of success!). There is no successful introjection, there is no pure and simple incorporation” (“Istrice 2” 321). For Abraham and Torok, normal mourning is the successful introjection of the other, and in their terms, successful mourning is when we “take within oneself the part of oneself contained in what has been lost” (“Introjection-Incorporation” 5). On Derrida’s gloss, here I kill the other, interiorize the other totally; therefore, faithful mourning fails if it succeeds.

If the other is successfully internalized, we have not been faithful to the other’s “infinite exteriority” (“Istrice 2” 321). We will have failed to mourn the other faithfully, precisely in successfully mourning them. This is not a claim about how to successfully mourn in psychoanalytic terms. Instead, it is a question posed from the standpoint of an ethics of alterity inserted into the work of Abraham and Torok. Should interiorizing the other entirely, even were it possible, be described as a “successful” fidelity to the other? From this perspective, Derrida argues, true mourning is impossible. If it succeeds, we haven’t respected the otherness of the other. Perhaps to “truly” mourn, we must fail to mourn, if “truly” mourn is taken to mean, be faithful to the radical exteriority, the indigestibility of the other.

This failure of mourning is what Abraham and Torok articulate precisely as “the crypt as a foreign body included through incorporation in the Self . . . radically heterogeneous insofar as it implies the topography of an other” (“Fors” xxx). “The most inward safe (the crypt . . . ) becomes the outcast . . . with respect to the outer safe (the Self) that includes it without comprehending it, in order to comprehend nothing in it” (“Fors” xix). If the ideal for Derrida is fidelity to the exteriority of the other, one would think that at least what Abraham and Torok call failed mourning succeeds. The other remains other in relation to me, “an inside heterogeneous to the inside of the Self” (“Fors” xvi).

But in the midst of explaining Abraham and Torok’s account of incorporation as the ego’s identification with the lost object, Derrida again glosses their account in terms of the thematic of my fidelity to alterity. Incorporation, he explains, is foreign to what Abraham and Torok call introjection, and marks a refusal to mourn. It is where “I pretend to keep the dead alive, intact, safe, (save) inside me,” but (and here Derrida introduces his thematic) “it is only in order to refuse, in a necessarily equivocal way, to love the dead as a living part of me” (“Fors” xvi). Within Derrida’s thematic, incorporation is no more faithful to the other than introjection.

incorporation is a kind of theft to reappropriate the pleasure object. But that reappropriation is simultaneously rejected: which leads to the paradox of a foreign body preserved as foreign but by the same token excluded from a self that thenceforth deals not with the other, but only with itself. The more the self keeps the foreign element as a foreigner inside itself, the more it excludes it.

(“Fors” xvii)

We retain the other within ourselves, and as foreign, but not as that foreign other with which we engage. While we incorporate the other, we do not engage with the other, we simply envelope them, effectively excluding their foreignness from ourselves. Derrida claims that:

The question could of course be raised as to whether or not “normal” mourning preserves the object as other (a living person dead) inside me. This question-of the general appropriation and safekeeping of the other as other can always be raised as the deciding factor, but does it not at the same time blur the very line it draws between introjection and incorporation, through an essential and irreducible ambiguity?

(“Fors” xvii)

This clarifies the terms in which Derrida claims that the introjection/incorporation distinction is not clear-cut. Only once the key issue (which is not the primary concern of Abraham and Torok) has become whether we recognize the otherness of the other, will there be ambiguity between incorporation and introjection. From this perspective, they are indistinct: both fail to succeed and succeed in failing. From this perspective, Derrida’s final intervention into a post-Freudian psychoanalytic account of mourning is that there is no successful true mourning, and no successful introjection. Both are, in his words, doomed to fail, and succeed in failing, from the perspective of the encounter with alterity. Of mourning he writes that it is “always doomed to fail (thus a constitutive failure, precisely), to incorporate, interiorize, introject, subjectivize the other in me.” Of incorporation he writes, “there is no pure and simple incorporation” (“Istrice” 321).

Both introjection and incorporation are said to fail, in Derrida’s terms, because the otherness of the other resists both processes:

Nevertheless, it remains that the otherness of the other installs within any process of appropriation (even before any opposition between introjecting and incorporating) . . . an undecidable irresolution that forever prevents the two from closing over their rightful, ideal, proper coherence, in other words and at any rate, over their death (“their” corpse).

(“Fors” xxii)

V

In Derrida’s material on mourning, the inability to mourn or incorporate the other is articulated in tandem with an articulation of the inevitability of doing so. Certainly, this reflection is prompted by theoretical accounts of mourning. However, Derrida’s material extends out from a discussion of literal mourning to a discussion of our status as cannibal subjects more generally. The same formulation is used, concerning the simultaneous inevitability and impossibility of cannibalizing the other. Once the material is generalized beyond a discussion of literal mourning, the import of this material for social and political philosophy that draws on the politics of alterity can be considered.

From this point on, we can ask what happens if this thematic is introduced into the cannibal metaphor as it is deployed by Luce Irigaray in her work on the ethics of sexual difference? Irigaray devises political programs that would enable mediated relations between subjects in order to interrupt cultural cannibalism (the tendency to appropriate and interiorize the other). Perhaps Irigaray overtheorizes the success of cannibalism, underemphasizing its necessary failure? For Irigaray, the cultural and political problem we face is precisely the success of cultural cannibalism. She argues the need for a series of cultural changes (at the level of linguistic, legal, religious, media, and economic reforms) that would mediate self-other relations and facilitate less appropriative relations between individuals in contemporary life. Her argument for the need for these programs is premised on her diagnosis of the success of cultural cannibalism.

But could one not also respond to Irigaray: and yet, appropriation of the other always fails? The other is always in excess of my reductions of and identifications with him or her. This is a point that Irigaray underlines very strongly in her early work, but has de-emphasized in her more recent work. This is also an issue that allows a comparison of interventions into psychoanalytic theory from Irigaray and Derrida. For Irigaray, the key political issue in interrogating Freud is how Freud theorizes sexual difference. Her criticism of Freud in Speculum of the Other Woman is directed at his impoverished and phallocentric account of women and femininity. In occupying the thematic of mourning in his work, she argues that women and girls can be interpreted as mourning sexual difference (Speculum 66–72). By contrast, Derrida occupies psychoanalytic accounts of mourning in order to destabilize the integrity of the subject who mourns the other and the integrity of the other who is mourned.

Irigaray’s recent work prompts the suspicion that a reconsideration of the integrity of the self and other is as important to feminism as a reconsideration of sexual difference, and that the one can not take place without the other. So, we can ask, how might Irigaray’s anti-cannibal politics be affected by a conceptualization of my appropriations, introjections, interiorization, internalizations of, and identifications with the other as always inevitable, and as always inevitably failing? We will always be faithful to the other, and even our worst cannibalisms must necessarily fail. While Derrida and Irigaray both argue that we are inevitable cannibals, it is Derrida who has tended more to emphasize the inevitable failure of our cannibalism. How might this emphasis displace the ethics and politics of Irigarayan alterity?

VI

In working towards this question, I turn now to Derrida’s expansion of the discussion of mourning to generate a generalized concept of the cannibal or “eating” subject who is always already the other “in us.” Derrida offers a radical reworking of basic psychoanalytic terms, including narcissism and projection, that question the integrity of the subject’s boundaries. The work on mourning can be seen in two movements, one in which an opposition between successful and failed mourning is destabilized, so that all mourning may be seen as a generalized form of failed mourning, once failed mourning is refigured as an encounter with the otherness (or “undigestability”) of the other. But in a second movement, Derrida turns to destabilize the opposition between a “normal subject” and a “mourning” subject. In a generalized sense of mourning, we are always already cannibal subjects, always “mourning the other.”

According to Derrida, if the subject is thought of in terms of a generalized structure of literal mourning, we are always already an interiorization of the other:

Upon the death of the other we are given to memory, and thus to interiorization, since the other, outside us, is now nothing. And with the dark light of this nothing, we learn that the other resists the closure of our interiorizing memory. With the nothing of this irrevocable absence, the other appears as other, and as other for us, upon his death or at least in the anticipated possibility of a death, since death constitutes and makes manifest the limits of a me or an us who are obliged to harbor something that is greater or other than them; something outside of them within them.

(Mémoires 34)

Here, Derrida turns from the description of a subject who mourns to that of the subject who will have to (literally) mourn. It may be that we only sometimes literally mourn, but we are always subjects who must anticipate the death of the other. We live with the other in the possibility of their absence or death: “this possibility of mourning . . . constitutes in advance all ‘being-in-us,’ ‘in me,’ between us, or between ourselves. . . the self appears to itself only in this bereaved allegory, in this hallucinatory prosopopeia-and even before the death of the other actually happens, as we say, in ‘reality’” (Mémoires 28–29).

Furthermore, the possibility of mourning illustrates that we always harbor the other within us: “If death comes to the other, and comes to us through the other, then the friend no longer exists except in us, between us. In himself, by himself, he is no more, nothing more. He lives only in us. But we are never ourselves, and between us, identical to us, a ‘self’ is never in itself or identical to itself” (Mémoires 28). If we are never proper to ourselves, self-identical, then in different ways we always have alterity enfolded within us, we are always in this sense, cannibal selves. In day-to-day life, we identify with the other, love and befriend the other, internalize the other as ideal ego, are influenced by others. Montaigne’s description of mourning is reflective of how before the death of the other, the other has always, in diverse modes, been internalized within our subjective boundaries.

Furthermore again, the other has been internalized within my boundaries in the very formation of the subject. Freud argues of primary narcissism that it is a stage at which there is not yet the distinction between object-libido and ego-libido. He theorizes the existence of “an original libidinal cathexis of the ego . . . which fundamentally persists and is related to the object-cathexes much as the body of an amoeba is related to the pseudopodia which it puts out” (“On Narcissism” 75). The oral or cannibal phase-the ego’s incorporation of objects into its boundaries-is described as the prototype of identification (“Mourning” 241, 249). At this point, there is not a distinction between ego and object libido precisely because rather than libido being directed outward toward the ego, it enfolds the object within its boundaries as part of the self. What is designated the “me” or “mine” is always already the object or other.

Accordingly, Derrida will come to question whether we think of narcissism in “sufficiently” complex ways. Again, his problematization of the integrity of the subject, its status as always already “eating,” and the ethical implications of this, arise out of his occupation of psychoanalytic theory.

VII

In Freud’s account, the adult interconnection between identification and object love is related to primary narcissism. There can occur a confusion between whether I love the other as other to me, or love the other as incorporated with me, in the mode of identification. Freud distinguishes narcissistic and object-directed forms of love in adult life. Loving the other narcissistically is loving the other in terms of an economy of sameness. As Freud argues in “On Narcissism,” I engage with the other insofar as s/he represents to me my idea of what I was, would like to be, or am. However, all forms of love and identification are also expressions of an ego constituted in the mode of primary narcissism. All forms of love involve the attachment of ego-libido to the object.

Thus, to love and mourn the other as a loss to the self may be an expression of what Freud describes as narcissistic love in adult life (loving the other because one identifies with the other, or enjoys their love for oneself, thus as a form of self-love, and thus as what Irigaray calls cultural cannibalism). But insofar as all mourning is experienced as loss to the self, whether the love is describable as anaclitic or narcissistic, it is an adult expression of the original constitution of the ego in primary narcissism in which the pseudopod libido enfolds the object as same within the ego-amoeba boundaries.

In Freud’s material, there is no distinction between ego and object libido in original narcissism. This need not mean we only encounter the object/other as part of (incorporated within) one’s subjective boundaries in the oral-cannibal mode. Primary narcissism could be theorized in a more complicated way: in enfolding the object within our boundaries we recognize difference so as to efface it. ³ Perhaps what we experience in enfolding within the self-as-us/same is what we also must recognize as other to reduce it to the same. The incorporation of otherness as sameness would be one way of thinking of primary narcissism, and the original incorporative constitution of the ego.

Accordingly, in Mémoires, Derrida discusses interiorization in the context of narcissism. Discussing the living of the other in us, in memory, Derrida suggests that this being “in us” of the other, cannot be:

the simple inclusion of a narcissistic fantasy in a subjectivity that is closed upon itself or even identical to itself. If it were indeed a question of narcissism, its structure would remain too complex to allow the other, dead or living, to be reduced to this same structure. Already installed in the narcissistic structure, the other so marks the self of the relationship to self, so conditions it that the being “in us” of bereaved memory becomes the coming of the other.

(Mémoires 22)

And again, later in the text, Derrida returns to the question of narcissism:

All that we say of the friend, then, and even what we say to him, to call or recall him, . . . all that remains hopelessly in us or between us the living, without ever crossing the mirror of a certain speculation. Others would speak too quickly of a totally interior speculation and of “narcissism.” But the narcissistic structure is too paradoxical and too cunning to provide us with the final word. It is a speculation whose ruses, mimes, and strategies can only succeed in supposing the other-and thus in relinquishing in advance any autonomy.

(Mémoires 32)

Narcissism is a psychic economy presented by Freud as loving the other as what I identify with, want to be and so on, thus a loving of the other in terms of an economy of sameness or relationality to self. Narcissistic love, like mourning, reflects the structure of primary narcissism in which there is no rigid self-other distinction. For Derrida, however, each of these modes-adult and primary narcissism, “failed” and “successful” mourning-can be seen as an enfolding of the other within the heart of the “self-same” that nevertheless entirely fails to annihilate otherness, is rather constructed around otherness, and in failing to annihilate otherness, is “faithful” to the other.

Irigaray specifically denounces narcissistic self-other love relations precisely as a relationship to the other in which s/he is subordinated to my nostalgia for unity:

Nostalgia for the one has always supplanted desire between the two. This nostalgia takes diverse forms. It can manifest as an aspiration for fusion-with nature, with a divine figure, with the other’s energy, with others. Sometimes, it corresponds to narcissistic self-love. It is often the equivalent of the will to be or possess the whole. To remain two requires that one renounce this fusional, regressive, autistic, narcissistic unity.

(Etre Deux 104, my translation)

Here, Irigaray could be said to offer a simple reference to narcissism as unethical and as a failure to recognize the two. My question is, how might this account be changed both by the suggestion that the success of narcissism fails and that the failure of narcissism succeeds, and the suggestion that narcissism cannot “succeed”? Does Irigaray suppose too quickly that narcissism is a successful subordination of the other to the self? Perhaps what is needed is an emphasis on the instability of the “identity” of narcissism, an insistence that it is always at once exclusion and incorporation of the other, infinitely complicated.

VIII

Drawing on Freud’s conceptualization of narcissism, Derrida is led to the formulation: “we are never ourselves, and between us, identical to us, a ‘self’ is never in itself or identical to itself” (Mémoires 28). Where he occupies psychoanalytic theory to theorize non self-identity at the heart of identity, he is led to the position that we are inevitably cannibal selves. The distinction between the abnormal (mourning) self and the normal self of integrity could not be sustained. The normal self does not possess integrity any more than the mourning self. The obvious lack of self-identity that is seen when the other is mourned in fact pertains in a more generalized way to every subject constituted with alterity at its heart. We are the constant interiorization/incorporation of the other.

Speaking, he says, of metonymical eating, Derrida reminds us, “one must begin to identify with the other, who is to be assimilated, interiorized, understood ideally” (emphasis mine). One must eat, he asserts. There must be eating: our relations with the other must, inevitably, involve assimilation, identification, interiorization. Yet, we also see Derrida remind that we cannot eat the other: “one must begin to identify with the other, who is to be assimilated, interiorized, understood ideally (something one can never do absolutely without addressing oneself to the other. . . .)” (“Eating Well” 115).

The other cannot be (entirely) effaced. There can be no complete autonomy over oneself or from the other if we have always eaten the other. Instead, the possibility of an adequate political and ethical perspective could begin only once one acknowledges that “we are never ourselves, and between us, identical to us, a ‘self’ is never in itself or identical to itself.” How then to locate responsibility towards the other, when we have always already appropriated the other? This is the question posed in the formulation, how to eat well?

If Derrida’s formulations call into question traditional ideals of autonomy, they also have the potential to call into question some of the approaches to political and social philosophy that have been presented by philosophers of difference. For example, where Irigaray devises a political program that would restructure the symbolic so as to see more effective recognitions of difference through mediation between subjects, Derrida’s material serves as a reminder of the risks of thematizing the radical effacement of difference or total cultural appropriation. One needs simultaneously to thematize its necessary failure. Precisely because I am already the other, I can never efface the other.

Irigaray’s concern is directed at the narcissistic breakdown of boundaries at work when I suppose that I am already the other. But in response, we could also ask, who do I think “I” am, if I think the other is “over there”? What integrity for the self’s identity do I hope to establish? For example, Irigaray argues that there is a widespread contemporary practice in philosophy, religion, and politics: “There is talk of the other’s existence, love of the other, concern for the other, etc., without it being asked whom or what this other represents. This lack of definition of the alterity of the other has left all thought . . . in a state of paralysis” (I Love to You 61). Irigaray is right that the politics of difference sometimes does not render its conception of “the other” sufficiently complex. Derrida’s response is to simultaneously put into question the integrity of the self. The way he does so-by theorizing the self as always already the other-risks incurring Irigaray’s accusations of narcissism and cultural appropriation. But despite her own concerns on this very point, the status of self and other may be too secure in her theory. Perhaps an adequately complex account of what the other is requires an account of how we must already be the other. ⁴

VIII

Historically, philosophical theories of love, friendship, and mourning have been contexts for the thematization of a problematics of appropriation of the other and resistance of the other to that appropriation. Approaching Luce Irigaray’s recent work, particularly in I Love To You, and more recently in Etre Deux (1997), we can ask how it can be fitted into this tradition. It is a question that may bring to light limitations in her recent theoretical direction.

I suggested that one early thematic de-emphasized in Irigaray’s later work is the inevitable resistance of the (feminine) other to its cultural appropriation. For example, if we look back at the thematic of mourning introduced in Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray uses the term to destabilize a sense of what exactly has been lost by the emblematic girl/woman deemed “melancholic.” In this case, Irigaray moves from Freud’s discussion of mourning to that of melancholia precisely because Freud uses the latter term to indicate a context of loss in which ‘“one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost. . . .’ The little girl, obviously, does not know what she is losing in discovering her ‘castration.’ . . . In more ways than one, it is really a question for her of a ‘loss’ that radically escapes any representation. Whence the impossibility of ‘mourning’ it” (Speculum 67–68).

By contrast, the recent introduction in Irigaray’s work of a thematic of ideal love and friendship has strangely coincided with a loss of just such an interrogation. In her early discussion of mourning and melancholia, Irigaray’s concept of feminine identity is represented as culturally annihilated: “I defend the impossible. . . . But am I actually allowed to do otherwise? Is not what is offered me already within a horizon that annihilates my identity and my will?” (I Love to You 9). But in the recent work, the sexual difference that has been culturally annihilated is more concretely knowable and speakable. In the early work in mourning femininity, we cannot know precisely what we mourn, what we have lost. In the later work, the femininity that is annihilated is much more precisely defined. Less obscure than was the definition of femininity in the early work, it is stabilized as a concept of sexuate identity. Ironically, this is seen in the very return of a (refigured) thematic of melancholia in I Love to You: “the relation between genders is determined by man’s needs with no consideration for woman’s identity. . . . [O]ur tradition lacks the mediations enabling her to keep her identity as a woman. . . . It is from a desire for exchange that women’s melancholy ensues” (135–36).

I have suggested that where Irigaray has shifted the political impetus to creating the cultural conditions necessary to interrupt cultural cannibalism (deemed the appropriation of the other) and the subjection of that other to economies of possession, ownership, and orientation towards the self, this impetus fails to sufficiently remember the inevitable resistance of the other to these economies. It suggests that appropriation is possible, except in the context of the political programs Irigaray supports. Of course, if such appropriation were entirely possible, then there would be nothing to ground Irigaray’s ideal politics, no ideal of sexual difference and mediation between subjects, a point made strongly in the early work. But the reminder is important, because Irigaray seems to fail to remember the failure of appropriation.

IX

Throughout, I have used philosophical meditations on friendship to reflect on recent articulations of the politics of difference. To conclude, who, then, is Irigaray’s ideal friend? Towards the end of I Love to You, Irigaray evokes an ideal for my encounter with the other, friend or lover, as s/he who resists my knowledge and appropriation of them:

I am listening to you, as to another who transcends me, requires a transition to a new dimension. I am listening to you: I perceive what you are saying, I am attentive to it, I am attempting to understand and hear your intention. Which does not mean: I comprehend you, I know you, so I do not need to listen to you and I can even plan a future for you. No, I am listening to you as someone and something I do not know yet . . . with you but not as you.

(I Love to You 116–17)

But in the prologue to I Love to You, ideal friendship is figured in the person of Renzo Imbeni, whom Irigaray does claim to be able to recognize: “there were living men and women. I did not get close to all of them. One of them, at least, I recognized” (15). Imbeni is designated as a man who can save a city, a man who is unsubmissive, respectful, innovative, who shares without complacency, is prudent and daring: “He only makes promises he can keep. It is possible to have faith in him. One can take from him without renouncing oneself” (I Love to You 15).

Irigaray worries that her reader may believe that she has been projecting onto Imbeni: “You are probably thinking that I must be blinded by some sort of passion for him, some projection onto him?” (16). In fact, the reader is more surprised by Irigaray’s desire to sustain the fantasy of boundaries between herself and a friend she admires, the fantasy that friendship, respect, and admiration is not traversed by projection. A stronger politics of friendship might be one prepared to negotiate the inevitable play of projection in friendship, not one concerned to disavow that play. What is also needed here is a more complex interrogation of projection, since projection, like narcissism and incorporation, both recognizes and fails to recognize the other. This is suggested by Derrida’s rethinking of classic psychoanalytic terminology to theorize the failure and success of ethics in friendship. And if Derrida and de Man are useful in rethinking Irigaray and Imbeni, so are Montaigne and La Boétie.

I suggested in relation to Montaigne and La Boétie that there is no account of the perfect friend who resists recognition. In this case, there is no account of an Imbeni who resists recognition by Irigaray, no account of the perfect friend as he whom she cannot know. There is no question of who Imbeni was. What Irigaray evokes is her very recognition of him, she is only too sure of who he was. The evocation of La Boétie as the perfect and true listener occurs in a politics of sameness in Montaigne’s work. So it is telling that although Imbeni is evoked in the context of an Irigarayan politics of difference, he is again represented as the perfect and true listener. By contrast, as suggested earlier, I might value in the friend what s/he could least comprehend about me and I about them, their refusal to be my perfect listener. What is strangest about this Irigarayan evocation of patient listening in ideal friendship is that it occurs precisely in the context of a politics of nonappropriative friendship, and it is precisely in these terms that Irigaray lauds her encounter with Imbeni. But what secures Imbeni from Irigaray’s appropriation of him? And why don’t we hear of an Irigaray who has projected onto Imbeni (an Irigaray with unstable boundaries) and an Imbeni whose identity she can’t be sure of?

Imbeni’s personal qualities are depicted by Irigaray in ideal terms, but it is the very ability to “attes[t] to the qualities of the other” that is depicted by Irigaray as truly ideal (16). If there has been an ethical encounter between herself and Imbeni, this should enable her recognition of “another who will never be mine.” Her homage to Imbeni occurs in the context of an evocation of an ideal for

the encounter between woman and man, women and men. An encounter characterized by belonging to a sexed nature to which it is proper to be faithful; . . . by the need for the recognition of another who will never be mine; by the importance of an absolute silence in order to hear this other; by the quest for new words which will make this alliance possible without reducing the other to an item of property.

(11)

This provokes then, an inevitable reflection on the status of the figuring of heterosexuality and homosexuality in the philosophy of friendship, mourning, identity, and difference.

X

In On Friendship, we saw that perfect friendship is depicted as more possible between two likes-such as two adult men, Montaigne proposes-than between adults and children, or between men and women. Here, Montaigne supposes that we know the like, and that the like occurs in the homosocial friendship. By contrast, in I Love to you, perfect friendship is depicted by Irigaray as more possible between the different: depicted above all as a man and a woman. Irigaray supposes that we know the different, and that it specially occurs in the heterosocial friendship.

Irigaray has been widely criticized for the relentless emphasis in her more recent work on a heterosocial imaginary. The real problem occurs with her figuring of both the hetero and homo. ⁵ She opposes those forms of homosocial politics between women that are “based on oneself,” those feminist politics based on egotism:

by basing their politics on themselves, on their needs and desires (real or imagined as they may be), and not on those of all women, these practitioners of . . . egological feminism . . . [show] no concern for the rights all women need-including the younger girls of today and tomorrow, and women of other cultures. . . . What is more, as they lack a positive definition of their gender and the objective qualities which give it an individual and collective content, these female minorities are very often formed in opposition to the other gender and from refusal of a mixed-sex culture.

(2–3)

It seems from this that Irigaray endorses a politics of difference, resisting any subordination of the other to myself in both heterosexual and homosexual contexts. But if so, she should affirm the play of difference in the homosexual context, rather than assuming it to be a privileged location of the self-same. Irigaray’s discussion of friendship and love illuminates the politics of the hetero and the homo in her work.

Montaigne’s figurings of friendship appear homosocial. However, one can challenge the way in which they figure the homo, resisting the supposition that either the homosexual or the homosocial is a privileged site of the relation between the same. Such suppositions de-emphasize the representation of alterity in the homosexual relationship. The relentless heterosociality of Irigaray’s evocations of friendship and love can offer no counter to this suppression of alterity in same-oriented representations of homosociality. Irigaray retains the belief that the other can be stably identified-in this case, not as the self-same, but as the “different.” But the heterosexual is no more a privileged site of the different than the homosexual is a privileged site of the self-same.

In Irigaray’s ideal politics, I particularly engage with difference at the site of sexual difference. ⁶ Furthermore, it is noticeable that the inevitable failure of this encounter with difference is not factored into her politics. The objection here is not that the politics are “utopian,” nor even that this is heterocentric, but that this is the wrong utopia and the wrong vision of heterosexuality, one in which there would be transparency of sexual difference, the transparency between those demarcated as different, different from each other, and secured from each other in their integrity, and their identity. This is a criticism that has long lingered in the minds of those who ask what a deconstructive reading of Irigaray has to offer, those who suspect that for Irigaray difference is figured “between”-between two identities, the male and the female.

True, one means of countering such readings is with the argument that Irigaray’s feminine is not posited as an identity because it is perpetually traversed by the relational, the constant play of relations with other women of one’s sexuate genre. ⁷ I support these readings as part of a politics that wants to generate a non-identity-based politics of difference out of Irigaray’s work. However, in reading Irigaray’s recent work, I have come increasingly to feel that these readings are not more scrupulous Irigaray interpretation, but regeneration of Irigarayan resources informed by thematics of difference derived from multiple sources, many of which she would contest.

Above all, Irigaray’s recent politics suppose that I can and do engage with the self-same. Men may be figured as the radically different, but other women are still figured as like me insofar as we belong to sexuate genre. ⁸ True again, it is possible to emphasize this point, so as to de-emphasize the exaggeratedly heterosexual imagery in Irigaray’s recent work. One can see Irigaray as arguing that there can be no heterosexual except as traversed by the homosocial, since the situation by each sex in the context of one’s own sexuate genre is what enables relations of sexual difference. In other words, a crucial reading of Irigaray is one that can locate within her figuring of the homo, difference. But it has become clearer that such readings are disruptive to Irigaray’s later work, and are readings she is likely to resist. Irigaray does not take as the political imperative the location of difference at the heart of what is designated “woman.”

One can bring this imperative to her work, and make the decision to derive complex concepts of “genre” from her theoretical resources. This is the best way to generate the most interesting Irigaray. But Irigaray’s own work has increasingly failed to offer strong accounts of why, by the terms of her very own theory, sexuate genre could never amount to a belonging to feminine identity, and why difference destabilizes the notion of such a belonging. Where Irigaray argues that identity allows relations of sexual difference, one counters with the argument that the difference at the heart of sexuate genre destabilizes the identities which she thinks enable sexual difference.

Irigaray’s anticannibal ethics of friendship and love presupposes that we know what a resistance to the cannibal would be. Her politics speak in the name of a nonappropriation of the other but assume that we know what the proper boundaries of the subject are. It is this assumption that allows her to condemn both narcissism and projection as an unethical overstepping of those boundaries in relation to the other. What is enabled by the encounter between Derrida and Irigaray’s work on friendship is a questioning of that condemnation. What is implicit in the condemnation of narcissism and projection? These condemnations subtly attempt to identify my secured boundaries and those of the other. When Irigaray condemns my appropriation of the other, she excludes the possibility of a politics that can recognize and deal more adequately with the fact that I must always have appropriated the other. If “I am,” I am appropriation of the other. If it is possible to project onto the other, the other is always already a projection of me. Each is the play of the difference of the other at the heart, and for Derrida ethics begins, rather than fails, at the point of this recognition. If one must always have “eaten” the other, then, concludes Derrida, ethics begins with the question of how to eat well. For Derrida, this is precisely what is deemed the moral question:

The moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat . . . but since one must eat in any case . . . how for goodness sake should one eat well (bien manger)? And what does this imply? What is eating?

(“Eating Well” 115)

I think a Derridean ethics of eating well does resist an Irigaray ethics of not-eating. Could Irigaray continue to speak in the name of a politics of nonappropriation, while also acknowledging that we have always appropriated the other, inevitably? It is that very appropriation which renders it impossible that we could ever be subjects with discrete identities who meet others, the difference lying “between us.” It is that appropriation which renders incoherent a politics of the self-same, a politics that does return in both the recent Irigarayan evocations of heterosexual friendship as privileged site of difference, and as belonging to sexuate genre as privileged site of shared similarity or resemblance. Are we reading against or with her when we locate the Irigaray whose texts are always writing difference at the heart of sexuate genre, at the heart of sexuate identity, love, friendship, the hetero, and the homo?