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LUCE IRIGARAY There Can Be No Democracy without a Culture of Difference Ours is an age of sociology, of statistics, of mass media, and of politics. To be sure, other components can be included, such as technique, which is perhaps the one that underlies and unites the others. And also the one that today imperils the democratic model, at least as far as citizens, both men and women, are concerned. But is it not up to these citizens to judge whether a democratic system is well founded and well functioning? Democracy at the Origin of Our History What we call democracy, in fact, was born in ancient Greece and had as its more or less explicit stakes the di√erentiation of the masculine body from nature and the mother, who was assimilated to the natural world. It was a matter of favoring the emergence of man as such, especially of his sexuate body, thanks notably to the constitution of a language, of a logic, and of a society formed only by men and between men. In such a cultural context, democracy served human individualization, at least up to a certain point. Man asserted his own forms—including in art—but the di√erence between one man and another man was not really taken into account. What was important was to emerge from a lack of di√erentiation with respect to nature, to the mother, and to any wholeness that could, in one way or another, substitute itself for her and cause the masculine individualization that had begun to assert itself to once again be lost. This masculine individualization was not carried out through a relation with the other. Man did not acquire an identity of his own by di√ering from a human individual other than himself—woman, beginning with woman in the mother—but by separating from her without any possible return thanks translated by heidi bostic, luce irigaray, and stephen pluháček no democracy without a culture of difference ∞Ω∑ to a relation between those who were the same, whose di√erence was only quantitative, or, one could also say, competitive. We know the importance of physical, even warlike, strength in this competition between men. And the importance of intellectual competence is not really all that di√erent from it, at least in its intention and its stakes. It is, however, at the level of the body that man remains closest to himself. This body will not receive an education that is truly appropriate to it. The culture that is put in place is a culture of the domination of matter, of the sensible, through a construction and a logic that are above all mental. One could say that the logos is the technique that Greek man defined and utilized in order to appropriate the world without wondering about the fundamental human alienation and exploitation that were thus put in place. Without the logos, the technological universe that is ours would not have become possible, nor its power of domination over humanity. In order to begin to individualize himself, man thus did not make use of the way of a relation to the other, in particular to the mother, but of a competitive conquest of the universe by and between those who are the same: men. In addition to sporting or even warlike competition, competition takes place through the appropriation of material or mental things. Man gains his individualization through appropriating a pregiven universe that becomes thing, object, body, and world that separate him from an original lack of di√erentiation from the living natural world. At first, this appropriation served a process of individualization in the masculine. But a concern for objectivity and universality gradually rendered neuter this construction of a world by the Greeks. The neuter has in a way occupied the place of relation in di√erence, an unrecognized qualitative di√erence this time. The neuter has become the arbiter of quantitative competitions between men, notably and exemplarily in the praetorium, but also in civil and political discourses and debates. A democracy established by and for men alone must be governed in the neuter, it alone being able to mask and regulate the competitive passions between those who are the same. The neuter has assumed a double function: to arbitrate the competition between quantitative di√erences, and to occupy or to cover up the place of a qualitative di√erence not taken into account and even repressed in this culture between men. The individualization...

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