Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline

Ethical Desires: Toward a Theology of Relational Transcendence

 Ethical Desires: Toward a Theology of Relational Transcendence M AY R A R I V E R A ‘‘Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness,’’ writes Octavio Paz in Double Flame. The supreme otherness of God—theologians call it ‘‘divine transcendence.’’ Eroticism thus suggests a link between human otherness and divine transcendence . In its most common versions, however, divine transcendence seems not to enhance the awareness of interhuman otherness, but rather to so relativize difference as to effectively absorb otherness into itself. Indeed, ‘‘transcendence’’ is assumed to be what God has and humans do not. Thus the otherness of God and the otherness of creatures, the love for God and interhuman relations are distanced from one another. The work of Emmanuel Levinas reacts against this dichotomy. The ‘‘gleam of transcendence in the face of the Other,’’ Levinas’s crucial formulation , seeks to turn discourses of transcendence away from dreams of an otherworldly realm, toward the concrete reality of other persons. Bringing transcendence to bear on the ethical encounter between human beings, Levinas’s work has influenced philosophies and theologies of liberation as well as poststructuralist thought. However, Levinas sets apart the sexual encounter and ultimately opposes ethics to eroticism. This is a common dichotomy that threatens Levinas’s critical reformulation of transcendence. Luce Irigaray’s reading of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity not only exposes the problem but also opens his proposal toward the possibility of an ‘‘ethics of sexual difference.’’ Her interrogation of the role that Levinas assigns to the feminine in the production of transcendence will 256 兩 t o wa r d a t h e ol o g y o f e ro s help us uncover the implicit gendering of Levinas’s transcendence as well as the spatio-temporality that it assumes. And yet her transcendence also closes itself around predetermined types of encounters. After a brief synopsis of Irigaray’s assessment of classic philosophical notions of transcendence, this essay will trace the move from Levinas’s face-to-face to Irigaray’s body-to-body encounter and its effect on the spatio-temporal imaginary of transcendence. We will explore the interpenetration of transcendence in the flesh and between persons as well as its broader cosmic dimensions, where transcendence appears as erotic cosmological incarnation. This breadth requires, paradoxically, greater singularity. The work of Chicana scholars Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga will allow us to move beyond Irigaray’s images of the body, to see the body in the singularity of its multiple differences and limitations. DISEMBODIED TRANSCENDENCES Luce Irigaray argues that ‘‘the philosophers’’ rightly recognized their need for transcendence as a basis for the becoming of subjectivity, as an external limit to their subjectivity, but also as a telos for their intentionality .1 These philosophers, Irigaray reminds us, ‘‘were men and they were debating between men. Their solution was, of course, a masculine one.’’2 As we know, they conceived the journey toward transcendence as entailing the overcoming of their own bodies—indeed of materiality as such— which they viewed as constraints to freedom. They projected these constraints onto women, positing a God as the ‘‘opposite pole of their instincts and natural inclinations.’’ God would be their external limit and the objective toward which their intentions could be guided.3 They proposed : ‘‘The subject develops between . . . two extremes: nature and God, nature and spirit, mother-nature and father-Logos, irreducible birth and absolute creation.’’4 An imaginary rift is thus opened between nature and God, which in turn divides spirit from nature and birth from creation. God was their other, perhaps their only transcendent Other, for the masculinist culture ignored the transcendent character of the body, of bodies, of the cosmos. Thus, Irigaray calls us to turn back to the relation between the sexes for a sexual or carnal ethics—an ethics of the passions.5 ‘‘Transcendence is no longer ecstasy, going out of the self toward the m a yr a r iv e r a 兩 257 inaccessible, extra-sensible, extra-earthly entirely-other.’’6 But Irigaray is not expounding pure immanence. Rather than choosing one side of the immanence/transcendence cosmological divide opened by the philosophers ’ transcendence, Irigaray interrogates its assumptions. She seeks a model for the relations between nature and God, nature and spirit, flesh and transcendence, that allows spirit to touch the most intimate spaces of life. A...