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Towards a
New Human Being
Edited by
Luce Irigaray · Mahon O’Brien
Christos Hadjioannou
Towards a New Human Being
Luce Irigaray · Mahon O’Brien
Christos Hadjioannou
Editors

Towards a New
Human Being
Editors
Luce Irigaray Mahon O’Brien
Paris, France Department of Philosophy
University of Sussex
Christos Hadjioannou Brighton, UK
School of Philosophy
University College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland

ISBN 978-3-030-03391-0 ISBN 978-3-030-03392-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03392-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018964116

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

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 Contents

Part I A Different Way of Bringing Up and Educating

Children

How to Lead a Child to Flower: Luce Irigaray’s Philosophy

of the Growth of Children 3
Jennifer Carter

What a Child Can Teach Us 17

Maria Fannin

To Be Born a Girl? Irigaray, Sexuate Identity and the Girl 35

Elspeth Mitchell

From Desire to Be Born to Desire for Being Together

in the Philosophy of Luce Irigaray 51
Katarzyna Szopa

v
vi   Contents

Part II Constitution of a New Environment

and Sociocultural Milieu

Heidegger, the Fourfold and Luce Irigaray’s To Be Born:

An Architectural Perspective 73
Andrea Wheeler

“Testimony Against the Whole”: Examining the Limits

of Peace with Irigaray and Derrida 91
Harry Bregazzi

Politics of Relation, Politics of Love 109

Emma Reed Jones

Original Wonder: An Irigarayan Reading of the Genesis

Cosmology 129
Abigail Rine Favale

Faithful to Life 147

Phyllis H. Kaminski

Part III Questioning the Philosophical Background

of Our Culture

Re-founding Philosophy with Self-Affection 167

Andrew Bevan

Can Our Being in the World Remain in the Neuter? 185

Christos Hadjioannou

On Nietzsche and Pregnancy; The Beginning

of the Genesis of a New Human Being 199
Katrina Mitcheson
 Contents   vii

Nothing Against Natality 221

Mahon O’Brien

By Way of Epilogue: Some Words from the Contributors 243

 Notes on Contributors

Andrew Bevan is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Research in

Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London, UK. His
research centres on the turn to affect in philosophy and neurobiology.
He is the author of one other publication: ‘The Plasticity of Empathy’
in Thinking Catherine Malabou (2018).
Harry Bregazzi is a Ph.D. student in the School of Geographical
Sciences at the University of Bristol, UK. His research focuses on peace
as a geographical concept particularly regarding how peace processes are
shaped by, and contribute to, contemporary geopolitics.
Jennifer Carter is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Stony Brook University
in New York, USA. Her work is in twentieth and twenty-first century
continental philosophy, especially Luce Irigaray, phenomenology, and
the philosophy of touch. She completed her doctorate at Stony Brook
University, USA, in 2018 with a dissertation entitled Touch and Caress
in the Work of Luce Irigaray.
Maria Fannin is Reader in Human Geography at the University
of Bristol, UK. Her interests include the corporeal geographies of

ix
x   Notes on Contributors

pregnancy and birth. Her recent work focuses on scientific and cultural
understanding of the placenta and its role in maternal fetal relations.
Christos Hadjioannou is IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University
College Dublin, Ireland. He completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Sussex
University, UK, in 2015. His thesis was entitled The Emergence of
Mood in Heidegger’s Phenomenology. His main research interest lies
in Heidegger’s philosophy, with an emphasis on the affective elements
of his thought. He has co-edited a volume on Heidegger on Technology
(Routledge, 2018), and is currently editing a volume on Heidegger on
Affect (Palgrave, forthcoming).
Luce Irigaray is one of the leading thinkers of our age. She is the
author of more than thirty books translated into various languages, the
most recent of which are Sharing the World (2008), In the Beginning,
She Was (2012) and Through Vegetal Being (co-authored with Michael
Marder, 2016). She is also the co-editor (with Michael Marder) of
Building a New World (2015), a volume in which early-career research-
ers from her seminars explore new ways of thinking, in order to pro-
mote a world-wide community respectful of differences between the
sexes, generations, cultures and traditions.
Emma Reed Jones, Ph.D. is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist,
writer, and organizational consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area of
California, USA. Dr. Jones studied at the New School in New York City
before earning her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Oregon
in 2011. Her doctoral thesis developed the concept of ‘relational limit’
via a reading of Luce Irigaray’s work in dialogue with that of Martin
Heidegger and Jacques Lacan. Dr. Jones subsequently earned a Master’s
degree in Integral Counselling Psychology from the California Institute of
Integral Studies in San Francisco. Her work seeks to embody philosophical
thought in different forms—for instance through psychotherapy, embod-
ied spiritual practice, and artistic practice.
Phyllis H. Kaminski, Ph.D. Professor of Religious Studies at Saint Mary’s
College, Notre Dame, IN, USA, earned her doctorate in systematic theol-
ogy at the Toronto School of Theology, USA. She teaches undergraduate
 Notes on Contributors   xi

courses in religious studies, Catholic theology, and religion, sex, and gender.
Among her publications are ‘Thinking through the Daughter: Challenges
of Feminist Theory and Theology,’ in Themes in Feminist Theology for
the Third Millennium I (Villanova University Press, 2002); ‘Desire and
Contemplative Silence: A Feminist Exploration of Transformation
Within and Beyond Tradition,’ in The Shaping of Tradition: Context and
Normativity, Annua Nuntia Lovanienses 70 (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters
Publishers, 2013); and ‘Holy Mary, Holy Desire: Luce Irigaray and Saintly
Daughters,’ in Colby Dickinson, ed. The Postmodern ‘Saints’ of France.
(London: T&T Clark, 2013).
Elspeth Mitchell is a Research Associate in Practices and Theories of
Feminism and Art at Loughborough University, UK. She completed her
Ph.D. in 2018 at the University of Leeds, UK, with a thesis on theo-
ries of ‘the Girl’ and the moving image and recently published this work
in Australian Feminist Studies Journal. In 2016, Elspeth co-founded
Feminist Readings Network and is a member of the International
Research Network World Gender: cultural and political translation of
gender and gender studies.
Katrina Mitcheson is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University
of the West of England, UK. She has published on Nietzsche, Foucault
and the philosophy of art and is author of Nietzsche, Truth and
Transformation (2015).
Mahon O’Brien is senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of
Sussex, UK. His work is largely concerned with issues in phenomenol-
ogy, in particular, the work of Martin Heidegger. He has published two
books on Heidegger to date with another due to appear later this year.
He is also interested in the history of philosophy more broadly and is
currently working on a number of papers on Plato as well as some of
the central themes in twentieth century phenomenology.
Abigail Rine Favale is Assistant Professor of English at George
Fox University, USA. Her 2013 book Irigaray: Incarnation and
Contemporary Women’s Fiction was awarded the 2014 Feminist and
Women’s Studies Association Book Prize.
xii   Notes on Contributors

Katarzyna Szopa is Assistant Professor of Literary Studies in the

Institute of Polish Literary Studies at the University of Silesia in
Katowice, Poland. She specializes in literary studies, with additional
research interest in feminist theories, particularly in philosophy of
Luce Irigaray, to which she devoted her Ph.D. thesis. In 2014 she par-
ticipated in Luce Irigaray’s International Seminar at the University
of Bristol, UK. Recently she published a book Poetyka rozkwitania.
Różnica płciowa w filozofii Luce Irigaray [Poetics of Blossoming. Sexuate
Difference in Philosophy of Luce Irigaray], (2018).
Andrea Wheeler is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the
Iowa State University, USA, where she teaches classes on Green and
Sustainable Architecture and is a studio instructor. Her work is about
sustainable buildings: she cares about lifestyle change, the actual per-
formance of buildings and challenging the sustainability agenda in
architecture. Most recently she presented papers at conferences organ-
ized and hosted by the philosopher Luce Irigaray including ‘Thinking
Love’ at the University of Bristol, UK, in June of 2016 and To Be Born:
Genesis of a New Human Being at the University of Sussex, Department
of Philosophy, UK, in February 2017. She will be a visiting research fel-
low at the Center for Research in Arts Social Sciences and Humanities
(CRASSH) at The University of Cambridge, UK, in the Summer of
2019.
 Introduction: Creating the Background
for the Emergence of a New Human Being

It is unusual for an author to write the introduction of a book the back-

ground of which is inspired by their own work. This might seem pre-
tentious, narcissistic and above all disrespectful of the rules which are
presumed to guarantee the value and truth of the thought. But what
about these rules? And this truth? And do those who will most criti-
cize such an initiative call into question the Socratic or Platonic truth?
Or will they instead disapprove of this Introduction in the name of the
Socratic or Platonic way of thinking? And yet at that time the philoso-
phers lived and thought in a sort of friendly community, and they tried
to approach truth together. Truth was not imagined to be the result of
an aseptic academic training which required the thinkers to rigorously
separate living and thinking. To be a disciple, then, amounts to being a
kind of parrot which devotes its life to passing on the words of a master
in the most neutral and repetitive way. But what does neutrality mean
here? Where or what has become the vital energy which animated the
discovery of the truth conveyed by the work of the master? Does not
assenting to him or to her amount to sterilizing not only one’s own
potential to think but also to live, and passing on to others, especially to
younger researchers, a deadly legacy? Could this correspond to teaching

xiii
xiv   Introduction: Creating the Background for the Emergence …

truth? According to me, not at all. And the situation in which we are
today must incite us to care about life instead of promoting a deadly
culture.
Taking charge of our life is the main issue which has inspired the
writing of To Be Born. And this undertaking cannot stop at mere phys-
ical care, it also concerns cultural or spiritual becoming. Unfortunately,
our past culture has neither brought up nor educated us towards devel-
oping our life through an appropriate cultivation of it. Rather it has
separated the care corresponding to our physical needs from the one
which would correspond to our becoming humans through a cultiva-
tion of our mind. Furthermore, our human prematurity, as the artificial
character of our culture, made us dependent on parents or masters with-
out the possibility of discovering by ourselves how to develop and take
charge of our own being. For various reasons this sort of education and
culture no longer suits our epoch.
However, to think alone and in spite of a sociocultural background
is a heavy, and almost impossible undertaking for a living being—only
some ‘great men’ can succeed in carrying out such a task, according to
Hegel. Indeed, it is difficult to survive, what is more to develop, inde-
pendently of an appropriate background and milieu. We cannot con-
stantly emerge from our environment towards living and thinking in
spite of our sociocultural surroundings. It is not completely impossible
to do that thanks to relating to nature and some spiritual figures of the
past, but it may only ultimately be possible.
No doubt another support exists to ensure the development of our
life and of our thinking: the relation between two, basically the amo-
rous relation between two naturally different beings. And we cannot
leap over this relation if we want to build a new culture, one which can
overcome a metaphysics based on supra sensitive values without for all
that falling into a worse nihilism, in order to meet the requirements of
our epoch.
But why not attempt to also create a sociocultural milieu which sup-
ports our creative development? Why not bridge the divide between
private and public life—a divide that Hegel still sanctions? Why do we
consent to be neutralized, not to say castrated, individuals as soon as
we enter the public space? And what does it mean, in this case, to be a
 Introduction: Creating the Background for the Emergence …   xv

man or a woman? Does this not amount too often to a sort of regression
to an uncultured natural belonging in the darkness of some or other
bedroom, on one hand, and the endorsement of a natural or cultural
parental or filial role, on the other hand? Could this correspond to the
achievement of our human destiny? Obviously no. To be a man or to be
a woman cannot be reduced to having a sex and generating at best chil-
dren with it. It rather corresponds to being a living being endowed with
a morphological structure which determines its way of being and of
relating to itself, to the other(s) and to the world. To be sexuate means
to have a specific identity and subjectivity and to inhabit in a particular
way a world, the horizon and organization of which depend on a sexu-
ate belonging.
We have not yet discovered this aspect of our sexuation as well as the
potential of its creativity in exchanges which respect our mutual differ-
ence(s). And yet this can open a new cultural horizon which does not
confine itself to the family home but pervades all our world and our
culture. It even leads us to adopt another logic, because to share in dif-
ference constrains us to take on the negative of the particularity of our
own sexuate being, that is, the fact that we can never be or become the
other.
One of the changes that we little by little innovate in our meetings,
in particular those about To Be Born, is to think in a sexuate way and
in a mixing of the sexes. And this not only inaugurates the nucleus of
a more living and ethical cultural community, thanks to the respect for
mutual otherness, but also brings more quality, flavor and pleasure to
the exchanges. To listen to the words of a woman or of a man, instead
of to the abstract discourse of castrated individuals, introduces a sensi-
tive and even sensuous dimension into the talks and discussions. They
become the flowering of our lives and our desires and are no longer
more or less competitive and conflicting performances. Furthermore,
the consideration for the difference of the other teaches us the respect,
and even the taste, for meeting between beings belonging to other
countries, cultures and even other kingdoms—which are indeed present
in some texts of this book.
Behaving in a cultured way with others differently sexuated, we learn
how to train our instincts and drives. And this benefits our intimate,
xvi   Introduction: Creating the Background for the Emergence …

cultural and even civic and political lives and relations. Without our
knowing it, something else also happens: the traditional privilege of
sight is imperceptibly balanced by the intervention of touch. Academic
morality must not worry about that, we do not touch one another if
not through taking into account our sensitivity, our feelings, our desires.
Being together in an academic space no longer entails that we leave our
bodies outside, as our traditional education too often asked us to do. It
is instead an opportunity to train ourselves in behaving in a cultured,
friendly and fruitful manner as comprehensive beings. We are no longer
watching for each other with more or less competitiveness and invidious
comparative assessment. Instead, we endeavor to set together a mood
which favors the emergence and the development of thinking for each
of us. It is one of our ways of working on the arising of a new human
being and the happening of a new world.
There is no doubt that such an evolution cannot occur overnight.
However, anyone who participated in our collective seminars and con-
ferences would not deny that the atmosphere is different from the usual
ones and that he or she themselves have changed by taking part in our
meetings. The very few exceptions which do not agree with that corre-
spond to people who do not want to evolve at a personal or collective
level, who are too narcissistic, egocentric or blindly ambitious to per-
ceive the issue at stake, its relevance and its urgency. Then they leave or
are unwittingly dismissed.
But what if we do not take charge of the evolution of the human
being and of its world? Must we let this evolution result from entropy
and saturation? From our own exhaustion and being exceeded, even
destroyed, by our own creations? Or from conflicts and wars? Unless we
entrust our future destiny to the pressure of our various environments?
Is it not time for us instead to assume the responsibility of our evolution
without passively undergoing it?
Obviously we do more than behave differently when we meet and
work together. We also think differently. The collective mood that we
endeavor to create aims at that—at making researchers able not only to
repeat, to imitate, to comment on the work of their intellectual teachers
or masters, but to think by themselves and from their own experiences,
desires and lives. And if this gathering of texts has as its starting point
 Introduction: Creating the Background for the Emergence …   xvii

To Be Born, each contributor has treated what he or she received from

the book in their own way and in accordance with their own will. To Be
Born has created a background from which each had the opportunity to
be, to become, to think in a particular mode.
So, for example, some contributors have tackled, each in their own
way, the necessary changes in bringing up and educating the child
which are required in order to make possible the genesis of a new
human being. Jennifer Carter above all broaches the question of how
to bring up the little child towards a more achieved flowering of its
potential through favoring its meeting with other living beings, taking
into account its longings and considering its specific sexuate belonging.
Maria Fannin reflects on what a child can teach us, in a sort of reversal
of our usual mode of conceiving of education according to which we
impose on the child, as parents or teachers, our own ideas and views on
the human being and the world. Elspeth Mitchell analyzes the extreme
difficulty in which the little girl finds herself in our culture in order
to develop as a girl, and not merely as a daughter of the father, and
how remedying this problem could contribute to the evolution of our
humanity and of our world. Katarzyna Szopa interprets the paralyzing
impact on desire of our traditional conception of sexuality and family
model, which a new understanding and practice of sexuate difference
alone can overcome, liberating in this way desire from the trap of the
Oedipal triangle and the subjection to genealogy.
Other contributors have worked on the elaboration of a new environ-
ment, as specifically a way of dwelling or as the political or sociocultural
context in which we live. Starting from the thought of Heidegger about
the fourfold and a personal experience, Andrea Wheeler, who is an
architect, writes on the manner of building houses sustainable as such
but also for our development as sexuate living beings. Harry Bregazzi,
at a more political level, questions the means of creating and maintain-
ing a peaceful climate both by avoiding conflicts and wars, which result
from our identification as parts of a cohesive whole, and by cultivat-
ing a living together which is based on a new understanding of human
subjectivity. Following the project of Harry, in a way, Emma Jones crit-
icizes the current emphasis on identity politics, arguing that the true
issue is less identity as such than the manner in which identities can or
xviii   Introduction: Creating the Background for the Emergence …

cannot relate to one another in a positive and fruitful way. It was crucial
to consider in this volume whether a religious belonging can allow for
the emergence of a new human being because it is an element which
serves to define and divide different identities. The two contributors
who broach this topic treat it in an almost universal way. Abigail Rine
Favale, as she usually does, reads the oldest text of the Judeo-Christian
tradition, the Genesis, in a manner that unveils the divine relational
character of humanity, especially of its sexuate difference, an aspect of
the myth of creation that is still generally ignored and misapprehended,
whatever the positive words of Pope John Paul on this subject. Phyllis
Kaminski, who is a theologian, stresses the phenomenon of incarnation
as the manifestation of the absolute of life itself, the mediator of which
would be a woman, and the potential of which we ought to cultivate
towards a new humanity by breathing, using living words and develop-
ing a sexuate relational flesh.
The last four contributors write on theory itself, especially on phil-
osophical theory, which more than ever needs to be rethought given
the challenges that we are facing. Indeed the increasing power of the
sciences and technology as well as the multi- and inter-culturalism,
the Freudian discovery of the unconscious and of the importance of
sexuality, the women’s emancipation or liberation, the criticism of our
past metaphysics and of our subjection to supra sensitive values or the
impact of materialism and ecology, to quote only some of the most
pressing problems we have to solve, constrain the thinker to consider
how human subjectivity can be restructured and the truth redefined.
With this purpose in mind, some philosophers today search in the
work of past authors elements which could be envisioned in a new way.
Some others treat above all what our tradition has ignored, but often as
an opposition to it, which remains in the same logical horizon. In an
academic context many content themselves with criticizing past meta-
physics. However, if criticism is present in almost all the texts of this
volume, the atmosphere of our meetings and the tone and thinking of
To Be Born are such that no text stops at mere criticism. For example,
if the chapter written by Andrew Bevan is largely devoted to question-
ing Socrates’ thought as a practice of ‘dying while living’, he tries to
interpret this practice as a sort of self-affection which confines itself to
 Introduction: Creating the Background for the Emergence …   xix

a mental level and needs to be developed also at physical and sensitive

levels. Katrina Mitcheson analyzes how Nietzsche conceives of preg-
nancy, especially regarding the genesis of the overman, and she notes
that if the Nietzschean method aims at transforming the old man of the
West into a new human it still corresponds to a Platonic giving birth
because of the lack of intervention of the other, especially of the sexuate
other, in such a process, which thus remains an ideal solitary undertak-
ing. Christos Hadjioannou interprets To Be Born as a kind of ontolog-
ical turn reversing the focusing on death of Heidegger into a focusing
on birth, which, amongst other things, allows for the transformation
of a Dasein in the neuter into a sexuate Dasein, which we can assume
through cultivating our breathing and giving rhythm to our living exist-
ence. Mahon O’Brien meditates on the relation of Heidegger to a meta-
physics based on presence, and he wonders whether the nature of mood
which prevails in the Heideggerian work could or could not overcome
such metaphysics, given in particular his manner of behaving towards
and talking to his two main sexual partners: Elfride Heidegger, his wife,
and Hannah Arendt, one of his young mistresses.
There is no doubt that all the papers which compose this book con-
tribute towards the advent of a new human being: through a different
way of bringing up and educating children, through the constitution
of an other environment and sociocultural milieu or the criticism of
past metaphysics and the introduction of new themes into philosophy,
especially those of self-affection, of otherness and relationality, and an
attention paid to the cultivation of our natural belonging, as sexuate in
particular.
But what about the new being? In other words, the ontological
nature of the new human being remains as a background or a horizon.
It is presumed to exist without any word which could express it. Perhaps
it is always, and at best, the case when it is a question of our being.
Without the possibility of its seizure by any logos this being happens, it
is. And I am myself surprised when I am asked about the ontological or
mere empirical status of To Be Born.
For me, there is no doubt that To Be Born is essentially—if I allow
myself to use this word—a book on the ontological nature of a human
being capable of overcoming past metaphysics and nihilism. Could
xx   Introduction: Creating the Background for the Emergence …

I dare to suggest that this book meets the expectations and quests of
previous philosophers like, for example, Nietzsche, Heidegger and even
Merleau-Ponty? And, that a response to their waiting could come only
from a woman? But it is not merely a matter of a different way of think-
ing, it is also one of experiencing differently the real and the truth of
our being. Furthermore, and for this very reason, To Be Born is not
only the result of a process dependent on understanding, imagination
or even the will of one person alone. This book tries to bear witness to
an event—the advent of a new being born from the meeting between a
man and a woman.
The new being which then happens is not a child but a being born
of each to their own being. Of course, they were already conceived by
a man and a woman, they were already born but not born to their own
being. They give to one another this being. And being then acquires
an ontological dimension extraneous to supra sensitive values, which
exempts them from searching for it outside of themselves and their
relation. Indeed, ‘to be’ never concerns only one being but the relation
between beings, beginning with two beings. To be is the copula which
unites them towards being.
We always try to capture being in an identity. But being, in par-
ticular our own being, results from a conjunction and can neither be
nor develop or flower without con-joining. To speak of being, and of
a new being as such is thus impossible. Being remains always an event
or advent to which we can give birth through our way of conjoining
one another. It seems to me that this care is present in some or other
way in all the papers gathered in this volume. The authors have thus all
contributed to the genesis of a new human being, even if they cannot
anticipate or know what or who it will be.
However, an aspect, which plays a crucial role in the possible genesis
of a new human being, is scarcely treated by the contributors, that of
the importance of the structure of discourse, of logos, in the determi-
nation of our being. And yet this element is broached in many parts of
To Be Born. Even the question of the linguistic status of the copula—to
be—and of its logical relation to or substitution for the living origin of
our being is considered. As long as the focus is not put on the articula-
tion of our discourse and our logic with the real, especially the real that
 Introduction: Creating the Background for the Emergence …   xxi

we are—in particular as far as the use of ‘to be’, ‘being’ ‘is’ or ‘are’ etc.
is concerned—we cannot really give birth to another human being. We
have first to understand that we are trapped within an ontological circle
which cuts us off from our living origin and conceives of presence in an
artificially constructed way.
We were born from a conjunction between two, and two who were
naturally different. If it intends to say the truth, the discourse, especially
the one about being, must take into account this original real of our
existence. Until then we remain subjected to a meaning which encloses
us in a fictitious horizon within which we are transformed into products
of an illusory conception, which paralyzes the dynamism and becom-
ing of our body and of our mind. And any judgment, negation or
denial can then be efficient in freeing us from a past metaphysical truth
because they act at another level than that of our living being. Instead,
they imprison us more and more in the labyrinth of a fictitious reality.
Only the negation applied to our natural being can be effective: I am a
woman, I am not a man, and I am not the conjunction who gave birth
to me either. Thus we have first to acknowledge the existence of two
beings, not to say of three, with their respective worlds, discourses and
truths, and wonder about the way in which they can conjoin with one
another. This will allow us to overstep the limits of the vicious circle and
the dead end within which we are trapped and to endeavor to give birth
to a new human being, beginning with our own.

December 2017 Luce Irigaray

 Part I
A Different Way of Bringing Up and
Educating Children
 How to Lead a Child to Flower:
Luce Irigaray’s Philosophy
of the Growth of Children
Jennifer Carter

A tree or a flower contain a wordless wisdom that can pass directly from
them to a child. It is not only such wisdom that is conveyed in Luce
Irigaray’s To Be Born. The book’s themes range from a perspective for a
collaborative construction of a new way of living for the coming gen­
erations, to bridging the spiritual and cultural divide between men and
women. But a major theme of the book concerns the way in which we,
as human beings, may not only bring to fruition our potentialities as
adults living and developing together, but also may be able to think
about children and childhood, about what it means to grow as a child
and throughout one’s life, as well as how to be a carer for children.
There are many original lessons to be learned in such a domain, made
all the more dramatically urgent because such a thinking of the begin-
nings of human life, of the growth of children and adults, and especially
of the relations between adults and children, has rarely been taken up
by philosophers. And when it has been, it was usually for demonstrating
a universal principle, teaching a moral, or illustrating another point.

J. Carter (*)
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA
© The Author(s) 2019 3
L. Irigaray et al. (eds.), Towards a New Human Being,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03392-7_1
4    
J. Carter

In the case of To Be Born, Irigaray has in mind something at once more

distinct and more comprehensive than, to take an example, that which
Rousseau aims at in his Emile. Whereas Rousseau seeks to demon-
strate the conflict the (boy) child endures to emerge from nature into
the social world, Irigaray’s To Be Born traces the child’s growth and the
­significance of its interactions with the other(s) as well as the peculiar
qualities of its relation with itself.
The being of the child, which is one of the focuses of To Be Born,
does not amount to some general and fixed model. Irigaray is as much
concerned with the child him or herself as she is with the adult that he
or she will become, and thus also with the material and spiritual situa-
tions that the child encounters or brings about. This situates her book
in a really special place amongst other discussions on childhood occur-
ring in philosophy. Another feature which differentiates To Be Born is
the attention that Irigaray pays to the internal growth and feeling of the
child, contrasting with the usual focus on the external growth and the
manifestations of child as a mere organism.
In addition to an extensive meditation on what it is to be a child and
what it means for a child to be growing, To Be Born imparts some uni-
versal lessons. One of them tackles what growing means for a human
beyond the merely physical aspect. Indeed, while there are elements of
growth that pertain particularly to a child, others relate to the special
way of growing that corresponds to humanity as such. Similarly, while
we can learn in To Be Born some specific lessons about the relations
between adults and children, that is, between persons belonging to
different generational stages, we can draw from it, too, specific lessons
about relations between and among the sexes, and within and across
generations.
The book is at once a demonstration of what sorts of radical insights
can be gained when we turn our attention to a topic so familiar, and yet
so philosophically unexplored to date, as children and childhood. But it
is also an acknowledgement of how truly new in certain ways our think-
ing about the generations is, and consequently, how we ought to open
ourselves to novelty in such a domain. To Be Born particularly invites us
to pay attention to the singularity of each human being and their own
 How to Lead a Child to Flower …    
5

creativity, and to the necessity of a generative quality of thinking about

creativity, since to be creative corresponds to being living, particularly a
living human. We learn, moreover, that a child is responsible for its own
growth, and that this growth amounts to a sort of transcending itself—a
process in which it must continuously engage itself during its entire
life. And finally what it is to relate between generation is, in fact, to
actualize someone and something new. Thus we cannot really anticipate
what the next epoch or the future phase of human development will be,
either for the single child or for the whole generation. Yet this ought
not to prevent us from thinking about what sorts of conditions might
foster or stifle such a generative process. There are ways of thinking and
ways of being in relation that can lead children to their flowering, but
there are practices and habits of thought that end in leading astray their
growth and being a drag on creativity. A major point in To Be Born is
Irigaray’s emphasis on the many self-giving births and rebirths that are
undertaken by the child—and by all of us. Not only does the child ini-
tiate their birth-giving, but they must continue to be the initiator of
their own re-birth and regeneration throughout their life. The child, not
anyone else, is the one whose will to live allows it to be born: to pass
from water to air, from weightlessness to gravity, from receiving suste-
nance from the mother’s blood to feeding by itself. As Irigaray writes,
“Even if it has been conceived by two and it began its human existence
in the body of an other, [the child] is the one who, alone, decided to
come into the universe of the living. […] We were also the ones who
gave birth to ourselves through our first breathing” (To Be Born, p. 1).
The moment of birth presents a great danger for the child: it might not
succeed in breathing by itself, and thus it might die. But coming into
the world is also a way for the child to transcend itself by passing from
a mode of being—being in the womb—to something altogether new. It
is this act of self-transcendence—transcending by oneself one’s present
condition, one’s present being, into something radically new—which
truly characterizes the way of growing of a child, but more generally of
the whole human life. In order to be a human being, we must be always
creative; that is, we must not only live but also continuously pass from a
stage or state of being to another, towards achieving our being.
6    
J. Carter

The Child’s Encounter with Living Beings

The child is not just passively delivered into a new state. He or she must
actively will their being-living to happen even if they do not consciously
know what they are doing. This is a first occasion to transcend them-
selves by themselves, but it also represents a paradigm of the series of
self-transcending that must characterize the continuous growth of a
human being. What is radical about this way of perceiving birth as a
form of transcendence is the understanding that far from being a com-
pletely helpless little organism, the infant is already in charge of the
most important and most necessary aspect of its existence: its life as a
self-transcendence. Although these aspects may be foregrounded for the
caregivers whose job it is to aid the little human in meeting its most
basic needs, helplessness and dependence dramatically contrast with
the act of courage the newborn achieves when passing from fetal life to
autonomous life. Thus, parents and other carers find it easy to ignore
the real struggle that the infant faces: not merely to survive but to tran-
scend itself. “Few adults,” Irigaray writes, “perceive the struggle, in a way
the ontological struggle, which goes on within this little being…” (op.
cit., p. 8). Adults choose instead to focus on the child’s physical needs.
They do this partly because it is simpler, and it is easier than contem-
plating the reality of the difficulties and joys that the infant experiences.
But they do this also partly because our culture(s) and education sys-
tems do not emphasize, and certainly do not promote, the cultivation of
such living forces, primarily and critically those related to breathing—
but also to moving, and relating to the other(s), notably with respect
for sexuate difference. Carers see the infant as a collection of vital needs,
and they almost entirely ignore the efforts made by the newborn in
trying to solve the ‘enigmas’ that it faces: for instance, the oscillations
between daylight and darkness, noise and silence, scent and scentless-
ness, a world which both changes and remains the same (idem), enigmas
which the baby eventually solves for him or herself.
Parents and carers are inclined to see the infant primarily as depend-
ent on them and needy. They tend to treat the infant as if the satisfac-
tion of its needs by the adults were its sole concern; they mostly ignore
or forget the understanding of the infant as a living being, and thereby
 How to Lead a Child to Flower …    
7

they do not respect the “autonomy” that he or she gained in breathing

by themselves (op. cit., p. 2). What parents and carers across cultures are
already taking up the true challenge that the child faces: to be subjected
to its culture, on the one hand, and in charge of it, on the other? The
child finds him or herself emerging in a culture which, in most cases,
subjects it to religious ideals, which traditionally are “supra sensible,”
or to ideals that are merely abstract, and not appropriately suited for
a natural growth and development. Irigaray writes, “being faithful to
our own nature does not mean confining ourselves to that which our
tradition calls our natural needs, but entails the cultivation of our nat-
ural belonging until its human achievement, including that of our rela-
tional attractions and our sublime aspirations” (op. cit., pp. 2–3). She is
then speaking not only about the way contemporary Western cultures
bring up children, but also about the philosophical approach to being a
human. In part, the lack of focus on children is already symptomatic of
a philosophical culture which favors metaphysical projects and abstract
methodologies and languages. She writes about the traditional Western
approach to subjectivity,

Instead of being really concerned with integrating the different stages of

our becoming human, subjectivity has been constituted only from certain
aspects: those capable of dominating natural growth through categories
and principles which are imposed on it from the outside or from on high
as modalities presumed suitable for human development. (op. cit., p. 15)

Irigaray already made clear to us that children as well as adults are sub-
jected to forces that are more or less alien to, or at least are inconsist-
ent with their development as natural living beings. But she takes a step
further in her analysis, suggesting that a child “will be asked to sub-
mit its natural growth to meta-physical requirements already defined,
the origin of which is not in its body [...]” (idem). What is the signif-
icance of this beyond naming the apparently inescapable effects of
undergoing subjection to virtually any cultural institution, one of which
having perhaps turned out to be a crushing machine? Asking the child
to turn the motions of its growth over to the external pre-defined meta-
physical requirements will, Irigaray writes, “paralyze its growth and tear
8    
J. Carter

it between a motion of which it is the source as living being and other

movements to which it is subjected and which transform it into a sort
of fabricated product, the mechanical functioning of which is dependent
on an energy external to it, at least in part” (idem, emphasis mine).
For Irigaray, the matter is not just one of institutional power relations
as well as economic, technologic, or political forces appropriating the
being of the child through their ordinary practical means—for instance,
by subjecting children to advertising that transforms them into subjects
of capitalism, or by habituating them to interacting mainly with little
computers. There is no doubt that these sorts of subjections—to politics,
to capitalism, to technology—do happen, and make living, grow-
ing, and relating to other human beings more difficult for children.
However, it is not only the institutional structures that tend to distort
children’s spiritual growth. It is also a lack of encountering living beings
within their milieu. Irigaray writes, “Only living beings come into pres-
ence by themselves and offer the little child, who opens up to them,
their own opening to its world” (op. cit., p. 21). Thus we must also
be concerned by the fact that the child may not, or probably will not
predominately encounter living beings, especially in nature, but rather
an environment filled with fabricated products. These can never fulfill
the aspirations of the child, or spark in it the creative desire that living
beings can spark. As Irigaray writes,

Different appearances of life will fertilize one another, and the opening up
of the child to the world will contribute towards its own blossoming as
living—which cannot occur if the child is surrounded only by fabricated
objects, the existence of which already amounts to human work and does
not provide a living presence and energy in a will. (op. cit., p. 22)

The Child’s Own Longings

Instead of the child’s development corresponding with the cultivation of
a natural belonging, it is subjected, at every level, to external purposes,
be they institutional or metaphysical. The child finds itself subject to
“categories and principles which are imposed on it from the outside or
 How to Lead a Child to Flower …    
9

from on high as modalities presumed suitable for human development”

(op. cit., p. 15). Not only is the child surrounded by fabricated products
in the environment where it lives and is presupposed to develop, but he
or she is also subjected to requirements concerning the way of growing
imposed from the outside on what could otherwise be faithful to a nat-
ural growth. These sorts of “techniques,” Irigaray writes,

by substituting themselves for the motion of a natural growth, will para-

lyze and distort it […]. Using techniques—including those presupposed by
our traditional logos […] to support our natural evolution, ends in the lat-
ter’s domination […] Then human being becomes a kind of manufactured
product, whose accomplishment will be subjected to an idea—an eidos— of
the human element which results from a culture instead of being a flower-
ing of its natural belonging, notably into a fleshly face. (op. cit., p. 15–16)

As the child, being born into the world, is never allowed to grow by itself
because it depends on others to meet its physical needs, it thus becomes
confused between its own natural growth and the ways of being imposed
on it, some of them coming from the ideological tradition of its culture,
and others from the fact that it was born into an already-constructed
world. Irigaray writes: “To be, for a human, will never amount to blos-
soming in accordance with its life or being present in its real achieve-
ment—one could say that it will never bloom according to its own face”
(op. cit., p. 16). Partly because of its dependence on other beings for
­satisfying its physical needs, and partly because of its being “bent to con-
structed imperatives that do not participate in the same energy” (idem),
the child’s quest for growing into a human being is diverted from its
course, and, when it should have grown up to be a human, it has instead
become a product of external forces without having grown in and as itself.
The remedy for the situation the child finds itself in, being thrown
into an already-constructed world, would be for the child to return to
itself by self-affecting so as to discover its own appropriate way of grow-
ing. The child, in various ways, ought to learn its limits. If we consider
the paucity of thinking, philosophical or otherwise, that goes into the
perception of limits as limitations, demarcations, and boundaries, both
physical and ontological, of the human subject, we must conclude that
10    
J. Carter

the question of learning our limits has scarcely been explored. Children
as well as adults are confronted with the fact that there is no teaching,
no tradition which allows them to perceive a framework within which
they can confidently explore. Indeed, limits are usually imposed on the
child either by a set of artificial boundaries, which are designed to keep
the child safe but at the same time prevent it from learning by itself.
Lacking a suitable education regarding its own limits and manners of
being, the child can easily cross the boundaries of its own safety. It is
prone to exceed these limits by almost boundless movements and explo-
rations which might give any satisfaction—unless, as Irigaray argues,
the child finds itself in nature surrounded by living beings. Often, even
when in nature, children are kept confined and allowed only to explore
with their eyes and not with their whole bodies, notably through touch,
taste, sound, and smell. Only if children are able to engage with the
world through more of their senses will they get the nourishment and
energy that their boundless explorations seek. And children need to
return to themselves again and again to free themselves from the exter-
nally imposed and programmed growing up; they also ought to encoun-
ter other living beings, human, animal, or vegetal. After all, Irigaray
asks, “If the child opens out to a world which is no longer opening to it,
what will happen to its own becoming?” (op. cit., p. 21)
We might also reflect on the fact that the other humans the child meets
are subject to the same or similar imposition of an external order on their
own growth and that, when they ought to provide the child with resources
for self-affecting or meeting other living beings, in particular meeting other
humans, the carers themselves “are endowed with a greater capacity for
surviving by cutting themselves off from their natural belonging, which
deprives them of their vital potential and even renders them unable to offer
the child a model of blossoming faithful to its nature” (op. cit., p. 22).

The Child’s Sexuate Being

The remedy for this conflicting situation lies in addressing the quandary
the children find themselves in, and, at the same time, bringing spiritual
resources to the adults, first through words and ideas which help them
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