Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 10, May 2002
Joshua Shaw
Struggling to See the Light
Cathryn Vasseleu _Textures of Light: Vision
and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and
Merleau-Ponty_ London: Routledge,
1997 ISBN 041514233 (hbk)
0415142741 (pbk) 157 pp. 1 Cathryn Vasseleu's _Textures
of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and
Merleau-Ponty_ is an exciting but frustrating book.
Vasseleu's goal is ambitious: she suggests that Luce
Irigaray's writings have been significantly underestimated.
Irigaray is often lumped together with other French feminist
and deconstructionist philosophers. She is read as one of
many French theorists who have sought to expose the male
biases in Western philosophy and, in particular, to show how
metaphors involving light and vision, metaphors with a
venerable history in philosophy, have served to perpetuate
these biases. Vasseleu argues that this reading of Irigaray
underestimates her originality. Irigaray isn't simply an
anti-visual theorist; she doesn't merely decry philosophy's
complicity in occularcentrism or, to borrow a term from
Martin Jay's _Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth Century_, 'phallogocularcentrism'. [1] She
also tries to rethink vision and light in terms of
femininity and touch. She not only exposes, that is, how the
feminine has been excluded from the light of reason in
philosophy; she charts out a new 'feminine investment' of
light by showing how vision is dependent on, but not
necessarily reducible to, the texture of light or touch of
light on the eye. Vasseleu motivates this
reading of Irigaray by showing how Irigaray's remarks on
vision and illumination both take up and transcend those of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas. Merleau-Ponty
and Levinas can be read, she suggests, as seeking to
undermine the dominant characterizations of vision and light
in Western philosophy. Merleau-Ponty seeks to show how
subject-object relations, which have generally been analyzed
in terms of vision, can be reduced to modulations of
'flesh'. Levinas also seeks to overturn the centrality of
light and vision in philosophy, albeit on the grounds that
philosophy's preoccupation with light and vision is
symptomatic of its hostility toward the transcendence of the
human Other. Levinas develops an account of sensibility, in
turn, that links sensibility with passivity -- with
vulnerability, exposedness, the potential to be
wounded. Vasseleu presents Irigaray
as deepening these interventions. Irigarary recognizes, in
particular, certain shortcomings in each philosopher's work,
moments when their occularcentrism coaxes them to accept the
very type of position they seek to reject -- moments when
they inadvertently treat touch as if it were a type of
vision and thus reduce it to another element in the 'scopic
economy'. By contrast, Irigaray clearly distinguishes touch
from vision: neither is reducible to the other. She also
argues, however, that vision is rooted in touch. Irigaray
here focuses on the play of light on the eye, on what
Vasseleu calls 'the texture of light' (11). Vision is made
possible by the contact of light on the eye; it is a product
of the eye being touched by light. Vision, then, flows out
of a kind of erotic experience, an experience that is best
characterized in terms of penetration, dazzlement, ecstasy,
and pain. Vision is founded, as Vasseleu puts it, on 'erotic
light' (121). This approach to Irigaray is exciting and
worthwhile. As other reviewers have noted, it opens up new
possibilities for feminist theorists interested in retaining
an appreciation for the significance of light and vision. It
invites us, in short, to distinguish feminism from
anti-visualism. [2] Vasseleu's approach to Irigaray
is also consistent with Irigaray's insistence that her
writings be read as philosophic texts. Irigaray's point in
insisting on the philosophic status of her work is,
presumably, to highlight the way in which the Western
philosophic canon shapes the limits of intelligibility.
Irigaray's goal has been to intervene in this tradition --
to expose the male biases it perpetuates and chart out forms
of intelligibility it has so far eclipsed. Given the
venerability of metaphors of light and vision in Western
philosophy, it seems appropriate to read Irigaray as trying
to return, as it were, to Plato's cave to retrieve a fresh
understanding of illumination. My sense, though, is that
championing this reading of Irigarary proves to be a little
too ambitious. _Textures of Light_ often feels as if it is
torn between conflicting impulses. On the one hand, Vasseleu
tries to walk her readers through some very dense passages
in Merleau-Ponty's and Levinas's notoriously difficult
writings. This is ambitious unto itself, especially since
many of the topics she discusses (touch, embodiment, vision,
illumination) have received relatively little attention in
secondary scholarship on these thinkers. (This is the case,
I would argue, in scholarship on Levinas.) On the other
hand, she also tries to show how Irigaray deepens the
reconsiderations of vision, illumination, and touch begun by
these thinkers -- to show, in short, how Irigaray's work
inaugurates a new understanding of erotic light. It isn't clear to me,
however, that she succeeds in either of these tasks. Again,
I had the sense that these competing pressures -- to
elucidate Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, and to pioneer a new
understanding of Irigaray's place in philosophy -- pulled
Vasseleu in different directions. The effect, I think, was
that she wasn't quite able to pull off either goal. Her
exegesis of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas is informative, but it
is often only marginally clearer than texts she seeks to
explain. At the same time, the bulk of _Textures of Light_
is devoted to this exegesis. It is thus difficult to accept
some of her more ambitious claims on behalf of Irigaray's
importance in her Introduction, the closing pages of her
section on Levinas, and her Conclusion. For she simply has
not said enough in the intervening sections, or at least not
clearly and forcefully said enough, to make her analysis of
Irigaray compelling. (At least not, I think, to someone who
doesn't already share her convictions about Irigaray's
importance.) 2 Vasseleu divides her book
into four parts. Parts I and IV, her Introduction and
Conclusion, are devoted to her reading of Irigaray. Parts II
and III focus on discussions of light, vision, touch, and
embodiment in Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. Each of these
exegetical sections begins with a general introduction to
Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. These introductions are then
followed by more focused studies of Merleau-Ponty's and
Levinas's remarks on illumination, vision, touch, and
embodiment. Let me briefly review what I take to be the key
points of Vasseleu's argument. I should preface my remarks,
however, by admitting that I found much of Vasseleu's book
to be vague, and I may be amplifying on claims she makes in
it in ways she might not accept. That said, the following
gloss represents, I think, some of her more pivotal
claims. Vasseleu's aim in Part I, as
I noted above, is to propose that the significance of
Irigaray's characterization of touch, vision, and
illumination hasn't been appreciated. Metaphors involving
light and illumination have played, of course, a vital role
in Western philosophy. One thinks of Plato's allegory of the
cave, divine illumination in Augustine, Descartes's *lumen
naturale*, or the reference to light in terms like
enlightenment or *Aufklarung*. Philosophers have often
turned to metaphors of light and vision to help them explain
the nature, methods, and goals of philosophy. Jacques
Derrida has recently argued that these metaphors in fact
play a foundational role in philosophy. Metaphors involving
light and vision aren't mere rhetorical devices philosophers
have used to decorate their prose; light is the suggestive
metaphor that launches the very enterprise of philosophy.
'Derrida argues', Vasseleu explains, 'that light is not just
one metaphor used in philosophy, but the metaphor which
founds the entire system of metaphysics of metaphoric truth'
(7). Irigarary deepens this
analysis. She accepts Derrida's claim about light as a
founding metaphor of philosophy, but she is more concerned
with the way this metaphor has served to erase sexual
difference. On Irigaray's analysis, it isn't so much that
Western philosophy hides its metaphoric origins through its
use of light-metaphors. The attraction behind these
metaphors is rather that they serve to suppress the
'maternal origin' (7) of philosophy by perpetuating a kind
of myth of auto-origination. Irigarary goes beyond
deconstructionist theorists, in turn, in that she offers a
positive account of light that doesn't exclude the feminine.
Again, the real challenge isn't simply to record the fact
that femininity has been excluded from light but to sketch
out a feminine investment of light. Irigaray achieves this goal,
for Vasseleu, by refining our sense of the relation between
touch and vision. Philosophers have often singled out vision
as the finest sense, and they have employed metaphors
involving vision to illustrate logical or epistemological
claims. (Thus we say that we 'see' how an argument works, or
we struggle to 'shed light' on passages in a philosopher's
work so we can 'see' her main argument.) This
characterization of vision has influenced, in turn, how
philosophers have discussed the other senses. Vision's
preeminence has led them to treat touch as if it were a type
of vision: feeling the rough texture of sandpaper on the
tips of your fingers is thought to be analogous to seeing a
shade of color in a painting. More accurately, philosophers
have tended to analyze both touch and vision as if they
involved a kind of disembodied, cognitive 'seeing'. By
contrast, Irigarary tries to show that touch cannot be
reduced to a mode of vision, and that a revised, subtler
understanding of touch 'invites a reconsideration of the
constitution of vision' (17). Vasseleu presents Irigaray
as focusing, in turn, on the 'texture or touch of light' in
her analysis of vision. Our capacity for sight is, she
suggests, founded on the play of light on the eye. Yet this
suggests that vision is grounded in tactility. For the eye
doesn't so much see light; it feels its brilliance. 'Light
is experienced', Vasseleu explains, 'as a non-rational
subjection to feelings such as being penetrated, dazzlement,
ecstasy, and pain' (12). Irigaray thinks of vision, then, as
being distinct from touch but dependent on it. Vision is
born of an erotic act of touching, an act in which the
distinction between subject and object, viewer and viewed,
perceiver and perceived are blurred. 'The indeterminacy of
the body in touch', Vasseleu explains, 'is the basis of an
erotically constituted threshold of immersion in the visual'
(12). 3 As I noted before,
Vasseleu's strategy for motivating this reading of Irigaray
is to show how her work builds upon and transcends that of
Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. She discusses Merleau-Ponty's
phenomenological analysis of 'flesh' in Part II of _Textures
of Light_. Vasseleu presents Merleau-Ponty as trying to show
how subject-object relations can be understood in terms of
touch. Merleau-Ponty uses the example of one hand rubbing
another to illustrate his understanding of touch. Suppose I
rub my hands together: Does my right hand touch my left
hand? Or does my left hand touch my right? Is my right hand
touched, or is it the agent doing the touching? It seems as
if my skin quivers between these possibilities.
Merleau-Ponty suggests that this ambivalence is paradigmatic
of touch. To be an embodied being, a being that touches and
is touched by the world, is to be a site where this
ambivalence occurs. Thus Vasseleu refers to Merleau-Ponty as
a 'philosopher of ambiguity' (75). Merleau-Ponty tries to
show how subject-object relations, which have generally been
analyzed in epistemological terms like 'knower' and 'known',
or in visual terms like 'viewer' and 'viewed', are reducible
to opposing poles of this primal ambivalence that occurs at
the level of 'flesh'. Vasseleu considers a
different type of critique of philosophy's obsession with
vision and light when she turns to Levinas in Part III of
_Textures of Light_. Levinas's remarks on light, vision, and
touch are motivated by his concern to honor transcendence of
what he calls 'the human Other'. The danger in philosophy's
obsession with vision and light, for him, is that it's
symptomatic of philosophy's relentless quest to comprehend
all of reality, to see all of reality exposed to the light
of reason. Philosophy's obsession with light renders it
hostile, in turn, to all that resists conceptualization and,
consequently, to the transcendence of other men and women.
Thus Levinas has an ethical impetus for critiquing the role
of light and vision in philosophy, and a major goal of his
work, on Vasseleu's reading, is to give an account of
sensation that isn't hostile to alterity in this way.
Levinas achieves this goal by shifting focus from vision to
touch. He critiques the emphasis on intentional,
theoretical, quasi-visual consciousness in philosophy, and
he emphasizes instead a notion of touch that conceives of
sensibility in terms of passivity. To be a sensate being, to
be a creature that is capable of sensation, isn't, for
Levinas, a matter of being an active agent that sees the
world. Sensibility rather consists in being exposed to the
world: it consists in vulnerability, the possibility of
being wounded. 4 I want to limit myself to
Vasseleu's commentary on Levinas in presenting my concerns,
which have more to do with Vasseleu's writing style and some
overall shortcomings of her book rather than with the
accuracy of her claims about Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and
Irigaray. This distinction between style and content is, of
course, a hard one to maintain. Nonetheless, I find it
helpful in articulating my dissatisfaction to say that I am
less troubled by Vasseleu's arguments, insofar as I
understand them, than I am by the way she presents them to
her readers. It isn't so much that she says anything wrong,
but she simply doesn't say enough to make her reading of
Irigaray convincing. Worse, much of what she says is too
vague to be helpful. I take these to be general flaws of
_Textures of Light_. I am more confident, however, about my
grasp of Levinas than Merleau-Ponty, and I will have an
easier time presenting my concerns if I restrict myself to
those sections of _Textures of Light_ that deal directly
with Levinas's work. What I am calling the
'exegetical sections' of _Textures of Light_, the sections
devoted to Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, are at times quite
informative. Indeed, I found them to be helpful on two
levels. Vasseleu prefaces her commentaries on Merleau-Ponty
and Levinas with introductions to each philosopher's work.
These introductions were quite good; I would recommend them
to students who want to know more about Merleau-Ponty and
Levinas but who may need guidance approaching their work.
Vasseleu also focuses on themes in Levinas that have not
received enough attention in secondary scholarship on him.
Levinas is remembered for his claims about the priority of
ethics. But his writings are extremely rich. He discusses a
wide range of topics, and it is refreshing to see someone
writing on themes that have been somewhat ignored in
secondary scholarship on him. Nonetheless, I often found
Vasseleu's remarks on Levinas to be frustrating. Her
explanatory remarks were often only marginally less opaque
than the passages in Levinas she sought to explain. It also
seemed to me that she tended to pass over some of the more
challenging passages in Levinas in situating his work in
relation to Irigaray's. Let me give an example. A key portion of Vasseleu's
discussion of Levinas focuses on Levinas's remarks on eros
at the end of _Totality and Infinity_. Vasseleu suggests
that Irigaray is right to worry that Levinas here excludes
femininity from light and vision by identifying the feminine
with the 'dark abyss' (106) that is the object of erotic
desire. Levinas prefaces his remarks on eros, however, by
warning that in this final part of _Totality and Infinity_
he will go 'beyond the face'. [3] He hopes, that is,
to identify areas in our lives that evince the reality of
what he calls 'the Other' -- modes of human interaction that
are made possible by the transcendence of the Other. Levinas
suggests, then, that erotic love evinces the Other, for the
phenomenology of eros reveals it to be a curiously
conflicted experience. Love is bittersweet: it aims at
possessing something transcendent, something that cannot, by
definition, be possessed. Eros aims at converting the Other
into an object of need. Levinas here equates the role of the
Other in erotic desire with femininity. The feminine is the
object of eros: the feminine is the object of the yearning
caress, a gesture that expresses the erotic longing to grasp
after the ungraspable. Vasseleu's worry, which she
draws from Irigaray, is that Levinas's analysis of eros
leads him to define femininity from the standpoint of male
desire. The feminine is depicted by him as, to quote
Irigaray, 'the underside or reverse side of man's aspiration
toward the light, as its negative' (109). But there is a
puzzle as to how Levinas's discussion of eros in _Totality
and Infinity_ should be interpreted. Is he recommending that
the feminine be viewed in this way? Is he claiming that the
feminine just is the abyss that erotic desire hopelessly
aims at possessing? Or is he making a quasi-empirical claim?
Is he pointing out that erotic desire, in its currently
dominant manifestation, has the structure he has described,
a structure that is only possible if the feminine is a human
Other and, consequently, ultimately addresses us from the
position of authority that we experience in the face-to-face
encounter? Is Levinas inviting us to question whether our
current understanding of femininity in erotic desire is
satisfactory? What relation do areas of human life 'beyond
the face' bear to the face-to-face encounter
itself? I raise these questions not
to excuse Levinas's claims about femininity in _Totality and
Infinity_ (I personally find them troubling), but simply to
highlight that his writings are studded with interpretive
riddles. What is wanted in interpreting someone like
Levinas, someone whose work is so challenging, is a more
cautious, line-by-line exposition of specific texts. My
sense is that Vasseleu passes over too much that is in need
of thoughtful exposition in Levinas (and Merleau-Ponty and
Irigaray). One sees this in her tendency to blur together
texts from different phases of Levinas's career. Levinas's
thinking underwent an important shift after the publication
of Derrida's 'Violence and Metaphysics'. Levinas sought to
substantially revise his thinking in light of Derrida's
criticisms, a task that culminated in his second major work
_Otherwise than Being_. Vasseleu attends to the differences
between Levinas's earlier and later work (see pages 81, 90,
and 108), but she often quotes indiscriminately from these
earlier and later texts (see pages 88-89, 102-103, and
104-105). Yet this is precisely the
sort of interpretive dilemma we are faced with. How should
we compare Levinas's earlier and later remarks on themes
like vision, light, touch, the caress, sensibility, the
erotic, femininity, etc., that would, I take it, attract
readers to Vasseleu's book? How does Levinas's view of the
caress change, for example, from an early essay like _Time
and the Other_, to _Totality and Infinity_, to some of his
later essays? The caress seems to be linked to his account
of the feminine. Does this mean that Levinas develops
different models of touch as he modifies his view of
femininity? Why does the notion of sensibility loom so large
in _Otherwise than Being_, whereas enjoyment is more
prominent in _Totality and Infinity_? Are these differences
indicative of a deep shift in his understanding of
embodiment? Someone familiar with Levinas's writings will, I
think, be attracted to a book like _Textures of Light_ in
the hope that it will (excuse the pun) shed light on the
answers to these types of questions. But Vasseleu moves
through Levinas's writings far too quickly, without
sufficient regard for the interpretative challenges one
needs to confront in order to make sense of them. I am not a
Merleau-Ponty scholar. But I imagine that someone
sympathetic to his work would raise comparable criticisms
about her commentary on him. My sense, too, is that
someone familiar with Levinas will find some of Vasseleu's
remarks to be a little sloppy. Vasseleu claims at one point
in passing that the 'there is' refers to the same thing in
Levinas as 'alterity', 'illeity', and 'the trace of the
Other' (85). Yet Levinas carefully distinguishes these
terms. The notion of the 'there is' figures primarily in his
early work as part of his critique of Heidegger, where he
uses it to challenge Heidegger's characterization of Being
in _Being and Time_. Heidegger is struck, of course, by the
link between Being and the idea of a gift suggested by the
German 'es gibt'. Levinas uses the notion of the 'there is'
to suggest that he is too sanguine: Being's plentitude,
which Levinas identifies with the 'there is', is not a gift
but a source of horror. Being is an impersonal, suffocating
presence. The 'there is' is by no means identical, then,
with the alterity of the Other. In fact, the Other, as
Levinas explains in _Ethics and Infinity_, is precisely what
rescues us from the 'anonymous and senseless rumbling' of
the 'there is'. [4] The terms 'illeity' and 'trace'
emerge in Levinas's later work, where he uses them, as I
understand him, to specify different dimensions of the
presence of the Other. 'Illeity' refers to a certain
third-personal dimension that can be discerned in the
presence of the Other, whereas the 'trace' gets associated
with increasing frequency in Levinas's later writings with a
divine presence that is latent yet irremediably hidden in
the encounter with the Other. These may sound like
nitpicky criticisms. Yet these kinds of flaws are apt to
cause readers familiar with the texts Vasseleu discusses to
second-guess her scholarship. They foster the suspicion that
she is more concerned with advancing a certain sense of
Irigaray's place in philosophy than with arduous task of
piecing together a coherent account of illumination, touch,
and vision from Merleau-Ponty's or Levinas's works. There
is, of course, nothing wrong with wanting to champion
Irigaray. But Irigaray's understanding of light tends to get
lost in Vasseleu's commentaries on Merleau-Ponty and
Levinas. (This problem is only exacerbated by her tendency
to draw somewhat hasty comparisons between the three figures
she discusses and other figures in continental philosophy,
like Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille.) The result is
dissatisfying. As I noted above, someone familiar with
Merleau-Ponty and Levinas will probably find Vasseleu's
commentaries to be superficial, and they distract her, I
think, from clearly elaborating on her reading of
Irigaray. 4 I worry that some of my
criticisms of Kathryn Vasseleu may sound unduly harsh, and
so I should perhaps say something about the biases I bring
to her book as a reviewer. My area of specialization is
continental philosophy. Much of my training, however, has
been in analytic philosophy. I am certain this shapes how I
read _Textures of Light_. I don't necessarily esteem the
writing style of analytic philosophy more than continental
philosophy. Indeed, I find the distinction between the two
traditions to be unhelpful -- one whose real attraction lies
in its ability to promote sectarianism by allowing
philosophers to pigeonhole one another. Nonetheless, I find
that I value ostensibly 'analytic' traits in certain types
of philosophic prose. I don't think that things like
clarity, careful argumentation, and distinction-making make
certain texts truer or more insightful than others. But I do
think they have a certain value insofar as texts that
possess these qualities make more of an effort to extend
themselves to new readers. There is a certain value to be
had in clearly laying out one's reasoning when one is
writing for audience that may not be familiar with one's
discourse position. My sense is that this sort of generosity
is especially crucial when one's task is exegetical, even
more so when one's object of exegesis are writings as
obscure as those of Irigaray, Merleau-Ponty, and
Levinas. My main concern with
_Textures of Light_ is that it doesn't extend itself to new
readers in this way, thought I am sure that many others will
find Vasseleu's book rewarding. In particular, readers
familiar with recent feminist critiques of occularcentrism
will find her reading of Irigaray to be innovative -- one
that opens up new possibilities for feminist
re-conceptualizations of vision and light. But my sense is
that many readers will also be put off by the obscurity of
her prose. I want to be careful here since it is so common
in analytic circles to dismiss obscure continental writing.
(A web-search reveals that Vasseleu's name appears on at
least one website devoted to mocking postmodern jargon.) Let
me just add, then, that my own reaction was to feel
frustrated by _Textures of Light_, not because I didn't
agree with Vasseleu's reading of Irigaray but because I
didn't feel as if enough work had been done to help me reach
the point where I could agree or disagree with her. I felt
as if I had been invited to see something exciting in
Irigaray's conception of light, but I also felt frustrated
that I had been left ill-prepared to articulate what I had
been asked to see. It would have been
interesting, on this point, to have seen Vasseleu use her
reading of Irigaray to study some particular film, painting,
or other object of visual culture. Vasseleu invites us to
distinguish feminism from anti-visualism, and she develops a
novel analysis of vision through her reading of Irigaray.
I'm sure her book has important implications, then, for film
studies and the broader study of visual culture. For
example, it has often been suggested by feminist theorists
that films model acts of gazing -- usually fundamentally
male or masculinist gazing. An exciting implication of
Vasseleu's book is that it invites us to rethink what it
might mean to associate film with gazing. My main complaint
about _Textures of Light_ is that I found it obscure.
Perhaps one way in which the author could clarify her ideas
would be to use her reading of Irigaray to analyze the
visual experience of watching a particular film or staring
at a particular painting. If vision is a kind of erotic,
tactile experience, then what should we think about, say,
the experience of staring at one of Vermeer's paintings of
light-drenched rooms? What should we make of the blinding
close-ups of starlets' faces that pepper Hollywood
melodramas? It would have been interesting to see what sort
of new, feminist analysis of such scenes Vasseleu might have
developed on the basis of her analysis of vision as a
tactile experience. Indiana University,
Bloomington, USA Footnotes 1. See Martin Jay's
_Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth
Century_ (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993). 2. For more on this point
see Kelly Oliver, 'Review of _Textures of Light_ by Cathryn
Vasseleu', _Hypatia_, vol. 16 no. 1, Winter 2001
<http://iupjournals.org/hypatia/hyptoc16.html>. 3. See Emmanuel Levinas,
_Totality and Infinity_, translated by Alphonso Lingis,
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp.
249-253. 4. Emmanuel Levinas, _Ethics
and Infinity_, trans. Richard A. Cohen, (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1985), p. 52. Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Joshua Shaw, 'Struggling to
See the Light', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 10, May 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n10shaw>.
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