APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

Cathryn Vasseleu’s Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty is a carefully argued work of scholarship that nicely introduces and connects the ideas of Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Irigaray. By focusing the book on a confined issue that is nonetheless central to philosophical speculation, Vasseleu is able to offer close readings of primary sources while still maintaining a tightness in her writing. The book offers an intriguing juxtaposition of feminism, metaphysics, and phenomenology, one that highlights the ethical limitations of a specular economy, and makes connections between various critiques of the metaphor of light.

Vasseleu’s innovative undertaking is to "consider woman’s participation in what could be called a ‘genealogy of light’" (11). This genealogy, by attending to "the traces or the material conditions of its articulation" (11), reveals the link between traditional metaphors of light and the constitution of masculine subjectivity. But Vasseleu goes beyond these metaphors to offer reconceptualizations of light—ones that might be more amenable to an embodied femininity. While her argument at points is quite complex, her overall claim is that we must rethink light in terms of its corporeality, or its texture, rather than as an ideal medium for truth.

The book is broken into four chapters, whose titles ("True Light," "Carnal Light," "Perverse Light," and "Erotic Light") are provocative and ultimately illustrative of the contents of each. Each of the first three chapters works through a specific author, Irigaray, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, respectively, while the final chapter contains a kind of proposal for thinking about erotic light as a "non-disclosure" that exposes one "to alterity in the erotic encounter" (117). What might be called an "ethics of light" hence emerges as a possibility for reorienting our thinking about the formation of identity. Although the chapters are best read in order, and in conjunction with one another, they could be read individually since they do each provide clear expository material.

The book’s opening, introductory, chapter ("True Light") reminds the reader of the philosophical history that links light with metaphysical speculation and the search for truth. Vasseleu introduces the theme of light’s metaphoricity, and examines the implications of this metaphor for representations of the feminine and the maternal. Here she focuses largely on Irigaray, presenting the latter’s argument that we cannot separate the metaphor of light from the patriarchal suppression of the maternal body. According to Vasseleu’s reading, Irigaray recognizes that "the displacement of the materiality of the passage is the condition of possibility of circulation of family likeness between sun and son" (9). In other words, men procure a privileged relation to truth by displacing the maternal body that is the material condition of birth, allowing the son’s origin to appear within "an exclusively patrilineal economy" (10). Vasseleu calls this displacement a "fantasy of masculine autogenesis" (10). Such a fantasy ensures that "any engendering of maternal origin never comes to light" (9). The philosophical adherence to the sun as metaphor (to photology) is not innocent but participates, and is even complicit, in the political efficacy of the patriarchal effacement of women. This complicity between photology and masculine identity is central to Vasseleu’s effort to expose the metaphysical erasure of feminine identity and subjectivity.

If specularity, metaphysics, and masculinity are thus allied with one another, this collusion is heightened by the assumption that light is an ideal medium which is itself transparent, the condition for the visible (and the invisible). But if light is not untainted by history, then the opposition between vision and touch can be challenged; there is another way of looking at light. Vasseleu wants to consider Irigaray’s analysis in terms that link the specular with the tactile, vision with touch. She claims that Irigaray is engaged in examining "the texture of light," defining texture as "cloth, threads, knots, weave, detailed surface, material, matrix and frame" (11–12). As a texture, Vasseleu argues, light "is both the language and material of visual practices, or the invisible interweaving of differences which form the fabric of the visible" (12). Reconsidering light in this way need not privilege touch over vision (or vice versa); instead, Vasseleu argues, such a reevaluation can provide for a political interpretation of photology. This is a compelling argument, one that, by making explicit the way in which light serves as a political bind between patriarchy and philosophy, offers feminism new avenues of intervention.

One example of this politics lies in Irigaray’s relation to psychoanalysis. Although Vasseleu does not directly enter into this debate, her reading of Irigaray helps to clarify how and why it is that Irigaray is able to challenge some of the central tenets of psychoanalysis while still remaining committed to its larger project. Psychoanalysis is often said to be a "specular" discipline, committed to the visual (the mirror stage) as the source of both the body and the ego. But by proposing that vision "is open to or affected by the touch of light" (12), Irigaray is able to refigure the origin of the subject in the ambiguity of the mother’s touch, a threshold that is not yet either internal or external. This alteration of psychoanalytic doctrine permits Irigaray to reconceive the relation of women to the Symbolic order, and to envision transformative possibilities in the genealogy between mothers and daughters.

After concluding her introduction with the question of intelligibility, "how the sexed nature of desires and political aspirations is incarnated or brought to light" (18), the next two chapters, one each on Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, go on to examine their respective articulations of subject/object and subject/subject relations in terms that return to the embodiment of light, and the libidinal or carnal nature of both perception and ethics. These two chapters comprise the bulk of the book, each about fifty pages, and quite a bit of each chapter is devoted to exposition and clarification of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty’s positions. There’s also quite a lot going on in these hundred pages, and it is sometimes difficult to discern Vasseleu’s own voice, or follow the thread of her thesis, as it runs through the exegetical material.

In chapter two ("Carnal Light"), Vasseleu outlines Merleau-Ponty’s account of vision as fundamentally corporeal, an "essentially incarnate reality" (21), and his interpretation of flesh as texture. She considers his "revolt against disembodied consciousness [to be] a starting point for theorizing the texture of light as an irreducible nexus of language and materiality" (25). In particular, Vasseleu turns to Merleau-Ponty’s conception of flesh as an intertwining or a "between-two," and, with Irigaray, she raises questions about the supposed sexual indifference of flesh. Irigaray is also brought into the discussion as a challenge to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of reversibility, against which she proposes the intimacy of contiguous touching. Although it contains some long explications of Merleau-Ponty’s reformulation of light, vision, and perception, this chapter is particularly compressed and some might find its elaboration of Merleau-Ponty difficult to follow and in a few places less accessible than might be hoped.

The third chapter ("Perverse Light") is devoted to a discussion of Levinas and the ethical avenues and responsibilities opened up by his account of the other as radical alterity. In Levinas’s view, this irreducible difference means that the ethical is prior to, and has priority over, philosophical speculation. For this reason, Levinas understands ethics to commence with touch, "the exposition of an affective involvement with others" (98), rather than with vision (the "violence of the gaze"). Because light operates as a universal medium, rendering visible objects commensurable with one another, vision is insufficient to account for that which is exterior to it, its own other. Although within the totality of the visual field, the subject is able to distinguish itself from its objects (light making possible the subject/object distinction and hence the emergence of the ego as such), this field does not permit a transcendence of egological existence (88). To regard this transcendent otherness, Levinas considers "the face." As Vasseleu describes this regard, it is "a generosity towards the face in its material particularity. Over and above its presentation as an image, the face is an irreducible other, which eludes the speculation of the gaze" (88). Rather than simply offering an opportunity to distinguish self from object, the face demands that one seek "the means to do justice to the other’s singularity" (89), which the universality of the visible cannot grasp.

While touch is associated with the maternal, it is the caress, or erotic mystery, that Levinas associates with the feminine. In both of these cases, Vasseleu provides a considered critique of the implications these associations have for women. With regard to the maternal as an ethical relation, Vasseleu points out that "maternal subjectivity, as opposed to ethical responsibility, is based on the tenuous elision of a distinction between dependency and autonomy, in which being held hostage is the paradigm of responsible motherhood" (103). With regard to feminine carnality, Vasseleu argues that the caress "reduces the feminine to humanity’s own carnal being, or to an alter ego that is left suspended in the anonymity of night" (108). While Levinas’s own rendering of the maternal and the feminine is unsatisfactory, implying a conflation of ethics with maternal sacrifice, and of carnality with a feminine loss of self and light, Vasseleu finds much of value in propelling her thesis forward.

By prioritizing the ethical over the specular, Levinas’s work lends itself to feminist adoption. Irigaray’s own "ethics of sexual difference" proposes, as Vasseleu points out, "a reconsideration of sexual difference as the threshold of ethics" (77), a formulation that both takes up and takes issue with Levinas’s ethics, since in Irigaray’s ethics sexual difference is no longer subordinate to ethics, but is its very condition and point of departure. Moreover, Irigaray’s ethics contests the patrilineal genealogy that passes from father to son, and instead, through a consideration of illumination as passion, or light as a subversion of identity, elaborates an ethics between bodies, thereby leading to consideration of a maternal genealogy.

Vasseleu’s brief, concluding chapter ("Erotic Light") returns to the ethical and political conundrum of feminine identity and pursues a new concept of light. Having argued that the photological appropriation of light cannot be severed from phallocentrism and patriarchy, Vasseleu draws from Irigaray a conception of erotic light that elucidates the alterity of the other. By articulating the caress as "a relation of wonder, in the unforeseeable nature of exposure to otherness" (118), Irigaray links light to generosity and to an "identity that resists formalization" (127). Thus Vasseleu concludes that "if our desires, aspirations, and ethical concerns as women are to be ‘seen’ politically it is necessary actively to intervene in the history of light and in turn to violate the texture in which woman has been rendered a figure of invisibility" (128). If the ideal of a neutral, objective light is actually an ideal that "erases all traces of sexual difference" (128), an erotic light might transform what it means to become a woman.