Luce Irigaray’s Sensible Transcendental: Becoming Divine in the Body

Abstract

This paper explores the transformative possibilities of everyday life experiences through Luce Irigaray’s call to become divine women (and men). The paradoxical construction of the sensible transcendental is Irigaray’s attempt to imagine a divinity that would be an “inscription in the flesh” (An Ethics of Sexual Difference 147). The paper considers an alternative language for such an understanding, including Romain Rolland’s oceanic feeling and Catherine Clement’s syncope, both of which locate a sense of a beyond in everyday experience. In contrast to previous readings of Irigaray’s divine, which have focussed on the subjectivity offered by the sensible transcendental, I argue that the divine is primarily a passage of becoming and transformation that can be understood as operating intersubjectively. How might we experience such a becoming? The paper offers the examples of free diving, reading and writing to demonstrate an embodied divinity.