Irigaray’s Madonna

Introduction

Since the early 1980s the philosopher Luce Irigaray has steadily been developing a way for women (and men?) to engage with the figure of Mary. From the final chapter in Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche/Amante Marine: De Friedrich Nietzsche (1991/1980; ‘The Crucified One: Epistle to the Last Christians’) onwards, Mary has made frequent appearances in Irigaray’s writings. This increasing importance given to Mary, moreover, occurs alongside the development of Irigaray’s turn to breathing and the breath and her re-thinking or transvaluation of virginity, both fostered through her encounters with Eastern thinking and practices such as yoga, Buddhism and Tantrism.

As abstruse as that may sound, particularly for those not familiar with Irigaray’s work, perhaps more perplexing is her recent revelation that she understands the virginity of Mary and the incarnation of the divine to be more than mere symbols of that power-wielding, patriarchal, monotheistic(-ish) religion known as Christianity:

… it is necessary to understand their historical occurrence and to be able to invent new figures to help us in our becoming. I do not interpret the incarnation, the Blessed Virgin Mary and God the Father as non-historical symbols, even if a symbolic use of their historical occurrence can be made (Irigaray, 2008b: 103).

I do not consider the incarnation as a symbol. It rather alludes to an event of our history about which we have texts and other traces. Interpretation and faithfulness regarding this event is incumbent on everyone. One could say the same about the Blessed Virgin Mary as mother of a divine son, even if the interpretation of her virginity provokes questions (Irigaray, 2008b: 102).

Similarly, Irigaray elsewhere makes the following, at first rather curious, statement:

It is astonishing that many women, in particular women mindful of their liberation, today want to imitate Jesus or his male disciples, rather than Mary (2004b: 152).

How are we to understand all of this? Obviously, given Irigaray’s rejection of traditional Christian (onto-)theology and the idea of god as One transcendent, creator ‘being’ (the immutable Father-God, albeit of dubious ontological status), we cannot take this as kerygmatic theology or as akin to the declarations of faith made by those confessionalists who strictly follow Church dogma. Moreover, we should note that event status is given to both the incarnation and the virginity of Mary, not the crucifixion or resurrection of Jesus. Perhaps more perplexing is that Irigaray seems to be suggesting that women might be better off imitating Mary, not Jesus. Can this really be the case, given how problematic a figure Mary has become over the last 60 or so years of feminist analysis? Indeed, with this criticism against ‘women mindful of their liberation’ who wish to imitate Jesus, and the curious suggestion that we imitate Mary, we might hear a distinctly anti-ordination-of-women stance from Irigaray. This is consistent with Irigaray’s staunch refusal to perpetuate the over-valuation of all that pertains to the masculine at the expense of the feminine. As problematic as the rejection of the idea of women’s ordination might sound to liberal-democratic ears, we need to understand this position, along with Irigaray’s readings of the Madonna, in relation to her overall political philosophy of ‘democracy between two’ and her related ethics of sexuated difference.

According to Irigaray, democracy and a politics and ethics proper to it must come to be understood as a civil society whose fundamental unit is two – man and woman – not the sovereign, supposedly neuter individual:

A democratic politics does not begin with an adding up of “yeses”, with a crowd electing whoever is going to govern them; it can only be based on a two which is not reducible to one plus one abstract individuals, on a two which comes into existence between a man and a woman who meet and respect each other in their irreducibility (Irigaray, 2001: 26).

In the 1990s, Irigaray set about attempting to articulate just what this new socio-political order founded on love between ‘the two’ might be like. It is well known that Irigaray has been criticized heavily for works such as I Love to You (1996) and Democracy Begins Between Two (2000/1994), for what many readers perceive as an unapologetic and potentially regressive heterosexism based upon her insistence that nature is fundamentally dualistic. ¹ While I do not have the space here to address these criticisms, I think it is important to remember that Irigaray is trying to think the impossible, trying to describe what a currently impossible society founded on sexuated difference, itself currently inconceivable according to her, might look like. ²

Furthermore, crucial to this task of trying to bring about a social order founded on love between the sexes is the radical rethinking not just of religion itself, but of the ways we engage with the texts and figures of our religious traditions. Irigaray insists that religion must be at the forefront of our thinking today, if our future is not only to be better, but even if it is to be at all. Importantly, we must attempt to think beyond what we’ve already accomplished in our conceptions of the sacred and the divine, as these conceptions have been monopolized by masculinist thinking (Irigaray, 1993a: 75). And, in ‘Women, the Sacred, Money’, she explicitly implores us to question the modes of inquiry we bring to sacred texts so that we might move away from our inherited (and paralysing) nostalgias for the past toward a practice of interpretation that can open us out toward a more ethical future (Irigaray, 1993a: 86).

I want to suggest that Irigaray’s recent, seemingly esoteric, readings of the Madonna actually provide us with a constructive, perhaps even politically progressive interpretive mode for engaging with the religious texts and figures of our tradition as women. As such, I argue that through her own specific interpretive practice Irigaray provides us with a new image of Mary, and this new Madonna figures the very interrelational interpretive practice that Irigaray believes essential when it comes to our engagements with the texts of our tradition. In short, Irigaray’s Madonna is an ethical listener, interpreter and exchanger of ‘sacred’ discourse and it is this aspect of Mary that warrants our allegiance. To imitate Mary is to practice reading, listening, and interpreting in the feminine, practices that can aid us in our ‘becoming spiritual’, which in Irigarayan terms is another way of saying ‘becoming woman’. And crucial to the development of such practices is a renewed focus on the breath and breathing.

Reading Irigaray Reading the Madonna: What is Announced in the Annunciation?

Informed by the Eastern practice of yoga, specifically its attention to the cultivation of breathing, and the Western, extra-biblical iconographic tradition of the Annunciation, Irigaray presents us with a Madonna who is what she calls a ‘spiritual virgin’. For Irigaray, the virgin woman is one who has attained autonomy through the cultivation of breathing, an autonomy that enables her to reach and maintain her integrity as a woman. This autonomous breathing also provides Mary with the ability to produce ‘a living and breathing speech, a speech which cultivates breathing and communicates with other(s)’ (Irigaray, 2008: 96). In other words, Mary is able to incarnate the divine, to make the Word flesh, as it were, because she is the one capable of producing speech that remains faithful to the flesh. According to Irigaray (and not unlike Nietzsche), Christianity seems to forget or else ignore its own ‘good news’, which is not that the sacrificial crucifixion and resurrection of a man-god removes sin and opens up the (illusory) possibility of (an after-) life without pain, but that at a certain point in history we begin to conceive of divinity as ‘an incarnational relationship between the body and the word’ (Irigaray, 2004b: 150), as the nuptial movement between nature and culture rather than as that creator-god expelled from our space-time framework to exist in a place best called nowhere (Irigaray, 1991: 169).

Because she has attained spiritual autonomy as a woman, Irigaray’s Mary is capable of participating with the father-god in the production of a divine child; she is the one capable of ensuring the ‘incarnational relationship between the body and the word’ (Irigaray, 2004b: 150). Importantly, for Irigaray the incarnation is not simply ‘the word made flesh’; rather it is that the word is made flesh in and with Mary. Unlike the matricidal story of Dionysus or the Hebraic father-creator god of Genesis, this god-man gestates in and is birthed by the body of a mortal woman. It is not, however, that divinity or the Word is simply incarnated in the singular form of Jesus. Such an interpretation perpetuates the patriarchal phantasy of woman as an empty envelope or vessel, container of the father’s potent seed. When the Word is made flesh, it happens in and with Mary’s body. Irigaray is here acknowledging at least the ideational presence of woman at the birth of divinity in this Western tradition, even if this is just ‘a tardy, and quickly neglected, recognition of woman’s share in creation’ (Irigaray, 1991: 176). Already, however, in this early text Irigaray provocatively alludes to the elements of the Marian tradition that she will develop later in I Love to You, Between East and West, and ‘The Redemption of Women’, namely Mary’s virginal status as integral to her suitability to understand the requirements of and participate in the production of divinity, which, according to her, means the production of words that remain faithful to the flesh in the service of the cultivation of sexuated identity.

What Irigaray claims (drawing on the extra-biblical tradition of Anne, the mother of Mary) is that Mary is chosen because of her divinity, a quality she is said to have been able to develop because of her own mother’s faithfulness to herself and her gender. The tradition of Mary’s own immaculate conception is understood by Irigaray as recognition of a divine genealogy in the feminine. What this sinless birth may come mean is that Anne, too, was a woman who had been able to cultivate her ‘spiritual virginity’(Irigaray, 2008: 89), remaining faithful to herself as a woman and to her genre and thus capable of producing a ‘divine child’, one who was able to breathe freely because her mother had ‘reached autonomy and the internalization of her breathing’.

‘Divinity’ or even ‘God’, according to Irigaray, should not be understood as some metaphysical being or entity, nor as the utterly ineffable, ³ but rather as the process of mediation between nature and culture (between body and word, for example), a process that destroys neither but enables those two principal aspects of our being to relate in a manner that cultivates well-being. And this explicitly relates to the cultivation of a sexuated identity, of a well-being in each of the two sexes, one appropriate for each of the sexes and thus able to be developed further between them as different. Importantly, she insists that woman can only accomplish this act of loving the irreducibly other (man) without surrendering herself to the law of the same (that currently reigns) if she is able to keep and cultivate her spiritual virginity. This virginity, Irigaray time and again points out, has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a body part, the hymen. Instead, it is akin to woman’s gathering together of herself, a feminine in-dwelling, her interiorization and nurturance of herself as a woman. This enables woman to remain faithful to her gender (or genre), understood as a horizon toward which she strives in the continuous process of ‘becoming woman’. In other words, Irigaray (2008: 88) uses the term ‘virginity’ to refer to a woman’s ‘capacity of reaching and keeping her own integrity’.

Obviously, this is not something a woman is born with and subsequently loses once and for all through sexual intercourse (the patriarchal definition of virginity par excellence). The loss of virginity, in Irigaray’s sense, is a loss of fidelity to the self as a woman and a loss of fidelity to her community, culture or feminine genre. Actually, it may currently be impossible to lose one’s virginity, as Irigaray (2004b: 161) suggests that this cultivation is yet to happen for women, that it is ‘still to be discovered’. Irigaray (2004b: 161) deems this task of loving the other without surrendering our difference to be ‘very difficult’, but a task that also ‘probably corresponds to the most spiritual task of human becoming’. This need for a ‘feminine mind or soul, an internal dwelling’ is perhaps how we should understand Irigaray’s argument that women need a divine in the feminine. And, it is certainly the case that a new socio-political order, a democracy ‘between two’, cannot come about until women acknowledge this as their task.

Thus, when Irigaray suggests that Mary is a better model for women to imitate, she is hardly suggesting that women become passive instruments of oppressive patriarchal will. Nor is she suggesting that Mary become an idol of worship. Rather, she is arguing that we acknowledge those (repressed? forgotten?) divine aspects of Mary, revealed through the Annunciation and her participation in the Incarnation, that enable Mary to become an aid and not an idol that paralyses women’s spiritual becoming: ‘The representation or figuration of the divine ought always to remain an aid in a journey, without ever being assimilated to its accomplishment’ (Irigaray, 2007: 354).

Integral to all of this is a mode of reading, listening and interpreting required when it comes to the sacred ‘texts and other traces’ of the West. Irigaray is adamant that the usual methods we employ, including feminist methods, while all quite rational, even scientific, simply are not up to the task of listening to or for what she calls ‘the spirit’ within the texts of our sacred tradition. Her own approach, which, as we shall see, might make even the most contemporary, forward-thinking biblical scholars, theologians and philosophers of religion uncomfortable, is certainly not revisionist; she is not interested in exhuming these stories and images for the purpose of improving our knowledge of the past. Nor is she interested in simply giving women a greater role in that past such that the patriarchal religious traditions of the West become more palatable and defendable by women who choose to remain within them. Such interpretive moves really count for little more than nostalgia, according to Irigaray. She is not interested in determining the ‘facts’ of the past but rather in engaging with the stories of the past in a manner that is more conducive to the production of a healthy and ethical future. Explicitly, her interpretive purpose, as she puts it, is one of ‘founding a new ethics’ (Irigaray, 1993a: 86).

This alternative interpretation, which requires a different mode of listening and language exchange, is designated by Irigaray to be interpretation in the feminine or interpretation ‘on the feminine side’ (Irigaray, 2004b: 162), even interpretation that is ‘close to feminine aboriginal traditions’ (Irigaray, 2005: 53). Irigaray emphasizes that, when it comes to the events of the Incarnation and the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, interpretation of these events, beginning with the Gospel accounts themselves, seems always already determined by a limited, patriarchal framework that universalizes a masculine model of subjectivity and experience.

Irigaray is of course well aware of the now traditional interpretations of Mary, including feminist criticisms, particularly the Annunciation to the (presumably) teenage Virgin, as told in Lk 1.26–39, dominant interpretations that have led to Mary being a figure of scorn for most feminist thinkers. In I Love to You, Irigaray states:

The Annunciation is given the following rather univocal interpretation nowadays: Mary, you who are young and still a virgin, thus beautiful and desirable, the Lord, who has power over you, is informing you through his messenger that he wishes to be the father of a son to whom you will give birth. Mary can only say “yes” to this announcement because she is the Lord’s possession or his property. The mystery of the angel remains (1996: 140).

Upon this reading, Mary, like all young women of her time, has no real say over the direction of her life; she is little more than an exchangeable pawn in the religio-political and economic games of men. She has no choice, meaning that her ‘yes’ has already been determined for her, especially given the power of the one who wants her. Thus, as Irigaray (1991: 167) puts it in ‘The Crucified One’, ‘according to the traditional interpretation, her “yes” is equally a “no”: a no to her own life. To her conception, her birth, her generation, her flowering. No to everything, except the Word of the Father’.

The traditional, virtually unquestioned, reading of the Annunciation is unsatisfactory for Irigaray in part because, as she states, there is one figure that seems rather superfluous to such an interpretation: ‘the mystery of the angel remains’. Why is the angel a mystery? We do well to remember that angels, traditionally conceived in the West, are those bird-like figures of mediation between the immanent and transcendent realms; they are figures that convey messages that cannot be conveyed by the normal means. So, Irigaray seems to be wondering, what does this god have to tell Mary/us that requires the work of an angel? Why is a mediatory figure required, especially a winged-one associated with the air and with movement between the immanent and the transcendent realms, at this point in our history when we seem to acknowledge the need for divinity to be recognized as relation between word and flesh?

In ‘The Crucified One’ Irigaray (1991: 175) suggests the possibility at least of Mary being the only one capable of hearing, understanding and agreeing to the requirements of such an incarnation, asking ‘[c]an she alone feel the music of the air trembling between the wings of the angels, and make or remake a body from it?’ In I Love to You, Irigaray ‘fleshes out’ her earlier interpretation of the angel’s message from the god:

There is another possible interpretation: Mary, you who, from adolescence are divine, because you were born of a woman faithful to herself – Anne, the one said to have conceived without sin – you who are thus capable of intersubjectivity, the expression of love between humans, do you want to be my lover and for us to have a child together, since I find you worthy of this even though you are young, inexperienced and without any possessions. It is only thanks to your yes that my love and my son may be redemptive. Without your word, we may not be carnally redeemed or saved (1996: 140).

And in Between East and West: From Singularity to Community Irigaray puts it this way:

The Annunciation, which precedes the birth of Jesus, can be interpreted in at least two different ways: as the substitution of the word of the celestial Father for corporeal relations, notably of breathing, between two lovers or as the fact that, in order to engender a spiritual child – a possible savior of the world – the conception of this savior must be preceded by an announcement through speech and a response from Mary. It is not a question then of miraculous birth by a woman who is supposed to have kept her hymen, but of an engendering preceded by an exchange of breath and of words between the future lovers and parents. The angel, the bird, the ray of the sun, and speech represent the mediations between the body of Mary and that of the Lord. All these mediations indicate relations between the body and speech without substituting the one for the other, as a certain type of teaching would have us “believe” (2005: 52).

Clearly, Irigaray is urging us to hear not a command in the message of the angel (as we are taught) but an announcement that invites a response. According to Irigaray (1996:124), what we may hear in the Annunciation is a series of questions concerning Mary’s willingness to participate in the engendering of divinity. This could be an announcement from a god capable of respecting speech as dialogue (and hence the need of the mediatory figure of the angel), in this case dialogue between man and woman. Thus upon Irigaray’s reading: ‘the Annunciation corresponds to shared words between lovers prior to the celebration of their marrying … Man and woman breathe together, engender together, carnally and spiritually. Their alliance is flesh becoming word … The logos becomes dialogic, the relationship between living women and men and not an ecstasy of truth in an idealized beyond’.

Now, of course, we believe we ‘know’ Mary’s response. When told she will have a child, she asks how that could be possible, given she hasn’t had sex with a man (Lk 1.34). When the angel then explains what is going to happen, she agrees saying ‘Behold, I am the handmaid/slave (δούλη) of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word’ (Lk 1.38). We can hardly say that the biblical story provides us with a picture that presents no challenge whatsoever to Irigaray’s interpretation of the Annunciation. Mary’s acceptance of slave or handmaid status is rightly problematic. However, as I mentioned earlier, the Gospels and other New Testament texts, along with the interpretations of our Tradition that we’ve been instructed to accept as truth, are understood by Irigaray to be expressions of only one gendered response, the patriarchal masculinist, indeed misogynist response (with all its possible variations, including those by women), to the historical moment when divinity will be conceived properly as relation between word and flesh.

Cultures of Breath

Crucial to the cultivation of this divine is a renewed awareness and attention to the importance of the breath and of breathing, which, Irigaray claims, has been forgotten or repressed in patriarchal societies. At a certain point in her life, Irigaray turned toward Eastern spiritual teachings and practices, especially the study and practice of yoga. This daily practice, she insists, is ‘what could help awaken or reawaken and discover words and gestures carrying another meaning, another light, another rationality’ (Irigaray, 2005: 6).

In ‘What Yoga has Taught (or Reminded) Me’, Irigaray (2005: 50–55) notes the relationship between breathing and the act of speaking, pointing out that for most people the relationship is an inverse one and that people who breathe improperly tend, in the worst cases, to talk continuously because it is their only way of breathing. Irigaray (1996: 122) states explicitly that there are different modes of speech made possible by cultures that promote the cultivation of the breath, modes such as ‘poetic telling, hymns and chants, prayers of praise and dialogue’. Unfortunately, patriarchal cultures have replaced these modes (though mercifully not entirely eradicated them) with ‘pre-written discourse or texts’ and as such language becomes paralysed by modes such as ‘ritual, repetition, a secondary attribution of values, speculation, and to a logic unsuited to life and its breath’ (Irigaray, 1996: 123).

Given that breathing is our first autonomous act, Irigaray believes that learning to breathe properly is akin to learning to live autonomously, which means learning to live without the need to appropriate others or things or cultures, which in her terms is nothing more than the continuation of placental living. The breath about which Irigaray speaks is thus not simply that which sustains our existence, operating only at the level of needs, but it is the breath that pertains to the spirit. There is vital breath and spiritual breath and we need them both to survive and flourish.

In order to become spiritual, it is necessary that we be able to transform the vital breath in such a way that it can attend to the promotion of ‘the heart, of thought, of speech and not only in the service of physiological survival’ (Irigaray, 2005: 76). Irigaray is adamant that when religious or spiritual traditions centre only on words or ‘the Word’, without paying attention to the breath and the concomitant silence that make the production of words possible, we end up with an authoritarian and dogmatic culture of death. She says that ‘(u)nfortunately most patriarchal philosophical and religious traditions act in this way: they have substituted words for life without carrying out the necessary links between the two’ (Irigaray, 2005: 51).

It is not simply that we need to (re)learn how to breathe so as to improve our physical well-being. Nor is Irigaray advocating a breathing that could cultivate something vaguely called ‘spiritual’, along the lines of numerous New Age persuasions. For Irigaray, becoming spiritual is akin to becoming human and, as such, spirituality, interrelationality, affect, corporeality, intellection and speech are intimately connected in her philosophy. Thus, her emphasis on breath and silence also opens up a new way of reading and engaging with the religious traditions and texts of the West: our interpretations must not substitute words for life but must ensure the relation between the two. And this is how we should understand Irigaray’s reading of the Incarnation and the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary: as an interpretation that seeks to foreground the role of breath, speech and silence when it comes to the relation between Mary and the Father-God, to foreground those elements already present to some degree in the sacred literature so as to create new figures that may aid us in our present and future task of ‘becoming human’.

Importantly, even though the Judaeo-Christian traditions are certainly guilty of substituting ‘words for life’, they both contain elements that remind us, if we listen anew, of the necessity and divinity of breathing. In Hebrew and Greek (the languages of the West’s sacred scriptures) the word for spirit is also the word for breath (Hebrew [ruach, חַוּד] and Greek [pneuma, πνεῦμα]). As Irigaray points out, Gen. 2.7 presents the god creating a man by putting his breath into matter. Furthermore, Jesus is born from the body of a woman ‘made fertile by the breath, the Spirit’ (Irigaray, 2005: 76).

Irigaray’s linking of these two moments of divine creation is in one sense consistent with traditional theology: that after the fall, humans are in need of redemption. However, Irigaray’s take on this redemption is hardly orthodox. According to her, the first couple, Adam and Eve, are incapable of living happily as a couple due to their desire ‘to overcome the power of their creator by becoming as him’ (Irigaray, 2008b: 88). As such, the redemption about which the New Testament speaks occurs not through an act of autonomous creation by a male deity, but this time through generation, an engendering between a male god and a woman who is divine by virtue of her status as virgin (Irigaray, 2008b: 88–89).

Again, upon Irigaray’s interpretation Mary is said to be a virgin because she is the one who has achieved the autonomous breathing necessary for ‘a spiritual interiority of her own, capable of welcoming the word of the other without altering it’ (Irigaray, 2004b: 152). And, as I mentioned earlier, Irigaray refuses to hear a command in the angel’s message. To hear only an imperative from the angel is, of course, according to Irigaray, an interpretation consistent with patriarchal eras, but she insists on the possibility of her alternative interpretation because of Mary’s virginity (Irigaray, 1996: 123). Such a refusal to hear ‘submission and compulsion’ is not simply a wilful act of mis-reading. Her reading of the Annunciation and the virginity of Mary is enabled by both the Eastern tradition of yoga and the iconography of the Annunciation in the West. In other words, she brings together two seemingly disparate traditions in order to break free (or at least begin to break free) from the restrictive patriarchal readings that to date have monopolized our engagements with this most important story.

Irigaray points out that many images of the Annunciation include words that come to Mary from the sky, the bird in song, a ray of light directed towards Mary and, importantly, they depict Mary’s hands (and sometime the angel’s hands) as crossed over. As an example, Fra Angelico’s ‘Annunciation’ (1425–28) includes most of these features (including the failed first couple, Adam and Eve):

Irigaray is a psychoanalyst and as such her interpretive practice pays particular attention to the smallest textual details, details often ignored or even unheard by other interpretive practitioners. In this particular case, however, (though certainly consistent with Irigarayan psychoanalytic practice) the meaning, or rather meaningfulness, of these features is clarified for Irigaray through the Eastern system of the chakras, or psycho-physiological sites of the subtle body that store and transmit vital energy throughout the body. In the iconographic tradition of the Annunciation, the two chakras designated are, first, that of elementary vitality and, second, the chakra pertaining to the heart, breath, sight, hearing and speaking. This ‘is situated at the junction between the two shoulders, there where the ray of the sun, the word of the ”Father” or of the angel, the song of the bird, touch, directly or indirectly, Mary’s body. Mary often has the hands crossed on this place’ (Irigaray, 2004b: 162). That Mary’s hands are crossed on this place signifies this attainment of spiritual interiority achieved through autonomous breathing.

OPEN IN VIEWER

For Irigaray, all of this indicates that the Annunciation provides us with an interpretive possibility potentially more beneficial to women (and probably men, as well) than the traditional patriarchal Christian interpretation. Instead of interpreting the angel’s message as the imposition of an order from the distanced Father-god, ‘as the substitution of the word of the celestial Father for corporeal relations, notably of breathing, between two lovers’ (Irigaray, 2005: 52), when we include the iconographic tradition understood in relation to the Eastern teachings of the body’s energies we are able to produce a reading of the Annunciation that, for Irigaray, might begin to guide us towards a culture of intersubjectivity between the sexes, one where words are exchanged ‘in the place where word and flesh fecundate one another intentionally’ (Irigaray, 1996: 141). And upon her reading of the Annunciation and the Incarnation, this is precisely the future possibility conveyed to us in the Christian story, if we have the ‘ears to hear’.

Divine Listening in the Feminine

With Irigaray’s later work, and the development of the idea that it is the spiritual virginity of woman that is required for the Word to be made flesh, ⁴ we can perhaps understand the import of her earlier questions concerning the inclusion of a woman in the creation of this divinity (Irigaray, 1991: 175–76). Irigaray (1991: 174) points out that in the stories of the Old Testament, after the expulsion from the garden and the banishment of the god from the earth, this god nevertheless seeks time and again to return to the earth to dwell with humanity, even though that earth has become ‘a great deportation camp, where men await celestial redemption’. He still appears in person early on to Abraham, Sarah, Jacob and Moses. The final time he appears as such is to Moses, though the god shows only his back and the man ‘takes refuge in a natural crevice’ (Irigaray, 1991: 174). This god is not yet confined to the realms of the transcendent Heaven, but is still present ‘physically, sensorially, cosmically’ (Irigaray, 1991: 174). But then, the god’s presence that was once material becomes abstracted, transmuted to legal words set in stone, with those tablets sealed up and guarded. The god is thus withdrawn from contact with humanity, venerated as writing and as law and thus ‘given over to commentators and translators’ (Irigaray, 1991: 174). Irigaray then makes reference to Exod. 25.8-22 and 40.34–38:

But God himself is divided between his law as inscribed in mineral and a cloud that accompanies and makes a sign to his people – divided between the most immutable fixed and the most lightly airy, between the least and the most porous… And, inside the ark, he is to be found in the place that is left empty between. Is this a memorial to a nearness that dwells and remains in the air? That occurs sometimes, like a trembling of the space between cherubim. A medium in which his tangible advent is sensed, set up, prepared. Guarded, safeguarded by angels, between their wings (1991: 175).

For Irigaray, the cherubim of Exodus represent the sexually differentiated couple who await the incarnation of a new divine. ⁵ Meanwhile, the god who is seeking to dwell amongst humanity is set in stone and protected beneath them, while his airy presence is guarded between them and their wings (Irigaray, 1993a: 45). The cherubim do not here announce anything verbally, as Gabriel later will. Their heraldry is readable only through their description, through ‘the gesture that represents them’ (Irigaray, 1993b: 16). Gabriel’s message to Mary might come to be understood as the articulation of this tangible advent, of divinity understood as the incarnational relation between the body and the word, between words and life. When Irigaray asks if Mary is the one who still senses something of the divine and whether ‘she alone (can) feel the music of the air trembling between the wings of the angels, and make or remake a body from it’ she is in fact suggesting that Mary, the spiritual virgin, is the one capable of hearing and recognizing the necessity of breathing and silence in relation to the production of words that remain faithful to the flesh, words thus capable of being exchanged with the irreducibly other without having to surrender to the law of the same. In short, Mary is an ethical listener, someone who listens to the discourse of the other understood as ‘someone and something I do not know yet … encourag[ing] something unexpected to emerge, some becoming, some growth, some new dawn, perhaps … as the revelation of a truth that has yet to manifest itself’ (Irigaray, 1996: 117).

Through such a reading, Irigaray is reminding us that divinity in the Judaeo-Christian tradition is associated with breath and air in relation to speech and words and indeed we may hear this association if our reading and interpretive techniques are not paralysed by the prescriptions of those ‘commentators and translators’ whose only talent lies in understanding words set in stone. Again, the Christian story is one about the Word becoming flesh in Mary, not stone, and this requires interpretive practices that can both honour and guide us forward from such an ‘event’. If this sounds secessionist, well, it is. I don’t believe that Irigaray feels any real duty to maintain the integrity of masculinist, patriarchal religions and nor do I. And it is important to realize that for Irigaray this Christian ‘event’ is only partially redemptive, given that the redemptive couple, while man and woman, is still confined to genealogical verticality (Irigaray, 2008b: 89). In other words, Irigaray recognizes the redemptive potential of this scandalous story, particularly for women. But, she is hardly arguing that fidelity to these ‘events’ means fidelity to Christianity as something called the ‘true’ religion.

While I cannot go into great detail here, this question of whether Irigaray’s readings of the religious figures, texts and traditions broadly called ‘Christian’ is useful for feminist ‘believers’ is an important one that will need to be addressed in the future. While I acknowledge that one might easily take Irigaray’s thinking on religion to be conservative, ⁶ this is an erroneous response. By this I mean that I think it is incorrect to hear a (perhaps unwitting) defence of masculinist religions and religious figures in Irigaray’s writings on religion in general and Mary and the Incarnation in particular. And more strongly, I believe it is incorrect, perhaps even unethical, to use Irigaray’s work to prop up a feminist defence of Christianity as the religion that reveals the true nature of the divine, even if trying to incorporate, with a level of sophistication, something positive for women therein. What I hope I have demonstrated is that, through a careful exposition of Irigaray’s new interpretation of the Madonna, we can see how this Madonna can function as a new figure who can aid us on our journey towards thinking the possibilities of a new era to come. I stridently argue that the function of Irigaray’s Madonna is not to enable us to remain within the tradition of Christianity, or Roman Catholicism more specifically, as guardians of a spirituality or faith in a divinity understood as already accomplished, with the ability to remain therein being the sole purpose of such an interpretive exercise. I don’t believe that Irigaray is interested at all in giving women intellectual justifications for their allegiance to a theistic system that is patriarchal in both form (the somewhat dubious ‘oneness’ of their god; the hierarchical power structures, etc.) and content (the masculine gender of divinity, or the neuter gender of the god, which is really a masked masculinity; the worship of the father and the son as divine, at the expense of the mother and the daughter and their divinity).

However, nor does Irigaray see it as at all worthwhile to reject our traditions entirely to pursue women-centred religious practices. Indeed, unlike Mary Daly, who, after declaring the potential of the ‘prophetic dimensions of the image of Mary’ (Daly, 1973: 82–97) came to reject Mary as ‘an image of total subservience’ (Daly, 1984: 73) and a disguised rape victim (Daly, 1978: 84), Irigaray has come to claim that the Annunciation and the Incarnation may in fact be ‘henceforth, destined for each woman, to which we will all be invited or called to take part in, as our feminine path or spiritual journey’ (Irigaray, 2004b: 162). Mary, it would seem, points the way toward a spiritual path of becoming for women. Again, however, Irigaray is urging us to read the texts and figures of our religious traditions anew so that we may move beyond conceptions of divinity that do nothing to promote the ‘becoming human’ of women. As such, if women wish to remain within their traditions it may be that they can assume ordained roles, but only if their goal as such is to promote a progression beyond the worship of the father and the son.

In conclusion, when trying to understand what Irigaray is saying about the figure of Mary we first need to remember that Irigaray believes that we cannot bring about change of any kind in Western societies – political, social, economic, ethical – without a radical (i.e. non-nostalgic) return to religion, which seems to persist as a phenomenon of human existence. Crucially, the Annunciation and the Incarnation are, for Irigaray, events that if properly engaged with today might guide us to a future age of the Spirit or Breath, one where redemption takes place between the couple, man and woman. However, such an era cannot take place unless we become mindful of the importance of breath and silence in relation to speaking and listening with each other. When it comes to the interpretation of religious texts, Irigaray is arguing that we must relinquish those patriarchal modes of listening and interpreting, modes that can only provide us with the ‘always already was/is’ that at best can only be repeated (in liturgies, pre-written creeds, and academic theses, for example) and at worst are imposed as imperative. To read, listen and interpret in the feminine means relinquishing our paralysing nostalgia for the past and its events, as if our only task were the collection and repetition of ‘facts’. I think we can hear Irigaray’s statement that ‘interpretation and faithfulness’ regarding these events is ‘incumbent on everyone’ to mean that through fidelity to the Incarnation and Annunciation of Mary we may begin to consider the possibility of speech capable of affirming and delighting in the materiality of human existence, capable of honouring each of the sexes and ensuring the continued becoming of sexuated difference, thus also capable of effecting ethical relations between the sexes. Fidelity to this originary event is a fidelity to ‘the coming of a reality that is alien to any already-existing identity’ (Irigaray, 1991: 171), something that ‘could incarnate the finality of History, or at least lead the way to another era’ (Irigaray, 1996: 141). As such, Irigaray’s reading of the Annunciation and the Incarnation is an integral part of her political thinking regarding the question of how we might guide ourselves into a new epoch, creating a new socio-political order capable of recognizing women and men as different and equal, one capable of engendering a respect for life and a love between two. For Irigaray, only once such an order begins to emerge can we expect a possible remediation between civil and religious existence.