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LUCE IRIGARAY

At the dawn of Greek culture, the path to differentiation is through affirmation of the body. Greek man apprehends himself as separated from infinite nature by his corporeal being. Dexterity and athletic valor are essential qualities of the Homeric hero. Strength and ability in combat are the means by which he learns to apprehend himself. The singularity that, from the start, seems to be the condition for the Hesperian makes him forget how this individuation was won. At present, he is shut up inside himself to the degree that attaining anything from outside himself is a difficult task. Nostalgia for a return to the One-Whole—such is his desire for reversal. Yet man cannot by himself undertake reversal to birth, and this is forbidden the man of knowledge without the guarantee of a foundation inside of which he takes place.

Whence the oblivion of the being's beginning?

And what conclusion should be drawn about the nothing that inhabits Being from. the fact that the thinker, whose care it is to recollect the initial loss in our history, perpetuates the unthought in man's relation to his body?4


Mans power comes from the transformation of space into time: Da-sein cannot realize its Being without an anticipatory essence that gives it power-to-be. Da-sein possesses the ontological structure of projection. It anticipates.

If physis, inasmuch as it gives rise to growth, is turned toward the future in a quasi-maternal way and prior to all naming, then man must project himself toward the future so as to not regress in the direction of that which gave him life. The generative woman, for her part, does not carve out a horizon by turning to what is before her, she gives herself forth and melds with what is given from her. With this temporal indifferentiation of herself and the other, which she sub-tends and accompanies, she


Luce Irigaray - Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger