Abstract

What might it mean to truly love the other, to love them in their alterity, for their differences? Assuming that it is even possible, why might we want to, and should we think of this loving in ways other than as a sublime affection of the heart? Arising out of the late 20th century debates on sexual difference in France, feminist philosopher, Helene Cixous alludes to the possibility of a love for the other that escapes the economies of debt and sacrifice, which have defined patriarchal configurations of love. Writing against the via negative of Hegelian subjectivity, Cixous deploys the post-structural strategies of deconstruction and a feminist revisionist psychoanalysis to ask what difference sexual difference makes to our thinking about the self and other? She proposes a feminine economy of exchange between subjects where the other remains other, and love arises in difference. This exchange bespeaks of equality; she refers to it as justice; but she implies it is a passage to the divine. ;Defined against the unity and totalizing grasp of the masculine subject of modernity, Cixous elucidates a feminine subject who is plural, shifting, alive to the present, and existing in a unique relation to itself and the other. Dispossessed of a relationship to self that is mediated by self-possession, Cixous' subject defies the static, autonomous, possessive subjectivity of traditional epistemology and ontology. This subject has neither a 'self' to lose, nor a 'self' to which the appropriated other might return, for 'she' is always a subject in the process of becoming 'herself'. Thus, Cixous' feminine subject displaces the structure of the self/other relation that inevitably places self-sacrifice in the service of other-love. ;Engaging with the Christian conception of divine love for the other , which has buttressed the masculine economy of sacrificial love, this thesis takes up the implications of Cixous' feminine configuration of love, to ask what might be the conditions of subjectivity from which it is inaugurated? Who are the subjects of a love that derives from a feminine excess and abundance, rather than sacrifice and loss? And how might such subjectivities, equal in difference, speak back to the theological debates on divine, agapic love?