(no subject)
Rather than grasping you- with my hand, with my gaze, with my intellect- I must stop before the inappropriable, leaving the transcendence between us to be. 'You who are not and will never be me or mine', you are and remain you, since I cannot grasp you, understand you, possess you. You escape every ensnarement, ever submission by me, if I respect you not so much because you are transcendent to your body, but because you are transcendent to me.
Far from wanting to possess you in linking myself to you, I preserve a 'to', a safeguard of the in-direction between us- I Love to You, and not: I love you. This 'to' safeguards a place of transcendence between us, a place of respect which is both obligated and willed, a place of possible alliance. You do not then, find yourself reduced to a factual thing or to an object of my love, and not even to an ensemble of qualities, which make you a whole perceptible by me. In stead, I stop in front of you as in front of an other irreducible to me: in body and in intellect, in exteriority and in interiority.
Certainly, I will never understand you, I will never grasp who you are: you will always remain outside of me. but this not being I, not being me, or mine, makes speech possible and necessary between us. No speaking about desire is valid without this muted question: 'Who are you who will never be me or mine, you who will always remain transcendent to me, even if I touch you, since the words have become flesh in you in one way, and in me in another?'
Irigaray, Luce. The Wedding between the Body and Language. Key Writings. New York: Routledge, 2004. pp 14,15