13
" Our eyes are not capable of seeing, nor even contemplating, intimacy, at least not directly. They can only imagine something about intimacy from the light, the gestures, the words, that it radiates. But intimacy as such will remain invisible, irreducible to appropriation, and thus strange to the logic of Western discourse, to the logos, except in its delusion its lack, its derelictions and artificial ecstasies. Intimacy allows itself neither to be seen nor to be seized. Nevertheless it is probably the core of our being. And any attempts to appropriate it risks annihilating being itself. However, it is not a question of magic, of irrationality, of madness--it is a question of touch. "
― Luce Irigaray , Sharing the World
19
" And superimposed upon your skin was always another skin, impalpable, with infinite reserves, in which you would hide me and keep me captive, so that it was not apparent that secretly you had taken me inside you. And could I cry out that I was living inside you? That I spoke through your mouth? That your love was mine just as much as yours? How could I escape from this confusion that loving you had got me into? I was kept in a cradle of eternity that there was never a moment when you could open again to mortal time. I rested in this dwelling where you kept me a prisoner - between you and you , neither man, nor god, and moving from the one to the other without achieving the union of the two. Was I not for you the place where you kept coming back to pass from the one to the other? Reassuring yourself that you were both? But I wanted you to be this path for me as well. And when I called on you to stay in yourself, to bring together and unite these extremes, instead of constantly jumping from the one to the other, letting me be both gap and bridge, what I was asking was to continue my own journey in you. And not risk falling into the abyss with every step I took. Unless renouncing my becoming, I were to be no more than a support for your trajectory." -- Luce Irigaray in "Elemental Passions "
― Luce Irigaray