Rebecca Hill - The Interval: Relation and Becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle, and Bergson

THE INTERVAL

RELATION AND BECOMING IN IRIGARAY, ARISTOTLE, AND BERGSON

Rebecca Hill

Copyright 2012 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hill, Rebecca.

The interval : relation and becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle, and Bergson / Rebecca Hill. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-3724-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Irigaray, Luce. 2. Sex differences 3. Irigaray, Luce. Ethique de la diffrence sexuelle. 4. Aristotle. 5. Bergson, Henri,
18591941. I. Title.

B2430.I74.H55 2012

176dc22

2011016592

Printed in the United States of America

14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

Irigaray

English Texts

French Texts

Bergson

English Texts

French Texts

Other Authors

I am grateful to Helen Tartar for her interest and belief in this project. My colleagues and students in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University deserve thanks for providing a supportive and stimulating environment in which to work. I am indebted to Ewa Plonowska Ziarek and Alison Ross for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of the whole manuscript. Thanks to Claire Colebrook, Linda Daley, and Kristin Sampson for conversations that helped me to shape my thinking in this book. I wish to acknowledge Liz Grosz for her friendship and encouragement during the long gestation of this project. Her comments on various drafts of the manuscript and the inspiration of her scholarship and teaching have been invaluable to the evolution of my thinking on the interval. Megan Eastlake, Imogen Williams, Dianne Currier, Kate McDonald, Kelly Pearson, Jami Weinstein and Belinda Smaill have my gratitude for their hospitality and friendship. Thanks also to my parents Christina and John Hill and my sister Melissa Hill. I particularly wish to thank Elizabeth Lamb for her love, generosity, and companionship.

An earlier version of Chapter Five, Interval, Sexual Difference appeared as Interval, Sexual Difference in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 23, no. 1 (Winter 2008). An earlier version of Chapter Six, Phallocentrism in Bergson, appeared as Phallocentrism in Bergson in Deleuze and Gender, ed. Claire Colebrook and Jami Weinstein, special issue, Deleuze Studies 2, supplement (2008).

THE INTERVAL

THE CONCEPT OF THE INTERVAL in English and in French (lintervalle) has both spatial and temporal senses, which are by no means discrete. Frequently, the interval designates a mere gap. An interval is a break between two events or actions in time, or, in extensive terms, an interval is an empty space between two things. Whether construed as spatial or temporal, the interval is presumed to be calculable and homogeneous. The conceptualization of the interval as a calculable gap in time or in space is precisely what I will be arguing against in these pages. Instead, I suggest a heterogeneous figuration of the interval overflowing all attempts at presentation. This book argues for a formulation of the interval as the generative threshold of space and time, as the very motor of difference preceding any designation of identity, and as the place of the possibility of sexual difference.