Living and Speaking Together

Living and Speaking Together

Many imagine that building a world culture requires us to use a conceptual and abstract universal language which would be capable of dominating the complexity of the world as it is today. Certainly, this corresponds to the way of reasoning of our past Western tradition. However, the danger in which our planet, the plant and animal kingdoms, but also humanity itself, now find themselves ought to encourage us to reflect on the limitations of our tradition, and the fact that we should elaborate another and different culture, which returns to what I term ‘our natural belonging’, and consider how to cultivate this. In order to avoid the total annihilation of the world, we have to return, I argue, and begin again with, the real universal that life is, and not a universal that corresponds to a constructed model appropriate to only one culture. This requires us to discover another way of living and speaking together – with regard to the real differences between us – including differences in language.

Luce Irigaray, Judith Still