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always particular. In short, Eurocentrism and phallogocentrism violate Irigaray’s differential
logic of the two.
Following the thread of Irigaray’s écriture féminine, it is worth lending our ears to the
important and fascinating study of women in Tantric (Vajrayana) Buddhism in Nepal and Tibet,
of yogini-tantra by Miranda Shaw in Passionate Enlightenment
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which seeks the middle path of
“bodysattva” (correctly spelled as bodhisattva or “heroic awakening”) and passionate, erotic
jouissance. Tantric Buddhism eulogizes the body or flesh as an “abode of bliss” by embracing
the “jewel” of sexuality or sexual union in which asceticism and celibacy have no place. Shaw’s
work, not unlike Irigaray’s écriture féminine, presents a gynecological view of Tantrism where
yoginis or female Tantrics, who are female practitioners of yoga, engage in the teachings and
practices of blissful intimacy as a path to enlightenment/awakening. However, Shaw contends
that the body of yoginis’s teachings and practices has long been overlooked in the West because
of the “androcentric bias” of Western observers and scholars.
Yoginis revolutionized Buddhism, just as Irigaray’s feminist philosophy has overturned
the “malestream” phallic-logocentric legacy of Western philosophy since Plato, in
comprehending or grasping the nature of the three “S” words: sensuality, sexuality, and
spirituality. It comes as no surprise that Irigaray has turned her ears to the East for her
philosophical verity in which she expands the horizon of her “logic of the two” (or
“betweenness”) to the East/West connection. In Between East and West (Entre Orient et
Occident),
82
Irigaray discovers that the “carnal geography” of Hinduism begins with the bodily
phenomenon of breath as natality or the first sign of life. In Hinduism “vital breath” is
transformed into “spiritual breath.” Whatever her critics say about this work, it is the intellectual
journey worth taking which, I suspect, is far from over or finished. She might very well benefit
Convention