Volume 28, Issue 4, Winter 2006
Ian Mills
Pages 413-428
Dwelling in No-Place
Our Ethical Between
Suggestions made by Luce Irigaray in her book, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, may offer a solution to a problem in environmental ethics which has much in common with the gender problem: the tendency of the masculine to exploit the Other as “a-place-to-be-in.” If humans are to achieve the ethicality of mutually beneficial, sustainable relating with all beings, we need to initiate an economy of desire which has regard to a reciprocity of receptivity-activity, as a way of safeguarding a clear space open to the kind of relating that makes possible a “permanent becoming” together of all beings. We need to live in a psychic No-Place, to experience our environment as the potentially infinite “Open” of “our-between.”