How can the subject amount to a relational practice? Luce Irigaray suggests  that the relation between two naturally different living beings can be a key towards a cultivation of life faithful to our energy, our own nature, our relationship with ourselves, with the other(s), with the world, and towards the elaboration of a civilization corresponding to a flourishing  and not merely surviving humankind.

In order to relate to a subject different from ourselves by nature, we need to return to and within ourselves. Such a relationship « requires an ability to dwell with the possibility of opening oneself to the other, of leaving home to meet with the other while remaining able to return home, to oneself, within oneself in order to keep the two, the one and the other » (cf. Luce Irigaray, In the Beginning, She Was, p. 143 ).

What a subjectivity formed by « dwell(ing) with the possibility of opening oneself to the other » could be like? How can a subject not amount  to a closed  territory but  to an inhabiting, thus a returning to himself/herself as to their home? How can we live as a subjectivity the structuring of which entails intersubjectivity? How can we be not only the ones who return but also the home to which we return? I think  that the returning to home and being the home are two components that we must cultivate as subjects in order to be able to open to the other as other. Thus I suggest that a bodily practice is a crucial undertaking to become capable of having a relationship with the other as heteros, that is, with the other of two who are both same and different, like the two sexes, and not with whatever other of a group ( see on this subject ‘The Return’ in In the Beginning, She Was). The question is: How must we return to our body in order to make possible the elaboration of a subjectivity capable of being in relation both with ourselves and with the other as different from ourselves by nature?

1 – Opening and closing one’s own world in order to be in relationship with the other as other asks us to assume a negative. Our world must be « open because the other, in their difference, remains inaccessible to me, because he, or she, represents a beyond in relation to my I, to me, to mine, a beyond here present beside or in front of me. Closed because, through the respect for the inaccessibility, for the transcendence of the other, I subject myself and my own world to the negative in order to preserve the duality of the subjects and of the worlds in presence. This way, I and my own world are provided with limits » (cf In the Beginning,She Was, pp. 16-17). Irigaray replaces a traditional abstract and mental transcendence with the transcendence of the other as naturally different, beginning with that of the sexuately different other. Thus the subject must both open to the transcendence of the other and withdraw into the self because the naturally different other represents a limit to  his/her expansion and he/she needs a withdrawal to preserve the singularity of their own being. How can we take account of this double process of opening and closing that the respect for the duality of subjectivities requires?

2 – The privilege of touch must be substituted for the privilege of sight. Indeed, touch allows us  to have another kind of shaping and relating regarding ourselves, the other(s), and the world. This must start with a practice of self-affection. Such a practice consists in the borders of our body, the limits between skin and mucous tissues, touching one another: for example, the lips, the eyelids, the palms of the hand, the soles of the feet. This practice of self-affection gives rise to a practice of hetero-affection, beginning between the subjects differently sexuate.

3 – Such a practice entails surmounting the split between activity and passivity; we touch and we are touched, and we can perceive this process as both active and passive.

I suggest that a practice of Taichi can be a means to « listen to our tactile perceptions » and so contribute to the elaboration of a new subjectivity. Irigaray writes  that cultures too often  aim at dominating the body without caring about our energy and its possible transformation. She also notes that psychoanalysis can act as a practice to « release the patient’s energy in order to bind it in a more adequate manner » (cf. A New Culture of Energy, chapters 1-2 ). The practice of Taichi with its repetitive, constant, daily mobilisation and re-binding of chi can operate in such a way. In this practice, the subject becomes an active ecosystem of chi. The body is imagined as a series of practices inspired by and embodied as landscapes of the universe instead of as a biological system. The mobilization of this ecosystem is carried out by the body independently of an ego but through an internal and inter-individual structuring intervening as bridge(s) between the body and the psyche. Irigaray has defined this structuring as the embodiment of phantasms which express themselves as verbs: « the verb…expresses only the establishment of a relationship…It implies neither subject nor object…the dissociation of subject and object has not yet been finalized. The subject, at this level, does not really carry out an action, contemplate a spectacle or articulate a discourse; the subject is included within the action, the spectacle and the discourse themselves » (cf. To Speak is Never Neutral, p. 55).

Irigaray has discovered this function of the phantasm and the verb which expresses it while practicing psychoanalysis. She has observed that the elaboration of subjectivity develops from different types of phantasms and the corresponding verbs. In her seminar, I proposed Daoist verbs as methods to elaborate a subjectivity in harmony with the body. The verbs that I presented during the seminar are:  沉  mobile settlement,  藏 fluid containment,  纏  open entanglement,  聽 tactile listening, and 隨 spontaneous correspondence.