Triune sex

Criticizing Levinas’s dyadism, Luce Irigaray writes, “He know nothing of communion in pleasure. Levinas does not ever seem to have experienced the transcendence of the other which becomes an immanent ecstasy . . . The other is [merely] ‘close’ to him in ‘duality.’ This autistic, egological, solitary love does not correspond to a shared outpouring, to the loss of boundary of the skin into the mucous membranes of the body, leaving the circle which encloses my solitude to meet in a shared space, a shared breath . . . In that relation we are at least three , each of which is irreducible to the others: you, me and our creation [ oeuvre ] that ecstasy of ourself in us [ de nous en nous ] . . . prior to any ‘child.’”

Sarah Coakley, who quotes this passage ( God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ , 317-8), comments: “If we take inspiration here from Irigaray’s insight about the implicitly ‘trinitarian’ nature even of human erotic ecstasy, we may perhaps glimpse how human ecstatic loves (at their best) might ultimately relate to divine ecstatic love: not by any direct emulation of the trinitarian nature, but by the ‘interruption’ by the Spirit of any merely ‘egological’ duality inherent in their relationship, such that the human lovers are themselves aware of a necessary ‘third’ between them – both uniting them and protecting their integrity in their new ecstasy of exchange.”