Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity [Paperback ed.] 080149396X, 9780801493966

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GYNESIS

GYNESIS Configurations of Woman and Modernity ALICE A. JARDINE

CO R NELL UNIVERSITY PRESS I rlmca mzd L01uum

Cop)•right tC 1985 bv Cornell Umvers1ry Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quororions in a review, thi' book, or pares thereof, must not be reproduced in any form withom perm1ssion in wriong from the publiSher. For infonnadon, address Cornell Um,·ersit)' Press, 124 Roberts Place, lthaca, New York 148so. Fim published 1i)85 by Cornell University Press. First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1986. Second printing, 1987. International Standard Book Number o-8014·1768·6 (cloth) International Standard Book Number o·80I+·9396·x (paper) Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 8+·+s8o6 Printed in the United States of America Ubraria11S: Library of Congress rotalogi11g itiformatio11 appean 011 tlu last page of the book.

The paper in tins book is acrd-free and meets tbe gmdeli11es for pemummce and drtrability of the Committee on Produaion Guidelines for Book L01l!Jevity of the C01111cil on Library Resortrces.

for my mother(s)

CONTENTS

Acknowlcdgmcms

9

Preliminaries

13

GYNESIS I: I NTERSECTIONS

The Woman-in-Effect 2. feminist Tracks 3. Crises in Leginmation: Crossing the Gre:u Voids 4. Spaces for Further Research: Male Paranoia

31

1.

10 61

88

GYNESIS II. INTERI'ACI, GS

S· The Speaking Subject: The Pmiti\ 1tic~ of Alienation

105

6. Thmking rhe Unreprcscntablc: The D•~placcmem of Difference 7. The Demise of Experience: Fiction as Stranger than Tmth?

118 145

GYNESJS II I : I NTERTEXTS

8. Toward the Hysterical Body: Jacque~ LJc.m and Ilis Others 9. The Hysterical Text's Organs: Angle~ on Jacque~ Derrida 10. Becommg a Bod\· '' ithout Orgam: G1Jies Dclcuzc and His Brothers 7

159

.-s zoS

( .(1//(t'l//)

IE'iiS 1\' 11 11

INTERII RENCES

1\ord, rim~ Dl\purc\ Ocd•pu~. Orc\tC:\, c:t al 1 he- 1-Juh ol rhc: Pronow1s, Or, Pc:rhJp\ rhc: Cc:ntury\ Master CJhJI

237 260

'>c:lc:,tnl B1hhography

lndn

8

265

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

W harever the destiny of Gynesis is to be, none of irs limita· rions and all of irs strengths arc due to the extraordinary women with whom I have worked. The contours of my questions were, in fact, mapped out during the meetings of two feminist study groups in Paris: ro Rosi Braidorri, Anna Gibbs, and Jane Weinstock 1 dedicate the concept of gynesis; ro Claire Duchen, Danielle Haase-Dubose, Nancy Huston, and Naomi Schor I dedicate irs writing. I owe thanks, in particular, to Rosi Braidorri, whose book forthcoming in France, Itiueraircs de la dissommce, intertwines with my own, each echoing the other, in a way unique to collective feminist research and writing. Julia Kristeva, in both personal and more intcllecrual ways, made this work possible. I an1 also grateful ro my dissertation director, Leon S. Roudicz, Columbia University, who has never failed to provide me with the personal encouragement necessary to complete the task at hand. I have been particularly helped by those who read unselfishly and painstakingly all or parts of the manuscript in one or several of irs versions: Rosi Braidotti, Jane Gallop, Nancy Miller, Naomi Schor, l'eggy Waller. I an1 also indebted to the Giles Whiting, Danforth, and Woodrow Wilson foundations for their generous contributions. My thanks go as well to my colleagues and d1c administrative staff of d1e Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University for their sup· port, and to the Columbia University Department of french, which made possible my stay at the Ecole Normale Supcrieurc (me d'Ulm). There arc, of course, others-nor the least of whom arc the students of my spring 1983 seminar on feminist theory at Harvard. Also, I ex rend many 9

AclmowlctiJ1mclzts ~

"Jrm rhJJlk.s tO Anne Menke and M.uy Gossy, my research as~istants, and 'iu\Jil 1-ucrst, my rvpist, for their generOSity and care. Finally. I give very special thanks to James, who stood by me through more than one ~eaM>n of solitude and discontent. Acknowledgment is also due ro those journals that allowed me to usc all or part of the following articles in revised form: "Theories of the Feminine.:: Kristcva," Enclitic+, 2 (Fall 1980); "Pre-Texts for the Transatlantic Fcmmisr," Yale French Swdies 62 ( 1981) ; "Gync.:sis," Diacritics (Summer 1982); and for Chapter 10, "Woman in Limbo: Dclcuzc and His Br(orhcrs)," Substance (December 1984). The lines from " Diving into the Wreck" from Diving i11to tbe Wreck: Poems 1971-1972, by Adrienne Rich , arc rcprinrcd by permission of the author and the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright © 19'"3 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Lines from Fragme11t, by John Ashbcry, arc reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher, Georges Borchardt, Inc. Copyright © 1969 by Georges Borchardt, Inc. ALICE ]ARDINE

New York City

10

Norhing can be said of woman. Jacques Lacan (A) woman does not represem somc:thmg, she:'' nor a distinct, defined pcNmality. Gille;. Dclctu-e .md Fcl~ Guanari

Howe' cr- tr ts woman who wtU be my ;ubjccr. SriU, one tmghr wonder wherher rhat doc>n'r rcallv amounr ro rhc same rhing- or is ir ro the od1cr. Jacqucs Derrida Doc~ nor the combat againsr rhc phalli. tc\"3

Bur 111 (a ) woman's language, rhc no place.

wn~cpr .1!.

\um would haw Luce Ingaray

I do not rhink eirher rhar rcvolunon can be broughr abour rhrough language. l lclcnc Cixous

ll

~In which sense' In which sen~ Ahcc J~k.~. vaguely percci,·mg that 11 1~ always in both sense ~~ ont critics) a; irrclc.:vant because it i> a wom:m >peaking. l ha,·c tried to introduce here briefly some of the reasons why feminists may nor want to qualif)', rex> rapidly, major texts of modcrnirv in the West, e>pccially in france, as necessarily feminist or antifeminist, mo~t particularly when they arc texts signed by women. I hope I ha,·c begun to convey, as well, how important I chink it is for feminist theoreticians in france, England, the United States, and (cspeciall)') elsewhere to rethink the historv, impact, place for, and possible future direction> of contemporary interpreth·e modes with regard to feminist theory. for if, as I ha'-e only begun to suggest, modernity represents a perhaps unavoidable and, in any case, new kind of discursiviry on, about, as woman, a valorization and speaking of woman, and if contemporary feminists arc going to take modemil:)' and its theorists seriously, then feminist theory must address some new and complex questions-questions that form the matrix of the pages to follow. · Arc gyncsis and feminism in contradiction, or do they overlap and interact with each other, perhaps even render each other inevitable, in some way? In what sense do certain of the texrs of gyncsis reintroduce very familiar representations of women in spite of themselves? To what extent is the process designated as feminine by those texts absolutely dependent on those representations? When we posit that process as one incarnated by women, are we not falling back inro the anthropomorphic (or gynomor· phic?) images thinkers of modernity have been trying to disimegrate? On the other hand, in what ways do some of the major texts in question exceed those familiar representations of women? How do women theorists' texts of gyncsis differ from those of male theorists; or french texts of gyncsis from American oncsl If the gyncsis seemingly intrinsic to modern· icy is but the product of male fantasy, doe> that necessarily mean it offers no radical tools for women? How might these texts offer new ways of connecting the most radical insights of feminism to the larger questions facing the West as it moves toward a new century? Most importanr, if modernity and feminism arc not to become mutually exclu~ivc and, at the 5ame time, if feminism is nor to compromise the quality of its attention ro female stcrcol:)•ping of whatever kind, what could be new strategies for asking new kinds of questions? 26

Preliminnrics In the first parr of this book, "Imersccrions," I discuss gencrallr rhe problematization of woman in contemporary thought, and most particularly in corm:mporary French thought- a probkmatization directly rclar· cd to rhat thought's explorations in modernity. Why, at the end of the rw~:nrieth century, has ''the feminine" become a wide-ranging area of concern> Why is it used as a metaphor of reading by some of the most influential writers working in France today? How and why this "prob· lcmatization of woman" poses particular problems for comemporary fcmi· nist theory in the United States is the focus of Chapter 2, while Chapters 3 and + trace the ways in which the crises associated with modernity have led to this expansive putting into discourse of woman. How do French theorists situate those crises historically, politically, and conceptually? How docs what has been diagnosed as the breakdown of rhe paternal metaphor in Western culture lead these theorists to valorize other metaphors-new metaphors that pose difficult problems for "feminism" as a concept? In the second section, "Interfacings," I examine in detail three of the major ropologies of contemporary French thought and irs recent history. I emphasize, in particular, the breakdown of the conscious, Cartesian Sub· ject, the default of Representation, and the demise of Man's T nrth. The third section, "Intertexts," includes close readings of selected texts by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Dcleuze-threc of the bestknown participants in the process of gynesis in France, and writers who have had the most direct influence on both feminist and antifeminist thinking there. I also read rvitb these writers several "tictions" they have selected as somehow exemplary of their "theories": Marguerite Duras with Lacan, Maurice Blanchot with Derrida, and Michel Tournier with Dcleu7.c. In the fourth and final section, "Interferences," I return to the question of "comparativism"-no longer in terms of American feminist questions and french explorations of modernity, but, rather, in terms of how both my questions and those explorations may be grounded in cross-currents of cultural specificity. I do this by looking at se,·eral American and French fictional texts written br men-within the context of the questions raised to thar point. The writers chosen arc exemplary to the extent that their particular imaginative strategies for exploring the "feminine" seem borh indicative and representative of the theoretical problem being examined. It was also nw concern to select writers who full somewhere within the "mainstream" of their respective cultural traditions- not because they arc widely read, although they mav be, but because their writing is self-conZ7

Pre/iw inn ric.r ;.:iously dcrcrminnl by the COIKcpwal frameworks prc1·iously examined. In some aftcrwords, I n:turn bridlv to the women theorists wirh whom I lxg.m.

One Ln.st Note Hegel, in the first volume ofTI;c Acstlmics, tells an anecdote about a fish who reproached his painter for not ha1·ing given him a soul. 15 The problem is, "·ho was speaking? \Vas it the m1/ fish or the pnimed fish or something in-between? My interventions at the crossroads of modernity :111d feminism could leal', " Freud'> Hatld," Yair Frmr/1 Stltdi«JSIS6 (197): ,!l6.

33

Gvncsis I : lntcrsl'ctions th\: ,Kutdl' interior, unJbashcdly im:c~tuou~ exploration of these new fomcthing more than that: that the deeply rhemrical .md thcrcfim: political adwmurc of gyncsis does nor need ro return, .md n1.1y in f.tct not allow a rcrurn, w thar plor. The writers in quc>tion .lrl' women·~ aunpa,f/1101/S de route, our intdkcwal fellow tra\·clcrs mto the rwcnty-tirsr century. They acwally represent only a \'Cry .!>mall corner of rhe contemporary theoretical ~rage, in spite of what the majority would h.we us bdie\'c. The distance between their work and the dominant cultural text we li\·e is immea~urablc; in that sense, their work is perhaps comparable only ro rhat of radical feminist theory. "\\'oman." as a new rherorical space, is inseparable from rhe most radical moments of most contemporary disciplines. To limit ourselves to the general ~ct of writers in focus here, "she" may be found in Lacan's pronouncements on desire; Dcrrida's internal explorations of writing; Deleuze's work on becoming woman; Jean-Franc:;ois Lyorard's calls for a feminine anah·tic relation; Jean Baudrillard's work on seduction; l=oucaulr's on madness; Goux's on the new femininity; Barthes's in general; Michel Serres's desire to become Penelope or Ariadne ... "She" is creared from the dose explorations of semanti!= chains whose clements ha\·e changed textual as \\'ell as conceptual positions, at least in terms of valorization: from time to space, tht same to other, paranoia ro hysteria, city to labyrinth, mastery to nonmastery, truth to fiction. As Stephen Heath has put ir in his essay on difference, today that which is designated unrepresemablc is \\'hat is finalh· the most strongh· represented. 23 I would add that, through gynesis, what has always been the most represented-women-while at rhe same rime declared the mosr unrcpresentablc (woman) have changed places, ha\'e changed spaces in an attempt to move beyond the representations of History towards the utopias of modernity.

have learned to sec women through the eyes of men in literant re and through the eyes of women in life. Women

Claudine Herrmann

\\'c have alread~· begun and will cominuc ro explore how the problcmarizarion of woman in conrcmporarv french theory poses particularly \'cxing problems for the American feminist exploring the ne\\' territories of modernity. More attuned than many of her French sisters to the devious history of the "eternal feminine" and "the Images of Women in fiction," >J. Srcphcn Hcarh, " Dilli:rclllc," Srrrw 19 (!'all 19-8): JI-IIJ.

38

The Woman-i1t·Effict and to the fact that "Woman" is the poet's most consranr creation, these American feminists face new versions of the anxiery of influence. Caught between the predominantly American feminist's "know thyself' (your true self versus "false images") and the modem discovery that there is no more self ro know, she may even feel obliged to opt for one camp over the other. For example, those of us attempting ro move away from psychological readings grounded in a transparency theory oflanguage without succumbing ro rhc ncurraliry of pure formalism may sometimes proceed in a schizophrenic manner reading American Feminist Criticism as background and French Theory as foreground, adopting a kind of "yes, l know characters arc nor real but ... "approach ro the literary text. Woman, valorized under the banner of demystification, has become the site of inquiry within a period of profound binary crisis. The tropologies of the feminine presented through gynesis, this new presentation of the irreprcsentablc, arc certainly important clements within the larger critique of classical reasoning. But for those American feminists still sensitive ro gender-determined reading, these dcmystifications and tropologies can prove troubling, particularly when accompanied by violent attacks on "feminism" via critiques of its roots in classical logic. 24 What may be the most widely shared and solid ground for the multiple manifestations of feminist theory- not assuming that the speaker is male-somehow gets lost in the fray; somehow seems undeserving of the wholesale critique feminist theory has received from those supposedly most sympathetic to it, especially in France. While struggling to find new configurations of desire outside of the logic of substitution, do we nor run the danger of (belatedly) developing nothing but the negative of the Great Western Photograph? What philosophical discourse today explores, it has also produced. While women are busy refusing the metaphors trapped in the chains of masculine desire, have the philosophers of modcrniry found a differently same "woman" for producing new images in what is henceforth "a modern society no longer nourishing itself with beliefs (as before) bur with images"? 2 5 When a man says, " I too am woman," he is sure of himself.26 Perhaps the inflarionary Z4. Baudrillard, Dckuze, Dcrrida, Lacan, Lrotard and Cixous, Kofinan, Krim·va, I.e· moine-Luccioni, and Macciocchi arc among the theorists in France who ha\'c adopted the most explicitly negative attitudes toward classical feminism. >s. Roland Banhes, Sollm itrivai11 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979), p. 89. All quotations from original French titles arc my translation unless otherwise indicated. u\. See, for example, the discussion of Gerard Manley Hopkh1s in Sandra M. Gilbcn and Susan Gubar, Mad»>OIIIall i11 tht Attit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 10.

39

(,)ncsis !: lnto-sut ions kmmo..·emri~m of gyncsi.-.-not, histoncally, the tir~t ~uch ~)·rnptom of p.1r.1no•a- ha' been confronting the breakdown of the pa ternal metaphor with norhing lc.:s\ than cfltncln·esis-sometim.:~ metaphor, sometimes mctommy, the only name for that which i~ unn:unablc- God-or, p;:r· !ups ... \\'oman. When we read those who would assert that in order tO have a body. one must be femalc; 27 or, more precisely. "It is impossible to di,sociate the questions of art, style, and truth from the question of the wom.m" 28 -~hall we welcome voices announcing a new hi~toriciry or must 11 c be careful that, like Helen, we arc not left in Egypt with only an image of ourselves transported to Troy as a pretext for war? How then might the feminist d1eorisr proceed? One of the primary assumptions of this smdy is rhar we cannot continue to pursue our investigation of what constitutes sexual difference from within our epistemological legacy. Wc cannot go back, bur rhc path in from of us is riddled with potentially dangerous detours. b there a w~y ro avoid taking an exit from signification, the kind of exit rCSef\·ed only for a funeral procession, a thcorin back into a u-topian desert, without being forced to pursue a feminism whose teleology is more than compatible with the patriarchal text? What is the potenrial for articulating new feminist fictions, borh theoretical and other, formed by the necessity tor women as subjects to remain acri1·e in and attentive to the signifYing practices of our times? A feminist critic very concerned with d1esc questions, Elaine Showalter, has, for exm1pk, distinguished between those feminists concerned with woman as reader-jemi11ist critique-md those concerned with woman as writer-gynocritique.2 9 According to Showalter, the first continues to analyze the male imagination while the second develops new models based on th8. Jacques Ocrrida. :,p,.n'tpmms, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: Umversi"· of Chi· cago Prc,s. 19"9), p. ••. (Oerritla repealing the feminist sentence.) 19. El.linc Showalter, '"Towards a fcmmiq Pocric,.\,~' in ~Vamn1 tY,1thtJ] and U'n.tn{!J nbour lVomtn, cd .•\1Jry j.a.,obu\ (London: Croom Hc:lm, 19""9), pp. 22-+L lO. This cmphasi~ on frmnlt ~xpcricncc has elsewhere bct·n pn.:scnu.·J in countapan to f(:mininc and fcm101U wrmng m England by EIJinc Showalte r~ A Liurnturr ofTbrir Owu (Prmccton: Princeton Univemrv Pr"''· 197") and di,cm(>phtcal tr3diuons. 1".

4/)

The Woman-in-Effect bk, 1 think, with the major challenges of modcrniry's fiC[ions. If we all remain divided between rhe two, it is because they can nor be separated in any culmre; this, at the ,·cry least, has been reaffirmed by the inevitably mystical when not reactionary nature of some nco-feminist thinking.·H The complexities of the intrinsically erotic choice of an "object of study" aside, the attempt to posit a new form of catharsis-to purity (women's) writing of male ropoi-is a return to the worst extremes of our meta· ph~·sical tradition. The elaboration of a feminist strateh'Y of reading and writing reaching through to the other side of and perhaps even beyond that tradition while in dialogue with it is what is most dit1icult. It is, I think, at the sensiti,·e point of contact between the American and French theoretical stances evoked thus far that some progress might be made or, at least, new kinds of questions asked. This involves thinking through the apparent contradictions between that French and American thinking characterized by the conflict between Jl'Omnu as process and 1vomm1 as sexual idmtity. l11is is not to impl)' a one-to-one cultural correspondence. The work being done by theorists, male and female, feminist or nor, in both countries is far roo rich and mulriplc ro be reduced to the number rwo and, politically, one often perceives only the most visible (or audible). 32 There arc, nevertheless, two very different sets of reading effcC£s being produced in the two countries, each with its own ser of debates and limitations. 33 For example, Christiane Makward has written of ncofeminist thought in France, "The theory offemininity is dangerously dose to repeating in 'dcconstructive' language the traditional assumptions on femininitv and female creati,·irv"; while Carolvn Burke has noted that ' . ' American feminists have perhaps "analyzed the constraints of the social context more avidly than the contradictions within oursch·cs."3 " Thinking ;1. In france, women in\'0)\'(;d in the group Questions FC:mm1Mcs ha\'c..' used the tc.:nn ~J38 J6. See his article, "One of the Things at Stake in Women's Struggles,'' Substamt (197&). 37. Ibid., p. 'l· 38. Lucc lngara~', Ce Jtxt ']"i n'w m pitS 1111 (Paris: Editions de J\·linui1, 19"7), p. 67.

4-3

10

G'l'lltsis I : Jntascctiom The J\'oid.u1cc of rhc neutralization of sc.:xual ditlcrence through a new kind of .mcncion to language im·olvcs, abm·c all and first of all, the elaboration of a new theory and practice of the speaking subject. Thi~ search for .1 new ~pc.1king subject should nor be thought of as a search for new symhc.\is or transcendence, bur as a strntcg_y-in rhe strongest sense of the rerm, even if that sense has been coded as "male." Only by participating in this daboration may women remain aware of our posicion in the signifymg cho.in. We know that we must avoid homologation-the inscription of '\\oman" into the discursive truth of the dominanc order is not subvcrsi\'C to char order. As Lymard has suggested, however, some women theoreticians may therefore arrcmpr ro remain our.~ide of magisterial discourse, rc.:jecring it as phalloccntric: but such a posicion, through irs very cxteriority. can only reinforce the central position of the discourse of power. The: Masters do not care at all about what the slaves bclitvc as long as the: slaves remain on the exterior of rhe empire. It is perhaps through what we might call a new French-American Connection, a ditlcrcnt conjunction of etbicnl concerns with process, that what Marguerite Duras has called "the last theoretical imbecile" may begin to percc~ve that the question of woman and language is not one of fashion; it involves rather a profound rethinking of both the male and female speaking subjects' relationship to the real, imaginary and symbolic, as well as of the status of metadiscourse itself. Work by women in France on new theories of the speaking subject and language has assumed rhc contours of the larger emphasis on language in France o1·er rhc past few decades, bm has provided those emphases with added weight: the recognition that the status of women is determined not only at social and politicalle\·cls, but by the \'erv logical processes through which meaning is produced. This recognition is very different from those of a certain kind of American feminist attention to "women's language"bascd on empirical sn1dies of women's "speech-acts."39 We might clarif)' this contrast, even if the clarification is ultimatcl~' inaccurate, by saying that these latter, empirical, studies exan1inc language "externally" while the effort in France is to explore signification "internally." For women theorists in France, howc,·er else they may disagree, the "human subject," "reality," "identity.'' and "meaning'' arc not natural gi\'cns that can be enumerated and analyzed, but arc rather fogies produced through language as it constructs and deconsrrucrs representations. For them, the invcstigaJ9. Sec, for example, Rob111 Lakoff. La>tguagt a>td IVomm~ PIIICt (New York: Harper Colophon, J97S), and ~!ary Ritchie Key. Malr!Frmalt Lat~g11ngr (New York: Scarecrow, 197!).

44

The Womal!-in-Effect tion of how biological difference introduces the speaking subject into the pby of bngu~ge rC\'Cals sexuality as intrinsic to any theorization of any practice, especially literary practice. Amid much disagreement about how it should be done, there is nevertheless total agrcemt.:n t that there must be a thorough rcqucstioning of our concept of language, of the role of the unconscious, of ,-arious conceptions of the speaking subject, and of the symbolic, ideological, and political assumptions underlying the thcoriza· rion process itself. They sec these questions as having the highest priority for feminists, especially for those working in modern theory but who remain wary of irs heritage, of C\'en irs most radical presuppositions. One of the most important and primary theoretical relationships being explored in France is, then. that of the relationship between language and the speaking subject. \Nithout the preliminary understanding that this relationship as classicallv defined is no longer adequate, modernity remains but an abstract idea. We will pursue in detail this problem of the subject in the next section, but it is essential here to remember that any theory of language is based on a conception of the subject which that theory either posits, implies, or denies. 40 Despite the multiple ,·ariations in Western theories of language, a common conception of the subject h.1s united them: it has alwavs been a question of some kind of organic identity, a homo loquens in histon•, a subject acquiring its position through cognition. From the Stoics to Descartes and on through C\'Cil the greater parr of the twentieth century, the logic of the subject has b:1scd itself upon the practice of the sign, on language as transparence, the neurral agent of representation and communication. This subject has ne,·er questioned itself, has never tmly doubted itself-it ne,·cr had an unconscious in an~· case. It has been master of its discourse, a Man. As already mentioned, many feminist cultural critics have finall~· come ro sec that we cannot pursue our in,·estigation of what constitutes difference (by which l mean, tcntati\'clv, sexual dificrcnce) within this epistemologicallcgacv of representation and its comfortable conception of the ;peaking subject and language. Once traditional conceptions of the speaking subject and language ha,·e been rejected, however, the real problems begin. One may retreat from those problems: accept on fuith that there arc male and female subjects, defined existentially; ignore the problem; or replace the human subject bv abstract entities. for ex:1mpk, one ma~· emphasize various fonns of "im·olunrarism" where, as Edward Said has pur it, the subject has no control, meaning is erased, and onlv those ~. See

""'ks by )uha Knsrc,a, csp. l'o~)'logu< (Paris: Ediuons du Scuil, inr't Text, p.

154.

ss

(,:yutsis 1: Imcrscct iom one's CIK'rg1c~ i~ modernity or, more prcci~dy, comcmporary thought reflecting on the posnnodcrn gc~turc. for a modernity presenting a new kind of diKursi\'ity on woman and women, a valorization and speaking of "oman through t,')'nc~is, the femini~t pmtures M> briefly surYeyed here become even more highly problematized. The second question needing attention with regard to the dominant modes of Anglo-Americ,\n feminist criticism is that of nddrm. !fit is more tlun :U\IIOI'i ng that men'~ question, addressed to each other, is ~till primarily " But what do women want?" it sometimes appears that feminist literary critics have still not asked "VI'har do we want?"-and the answers to that question depend a great deal upon those with whom we nrc in dialogue. The question ir~clf is already overdetermined culturally (woman as the suppliant); but the question remains ali1·c, nonetheless, for the public feminist critic. This question is related to the polemical or prescriptive problem that Kolodnr speaks of in the article with which we began. While l strongly agree that one must nor prescribe how or what someone should write, l cannot sec how or why a feminist critic. would want to or be able ro "separate political ideologies from aesthetic judgments" while "[continuing) for some time, to be avowedly 'political"' (nor how she could evaluate :\forman .t\lailcr's TIJe Nnked nnd tbe Dead as "probably the finest novel to come out of World War Il").l 2 Howc1'cr one feels about Mailer, what is troubling here is the separation of "ideology" not only from "politics," but from something called "aesthetic judgment" as well. If Kolodny is saying that feminist criticism must have a strategy of evaluation rooted in irs own time and history in order to avoid idealization, l agree. But if she is implying that the kind of fumre answers feminists want can be ~epa rated from the kind of questions the\' ask now, l do not. And the answers will in part depend upon whom we address rhc questions ro. That is, ro and for whom arc feminist critics writing? Is there a desire for men ro start 1\Titing "about" woman in a "feminist style"? 13 For them to stop writing about women altogether? Do feminist critics want the male critics ro read them> Or do they want just women ro do so? It is essential to ask these banal and yet surprisingly unanswerable questions because feminist scholarship has reached something of a double bind, raising numerous 11. Kolodny, "Some ~Otc On the other hand, when you problematizc "Man" (as being at the foundations of Western notions of the self) to the extent that French moughr has, you arc bound to find "woman"-no matter who is speak· ing- and that most definitely concerns feminist criticism. 16. ,\lichel Foucault, " What Is an Author?" uans. Josu~ N. Harari, in Text ~tal Smuegirip. pp. 51-6o. >s. Cf Helene CixouC~ (Technolf:.'Y? C.tpitalism?) would be caught in the s.tmc impo;,lbJii r,· of knowing. \\'e can only talk about the seeds of this crisi~. They were buried, tor example, in two of the major kinds of narrati\'eS of the ninctecmh ccmury: those of spccul.uion (for example, freud) and emancipation (Marx). Lyorard emphasizes that this cnsis in legitimation is, first and foremost . •1 crisis in governing, in the \'alidity of the social contract itself, rather than in tl1.1t of am· one particular ideology, within patriarchal culture. Although p.uemity per sc is nor a major copic in Lyotard's text. he makes it clear that the crisis is not sexually neutral. He docs this primarily through his descriptions of the only ,·iablc source and place he sees f()r legitimacy in po;rmodcrn culture: "para-logic." Thi... kind of logic is dependent upon Jnd \'alorizes rhe kinds of incomplete "shorr stories" historically embed· ded, hidden, within so-called "scientific" or "objecti\·e" discourse: rhc kinds of short narratives that this discourse attempts to evacuate in order to shore up its "Truths. " 3 These short narrati\•es arc described as anrisy;tematic, antimethodical; their proponents would be in fa,•or of"temporary pacts" rather than '\mi,·crsal social corotracts."4 They arc the components of what lxorard will call, in a later article, a new kind of "pseudotheory": "a feminine relation of ductility and ductibiliry, polymorphism." 5 Ly01ard argues in fa,·or of establishing a "philosophy of fairies [sic) and women" whose primary characteristics would be anonymity, passi,·iry, and a theatrics of faceless masks. But his rather timid insights into how the crises in question arc cri.ses in the fables, systems, and theories imagined by men become bolder and more explicit elsewhere; for example, in his "One of the Things at Stake in Women's Struggles": "Deceitful like Eubulides and like realities, women arc discm·cring something that could cause the greatest rc,·olution in the West, something that (ma.sculinc) domination has nc,·er ceased ro .stifle: there is no signifier; or else, the class above all classes is just one among many; or again, we \Vcsterncrs must rework our space-time and all our logic on the basis of non-ccntricism, non-finality, non-truth."6 The slippage in male theoretical discourse from the ftminine (anon~·mity, passi\'ity, and so on) to women (as metaph\'Sically opposed co men ) and, finall\', to ''we" ("we Westerners") will be of concern through;. On SC1cnntic d•scour1ichi:fc ,\1omrday, "Toward rhe Orhcr Bod)'» ( unpublished paper). 16. One of the most audacious of contemporary philosophers in this realm is Gilles De· leuze. We will come back 10 h101 111 dctailla1cr. r-. Sec espcctaill' ,\hchdk Lc Docuff, L'rma,qmnrrt piJriiJSopiJrqut (Paris: l'ayot, r93o). Sec abo Lue< lngarar'> ,Sprwlum dr l'n111re frmmr (Parr;: Edittons de Mrnuit, 197+).

70

Crises in Legitimatum the "exemplary images" used by philosophers since antiquity to defme the world: for example, Plato's "cavern," Descartes' "closed room," Kant's "island," or, in another register, Kierkcgaard's "finger in the mud." One of the most familiar examples, very close to our own time, is Alexandre Kojcve's illustration of his ontology through the usc of tbc Sartrean image: the gold ring whose hole is as essential to its cxisrencc as is its gold. 18 The mumal interdependency of rhe parts of any such srmcturc has had infinite variations, but those variations, now hiscoricizcd, arc no longer sufficient for modernity, according to the philosophers: the crisis in the discursive itineraries of Western philosophy and the human sciences isomorphic to it im·olvcs first and foremost a problcmatizarion of the boundaries and spaces necessary to their existence, and this, in turn, involves a disruption of the male and female connotations upon which the latter depend. In his early essay, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Scicnces," 19 Jacques Derrida shows that both the concept and the word stnwure arc as old as the West and that that stmcture has always assumed a center, a presence, an origin-one with different names according to the historical moment. At some point, however, there was an event, a disruption, and as Derrida puts it, one began to suspect d1crc was no center; the center was deccntered; the structure began to collapse. 2 0 Like Lyotard, he insists that trying to nan1c the event or time that brought about this decentcring would be naive. We can only nan1c the work that opened the way to this dccentcring: rhe Nicrzschean critique of metaphysics, the Freudian critique of self-presence, and the Heideggcrian destrncrion of metaphysics, of onto-rheology, of the determination of being as presence. 21 What was disrupted, decentered, put imo question, particularly by these writers, was the "Big Dichotomies,"2 2 those mat had allowed Western philosophers to think about boundaries and spaces, about strnccurcsmost especially about Culture and Nature- up until rhc nineteenth ccnrury. Since then, d1e major concern of philosophy, the human sciences, and che narural sciences seems to have been me same: as Levi-Strauss says in reference to anthropology, "It would not be enough to reabsorb partie18. Alexandre Koi: rollS, rrs-u- lking·conscious·of·itsclf Would be the ellS CIIIISII Slli, that is, God ... and "[with Sartrc I the passage from lmm1111 subjectil'il)· ('I ~peak of the world.') to absolute subjectivity ('The world speaks of ir~clf.') is prohibited. " 36 Same's conclusion is that all "'ian can do in the twentieth century is proceed "as if": "E,·eryrhing happens as if the world, man, and man-in-the-world succeeded in realizing only a missing God [u11 Dieu mauqut']. "37 Almost but not quite a God .. . Could it be that the end result of the history of technique, here incarnated by Man's pour-soi, is the creation of an twtomnto11, a kind of''spirit·in·matter"? Could this be the phantasmatic, utopian end point not onh• of all technical progress bur of philosoph)' itself? A kind of sacred materiality that can communicate nothing detached from itself? A kind of "pregnant matter,'~ as Dcrrida might put it? So closclv associated with Western notions of God, this "spirit·in·matter" is terrifYing, 11/llll!llltl!bfc; it can engender irsdt; it has no need of a mother or f:uher. It is beyond the representation that Man has always presented himself with and controlled. It is, in irs essence, an indistinctness between the inside and the outside, between o riginal boundaries and spaces. To think this indistinctness in the twentieth cenrury has been to think a crisis of indescribable proportions, ro throw all of the Big Dichotomies into question: for if the e~rerior is interior, then the interior is also exterior; Man's soul is outside of him-self; history is but the exterior of his own no longer interior imagination. An exploration of this crisis, as an exploration of the figural, has been experienced as a necessity by those philosophers attuned to the violence of technique and irs technologies in the twentieth century. Either Nature, for modern Man, can become nothing more than a complex ~data bank," a source from which he will extract what he needs until it is empty, or she can become more plastic, she can be assumed and affirmed-saved from .;s. TheM: connotations arc: now wlddy rccogniz ln~read of making physis ~peak, perhaps Man should let her speak. Rut to do this, w conceptualize this confusion of borderlines, the Philosopher-Man cannot remain ar the center as in the past. He has modeled himself, rather, after Orpheus, "[who J did nor descend into night in order to put himself in the position of being able ro produce a harmonious song, to bring about the reconciliation between night and dav and to have himself crowned for his art. He went to seck the figural instance, the other of his VCI)' work, to sec the invisible, to sec death. " 38 Like the "arri~t," the Philosopher-Man in d1c late twentieth century rnust descend, then find and embrace tharftgm·c, figurative device, which has no visage, no recognizable traits. And that figure, Eurydice, is u'()mmt. 3 It is no accident that Lvotard has here chosen the Orpheus myth to exempli f)' the problem of the figural, of the imagistic, tor modern J\lan. Alreadv a central myth for manv philosophers, espcciall)' since the nineteenth century, this nwth has taken on special significance in conrernpo· rary French thought (most notablv, in echo to the work of Maurice Blanchot). 40 Orpheus is the poet who descends into Hades to search for Eurydice; but if he wants to rescue her and bring her out into the daylight, he must not, above all, turn and look at her. Bur, of course, he docs look (in French, ilia &visage) and thus loses her and, ar the same rime,fmds his poetry and his song. That is, in order to find the pocticftgm·c, the visage must nor be seen: "La figure esr ce qui n'a pas de 1•isagc" (the figure is char which has no facc).41 Like literature, philosophy will ha,·e ro put aside irs fear of mm·ing beyond what is merely human and male (the visage); it must accelerate irs search for Eurydice, for what is female, lor the frgtwe, if it wishes to invent new songs. In fact, modernity has increasingly been qualified as what Gilles Ddeuzc calls rhe process of devisngiftcntic11, a kind of dc·individualizarion 42 For him, the visage, the identifiable face, is "black holes on a white wall," an abstract, European, white male machine that has a definite social function:

38. }('an·franc;oi.s Lyorard, /)fnl't ti pnrtir dt .\fn.rx tr frrud ( Paris: Editions c.k

PI>- l9-60. 39. Fi._qurt. in f~JlCh, is both a generic term for the t'Jcc and a rhetoncal

~·ti nuJt,

19'J),

tt'nll (as in English). l'iSftJ]t fffcr~ to thJt aspcm le Sicn; c'cisage has a great future, provided it is destroyed, undone. En route toward the asignifianr, roward the asubjccrive. Bur we still ha,·e explained norhing about what we fccJ."SO Bur then neither has the feminist critic. The philosophers thinking about the status of the image in modernity haYe increasingly devoted a large portion of their attention to the hiscory of religion in Wcst.:rn culture. For the history of the West has not only been that of metaphysics, of its structures and dichotomies. It has also been that of Judeo·Christianiry: the strange dialogue between the Greek and the Jew-and their sons. 5 1 What has been diagnosed by philosoph)' as a crisis of indistinctness berwecn the inside and the outside, between a certain space and a certain boundary, between metaphor and metonymy, is seen to be a crisis, as well, of a confrontation with the Judeo·Christian God and the denial, displacement, or resurrection of the possibilities of His image(s), of the figurabiliry of the sacred. For example, if the Greek father was there to confer authority on his son, either through his presmct (Pure Life) or his absmct (Death), the Judaic father turned his back on the son and disappeared from the Temple. The Judaic father cannot be represented any more than could the maternal idols m•cr which the Judaic Temple was built. If Oedipus was able tO accomplish his primordial desire through a confrontation with the Father, Abraham was not led by desire, but closed his eyes in order to lisrm to rather than to sec God the Father. In Judaic thought, there is only the Father's voice warning against all representations, aU images- an empty space whose boundaries arc the car. The Christian father-as grounded in Catholicism-is, on the od1cr hand, abw1damly represented through tri· angular mediation: the concept of the trinity. With Christianity, the curi· ously maternal HOI)' Ghost and Son will unite wirh the Judaic father's voice and representationally unite in Celestial Love. Protestantism is seen so. Dclcuzc and Guanari, ~vi.sagCirC," pp. 109-10. Also SC"C Henry Miller, Tropic ofCnpri· uan rhought" (p. w ). Sl Juli.t Krisrcva, Pou'tr'S of Horror: An £ssn_v on Abjcct;qn, tr.ms. l..eon S. Roudic-.t. (~ew Yo rk : Columb1a Cnhcr"tv l'rc>s, 1982), p. 95.

8o

Oises in Legitimation But wh~t was and still is this space so suddenly our of control, this loss of puriry ~nd tcrrif)•ing force? Another God> The aftershock of God's Death? New figures must be found beyond theocentric representation. The teclmii has been threatened from the interior and exterior b1• a lan' guagc it may ha1·e produced but which, in any case, it cannot seem w control. Freud heard that language, as did Nietzsche; and they both could only, if in different ways, represmt it as the unmediated violence of JV!itra, the Great Mother. The hnguagc threatening the end of the world is seen by the philosophers at the threshold of modernitY as emerging from an unrecognizable, anonymous space formerly hidden in the shadows: the face filled with light of the young "Persian God" who, roda1', still remains incomprchmsibk, unknowable, unnameable, and impossible to control. Modernity's task will be to name this unnameable. Philosophy will han: to unite with religion to d1ink this space by turning back on itself, bv finding a new definition of sovereign['\,· (beyond God ), and, most important, by rethinking in its entirety what in rhe West has been called History: ''And mankind reckons rime ... from the first dav of Chrisriani['l,'! WIJy not mtlm-jiwn its IIISt?-Prom todny?-The transvaluation of all values! . .."5 4 There is, then, on the part of some of the most important historians and philosophers of modernity, at least one generally accepted consensus from within this continuing figurative crisis: the West is approaching or has already traversed the mdii!!J of a certain stricth- delimited history: that of metaphysics and Judco -Christianiry. Bur to speak of an end is alreadv ro adhere to a certain logic-the logic of that hisrory. And so e1•en historythat most encompassing of master narratives , rhe one ro which we in the Wesr have alwavs been able to mrn as a last resort-becomes problcnmic in and of itself (it becomes historicizable) and turns back upon itself. It would be impractical to try even to sum up the major rci'Oiutions the word "history" has been through in France 01•cr the: past quarter of a cenmrv. Suflicc it to say that "history" as a concept has been questioned, as we might expect, from within the context of an entire " new (re )gencration" of French philowplw. This (rc)gcncration has taken place within what Vincent Dcscombes (rather unhistorically but ar least clearly) has termed the passage from the generation of the three H's (Heidegger, Hegel, and Husser!) to the generation of the three "Masters of Suspicion" (Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud) and, most important, beyond. 55 The 0\'erall interrogation in France of all systems ofhisrorical thinking has emphasized most strongly their mumal dependence on certain fundamental conccp· ~.._.

ss.

>:ii:tJ..Schc-, Tbr Ami·OJrist. pp. 181-82. $c(' Dcscombc-c;, Modrm Frnuh Pbi!Dtuphy.

8!

(,)•ncJiJ 1: /ntcrscctiow rion• of rhe speaking subject, language, and religious structures. "HistOry" lS teleology and projt·ct, whether elaborated within a "Marxist" or "Idc.1li~r" fr.1mcwork, i• presented as anothn collapsing structure that must be rhoughr in and of irsd( This has led to a kind of accdcration in the hi~rorici~.nion of Western hi~ror:· and irs limits, leading, ultimatclr. to a set of ,Kcdcrating, interdisciplinar:· extrapolations: history is linked to the ro_qito, ro rhc patcnl.lllunction, rcprc~cntarion, meaning, denotation, sign, ~ym;L\, narration, and ~o forth. At the ~ame time, that which has been "left our" of hi~tory and the fields of irs extrapolated concepts has been revalorized as their (feminine) "foils." If the seemi ng isomorphism among philosophical, religious, and figurati,·e crises is increasingly wc:lcomed bl' femin ist theoreticians, rhe breakdown of historical modalities of thought. and rhe above-mentioned genderizarions, pose a series of difficult questions. !:'or, once again, feminism is neccssaril~· about women-a group of human beings iu bisttny whose identity is defined by that histOry's representation of sexuality. It is hardly necessary ro point our that the wa~·s of-thinking about feminism in the West arc already O\·erdetermined; that th~y arc based on systems of inherited thought: in most cases, on empiricism or on existential, concrete thinking. There is, after all, an insistence bv feminists on what is simp!)' called reality: a pragmatic definition of truth, or, as Dcscombcs writes in reference to Sartrcan humanism: "the true is the result." TI1is has led to the rejection of the word "feminism" by some women in France as simply a complex plav of humanist ideology; or else, it has culminated in an attempt ro li,·e in rwo rimes: historical rime ("reality") and written rime ("elsewhere"). An increasing majority, howe,•er, retain rhc word ''feminism" - admitting rhcrc arc problems wirh ir bur insisting on using it now, concrctc:ly (rhar is, cxistcnrially). As rhey might say: If humanism was about purring the word "Man" where "God" had been used before, and if therefore feminism is nothing but another humanist gcsntre in that it replaces "Man" with "\·\'oman," so be it-for now. Some have suggested thar "feminism" is nothing more than a historical moment itself.ha,·ing arisen, flourished, and died within a historical trajectory beyond which the West is mm·ing rapidly. From this poinr of view, feminism is jusr as anachronistic as is H isrorv. History as anachronistic? This concepntal oxymoron is in fact what is being examined in france. A new conception of history means a new conception of rime- a rctrmt from rime and emphasis on space. Some of those examining new spaces-whether tranwersal, interior, or hidden behind what we used to call Timc-h:l\'e remained within schemes of 8z

Crises i11 Legitimation causaliry. Others have rejected causality completely and, through an em· phasis on language, have shown the part played in historv by chance, discourse, or writing. What is most striking about all of these destmcrur· ings, however, is their common emphasis on the f.~ct that r) we seem to have traversed tbree precise cpocbs in the West and 2) we arc now rapidly rnovi ng into a fom-tiJ as yet unknown. This is not an uncommon modern periodization of" History"-from Erich Auerbach to Dclcuzc, male theo· rists have consistently posited a tripartite configuration of Man's life. 56 Bur what is striking about this configuration in conrcmporary france is its rdati,·c auronomy in relationship to "empirical facts." In conremporary French rhought, it is not the "event" rhat assumes importance as a histor· ical mark, but the epistemological ~nftgurntious surrounding that e,·cnr, especially with regard to language. For example, as outlined in Chapter r, Jean-Joseph Goux has cmpha· sized that these three epochs correspond to the three stages in Marxist and Freudian thought; in fact, Goux himself has constmctcd a four-layered historical rclcscopc capable of taking that thought inro account. Michel Foucault. while rejecting both heudianism and Marxism. has also cmpha· sized three epochs (and a new fourth one) in history-but he adds that we cannot in any f.1shion dialccticizc them or discuss rhc links berween them. For him (and others), the suggestion rhar there is an end to His tory, analogous to the end of an individual's lite, is an anthropomorphic as· sumption already inherent in schemes of causality. What arc the three epochs presented as essential to Western Time? The firsr would seem to run up to and, in some cases, through the Renaissance. The second expands through the SC\-cntccnrh and eighteenth ccnrurics; and the d1ird begins somewhere in rhe late cightcenrh or early nincteenrh century and conri nues-unril when? Alrhough Foucaulr once suggested I950 as the end point of the third epoch, we arc at prcscm unable to say whether we arc acrually still enclosed in ir or alreadv beyond it. Many theorists would agree, I think, that we arc both within and withom it at the same rime; here again, boundaries become problematic- or else act as ,·cils to hinder us from knowing. Let us briefly explore the attributes of these three dearly outlined stages before exploring tl1c unclear horizons of the fourth. And although this 56. f or rwo dis..o;imilar distorical tradition, linguistic unity- were irreversibly weakened. Both the idemitic~ and loss of i To my knowledge, this question has not been adequately examined, but is certainly worthy of serious con· sideration bv feminist historians. For example, the first transition period- between the Middle Age,~ and the Renaissance-was a period when "woman" was at the height of dis· cursi,·c circulation: a circulation in which women came w play a decisive part. Feminist historians generally agree that the rise and consolidation of Christianity had combined with the classical tradition during the Middle Ages to produce a rhoroughlv misogynist culmre throughout Europc15 13. Ro!>i Braidoui, "FCminismc ct philosophic" (di~~ .• Uni\•cni~· of Pui~ I , 1981 ), p. ++· 14 Ibid., pp. 46-.p. 15. For a summarv of thi~ misogynist tradnion with spcciaJ rcrcrcncc 'o Briuin, ~cc in

panic-ul:ir Katherine' M . Rogers, 111f Troublcsomr Hrlpmatr; A Hisro1:r of Afisogyn.T m Littr·

93

Gvucsis I: I mcrscctious The t:um>tt\ "Querdk· dt'S ti:mmcs" beg.1n in the tenth and ck\'cnth centuries (extmding ro the sixteenth and, according to some, bcvond), producmg such texts as Roge r de C.1cn's Camten dr mundi contcmpru and a M:ric> of Church Counci ls devoted to keeping woman in her place (for cx.1mpk, the Council of Paris in 1023). The literamrc of courtly love throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in its ambivalent and simultaneous hatred and idca liz.1tion of ""'oman," would do nothing to sub,·ert, in any significant way, the fundamental attributes of \\'Oman by then firmly CMablishcd: "stupidity, irritability, incumtancy, loquacity, fri ,·olity, drunkenness, gluttony, pcrYcrsity, hypocrisy, selfishness. [... )" 16 Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the representation of \\'Oman bt-came one of drastic ext remes. Lc roman de Ia t'()SC and the subsequent tide of literature it generated could serve here as a symbol of the change in question. Begun in 12.2.0 by Gui llaume de Lorris and completed in 12.65 by Jean de Meun, Le roman de In rose incorporated in one volume a radical change from courtly inspi ration and irs ambi,·alcncc to an extreme, solid hatred of women: "Also it is really the thinking of Jean de Meun and not that of Guillaume de Lorris that was a problem at the end of the Middle Ages. Wirh him, antifeminism had arrived at a \'eritablc crystallization: it was no lo nger possible ro allow the dc,·dopmcm of a dury of response. I' rom the midst of the quarrd that broke out around him appeared the firsr concerted adventure of fcminism."L7 The qu~relle dr Ia Rose, the querclle des femmes was at its height; 111 and the atmosphere thus created di,·idcd the Church and the humanist movement alike. 19 But, most important, the quercllc also produced the first woman in France to Ji,·e by her pen: Christine de Pisan, who produced a response to de Mcun in her Ln cite des dnmcs. 20 The ensuing angrv, rhetorical battles rtwrr (Seattle: L'n"·crs1t)' of Washington l'rcss. 166); and with regard to france, Alb1~tur and

M3.It~

Danzcl Armogathc, Hl.Stotrt dtf fimmismt fnmcms (Pan\: dcto Fcmnl..tmplc, Kristt"\'3 has shown that it was during tht: period 1300-rsoo that the dominant modes of symboliz.1rion in the \Vest were changing radic.1lly from the: syrnbol to the sign. Cf. Juli3 Kristcv:t, /~ tcxtt Ju romnu (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), p. z.~. !4. Sec JJn MacLean, H'oman Triumphant: Frminism it1 Frnu!J Liltraturr J6Jo- I6$l (Ox· ford: Clarendon, 1917). 1.5. Albistur and Armogathcl HisttJirt. p. 191. 1

Gynesis 1: lntt:rsectiom f1fkcnth cemury. was ro continue in essentially the ~ame 1n. In on01hcr ,·em, Susan Sukiman has doagnoscd the contemporary "sdf· engendered text'" as :t complex manifntation of male parnnoi:t in ~Reading Robbc·Grillct: Sac.hsm and Text m l'n'l)te pour 1mr rh'Oiutiou d Nrw Yorlt," Romnnic Rrvinv 68:1 (January •9--): 43- 6•.

Spaces for Fmther Research un.:. ·~5

That is, the desire to be borh woman and spirit (both matter and form, self-created-an automaton?) may be the only way w avoid becom· ing the objt·ct of the UtlmJs (female's) desire; ir allows the complct can be adcquatd~· addressed m th•s ~tudy. The reader might want to refer to the following cs.s..ty. wrirrcn from a pcrspcc· rh·c diffcr"cnr from mine: Cath(rinc Chalicr~ Fig urn du finn lim: Letrllrf d'Emmtt11utl L.rvwru ( Pans: La :>:urt Survcillcc, 1982). Jj. Also sc:c Lucc Jrigara~· on thts quc~tion in Spuulum, c~pcdally the l~t sc..:[ion. 16. Derrida, ll'nW('I and Otjfrrmu, p. 88. 11. Ibid., p. 91. 18. lb1d., csp. pp. 104-IOS. 19. Dcrrida, Disummnr:ou, p... 7.

llQ

The Speaking Subject the classical notion of the author is just that-cl::tSsical-and must lx deconstmcred if altcrity is ro lx tmly reinvented. The subject of c.'criture would thus be seen as but "a system of relations l-x:tween strata: the Mystic Pad, the p~ychc, society, the world,'' for "within that scene, on that stage, the punctual simplici ty of the classical subject is not to be found."20 Dcrrida will sho w, throughout all of his readings-with-others, that any one writing subject in an~· text is indeed unfindable and most cspeciall)• he himself is impossible ro "pin down." for Derrida, there arc always in any text at least "two texts, rwo hands, two visions, two ways of listening. Together simultaneouslv and separatdy."21 Writing is altcrity in language, and conceived in this way, it offers ethical possibilities as ~·ct undreamt of in the West. Dcrrida docs not, of course, insist only upon Blanchot, Hcidcgger, and Lcvinas. Excavating Husscrl's "absolute subjccti,•iry," for example, he shows how it escapes Husscrl's own hands because "there is no consticuting subjectivity. The very concept of constirution itself must be dcconstmctcd."22 Wandering through Bataille's proposals for a new kind of sovereignty, Derrida gently pus hes the proposals om from under the umbrella of Hegelian mastery where lhtaille's sovereign sometimes remains: "For sovereignty has no identity, is not self, for itself, ton>nrd itself, 11cnr itsclf" 23 In his article, "Signature, Event, Context," Derrida shows how assumptions about writing, context, author, source, intention, and communication, as articulated by J. L. Austin\ pcrformativc linguistics, arc but a series of metaphysical cliches and commonplace;. When John Searle (the son) comes to Austin's (the father's) defense, Dcrrida playfully, indeed gleefully, metamorphoses "Searle" into an "anonymous society": SARL (Sociiti nuonyme n rcrpo11snbilite limitec) . E,·en a signatu re is no guarantee of :mthenricity. For Derrida, the proper, that is, paternal name itself is one of the first things to become totally improper, improbable, and strangely Othcr.24 20. Ot·rrida, lVritbtq nnd Diffrrnuc, pp. 226- 2 ... In j. l.:atcr inttl'\ icw with Jc:J.J'l •l.cmi~ Houdebinc and Guy Scaqx:na, published in ['otifiOIIS, Derrida reminds us that he JS not saying th:J.t there is no ~ubjcct of writing (or no subject), but th.u "'it is solely nt.'CsyciJQ/ogi'al Work:r, pp. 135- 36. Howc.:vcr an exploration of the relationship of L.ac.tn's thought ro dialectics might be approached, one would have 10 begin "ilh l'rcud's article on negation; Hyppolitc~.s reading of it (Jean Hyppolitc, ~£CommcntJ.irc pariC sur Ia Vcrncinung de Freud'' in Lacan, F.trits, pp. 879- 87); and Lacan's "R.cponsc:'' (Emn, pp. 381-99). An introduction to dtis ut•crallargumcm on ncgatil'ity is Anthony Wilden, TiJr Lnnguagt oftiN Srlf(':, 1968). 7. for .m intcrcsdng discu~ion of fcucrbach and Marx, sec jean·Joseph Goltx's "Lc temple d'mopic," in Ln iamodnsrer, pp. 31-SI. 8. Jacques Lacan, "On a Qucst1on Preliminary to An~· PO$Siblc Treatment of Psrchmh," tn Etrits: A Sdcctioll, p. 196.

s.

IZI

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II: f11lfljncings

o'a which "it" Ius no comrol: the ~ubW!lHion and di;placemem of ~ig· mtirr,, the lfitfcrmti.ll procrs~ of language.\' .\ lmt important for our concerns here is the facr that this twisting of the nornully orderly dialectical S\'Stcm was due to Lacan's recognition of and nmstcnce on that which escape~ any possible dialectic of representation: wlut he c.llb the "Real" and Bataille calls the "sacred." 10 In order ro understJnd the process of gyncsis, it is important to remember that rhc \'arious attempt~ to join freud with dialectical thinking have diflcred sub· st.mrially according ro whether or not they situate themsclvc~ "before" or ",1fier" L.1c:-tn; and, among those that come "after," according to whether or not they respect his radical •ubterfuge of the traditionally conceived dialectical process through his emphasi~ on thi~ Real. The Real must lx: treated carefully. For not to handle it carefully is tO rnisjudgt: tht: force of Lacan\ m·iMing of the dialectic and tO return to a nineteenth-century freud through the back door. for example, in what is an oth~:rwisc highly cogent analysis of the possible contributions ofLacan· ian theory to historical materialism, Fredric Jameson first "brackets" the notion of the Real and then , finally, decides that "it is not terribly difficult ro s:w what is meant by the Real in Lacan. It is simply history itsclf."11 This conclusion, ifsuggesti,·e, is cbrly false. For if the Real is anything, it i~ certainly not hisrory-nor "reality," nor a "tcxt."l2 The closest L1can has e\-cr come, to my knowledge, to giving the Real an o ntological foundation is in the following statement: Marhemarizarion alone achieves a real- and that is because ir is compatible with our discourse, rhe discourse of analysis-a real that has nothing to do with what traditional knowledge has stood up to. and which is not what it bdicTcS, re.tlity, bur truly a fantasy. The real. I would say, is the mystCI)' of rhe speaking body; it's the mystery of the unconscious.13 In bcanian literarure, the "Real'' designates that which is categorically unrepn:scnrable, nonhuman, at the limits of the known; it is emptiness, 9. ~?r example, on the t.lctc:rminJtion of the.: ~ubjcct'~ destiny through the: displacement of "gn•hcr\, sec Lacan, f.mn, p. 10 10. ( 1\ some ways, the "Real" nught be seen as the object and tdot. or p~yc:hoan.al~·sis itself . . "· hednc )amc"ion, "lmagulal')' and Symbohc m Lacan: :O.farxism, J',ychoanal)~ic Crir•mrn, and the Problem f the Sub)CCI," Ynlr Frr11tiJ Stt the work i~ nor hading what it docs not say; thi~ is ~impl y missu~q lrrln lui mnnquci."22 Althus~cr .md his immediate fctllowe~ ne,·er ventured closer to LK:m's rwisr ing of rltpc.tking subjcct w.ts left out of their analysis compktcly. The task of attempting a new kind of materialist reading :Jnd writing of that odter, ;o called ial\'isibk tnt, through radical reinterpretation of the speaking ,ubject. Jell ro the group Tel Que/: there, a new post·Lacanian theory of the speaking subject came to be seen as essential ro the development of a nonmcchanistic, nonmimetic materialism beyond representation. 23 llte texts Western J\13n has nor been able tO read wen:, for dtc early T d Qucl group, first and foremost rhosc rexrs where the subject is submitted to a nmcrialisr practice (rather than praxis), a practice rendering the subject unrccogni7-lblc: rcxrual ccrirurc. 24 Concentrating on the texts of Baraillc, .\-lalbrmc, Sadc, L1urrcamonr, Nietzsche; and orhers, this group of writers and philosophers searched intensively for that geometrical space where both meaning and its subject disappear and explode into the "black hole" of Lacan's Real. Providing a history here of the theoretical innovations of T cl Qucl would be pushing far beyond the goals and limits of this tcxr. 25 Bur it is important to emphasize that unril approximately 1974, the collective search ofTcl Qud, in all of its di,•crsiry, for a new scientific theory of writing and reading exercised considerable inAuence in linguistics, philosophy, and literary thc..'Ory. 26 Mrer 197+, many of the. individual members of d1at 21.

19'"8)~

Pierre ,\lachtrc)\ A Tbtory of Lrttrnry Prvd11rtW" (London: R.outkdge & Kcgan !'au I, p. 86. Alm '\Ct: Jamc;'i H. Ka\·anagh's essay '"Marxio;m\ Althusscr: Toward a Pohcic:s of

Lm;rarv Theon:."' as well lS the interview with Etic:rmc; Ralib31' and Pieroc Machercv il'l 11 (Spring 1981). ' 2.3. Sec. for example. an early work Philippe Sollers, Sur It mnth-inlismt (Paris: Ediunm du Scu1l. 19"4). esp. p. 89 on Alrhusscr. 14. Sec Philippe Sollers. LogiqttN (Paris: Editions du Scuil, •968), c•p. p. 9. 11. ll'h1ie there is as ycc no reliable O\·crall history of the "Tel Qucl group" (which snll c:x1sn). rhc English reader can refer to: Leon S. Roudicz, "Twelve Poirll~ from Tel Quc.:l,"' L'apnt criauur 14:4 (\\'uuer 19-4): Stephen Ht'ath. TIJe Nomm111 Roman (London: Elek. 19"'2). A comidcration of Ttl Qutl as a journaJ, wirhin a general rht.-ory of"culrural rene-wal,"' can be t(,und in Dru1ic:Uc Scouias...Toward a '~cw Culture': II Poliuwito, Ttl Qud. and Cultural Renewal" (diS•., Columbia Uni"cran ediuon. N. Abraham and M. Torok's L'/cqrcc erie IIDJRU ( P.tris: Flamnurion, t978) plays With this metaphor. 129

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lkrrid.1 rt·cognit.e.'>, however, that to oppose this dominant :1nd cthno· temri( logic of rc.l>On would only be tO tall prey to its own logic: "one cannot >peak out .1g.1imt it except by being for it, 1- •. ] one can protest it onh from within it; and within it~ domain, Reason kavc~ us only the rccour'e to str.nagcms and strategic~. "~ 5 We arc thu~ left by Dcrrida tO the ad,·emurc.., of .1 ccrrain wandering, withom tclo~ or finality, without domi· nauon or mastcry. 36 In order to pry apart the metaph~·sical oppositions that h.n c chained us, we must begin to follow the movcmcms of dit: fcrcncc-in-morion (pl!ysis) before it is chained by tnlth, sym:1x, and sign. Den· ida's dissemination solicits physis instead of ordering it and, in the process, catches philosophy at its own game. 37 The Dialectic hcnccf(mh becomes, in tmth, a Zig· Zag. Just a few words at this point on "Derrida" and "Marx." If Marx turned Hegel on his head, Derrida has sent both spinning in the same direction. In the work that he has published, however, Derrida makes very few rctC:rences to Marx and e\·en fewer to Marx·and·Hegel. Any speculation as to his speeitlc or personal position on the problematic would be hopeless from the beginning. It is not that he "hasn't had time" to subject Marx to the same "protocol of reading" as he has applied to Husser!, Heideggcr, ~ictz.schc, etc.; 38 such a conclusion underestimates his notion of strategy "as opposed to" opposition. In "Positions" (his third interview, originally published in 1971), Dcrrida is deliberately provocative in refercncc to his sidestepping of Marx: "Do me the credit of bclic,·ing that the 'lacunae' to which \'Ou alluded arc explicitly calculated to mark the sites of a theoretical exploration which remains, for me, at least, still to come. And they arc indeed lacunae, not objections; they have a specific and del iberate status, I C\'Cn dare say a certain cfficacit)'. "3 Y Injn, oulefaux bo11d (the second part of his fourth interview, published fi,·c years later), Derrida again reiterates the necessity to move slowly; rejects "dogmatic Marxism" as well as so-called "post-Marxism"; emphasizes that the relationship between the concept of "Marxism" and our "metaphysical tradition" still remains to be problematizcd-and only then posits that "as a 'philosophical srstem,' if Marxism (a hypothesis to be complicated) would present itself in this way, it would entail, ns [docs] ll· Dcrrida, Wnww n11d Dijfrre11u, p. 36. !6 On "matcgv," >ec, cspce&ally, Mn>'!Jilu of Pbik>iopily, p. 7. ~- Sec Dmtmlllhtl(m, p. H· ~8 Of Gmmmntolog:r, Gayatri Spivak~s note, p. } 18. 39. Dcrnda~ Posltwm, tran~. Alan R.t.,~. p. 62.

130

Thinki11g the U11represemab/e eJ'try symm, possibilities for deconstruction and even amo-deconstruction whic,h must be taken into account practically. politically." 40 Dcrri&1 is clearly aware that dcconstn1cting "Marx" today would l:x: a totall)' different gesture from dcconstructing "Hegel," "Husscrl," "Hcideggcr," "Nietzsche," etc.- both practically and politically. If American and French Marxist critics can have so insistently objected to Dcrrida's "anti-Marxism," is it not because he has rendered, at least for the time l:x:ing, "Marx" (his texts? "Marxism"?} thoroughly unreadable through his dcconstructions of The Dialectic: Dcrrida's "dlicacious lacuna" seems tO be all we arc left with where the "rational kernel" should have been after the "mystical shell" was peeled away. In a characteristic fanx- bond, Dcrrida's zig-zag seems tO have been curiously on targct.41 For Derrida, then, the Dialectic of representation is any conccpmal logic, based in binary opposition, with or without a mediating third clement, which through negativity and the contradiction of idcntiry and difference brings about a representation, a mimesis productive of Universal T rmh, thereby erasing the movement of diffemnce. 42 He will link the Dialectic to its specific manifestations within logics such as those of Christianity (as opposed to Judaic thought) 43 and the Family, as well as to its dependent concepts: the sign,44 the metaphor, 4 s the Cogito,4 6 and castration.47 As we shall sec later, his zig-zag through all trinities to be deconstructed metamorphoses into various spatial ligures that, like Lacan's topology mentioned earlier, arc based in a qunrmzary logic. Most particularly, there is the logic of the chiasma. At the crossroads of the chiasma, there is no center, neither presence nor absence. There is, however, the possibility of a "gap," a space of slippage, where meaning escapes rhrough a process never to be seen as such: a "certain dialcctics."4 8 Any attribute 40. Derrida, ")a, ou lc faux bond," Digrnpht 11 (April 1977): 118. ••· Derrida h"" been increasingly explicit aboUI this srratcgy. Sec. for example, La ji11s tit l'hommt, pp. S16-2.8. For the most COl~dc:nscd consideration of the Daalcctu:, sc.."C the left-hand margin of GIN. Specific passages on negativity and the dialectic arc .scarten:d throughour hh. pubfished work: for example, «Cogiro and the History of Madncss.n esp. p. 308, n. 4; uThc Theatre of Crudt)' and the Closure of Reprcs.:nranon; esp. pp. l4j-47; " fro m Restricted to General Economy," esp. pp. ns- 76- all in IVriN>!!J and Diffirmu; or "The Pit and the Pyr.mid," csp. pp. 76-78, and, of co urse, "DiiTcrance," in Mnrgim of Philosophy. 41. We shall rerum to this word in Gynesis Ill. 4). E.g., in Gins, p. 64: "there is therefore no jewish 'for oneself,' ncar·to ·oncself." 44. E.g., Margi>~s of Phi/OfO{'hy, pp. 7S- 77· 4l- See "White Mythology" in Margim of Philosophy. 46. Sec especially "The Ends of Man," in Mnrgiw d Diff'frmu, p. >46.

IJT

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th.u empmc.1 l. common sense might h~vc hdic\·ed to exist ar this center, "hid1 1s nor .1 center, becomes both there and nor there, in and out of the l(lld' of rhe text. c.uogh t in Derridn's chiasmatic net. Th.u .utributc, which i; alw.w; alrend)' never there where we bclie,•ed it "'·"· i~ the ''tr.m;ccndcmal >ignificr" and its ;ignificd. And it will be with a zig·LJg through LacJn that Dcrrida will most precisely ;how that The Signifie r fi>r Lacan- the Phallu;- is not ever where we think it i>. For Derrida, C.l!>tr.uion i; nevn ;impk:- nor, for that matter, is Derrida'; rd.uion~hip to a p>ychoan.1lysis that is mmt definitely after Lacan. 411 We ~hall return more spcc ificallv ro some of the words Dcrrida has put into pia~· to tksignate the workings of that >trangc place benvccn ps)'choanalysis and philosophy, the place of the "Other Tcxt.n His dis.semination of all concepts leads hack, in facr, very quickly to that space where there is no contradiction but only a transposition-ot:spaces-in-difl'ercnce-the unconscious-even while Derrida is already, always, dcconstructing by "cncryptmg" that "inner space" itscJf.S 0 for what Derrida is working on has no name or place-at least not yet. Lacan's ReaE !\'or exactly. The trace of ditT~rancc i; eYen more thoroughly unnameable, unrcprescmable, than Lacan's Real: "There is no llfiii/C tor it at all."5 1 :-.Jcither inner nor outer, it is in-between (eutre), it enters (e1m·e), it intcr·,·cncs between all metaphysical oppositions. And, as we shall sec later, "When the middle of an opposition is not the passageway of a mediation, there is every chance that the opposition is not perti nent. The conseq uences arc boundlcss."52 If o ne is alrcad)' working with several signatures when focusing on Jacque; Dcrrida, with Gilles Ddcuzc the problem of the proper name becomes c,·cn more visible. -Literally, first of all, because his imellecrual collaboration with rclix Guarrari since 1969 has remained a steadfast one. But CYcn if their first publication together (A uri-Oedipus, 1972) was to bring about a certain change of "style," Dcleuze's multiplicity was already apparent in the di,·ersitv of his prc,•ious writings as a, strictly speaking, " profc;;ional philosopher": the proper names in his titles-Nietzsche, Spino7~1. Kam, Bergson, Proust, Sacher-Masoch, Lewis C1rroll-testif)' +9· Sec. for example, pp. 107- 11, fl . # , m Posmons, trans. Alan Ra~6. J2. Ibid., pp. •n-)6. fl.

T!Ji11ki11g the U11represmtab/e to his disdain from the beginning for any homogenized canon of signatures. Secondly, with Ddeuzc, one cnrcrs nor only a funhousc, but an entire camival of science and fiction. In all of his books, there is a scrambling of discursive, disciplinary codes ccrrain to unsettle any academic reading. For example, in reference to Dekuze and Guattari's 1980 book, Mille plateawc, Catherine Clement remarks something that could be said about most of his books, whether or nor his is the only signature: it is a book of history, economy, ethnology, politics, aesthetics, linguistics. And a book of philosophy? "It's philosophy. Or maybe nor. It's writing, and thinking. Chagrined people-those with thin skin, you know?-will worry in d1cir corner, smaller and smaller. The ochers, philosophers or not, will amuse themselves. And even seriously."53 Seriously. For some, especially in the United Stares, this adverb is irrelevant to Dcleuzc and Guarrari. That judgment, in my opinion, is, however, oversimple and nnfommatc. First, Delcuzc and Guartari are very "serious." Perhaps they arc nor serious in the French sense (grave, without laughter, reasonable), since their work is also frivolous, gay, and light (perhaps even futile), but they arc most certainly nor joking. This is clear if only because of the wide impact they have had on contemporary thought and, most especially, on its srudcms everywhere. In d1e United States, where theory from France enters through language and literature departments, that impact has tended to be academically minimized with words like "utopian," "anarchistic," and "perverse." This is in P'lrt perhaps because Dcleuze and Guarrari take you further and further om of the cext, not deeper into it. It is also because their books arc often categorized and then quickly dismissed as but frivolous by-produces of 1968. Rue it is mosd)' true because Dclcuzc and Guartari arc \'irulcntl)' anti·acadcmic academics, with a hatred of the "faculties" impossible to contain within prescribed public, academic discourse. The private has alwars been their politics, and they rend ro ignore the professionalistic demand ro censor \\'hat they have ro say. s• Deleuze and Guatrari occupy precarious positions at the intersections and interfacings of the questions- both French-American and feministin this book: 1) because of che status of their work in chc United States, where they arc ignored or dismissed by the majority of academics and H· Catherine CICmcnt, "Postflcc 198o: De l'anti ·Oc:dipc

alLclcu?.c, l:.mptnmu rr sttbjtamti (Paris: I'U!'. 19ll), esp. p. 119. s· Dclcuzc and Pamct, Dinll>fft~9, •ss-s6. 0 Dcleuze wams to de,·clop, rather, a pbilosopbie du oui, a philosophy of affirmation mat is not dependent o n two negations; an affirmation mat differs from negation without opposing it 61 Taking difference out of contradiction with opposition is Ddeuze's most extensive strategy-with· Nietzsche against representation; a question finally of perpetually moving diftcrence imo difference-with-itself. Dclcuzc's diffb·encinnt dr In differwce, d1c differentiating of difference, affirmative beyond contradiction, is a difference witbout C011cept, without place, without med iatio n, and always in movcmcnr.62 Iris an intensively diftcrcnr kind of difference that Dcleuze wants tO bring w the surface of life, a diftcrcnce distinguished from itself wimouc distinguishing icsclf.63 Dcleuze will consequently cake on all machines of representation wh ich refuse this affirmative difference, and most especially those of Oedipus, Hegel, and Marx. For Dclcuzc, pyschoanalysis is d1e last avatar of the and1ropological rcprcscnrario n of sexualiry, "psychoanalysis as a gadget, Oedipus as a rcrcrricorializacion, a rcrimbering of modern man on the 'rock' of castration. "64 Psychoanalysis has produced an unconscious chat is negative, "an enemy"; it can reach us only about lack and the law; it has in fact confused the "lack" of castration wim the "emptiness" of desire: "the result: castrate the mother and be castrated; kill the father and be killed" wimin the world of images, the world of fam asy.65 But psychoanalysis is not the only sedentary binary machine challenged 59. Ibid. , esp. pp. Hl-46.

Gille.:.\ Ddcw.c, "Lc surhonunc: Contrc Ia dialc.:ctiquc," in Nietzstbe tt (Paric;: Prcucs Univcrsit:ures dt- France, •96:z), p. 214. 61. Ibid., p. 216. 62. St·r.-. ychoanalni> will be profoundly sub\'Crted, Ami-Oedipus being Anti· Sr.uc, ntpntre with the despotic contigurarion unconsciously present in psychoanalysis. But parallel to that, evcryd1ing unconsciously libidinal in Marx· "m will he dcrachtd, a libido imprisoned in the religious scaflolding of dialectic.1l politics or ~-conomic cataMrophi;m, a libido repressed in the unin· rerntpted analyses of commodity fetishism or of the nanoraliry of work.M

Production, recuperation, negativity, guilt, anguish, analysis-common to the sedentary dialectical machines of Marx and Fceud-are to be transfanned by forcing both machines to their breaking point. For Dcleuze and Guattari, it is new kinds of desiring m·achincs, as opposed to Oedipus or the State, which can help us to produce a new kind of unconscious, a generalized unconscious, more in tunc with a modernity beyond rcpcesen · ratton. In its empha;is on the need to liberate difference from the dialectic and to introduce movemenr inro the stable, and in its war against all tripartite machines of representation (Oedipus, dialectics, the sign), the work of Dclcuze and Guattari has strong affinities with that of Dcrrida. But the resemblance ends there, not only because of De leuze and Guartari's nco· empirici~m. bur also becatL~e of a curious mixture of "life" and "writing": the text and its modalities of concealment arc gil'cn no oncological priority within their surface-machinations. The text, any text, an)' part of a text, is for them but one of the partial objects in the unconscious still to be invented. The key words of their strategy arc not careful patience, but speed; nor undccidables, but paradoxes; not traces, but rhizomes . Theirs too is a quaternary logic capable of accounting for thought as event rather than as significa tion; but it is a logic so dererritorialized, so rapid, as to be bevond any textual ccriture. The problem for Dclcuzc and Guattari is not one of how to weave 66 Sec Jean-l'ran~ois L)'Otard, "Energumen Caprrali•m." Scmwuxt(t) >:J (1977): 12.

Thinking the Unrepmmtable together, or e\'en disentangle, but of how to break apart, of how to rdease and quicken the flow ourward of any dement which has already begun tO exceed 311)' gi\'en system of representation. This clement is what they call the paradoxical clement, one in excess, with no proper place or identity, an empty place_67 This empty space, this clement x-unrcprescnrablc, unnameable-escapes in a movement destmctive to signification. The most promising strategy for Dcleuze and Guattari, once this mO\·ement has been produced, is not, however, to meditate on the meaning thus destroyed, as some Dc·rridians might do, but to move away quickly, forget it, produce a new meaning before polarization can again set in: "to make the c·mpry space circulate, to make pre-individual and non-personal singularities speak, in short, ro produce meaning is the task todar-"68 The unconscious-yet-co-be-produced is the only space for Dcleuzc where the unn:uneable clement x might freely circulate in a kind of "chaosmos. "69 Often described as a Real-in-flux , it is where No-One reigns. The privileged points of entry into the Real-in-fllLx arc the f.1mous Dclcuzian "escape lines": lines tor an escape into life. The Rcal-in-flm: is life itself for Dcleuze and Guattari, an "experimentation-life." It can also be writing, but only as parts-of-writing-connected-with-life, never as immanent in tcxtualiry or ccriture. 70 Finally, the "escape lines," royal road ro the Real, arc nc,·cr in dualistic positions but, as we might expect, always already between. This "between" is not, however, cxacrly the same as Derrida's " between," for it is nor a space of oscillation, bur a space of "absolute speed." It is a process that, by shooring through the gaps in the texts of the world, might produce new worlds, new life, escaping presence and absence, the life-only-assubordinate-to-death of representation. 7 1

in reality, rhcrc is ncirhcr union (lllllf/) nor separation (jirf/), jusr as there is neither disrancing (bu'd) nor approaching (.!J11rb) ... Thac is union without unification, approaching without proximiry, and disrancing without any idea of distance and proximity. Ibn 'Ar:~bi, Lt Trniri de !'Unite (mystical rcxt, c. twelfth-dlir· reend1 cenrun•) 67.

Logu]ur du sms, p. 2.65.

68. Ibid., p. 91. 69. lb1d. , p. >06.

pp. 61-·6 t. 71. On Dclcul.C :tnd Guattari•s ''bcrwcc::n," «:c, for C.\:lmplc, "lntcrme-;:;c;()/' the last potgc of Cuhwoe Ck'mcnr\ "PO£tface 198o." 70. On Ccrirurc, sec Oclcuzc and Pamer, DznllYJttt'S,

137

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11: lnwfnciiiJJS

For no thing. dcMrr~ dc.:~cription MJ nmch a~ wonb, and yet there i-. norhing more necessary thnn ro pi.Kc bcf(ue the eyes of men ~.·crt.llll rhn1gc;, t 11,. exist('ncc of which i~ neither provable nor protuhk, bur wh1ch, for this vc1y reason, pious and scholarly

mm trr.u w a ccn.tin ~~ tent a> exbtcllt in order thar thC)' may lx: led .t \tcp fun ltertoWJrd their being a11d their lx:coming Itoward oci ng born 1Aihcnu> Secundus (epigraph to Hermann Hesse's Tilt Gln.rs /Jend Game)

The di~placcmcnt and indeed destructuration of the dialectic in france arc, lor o ur purposes hen.:, where the process of gym:>is and its rda· tion~hip to nKxkrniry as well as feminist theory become clearest. Fo r, a> with the dcmi>e of the Ca1Tcsian ego, that which is beyond the !'ather, overflowing the dialectics of representation , un represenrable, will be gcn· dercd a~ fem in ine. To dcstructurc o r attempt to >ubvert the dialectic i> to put the function of med iation imo question. As \\'C have seen briefly, Lacan was the first tO displace, slig ht!)', the med iator in patriarchal culture-the !'ather- from "reality" ro the "symbolic,» as well as the first to rcconccptualizc and rcemphasi7.c spaces "exceeding" the dialectic, twisting the dialectic into a knot. But those efforts did not bring about the Father's disappearance-in· representation. On the contrary. for the psychoanalyst, any state existing before the mediation of the name-of-the-Father continues to be consid· cred as the state of primary narcissism represented by the mother and child. Any state where that mediation has been foreclosed or bypassed is an entry into psrchosis, represented by a feminized dialogue with God (the case of Schreber). 72 For Lacan, not to recognize the phallus as be· longing to the Father-as mediator between the mother and child in all of us- is to open the door to delirious metonymy in the Real; or to mass hysteria: what sex am I, anyway? Philosophers were not to underestimate the power of that Lacanian conclusion and it~ implications for philosophy. They were also not u n · aware that an)' denial on their part of the dialcctics·of-prescnce·and·ab· >O;is," in J;mz:s: A !>tlcaicn, p. ,-9 and pas;im.

138

An~,

('ossiblc Trc:auncm of

Thinki11g the Um·ep1·esmtab/e rally ddinL'S male and female rhrough hierarchiz.1rion: "TheAujlJebmzg is 1•cry precisely rhe rclario nship of copularion ro sexual diffcrcncc."73 They wi Urherefore displace rhe Aufhebung of mediation even furrher, ser about a roral reconccpmalizarion of diflcrcncc beyond contradiction and, in so doing, self-consciously throw borh sexes, and rhcir sexual organs, inro a meronymic confusion of gender. The phallus-as-Aufhebung becomes in their texrs linlc more than o ne partial objecr among orhers. Borh "men's" and "women's" bodies become rruly cut up. fragmented bodies: penises, anuses, breasts, \'aginas arc cur from rhc images of rhcir rcprescntarions in o rd..:r, cvcnrually, tO imagine a new kind of body. Bur as we might expect and as Derrida writes: " Remains-the morher." 74 Fo r this newly invenrcd bodv in their work is in-bcrween, undecidable, or, ar rhe 1•cry minimum, in absolure speed. Nor exacrly neuter, it is nonetheless borderline asexual. It is, srrangcly enough, a perfect Freudian rcprcscntarion of the mother's bod1• for the infant, the mother as primmn movens of the infant's sexual aJlXlery. Ir is no accident rhar the inrcrrogarive return to our sources of knowledge must also be a return to the mother's body. This in-between body ob1•iously poses certain new questions for the feminisr reader. Fo r the rradirional feminist quesrion has been about the phallus: Is not the phallus a figment only of rhc male imaginarion? Who decided it to be The Mediator? Why docs The Mediator have ro be the phallus? Why can it not be the breast or . .. The philosophers would seem ro agree. And yer, their first steps toward asking rhose same questions, by removing the phallus from irs sacred attachment to the male body, seem ro have created a new body even more unrecognizable. The woman reader, in any case, knows rhar ir is mosr certainly not hers. Whose phallus is ir, anyway? The Farher's? The Mother's? Or docs it belong to a body in-between? Derrida's srrategy for posing and then subverting when nor shorr-circu iting rhese questions may be summed up by the words osci llation and undecidable. For example, one of Dcrrida's disciples, Sarah Kofinan, begins to ask certain questions wirh regard to the Ccrisy Colloquium "Les fins de l'hommc":75 " .. . one might ask oneself if, by keeping for this colloquium a ritle so strongly marked by meraphysical humanism, one docs not run the risk of arousing suspicions rhar a need tO mnstcr dif7;. l)crrida. GillS, p. m. 7+· Ibid., p. 131. 75. Sarah Kofman. ences tn rcxt.

•Ccne in t\1 ch c 1 car> h.1; been di;pbccd, Jbt st·xurrl riiffc•·ma· I· .. How can we e,c.1pe J the >mpicion that this colloquium i> de>igncd to rescue, a»i>t, >et upnghr .lg.lin (in ewry ;ense) man, undcr;tood no longer J> nmbropos, the uni1cr,.11 nun, ,exuJIJy neuter, but .1; nnrr or vi1·?'' (p. yo). She continue>, hm1c1 er: "It ;ccms that the subtitle of this colloquium: 'around the works of Dcrrida· .JIIows u; to erJ>C immcdi.udy any such suspicion ... " (p. 90). For Dcrrida-unlikc "Freud" (f(>r example, pp. 9t-98) and "feminism" (l(>r c\ampk, p. 91 )-has continually denounced the phallocentrism of any (mak) we. His \tratcgy of denunciation is that of oscillation-a "feminine mcillauon" represented by \\'Oman, an oscillation that, according to Kotlnan, all phallocrats have tried to fix into a stable position of oppositiOn (pp. 97-98). This stratcgv of oscillation is, of course, a strategy of generalized fttisbism- "to the protit of the feminine" (pp. 99-100). Kofman goes no fi.trther, but simply calls for "the end of all oppositions, dut of n13n as \\'ell as of woman, to the adl'antage of a 'feminine jouissancc,' if by feminine one under;tands undecidable oscillation" (p. 111). A generalized undecidability is a generalized fetishi;m is a generalized fcminity- beyond phalloccntrism. It is also-and this is never mentioned in Kofman ·~ article-a generalization of male pnmnoin. 7 h it only a coincidence, then, that President Schrcbcr represents for Dclcuzc and Guattari their ideal "body without organs"> While denouncing paranoia as opposed to the liberation of schizophrenia, Schrebcr, praised as-thc-schizophrenic-bcforc-frcud'~-paranoia, i~ retained as the model for the body without organs, a body in oscillation, a ftmale bod)', which is nollcthclcss not a woman as opposed to man. 77 This is where our femintst questions have certain I)' already begun. Bm our questions canllot be our traditional ones, for the phallus has alrcad)' been "burned'' along with the Dialectic and amhropolog)'. What then is this strange bod\'? Might not the confusion of boundaries, between inside and out;ide, surface and depth, lead us to J\1clanie Klein's work on the Good and Bad .\1othcr?7 8 Arc the spaces of primary narcissism, or of psychosis, the on I)· 11·ay to escape the Oedipus complex? Could it be that, '"6.

IXrru.ta, in hr. cloche." p. 114

- On S~..hrcbcr\ fcmaJc: bc.xiy·\\'it.h()ut·orgam pp. 8, IZ.-19. ~6-~-. \\'c wrll rerum ro 1t larcr.

~cc

Ddcuz.c and Guanari, Anti·Otdrpus,

·8. ~!cl>noc Klcon. TIJ< Wnwtq! of.l!tlnllit Kltill ( London: Hogarth, 19"5- 198o). I~

Tbinllillg the Um·epresmtable our;idc of Oedipus and the Diakctic, there can be nothing other than a woman-without·organs-in·oscillation? If woman is indeed the phallus for Man, as Lacanian theory would have it, arc the male philosophers fighting over it? And, most important, what arc we going to do about the word "representation"> for it is, at the very least, obvious to the feminist reader that it is in those texts chosen as exemplary by the theorists of the· process· beyond-representation that some of the cruelest prcscmations of women's bodies and destinies remain. What new can be done with this presenta· tion-beyond·rcprcsenrarion which has been diagnosed as modernity? And where can the fem inist emphasis on the texts of modernity be marked: on the " potentially liberating" process beyond the trad itional images-of-our· dead-bodies; or on the nontraditional presentations of rhc process that still brings about those deaths? In any case, it is clear that psychoanal)rsis and philosophy, especially in France, have themselves polarized into a rather Oedipal structure: as Joyce might pur it, psychoanal)'sis has increasingly come to be about saving "the Time of the Farber" and philosophy about s:n-ing "the Space of the Mother." This dichotomy mimes another which is of immediate inreresr here in reference to rhe morhcr's body: psychoanalysis and mysticism. As contemporary philosophers arc quick ro point our, heud himself was allergic to philosophy, as well as to music and anything "Dionvsian." Fo r him, philosophy was inherently mystical rather than "scientific," and to be avoided ar all costs. This allergy on the parr of Freud is nor without context. German mysticism, initiated by Master Eckhart in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, after various permutations resurfaced in force in rhc nineteenth century: "This first wave, after having ebbed, manifested itself again at rhc begitming of the 19th century, ar the.: moment of the great return ro mysticism promised by nascent romanticism, of which Franz von Baader was the promoter. lr was he who pulled Eckhart from purgatory ' and, after ha1•ing discovered hi m in Munich, he revealed him ro German idealism, beginning with H egel (t824)."79 German intcllccruals came to equate both Hegel and Nietzsche with mysticism; Freud certainly did so, even while he himself had been protoundly and early influenced bv Goethe and the cult of Nature. Gradually, however, freud was to renounce all "mystical temptations" with wonted vehemence. Most interesting in rhc prt·senr connection is his particular notion of mysticism, encapsulated within one of the last senrc.:nces he wrote: "Mysticism: rhc obscure auto· -9. Sec: Paui-Laun:nt As.owun, "'l=rcud ct Ia m~rstiquc," in .. Rltsurgcncc.~ er d~ri\'~C'S de Ia my.sriqul'," ~p, Otto Rank) trace to thi> day a w lid di1·iding line between p.ucrnaliscic Freud and his matcrnalistic Other> (D. \V. Win· nicott, Klein, Jung, etc.).KI If thi> ~eric~ of internal and external di,·isions-first between the scicn· rilic hcud and hi; early Goethian temptations; then between Freudian p'ychoanaly>is and German Idealism (and philosophy for Freud); and finall~· between Freudian psychoanalysis and irs excommunicated pS)•Cho· analytic "mystics of the rnaternal"- is already complicated, it becomes cl'en more so when we look at the more precise coordinates of mystical discourse: the Mother, Death, and the Unknown. E1·en a cu rsory exami natio n of religious and lay mptical currents rel'eals a series of ideas we have already come across.in our explorations thus far. ~2 For example, mystical discourse would seem tO include: 1) an antira· tionality founded in paradoxical and apophatic logic (e.g., pp. 8, 158); 2) a posture of antiknowledge (p. 23); 3) experiences " without" a subject (p. +r); +) an experience where, dil'orced from words, "tbe Tbi11g would spenk by itself' (p. 63); s) where the Other is without a f.1ce for identity (p. 12+); 6) where an unresolved paradox leads to confusion between the inside and the outside ( pp. r68, 6o); 7) where the ego is exploded onto the surfaces of the body (p. 167); 8) where language is not one of communication but of "transmutation at the interior of terms" (p. 23); 9) where there is an emphasis on gi1·ing rather chan exchanging (p. 31); 10) where there is an obsession with that which survi,·cs death (pp. 81-82) and especially with cadavers (p. 9); 11) where there is a paranoid hatred o f the world tend ing co crystallize in sects of the "elect" (pp. 32, 18- 19, 29- p.); 12) where there exi~t~ an alienation from any form of commitment (in the existential sense) (p. 205); 13) where rhere reigns a profound pessimism about changing So. Ci1cd by As•oun (ibid.) as from Freud, Gctnmmdu Wrrkt, \Ol. 17. 81. The rc01dcr will no doub1 note rhat n rend~ to be the~ ""thcorisn of the marcrnal" who h01vc found a home in the United State~. Could this be bccau,c, in these theories, the libido is characterized as \c:xually neutral rather than cxclu'il\·cly male? ln fr.mce, Jung is just now bcg.nnmg to find a ccnain reading audience in psycho.malyric circlt:s o utside Lacanian mtluencc. The group ""Conlrontations" has rccogni7.c..i chjs 1nflux and some of it~ member\ arc going back to rccons1dcr the mfantilc (m.tgo [hat combines the Mother and Father in one orgamc figure· It f'rrt·.lftrt, rhc bJhcr·.\lmhcr. 81. Xom-cllt rrrut dt Ia psytiJanaJ.vs~'s special issue, ""R6urgcncco;," summariz\..-s \\'Cil the rcxem ~1crarurc on psychoanalvsis, philosophy, and mysticism. Page numbers in JCXI refer to thlSt\\UC. 1~

Thi11ki11g the U11represemable anything: i.e., "there is 110 future" (pp. 206-7); J.l.) where the sex must be female to bring about a resurrection of spirit (p. 14)H3 It would be difficult, gin:n these references, not ro perceive a series of connections with contemporary psychoanalysis and, especially, with philosophy in France. American critics, at least, have not failed to po int our those connections. Some attribute this to an immediate "mystical" literary tradition (the Surrealists, Bacaille, Heidcggcr, ere.), and in so doing, retain the negative connotations that have been attached to the word "mysticism," especially si nce Sartrean existentialism. Bur others, including the writers we arc interested in, ha,·c questioned the ,-ejtt:tion of mysticism. According to the psychoanalyst Guy Rosolato, the scientific denial of mystici~m im·itcs "a scission between scientific acti,•ity and the usc one can make of it, between a rational domain about which one is concerned and a domain of the unknown which one lca,•es aside as the responsibi lity of others, either in order to disinterest oneself in it or else to adopt irs myths in a paradoxical co-cxistence." 84 It would seem, indeed , that one of the lessons of the late twentieth century has been th at human beings arc unable to live without a certain experience of the sacred. To ignore o r dcnv that experience is therefore to invite, among other things, a return of traditional religions-or of their cquivalcnrs (including terrorism) i1~ a lay universe. Feminism, as a philosophy of questions, must be particularly attentive to this problem. For mysticism, as experience, is about sa,·ing the Motbe~· from and instead of the Father. 85 To the extent that feminism is necessarily involved in that gesture, the question becomes, how do we want ro S3\'C her? Our approach, in any case, cannOt be to decide benvem paternalistic psychoanalrsis and what Freud saw as its antithesis: marernalistic mysticism or philosoph)'· This is where tht· male writers we arc focusing on, and the women theorists who arc their disciples, arc of particular rclc,·ance. For mysticism , is often defined as the "pretension w do wi thout an intermediary" (Lc Littn'). Theorists, writers of modernity arc attempting prccisch·, each in 8;. Once again. I cmplmi>c the colkction, " Resurf.CllC~< 11 ( 1975), p. ·•·

7 The Demise ofExperience: Fiction as Stranger than Truth? A labyrinrhian man never looks for the rrurh, but only for his Ariadne. Nietzsche Truth is nor an unveiling which destroys rhe secret, but the revelation which does it justice. Walter Benjamin

T he ancient problem of the relationship between what m evc:ryday language we call "experience" of "reality" and what we then decide to call "knowledge" about it (let alone knowing the "truth" about it) has resurfaced with a vengeance in the twentieth century. Radical critics of dominant Western culn1re have been urgently concerned, since at least the turn of the cenrury, with the problem of how to continue criticism in a modem world where it is understood not only that what is being criticized js already an ideological, symbolic construction, but also that it is therefore already a lie. So then, where might be found the truth? From the arts, especially modernist and postmodernist fiction, to the philosophies, a deep dissatisfaction with science has led to a radical reevaluation of the relationships between what Walter Benjamin called "direct, lived experience" (Erlelmis, "shock") as opposed ro retrospective, " privileged, inward experience" (Elfalmmg, "aura"). 1 That the relationship between the two is no longer obvious; that, in any case, it can no longer be seen as reflective, narural, or unmediated, is now certain. As Gi lles Dclcuzc has explained, we arc talking about an era of generalized anti -Plaronism, where it is no 1. Sec in particuJar Benjamin~$ Charles Bnudtlairt>: A L.vric Pott in thr Em of High ttnlism, ical c.ucgorics of opposition- or between them. This approach uwoln:s, fir~t and fixe most, a relinquishing of mastery, indeed a valoriza· rion of non mastery. And, as we know, a lack of mastery has, historically, alwan connoted the feminine.26 Secondly, the tmt, to be isolated in those processes anterior to or, in some cases, berond the Truth as produced by the teclmi, is that which can never be seen, which never presents itself as such bur rather captures, points, withdraws, hides itself in irs veils: and that true is seen as being "woman "- the "nontnlth" or "partial tme" ofTmth. Or, for others, " woman" is precisely that clement which disturbs e1•en d1at presupposition (Tmth as castrated). Whatever the strange intricacies of these new wanderings through the demise ofTrmh·in-Experience, "woman" is that dement most discm'Sively prtstllt. Julia Kristcva has called this new clement in modernity a V1·iel- a kind of "she-truth": · We can rodar perceive, by li~rening to d1e discourses that speak to us as contemporaries as well as to the approaches which rry to speak of the source and progression of those discourses, that the grcar uphca,•al of speaking beings today can be summarized in this way: the tmth [r•il·iti] which they are seeking (which they are trying tO tell), is d1e real [rld]-"Vreel" then. An obse~si1•e fear since the bcgiJUting of time, this experience is becoming today, if not one of the masses, at least massive, weighty; even more so because no conm1on code is d1ere to neutralize it by justifying ir. ( . ..J The ancient question returns: how to render the vrcel more likely, more representable [vraisemblabltJ?27

The only way, of course, ro render this "vrccl" vmisemblable, seemingly true, is to put it into discourse in new ways: hence the gy11esis whose potential spaces we have had to outline so schematically here. The demise of the Subject, of the Dialectic, and of'!'ruth has left modernity with a void that it is vaguely aware must be spoken differently and strangely: as woman, through gyncsis. What can be the feminist's response to these manifestations of gyncsis and its strange body? Is not her first impulse ro den~' ir?-to charge that 25. Ibid., p. n.

Cf.. to r example. Gilbert and Gubar\ MadJII()tlln11 m tltt AtTtc, p. ro. :.- . Kri~tc\·a, Folie JintC, p. 11 . The nc:o logi.sm, m•itl, !luggc)tS the words l'rni(rrurh), riel ' real), and tile (•he). 16.

1$4

The Demise of Experience these "processes beyond representation" arc bur parr of a new ruse tnvcnred by Man to :woid, once again, his own rrmh and experience? Bur, on the other hand, in order to demonstrate rhar, arc we nor just as obliged, as feminists, to pur the signifier woman into circulation, ourselves to engage in gyncsis? Whose ruse is ir then' And whose gyncsil? It is too easy to pur gyncsis down to "idealism" as somehow opposed to feminism, a mtc "materialism., As long as we do not explore the boundaries of and possible common spaces between modernity and feminism; as long as we do not recognize new kinds of artificial, symbolic consmtctions of the subject, representation, and (especially) experience, we will be engaging in what arc ultimately conservati ve and dated polemics, nor radical theory and practice. It becomes particubrly tempting at times of extreme political crisis to abandon this challenge of our century and revert to a "natural 1·icw of things'': reality is what I sec, hear, and touch. Noth ing could be more reactionary-or poi ntless-in postmodcrn culture. As Jam: Gallop has so succinctly put it, "Belief in simple refcrenriali t:y is not only unpoetic but also ultimatcl~· politically conservative, because it cannot recognize: that the reality tO which it appeals is a traditional ideological construction, whether one terms it phallomorphic, or mctaph~·sical, or bourgeois, o r something else. The politics of experience is inevitably a conservati1·c politics for it cannot help but conserve tradirio ml ideological constructs which arc nor recognized as such but arc taken for the ' reaL' »28 To question how thought-in-modernity and feminism itself may both be inscribing woman as the ultimate truth of and for modernity is, for the feminist toda~·, ro risk becoming entangled in her own apocalypse. But then, that is a risk intrinsic to modernity itself- and I think it is a risk worth raking. To do so, however, feminists must rake the risk, must "dive imo the wreck" of vVestern cu lture rather than push it aside: \Ve are, I run) you are by cowardice or courage

the one who find our wa1• back ro this scene cam,ing a knife, a camera a book of mvths in "'hich our names do not appear. 29 :.8. Jam· Gallop~ "Qmmd naJib.,·ts t'inil'ott: lrig.u.w's 8oc.l\' Politic;· /{omtmir Rt·1·icw -..,.:1 (January 1983): 83. 29. from Adrienne: Rich's "Dh ing imo the \Vrcck." Vi"'''tfl imo tbt ll',.rtk. P(}(mS 19""1-19"1 (l'ew York: II', \\', Norton & Company, Inc., 19-3),

155

GYNESI S III

INTER TEXTS Field of s•gnification when: there has been a tran~position of one or more systems of signs into .mother, accompanied by new amculations of the enUilCIOtiVC and dcnotat•vc position.

8 Toward the Hysterical Body Jacques Lacan and His Others On the whole, a woman is much more than that. She is the necessary rcprcsmrarion fr rhar which consrirurcs in every discourse this WeibliciJe as the nomination of the fimdamenral necessity for the constitution of articulated discourse_ Wladimir Granoff, Ln pensie et le ftmi>Jin ... rhe substance of the repressed being on the side of the feminine. Sigmund Freud, lcrrcr ro W. Flicss

The fact that woman and her obligatory connotations arc essential to the functioning of psychoanalytic theory has never been denied by those caught up in the conflicting winds ofrhc polemical tOrnado that psychoanalysis always seems co produce. Less often emphasized until recently, however, has been the fact that psvchoanai)'Sis was founded as a science on wtnneu- that is, on women hvsterics. It was freud's work with ' )can-Martin Charcot in Paris on the iconography of h)'Steria that was to lead w his first full-lcngtll studr with Josef Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, :1nd, indeed, to his usc of the word psychoanalysis itself. As Stcphre, that this attention to pi~1'Sis involve; new rclation,hips to the feminine as well. \\'c h;!,-e .1lready looked briefly at some of the ways in which Lacan's \\Ork. to the extent that it is engaged in the project of modernity, is linked ro gl'lle\is. It is in his Semimtire XX: Eucore 10 that these links arc mOM explicit-and his new feminine spaces most pervasive. There he clabo· rates, claboratcl~·. how and why "woman" is that which escapes any form of universal logic, how and why ""·oman is not AIL" He shows how, as opposed to Uni,·ersal J\1an (the Self of humanist thought), "woman" may be seen as the anri-uni,·ersal pnr exce/lmce. Generallv considered as his maJOr contribution to knowledge about the "dark conrinenr of female sexuality,'' Encore has been the object of numerous studies. 11 Yet, what is most surprising about this seminar is that iris not ostensibl~· about women at all: except for Saint Teresa, "the ladih, for example, sec Heath's "Dtffercnce."

16Z

Townrd the Hysterical Body 3x 'rlx

Ox Ox

3x 'r/x

t----~_:s~ittli)) (I

~-----+--~--.~ -3-__,:,..Jd' (femme)

3x qlx = The Primitivo: Father 'rlx 4>x = Tile Phallic Function 3x ~ = The Woman as Not All 't/x Ox = The Woman in the Phallic Function Fig11re / . (From jncqucs Lncnu, I.e Scminaire Livre XX fl'nris: £ditio11 du Smil, 1971{. Reproduced by pcrmissirm ofM. f ncqucs-Ainin Miller and EditioiiS du Semi.)

determined for us by our culture, and again by Lacan. So much for Nature. This obligatory cultural seating arrangement leads us into the major posrulatc of the seminar-a postulate constructed around four poinrs: jouissance, the Other, the sign, and love (p. 40). Postulate: There is no sexual relation: the only basis of analvtic discourse is that "there is no' that ir is impossible to pose-sexual relation" (p. 14). This is "the only truth" of pS)'Choanalysis, even if psychoanalysis was nor the first to remark it (p. 17). Two bodies marked male and female, carried along in a signif),ing chain, can never meet; they never have and they never will, according to Lacan. Lacan's most graphic statement in Ettcore will perhaps clarif)' this hopeless situation and allow us tO explore with him ~ome m:w space~. The lefthand side of Figure 1 (above) represents the "male part" of speaking subjects and the right-hand side the "female part." According to Lacan, an~' speaking subject can inscribe himself or herself on either side. The formulas at the top of the graph represent "ideal" situations-"omsidc of history" as Lacan would say-while the bottOm half represents the itinerary of speaking subjects as sexed in history and cultun·. l2 Those who arc sexed male must cope with Universal Man: the primitive father who denied castration, 3x ibx. Those bodies sexed male mar or may not deny it, 12 . Encorr. p. 73. ln spite of Lacan's own lengthy wanungs about the dangers of rcsoning ro grlph:;, the.: diMinction~ and intt:l'td~uion..~hips bccwccn the top and the bottom hJJn:s of

the graph arc nt\'(!r que~tioned. nor is the t3ct that one

a~sumcs

the other. !6]

Ov11rsis Ill : /ntCitcxts hence the possibilin· of aho ha,·ing \;/x x. On the right side of the graph, we might expect to lind Universa l vVoman: bur, I.acan tells us, she docs not CXI\t. She is alwa1•s ;ll rt•ady "barred." Beyond that distinction, the '>.une rwo pm•ibihtie~ ~xist as to castration : 3x x or l;fx cj)x. This "worn· an," who is never universal, is represented in the lower half of the graph by .1-.:r: What is th•s woman, then? "There is no woman except she who is excluded by the nature of things which is the narure of words, and it must be ,,,id that if there is something about which women themscln:s com· plain enough lor the moment, ir's certainl)' ;lbout that-simply, they 1women] don 't know what they're saying, that's the whole difference between them and me" (p. 68). Or again,

f. .. ] rhar means that when no matter what speaking subject falls in under the ham1er of women, this proceeds from 1he fact that he is founding hm1self as being not·al l, by placing himself in rhe phallic funCtion fro be the phallus]. That is what defines the .. . the what?-woman exactly, with this exception. th.u \\'oman I Ln femme] can only be written bv barring the Ln. 'll1erc i• no \\'oman ILn ftmmt], with ,, definite article for. designating the universal. There is no Woman because- I have already w nrurcd the term , and why should I think twice ahour it-llith regard to her cs.schcc, she is nor all. (p. 68) She is not All with regard to her essence; in essence, she is not All.I 3 Woman is di,·ided, multiple, everywhere and nowhere on Lacan's graph. Docs Le Tour, an "All," exist for the right side of the graph? Of course; it is the Mother. Here is where Lacan's distinction bcrwecn woman and the mother becomes insistent. I fit is tnze that woman can enter into the sexual relation only under the sign of motherhood, that docs not mean that she is a mother. A mother is a woman-with-child, her "hole is corked," and she has become All. For Lacan, woman as absent subject is not the Mother: "and don't speak to me about the secondary sex characteristics of the woman, because, umil a new order, it is those of rhc mother which prevail in her. l'othing distinguishes woman as a sexual being, if not precisely her sex, her sexual organs" ( p. 13). Woman is not All. Women arc not All? The distance between the sin· gular and plural is quickly traversed. For Lacan, \\'Omen have a "particular function in the symbolic ordd'; a "dead-end position"; with a "second r~ ..Many defenders of L..1can ha\'c remarked rhar fcmmist objl."Ctions m thisObSl'r\'ation arc

mi'>gmdcd-for, rhcy o.;ay, thi~ is cx01Crly '"':hat feminism is about: the belief that \VOincn must no• be abstrahe nevcrthcle;s has access to what he calls a ";upplcmcntary jouis:.atKc"-bcyond Man, beyond the Phallus (p. 68}. Of this supplementary jouissancc, it would seem women can know nothing: "she has a jouissancc, this sbe who does not exist and docs not signif\• am•thing. She has a jouissancc about which maybe she herself knows nothing, except that she feels it-thar, she knows. She knows it, of cou rse, when it happens. Bur it doesn't happen to all I women]" (p. 69). She doesn't "breathe a word abom it" (p. 56), nor do the "women analysts" (pp. 54, 69). This "extra jouissance," beyond ph:illic jouissance, is nonutilitarian (p. to) and has nothing to do with Jove (p. u). It has to do with the space of the Other ( p. 1+). It is, in fact, a substn11cc, ditTerent from but not unrelated to "the quire expansi1·e substance, complement of the other" described as "modern space": a "pure space, just as one says pure spirit" (p. 25). It is the substance discovered by Freud in the discourse of the hysteric (p. 41) and, most important, it is of the order of the infmite; it cannot be understood consciouslv, diakcticall v, or in terms of Man's Trmh-for it is what we have always called "God." 17 Lacan announces from the 1·cry beginning of the sem inar rhar he will prove that "God" docs in fact exist in the modern world-and that It would be the l'cry substance of the Other sex (p. ++)- This is in fact announced b~· the COI'Cr chosen for the published seminar itself: "you only Lacan. "The- SubH:r~ion of the SubJC:Ct and the Diafl'.cric of Desire in the Freudian p. \O.f.. I"". It I.S no accidt.:nt d1at hy)h:ria 1.s agrun c\·okt:d. sending us back lO rhc oscillacion bcn\'C\.'ll femak· body and the male subject. «Once you arc dcahng \\ith :a.n intinitc cn.scmblc, ~·ou cannOt pos~ibly posit that the nor·aJI cmails the c~i)tl'ncc of somc.:thin~ produccJ by a ncganon, by a contradictiOn You can, at rhe \'Cry mosr. posit tt as an undcrcrmmcd existence. (... ) h 1'1. bctwct·n the: 3x and rhc Tx' thott thi:> intkccrminouion i~ ~u.)pcndcd~ between an CXIStencc that can find ltarrage, p. 100) . For Lcmoillc·Luccioni, thi s partition would seem to explain woman's nar· cis~i>m (Parr age, p. 35); whv she can't create ("cl'en as a painter") (Pnrragt, p. 165); will' it is men who arc the philosophers and poets ("We\·e known that >ince Dame"; Parrrrge, p. ro). It would explain why woman is defined bv her beaurv (Partnge, p. 151) or, if unattractive, b)' her career (Part age, p. 1-6). In fact, it explain> everything- from woman's lack of talent for math· ematics (Pmtnge, p. 8o) to her perennial modesty ("It is not in the nature of woman to expose herself''; Pmtagc, p. 70). In her second book, Le rere du romumartte, Lemoine·Luccioni goes Cl'cn further. There, she insists that women in fact incarnate wean's woman spaces. Women exist within his ''feminine jouissance" (Le reve, p. -1-9); they attain the Real "more surely" than men (Le ril•e, p. 61 ). We must nor change this state of things, according to Lemoine· Luceioni, for the Real must always come before the symbolic and the imaginary if we arc to avoid "nothingness" (Le '·eve, p. 89). For her, it is, abo1·e all, women who en· gender the lalanguc upon which the symbolic order is founded and upon which it will always depend (Le rcve, p. 132). Within this context, it comes as no surprise that feminism is denounced by Lemoine· Luccioni as a danger to the social contract itself. 27 For if "woman" were to disappear, "so too would the symptom of man, as Lacan say>. And with no more symptom. no morc language, and therefore no more man either" (Partage, p. 10). According to Lemoinc·Luccioni, femi· nisrs, in their efforts to do awar with the "stcrcorypcs of the male imagina· tion," play a dangerous game; seem indeed robe playing with rhe ultimate apocall'pse; should " reflect before crying ,·icrorv" (Panage, p. 99). For her, "the most inextricable ambiguity necessarily muddles up this politic I This SanlC which aims ro restore ro woman a look, the righr tO a look

r' ..

26. Stephen HcJth, in "Difli:rcncc,"' highlights the rcpcddon of this s~·magmc by Lcmotnc-Lucciom . 1... Lcmomc-Luccaoni iruists that woman's siruation is universal-and that psychoanalysis can explatn u wharcn:r 1t rna\' be: e\·en feminism. f or example. for Lemou1e-Luccioni, 1f

women 1rc today demanding a right to abortion, it i-. because "the baby"' has become

umvmboh.abk ( Partnge, p. p.)-rc-prc«:ntaliH: of a new "dc:fault an obJe;xuvauon .. due to an ntrcmc case of panidon (Partngt, p. JS). 170

TolVard the Hyste1-icnl Body look, poking holes right through the world, would min the symbolic order" (Prwtage, pp. 173-7+)· The only hope, therefore, is for women to claim their right, not to a discourse or to a look of their own, but rather to their difference-as-not-all. \Vhat then would be women's place in the world? If women "incarnate" woman as the problem of identity, the discontinuity of the social contract, the symptom of Man, then "why not count on them to assume the irreducible difference that resists unification, since woman is there, and the sexual difference is there as well, and since woman alone can be the figure of division'" (Lc I'CJ>e, p. 182). Lcmoinc-Luccioni would have us believe that only b)' stopping the stmgglc for autonomy and assuming our difference can women protect Man from the ultimate apocal)•pse. Saving the world would seem to be up to women ... Another woman analyst, Michele Montrclay, while sharing the curious, logical mixrurc of pessimism and optimism apparent in Lemoine-Luccioni, is less dogmatically Lacanian. 28 Her analysis, while remaining strictly loyal to the Lacanian doxa, docs nor fall into the same anthropological commonplaces as does that of Lcmoine-Luccioni. This is in part because she is not primarily writing about women, but about something called "femininity." But it is also because she is closer than Lemoine-Luccioni to the literary text. Momrclay would seem to want to render Lacan's "woman" incarnate in a differem way. Her "woman" is nor partitioned, divided, in d1e world, but rather the locus of a "primary imaginary" dedicated m "feminine jouissance." Women are nor necessarily closer ro this primary inlaginary than men; in fact, "Women's books lonly] speak of this 'feminine' imaginary which men -poets, an1ong others-possess" (L'I!Inbre, p. 155). Women may "pull toward" this femininity: a femininity which is unreprcsentable, dark, omside of the symbolic economy, destructive of interpretation, and dose to madness. Bur incarnated by a woman, it can only yield a monster, the Sphinx: "Docs nor the encounter with this enigmatic figure of femininity menace every subject? Isn't it this figure which is at the root of the ruin of representation?" (L'ombrc, p. 66). That is, woman can incarnate this femininity, but only as "an effect of unconscious representation" (L'ombre, p. 66), for, according to Momrclay, ir is the male pocrs, nor women, who have provided us with an na:m to that imaginary-through writing. 29 28. Monrrday, L'ombrt et It nam. All luge.' tcfcl'cnccs in rc curiouslv disparate reading;? Ir is obviou; rhat the problem is not onur.~. 1'11r Rnl'llhi•(lf lAJ Suin, p. 181. ~1)' tr•ns Organs (For) Dero·iJa is a philoM>phcr of respect, of respecting the Odtcr (Text). He.: gives respect and expects ir in return- when not rccdvcd, he can bite (although he r.trcly draws blood ). (For) Dcrrida is (also) a non-violent reader, a philosopher of non-,·iolcncc. A philosopher of rhe gift and the inevitable ensuing debt, 1 his major prob· lcrnadc has comint~~:d tO be: Is dtete a way to name withom violence, to give (a name) wirhout rhc appropriation of debt? "To inspect is to demand idcnti· fication papers, an origin and a destination. It's pretending to recognize a proper name. How to name widtout inspecting? Is ir possiblc?"2 11tat is, is there a way to npcrsuadc," Hgivc reason," "-approach," without the tuhni cutting through piJysis with a Name· Blade? (For) Derrida, rhis COilCern wirh naming extends to his own name first of all-to his paternal name that is. Ejaculated throughout his writing, beginning wid1 Dismninntion, D·e· r· r· i·d·a ril·de·lti, jn·mnis·dn. Ctypronomy as auro· biography, Ga~'atri Spivak will suggesr:3 the name as Thing-like d1e mother, feminized ar dte very least. " DIONYSUS ERIGONE ERIPETALE RE· SEDA »-the stuttering constclbrion of rhar which, "physisizcd," feminized, might perhaps at least •·esist the blade.4 (For) that which remains unnamed, intcrnamed and overnamed is that which is wirhour eigms and mosr especially of dtc morher- or at least of/in dtc maternal mnJ,'lLc-which is also/ must become a "whorish language"6 (if nor a Tower of Babel). In order ro liberate mimesis from its history, we IIHtSt (both words problematic) allow pbysis a voice as remainder: "to re·claborare, accounting for the remainder, a thought of mimesis: without imitation (of a represented, identifiable, preliminary and repeated object}, without rcpcti· r:ion (of a dting, an event, a refetenr, a signified), without signification (of a sense or a signifier). Logic of an uncanny stricture..." 7 Rcs(tc) Derrida. A male modtcr if dtcrc ever wa; 0· N·E. (For) to rcprescm Derrida in a book is, unequivocally, an act of violence, &om the minute we respect the name Derrida as the only surYivor of his own "Tiling. The presem rext rna~· be (a "viens") addressed to women readers, bur ir will, as feminist, inevitably do violence to thc·mak~tcxt·in·qucstion. (This srudy is tnll)' apocalyptic). Bur I must dare to proceed-with Derrida as my plifplca-(Dn).

On rhc "gifr" and "dcbr" sec, for example, Dcrrida, GillS, pp. 210-7>. GillS, p. IJ. J. Gayarri Spivak. "Gia.s-PiJ.

Ill Chap[(:r 6, above. 107.

The Hysterical Text's Orgam For Dcrrida, the questions of how women might accede to subjccthood, write surviving texts, or acquire a signarure of their own, arc the wrong quesrions-eminemly phallogoccmric questions. Rather, it is woma11 that must be released from her metaphysical bondage and it is writing, as "feminine operation," that can and docs subvert the history of that metaphysics. The attributes of writing are the attributes of "woman"- that which disturbs the Subject, Dialectic, and Truth is feminine in its essence. Within those larger parameters, Derrida oscillates beyond the book coded as strictly philosophical, connecting it to "fictional" texts fascinated with woman, and womcn-Jabes, Mallarmc, Genet, Blanchot, Sollers. As has been pointed out by others, most of these texts arc written by late ninctecmh- or twemieth-cenrury French men. 21 And, in all of them, woman is somehow that which cries our for response from within a babel of maternal tongues; woman is always, via Derrida, that which calls out to Man, that which puts him into question. Derridean reading clearly does not respond to that call, placing woman and her parts into discursive circulation merely to titillate the male reader-although she undoubtedly remains more than quietly seductive to the male reader, since, among other things, "she," for Derrida, is that which docs not name, that which docs not do violence through naming. But then (and here is perhaps the place for our difficult feminist questions), for the woman reader, and if naming is always violence, is the process of being un·named through a re-naming-i n-parts any less violent?-even when born within a nonviolent, even at times feminist gesrure? The body-image with which women claim they have been saddled by a certain metaphysical logic here begins a strange disintegration into labyrinths of female voices, hymens, veils, vaginas, tocreim, traces, and texts. And it is from within those labyrinths that Dcrrida pulls on the feminine thread, unraveling the fabric of Western thoughr. If there is a common measure to Derrida's texts, it is the inscription of the imperative within the act of spacing. As pointed out by Jean-Luc Nancy, "Within the register of meaning as well as within that of the subject, the imperative is and does nothing but space. The imperative spaces [ ... J The difference, the process of spacing, writing therefore, would in this way be the law of the law. »n lJ.

22.

Roger Laponc, .. Nullc part sCjoum3.nt,'' in Lrs fins d~ Pbomme, p. 204. Jean·Luc :-Janey, " l.a ,·oL' libre de l'hommc" in I.es jills de l'hommt, p.

183

18o.

(,)'1/fSIS

I !I: I lllCr11'XlS

Fwm hi> e.1rlic>t teXb, Derrid.1 h.1s in~iMcd thJt our first imperative is to brc.1J.. dm\11 vulg.u, metaphysical notiom of the rdationship berwecn sp.Kc .llld time: that is, rhc occoming time of space through the negation of the A ujbcbunJJ. For the mctaphy:.ician, time is ~pace's only po~siblc destin~·. its only truth: "Time is the true, essential, past space, space as it wi ll have occn thought, that is, relcvi. Wbntspnce JVill bnlle IIICflllt is time."2 3 Th is notion of sp.lCc and rime- ulrirnatcly space as narure (as feminine) and rime as cu lture (as mascul inc)-must be thought differently, even, for the moment, bdore their opposition. Derrida moves the metaphysical opp. It i., our colpos, the place where nothing and no one reigns: "In Greek, it is the breast of the mother but also that of the nurse, but abo the fold of a garment, the fold of the sea between rwo "a\'e.'., the ,·aile~· that sinks into the bosom of the earth. "3 7 Writing is the locus of the "golden fleece," a tissue of "cils, in-credibly m l'imlsibk within Platonic conceptions of mimesis. Dcrrida therefore rakes on the concept of mimesis-complete with its dialectics, truths, values, and icons-with sexual diflcrcnce serving as privileged lever between fiction and (the) truth: mime versus mimesis. Dcrrida renders mimesis strange through endless mime; mime as rhc writing (outside) of the book: "The Mime ought only to write himself on the white page he i>; he must IJimself inscribe bimstlf through g.esture!> and play> of facial expressions. At once page and quill, Pierror is both pa;~ive and active, matter and form, rhe author, the means, and the raw material of his mimodrama" (DS, p. 198). This Picrrot is writing, for (it, he/she) reflects no reality, remains inaccessible in a supreme spasm-writing as a "d ramatization which illustmtcs IUJtbiug. which illustrates the 1/0tl!illg, lights up a space, re-marks a spacing as a nothing" (DS, p. 208). That is, Picrror is a h_vmm, a word designating both marriage and the membrane of rhe female vaginal traer. For Derrida, the hymen is the ''absolute" in undecidability: there is hymen (virginity) when there is no hymen (marriage or copulation); there is no hymen (virginity) when there is hymen (copu lation or marriage). The hymen is the locus ofrhc abolition of the difference between difference and nondiflcrencc- the explosion of laughter and death which docs no violence. "Bcrond" this culrurally determined puzzle, what interests Derrida is the "white marriagc"-the mariagc blanc, where what rakes place take> (a) place without taking place. The place where, bct\\'ccn the metaphorical (marriage) and the literal (the membrane), there can be no more di>tinction for the Father to judge. 54 ,4.. On the ..white marriage" and its 'onscqucnccs fi>t Judi1h and Holophcrnc as \\ell as lor an1· rcadmg of l'rcuJ\ "Tahoo elf Vorginity" (The C.omplcrr Ps_rdJOlogirnl IVo,.ks, l'ol. 11), 's Orgnw Under Derrid,1'~ pen, the hymen-that which h;1~ always been "read" b)' !he futher in all the dccidabiliry of It~ pn:scncc or absence-becomes the f.~ther-ks~. always fi:mmine paradigm of undec1dabihry. Derrida emphasizes that the word "hymen" is nor mdispemablc-as sylltpsu-to either "his" or "MallarmC's" text; l1ke all previous words of undecidability, and some others, it merely designates in echo "a ,·cry singular relation to writing" (OS, p. 221 ).s~ 1bc hymen remain~. howe\ er, the privileged figure for the second "scene" of Derrida'~ text, metamorpho~ing into multiple configurations before our n:ry eye~. Foldt-d, the hymen begins to float-becoming now !he dance of a pen, now a woman dancer, the V of ballet: the text miming Mallam1C's "dancer" itself begins to dance, "I is] always, i11 ndditio11, dcscriptionsfinscriptions of the strucrure and mo,·cmem of the literary rextile, a 'hesitation' turning into wrinng. In folding it back upon itself, the text thus pam (with) reference, spreads it like a V, a gap that pivots on its point, a dancer, flower, or Idea" (OS, p. 239). TI1erc is no quc~tion of a woman here, "but a meraphor" (DS, p. 242) designating thar which dances across the secure rerriwrics of truth, unset· tling them. Ultimatcl)', the metaphrsical V of the dialectical venus explodes into the Dcrridean wings (niles [ L's1) of rhe bum:rlly, rhc n11gles (L's) of the text: in ro rhe crisis ofrhe (Mallarmcan) bk,lcaving behind only the elles, "shes" of a now (crern~ll)•) feminine ccriture ... Is there any room lcfr here for our feminist questions? We could emphasize d1c narrative on which this entire (de?) construcrion nevertheless rcsrs: a man murdering hi~ wife. Or we could ask why Derrida silences d1e male homosexual potentialiric~ fi>r this Mallarmcan/Dcrridcan "double plar": "the very mark of the feminine position with rcspccr ro rhe father, of homosexuality (the rearing of the anal 'hymcn')." 56 Or we could emphasize rhe abundant stereotypes attaching to virginity (whiteness, etc.), or !heir "sources" in Freud. 57 Or we m1ghr e\•en ask why Derrida did not operate a complete reversal-on the testicles, for example, as pcrfecr parcrgon of any male text; why ha,·e thcv not received !he same dramatic ss. Pn:>5Cd 1on ;mo~hcr pi•«. mUno!l, ''.~krnhr.m~. pellt way, w~ must not forger: - Dcrrida's "'Dis..!ieminarion": where rhc farhcr·Aurhor tinally di5appe:ars from writing·

colloqumm paper, '"Hymne/Hymen," published

bcyond·casrrauon as echoed through ... - Dcrrida's "'rympan": where the unfolding of the new body continues with added

organs: where the car as philosophical machine (and female sexual organ and matrix) is rendered o;-rrangc, dcnaturah7..cd in

1ts

passt\'iry, rakcn, apart. The labyrinth of rhc car·

1•agma is entered, slowly, crotid7-r tnnh. And she is woman precisely because she herself docs not bc::lic,·e in tnlth itself~ because she docs not believe in what she is, in what she is believed to be, in what she thus is not" (Spun, p. 53}. First attribute of "womann: "Woman" (in truth) is not to be found, taken; "that which will nor be pinned down by truth i~, in truth-feminine" (Spun, p. ss). n3. ~icr:1..sc:he. Tlu Gnv Satnct, tr.ms. \\'alter Kaufmann (~cw York: Random House. 1974). fragment 6o, p. 1;;.

6+. The altrmarions in :-.Jicmche from her operation) she knows that such a r~,·ersal would only deprive ha of her power. of simulation, that in truth, a r~'\·crsal of that kind \\'Ould, in the end, only amounr to d1c same thing and force her just as surdy inro the same old appararus. She kno\\'S that she \\'Ould only find herself trapped once again in a phallocemrism ... (Sp11n, p. 61 )

Second attribute of ''woman": she is what docs not believe in either castration or ami-castration, in Tnnh or irs negative, even if, nonetheless, she needs their effects.

"Adommems" Hence the extreme "Skepsis des Weibes'' (Spurr, p. 63). Only Man ("l'hornmc") bdic\'eS in the pros and contras of castration. Dcrrida adds with ~ietzschc: "And in tmth, thcr roo arc men, those- women feminists so derided by ~icrL:Schc. Feminism is nothing but the operation of a

194-

The Hysterical Text's Orgam woman who aspires to be like a man. And in order to resemble the masCl.llinc dogmatic philosopher this woman lays claim-just as much claim as he-to truth, science, and objectivity in all their castrated delusions of virility" (Spurs, p. 65). For Nicrzsche (and Dcrrida), the feminist wants nothing more than a pamre supplimentni1·e, "new adornment for herself," whenever she seeks 1111e txplication ason prllfJre sujtt, "enlighrcnmcm about herself." For NietzSche, feminists (male or female) "lack style," arc "sterile old maids"-as opposed to :-Jiet'J-Sche who, Derrida adds, is, on the contrary, "the thinker of pregnancy" (Spurs, p. 65). Third attribute of''woman," then: she is that which is not feminist (and who is therefore with style): "feminism too seeks to castrate. It wants a castrated woman. Gone the style" (Spurs, p. 65).

''Simulation'' The "feminine operation" is designated by the spaci ngs in and b)' Nierzsche of "woman"-as nffirmntiJ>e: "she [woman] is twice model, at once lauded and condemned. Here, in a manner like to that of writing, surely and safely, she forces the prox>•'s argument to bend before a sort of kettle logic. [...) She plays at dissimulation, at ornamentation, deceit, artifice, at an artist's philosophy. Hers is an affirmative power" (Spurs, p. 67). Nierzsche, in his praise of dissimulation, ranks her with the Jewsboth equally comedians. Fourth attribute of "woman": Dns Weib ist so anistich-and aflirmati,·cly so (Spun, p. 69). "Woman" is nor to be found through the Truths and Lies of concept and knowledge, "yet it is impossible to resist looking for her" (Spzm, p. 71).

"History of an e1-ror" It would seem that Nicrzschc wanted tO substitute an "aesthetic of produaion~ (connoted as masculine) for the traditional "aesthetic of consumers" (connoted as feminine) (Spm'S, pp. 71-79). Bur as Hcidcggcr poimed out, he also is "seeking something else" (Spzm, p. 79): not a simple inversion of the hierarchy, nor a1urchy, but rather, rhc very rranstomlation of the notion of hierarchy itself. ("Woman" is absent from this very philosophical interlude.) 195

Gmcsis Ill: lmertcxts !lui with "Fcmininrt 1>ita" ( Rc) "entre !.1 f~mme" (Spm~, p. 82). Bccau~e Derrida lay~ empha~is on the f.tet that H~idcggcr, in the wake of these remarks, in his "explication" of :--..'ictt.\chc ·~ '' H iMory of an Error," docs not comment upon N ict'l..SChc's reflection that "the idea becomes woman I Wcibl~ with Christianity. Nor .1n innoccnr lapse, Derrida explains-for it signals nor only a Hcideggcrianmomcm of metaphysical blindness, but also the in~riprion of ''bccoming-tcmalc:" as a ''process of the idea" (Spurs, p. 87). Woman and Truth ha,·e a history- and "woman as castrated" (Christianity) is only an epoch now long past. fifi:h attribute of "woman": she is something that Niet7.sche, as opposed to Hcidegger (and metaphysics), was attempting to think in (her) history.

"Positiom)) :--..'ict:zsche's propositions on "woman" ·arc therefore heterogeneousand that is his merit as a great srylist, according to Derrida. "[His sryk] is manifest in the ,·cry hcrcrogeneiry of the text" (Spurs, p. 95). For outside of the positivi tics and ncgativitics of the dialectic, "the reversal, if it is not accompanied b)' a discrete parody, a strategy of writing, or difference or deviation in quills, if there is no sryk, no grand srvlc, this is finally but the same thing, norhing more than a clamorous declaration of the antithesis" (Spurs, p. 95). l'ict'l.sche's positions arc, schematically, three, according to Derrida: 1) Woman is condemned as nontrurh; 2) Woman is condemned as tnnh ; 3) Woman is recognized, beyond this double negation, as atlirmative and Dionysian. "And no longer is it man who atlirms her. She aflirms herself, in and of herself, in man" (Spun, p. 97)- (Castration and ami-castration have no place in this third position-nor do feminism and antifeminism). "Nietzsche might wdl be a little lost in the· web of his text, lost much as a spider who finds he is unequal to the web he has spun. Much as a spider indeed, several >pidcrs even. Nietzsche's spider. Lautrcamont's, that of Mallarmc, those of Freud and Abraham" (Spun, p. 101). What's more, Nietzsche was all of these women, "at once, simu ltaneously or successi,·dy, depending on the position of his body and the situation of his story" (Spm!, p. 101).

The Hysterical Tc.xt)s Ot;gam "The gaze of Oedipw>J " ror just th is reason then, there is no such thing either as the truth of Nietzsche, or of Nietzsche's text" (Spurs, p. 103). T here is no 11'011/ntl, as tnlth or nontnah in itself Derrida adds that all "feminists"- "Mme. Roland, Mme. de StaCI, M. [Monsieur1 Georges Sand I Nietzsche adds George Eliot ]"-arc "rightfully chastised" by l':ictzsche for their "bad taste" (Spurs, p. 103). It is the question of woman, not "the woman questio n," that suspends the opposition between truth and nontruth those women were attempting to isolate: "there is no truth in itself of the sexual diflcrence in itself, of either man or woman in itself" (Spurs, p. 103) ... and what that recognition unleashes for a modernity "beyond" metaphysics, therefore, is not a question of men and women, but rather "the question of style is immediately unloosed as a question of writing. The question posed by the spurring-operation (opimtioll ipcromumtc) is more powerful than any content, thesis, or meaning" (Spurs, p. 107).

Le coup de don "Man'' and "Woman" change places in finitely, then, according to their "attributcs"-for example, according to whether they ''give themselves" (en se domu111t) o r "take themselves for" (se tlomumt pom·) - a problematic that Derrida desires to think before the problem of being or identity. He warns that to ignore that necessit)' is to remain "[in) the onto-hermeneutic presupposition, [... ) in its pre-critical relation to the signified"; it is to "remrn ro the presence of the spoken word, to a natural language, to perception, visibi lity, in a word, to consciousness, and its phenomenological system" (Spm'S, p. 113).

"Abysses of tmth)) That is, "Perhaps truth's abyss as non-truth, propriation as appropriation/a-propriation, the declaration become parodving d issimulation, perhaps this is what Nietzsche is calling the stvlc's form and the no-where of \\'Oman." And finally ... "The gift, which is the esscnrial predicate of woman, appeared in the undecidable oscillation of to give oneself/to gi1·c

197

Gwmis Ill: Jnwuxts onc,df tilt, gi,clt.ll..c, kt t.lkclappropri.ltc. [t., \',lluc or priiole, le 11oi/e, In IJ()ile) where Tnuh is nor to be decided, because "the rcxr \'Cils itself by irsclf um·ciling irsclf'-likc a woman. 65 The rcxr is veiled-borh open and closed, like a flower, like a woman. Bur it would be a misrake to rhink thar something lies behind irs veils. The text hides neirher rnlth nor umnJth, but operates an uncertain[)' of vision which is no longer anguished, an uncerraimy as to casrrarion and noncastrarion-a dissimulation rhar, in its effect, is female to rhe extcm rhar it is affirmarive (that is, not anguished). :-:or robe "taken,~ believing in nothing, never negative, nor to be found through conccpr or kno\\'l.:dge, affirmati,·e, forever transitory, with style-writing, as \\·oman, is thar which philosophy and, indeed, the male philosopher must become if the boundaries of metaphysical thought arc to be crossed. 6bommt. pp. 90-100.

"'Onhodo.x" is used here in the same war as in "orthodox Lacania.ns''-scc Chapter 8, abo, c. 67. Sarah Kofinan, Nictzstht tt Ia stbu pl11losophi.que (Pan s: 1ol18, 1979), p. 170. 68. Most imponant, through his insistence on the figure of BaubO: sc:c Kofman, NierzulJe, pp. 295-9"·

69. Sarah Kofman, Abtrratio11S: Lt dtJ'rlllr ftmmt d'AU!JI.SU Comu (Parts: rlammarion. 1978), p. lj. 10. Ibid .• p. t+J. 71. Ibid., pp. •9-JO.

199

qvncsi.r Ill: lntcrtrxts re.ulon!-\" of freud, and onh• secondly .1 Dcrridc:m reading designed to dt,•idc Frl·ud .1g.1in~t himself. The text is dc\·otcd to the demonstration of wom.111\ ~t.nm ,15 enigma in the text of freud. On the one lund, there is Frcud·the·ph.lllotr.lt and his phallocentric science; on the other hand, there i> anorhcr Freud-the one of"On Narcissism," where, according to Kofin.lll, Freud meet> with Nict?A\chc: ..ntJr which would render woman cnigm:ttlc would no longer be .)Omc dcfcctl\'(:ncss,') some bck, but on the contrary her Jl.lrcissisric autosutlioency and her indifference; it i' no longer she who will envy man for his pwts, it is he who will envy her for her elusi,•e libidi11al positi011, for ha,·ing know11 how to keep her narcis.rce of order or law ("What 'exacrly' are you talking abom?": me truth of equivalence). (LO, pp. 104-5)

At the price of acting-as-police, we ask what is the "narratorial \'nice" of Death Smtcucc? 75. J)crnda's -L"·ing On/ Borderlines"""'' tr>n, p. 98>. 202

The Hyste1ical Text's Ot;gallS rativc"). They speak in a "cryptic tongue" about this "project." Thenarrator "rcfkcts" on these "cl'cnts." Even those who arc totally unfamiliar with Blanchot's text will sense the violence done to it by this summary, this telling of the story. And, indeed, after a reading of Dearh Sentence with Derrida's "Living On/Borderlines," this kind of summary becomes impossible. It is not possible here to follow all of Derrida's reading directions as to wh)' this is so. But I do want to touch on those places in Derrida's text where it becomes clear how our "sununary," our "story," remains possible nonetheless: that is, on those places where the "feminine operation" disrupting this kind of "police reading" would itself be impossible without certain represmtfltums ofrvomm. "Woman" or her "hymen" cannot disn1pt this text without its women. If there is an overall accent in "Living On," it is on that of the undecidability of limits, beginning with the title "Survivre": living on, on living, afterlife, life after death, life after life, etc. ("Nomination is importam, but it is constantly caught up in a process which it docs not control" [LO, p. 8rl) This undecidability extends even to the limits among "texts" thcmsd1·es. Derrida shows, for example, how the three texts he is reading arc themselves in transference: the boundaries among them arc no clearer than arc the boundaries "within" them. This is done b)' looking at how the three texts under consideration put into operation, "pre-logically," certain privileged signifiers, so as to "undo" a metaphysical opposition: in this case, life and death. Dcrrida has often insisted before on the semanric chains tied to these two words; for example, in Hegel, where "Life is life, life is light, life is rrurh."79 Metaphysics is a "philosophy of life,"So where "death" can only be life's opposite, its limit, its banal ending. To rake life and death "our of opposition," out of "mutual exclusion," is to move toward "a place withour passage, without a beyond, toward a livi11g which is finally intransitive, which is worth 'perhaps even dying."'8 1 It is co think, with the poet, life's and dcarh's attributes: force and weakness, light and dark, speech and writing (Thor was not only the god of writing but also a god of death), masculine and feminine, etc. It is to explore, gropingly, the shady areas between life and death: "the pre-logic of the crypt."82 79. Dcrrido, GillS, p.91. 8o. Derrida, "Speech and Phenomena," pp. 10-11. 81. Dcrrida~ "Pas," in Gmmma, nos. 3- 4 (I9i 6) : 138. 82. "Fors" is perhaps Derrida's most extensi,·e reflection on rhe life and death opposition. There he mentions, because of its exemplarity, Bllrlchot's Drnth Smttnu, "a truly cryptic story" (p. t04)203

(;wwis Ill: ImertexlS h is in Dcrrid.1's wandering through /,a folie du jour that we find the lim mdir:mom rh.H rhis oppos itio n-i n-narrati\'C cannot be undone without r.1king gmder imo account. Thi~ is so o n two lc\-cls: first, most obviously, bcc.msc of the clear gender-in-pronouns of Bbnchor's " narrative," where "a munlx:r of signs m.1kc it possible ro recognize a man in the first-person spc.1kcr," as Derrida puts It ( LO, p. 9S)- It is women (characters) who \luke up men's (the narrator's) cerrai mies about life and death. Bur, second, this reading cannot be gender-neutral because the "narrarin:" is shaken up in its ,-crv stnlcture , is, in Derrida's words, ''i nvagiIUted": " Bv definition, there is no end to a discourse that would seck to ' describe the i1waginated structure of La folic dtt jour. ilwag ination is the inward refolding o f Ia g ainc [sheath, gi rdle1. the inverted reapplication of the omcr edge to the inside o f a form where the outside then opens a pocket" ( LO, p. 97)- This infolding of the " narrative" produce~ a Structu re w abyme which can no longer even be called a " narrati,·c": the demand for narrative and its truth " is itself n.:countcd and swept along in the endless procc~ of invagination" (LO , p. 98). Wonien and "woman" here coincide to disrupt the amhority of the text and its '\·ision," with the process of "double im·agination" designating "the narrative of deco11smtction in deC(msmtctioll" (LO, p. 100). Before moving on, spccificall)', to Deatb Sentmce, Derrida remarks that this "narrative in deconstmctio n," the process of im·agination, is Blanchet's "narrative ,·oice" (as opposed to the " narratorial ,-oicc" of our summary). There is no ego-centric voice in Hlanchot's text ; and Derrida only briefly stops o\·cr the question of why the reader docs in fact recognize a man in the first person pronoun: "\Ve might wonder-and this is one of the questions that will run through my reading of this fragmentwhv the neuter of the i/ t hat is not an '1,' not an ego, is represented in French, according to Blanchot, by a pronoun t hat pri,•ilcgcs the affinity or apparently fortuitous and external resemblance between the masculine il ['hc'l and the neUter il I ' it']" (LO, p. 105). Dcrrida never answers this question. e\·en if it "nms through his reading." He insists o nly on the necessity of the neuter for a "narrative" that would be "borne beyond the system of philosophical oppo~itions" ( LO, p. 106). The rest of the reading will be, in fact, more about showing that necessity than asking why it might be one. With the title, Death Semmce, we arri,·e, already, at the first undecidability of the text (m-ret de mort as both death sentence and stay of death) -w be incarnated by the woman named J. in life and death with and through the lives and death~ o f the narrator. Through an analysis of that undccidabilin·, Derrida renders his "first conclusion": "It is thus not a qucs204

The Hysteriml Text's Or:tJn11s tion of oue death, one de:1d woman, a person who is dead or living on, bcxuJiity, resulring in the woman comaining as many men as the man, and the n1.1n .1s nuny women, all capable of entering- men with women, women \\'ith men-into relations of production of desire that overturn the st.ltiMical order of the sexes" (AO, pp. 295-96). If, later, D + G renounced using this ''mct.lphor," it was became it was tCXl often t aken as, precisely, a model- and c>peciall~· ,1s a model for woman (cf. DLS, p. 121): But the problem of the desiring machine, in its esscnriall)' erotic character, i> not .1! .111 to know if a machine could ewr give "the perfect illusion of woman." It os on the comrary: Iro know) in which machine to put woman, in what machine a woman puts herself in order to become the non-oedipal objL'Ct of de>ire, d1at is to say nonhuman sex? In all desiring machines, sexualirv docs not mn>ist of an imaginary couple woman·machine as a substinue for Oedipus, but of d1c couple machine·desire as the real production of a girl bom without a mother, of a non-oedipal woman (who would nor be oedipal either for herself or for others).S As opposed to insisting on desiring machines, therefore, D+G have in· crcasingly preferred to denaturalize the human body through the con· stnlctions of a "Body-without-Organs" (BwO). The BwO is "what re· mains when everything has been removed. And what has been removed is precisely the fant asy, the ensemble of significations and subjectifications."6 D+ G's strategies for evacuating our prefabricated fantasies to make way for new kinds of process arc radical. The BwO is the temporary si te for that radicality-a body without an image, capable of including everyth ing from death (AO, p. 329) to contemporary writing (MP, pp. 9 -13). It is opposed tO metaphysics (life or death), the body of psychoanalysis, and c\·en theories of writing with their still human and corporeal, even if alternative or partial, organs. 7 In fact, the BwO docs not really exist yet, bur is always there, next to us, as a limit of desire (MP, p. 197). Luce Irigaray has insisted on how both the "desiring machi ne" and the "Rody·without·Organs" resemble, above all, beyond their obvious con· s. Gtl!t:") Ddcu.LC and F~lix Guan.1ri, "Appcndic~:: Bilan·programmc pour machine~ dCsir· anterene. r... I The consequence of thi, ;, thlt narrllion, the fundamental act of 1he M1bjen, cannot be nal1·cly taken charge of by any personal pronoun: 11 is N.trration \l'hich spc.tks, 1r is irs Oll'n mouth and 1hc language it cnllts is origmal; the voice here is not the instrument, even depersonalized, of a JtC!·et: the id it [fll 1 ll'hich is reached is nor that of a person, it's that of literature. (DPR, pp. 20- 21 )

As Rarthes is well aware, "The depersonalization of the subject is common to many modern works." Ne,·errhcless, there is a difference. "What is characteristic of Dmnu is that it is not 1'tCimiztttl (reported), but amstituted (so to speak) by rhe very action of the narrmivc" (DPR, p. 21, note 3). Solkrs's work explores alterirv not through a narration, but through an act of "pure narrativiry." This act of pure narrarivity is accomplished through a formal alternation of the pronouns "!" and "he": "be is each time the one who is going ro write I; I is each time the one who, beginning ro write, will ne,•erthclcss reenter into the pre-creature who gave birth to him" (DPR, pp. 22-23). "The man searching for something" in this novel is not n man but a textual a~scmblagc of pronouns spinning around an empty space which is to be filled with- no One. \\'hat is this "pure narraror" looking for? L'bistoire l'iritnble (the renl story) is what the text indicates, and "we understand right away that the real sto1y is none other than the search which is told to us" (DP R, p. 25). The "srorv" . in Dmme is the dtsi1'e for a srorv' with little overt concern for what the story i~ "about," or where it might lead. "Sollers follows very closely the fi.mdamemal m~-rh of the writer: Orpheus cannot nnn around, he must go forward and sing [:~bout] what he desires without considering it" ( DPR, p. 29). A pure narrator is here constimting pure narrativity: the narration of pure desire itself, without a consideration of its object. And yer, Eurydice has not abandoned Orpheus. She is sti ll there, but behind him.

The Frmlt of the

Pl'OUOiliiS

Ranhes suggests, in a note 1•cry early in his text, that Drnme, while neither poem nor nm-d, might be read like a poem: as "the indistinct celebration of language and of the beloved woman, of their path toward one another, like the Vita Not•n of Danrc was in irs rime: isn't Drnme the infinite metaphor for 'I love you,' which is rhe unique transformation of all poetry?" (DPR, p. tJ). The beloved woman> Yes, Dmme is nor only a formal, modern project in depersonalization, an emptying of rhe pronouns "I" and "he," bur an old·fashoncd heterosexual love story of sorts. For there arc two other pronouns in Drnmc, which arc never explicitly mentioned by either Sollers or Barthcs: "you" and "she." Pronouns we ha1·e seen before.

Ph.S.: " But, in order to limit ourselves tO a general obscrva· tion, kt us just say that my interest in women, wouldn't you say, is certainly the motif, in the pictorial sense, which has provided the impulse for my writing, without any doubt." D.H.: "From the beginning?" Ph.$.: "Oh yes, it's visible." Sollers, Visum ti NtJV Yoril

Sollers's first rull-lcngrh novel, the one that brought him his first ac· claim but that he has since rejected as too traditional, is the story of a young bo~~s parallel initiation into love and writing. Vue curimse solirude "tells the storl' of that young bo)~S seduction by the mysterious, foreign, and older Concha; her abandonment of him; his initiation into writing necessarily concurrent with her absence; his rediscovery of Concha (and of her homosexuality); and finally his abandonment by her, lca1•ing him alone tO himself-and to the writing whose coming into existence would have been impossible without her. Sollers's second novel, Le pm·c, is a succession of "sri II lifes"; shadowv images of women in 1·arious poses, coming and going silently through rhe rooms of a man's imagination as it slowly places itself before his notebook and ink: "the orange·cm•cred notebook patiently filled, overflowing with writing, evenly driven ro this page, this sentence, this period, by the old pen often and mechanicaU1· dipped in the bluish-black ink." 8 8. Lr parr, p. 111. 241

(,)•11csis IV: /11leljcrmces In Drmnc, rhe perfcm1unce \\'t' participate in as reader, rhe link between "•he" .md ""'riting" will be maintained, but \\'ithout plot, character, shad-

. the ">he" who .1llows "he"

ow. or inl.\J?,C. The Hvoul' \Vho al lo\VS .

urtamly they lca''C one minute-old vice for one h.uf .1s old I \\".lilt to write ogain>t them jwomenl to hate them ;lander them ... IS 4

w''''·""""

Sollers's Fe~Jmus is, in a sense, the "key" to his Paradis; there, "woman" and women alternate, less connected to modernity and irs text. It is almost as if the "blueprint" for Paradis (as "fundamemal experiment") had to be published elsewhere. in a more or Jess traditional, representational no\'cl like Fmmm. In Femmes, what is seen as the master formula of our comcmporary culture is explicitly re\'eakd: "the trutl1, finally, abom the secretwomen. about the secret that tran~pircs through women and dissolY~ the belief that there is a world and a necessity for this world ... " 16 There is also, howc\'er, and sometimes incredibly so, a textual insistence in Pnmdis and Fmmus that these texts arc not engaged in some kind of "misOl,'}'nist project" on the part of the "male author" bur, rather, thar iris once again "the structure of things" that is ro blame: "what we arc trying ro mark here is simply the mounting the way in which this makes a collage the puzzle rhe "'ea,•ing." 17 For Sollers and for the writers working in France whom I ha"e pri,·ilcged in this study, the problem of woman would seem to be one neither of "idealization" nor of"misogyny" in their texts, but of understanding why and how "she" has become so central to modernity, ro the world and its texts in the late tewentieth centurv. The "she" haunting much of the most important contemporary writing by men in France is at rimes angelic, at times monstrous. But "she" is always seen, abon: aJJ, as that which must be explored through an erotic merging at the interior oflanguagc, through a radical dismemberment of the textual bodv. a female body. Women, as identity, may e\'cntuall\' reappear within rhe boundaries of that exploration, but nc,·cr for long, usually separated from it, and always wirh duplicity. It would seem ro be only "woman" thar can ser\'C as imaginati\'c straregv for exploring the breakdown of the paternal metaphor within the epistemological laboratory of the late twentieth centur\'. 15. Ibid., p.

ns.

Femmts, p. J06. s- Solle-rs, Pnrtulis, p. 48.

16 Soller>,

The Fnult of the

PI'0/10111/.S

I Crm Get nloug without You Mother . .. his quarry lined in with rhe Big OrlC, rhe ccnrurv\ masrer cabal. ... Thoma~ Pynchon, V.

Chri>uuas Enc, 1955, Benny Prof.tnc, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sne.tkcr> and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk. Virginia.'"

From the very first sentence of what has nor failed to be recognized as one of the mosr important contemporary American novels, readers find themselves in a textual universe different from the one we have been exploring rhus far. "Time," "place," and "character" remain unsclf-consciously intact. How can we possibly ralk about gyncsis? And ycr, Thomas Pynchon's V. is a perfect example of rhe rhemarizarion rather than constitution of gynesis in contemporary male American writing. V. is a novel about imerprcrarion, about the possibilities and impossibilities of "making sense," of "making plots." And it is a woman who is at the source of tllOSl' (im) possibiliries. V. is about how a woman is narrative's problem, about how a woman is the object of the subject-innarrative's quest. This woman is nor, howe1•er, a "character" in the novel. Rachel Owlglass, Paola i\1aijsrral, Charisma, and Esther pose only traditional problems fi>r now traditional antiheroes. The woman 1\'ho serves as matrix for this nm·el about interpretation may or mav nor exist; docs and does nor exist; must and yet cannot exist if narrari1·c is to continue. Around that woman, two psychologized male characters- Benny Profune and Herbert Stencil-revolve. The critics have seen Renny as "twentieth-century man"-hc has no plot. 19 He is a ''schlcmihl," a "yo-ro." 1virhour goal, identity, object, or proper place. B~nny wanders through plots that clearly arc nor his own. Benny's is a 1•ery profane metonymy. Herbert, on rhc other hand, is "hisroricalman." His life is nothing more than the series of analogous plots he has made up, lived, and dreamed. Forcibly dislocating his personality, Stencil refers to himself in the third person (p. 51); "Stencil" sees and lives plots evcrvwhcre, and we, as readers, follow those plots- even when "Stencil" is absent-through a series of third person narratives. Stencil is a master of metaphor, and his r our purpo~es her~, how~vcr, i~ the [let th,lt in this book ",1bmu" th~ de.nh ofinnoecn~c in th~ t:Ke of the ine1•irabk violence of 'l'\U.li t:u1t,l\)' out of (ontrol, the b.1rc outline of the burning maternal brc.l'l i> th~ moM trcqucnr haunting image i11 the nighun,uc cnvdoping .\lidl.lel, ,\l.trg.m:r, .utd rhc reader. It i~ the bare outline of color-the red nipple .llld white hreast caught in red and "hire flamcs-that punctuates rlw rn t to its heroic son\ end. Red and white arc, in fact, the only two colors marking the narrative path of lvlichacl and J'vlargarct'~ phanrasmatic destitw. !'rom white hor~cs, fog, hcllics, and pearls to red blood, hurning cities, lips and wine, rhe white and red of the maternal breast add the only color to this otherwise gray narrative of Michael and Margaret Banks's fall IntO evil. The end of the narram·c is the e1•em of the Golden Bowl- the horse race where Michael's hor~e is to n111 illegally. Nor surprisingly, the race track itself is 01•al and white with, in its center, a garden of roses. M ichacl Banks, in a last possible act of heroism, nms unexpectedly straight toward that 01·al and the smoke of the horses' hooves, straight into the path of the horse that was to fulfill his dream. The na.rrative ends with the image of Banks, horses, and riders crashing t9gcther in an exploding cloud of smoke. Michael Hanks·the·husband inherited and ended Hencher·thc· son's dream-and his nightmare. The image of the white oval track and its bed of roses, now covered in smoke, repeats the image with which rhis narrative of filial self-destruction began. It echoes rhe destiny of Hippo· lyrus, killed because of his step-mother's treachery. In Tbe Pnssion Artist, the act of willed self-degradation and destruction on the part of the son is even more directly linked ro the mother's bodyin this case ro a mother who literally murdered his father, and is in prison for that acr. The Pnssion A 11ist is a complex, allegorical exploration of the denied or embraced erotic union between son and mother and irs potential conse· quences for the son-as-artist. At first, that union is denied. Konrad Vost li\'rced ro rake into account "the fierce spirit invested in all forms offemalc li fe" (p. 144). And finally, in a burst of sclf·revclation, he comprehends the analogy between " rhc woman ques· tion" and himself: "In no other way I... ] can a "·oman so rcn:al her 2SS

amiu,m.l'> by .lll .Kt of the will" (p. 180). And wuch~d by that will, loving th.ll unknown IIOIUan, his mother's ,·oice rocking hi~ now hclplc.>~, infantile bodv . ' Konrad Vmt b linalh•. li-.:c to become a woman, to become an .1n ;,, : "Konrad Vost knew at last rhc transports of that singular experience wh1ch make'> Cl'cry man an arrisr: rhe cxpcricnce, rhar is, of the willed erotiC union'' (p. 181). Konr.ld Vosr is c1·enn1.111)' allowed ro leave La Violni11e. As he rerurns ro the light ofda)', however, he is killed by one ofrhe men who chose not ro cnrcr the world of women. The willed erotic union wirh woman leads the artist m his only possible destiny: a deep "knowledge of himself," his hatred and rejection by other men, and the discO\•ery of "what ir was to be nothing": "Poor Gagnon ... They may destroy me, they may devour me. Bur I am who I an1." With thi; remark Konrad Vo>t achieved hi; final irony, for as he spoke he wa> already smiling and rolling o1•cr to discover for himself what it wa~ to be nothing. (p. •8+)

In these rwo no,·cls, the American son returns to the morhcr's-body- innarrati,·e in order ro find himself through an act of heroism and will-one directly leading to his death. In Prnchon's V., the son makes that return almost in spite of "himself," but still in narrativc, in an effort tO under· stand the ficrions that make up his life. In all cases, the maternal figure is guilty of something-a crime of some sorr, Cl'cn her own death-as imagined by the artist-son. further, ir is onlr rhe marernal figure who knows the story-rhe true story to be told-that might allow for the son's redemption. The American son as arrist p01trays the "woman," and hence the morher, as something that must be known. He expresses rather than consrirures woman as modernity's problem without making her his own. The American son-artist's seeming reluctance to let loose of the third person function within representation is nor a result simply of what Bbnchot called the "narratorial voice"-the \'Oice-over of the text. 23 As Harold Bloom has suggested, exemplary American texts will most likely alwars pro,·c resistant to "deconstruction" or "analytic association," be· cause writing "in the American grain" aflirms "the self OI'Cr languagc."24 :;. Sec the di\Cu,,ion of Rlanzfai.s. Paris: des Fcnunes, 1977. Allen, Suzatmc. "1-Iymnc/Hrmen." In /-a jim de l'l11mmze, cd. Philippe LacoueLabarthc and )ean-Luc Nancy. Paris: Galilee, 1981. ' Althusscr, Louis. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Pantheon, 1969. Pour Marx. Paris: Maspero, 1965. - - · Lmiu aud PhilosqpiJJ. New York: Monthly Review, 1971. Lbziue et Ia phiWsopiJie. Paris: Maspcro, 1969. Arnold, Marthcw. Cttllllre and Anarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950.

Assoun, Paul-Laurent. "Freud et Ia mystique. " Nottvelle revue de In psyehmzalyre 22 (Aunmm 1980). Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. Trans. Willard R. T rask. PrincetOn: Princeton University Press, 1953. Barth, John. The Floaring Opera. New York: Bantam, 1956. - - - "The Lircrarurc of Rcpknisluncnr.n Atlamic Mo11tiJiy, january 1980.

265

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11.\nlwlmc, Dm1.1ld. Thr /)end Fnthrr. New York: Pocket Boob, 1975. B,tnh du Scuil, 1970. B.ua1llc, George-s. L'exphimce imiriwre. P3ris: Gallimard, 197o-73. Hautlnll.lrd, Jean. l>t In siductiou. P3ris: Galilee, 1979. Beckett, Samuel. :vto/111)1, Mnlo11e Dres, The V1111nmnble. London : john Calder, 1959. Ben~zct ..\ lath ieu. Ln fin de 1'/xmmte. Paris: Flammarion, 1979. - -· Le ron:nn de In langue. Pari.: 1oh8, 1977. Benjamin, jessica. "Authority and the Family Rc,·isircd." Nnv Gcn11a11 Cn'tique 13 (19/i). Benjamm, \\'alrer. Chm·lts Bnudtlnire: A l.yru l'oer i11 rhe Ern of High Captraltsm. London: :-ILB, 1973. - -· "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man." In One Way Sn·eer, trans. Edmund )ephcon and Kingsley Shorter. London: NLB, 19i9· "Sur lc langagc." In Mytbe et 1>iolmre. Paris: Dcnocl, 1971. - -· "La phorographie." In Pohie er rii'Oiutio11. Pari~: De noel, 1971. --·"Theses o n the Philosophy of Hi" ory." in 11/ttmmations, cd. H annah Arendt. :-. Ll'dia Da,·is. Barrnown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1978. L'nrrct de mort. Paris: G~llimard, 1948. ' - - · L'em rmm i11ji11i. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. - - · Ln folte du jour. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1973. - - · Tbt Space of Lirerarzm: A Trnmlntion of "L'Espnce Litteraire!' Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: lJniYcrmy of l'ebraska Press, 198z. L'espace lirtiraire. Paris: Gallimartl, J9JJ. - - Thomas l'obswr. Paris: r-:RF, 1950. Bloom, Harold. "The Breaking of Form ." In De((mstmctro/1 mtd Critrcum. :-975"Dcrrid.>." Lts jim tlt·l'bommc: A pa11ir du tml'ail de jacques Oerrida, ed. Philippe I..Kouc-1->b.mhc .md je.u1-Luc Nancy. Pari>: Galil6:, 1981. Drrrid.>, jacques. "L'jgc de Hegel~; "La philo>nphic et ses classes~; " Rcponses a Ia :---;oul·clk Cnriquc.~ in Qui a peur de Ia pbilosopbie' G REPH (Groupe de Rc· chcrchc >ur I'En;eigncmcnt l'hilosophiquc). Paris: Flammarion, •977--- l.n rm1r p(}jtale. Paris: Flanm>arion, 1980. - -· Dissem11mtion. Trans. Barbara johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Pre>s, 1981. l.n J)issiminntion. Paris: Editions du Scuil, 1972. - -· "Fors." Trans. Barbara )ohn~on . Tbe Georgza Review 31:1 (Spring 1977}. Prdacc 10 Nichola; Abraham and Maria Torok, C.yptonymir: Le verbirr de l'hommc alL'< /oups. Pari;: Aubier· Flammarion, 1976. - - · Gins. P.>ris: Galilee, 1974. --· "Ja ou le faux-bond." Vigmphe 11 (April 1977}__ , "Limited Inc.~ Glyph II (Fall J9i7). Also published separate!)'· Baltimore: john; Hopkins Univ~rsiry Pre~. 1977. - -·"Living On/Borderlines." In Dctonstructionlmd Criticism. New York: Seabury, 1979. - -· M nrgim of Pbilosoplry. Trans. Alan Bass. Brighton, Sussex: H an·esrcr, 1982. Marga dt Ia pbilosophi~. Paris: Editions de Minuir, 1972__ , OfGrammatology. Trans. Gayarri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Unil•crsity Press, 1976. De lagrnmmatologit. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967. - - · HOU commence ct comrncnt finit un corps cm.cignant.n rn Politiqurs de Ia pbilowphic. Paris: Grasser, 1976. - - · "Le parcrgon ." Dtgrapbe 2 ( 1974). - - · "Pas." Gramma, nos. 3-4 (1976). - -· l'omums. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Uniwrsiry of Chicago Press, 1981. Positions. Paris: Editions de 1\!inuir, 1972. - -· ''The Pun·cyor of Truth." Yale Frmcb Srudirs 52 (r975). "Le facreur de Ia I'C:ntc." In Da carre posrale. Paris: flammarion , 1980. - -· "I.e sans de Ia coupurc pure." ("Parergon II.") Digrapbe l (1974). - -· "Scribbk." Preface to Warburton, Essai mr les biiroglyplm. Paris: AubicrFI:lll1marion, 1978. - - · "Signature, El'ent, Context." In Margins of Philosophy. Brighton, Sussex: Han·cstcr, 1982. "Signamre, evenemcnr, contexte." In /lfarges. Paris: Editions de Minuir, 1972. Trans. in Glyph I (19r). --·Speech mtd Pbmomt~~n, and Other Essays 011 Husser/'s TheOI)' ofSigm. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973. La >'Oix ct le pbinominc. Paris: PUF, 1 on an Autobiographic.ll Account of a O.,c of Para· noia." The Sundard Edition, vol. 12. - -· "Some Pisitm . Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973. Lacoue-Labarthc, Philippe. "L'imprcscmable." Poetique 21 (1975) . Lakoff, Ro bin . Lmtgungt a11d Women's Platt. New York: Harper Colo pho n, 1975. Laporte, Roger. " Nulle part ~journam." In Les fins de l'homme, cd. Philippe Lacouc· Labarthc and Jcan· Luc Nancy. Paris: Galilee, 1981. Lasch, Christoph«. The C11ltttre ofNarcissism: Amcrica11 Lifo i11 an Age ofDiminishittg £.ypeetntiotiS. New York: Warner, 1980. Le Doeufl~ Michelle. L'imaginairt phi1Mf1Jhiqtte. Paris: Payor, 1980. Le Guern, Michel. Simantique de In mitaphore et de Ia mt to11ymie. Paris: Larousse, 197).

Leiris, Michel. L'lige d'homme. Paris: Gallimard (Fo lio), 1939.

Sdtctrd Uibfityrmpln• Lcmnlnc·LutCIOill, Eugcmc. l'nrtn.,qt dt's fhmuu. P.ori-= Edition; du Scuil, 1976. - - · /.r 1lJ't du cusmuwrutc. P.ui~: EJnioab du .St"uil, 1980. Lcn-StrJll'>.', C l.llldc. 'J'hr Sno•n,qc Mmd. London: Weidenfcld & Nicol"> du silcncc/tlu dcl irc: Marguerite Dura,/ Hcli:nc Cixous," l'oiriquc 3S(1978}:31". --·"To Be or Nor to Be ... a Feminist Speaker." In TiJe Fuwre ofDiffirmce, ed. Hester Eiscn>tcin and Alice Jardine. Boston: G . K. Hall, 1980 . .'vlarim, Marcelle. Ttmtoires du ftmini11 nvec Mm;guerite /)urns. Paris: Editions de Minu it, 19n. Mark>, Elaine. "Women and Literarure in France." In Sigm 3'+ (Summer 1978). ,\'larx, Karl. Cnpirnl. Tra11s. E. Paul and C. Paul. London: ). M. Dem & Sons, 1930: McC',onneii-Gim:t, Sallv, Ruth Borkcr, and Nellv Furman. W0111t11 nnd /..111rgunge in Litcmture nnd Socwy. :-\ew York: Pracgcr, 1980. Mehlman, Jeffrey. RePolmioll and Rcpetitiou. Berkeley: Quantum, 1977. ,\!crleau-Pomv, ,\Iau rice. /11 Praise of PI11'Josophy. T rans. j ohn Wild and james M. F.die. Evamton, Ill.: Northwe~rcrn Unh•ersity Pres~. 1963. £loge de Ia piJilosophie. Pans: Gall imard, 1951. - -· Smse n11d Nou-Stwe. Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. E'·an>ton, Ill.: :-\orthwcstern Univcrsitv Press, 1964. Scm ct 1/0II·sem. Paris: Nagel, 1948. ' .\!tiler, Henrv. Tropic ofCaJnicom. New York: Grove Press, 1961. .\Iiller, l"ancv. The Heroi11c's Ttxt. New York: Columbia Univcrsitv Press, 1980. Mirschcrlich,' Alexander. Society ll'it/J(Iut the Father: A 0Jmribmio11 Social Ps_vciJol· ogy. Trans. Eric Mosbacher. London: Ta,·istock, 1969. Moe~. Ellen. Lirern•y Wm11en. London: Women's Press, 1963.

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Selected Bibliography •'-'lontrday, Michele. L'ombre etle nom. Paris: EditiOilS de Minuir, 19n. - -· "Toward the Other Body." Unpublished paper. Morris, Me>gh>n. "French Feminist Criticism.» Htcatt 5:2 (1979). Mulwy, L>ura. "Visu>l Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screm 16:3 (!'all 1975). Nancy, jcan-Luc. "La voix libre de l'homme." In Les jim de l'homme, ed. Philippe Lacouc·Labarrhc and Jcan·Luc Nancy. Paris: Galil~e, 1981. Natanson, Maurice. "Phenomenology, Anonymity, and Alien,nion.~ New Litermy Hirt01y 10:3 (Spring 1979). Nietzsdu nujourd'lmi? Paris: 10II8, 1973. Niet7.schc, friedrich. TheA11ti·Chrnt. Trans. H. L. Mencken. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1918. - -· Bryo11d Good n11d Evil. Trans. Helen Zirnrnern. New York: Macmillan, 1924. - -· Tbe Da11•11 ofDay. In The Complete Workr, cd. O;car Levy, vol. 9. New York: Gordon, 1974. - - · The Gay Scimce. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 197+· - - · The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1968. - - · "Twilight of the Idols." In Tbe Porrnble Nirtzscbe, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1968. Pajaczkowska, Claire. "Imagistic Rcprcscmarion and the Stan•s of the Image in Pornography." Unpublished paper presented ar rhe lnrcnl3lional Film Con· ferencc, University of Wisconsin, March 1980. Pemoud, Rcginc. Ln femme nu temps drs cathidrnles. Paris: Srock, 1980. Peritot, Fran~oisc. " Inter-dire." in Les cahim d11 G!UF 26 (March 1983). Pisan, Christine de. The Book ofthe City ofLadies. Trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards. New York: Persea, 1982. Pleynct, Martelin. "La levee de !'interpretation des signes." In Art et /irrirawre. Paris: Scuil, 1977. Poe, Edgar Allan. "1l1c Philosophy of Composition." In The C01uplete Stones of Edgar Alla11 Poe, With Sclcctiom fi-om His Critieal Writizws, ed. A. H. Quinn. New York: Knopf, 1951. Poggioli, Rena1o. Thetny of the Az>nm-Gnrdr. Cambridge, Mas~.: Belknap, 1968. Poirion, Daniel. Lt moym iige. Paris: Arrhaud, 1971. Pynchon, Thomas. V. New York: Bantam, 1961. , Rabam, Christiane. "La bCrc chamcusc." In "Jacques LacaJl," L'nn: 58 (197+). "Resurgences ct dcrivccs de la mystique." Issue of No11vclle revue de In psydm11nlyse u (Fall 1980). Ribettcs, Jean· Michel. "Le phalsus (Vrai/scmblam/vraiscmblance du texte obses· s1onnel)." In Folie J>tritl, ed. Julia Kristc,·a. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979. Rich, Adrienne. "Diving inro the Wreck." In Divi11g imo the Wreck, Poems 1971-1972. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. Rogers, Catherine M. The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Mirogy11y ;, Liter· ntztl'e. St'llttlc: Uni,·ersiry of Washington Press, 1966. Roudiez, Leon S. "Twelve Points from Tel Que!." L'esprit criatmr 1+:4 (Wimer 1974). Sade, Marquis de. "Philosophy in the Bedroom." Trans. Richard Sea,·er and Austryn Wainhousc. New York: Gro,·e, 1965.

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Rohmd. 18, 75; on Sollers, lJ9-

88; .md >pJdng, 181-86; on >p. 209-

108 11;

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192- 98

Dcscombc,, Vmccnr, 81-8> D1alect1J6

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The remnunc, t+. M-~>". ry U.S., llkm nt modcnutL lntcrdtsciphn.uy on her >ppro.1~:h, she mnhunts and addrc\5 Antc>n!t the aut!Klr. ''"' disc"'"'' arc I .J\.111, l'krnda. Dcln11x, !\ brgucrirc Duu,, .\IJurh:e ll!JtKhnt .•md Michel Tournter. -A lu.:l "hidt, Jlt too often, Me lett undefined, 'l""'ti,all) the uucr·nohural di\linctinm between the prohkm.uit.tl \1MKcpt of'flkc.onn

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