19. Luce Irigaray1
[1.The Key to Irigaray quotes is
SP: Speculum of the Other Woman; and SEX1: This Sex Is Not One.]
If Jameson’s enterprise of merging Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis
seems radical, so too does Irigaray’s enterprise of merging feminism and
deconstruction, plus an anti-Freudian psychoanalysis, anti-Platonic Platonism,
and the curious stew of psychoanalysis, philosophy, logic, and mathematics
distilled from the ‘Writings’ of Jaques Lacan.2 [2.
Irigaray worked at Lacan’s Institute where (according to others who worked
there and have spoken with me) he subjected her to abuse and harassment for her
feminist views and drove her into a nervous breakdown. He also made sure that
she would receive a failing mark on her doctoral dissertation, Speculum.
Regarding Lacan’s ‘Writings’, I heartily agree with Sokal and
Bricmont (1998) recent volume on Intellectual Impostures.]
Irigaray’s version of deconstruction is the most radical I know of. It
tackles with the greatest force the dilemma expressed by Elaine Marks and
lsabelle de Courtivron (1985: 4): “whether or not we can in fact escape from
the structuring imposed by language is one of the major questions facing
feminist and non-feminist thinkers today”. Such an escape may impel feminism
to seek experimental forms of discourse that attempt to propose and practice a
radically different mode of communication.
And Irigaray’s own search has stirred some lively controversy.
Predictably, Shoshana Felman (1975: 3) castigates her for not declaring “from
what theoretical locus” “she is speaking”. To do that, Irigaray would have
to deliver some firmly situated theory of the place of woman and her speech; yet
Irigaray contends, as we will see, that such a theory is precisely what cannot
be formulated.
Predictably too, Rachel Bowlby (1983: 67) faults Irigaray for a “lack
of any coherent social theory”, whilst Toril Moi (1985: 148) rebukes her for
the “absence of a materialist analysis of power” in its “historical and
economic specificity” “along with its ideological and material
conditions”. Such reactions reflect the ambition of political feminists
for a deconstructive discourse that can generate concrete analyses and promote
interventions in the praxis of social discourse.
In my view, such critiques miss the main
point of Irigaray's project: to pursue experimental forms of discourse that
might open up radically new alternatives, even in the face of history and power.
I feel reminded of Derrida's (1978: 116, 133) unsettling dictum that
“discourse is originally violent”; “upon what basis does the original
violence of discourse permit itself to be commanded to return against itself?”
His answer is still more unsettling: “Language can only indefinitely tend
toward justice by acknowledging and practicing the violence within it --
violence against violence.” (1978: 117). So he proposes and practices a
“double writing,” “an erasure which allows what it obliterates to be read,
violently inscribing within the text that which attempted to govern it from
without” (1981: 41, 6).
Derrida's (1981: 41) argument that the “classical philosophical
opposition” is by no means a “peaceful coexistence,” but “a violent
hierarchy” in which “one of the two terms governs the other” is nowhere
more apt than for the opposition “male/female” or “masculine/feminine.”3
[3. “Female” and “feminine” are often distinct terms, as when Kate
Millett proposes to reserve the first for the biological, the second for the
symbolic/cultural, although she does not always do so herself. Writing in
French, Irigaray makes no similar attempt.]
We of course first think of what John Stuart Mill (1859: 476f) called
“the utmost habitual excesses of bodily violence” perpetrated on the woman
by men who imagine that “the law has delivered her to them as their thing”
(cf. Millett, Ch. 18). But a deeper
dimension is uncovered -- as Moi's allusive title Sexual/Textual Politics
is calculated to suggest -- when the fabric of discourse in general is
implicated in violence, irrespective of whether a writer or speaker appears to
be talking about conflicts of the sexes.
Feminism not merely “renders visible the hitherto invisible component
of ‘gender’ in all discourses produced by the humanities and the social
sciences,” as Ken Ruthven (1984: 24) says (24). It pushes its inquiry to the
margins of all discourse. The urgency of this new dimension is accentuated by
the tendency in both structuralism and post-structuralism to foreground language
as the pre-eminent model of all human phenomena. Thought, reality, the self or
subject -- all of these are asserted to be determined by, if not created by,
language. Whether or not we accept such a radical inflation, of which Derrida's
“écriture” is a famous instance, we cannot deny that language influences
our vision of the world at large and that its problematics spill over into
nearly all areas of the human situation. Language subjects the world to a barely
resistible power to posit, designate, signify, and organize.
Feminists now claim that this power is pervasively deployed to
marginalize or exclude the “Other,” whose very archetype is the feminine,
the woman and all properties associated with her, constitute the “Other.”4
[4. l use this term in an ordinary sense. How Irigaray's use
of the term “Other” relates to the complex sense proposed by Lacan I
cannot judge. According to Henry Sullivan, the “Other” (capitalized) is in
Lacanian terms the subject's external world (including life history) as it has
come to be reframed in the subject's unconscious.] Here lies the real crux of
the matter, and it concerns everyone, not merely the feminists. Does the
relation between language and the “world” retain enough leeway to allow a
substantive remodelling of our consciousness? Can we deregulate the functioning
of discourse so that its limits could be differently drawn? Can we deconstruct
our entrenched conceptions, and the discourses that presuppose them, to the
point where a genuinely non-aligned system of discourse might enable a free and
commensurate communication among all humans, be they women or men?.
Irigaray’s two best-known books, both published in English in 1985, Speculum
of the Other Woman (hereafter SP) and This Sex Which Is Not One
(hereafter SEX1), are difficult reading even by the standards of literary
theory. Yet this difficulty programmatic for a radical critique of language that
suspects the normal conventions of coherence of promoting a certain biased form
of closure, a norm for “discourse of the same.” lrigaray engages those
conventions on many levels, partly by inhabiting established discourses through
quotation, mimicry, or paraphrase and partly by evading or circumambulating them
through calculated irruptions and exits at critical points. She thus adapts
various deconstructive strategies to signal how the very groundwork of Western
thought and philosophy from Greek antiquity to modern psychoanalysis implicitly
gains its solidity by an exclusion of the “Other,” while it explicitly
devalues the feminine, both referentially and metaphorically. She might aptly be
said to develop with a new rigour Millett's precept that “the arena of sexual
revolution is within human consciousness even more pre-eminently than it is
within human institutions” (SX 88).
lrigaray's' point of departure is
uncompromisingly bleak. She raises the prospect that “all existing theory, all
thought, all language” “are monopolized by men”; and that “all discourse
is masculine”(SEX1 165, 121). “Women” are thus “already dominated by an
intent, a meaning, a thought; by the laws of a language” (SP 230). “The
enigma that is woman will therefore constitute the target, the object, the stake
of a masculine discourse, a debate among men” (SP 13). Within that discourse,
“woman” has been “misinterpreted, forgotten, variously frozen in
show-cases, rolled up in metaphors, buried beneath carefully stylised figures,
raised up in different idealities” (SP 144).
Already, we face the dilemma of how the concept of “woman” can even
be thought, much les expressed. As things stand, “‘femininity’ is a
role, an image, a value, imposed upon women by male systems of representation”
(SEX1 84). “Women are trapped in a system of meaning which serves the
auto-affection of the (masculine) subject” (122f). Here, “the woman neither
is able to give herself some meaning by speech nor means to be able to speak in
such a way that she is assigned to some concept” (SP 229). “Access to a
signifying economy, to the coining of signifiers, is difficult of even
impossible for her because she remains an outsider, subject to their norms”
(SP 71). So “woman does not have access to language except through recourse to
‘masculine’ systems of representation which disappropriate her from her
relation to herself and to other women” (SEX1 85).
Irigaray invokes a range of diverse pressures that have led to this
impasse. As “historic causes,” she cites “property systems, philosophical,
mythological, or religious systems,” plus “the theory and practice of
psychoanalysis” -- all these “prescribe and define that destiny laid down
for woman's sexuality” (SP 129). She considers these factors strongly
interdependent, but more in the sense of a circle or circumference than of an
ordered chain of causality. A fitting motto might be: “cause, effect, goal,”
“law, and discourse form a single system” (SEX1 95).
To portray and subvert this, her own discourse moves toward a
corresponding form: a cyclical array of concepts or theses touching each other
at their edges, but not striding forward in the directional march of argument or
syllogism, let alone of formal demonstration or proof. We may enter at various
points and move about freely, never finding a first ground or absolute origin.
Social, economic, symbolic, linguistic, psychoanalytic, and philosophic issues
reflect and refract each other in a bewilderingly variegated and often richly
imagistic texture.
Her analysis of society, like Millett's, bears Marxist overtones.
“Woman” is seen to be “bound up in the cultural systems and property
regimes that dominate the West” (SP 110). “Marx defines man's relation to
woman as an index of his relations to all his fellows, notably insofar as
exploitation is concerned” (SP 120). “Sexual relations clearly cannot be
dissociated from the general economy in which they operate”. Engels adds that
“'the modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic
slavery of the wife”; “the husband” “is the bourgeois and the wife
represents the proletariat” (SP 121). Indeed, “'the first class oppression
coincides with that of the female sex by the male”' (SP 123; SEX1 82).
Yet Irigaray finds this groundwork insufficient, because “the relation
between the system of economic oppression among social classes and the system
that can be labelled patriarchal has been subjected to very little dialectical
analysis” (SEX1 82). For her own “interpretation of the status of women,”
she adapts “Marx's analysis of commodities as the elementary form of
capitalist wealth” (SEX1172). “As commodities,” women “are two things at
once: utilitarian objects and bearers of value” (SEX1175). “Women as
commodities are thus subject to a schism that divides them into the categories
of usefulness and exchange value” (SEX1 176). “Her value-invested form
amounts to what man inscribes in and on its matter: that is, her body”
(SEX1187). “The properties of a woman's body have to be suppressed and
subordinated to the exigencies of its transformation into an object of
circulation among men”.
Because “women, signs, commodities, and currency” are all used in
“transactions among men and men alone,” “homosexuality” might seem to be
“the organizing principle of social order” (SEX1 192). However,
“homosexual relations” are “forbidden because they too openly interpret
the law according to which society operates”; “they cannot be put into
practice” “without bringing one sort of symbolic system to an end” (SEX1
193). “Between (at least) two men,” “woman is the mediation prescribed by
society” (SEX1 199). In this sense, “heterosexuality is nothing but the
assignment of economic roles” to “agents of exchange (male)” and to
“commodities (female)” (SEX1 192).
By now we begin to see how Irigaray's proceedings intertwine society and
language. Being “external to the laws of exchange” (SEX1 191), though
“included in them as 'commodities,”' women can “elaborate a ‘critique of
the political economy’ that could not, this time, dispense with the critique
of the discourse in which it is carried out”, “of the metaphysical
presuppositions of that discourse,” and
“of the symbolic system in which it is realized” (SEX1 85, 191).
Her own work presumably intends to outline or prepare for just such a
multidimensional critique extending well beyond the more obvious issues of
sexism in language. She calls for “an examination of the operation of the
‘grammar’ of each figure of discourse, its syntactic laws or requirements,
its imaginary configurations, its metaphoric networks,” plus “what it does
not articulate at the level of utterance: its silences” (SEX1 75).
Ostensibly diverging from Saussure and Derrida, who emphasize
“difference” or “différance”5 [5. However, for the
sense of “deferral” Derrida lends to this term (cf, Culler, Ch. 13),
lrigaray's critique runs a kindred course to the degree that the question of
woman and her pleasure is always deferred by the economy of the same.]. she
postulates “sameness” as the constrictive, omnipresent intent of prevailing
discourse systems. Many of her arguments and her favoured images and metaphors,
such as the mirror and its “specularity,” call to mind the quest for
sameness and its narcissistic self-preoccupation. The “syntax of discourse, of
discursive logic -- more generally too, the syntax of social organization,
‘political’ syntax” -- is “always” “a means of masculine
self-affection,” “self-production,” and “self-representation -- himself
as the self-same, as the only standard of sameness” (SEX1 132). Being the
Other, woman “does not enter a discourse whose systematicity is based on her
reduction into sameness” (152). “Her sex is heterogeneous to this whole
economy of representation” (152).
“It is therefore useless to trap women into giving an exact definition
of what they mean, to make them repeat (themselves) so that the meaning will be
clear” (SEX1 28f). “They are already elsewhere than in the discursive
machinery where you claim to take them by surprise”. “One would have to
listen with another ear, as if hearing an ‘other meaning’ always in the
process of weaving itself, of embracing itself with words, but also of getting
rid of words in order not to become fixed, congealed in them”.
Irigaray focuses particularly on “philosophical discourse,” declaring
it the “master discourse” “that prescribes, in the last analysis, the
organization of language,” “lays down the law to all the others,”
“dominates history in general,” and “has largely governed the discourse of
science” (SEX1 149, 151, 159, 169). “Since philosophical discourse has set
forth the laws of the order of discourse, it will be necessary to go back
through its decisive moments looking at the status imparted to the feminine
within discursive systematicity” (SEX1 169). We must “try to find out what
accounts for the power of its systematicity, the force of its cohesion, the
resourcefulness of its strategies, the general applicability of its law and
value” (SEX1 74). In her own account, “the domination of the philosophic
logos stems in large part from its power to reduce all Others to the economy of
the Same,” and “to eradicate the differences between the sexes in systems
that are self-representative of a ‘masculine subject’” (SEX1 74; cf. SP
232).
She retraces how “the philosopher decides that from now on nature
overall will be put under the control of human spirit and her [i.e., nature's]
origins will be based on her necessary obedience to the law” (SP 203).6
[6. One major aspects of lrigaray's texts that tend to get lost in
translation is her many plays on words, such as deliberate highlightings of the
grammatical gender of French nouns.] “Nature is foreclosed in her primary
empirical naivité” and enslaved to man's “arrogant claim to sovereign
discretion over everything” (SP 204). To ensure “purity of conception,”
“autonomous observation, evocation, figuration” are abandoned (SP 314).
“Diversity of feeling is set aside in order to build up the concept of the
object”; “the multiplicity of unlabeled sensations is blacked out” (SP
204).
“Psychoanalytic discourse,” which for Lacan at least “determines
the real status of all other discourse”'(SEX1 104), is rebuked for having set
about to disrupt the dominance of the same but having fallen right back into it.
“If Freudian theory indeed contributes what is needed to upset the
philosophical order of discourse, the theory remains paradoxically subject to
that discourse where the definition of sexual difference is concerned” (72).
In fact, “psychoanalysis itself has committed its theory and practice to a
misunderstanding of the difference between the sexes” (160). “The
established order,” “the whole economy of sexual affects,” is
“maintained” by “misprision” (SP 58).
Being “a prisoner of a certain economy of the logos,” “whose link
to classical philosophy he fails to see,” Freud “defined sexual difference
by giving a priori value to Sameness, shoring up his demonstration” with
“time-honoured devices, such as analogy, comparison, symmetry, dichotomous
oppositions, and so on” (SEX1 72; SP 28). Moreover, the discovery of the
“unconscious” lost much of its impact when the very “field” “which
insists upon its heterogeneity, its otherness,” was “forced into the same
representation” and “the same discourse” (SP 137). Instead of
“interpreting what the over-determination of language” “owes to the
repression” of “maternal power,” Freud only offered a “confirmation of
the discourse of the same” (SP 141). “Woman's sexuality cannot therefore be
inscribed as such in any theory except indirectly when it is standardized
against male parameters” (SP 233). “Every aspect of female desire” was
“,assigned meaning through auto-representations of the (so-called) male
sexuality” as “models, units of measurement”. Using terms like “envy,
jealousy, greed” “correlated to lack, default, absence,” Freud
“described female sexuality as merely the other side or even the wrong side of
a male sexualism” (SP 51). “Woman would thus find no possible way to
represent or tell the story of the economy of her libido” (SP 43).
This masculine bias underwrites the thesis promulgated by Lacan of “the
phallus” as the “master signifier” (SP 50, 60). In this function, “the
phallus” is not “a real organ,” but a “signifier,” “emblem,”
“fetish,” and so on, that “functions” “in psychoanalysis as the
guarantee of sense,” “controls” the ‘signifying economy,” and
“erases” “the recall of a heterogeneity capable of reworking the principle
of its authority” (SEX1 44-61f). (You men must be left dong-tired.) The
outcome is “phallic imperialism,” “phallomorphic representation,”
“phallic categories,” “phallocentric -- or phallotropic -- dialectic,”
whereby “the theory” is “protected” and “the woman's lack of penis and
her envy” “ensure her the function of the negative” (SP 52-80). “Through
the reign of phallus and its logic of meaning and its system of
representations,” “woman's sex is cut off from itself and woman is deprived
of her ‘self-affection’” (SEX1 133). Already in childhood, “the girl”
“must inscribe herself in the masculine, phallic way of relating to origin
that involves repetition, representation, reproduction” (SP 78). Indeed, “we
might suspect the phallus (Phallus) of being the contemporary figure of a god
jealous of his prerogatives” and “claiming, on this basis, to be the
ultimate meaning of all discourse, the standard of truth and propriety” (SEX1
67).
“The phallus” also acts as the “emblem of man's appropriative
relation to the origin,” and as the “agent of the patriarchal System, to
shore up the name of the father (Father)” (SP 42; SEX1 67).7
[7. lrigaray refers to the “primacy residing in the name(s) of the father,”
the “patronymic,” the man's right to “mark the product of copulation with
his own name,” and so on (SP 167, 216 23). Compare also Freud's idea that
“the superego retains the character of the father” (SP 85).] Being
“enmeshed in a power structure and an ideology of the patriarchal type,” and
“failing back upon anatomy as an irrefutable criterion of truth,” Freud
“resubmitted women to the dominant discourse of the father, to the law of the
father, while silencing their demands” (SEX1 70f). “The paradigm of the
Father and the son, of the Father as self-same,” “is apparently the only
model possible for what may occur in the order of discourse” (SP 344). Hence,
“the woman” can only “follow the dictates issued univocally by the sexual
desire, discourse, and law of man,” “of the father” (49).
In view of this grim assessment, what are the options available to women?
On the face of it, one might suspect, none at all. Does lrigaray's apodictic
rhetoric portray women as being absolutely hemmed in by such a forest of
restrictions, reservations, and institutions that no space is free? Does “the
social order” demand women's “non-access to the symbolic” (SEX1 189)? Do
all “symbolic operations” depend on “a schism” to which “the economy
of desire” “subjects women” (188)? Has the state of affairs been “always
already” in place, as
suggested by
lrigaray's frequent use of that phrase (a trademark of
post-structuralists in general, as I noted for Jameson)?8
[8. I noticed the phrase 48 times in Speculum alone, for example:
“women would always already have been conquered”; “she functions”
as “a choice that has always already been made by 'nature,' between a
male pleasure and her role as a vehicle for procreation” and so on (94, 166).]
Can we then imagine no time or place where these strictures were not yet in
force?
In the face of such imponderables Irigaray's position may seem
self-contradictory. She concedes it is “difficult or even impossible to
imagine” “that there could be some other mode of exchanges) that might not
obey the same logic” (SEX1 158). But she adds at once: “yet that is the
condition for the emergence of something of woman's language” (158).
Several feminists claim that this s apparent contradiction vitiates lrigaray's writings. Shoshana Felman (1975: 3) demands to know: “if ‘the woman’ is precisely the Other of any conceivable Western theoretical locus of speech, how can woman as such be speaking in this book? Who is speaking here, and who is asserting the otherness of the woman?” Toril Moi (1985: 138) asks: “If specular logic dominates all Western theoretical discourse, how can Luce Irigaray's doctoral thesis escape its pernicious influence?”
Such responses as these (both referring to Speculum) indicate that
the critics have not properly estimated the essence of deconstructive discourse.
Instead, they cling to the kind of yes/no and if/then logic of closure that such
discourse defies. Only in a conventional syllogism does it necessarily follow
that I must be ruled by every premise I postulate to be universal. In
deconstructive discourse, in contrast, I take it for granted that I will
undercut at some points what I assert at others. This effect does not vitiate my
argument, but clinches it: namely that such logics and syllogisms are too closed
and shallow to serve the purposes of a radical critique.
Such is the intent when Irigaray projects a “disruption” in which
“nothing is ever to be posited that is not also reversed and caught up again
in the supplementarity of this reversal” (SEX1 79f).
We must therefore be very cautious in assessing Irigaray's vision of the
predominance of masculine discourse and the pressure on woman to mimic it. Her
vision is calculatedly inscribed to give the flavour of enclosure inside that
dominance, yet she pursues a thought-experiment whose outcome is far from
foreclosed in all cases, however biased it usually is. This experiment might be
a prelude to a countermovement in which the mind turns back upon itself (as in a
curved mirror) far enough to cast a new image of the unrealised potentialities
of the repressed, silenced feminine side. lrigaray is thus not inconsistent in
proclaiming the unchecked power of the same systems she proposes to unravel. She
is merely staking out the usurped ground while deferring her intent to seek some
other ground, to clear a space for the discourse of the dispossessed other.
Probably, the criticism of other feminists is fuelled because Irigaray
forbears to urge women to become active in the politics of the day, as we saw
before. Her reason is clearly announced: “political practice” “is
masculine through and through” (SEX1 127). She counsels against “demanding
powers equal, or ‘equivalent’' to those of men” through “a sexual
revolt, or revolution that would simply reverse things and risk ensuring an
everlasting return of the same” (SP 119). “It clearly cannot be a matter of
substituting feminine power for masculine power, because this reversal would
still be caught up in the economy of the same” -- merely “a phallic seizure
of power” (SEX1 129f).
“In order for women to be able to make themselves heard, a
‘radical’ evolution in our way of conceptualizing and managing the political
realm is required” (SEX1 127). Since “the existing forms of politics are
men's affairs,” “liberation movements” must strive for “innovation”
and “invent new forms of struggle, new challenges” (SEX1 166). Still, this
cannot be done without sonic prelude: “women have to advance to those same
privileges” “before any consideration can be given to the differences” (SP
119). Before “a transformation in the political process,” “there can be no
‘woman's discourse’ produced by a woman” (SEX1 81, 127).
Nonetheless, Irigaray's characteristic proceedings indicate the reverse
approach: that innovations in the practice of discourse can affect the practice
of politics, and here too she resembles Derrida (especially in his paper on
“The Conflict of Faculties”). For Irigaray, “every operation in and on
philosophical language” “possesses implications that, no matter how mediated
they may be, are nonetheless politically determined” (SEX1 81). To be sure,
the link between philosophy and politics is considerably more potent and vital
in French culture than in American -- a factor we must always keep in mind when
assessing French feminism. (Try to imagine a philosopher in the U.S with an
influence equal to Sartre or de Beauvoir in France!)
An essential part of the needed innovations in the practice of discourse
is to deconstruct all appeals to “truth.” “The double demand for both
equality and difference” appears precarious as long as “the ideal of
truth” “determines” “the order, the hierarchy, the subordination of the
interventions by which differences are regulated and declinable as more or less
‘good’ copies” “of the same” (SEX1 81; SP 262). In an idealism such as
Plato's, “truth can repeat, reproduce, represent only itself'; for instance,
“man is a more or less good copy” of “the idea of man” (SP 291). To
“see” “truth” “represented” – “or good, or father, or phallus”
-- is to enter “one, same unit(y) of synthesis or syntax”; “whatever
assures the functioning of difference” “will always already have been
wrapped in verisimilitude” (SO 247).9 [9. Irigaray's counsel
that “we must go on questioning words as the wrappings with which the
‘subject’ modestly clothes the ‘female’” can be juxtaposed with her
assertion that “the metaphorical veil of 'the eternal female' [a phrase at the
close of Goethe's Faust II covers up the sex organ seen as castrated” (SP 142,
82).] “All divergences will finally be proportions, functions, relations that
can be referred back to sameness”.
Yet the solution cannot be to declare a frontal assault that stands truth
on its head. Plato's remark in his Statesman that “reversal” “is
the least alteration possible” (SP 305) gains ominous momentum when lrigaray
warns that “to reverse the order of things” “ would leave room neither for
woman's sexuality nor for woman's imaginary, nor for woman's language” (SEX1
33; cf. SEX1 68, 145, 156). “It is necessary to interpret any process of
reversal” as “an attempt to duplicate the exclusion of what exceeds
representation: the other, woman” (SEX1 156). Hence, Irigaray rejects the
project of “reversing the economy of sameness by turning the feminine into the
standard for ‘sexual difference’” (SEX1 159).
“To escape from exploitation,” women need a more diverse project: to
“disrupt the entire order of dominant values” and “call in question all
existing theory, all thought, all language” (SEX1 165). “Women's
‘liberation’ requires transforming” “culture and its operative agency,
language” (SEX1 155). “Without such an interpretation of a general grammar
of culture, the feminine will never take place in history”. Nothing less is
called for than “another ‘grammar’ of culture” (SEX1 143). “If we
don't invent a language” “and find our body's language, it will have too few
gestures to accompany our story” (SEX1 214).
We should thus comprehend why the “distribution and demarcation and articulation” of “terms” “necessitate operations as yet nonexistent, whose complexity and subtlety can only be guessed at without prejudicing the results” (SP 139). “How can we speak so as to escape their [men’s] compartments, their schemas, their distinctions and oppositions?” (SEX1 212). “How can we shake off the chain of these terms, free ourselves from their categories, rid ourselves of their names?”
Only within “an other topo-(logy) of jouissance,” a play of
significances, can woman finally get “beyond all pairs of opposites, all
distinctions between active and passive or past and future” (SP 230). This
space respects the fact that “woman refers to what cannot be defined,
enumerated, formulated, or formalized”; “woman is not to be related to any
simple designatable being, subject, or entity”. The “‘ideal’
morphology” whereby “diversity” is “traced back to the type alone,” is
displaced by a realm of “limitless indeterminacy” (SP
343).
In pursuit of such projects, “it is
surely not a matter of remaining within the same type of utterance as the one
that guarantees discursive coherence” (SEX1 78). “(Re-)discovering herself,
for a woman,
”would ‘signify” an “expanding universe to which no limits
could be fixed, and which would not be incoherence nonetheless” “in a
[feminine] syntax”; “there would no longer be either subject or
object,” “no proper meanings, proper names, ‘proper’ attributes (SEX1
30f) “Instead, that ‘syntax’ would involve nearness, proximity, but in
such an extreme form that it would preclude any distinction of identities, any
establishment of ownership, thus any form of appropriation”, 134; cf. 156).
The prospect arises of “jamming the theoretic machinery itself, of
suspending its pretension to a production of a truth and of a meaning that are
excessively univocal” (SEX1 78). “A disruptive excess” “on the feminine
side” should engage the “logic” wherein “the feminine finds itself
defined as lack, deficiency, or as imitation and negative image”. In the
“language work that would leave space for the feminine,” “every
dichotomizing” or “redoubling” “has to be disrupted” (SEX1 79).
“There would no longer be either a right side or a wrong side of discourse, or
even of texts, but each passing from the one to the other would make audible and
comprehensible even what resists the recto-versal structure, that shores up
common sense” (SEX180).
“If this is to be practiced for every meaning posited -- for every
word, utterance, sentence, but also of course for every phoneme, every letter --
we need to proceed in such a way that linear reading is no longer possible”.
This “work would thus attempt to thwart any manipulation of discourse that
would also leave discourse intact -- not, necessarily, in the utterance, but in
its autological presuppositions”.
Obviously, “to work at destroying the discursive mechanism” “is not
a simple undertaking” (SEX1 76). “This disconcerting of language, though
anarchic in its title, nonetheless demands patent exactitude” (SP 143).
“Sense” will have to “undergo unparalleled interrogation, revolution”
(SP 142). “Turn everything upside down, inside out, back to front;”
‘insist also upon those blanks in discourse which recall the places of her
[woman’s] exclusion and which, by their silent plasticity, ensure the
cohesion, the articulation, the coherent expansion of established forms”;
“reinscribe” “ as divergencies, in ellipses and eclipses” “that
deconstruct the logical grid of the reader-writer, drive him out of his mind”.
“Overthrow syntax by suspending its eternally teleological order,” “not by
means of a growing complexity of the same,” but “by the irruption of other
circuits”. Or, “speak only in riddles, allusions, hints, parables,”
“even if people plead that they just don't understand”; “double the
misprision to the point of exasperation” (SP 143).
A special motive for this program of displacement -- and a referral to
another sense of “jouissance” as “play” -- is “the continuity between
language” and the “gestural expression or speech of desire” (SEX1 137).
This association is important because “the discourse of truth cannot
incorporate the sexual relation within the economy of its logic” (SEX1 99).
Hitherto, “feminine pleasure has to remain inarticulate in language, if it is
not to threaten the underpinnings of logical operations” (SEX1 77). “Even
with the help of linguistics, psychoanalysis cannot solve the problem of the
articulation of the female sex in discourse” (SEX1 76). Hence, a
“language” must be “recovered or invented” for “a feminine sexuality
‘other’ than the one prescribed in, and by, phallocratism” (SEX1 119).
“By socializing in a different way the relation to nature, matter, the body,
language, and desire,” “women might leave behind their condition as
commodities” (SEX1 191). “Their
desire” “involves a different economy” that “diffuses the polarization
toward a single pleasure” and “disconcerts fidelity to a single discourse”
(SEX1 29f).
A physiological parallel is proposed: “woman has sex organs more or
less everywhere; even if we refrain from invoking the hystericisation of her
entire body, the geography of her pleasure is far more diversified, more
multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is commonly
imagined” (SEX1 28). “The multiplicity of genital erogenous zones” “in
female sexuality” is truly “astonishing” (SEX1 64). So far, however,
“woman's desire” has been “submerged by a logic that has dominated the
West since the time of the Greeks” (SEX1 25). For that reason, “the terms
that describe pleasure evoke the return of a repressed that disconcerts the
structure of the signifying chain” (SEX1 114).
As we see, lrigaray insists in a wide range of ways that the whole system
of thought and language debars the very kind of enterprise she advocates. She
grants that “women are incapable of realizing whether some idea”
“corresponds to themselves or whether it is a more or less passable imitation
of men's” (SP 342). Yet as I said before, a deconstructive discourse not being
a closed system, such admissions do not rule out the possibility of providing
new ideological groundwork.
Her main hope, I think, lies in certain tactics of writing (“écriture”).
“In the writing of Speculum,” she says, she “attempted to
practice” “a logic other than the one imposed by coherence” (SEX1 153).
This logic “would reject all closure,” and “entail a different relation to
unity, to identify with self, to truth, to the same and thus to alterity, to
repetition and thus to temporality”. “Speculum has no beginning or
end: the architectonics of the text, or texts, confounds the linearity of an
outline, the teleology of discourse, within which there is no possible place for
the ‘feminine,’ except the traditional place of the repressed, the
censured” (SEX1 68).
Speculum is undeniably a curious labyrinthine work, replete with
variegated modes of multiplicities. The ordinary pursuit of coherence is
frequently deferred in favour of markedly unconventional tactics. Linearity,
though not fully suspended or eliminated, competes with circularity, a cyclical
touching of theses. This discourse unrolls the presuppositions that set powerful
odds against it yet sustain its own disenfranchised discursivity. Acculturated
terms are estranged for new functions, yet without intending to generate another
perspicuous terminology in their place.
I shall
try to present at least some of the tactics involved in this particular practice
of deconstructive discourse. Two chapters of the book consist of uncommented
excerpts from texts by Plato and Plotinus, the former dealing with women in
quaintly sexist generalities, the latter arguing the ultimate priority of
“Idea” over “Matter” (“Matter” being “female in receptivity,”
[SP 170]). These passages demonstrate a woman's tactic of “playing with
mimesis” in order to “recover the place of her exploitation by discourse”
and to “resubmit herself -- inasmuch as she is on the side of the
‘perceptible,’ of ‘matter’ --
to
‘ideas,’ in particular ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a
masculine logic” (SEX1 76). This “playful repetition” could “make
'visible”' “the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in
language”.
Other chapters are built of carefully selected excerpts by philosophers
and psychoanalysts. Here, the tactic is to “examine the texts of
psychoanalytic discourse” in order to “make explicit some implications of
psychoanalysis that are inoperative at the moment”; and to “challenge and
disrupt” “philosophical discourse, which “sets forth the law for all
others” (SEX1 72, 74, 168). These two moves are closely linked, since for
Irigaray, “the process of interpretive reading has always been a
psychoanalytic undertaking as well” (SEX1 75) -- a thesis which Freudians like
Norman Holland would also underwrite. “We need to pay attention to the way the
unconscious works in each philosophy”; and “to listen (psychoanalytically to
its procedures of repression, to the structuration of language that shores up
its representations, separating the true from the false, the meaningful from the
meaningless” (75).
The excerpted texts may appear either in a block at the head of the
chapter or in distributed fragments as the discourse moves along. The texts are
woven into distended fabrics that both reveal and subvert their underlying
logic. The most extensive engagements are with Plato and Freud at the end and
beginning of the volume, respectively; Sophocles, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant,
and Hegel are more tersely encountered in between. The interweaving of original
and commentary is often so elaborate that lrigaray's own position hovers in a
state of calculated indeterminacy. Her role ranges from echo, mirror, or mime at
the one end, all the way over to forceful antagonist and accuser at the other
end.
A particularly emblematic tactic is the progression wherein she will
reprint an argument, then mimic it
in her own words, then extend it to the point where it begins to seem
indecorous, irritating, incommensurate, and finally supererogatory, peremptory,
unjustifiable. The steps in this progression flow into each other so subtly that
we seldom notice any interstices. We have here a demonstration of her tactic to
“begin by using the standard language, the dominant language,” then “to
situate myself at its borders and to move continuously from the inside to the
outside” (SEX1 144, 122). Such a movement is highly strategic, since “one
cannot simply leap outside that discourse,” but one can “try to
circumvent” it by “trying to show that it may have an irreducible
exterior”.
Another prominent tactic is to introduce the same metaphor repeatedly
into diverse contexts, fitting its valences to changing contingencies. This
tactic cannot be fully shown without far more extensive quoting from the
original than is possible here, but I will provide a few examples. The mirror is
among the most pervasive: in a flat shape, it can represent the masculine quest
for sameness and self-representation; in a concave shape (the converse to John
Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" analysed by Bloom in Ch. 15 but not referenced here), it can reflect
things upside down, or set them on fire; and so forth.10 [10.
Also, as Moi (1985: 130) stresses, “a speculum” can be an instrument
“gynecologists use to inspect the cavities' of the female body”.] The cave
metaphor is thereby already tied in here. Moreover, the mirror has been a
preferred item for philosophers, as quotes from Plato, Plotinus, and Kant attest
(SP 147, 169f, 174f, 203).
The cave is another featured metaphor, identified with the womb (“hystera”
in Greek), but also with an ambiance of representation, particularly as
extracted from Plato's famous parable of the prisoners chained in a cave add
forced to watch a play of shadows on the wall. The multiplicity of functions
such a metaphor can assume subverts any sameness derivable from the invoked
object or image. Again, a play of significances is enacted to show how far even
familiar objects like a mirror can escape all attempts to fix their reality and
make them hold still.
A similar unsettling of what is usually judged a pre-eminently stable
point of reference is carried out upon the discourse of science and reason. If
in “the operations of discursive logic,” a “hierarchical structure has
always put the feminine in a position of inferiority” (SEX1 161), lrigaray
should be able to adduce the bias even when logical reasoning seems to function
without gaps, flaws, or breakdowns. This bias takes its revenge by promoting
subterranean violations or perversions of the principles in whose name the
philosopher writes.
lrigaray enjoys “deconstructing” the discourses she engages by
revealing that, when probed at this deeper level, they do not function as
advertised. These revelations count as evidence of universal bias at least in
the sense -- and again deconstruction would concur -- of implying that no amount
of effort or expertise can situate an entire system of ideas and statements
totally inside a rigorous closed logic.
lrigaray diagnoses for example “sleight of hand” in a
“representation” or “discourse,” an “odd hitch in the system,” a
“curious association,” a “curious syllogism,” a “conjuring trick,”
and so on (SP 274, 299, 253, 106, 97). She notices where Freud, to preserve his
arguments on female sexuality, “makes a point of forgetting” his own
assertions, or perseveres “against all rhyme and reason,” or “contradicts
himself' (SP 104, 29, 110, 167). She calls attention to his “trenchant,
peremptory tone,” his “perplexing,” “imperious, normative, moralizing”
“statements,” which are “obscure and curiously stitched together” (SP
29, 31, 91). She remarks how, “when it is a question of woman, the text will
have surreptitiously broken the thread of its reasoning, its logic” (SP17).
Yet if logic itself is male-dominated, its need to break out is a surplus, a
double-dealing that distrusts even the rules it has already bent to its own
will. Irigaray answers with a duplicity of her own, asserting the force of the
male bias yet unleashing a counterforce that seems to defy her own assertion.
A related tactic is to retrace how the mainstays of Freudian theory
express Freud's own expediency as a person and a male (an argument masterfully
developed by Millett as well, Ch. 18). To ensure a total “victory for
(so-called) masculine sexuality,” Freud had to devise his (in)famous chain of
propositions about “the castration of woman, penis-envy, hatred of the mother,
the little girl's despisal and rejection of her sex organ,” and so on (SP 77;
cf. 48f, 52, 83). Freud's obsession with explaining the entire personality in
terms of infantile experiences emerges as a tactic whereby the analyst can not
merely keep turning back to the only phase in life Freudian theory had covered
in great detail, but can assume that “everything concerning woman's allotted
role and the representations of that role would be decided even before the
socially recognized specificity of her intervention in the sexual economy is
practicable” (SP 25). This way, “the tale of women's sexual history is
suspended before woman reaches adulthood. Before even the onset of puberty is
touched on” (SP 112).
Again, Freud is found out battling in the service of his own
“well-brought-up, middle-class super-ego” that “forbade him” “to
identify with a woman” (SP 101). “His own views coincided with the
traditional ones, particularly when it is a question of female sexuality”; he
“resorted” to “fundamental concepts of classical philosophy” and
maintained that the “state of things is so ancient as to find its legitimacy,
its necessity, and even its rationality, in phylogenesis” (SP 103, 28, 93).
All these manoeuvres put Freud at odds with the “scientific” principles he
loved to invoke; yet lrigaray indicates that those very principles must have led
him or any other analyst to just this mode of theorizing.
All these tactics that I have tried to illustrate -- quotation, mimicry,
paraphrase, displacement, dispersion, metaphoricity, logic-breaking, and so on
-- suggest some ways for experimental discourse to proceed even in the face of
pre-established systems and exitless enclosures. Before we can ask what the
author's intention may be, we must ask if the concept of intention is
appropriate here at all. Irigaray might well not intend to consolidate herself
as the writing subject, since “any theory of the subject has always been
appropriated by the masculine” (SP 133). Nonetheless, lrigaray's tactics for
mimicking texts in order to resituate them and unravel their texture shows just
how much does depend on the intention with which “one and the same”
discourse may be performed. This alienation makes the concept of intention leap
into problematic focus, the more so when the original author purports to be
speaking impersonally, invisibly, purely in the name of truth, reason, or
science.
Although lrigaray's critique implies that every discourse relies on
repression and reduction of the Other, her samples were evidently selected
because they are so conducive to the demonstration. Many are texts that
explicitly marginalize or stigmatise the woman and her sexuality. Indeed, the
misogyny of Plato, Freud, or Lacan is too egregious to require further
documentation; but a meticulous analysis can refine our understanding of how
this misogyny also underwrites the logic of pure reason or disinterested
science. The “feminine” comes to include not merely what pertains to women,
but whatever is projected and declassed as the other side, the passive, the
malleable, the repressed, no matter how abstractly. Accordingly, feminism arises
to oppose “all writing that does not question its own hierarchical relation to
the difference between the sexes” -- even if that means to oppose the entire
“economy of proper meaning” (SP 131).
Meanwhile, much can be gained by navigating within that economy, provided
we do so with a disruptive self-awareness such as that driving lrigaray's own
writing. To know that our entanglement is inescapable is not necessarily to
acquiesce. We might rather elect to move against the spiral, away from its
central vortex toward its distended margins. If our habituated understanding
seems to be the whole world, we might, like the sailors of Columbus, fear to
fall off its edges by venturing out too far. But who can say before trying what
is really “out there”?
Irigaray's critique is all the more impressive when it makes us sense the
massive inertia it charges us to set in motion. Despite the vast heap of
misapprehension and repression, she is able at moments to make an effective
voice heard above the bias of discourse. The extent to which she succeeds brings
a signal of worlds beyond the edges of the familiar, of territories still open
to an unforeclosed discourse of the Other, or indeed, of everyone, finally no
longer preoccupied about who is “the Other.”
Perhaps too, deconstruction and Marxism share the search for such worlds,
though they may have a different vision of the Other. Like feminism, they are
essentially stories of repression and violence (though some polite anodyne
reworkings may conceal that focus). And all three domains are frequently
denounced as if they had fabricated the story and invented the repression and
violence themselves. Which is not to say that Irigaray “means the same
thing” as the stories of the other two domains when she speaks within them.
But all three are on the “other” side of our dominant ideology, no matter
how they may be co-opted by opportunist academics.
Nor are deconstruction and Marxism the only parallel models that can lend
momentum to feminism. A physical model might be the quantum theory dealing with
concurrent realities (“wave functions”) and virtual particles. An
astronomical model might be the open, ever-expanding cosmos, most of whose mass
is apparently undetectable. A psychological model might be the flipping between
figure and ground during the perception of ambiguous images. A geometric model
might be the range of non-Euclidian geometries in which strange mutations of
space proliferate. An aesthetic model might be the portrayable yet impossible
worlds of Escher and Borges.
So far, these “possible models” are often contained by treating them
as unplanned ruptures in our ultimately well-grounded sense of the world. Yet
they converge upon creative spaces into which we can be restituted from our
common sense's inertia and its passion for sameness.
As we would all agree, “sexual liberation” is “a feminist demand,
the terms of which have not infrequently been poorly expressed, ill judged,
inadequately worked out” (SP 119). Much work has been done, however, and the
danger now is to believe too soon that we have a full and clear statement of the
problems. lrigaray comes to warn us that at least at this preparatory stage,
“it is useless” “to trap women in the exact definition of what they
mean” (SEX1 29). It is time for us to listen and read in unwonted ways; to
disaccustom ourselves from our facilitated certainties and our complacent
literacy; to multiply meanings without an irritable grasping at closure.
Feminism opens new spaces for such activities. its utopian imperative to practice unforeclosed discourse is all the more urgent at our stage in history, when the pre-programmed motive of the social order belies and affronts more than ever the diversifying pressures of being human and challenges the humanities to proclaim their alternatives. Not to hear, or to mishear as sameness, the signifyings of the Other, the repressed, the marginalized -- the feminine, in the broadest conceivable sense -- would be to block an energizing impetus toward a genuine renewal of language and all that rides upon it.