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In
Anglo-American academic discussion, it is common to refer to Helene Cixous,
Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and others as "the French feminists." This
terminology assumes that somehow these theorists represent or speak for ALL
feminists who are French, thus silencing the voices and ideas of other
feminists who are French, such as Christine Delphy, Elisabeth Badinter,
Francoise Picq, Benoite Grould, Genevieve Fraisse, Giselle Halimi, and many
others. To avoid the imperialism inherent in the Anglo-American construction of
Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva as "the French feminists," I will
refer to these theorists as "poststructuralist theoretical feminists."
My thanks
to Stephanie Cordellier for her lucid email comments and corrections regarding
the politics of labeling on this issue.
For an
updated and revised version of this lecture, see or the home page for .
You've
probably noticed a difference between what Sandra Gilbert is saying in her
essay "Literary Paternity" and what Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray
are talking about in "The Laugh of the Medusa" and "This Sex
Which is Not One." Part of that difference lies in the fact that Gilbert
is a pragmatic feminist coming largely out of a humanist tradition as a literary
critic, and Cixous and Irigaray are poststructuralist theoretical feminists. They
represent two distinct (different but related) branches of contemporary
feminist theory.
Gilbert's
piece represents what we might call a "pragmatic" American feminist
school of thought. Emerging from a tradition called "liberal
feminism", this American pragmatic feminism is interested in looking at
how systems of female oppression have been perpetuated and elaborated; such
analysis usually pays a lot of attention to history (and hence is not based on
structuralist principles of synchronic analysis). Liberal/American feminism
often emphasizes understanding origins of social practices, in order to
understand how to intervene in them, to change them. That's why I call it
"pragmatic": much American feminist thought is oriented toward
getting things done, toward theorizing so that some kind of social action or
change can take place. (This kind of theorizing-for-application has its roots
in a number of political movements and theories, including Marxism and
socialism, civil rights, and, of course, the "women's liberation"
movement).
Gilbert's
article represents the historical aspect of this kind of American feminist
theory; her article looks specifically at literary history to find that an
overwhelming number of male authors have attributed their creative capacity
directly to their bodily configuration: the pen, as Gilbert documents, is a
metaphoric penis, and vice-versa. This metaphoric equation between pen and
penis is important, Gilbert asserts, because such metaphors shape how we are
able to think about the process of writing, and about creativity in general. By
linking writing with having a penis, these authors insist that writing, being
creative, is a biological act, one rooted in the body--and specifically in the
male body. Her article shows that this equation is not an isolated incident,
something that just a few jerks thought, but rather is one of the dominant
metaphors of creativity in Western culture, for both male and female writers.
Now, we can
critique this stance pretty easily--how come these guys thought that penises
were the physical model or analog for creating, when it's just as
"logical" (and even more self-evident) to say that creativity comes
from a female body, since that is, after all, the body that actually gives
birth? But that is precisely Gilbert's point: throughout Western cultural
history, women have been confined solely to the role of giving birth, of being
mothers of human beings; men, meanwhile, have signified their creativity as
giving "birth," as being fathers/progenitors, of immortal things,
like books, and not being connected to beings that perish (like people).
There are
lots of ways to read this assertion of male creative
fatherhood/authorship/authority. We can see it as an anxious response to the
male inability to know for sure that they really are the father of biological
children (since only the mother knows for sure who the parents of the child
are). We can see it as a reaction-formation (in psychoanalytic terminology) to
the threat of castration, by asserting the predominance of the penis (as
presence) as creative organ. We can see it as an attempt to reduce what Harold
Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence," the feeling that one will
never be as good as (as powerful as) one's father, and particularly as good as
one's literary forebears, one's literary "fathers." Or we can see it
as a conscious attempt on the part of male authors deliberately to exclude
women writers (and women in general) from membership in their exclusive club,
by defining the only "good" writing as coming from men.
However we
decide to interpret the phenomenon Gilbert is describing, it is clear--from her
voluminous documentation--that this equation between pen and penis has been a
powerful metaphor in Western thought--one which many women authors internalized
(and which countless women who might have been authors may have internalized
and believed, and allowed it to prevent them from attempting to wield the pen).
Gilbert concludes that the exclusion of women from the tools of the trade meant
that women writers found alternate methods of writing--if they couldn't use
pens/penises, what did they write with? Perhaps with milk, with blood, and on
leaves and bark. She means this metaphorically, just as the pen=penis image is
a metaphor, but also literally, as the pen=penis image is also meant literally.
She means that we must look for women's writing in places, and using
instruments, not traditionally associated with writing, because those
traditions are defined by male authors.
These are
themes very similar to those taken up by the poststructuralist theoretical
feminists. Gilbert poses the question in her essay, "If the pen is a
metaphorical penis, with what organ can females generate texts?" She finds
her answer in images created by women writers. Cixous and Irigaray take up the
same question, and use the poststructuralist ideas of Derrida and Lacan to come
up with some provocative answers.
Helene
Cixous takes up where Lacan left off, in noting that women and men enter into
the Symbolic Order, into language as structure, in different ways, or through
different doors, and that the subject positions open to either sex within the
Symbolic are also different. She understands that Lacan's naming the center of
the Symbolic as the Phallus highlights what a patriarchal system language
is--or, more specifically, what a phallo(go)centric system it is.
This idea,
that the structure of language is centered by the phallus, produced the word
"phallocentric." Derrida's idea that the structure of language relies
on spoken words being privileged over written words, produced the word
"logocentric" to describe Western culture in general. Cixous and
Irigaray combine the two ideas to describe Western cultural systems and
structures as "phallogocentric," based on the primacy of certain
terms in an array of binary oppositions. Thus a phallogocentric culture is one
which is structured by binary oppositions-- male/female, order/chaos,
language/silence, presence/absence, speech/writing, light/dark, good/evil,
etc.--and in which the first term is valued over the second term; Cixous and
Irigaray insist that all valued terms (male, order, language, presence, speech,
etc.). are aligned with each other, and that all of them together provide the
basic structures of Western thought.
Cixous
follows Lacan's psychoanalytic paradigm, which argues that a child must
separate from its mother's body (the Real) in order to enter into the Symbolic.
Because of this, Cixous says, the female body in general becomes
unrepresentable in language; it's what can't be spoken or written in the
phallogocentric Symbolic order. Cixous here makes a leap from the maternal body
to the female body in general; she also leaps from that female body to female
sexuality, saying that female sexuality, female sexual pleasure, is
unrepresentable within the phallogocentric Symbolic order.
To
understand how she makes that leap, we have to go back to what Freud says about
female sexuality, and the mess he makes of it. In Freud's story of the female
Oedipus complex, girls have to make a lot of switches, from clitoris to vagina,
from attraction to female bodies to attraction to male bodies, and from active
sexuality to passive sexuality, in order to become "normal" adults
Cixous rewrites this, via Lacan, by pointing out that "adulthood," in
Lacan's terms, is the same as entering into the Symbolic and taking up a
subject position. Thus "adulthood," or becoming a linguistic subject,
for Cixous, means having only one kind of sexuality: passive, vaginal,
heterosexual, reproductive. And that sexuality, if one follows Freud to his
logical extreme, is not about female sexuality per se, but about male
sexuality: the woman's pleasure is to come from being passively filled by a
penis (remember, Freud defines activity as masculine, and passivity as
feminine). So, Cixous concludes, there really isn't any such thing as female
sexuality in and of itself in this phallogocentric system--it's always
sexuality defined by the presence of a penis, and not by anything intrinsic to
the female body or to female sexual pleasure.
If women
have to be forced away from their own bodies--first in the person of the
mother's body, and then in the person of their unique sexual
feelings/pleasures--in order to become subjects in language, Cactus argues, is
it possible for a woman to write at all? Is it possible for a woman to write as
a woman? Or does entry into the Symbolic, orienting one's language around a
center designated as a Phallus, mean that when one writes or speaks, one always
does so as a "man"? In other words, if the structure of language
itself is phallogocentric, and stable meaning is anchored and guaranteed by the
Phallus, then isn't everyone who uses language taking up a position as
"male" within this structure which excludes female bodies?
Cixous, and
other poststructuralist theoretical feminists, are both outraged and intrigued
by the possibilities for relations between gender and writing (or language use
in general) that Lacan's paradigms open up. That's what Cixous means when she
says (p. 309a) that her project has two aims: to break up and destroy, and to
foresee and project. She wants to destroy (or perhaps just deconstruct) the
phallogocentric system Lacan describes, and to project some new strategies for
a new kind of relation between female bodies and language.
Lacan's
description of the Symbolic (as illustrated by the pictures on p. 741 of the
two doors) places women and men in different positions within the Symbolic in
relation to the Phallus; men more easily misperceive themselves as having the
Phallus, as being closer to it, whereas women (because they have no penises)
are further from that center. Because of that distance from the Phallus, the
poststructuralist theoretical feminists argue, women are closer to the margins
of the Symbolic order; they are not as firmly anchored or fixed in place as men
are; they are closer to the Imaginary, to images and fantasies, and further
from the idea of absolute fixed and stable meaning than men are.
Because
women are less fixed in the Symbolic than men, women-- and their language--are
more fluid, more flowing, more unstable than men. It is worth noting here that
when Cixous talks about women and woman, sometimes she means it literally, as the
physical beings with vaginas and breasts, etc., and sometimes she means it as a
linguistic structural position: "woman" is a signifier in the chain
of signifiers within the Symbolic, just as "man" is; both have stable
meaning ("woman" is the signifier attached to the signified of vagina
and breasts (etc.)) because both are locked in place, anchored, by the Phallus
as center of the Symbolic order. When Cixous says that woman is more slippery,
more fluid, less fixed than man, she means both the literal woman, the person,
and the signifier "woman".
Cixous'
essay is difficult, not only because she's assuming we all know Freud and
Lacan's formulations about female sexuality and about the structure of
language, but also because she writes on two levels at once: she is always
being both metaphoric and literal, referring both to structures and to
individuals. When she says that "woman must write herself,"
"woman must write woman," she means both that women must write
themselves, tell their own stories (much as the American feminists say women
must tell their own stories) and that "woman" as signifier must have
a (new) way to be connected to the signifier "I," to write the
signifier of selfhood/subjecthood offered within the Symbolic order.
Cixous also
discusses writing on both a metaphoric and literal level. She aligns writing
with masturbation, something that for women is supposed to be secret, shameful,
or silly, something not quite adult, something that will be renounced in order
to achieve adulthood, just like clitoral stimulation has to be renounced in
favor of vaginal/reproductive passive adult sexuality. For women to write
themselves, Cixous says, they must (re)claim a female-centered sexuality. If
men write with their penises, as Gilbert argues, then Cixous says before women
can write they have to discover where their pleasure is located. (And don't be
too quick to decide that women write with their clitorises. It's not quite that
simple).
Cixous also
argues that men haven't yet discovered the relation between their sexuality and
their writing, as long as they are focused on writing with the penis. "Man
must write man," Cixous says, again focusing on "man" as a
signifier within the Symbolic, which is no more privileged than
"woman" as a signifier. In an important footnote, Cixous explains
that men's sexuality, like women's, has been defined and circumscribed by
binary oppositions (active/passive, masculine/feminine), and that heterosexual
relations have been structured by a sense of otherness and fear created by
these absolute binaries. As long as male sexuality is defined in these limited
and limiting terms, Cixous says, men will be prisoners of a Symbolic order
which alienates them from their bodies in ways similar to (though not identical
with) how women are alienated from their bodies and their sexualities. Thus,
while Cixous does slam men directly for being patriarchal oppressors, she also
identifies the structures which enforce gender distinctions as being oppressive
to both sexes.
She also
links these oppressive binary structures to other Western cultural practices,
particularly those involving racial distinctions. On 310 she follows Freud in
calling women the "dark continent," and expands the metaphor by
reference to Apartheid, to demonstrate that these same binary systems which
structure gender also structure imperialism: women are aligned with darkness,
with otherness, with Africa, against men who are aligned with lightness, with
selfhood, and with Western civilization. In this paragraph, note that Cixous is
referring to women as "they," as if women are non-speakers,
non-writers, whom she is observing. "As soon as they begin to speak, at
the same time as they're taught their name, they can be taught that their
territory is black:"--i.e. entry into the Symbolic order, into language,
into having a self and a name, is entry into these structures of binary
oppositions.
Cixous
argues that most women do write and speak, but that they do so from a
"masculine" position; in order to speak, women (or "woman")
has assumed she needed a stable, fixed system of meaning, and thus has aligned
herself with the Phallus which stabilizes language. There has been little or no
"feminine" writing, Cixous says (p. 311). In making this statement,
she insists that writing is always "marked," within a Symbolic order
that is structured through binary opposites, including
"masculine/feminine," in which the feminine is always repressed. Remember
here, when Cixous speaks of "feminine," it is both literal and
metaphoric--it's something connected to femaleness, to female bodies, and
something which is a product of linguistic positioning. So Cixous is arguing
that only women could produce feminine writing, because it must come from their
bodies, AND she is arguing that men could occupy a structural position from
which they could produce feminine writing.
Cixous
coins the phrase "l'ecriture feminine" to discuss this notion of
feminine writing (and masculine writing, its phallogocentric counterpart). She
sees "l'ecriture feminine" first of all as something possible only in
poetry (in the existing genres), and not in realist prose. Novels, she says on
p. 311, are "allies of representationalism"--they are genres
(particularly realist fiction) which try to speak in stable language, language
with one-to-one fixed meanings of words, language where words seemingly point
to things (and not to the structure of language itself). In poetry, however,
language is set loose--the chains of signifiers flow more freely, meaning is
less fixed; poetry, Cixous says, is thus closer to the unconscious, and thus to
what has been repressed (and thus to female bodies/female sexuality). This is
one model she uses to describe what "l'ecriture feminine" looks like.
(It is worth noting, however, that all the poets and "feminine"
writers Cixous mentions specifically are men.)
Such
feminine writing will serve as a rupture, or a site of transformation or
change; she means "rupture" here in the Derridean sense, a place
where the totality of the system breaks down and one can see a system as a
system or structure, rather than simply as "the truth." Feminine
writing will show the structure of the Symbolic as a structure, not as an
inevitable order, and thus allow us to deconstruct that order.
There are
two levels on which "l'ecriture feminine" will be transformative,
Cixous argues (p. 311-312), and these levels correspond again to her use of the
literal and the metaphoric, or the individual and the structural. On one level,
the individual woman must write herself, must discover for herself what her
body feels like, and how to write about that body in language. Specifically,
women must find their own sexuality, one that is rooted solely in their own
bodies, and find ways to write about that pleasure--which Cixous, following Lacan,
names "jouissance." On the second level, when women speak/write their
own bodies, the structure of language itself will change; as women become
active subjects, not just beings passively acted upon, their position as
subject in language will shift. Women who write--if they don't merely reproduce
the phallogocentric system of stable ordered meaning which already exists (and
which excludes them)--will be creating a new signifying system; this system may
have built into it far more play, more fluidity, than the existing rigid
phallogocentric symbolic order. "Beware, my friend," Cixous writes
toward the end of the essay (p. 319) "of the signifier that would take you
back to the authority of a signified!"
The woman
who speaks, Cixous says, and who does not reproduce the representational
stability of the Symbolic order, will not speak in linear fashion, will not
"make sense" in any currently existing form. L'ecriture feminine,
like feminine speech, will not be objective/objectifiable; it will erase the
divisions between speech and text, between order and chaos, between sense and
nonsense. In this way, l'ecriture feminine will be an inherently deconstructive
language. Such speech/writing (and remember, this language will erase that
slash) will bring users closer to the realm of the Real, back to the mother's
body, to the breast, to the sense of union or non-separation. This is why
Cixous uses (p.312) the metaphor of "white ink," of writing in breast
milk; she wants to convey that idea of a reunion with the maternal body, an
unalienated relation to female bodies in general.
Cixous'
descriptions of what "l'ecriture feminine" looks like (or, better,
sounds like, since it's not clear that this writing will "look like"
anything--since "looking like" is at the heart of the misperception
of self in the Mirror Stage which launches people into the Symbolic order) flow
into metaphors, which she also means literally. She wants to be careful to talk
about writing in new ways, in ways that distinguish l'ecriture feminine from existing
forms of speech/writing, and in so doing she is associating feminine writing
with existing non-linguistic modes. So, for instance, l'ecriture feminine is
milk, it's a song, something with rhythm and pulse, but no words, something
connected with bodies and with bodies' beats and movements, but not with
representational language.
She uses
these metaphors also to be "slippery", arguing (p. 313) that one
can't define the practice of "l'ecriture feminine." To define
something is to pin it down, to anchor it, to limit it, to put it in its place
within a stable system or structure--and Cixous says that l'ecriture feminine
is too fluid for that; it will always exceed or escape any definition. It can't
be theorized, enclosed, coded, or understood --which doesn't mean, she warns,
that it doesn't exist. Rather, it will always be greater than the existing
systems for classification and ordering of knowledge in phallogocentric western
culture. It can't be defined, but it can be "conceived of,"--another
phrase which works on literal and metaphoric levels--by subjects not subjugated
to a central authority. Only those on the margins--the outlaws--can
"conceive of" feminine language; those outlaws will be women, and
anyone else who can resist or be distanced from the structuring central Phallus
of the phallogocentric Symbolic order.
In
discussing who might exist in the position of outlaw, Cixous brings up (p. 314)
the question of bisexuality. Again, she starts from Freud's idea that all
humans are fundamentally bisexual, and that the Oedipal trajectory which steers
both boys and girls into heterosexuality is an unfortunate requirement of
culture. For Cixous, "culture" is always a phallogocentric order; the
entry into the Symbolic requires the division between male and female, feminine
and masculine, which subordinates and represses the feminine. But by
erasing/deconstructing the slash between masculine and feminine, Cixous is not
arguing for Freud's old idea of bisexuality. Rather, she wants a new
bisexuality, the "other bisexuality," which is the "nonexclusion
either of the difference or of one sex"--a refusal of self/other as a
structuring dichotomy. In essence, rather than scotch-taping masculine and
feminine together, Cixous' bisexuality would dissolve the distinctions, so that
sexuality would be from any body, any site, at any time.
Without the
dichotomy of self/other, all other dichotomies would start to fall apart,
Cixous says: her other bisexuality would thus become a deconstructive force to
erase the slashes in all structuring binary oppositions. When this occurs, the
Western cultural representations of female sexuality--the myths associated with
womanhood--will also fall apart. Cixous focuses in particular (p. 315) on the
myth of the Medusa, the woman with snakes for hair, whose look will turn men
into stone, and on the myth of woman as black hole, as abyss. The idea of woman
as abyss or hole is pretty easy to understand; in Freudian terms, a woman lacks
a penis, and instead has this scary hole in which the penis disappears (and
might not come back). Freud reads the Medusa as part of the fear of castration,
the woman whose hair is writhing penises; she's scary, not because she's got
too few penises, but because she has too many. Cixous says those are the fears
that scare men into being complicit in upholding the phallogocentric order:
they're scared of losing their one penis when they see women as having either
no penis or too many penises. If women could show men their true sexual
pleasures, their real bodies--by writing them in non-representational
form--Cixous says, men would understand that female bodies, female sexuality,
is not about penises (too few or too many) at all. That's why she says we have
to show them "our sexts"--another new word, the combination of sex
and texts, the idea of female sexuality as a new form of writing.
Cixous then
moves on to talk about the idea of hysterics as prior examples of women who
write "sexts," who write their bodies as texts of l'ecriture
feminine. Again, she's following Freud, whose earliest works were on hysteria,
and focused on female hysterics. The idea of hysteria is that a body produces a
symptom, such as the paralysis of a limb, which represents a repressed idea;
the body thus "speaks" what the conscious mind cannot say, and the
unconscious thoughts are written out by the body itself. L'ecriture feminine
has a lot in common with hysterics, as you can see, in the idea of the direct
connections between the unconscious and the body as a mode of
"writing".
Cixous
concludes the essay (starting on p. 318) by offering a critique of the Freudian
nuclear family, the mom-dad-child formation, which she sees as generating the
ideas of castration (Penisneid, in German) and lack which form the basis for
ideas of the feminine in both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She wants
to break up these "old circuits" so that the family formations which
uphold the phallogocentric Symbolic won't be recreated every time a child is
born; she argues that this family system is just as limiting and oppressive to
men as to women, and that it needs to be "demater-paternalized."
Then she
discusses other ways to figure pregnancy, arguing that, like all functions of
the female body, pregnancy needs to be written, in "l'ecriture
feminine." When pregnancy is written, and the female body figured in
language as the source of life, rather than the penis, birth can be figured as
something other than as separation, or as lack.
She ends with the idea of formulating desire as a desire for everything, not for something lacking or absent, as in the Lacanian Symbolic; such a new desire would strip the penis of its significance as the signifier of lack or of fulfillment of lack, and would free people to see each other as different beings, each of whom are whole, and who are not complementary. These beings, not defined by difference, absence, or even by gender, would begin to form a new kind of love, a love which she describes on 319-320, in the paragraph beginning "Other love . . . . "
This essay
was written by Dr. Mary Klages, Associate Professor of English at the
University of Colorado at Boulder, and remains her property.
17.02.2005
Teresa
Ebert (1995)
In
Anglo-American academic discussion, it is common to refer to Helene Cixous,
Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and others as "the French feminists." This
terminology assumes that somehow these theorists represent or speak for ALL
feminists who are French, thus silencing the voices and ideas of other
feminists who are French, such as Christine Delphy, Elisabeth Badinter,
Francoise Picq, Benoite Grould, Genevieve Fraisse, Giselle Halimi, and many
others. To avoid the imperialism inherent in the Anglo-American construction of
Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva as "the French feminists," I will
refer to these theorists as "poststructuralist theoretical feminists."
My thanks
to Stephanie Cordellier for her lucid email comments and corrections regarding
the politics of labeling on this issue.
For an
updated and revised version of this lecture, see or the home page for .
You've
probably noticed a difference between what Sandra Gilbert is saying in her
essay "Literary Paternity" and what Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray
are talking about in "The Laugh of the Medusa" and "This Sex
Which is Not One." Part of that difference lies in the fact that Gilbert
is a pragmatic feminist coming largely out of a humanist tradition as a literary
critic, and Cixous and Irigaray are poststructuralist theoretical feminists. They
represent two distinct (different but related) branches of contemporary
feminist theory.
Gilbert's
piece represents what we might call a "pragmatic" American feminist
school of thought. Emerging from a tradition called "liberal
feminism", this American pragmatic feminism is interested in looking at
how systems of female oppression have been perpetuated and elaborated; such
analysis usually pays a lot of attention to history (and hence is not based on
structuralist principles of synchronic analysis). Liberal/American feminism
often emphasizes understanding origins of social practices, in order to
understand how to intervene in them, to change them. That's why I call it
"pragmatic": much American feminist thought is oriented toward
getting things done, toward theorizing so that some kind of social action or
change can take place. (This kind of theorizing-for-application has its roots
in a number of political movements and theories, including Marxism and
socialism, civil rights, and, of course, the "women's liberation"
movement).
Gilbert's
article represents the historical aspect of this kind of American feminist
theory; her article looks specifically at literary history to find that an
overwhelming number of male authors have attributed their creative capacity
directly to their bodily configuration: the pen, as Gilbert documents, is a
metaphoric penis, and vice-versa. This metaphoric equation between pen and
penis is important, Gilbert asserts, because such metaphors shape how we are
able to think about the process of writing, and about creativity in general. By
linking writing with having a penis, these authors insist that writing, being
creative, is a biological act, one rooted in the body--and specifically in the
male body. Her article shows that this equation is not an isolated incident,
something that just a few jerks thought, but rather is one of the dominant
metaphors of creativity in Western culture, for both male and female writers.
Now, we can
critique this stance pretty easily--how come these guys thought that penises
were the physical model or analog for creating, when it's just as
"logical" (and even more self-evident) to say that creativity comes
from a female body, since that is, after all, the body that actually gives
birth? But that is precisely Gilbert's point: throughout Western cultural
history, women have been confined solely to the role of giving birth, of being
mothers of human beings; men, meanwhile, have signified their creativity as
giving "birth," as being fathers/progenitors, of immortal things,
like books, and not being connected to beings that perish (like people).
There are
lots of ways to read this assertion of male creative
fatherhood/authorship/authority. We can see it as an anxious response to the
male inability to know for sure that they really are the father of biological
children (since only the mother knows for sure who the parents of the child
are). We can see it as a reaction-formation (in psychoanalytic terminology) to
the threat of castration, by asserting the predominance of the penis (as
presence) as creative organ. We can see it as an attempt to reduce what Harold
Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence," the feeling that one will
never be as good as (as powerful as) one's father, and particularly as good as
one's literary forebears, one's literary "fathers." Or we can see it
as a conscious attempt on the part of male authors deliberately to exclude
women writers (and women in general) from membership in their exclusive club,
by defining the only "good" writing as coming from men.
However we
decide to interpret the phenomenon Gilbert is describing, it is clear--from her
voluminous documentation--that this equation between pen and penis has been a
powerful metaphor in Western thought--one which many women authors internalized
(and which countless women who might have been authors may have internalized
and believed, and allowed it to prevent them from attempting to wield the pen).
Gilbert concludes that the exclusion of women from the tools of the trade meant
that women writers found alternate methods of writing--if they couldn't use
pens/penises, what did they write with? Perhaps with milk, with blood, and on
leaves and bark. She means this metaphorically, just as the pen=penis image is
a metaphor, but also literally, as the pen=penis image is also meant literally.
She means that we must look for women's writing in places, and using
instruments, not traditionally associated with writing, because those
traditions are defined by male authors.
These are
themes very similar to those taken up by the poststructuralist theoretical
feminists. Gilbert poses the question in her essay, "If the pen is a
metaphorical penis, with what organ can females generate texts?" She finds
her answer in images created by women writers. Cixous and Irigaray take up the
same question, and use the poststructuralist ideas of Derrida and Lacan to come
up with some provocative answers.
Helene
Cixous takes up where Lacan left off, in noting that women and men enter into
the Symbolic Order, into language as structure, in different ways, or through
different doors, and that the subject positions open to either sex within the
Symbolic are also different. She understands that Lacan's naming the center of
the Symbolic as the Phallus highlights what a patriarchal system language
is--or, more specifically, what a phallo(go)centric system it is.
This idea,
that the structure of language is centered by the phallus, produced the word
"phallocentric." Derrida's idea that the structure of language relies
on spoken words being privileged over written words, produced the word
"logocentric" to describe Western culture in general. Cixous and
Irigaray combine the two ideas to describe Western cultural systems and
structures as "phallogocentric," based on the primacy of certain
terms in an array of binary oppositions. Thus a phallogocentric culture is one
which is structured by binary oppositions-- male/female, order/chaos,
language/silence, presence/absence, speech/writing, light/dark, good/evil,
etc.--and in which the first term is valued over the second term; Cixous and
Irigaray insist that all valued terms (male, order, language, presence, speech,
etc.). are aligned with each other, and that all of them together provide the
basic structures of Western thought.
Cixous
follows Lacan's psychoanalytic paradigm, which argues that a child must
separate from its mother's body (the Real) in order to enter into the Symbolic.
Because of this, Cixous says, the female body in general becomes
unrepresentable in language; it's what can't be spoken or written in the
phallogocentric Symbolic order. Cixous here makes a leap from the maternal body
to the female body in general; she also leaps from that female body to female
sexuality, saying that female sexuality, female sexual pleasure, is
unrepresentable within the phallogocentric Symbolic order.
To
understand how she makes that leap, we have to go back to what Freud says about
female sexuality, and the mess he makes of it. In Freud's story of the female
Oedipus complex, girls have to make a lot of switches, from clitoris to vagina,
from attraction to female bodies to attraction to male bodies, and from active
sexuality to passive sexuality, in order to become "normal" adults
Cixous rewrites this, via Lacan, by pointing out that "adulthood," in
Lacan's terms, is the same as entering into the Symbolic and taking up a
subject position. Thus "adulthood," or becoming a linguistic subject,
for Cixous, means having only one kind of sexuality: passive, vaginal,
heterosexual, reproductive. And that sexuality, if one follows Freud to his
logical extreme, is not about female sexuality per se, but about male
sexuality: the woman's pleasure is to come from being passively filled by a
penis (remember, Freud defines activity as masculine, and passivity as
feminine). So, Cixous concludes, there really isn't any such thing as female
sexuality in and of itself in this phallogocentric system--it's always
sexuality defined by the presence of a penis, and not by anything intrinsic to
the female body or to female sexual pleasure.
If women
have to be forced away from their own bodies--first in the person of the
mother's body, and then in the person of their unique sexual
feelings/pleasures--in order to become subjects in language, Cactus argues, is
it possible for a woman to write at all? Is it possible for a woman to write as
a woman? Or does entry into the Symbolic, orienting one's language around a
center designated as a Phallus, mean that when one writes or speaks, one always
does so as a "man"? In other words, if the structure of language
itself is phallogocentric, and stable meaning is anchored and guaranteed by the
Phallus, then isn't everyone who uses language taking up a position as
"male" within this structure which excludes female bodies?
Cixous, and
other poststructuralist theoretical feminists, are both outraged and intrigued
by the possibilities for relations between gender and writing (or language use
in general) that Lacan's paradigms open up. That's what Cixous means when she
says (p. 309a) that her project has two aims: to break up and destroy, and to
foresee and project. She wants to destroy (or perhaps just deconstruct) the
phallogocentric system Lacan describes, and to project some new strategies for
a new kind of relation between female bodies and language.
Lacan's
description of the Symbolic (as illustrated by the pictures on p. 741 of the
two doors) places women and men in different positions within the Symbolic in
relation to the Phallus; men more easily misperceive themselves as having the
Phallus, as being closer to it, whereas women (because they have no penises)
are further from that center. Because of that distance from the Phallus, the
poststructuralist theoretical feminists argue, women are closer to the margins
of the Symbolic order; they are not as firmly anchored or fixed in place as men
are; they are closer to the Imaginary, to images and fantasies, and further
from the idea of absolute fixed and stable meaning than men are.
Because
women are less fixed in the Symbolic than men, women-- and their language--are
more fluid, more flowing, more unstable than men. It is worth noting here that
when Cixous talks about women and woman, sometimes she means it literally, as the
physical beings with vaginas and breasts, etc., and sometimes she means it as a
linguistic structural position: "woman" is a signifier in the chain
of signifiers within the Symbolic, just as "man" is; both have stable
meaning ("woman" is the signifier attached to the signified of vagina
and breasts (etc.)) because both are locked in place, anchored, by the Phallus
as center of the Symbolic order. When Cixous says that woman is more slippery,
more fluid, less fixed than man, she means both the literal woman, the person,
and the signifier "woman".
Cixous'
essay is difficult, not only because she's assuming we all know Freud and
Lacan's formulations about female sexuality and about the structure of
language, but also because she writes on two levels at once: she is always
being both metaphoric and literal, referring both to structures and to
individuals. When she says that "woman must write herself,"
"woman must write woman," she means both that women must write
themselves, tell their own stories (much as the American feminists say women
must tell their own stories) and that "woman" as signifier must have
a (new) way to be connected to the signifier "I," to write the
signifier of selfhood/subjecthood offered within the Symbolic order.
Cixous also
discusses writing on both a metaphoric and literal level. She aligns writing
with masturbation, something that for women is supposed to be secret, shameful,
or silly, something not quite adult, something that will be renounced in order
to achieve adulthood, just like clitoral stimulation has to be renounced in
favor of vaginal/reproductive passive adult sexuality. For women to write
themselves, Cixous says, they must (re)claim a female-centered sexuality. If
men write with their penises, as Gilbert argues, then Cixous says before women
can write they have to discover where their pleasure is located. (And don't be
too quick to decide that women write with their clitorises. It's not quite that
simple).
Cixous also
argues that men haven't yet discovered the relation between their sexuality and
their writing, as long as they are focused on writing with the penis. "Man
must write man," Cixous says, again focusing on "man" as a
signifier within the Symbolic, which is no more privileged than
"woman" as a signifier. In an important footnote, Cixous explains
that men's sexuality, like women's, has been defined and circumscribed by
binary oppositions (active/passive, masculine/feminine), and that heterosexual
relations have been structured by a sense of otherness and fear created by
these absolute binaries. As long as male sexuality is defined in these limited
and limiting terms, Cixous says, men will be prisoners of a Symbolic order
which alienates them from their bodies in ways similar to (though not identical
with) how women are alienated from their bodies and their sexualities. Thus,
while Cixous does slam men directly for being patriarchal oppressors, she also
identifies the structures which enforce gender distinctions as being oppressive
to both sexes.
She also
links these oppressive binary structures to other Western cultural practices,
particularly those involving racial distinctions. On 310 she follows Freud in
calling women the "dark continent," and expands the metaphor by
reference to Apartheid, to demonstrate that these same binary systems which
structure gender also structure imperialism: women are aligned with darkness,
with otherness, with Africa, against men who are aligned with lightness, with
selfhood, and with Western civilization. In this paragraph, note that Cixous is
referring to women as "they," as if women are non-speakers,
non-writers, whom she is observing. "As soon as they begin to speak, at
the same time as they're taught their name, they can be taught that their
territory is black:"--i.e. entry into the Symbolic order, into language,
into having a self and a name, is entry into these structures of binary
oppositions.
Cixous
argues that most women do write and speak, but that they do so from a
"masculine" position; in order to speak, women (or "woman")
has assumed she needed a stable, fixed system of meaning, and thus has aligned
herself with the Phallus which stabilizes language. There has been little or no
"feminine" writing, Cixous says (p. 311). In making this statement,
she insists that writing is always "marked," within a Symbolic order
that is structured through binary opposites, including
"masculine/feminine," in which the feminine is always repressed. Remember
here, when Cixous speaks of "feminine," it is both literal and
metaphoric--it's something connected to femaleness, to female bodies, and
something which is a product of linguistic positioning. So Cixous is arguing
that only women could produce feminine writing, because it must come from their
bodies, AND she is arguing that men could occupy a structural position from
which they could produce feminine writing.
Cixous
coins the phrase "l'ecriture feminine" to discuss this notion of
feminine writing (and masculine writing, its phallogocentric counterpart). She
sees "l'ecriture feminine" first of all as something possible only in
poetry (in the existing genres), and not in realist prose. Novels, she says on
p. 311, are "allies of representationalism"--they are genres
(particularly realist fiction) which try to speak in stable language, language
with one-to-one fixed meanings of words, language where words seemingly point
to things (and not to the structure of language itself). In poetry, however,
language is set loose--the chains of signifiers flow more freely, meaning is
less fixed; poetry, Cixous says, is thus closer to the unconscious, and thus to
what has been repressed (and thus to female bodies/female sexuality). This is
one model she uses to describe what "l'ecriture feminine" looks like.
(It is worth noting, however, that all the poets and "feminine"
writers Cixous mentions specifically are men.)
Such
feminine writing will serve as a rupture, or a site of transformation or
change; she means "rupture" here in the Derridean sense, a place
where the totality of the system breaks down and one can see a system as a
system or structure, rather than simply as "the truth." Feminine
writing will show the structure of the Symbolic as a structure, not as an
inevitable order, and thus allow us to deconstruct that order.
There are
two levels on which "l'ecriture feminine" will be transformative,
Cixous argues (p. 311-312), and these levels correspond again to her use of the
literal and the metaphoric, or the individual and the structural. On one level,
the individual woman must write herself, must discover for herself what her
body feels like, and how to write about that body in language. Specifically,
women must find their own sexuality, one that is rooted solely in their own
bodies, and find ways to write about that pleasure--which Cixous, following Lacan,
names "jouissance." On the second level, when women speak/write their
own bodies, the structure of language itself will change; as women become
active subjects, not just beings passively acted upon, their position as
subject in language will shift. Women who write--if they don't merely reproduce
the phallogocentric system of stable ordered meaning which already exists (and
which excludes them)--will be creating a new signifying system; this system may
have built into it far more play, more fluidity, than the existing rigid
phallogocentric symbolic order. "Beware, my friend," Cixous writes
toward the end of the essay (p. 319) "of the signifier that would take you
back to the authority of a signified!"
The woman
who speaks, Cixous says, and who does not reproduce the representational
stability of the Symbolic order, will not speak in linear fashion, will not
"make sense" in any currently existing form. L'ecriture feminine,
like feminine speech, will not be objective/objectifiable; it will erase the
divisions between speech and text, between order and chaos, between sense and
nonsense. In this way, l'ecriture feminine will be an inherently deconstructive
language. Such speech/writing (and remember, this language will erase that
slash) will bring users closer to the realm of the Real, back to the mother's
body, to the breast, to the sense of union or non-separation. This is why
Cixous uses (p.312) the metaphor of "white ink," of writing in breast
milk; she wants to convey that idea of a reunion with the maternal body, an
unalienated relation to female bodies in general.
Cixous'
descriptions of what "l'ecriture feminine" looks like (or, better,
sounds like, since it's not clear that this writing will "look like"
anything--since "looking like" is at the heart of the misperception
of self in the Mirror Stage which launches people into the Symbolic order) flow
into metaphors, which she also means literally. She wants to be careful to talk
about writing in new ways, in ways that distinguish l'ecriture feminine from existing
forms of speech/writing, and in so doing she is associating feminine writing
with existing non-linguistic modes. So, for instance, l'ecriture feminine is
milk, it's a song, something with rhythm and pulse, but no words, something
connected with bodies and with bodies' beats and movements, but not with
representational language.
She uses
these metaphors also to be "slippery", arguing (p. 313) that one
can't define the practice of "l'ecriture feminine." To define
something is to pin it down, to anchor it, to limit it, to put it in its place
within a stable system or structure--and Cixous says that l'ecriture feminine
is too fluid for that; it will always exceed or escape any definition. It can't
be theorized, enclosed, coded, or understood --which doesn't mean, she warns,
that it doesn't exist. Rather, it will always be greater than the existing
systems for classification and ordering of knowledge in phallogocentric western
culture. It can't be defined, but it can be "conceived of,"--another
phrase which works on literal and metaphoric levels--by subjects not subjugated
to a central authority. Only those on the margins--the outlaws--can
"conceive of" feminine language; those outlaws will be women, and
anyone else who can resist or be distanced from the structuring central Phallus
of the phallogocentric Symbolic order.
In
discussing who might exist in the position of outlaw, Cixous brings up (p. 314)
the question of bisexuality. Again, she starts from Freud's idea that all
humans are fundamentally bisexual, and that the Oedipal trajectory which steers
both boys and girls into heterosexuality is an unfortunate requirement of
culture. For Cixous, "culture" is always a phallogocentric order; the
entry into the Symbolic requires the division between male and female, feminine
and masculine, which subordinates and represses the feminine. But by
erasing/deconstructing the slash between masculine and feminine, Cixous is not
arguing for Freud's old idea of bisexuality. Rather, she wants a new
bisexuality, the "other bisexuality," which is the "nonexclusion
either of the difference or of one sex"--a refusal of self/other as a
structuring dichotomy. In essence, rather than scotch-taping masculine and
feminine together, Cixous' bisexuality would dissolve the distinctions, so that
sexuality would be from any body, any site, at any time.
Without the
dichotomy of self/other, all other dichotomies would start to fall apart,
Cixous says: her other bisexuality would thus become a deconstructive force to
erase the slashes in all structuring binary oppositions. When this occurs, the
Western cultural representations of female sexuality--the myths associated with
womanhood--will also fall apart. Cixous focuses in particular (p. 315) on the
myth of the Medusa, the woman with snakes for hair, whose look will turn men
into stone, and on the myth of woman as black hole, as abyss. The idea of woman
as abyss or hole is pretty easy to understand; in Freudian terms, a woman lacks
a penis, and instead has this scary hole in which the penis disappears (and
might not come back). Freud reads the Medusa as part of the fear of castration,
the woman whose hair is writhing penises; she's scary, not because she's got
too few penises, but because she has too many. Cixous says those are the fears
that scare men into being complicit in upholding the phallogocentric order:
they're scared of losing their one penis when they see women as having either
no penis or too many penises. If women could show men their true sexual
pleasures, their real bodies--by writing them in non-representational
form--Cixous says, men would understand that female bodies, female sexuality,
is not about penises (too few or too many) at all. That's why she says we have
to show them "our sexts"--another new word, the combination of sex
and texts, the idea of female sexuality as a new form of writing.
Cixous then
moves on to talk about the idea of hysterics as prior examples of women who
write "sexts," who write their bodies as texts of l'ecriture
feminine. Again, she's following Freud, whose earliest works were on hysteria,
and focused on female hysterics. The idea of hysteria is that a body produces a
symptom, such as the paralysis of a limb, which represents a repressed idea;
the body thus "speaks" what the conscious mind cannot say, and the
unconscious thoughts are written out by the body itself. L'ecriture feminine
has a lot in common with hysterics, as you can see, in the idea of the direct
connections between the unconscious and the body as a mode of
"writing".
Cixous
concludes the essay (starting on p. 318) by offering a critique of the Freudian
nuclear family, the mom-dad-child formation, which she sees as generating the
ideas of castration (Penisneid, in German) and lack which form the basis for
ideas of the feminine in both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She wants
to break up these "old circuits" so that the family formations which
uphold the phallogocentric Symbolic won't be recreated every time a child is
born; she argues that this family system is just as limiting and oppressive to
men as to women, and that it needs to be "demater-paternalized."
Then she
discusses other ways to figure pregnancy, arguing that, like all functions of
the female body, pregnancy needs to be written, in "l'ecriture
feminine." When pregnancy is written, and the female body figured in
language as the source of life, rather than the penis, birth can be figured as
something other than as separation, or as lack.
She ends with the idea of formulating desire as a desire for everything, not for something lacking or absent, as in the Lacanian Symbolic; such a new desire would strip the penis of its significance as the signifier of lack or of fulfillment of lack, and would free people to see each other as different beings, each of whom are whole, and who are not complementary. These beings, not defined by difference, absence, or even by gender, would begin to form a new kind of love, a love which she describes on 319-320, in the paragraph beginning "Other love . . . . "
This essay
was written by Dr. Mary Klages, Associate Professor of English at the
University of Colorado at Boulder, and remains her property.
17.02.2005
Teresa
Ebert (1995)