32 Feminism and Psychoanalysis: Helen Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Spectre of Lacan

Ms. Ratika Anand

INTODUCTION TO CHAPTER

In this module, I will be providing a brief background on Feminism and Psychoanalysis which would help you with your understanding of Psychoanalytical Feminism. Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray are French Feminists who worked closely with Psychoanalysis, especially with the theories of Psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s concept of the ‘Mirror stage’ is significant to gain a perspective, on why French Feminists link their theories to Lacan’s work. Both Cixous and Irigaray, are influenced by Lacan’s work but at the same time they view some of his concepts in a critical light. It would be interesting to see how feminism can be linked to a distinct field of psychoanalysis to show, how sexual difference initiates in the pre-oedipal stage itself; and Language, laws, norms etc. are biased towards men giving women a secondary status in the society.

INTRODUCTION TO FEMINISM

Feminism is characterized by significant political movements, range of ideologies, far- reaching social revolutions, each being driven towards a sole objective: to align women’s personal and political status with that of men. The aim was not to displace the patriarchal centre with the Feminist model but to empower women to formulate an identity in the society through: gaining the right to vote, being a part of productive labor1, to receive education, achieve reproductive rights, and to own property.

Feminist movement has been divided into three stages called the Three Waves of Feminism. The First Wave was synonymous with the Women’s Suffragette Movements. In the Second wave, Women were not only influenced by, but also participated in the contemporaneous Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. It was a reaction to the Post World War domestication of women, limiting their involvement to household chores. Betty Friedan, with her book The Feminine Mystique, (1963) is often credited with starting this wave of Feminist movement which focused on issues like sexuality, marriage, reproductive right, workplace environments and physical and sexual violence. Gender and Sexuality is central to the Third wave ideology. It addressed the issues surfacing in the second wave: mere appropriation and often misappropriation of women who were outside the domain of the white upper middle class. The focus was on individualized identity and giving a voice the subaltern2 women who were excluded from the feminism movement. Began in 1990’s, the movement continues to simmer even today. For instance, the “Slut Walk” in 2011 and the present time Queer movements taking place in different parts of the world.

The Critical Approaches of the 1980’s can be studied as three stages. In the first stage, women drew from the approaches of other kinds of criticism: Marxism, Structuralism, Psychoanalysis, Linguistic, etc. In the second stage, a greater emphasis was laid on reconstruction of female experience, the movement was no longer limited to attacking male supremacy. In the third stage, efforts were directed at: rewriting Women’s history and creating a New Canon of Women’s Writing.

INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOANALYSIS

Psychoanalysis was founded by Sigmund Freud; Interpretation of Dreams (1899) was one of his most notable works. Psychoanalysis employs theories and methods to delve into one’s Unconscious: repressed thoughts and experience, supressed emotions and latent desires. Psychoanalysis stems from the theory of the Unconscious which attempts to examine the links between Sexuality and Subjectivity3. Psychoanalytic Criticism and Literature, assist at gaining insight into the covert meaning of a text and author’s hidden motifs and also, at times, the author’s fixations and childhood traumas.

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), French Psychoanalyst, influenced many distinct fields like Post Structuralism, Feminism, Marxism, Film Theory, etc. Lacan represents his own work as a “return to Freud” and attempts to bring the understanding of Structural Linguists, Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson; and Structural Anthropologist Levis Strauss, into the realm of Psychoanalysis. His most influential work was “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I function as Revealed in the Psychoanalytic Experience”. Lacan thinks “Unconscious is structured like language”. For Lacan, “Three Orders” of one’s mental disposition are responsible in the construction of one’s Identity, which are:

The Imaginary Phase, also called the Pre-Oedipal Phase is when an infant identifies, for the first time, with his/her image reflected in the mirror. The infant at the age of six months possesses no identity. There is no difference between self and the other. H/She constructs an image, mostly an idealized image, an illusion, a product of his imagination which may not match the real self, which lacks mobility and even proper motor and speech skills. The child is oblivious to the powerful dominant culture that will separate the infant from the mother. It is for the first time a child formulates an understanding of his or her body. It is through this process of identification which aids in the formation of Ego4.

Phallus acts as a “master signifier”5 and is the centre of the second stage called Symbolic Order. The child is introduced to the Father, the “Big Other”, a paternal figure of authority, who sets the norms and the rules of Law and Language. Phallus is a representational determinant of the sexual difference in its presence/absence. Castration, functions as another symbol, at forcing the child to step into the symbolic stage governed by the Law of the Father. The Child has to let go of the bond with the mother and set out to acquire the concepts of Language and meet socio-cultural expectations dictated by the Father. However Lacan says, Phallus is not symbolic of the male organ penis, as sexual difference, for him, is beyond biological.

In Shyam Selvaduria’s novel The Funny Boy (1994), for instance, the protagonist Arjie wasn’t introduced to the ‘Law of the Father’ until his aunt embarrasses him in front of the entire family for being dressed up like a girl. Arjie, who was close to his mother, loved to see her get dressed and took immense joy in playing ‘ghar-ghar’ with the girls, had been oblivious to the ‘symbolic order’ until the moment when, for the first time, the anger in his father’s eyes makes him aware of the socio-cultural norms existing at the very centre of Patriarchal society which Arjie must conform to. Religion, Education, Legal and Scientific discourse are all a part of patriarchal structure.

Real Order, for Lacan, is incomprehensive since Language fails to define the experience. It’s not placed in opposition to Imaginary Phase but beyond the Symbolic Order. Lacan views this stage as pre-imaginary, symbolizing completeness which was later lost as Language comes into existence. It continues to surface in our lives against which our fluid fantasies and Linguistic structure fail. It is often read as traumatic as it makes one realize the materiality of our existence.

The Major Divisions within Feminist Literary Criticism are: Anglo-American, British and French Feminism.

French Feminism is theoretical, influenced by the poststructuralists: Lacan, Derrida and Foucault. French feminists deal more closely with the issue than literature, representing the reality not the literary text. Major Figures of French Feminism were: Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. They sought for a language free from any bias. “L’ecriture feminine” (meaning Feminine Writing) was Hélène Cixous’ main concern. French feminists focused on how female physiology can guide Women’s Writing because the realm of the Body is free from social and gender conditioning. However, the above notion can be problematic as Femininity itself is a social construct. For French Feminists, Psychoanalytic theory is also significant, particularly, the work of Lacan, who’s work acts as a powerful influence and at the same time becomes an object of critique. French feminists are keen at examining and deconstructing the very system of Binary opposition, that has placed women against men, and the other binaries which have upheld this model.

For French Feminist Theorist, Hélène Cixous, the key issues of Feminist Criticism are: the Unconscious; Bisexuality and “L’ecriture Feminine”. Central to Cixous theory is Feminine Writing and the phrase “L’ecriture Feminine” was coined by Cixous herself. Her important critical works, Laugh of Medusa and “Sorties” were published in 1975. While the former builds up a psychoanalytical interpretation of the Greek mythology to challenge the patriarchy, the latter, works on establishing a connection between Women’s desire and Women’s language.

Patriarchy, for Cixous, exists in a cultural and historical context with active power relations. She draws from the work of Jacques Lacan, who attempts to connect language, psyche and sexuality through a) Imaginary Phase which is representative of Feminine mother and Body; and b) Symbolic order which upholds the Law of the Father characterized by Language and Sexual Differentiation.

Cixous places Feminine writing in the Pre-Oedipal/ Imaginary Phase with a positive outlook. Feminine or Imaginary can be employed to disrupt the Language of Oppressive Father. She chooses Pre-oedipal phase since the infant is in a state of innocence, not yet conditioned by the dominant culture. There is time during this phase, to cultivate oppositional boundaries prior to being classified as Masculine or Feminine within the system of Binary Opposition6. She is critical of the model of Binary Opposition that has given Women the status of the ‘other’7. They find the structure of western thought reflected in the binary opposition: presence/absence, masculine/ feminine, order/ chaos, language/ silence, speech/writing where one is valued more than the second. The problem of essentialism8 is inherent to the dichotomy of presence/absence. To overcome these binaries, she uses the approach of employing excess, for instance the laughter in The Laugh of Medusa. The laugh then stands to redeem women and liberate them from the shackles created by men in the history of male mythology.

Another subject important to Cixous is “Jouissance”9 which for her operates in the realm of Female imagination, outside the patriarchal sphere. “Jouissance” is a source of pleasure beyond the male hegemony and outside the established substructures in the form of norms, laws, grammar, etc. She perceives it as a source of Women’s Writing, displacing the Law of the Father thereby providing an expression to women.

Like the above concept, the notion of the unconscious space too, persists outside the culture. The unconscious is associated with femininity and repression. Imperialistic metaphors which are used for colonized lands such as “darkness”, tend to be associated with women like Medusa, who was once a beautiful young priestess. From a woman of Desire, she was reduced to a monstrous woman, who was said to have snakes in place of hair, and was feared to be even looked at. The abysmal portrayal of Medusa, remarks Cixous, is framed within the purview of the Male Gaze. The reasons for her condition are looked at as irrelevant and often erased. Metaphors of conflict, imagery of violence and war feature in the writings of Cixous. Even the title, “Sorties”, means a battle which Cixous herself is fighting through her writings. It is challenging enough to write, and to write as a woman may pose to be a struggle connected to class and race too. Therefore, otherness is not solely based on the criterion of gender.

Bisexuality plays with the boundary and because of the ambiguity surrounding this sexuality, it is often seen as a threat to the model of binary opposition. The idea of Bisexuality is drawn from the theory of Lacan, Freud and even Derrida. It is not like Androgyny, a combination of sexes which Virginia Woolf propagates but rather a displacement of the dual category of masculine and feminine and to be able think beyond this division. Cixous proposes bisexuality especially for women, as they have been conditioned to accept the role assigned  to them.

Cixous encourages women to “think differently” about their histories, to invent another history with their own language that is free from any bias. Feminine writing is a physical act of writing with one’s bodies and the metaphor of childbirth is also used to describe this creative process of writing. Both Cixous and Irigaray, combine the elements of patriarchal system, and language found in Lacan’s Symbolic Order to form Phallogocentricism10. The child must separate from the mother to enter the phase of symbolic order. Cixous argues: a) how would a woman be able to write if she, continuously, is made to submit before the male hegemony. b) Why women are made to, not only move away from her mother, but also their body. Female sexuality is smothered. The Female body and her sexuality cannot be represented in phallogocentricism. c)Why women must undergo a lot of changes before taking up the subject position in the symbolic order. She is made to accept the symbolic order of the Phallus. She fails to find expression in an alien tongue, a male-centric language which is not her own. Women are conditioned to use male language from which they are excluded.

Feminists say women are at the margins of symbolic order, and their language is more free- flowing, closer to the imaginary phase with no fixities in contrast to the stable, absolute and ordered language of men. Each form of language is representative of their respective social status. “Women must write herself” and “Woman must write woman”, says Cixous, referring to the creation of feminist structure, and providing an expression to their individual experience. She advises women to choose writing poetry over realistic prose. Cixous herself is known to write in poetic language. A novel represents an established structure usually in the absolute masculine language. Poetry, on the other hand, has no fixed meanings and sees a fluid associations with ‘signifiers’. It is also closer to the realm of the unconscious.

Like men write with their penis, women must find a female-centred sexuality too so their pleasure can be located. Most women, says Cixous, speak and write from masculine position. There exists no feminine writing because anything feminine is typified as a lack, to be repressed. Feminine Writing, proposes Cixous, can serve as a Rupture11 or break, that will indicate symbolic structure is not the only structure.

Feminine Writing is transformative in nature. At the first level, the individual self finds an expression, as women attempt to find their sexuality. On the second level, women stop reproducing Phallogocentricism in their work, and speak and write through their bodies, to take up the role of an active subject and give up being passive.

Feminine speech is not objective. It blurs the binaries like Order/ Chaos, Speech/Text. Since Feminine writing is closer to the realm of real, there is a union with the maternal body. With the phrase “white ink”, Cixous hints at the other mediums which Feminine writing can experiment with, like ‘milk’ in the above reference to “white ink”, song, bodies, etc. Cixous also uses the term “slippery” to describe Feminine writing and how it cannot be defined. Feminine writing is greater than the existing Phallogocentric system and cannot be therefore enclosed in a structure.

French Feminist Theorist, Luce Irigaray, engages with interdisciplinary works from Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Linguistic fields of study. Speculum of the Other Women (1974) is Irigaray’s most acclaimed work and is a fundamental contribution to the field of Feminist Theory. Here, Irigaray deconstructs Psychoanalysis and brings forth the underline male ideology embedded in the Psychoanalytical model itself. She was a student of the Jacques Lacan, and she is known to work closely with the concept of Psychoanalysis, to build on Feminist Criticism. She draws a lot of her ideas from Lacan, and is critical of some of his theories too. In Speculum, she critiques the phallocentric ideology in the work of both Freud and Lacan. She assesses the exclusion of women from the realm of Philosophy, Psychoanalytical Theory and Structural Linguistics. This is reminiscent of the exclusion of women from the socio-political domain, and erasure of women and their contributions from the historical context and literary works.

Lacan privileges the Male body by employing the Phallus, as the core of his Symbolic Order. Symbolic of “The Law of the Father”, Phallus is represented as a sign of Male Power or Female lack. Irigaray is critical of Lacan’s monolithic and sexist model of Gender Difference, solely based on the presence/absence of Phallus, as she attempts to displace Lacan’s Phallocentric discourse. Lacan’s rigid sexual differentiation stems out of the system of Binary opposition, that requires to be deconstructed. Man/Woman, Presence/Absence, Superior/Inferior among the other binaries places one at a dominant position to the ‘other’.

For Irigaray, biology is culturally defined. Lacan’s Imaginary Phase reflects the Western culture’s bias against women because in the western culture, the imaginary body which dominates at a cultural level, is the Male Body, thereby, defining the women as the ‘other’ With the entrance of the Big O, that is the paternal figure, the infant realizes the need for social existence thereby, moving into the Symbolic order, where the infant is aware of the sexual difference and moves away from the mother, in order to acquire a set of rules governing the language, the law and the patriarchal society in general.

Irigaray distances herself from Lacan’s following arguments. Firstly, from Lacan’s representation of Symbolic Order as ahistorical12. Symbolic order, argues Irigaray, is not ahistorical but rather a construct to reinforce Male Supremacy. Secondly, she was not convinced in Lacan’s description of Phallus, that it has no connection with Male anatomy. For Irigaray, Phallus is not Symbolic but is rather an extension of Freud’s “One-Sex” Model.

Language is integral to both Lacan and Irigaray. Structural Linguistics becomes a backdrop in Lacan’s theory of Psychoanalysis. In, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray states, the sexual difference rests in language and not anatomical difference. The linguistic disposition of sexual difference is also discussed in The Sex which is Not One in a similar manner as Lacan does. Language plays a significant role in sustaining the supremacy of Men. The object of Power and Value for instance God, Irigaray argues, is represented as masculine that in turn, would also influence religion which is further linked to culture. Language, is seen as a product of culture, both of which acknowledge the sexual difference. There is, therefore, a need to disrupt the male language which is upholding the dominant patriarchal supremacy. Speech patterns of men and women, she says, have been studied to find women are excluded from the subject position and their inclusion in the existing subjectivity is no solution. There is a need to reconstruct the identity of women, autonomous of the pre-established standard framed by male hegemony. It is however difficult, to define femininity since women have been denied a voice and have failed to create a language of their own. Femininity has always been defined through the Gaze of men, and their experiences have been appropriated through phallocentric language. Women are wrongly projected in symbolic order. Man is the set parameter, a touchstone against whom women’s identity and their roles are designed.

Irigaray states that Sexual Differentiation is not a dominant system but a cultural practice where in, politics, history, literature, law, tradition act as agents which strengthen and empower it further. Irigaray also hints at the new possibilities Sexual Differentiation can offer, if women start speaking differently, thereby making it conceivable to change the meaning of being a woman itself. Irigaray herself, is known for her unique writing style which is named as “Mimesis”. It is a ploy she employs, to question the clichéd and stereotypical nuances which target women. She argues that, there is no need to ignore or repress these views but to challenge them and put them through thorough scrutiny. This strategy of readdressing and replying to male dominance is referred as “Strategic Essentialism”. This style challenges authority by responding to biased perspectives against women as being false, which assists in the emergence of a new female subjectivity. In The Sex which is Not One, she discusses how one cannot redefine femininity outside the male definition and how the new definition would have a mimetic involvement with the old definition.

Irigaray gives an expression to her Utopian Ideals in Sexes and the Genealogies. She discusses the concept of protection of virginity as a patriarchal construct, a means to guard feminine sexuality, placing women in a position of a mere “facilitator” for the gratification of men. Also, the mother-daughter relationship must be protected so as to further develop female subjectivity. However, this relationship is under threat, right since the infant is moving from the imaginary stage to the symbolic order, where the child has to let go of the mother in fear of castration and thereafter, adopt the newly introduced cultural norms taught by the Father Irigaray’s essay “When the Goods Get Together” from The Sex Which is Not One is a Marxist Feminist critique on the commodification of women in an Economy dominated by Men, reflecting the western cultural psyche itself, presented earlier in Lacan’s Symbolic order. The essay discusses the Utilitarian philosophy adopted by Men at trading women like mere goods. The capitalist set up is controlled and driven exclusively by men. Trade of products, services and even women takes place among men. Drawing on Psychoanalysis, the question arises thus, that why is this ‘Homosexual’ relationship (among men) allowed to proliferate in a capitalist culture, in the same society where Homosexuality is regarded as a taboo, going against the symbolic order set by the paternal figure. Also, the system of Binary opposition fails to provide room for ‘play’14 as it may create a Third Space, creation of which would lead to the breakdown of the established structure. However, this masculine relationship shared among men in the market is seen as an exception, working closely with the “Ideological State Apparatus”15 to culturally establish themselves as the Idealized Imaginary body. Women are not provided with the space for homosexual engagements which for Irigaray, can be a space, for allowing female libidinal economy to exist. Instead, women are limited to the territory of heterosexuality wherein they are assigned not productive roles like men, but only reproductive roles instead. Female sexuality exists only in relation to male sexuality as earlier established. It is understood as ‘lacking’ the power of participating in auto-eroticism or homoeroticism and are made to internalize her passive sexual role against sexually active men. Women need to subvert their subordinate status by overthrowing the repressive language, the conditioned means of sexual pleasure dictated by Phallogocentricism, and instead split and be the ‘sex which is not one’: not one with the dominant male oppressor.

According to Irigaray, there is a need to liberate both Feminine and Masculine from every constraint allowing them to create a sexual difference independent of the nature and culture held by each other. Being two different beings, a dual arrangement by forming, two different paths, must exist in the culture for both to grow distinctly without being hindered by any norms or intimidated by a set parameter.

SUMMARY

French feminists, Cixous and Irigaray, attempt to work with the theories of Lacan as they try to overthrow the existing structure, not by replacing it with another, instead, they provide alternative solutions, to bring a New model which can displace the singular Male model of Lacan’s Symbolic order. They are not arguing for the inclusion of Feminine structure in the present subjectivity, instead they want the Feminine structure to co-exist as independent from the male model. Psychoanalytic Feminist theory of Cixous discusses Bisexuality, Unconscious and Feminine writing while Irigaray focuses mainly on Language and Sexual difference. Language plays an essential role in their critique of Lacan: while Cixous places Feminine writing in imaginary phase, Irigaray places it in the symbolic realm. Cixous advocates poetry over prose and she herself has a Poetic style of writing. Like men write with their penis, Cixous suggests women to find their female-centric sexuality. She asks women to ‘think differently’ to quit writing like men. Irigaray sees positive potential in Sexual differentiation. She encourages women to ‘speak differently’. She herself uses a different style of writing called ‘mimesis’ to subvert the male order. Both reject the model of Binary opposition, central to the meaning of Phallus in Lacan’s theory, because it gave women the secondary status in the society.

GLOSSARY

• Productive labor: In contrast to reproductive labor, productive labor results in goods or services that have monetary value in the capitalist system
• Subaltern: coined by Antonio Gramsci, later used in Postcolonial theory by Spivak, it means the section of population which is socially, politically and geographically outside of the hegemonic power structure
• Subjectivity: refers to a person’s perspective or opinion, particular feelings, beliefs, and desires. In philosophy, the term is often contrasted with objectivity.
• Ego: The sense of connection or belonging between a person and a particular social– religious, or political group. It is rooted in early developmental experiences and linked to one’s identity.
• Master signifier: In Lacanian theory, a signifier which stops the slippage of the signified under the signifier and fixes meaning, thereby forming a stable symbolic order. It is a particular signifier with no signified of its own, which stands in for the “fullness” of the meaning of the symbolic system itself. It is always haunted by the return of the Real.
• Binary opposition: also called binary system, it is a structuralist theory wherein a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning are place together. Post-structuralism later debunked the theory through deconstruction.
• Other: The condition and quality of Otherness. The characteristics of the Other, is the state of being different from and alien to the social identity of a person and to the identity of the Self, distinct and separate from the Symbolic order
• Essentialism: a belief that things have a set of characteristics which make them what they are
• Jouissance: In Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory, the term Jouissance denotates a kind of pleasure or enjoyment that is linked with sexual aspects. The concept of Jouissance is linked with Lacan’s concept of desire
• Phallogocentrism: is a neologism coined by Jacques Derrida to refer to the privileging of  the masculine (phallus) in the construction of meaning. The word is a combination of the older terms phallocentrism (focusing on the masculine point of view) and logocentrism (focusing on language in assigning meaning to the world).
• Rupture: According to Derrida, the event of the rupture occurred when there was a disruption in the series of substituting one center for another.
• Ahistorical: without concern for history or historical development; indifferent to tradition
• One-Sex Model: Thomas Walter Laqueur wrote that there was an ancient “one-sex model”, in which the woman was only described as imperfect ‘man’ which was upheld later by Sigmund Freud.
• Play: Free play is a literary concept from Jacques Derrida’s 1966 essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” It is a disruption of order.

Ideological State Apparatus: Also called ISA, it is a term developed by the Marxist theorist Louis Althusser to denote institutions such as education, the churches, family, media, trade unions, and law, which were formally outside state control but which served to transmit the values of the state contrasted with the so-called ‘repressive state apparatus’ of the armed forces and police which functions as state agents to ensure conformity to the dominant structure.

Reference

• Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009
• Habib, Rafey. Modern Literary Criticism and Theory: A History. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2008
• Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Ecrits: A Selection. New York: Norton, 1977.
• Patricia Bizzell, Patricia and Herzberg, Bruce ed. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to The Present. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press,1990.
• Conley, VA. Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
• Stone, Aliso. Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006