Due to the focus of this blog away from gender identity, this is going to be a difficult post to write. I’m probably not going to say anything edgy or controversial, but it’s hard to know how to word it without impinging on the subject. Nonetheless. . .
I had a dream, and no it was not like the one Martin Luther King had. I’ll slightly fictionalise it, but I find memories of dreams to be very flexible, as if they’re still forming when one awakes. In this dream, I’m back at Warwick University and Christine Battersby says that in order to stay on course for an MA, we all have to write an essay on Julia Kristeva. We have an hour to do it. This is in a way very much like the dream where you find yourself back at school having to do your exams and aren’t ready, but there’s a twist. When I look at the paper I’m planning to write on, all of it has stuff printed on it and with fifteen minutes to spare, I go back to my room to get clean, plain paper. On getting outside, I’m in Bristol. I can literally write anything at all on Julia Kristeva and get through, but even that seems to be beyond me in the dream.
OK, so hearing about other people’s dreams is boring isn’t it? For most people anyway. That said, it’s worth dwelling on this one to some extent and here comes the tightrope walk. There used to be a book with a mirror cover called ‘A Woman In Your Own Right’. It was about assertiveness and I didn’t buy or read it because at the time I definitely didn’t regard myself as a woman in my own right and felt that were I to become assertive it would be at the cost of actual women. I think I was fourteen at the time. There’s a long tale here about whether being assertive or successful occupies someone else’s space which I won’t go into here, but this was the beginning of a general approach towards feminist theory which I continued to pursue well into adulthood. Whether or not it made sense, I still had that attitude when I was doing postgrad at Warwick, that feminist theory was for women to read, not men, and that for a person constructed as male to do so was transgressive, invasive and violating, as well as effectively stealing women’s intellectual work, and that I wouldn’t understand it anyway because my mind was inferior to that of a woman’s due to emotional imbalance and male-socialised fake rationality. Consequently, I had some difficulty when I started my MA because, being in continental philosophy at Warwick, there was a big overlap with the Women’s Studies department. Most of my interaction with the staff there was with Gillian Rose and Christine Battersby. Gillian very sadly died of cancer in 1995, although the view was expressed that people took her work more seriously than it deserved to be because of her illness. I can’t comment because I know nothing. I heard something from her and knew a little of her. I was aware that she wanted to promote women’s work in philosophy, so I ignored her so as not to interfere. Christine Battersby is different. She’s chiefly known for her ‘Gender And Genius’, which analyses the concept of genius in the Romantic tradition and the appropriation of emotion from a feminine to a masculine trait. I mean, I haven’t read it, so I’m guessing there.
And this is the thing: I’ve never read it, whatever “it” is, in this setting. I was aware of Kristeva and Irigaray, but clearly I’m focussed on the former in this dream, and I am kind of honouring this dream by now writing about Kristeva here, and I’ll go on to write about Irigaray: semiotic and post-structuralist thinkers in the French mode.
Both of them were followers of the famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Although I’m no fan of his, simply because they used to be his acolytes, it doesn’t follow that they either slavishly followed his sexist assumptions or built on them, and it’s possible to salvage positive things from an unpromising start. Sometimes, also, you presumably have to make compromises to get where you aim to be in your career. Anyway, Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French polymath working in the area of critical theory, and when I say she’s a polymath I mean she applies her thought to a number of disciplines. She sees them through the same lens. Two important concepts of hers are abjection and the chora, although there are others such as the symbolic vs the semiotic and intertextuality. At this stage, all I have is a dream I experienced a few days ago and a peremptory examination of her work, but I can plonk these two in front of you. Abjection is the idea of what emerges from one which is therefore intermediate between subjective and objective. A really obvious example is excrement, but an interesting observation can be made on another form of the abject. Speaking for myself, if I had a glass of water in front of me I was about to drink and I spat in it, I’d no longer want to drink it. This is of course apparently absurd, as that saliva would have immediately mixed with the water when it was in my mouth. Likewise, what one does in the toilet is expel matter which is already in one’s body, yet most of the time this is not dwelt upon. Probably most people, when asked to reflect on this, would say it’s an instinctive response which protects one against possible danger such as infection or poisoning, but Kristeva’s view is that it’s a psychoanalytical phenomenon which is extended to others, and in fact to the Other, which has a significance beyond instinctive survival. I can get on board with this to some extent because I can see that much of the time we don’t eat to keep ourselves alive, don’t play ball games to practice hunting skills and so on: function and purpose are in different realms, so that’s okay. There’s an important principle here actually, that evolution is effectively blind and produces whatever is good enough from the resources available.
Though somewhat elaborate-seeming, the abject is similar to the disgusting and the abhorrent. Kristeva uses it, as do others, in the analysis of horror and film critics have applied this to horror films. This also blends into the “monstrous feminine”, not so far as I know a specific concept of hers but overtly developed from this concept. In ‘Alien’, for example, the alien lays eggs in humans and hatches out in the abdomen before tearing out of it. The ‘Star Trek’ episode ‘The Devil In The Dark’ is about a mother alien killing human miners, and it even applies to ‘Beowulf’. The claim goes further than that to propose that all horror is in fact about the monstrous feminine. I have to say that that seems quite far-fetched but I haven’t read the arguments, which is a general problem with what I’m writing today. I haven’t read her at all.
Abjection is extended to refer to the Other, i.e. those who are “not we”, which often includes other humans whose differences, and even similarities, to oneself, are emphasised. Hence for a White able-bodied heterosexual man that could be women, non-Whites, the disabled and queers, or a combination of those. It could also work the other way but this is seldom done, or at least not enough. The situation is complex because as well as othering the people concerned, one also recognises, and possibly fears, oneself in them. This is clearly similar to the anthropological idea that things which don’t fit neatly into single categories are deemed disgusting, the classic example being a flying squirrel since in terms of the culture concerned it was neither beast nor bird – I don’t know what they thought of bats.
The other big concept is the chora, from the Greek and adopted from Plato’s idea of the inaccessible origin of creation, including the uterus as well as the primal chaos of the abyss from which the cosmos came forth. Kristeva tried to reclaim this concept from its patriarchal setting as Plato conceived it. For her, it’s a nourishing maternal space. It can also be thought of as early infancy, before the Mirror Stage, a significant event in Lacanian psychoanalysis where children first recognise themselves in mirrors. Before that point, the mother’s body is the sole mediator between the chora and the symbolic realm: she’s everything to the chora. Hence another distinction in Kristeva’s thought between the semiotic and the symbolic. The former is not to be confused with semiotics. Instead, it’s emotional and non-linguistic, involving rhythms, music and the poetic. This continues after entering the symbolic phase but is kind of hidden in crevasses. To me, that’s also fine but with both the chora and the semiotic it’s a major assumption, given the importance mothers have for their children, that they would be the sole progenitor of their children much of the time. This to me comes across as a model of development frozen in the past. This is often an issue with psychoanalysis: it feels like it’s frozen in a particular culture at a particular time in history. Even so, to some extent this is still valid and it’s certainly germane to the wider human world even today.
I can’t spend too long on Kristeva, but I will say a couple of other things about her. She was also a novelist, writing detective stories which were linked to her theory, with a journalist character representing her called Stephanie Delacour. I haven’t read them of course. The other thing was that she may have worked as a secret agent for the Bulgarian government and her early writing was published in Maoist journals. I don’t know how much evidence there is for that allegation and I’m just passing it on. It’s quite odd though because she seems quite conservative politically to me.
Now for Luce Irigaray, who wasn’t in my dream. She didn’t explicitly respond to Kristeva although some of her work is clearly a response to hers. The first thing I think of with Irigaray is that when my ex and Sarada were discussing her in a pub once, having read some of her work, they were interrupted by men who seemed to be threatened by the idea of two women talking about something intellectual. I don’t know if they’d noticed it was feminist theory. I wasn’t there, but clearly it was something important to the two of them around the time Sarada and I got together. I don’t know where my ex stands with her now, but Sarada can’t remember much. I could ask my ex I suppose.
Irigaray is a difference feminist. That is, she doesn’t believe women and men are the same and they’re both men, but that women have the potential for their own subjectivity which is inadequately explored, equal to men’s subjectivity and also different. She views Western society as inherently unethical because of the patriarchy. Regarding sexuality, I find her views are really rather strange. She says male sexual satisfaction can only be achieved via an instrument, by which I presume she means the phallus, whereas females are constantly auto-erotic because they are constantly touching themselves, by which she means that the labia are in contact with each other. This enables her to view penis in vagina sex as an interruption of this contact, so I presume that’s where she’s going with that. But the whole thing seems highly metaphorical. Clearly the human body regardless of sex is constantly in contact with itself, and this may be affirming but it doesn’t feel like much can be built on it. It seems to me that if one confines oneself to the metaphorical and poetic, as Irigaray seems to do, it changes philosophy’s role, or perhaps reveals a different role which seems unproductive, which is maybe what she was already either trying to do or already existed in continental philosophy. After all, philosophy is seen by some as literature. But to illustrate what I mean, in the analytical tradition philosophy is used to inform ethical debates, analyse politics and to design digital electronics. All these are thoroughly practical uses, although it’s easy to see the last as fairly irrelevant to social progress. If philosophy is to be replaced by a more metaphorical approach, either it has another function or it needs to proceed in a very unfamiliar way, perhaps in the way literature does, and of course I don’t know what that is but to me it may not be progress because of the peculiar phenomenon of universalism. If we have the ability to appreciate works written in Greek, Roman or Mediaeval settings, that common connection is positive but it also seems to mean it can’t touch social justice or provide a means of improving things, and I would expect a feminist philosopher to want progress.
Irigaray has notoriously been challenged by Sokal in his ‘Fashionable Nonsense’, but it’s unclear whether he simply misunderstands her or is onto something. The issue is that Irigaray states that physics has a masculine bias because it focusses on solid mechanics rather than fluids and also that E=mc² prioritises c as it’s the “fastest” constant. Irigaray also uses mathematical terminology without seeming to understand what it means. Sokal regards all of this as uninformed and unscientific, and as creating illusory profundity. Lacan is sometimes seen as having done the same with his focus on the Borromean Knot.
It has to be said that this feels like some bloke with unearned self-assurance wading into an academic field and explaining things to a woman, whether or not that’s what actually happened. It’s like Richard Dawkins’ fight with Mary Midgley. Irigaray is not trying to do science here but something like psychoanalysis or semiotics, so the question may be about whether what she’s doing is worthwhile compared to what a male scientist might be doing. It’s quite close to being an art vs. science debate. Irigaray has a practice of what’s been called “mimesis”, where she uses scientific terminology to subvert it from within. She may also be trying to show how anti-language is used, and as such it seems to have worked almost too well with Sokal. It is also true that the likes of turbulence and chaos, as reflected for example in how blood flows through the circulatory system in pathological situations and in forecasting the weather and predicting climate change, should be considered more seriously than it has been. Sokal has been accused of scientism, which is the idea that the findings of science are the only important set of views.
One of her aims was to make it clear that scientists and in fact the culture in general was unconsciously perceiving things from a masculine perspective. So for example, many scientific papers and other writing uses the “editorial we”, which is of course gender-neutral in most European languages, but in fact that “we” usually refers either to men or to women who have been induced to adopt a male-centred approach.
‘Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un’ – ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’ – is among her most important works. Now this is an interesting title, bringing to mind the idea that the female body is the default from which the male form deviates, which is how things are among most mammals including humans and meaning that the female sex is not a sex but simply the standard, unmarked and straightforward human form. However, strangely, she seems to mean the opposite. It’s a collection of essays including the eponymous one. Her view, and I’d agree with this, is that the patriarchal view of sex has historically been that the male is the unmarked and the female is either denied or seen as a deviation. The essay itself is about the Freudian idea of penis envy, which it deconstructs. The vagina is literally a sheath or a hole rather than a thing in itself and the clitoris is ignored completely. It does make sense that in a male-dominated society these things are made to be so and do assume such significance although she seeks to deconstruct this too. It’s also interesting that it seems to be autoeroticism which is the contrast to heterosexual penetrative sex rather than lesbianism for her, although this does provide some kind of solitary self-sufficiency, but it omits the solidarity of women together needing each other and not needing men, which seems like a missed opportunity. She also posits the idea that heterosexual sex for a man involves a sadistic fantasy into which women can only insert themselves in a masochistic role, which seems to be an unrealistic generalisation about the male psyche, doesn’t allow for the existence of masochistic men and also for masochistic women whose masochism is deeply in accord with their desires. It seems, in other words, to be kink-shaming. This reminds me of Andrea Dworkin’s views as expressed in ‘Intercourse’, where Dworkin seems to describe a willing submissive role as in some sense morally wrong for women, presumably because of failure of solidarity with other women in this respect. Overall, I do actually find what Irigaray says as rather unsatisfactory and unfair on women, regardless of her view of men.
‘Speculum de l’autre femme’ preceded the other work, and I’ve not read it. This is also a collection of essays which as I understand it analyse male thinkers in terms of their phallocentrism. Published in 1974, this seems long overdue for the time and it could suffer from the problem hindsight imposes on some cultural phenomena of making them seem trite and tired simply because their ideas were ground-breaking and then adopted widely, so it may be difficult to appreciate how revolutionary her ideas were at the time. She asserts that female sexuality is like a “dark continent” for psychoanalysis because of its prior focus on males and their sexuality. I’m intensely curious about whether the speculum referred to is not just a metaphorical mirror but a reference to the gynecological instrument. I’m assuming it is, but as I say I haven’t read it.
There is a third prominent author of this kind whom I’ve not read and who seems to be less well-known in the Anglosphere but equally prominent in the French-speaking world, namely Hélène Cixous. Her most famous work is the 1976 ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ – ‘The Medusa’s Laugh’ – which calls for the development of écriture feminine, also referred to as writing with white ink, the metaphor being partly connected to breast milk. I know even less about her than I do the other two, but I do know that Irigaray shared the idea of using female-centred language and I’m guessing this is similar.
In what I’ve written, I may have come across as quite dismissive of the ideas and writing of these thinkers. I feel that I may have missed something in knowing practically nothing about French literature, but it does seem to me that there is an attachment to words and language here which is not about communication and clarity, and therefore not about sharing wisdom and being open to the wisdom of others. There seems to be an arrogance to it which I guess is inherited from Lacan. Another aspect of this is the fairly vapid nature of psychoanalysis itself. I see it as a necessary early stage of depth psychology, i.e. the kind of stuff you talk about in counselling and psychotherapy, but in my own training in psychology and psychiatry it’s notable that other paradigms are much more evidence-based and helpful, and psychoanalytical concepts as applied to non-conforming behaviour and presumably the states of mind associated with those are simply an unnecessarily elaborate mind game.
However, all of that must be placed in context, some of which is sympathetic to feminism and some of which is more to do with intersectionality. I actively avoided reading any feminist texts other than those I was compelled to do as course requirements for two reasons. One was that I regarded those texts as for women and explicitly excluding me, and it was important for them to have their own space. The other is that due to constructing myself as a man, I felt that feminist theory would be beyond me in the same way as mainstream literature is: I lacked the ability to respond to or understand it properly. I suppose this is a little like the chora, in that I wanted there to be a nurturing space for women to find their own authenticity. Obviously I’ve abandoned all that now (and I’m edging into dodgy territory). The intersectional approach is more hostile to this theorising. One of the most peculiar experiences I’ve had with respect to gender politics is when I read ‘The Sexual Politics Of Meat’ by Carol J Adams, where she made the startlingly false assertion that it surprises some people that so many feminists are vegetarian/vegan (“vegn”). My own experience of that was precisely the opposite. It was notable to me that so few feminists were vegn, the reason for that apparently being that they regarded linguistic construction as central to consciousness and therefore rejected the possibility of non-human consciousness. Therefore, the whole time I’m engaged in this, I’m acutely aware of the possibility that these feminist theorists are hostile or apathetic about animal liberation and may also be White supremacists. All of these people are White and European and seem to be oblivious of those facts, and that makes it hard to trust their judgement.
All that said, it probably is worthwhile reading them and I plan to do so.
A Box Of Chocolates 