## 1. The Freudian Riddle of Femininity



Rooted in both clinical practice with patients and speculative
attempts to apprehend and delineate foundational concepts,
Freud's psychoanalysis aims to offer descriptions of psychical
structures that underlie and account for individual experience in the
variety of its empirical formations. Rather than the rationally
self-interested individual presumed by liberal political theory or the
self-contained and independent *cogito* presumed by Cartesian
epistemology, Freud puts forward a divided subject, unknown to itself,
an 'I' traversed by multiple
agencies. According to Kristeva,
"Freud's discovery designated sexuality as the nexus
between language and society, drives and the socio-symbolic
order" (Kristeva 1974 [1984: 84]). Freud's break-through
insight, in other words, is that sexual bonds initiate us into
subjectivity and civilization.



Freud distinguishes human drives from instincts insofar as drives
(unlike instincts) have no pre-given aim or object supplied by nature
and follow no pre-set biological path. For those who
inhabit a human world, drives might come to be attached to any number
of aims or objects, and felt through any number of bodily locales.
Drives, according to Freud, become specified in these ways through the
mediation of ideas or representations. Human embodiment is thus imbued
with opaque meaning, and sexuality emerges from a kind of instinctual
inadequacy that presents desire as a difficulty or problem, and
propels its increasing complexification.



The core of Freud's claim about the impact of sexuality on
psychic processes can be discerned starting with Freud's early
works on hysteria, although a crucial transformation in his thinking
must be clarified. In *Studies in Hysteria* (1895),
written in collaboration with Josef Breuer, Freud examines the
phenomenon whereby a symptom might exist in the absence of an organic
lesion. Hysteria is diagnosed when it is an idea or memory that makes
one ill, without any physical disease being the cause. By definition,
hysteria is ideogenic (caused by an idea), as it designates the
process by which a troubling but repressed idea is converted into a
bodily symptom. Freud initially posits that hysterical symptoms arise
as a result of violent childhood seduction (what today would be called
molestation), a real trauma that is then retroactively set in motion
by a second, comparatively more mild, event, after a period of
latency. The 'seduction hypothesis' is an attempt to
explain the aetiology of hysteria (the origins of neurosis) by the
traumatic force of a premature sexual experience occurring in early
childhood, an external event that impinges upon the psychical
apparatus but whose memory is repressed, cut off from consciousness.
The repressed memory becomes somatized (enacted on the body and in
bodily symptoms) when a later event, usually occurring in puberty,
catalyzes the earlier memory traces. The talking cure is developed as
a way to bring repressed memories forward and abreact or release them,
re-binding the idea to its severed and dispersed affect (unrepressing
it) and thereby dissolving the bodily symptom.



In the later *Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality* (1905a),
Freud contends, contrary to the earlier supposition that sexuality
intervenes from the outside, that sexuality is a primordial and innate
(if also inchoate) force of infantile life, arising from the bodily
sensations that accompany the life processes. In the interim between
these two works, Freud had abandoned the seduction hypothesis and
replaced it with the thesis of infantile sexuality and the idea that
symptoms are brought about via the conflicts and repressions of
unconscious fantasy. In other words, it is no longer repressed memory
that makes one ill and traumatic sexual violence no longer figures as
the primary cause of symptoms. Instead of an actual past experience,
Freud posits fantasy as the determining factor of neurotic symptoms.
To understand the significance of this transition in his thinking, we
must grasp what Freud means by psychical reality and its distinction
from material reality. In contrast to the historical, intersubjective
domain of material reality, psychical reality is the vital domain of
fantasy and intra-psychic life, operating independently of objective
considerations of veracity. In Freud's view, unconscious
fantasies are not lies or deceptions, but reveal a truth, not about
the objective world, but about the internal life of the subject, who
one is and what one wants. It might be better to say that fantasies
conceal this truth, since conscious articulations of desire and
identity will often lead us astray, expressing but distorting,
manifesting but denying, the subject's wishes.



As Freud documents in "Remembering, Repeating, and
Working-Through" (1914b), the conjectural move from memory to
desire and from fact to fantasy is also a move from external scenes of
seduction to internal psychical acts, from past events to present-day
forces, and from passive submission to active maintenance of discord.
Instead of an external event impinging upon a child's
undeveloped sexuality, the idea of infantile sexuality presupposes
both an energetic drive force at work from earliest childhood and an
internal or intrapsychic dissension, a subject at odds with its own
desires. The thesis of infantile sexuality universalizes the event of
trauma, locating its experience in the instinctual excitations that
overwhelm the psychical apparatus which is prematurely affected. In
discarding the seduction hypothesis, Freud not only discovers the
domain of fantasy and psychical reality, but he also paves the way for
considering the energetics of the libido, the intrapsychic conflict
that is intrinsic to human being, and the idea of responsibility for
the dissonances of desire and the skirmishes that shape a life and its
patterns. While controversy has swirled around Freud's rejection
of the seduction hypothesis, without the scandalous supposition of
infantile sexuality there would be no psychoanalytic theory of the
unconscious. Although some revisionists have argued that Freud
abandons his principles and betrays his patients, in fact Freud never
abjures the reality of sexual abuse or denies that some children are
molested. Rather, the transformation in his thinking concerns the
aetiology of hysteria in a diagnostic sense; neuroses are no longer
said to originate in (presumably rare) childhood sexual violence, and
thus they can be seen to pervade rather than oppose whatever might be
considered normal sexual development. In discarding the idea of a
primary or ontological innocence of the psyche which is then violently
imposed upon from the outside, Freud arrives at the fundamental
premise of psychoanalytic thought.



The exemplar of this phantasmatic activity of the unconscious is the
Oedipal Complex. In Freud's later writings on femininity,
including "Femininity" (1933), "Female
Sexuality" (1931), and "Some Psychical Consequences of the
Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes" (1925), Freud
postulates that the little girl's Oedipal Complex runs a
different course than the little boy's and holds a different
relation to castration anxiety. Crucially, Freud maintains that
femininity cannot be grasped from a biological or conventional
perspective (Freud 1933 [1968: 114]). Another way of putting this is
that sexual difference is centrally concerned with psychical reality
rather than material reality, with the realm of fantasy rather than
nature or culture. The Oedipal story is the story of psychic
development, the story of how we become subjects and in becoming
subjects, how we become sexually differentiated.



The boy and the girl start off, pre-Oedipally, in the same emotional
place, attached to the mother, and it is because of this shared
starting point that Freud claims the little girl is a little man; they
are not yet distinct or sexually differentiated. It is for this reason
as well that Freud maintains the idea of a single, masculine, libido:
the libido is not neutral in Freud's view since its original
object is the mother and this desire for the mother is associated by
Freud with masculinity and activity, just as he associates infant
clitoral pleasure with phallic enjoyment. Still Freud acknowledges
that in the libido's most primordial stages, there can be no
sexual distinction. It is not until children pass through the Oedipal
Complex that they can properly be said to have a genital organization
since this is acquired through a relation to castration and is the
last stage in sexual development (following oral, anal, and phallic
stages). Hence both children at infancy are 'little men,'
their desire construed through the terms of a single masculine
libido. 



Freud seems genuinely puzzled by how femininity comes
about given the girl's prehistory of love
and attachment to the mother, why would she switch allegiances to the
father? And since, prior to genital organization, she too goes through
a phallic (masturbatory) stage, why would she switch the site of
bodily pleasure from the clitoris to the vagina? These are among the
mysteries he means to designate when referring to the riddle of
femininity. That he understands it to be a riddle also intimates that
he understands sexual identity not as a natural pre-given essence,
rooted in anatomy, but rather as a form of individuation and
differentiation realized through complex interaction between the
bodily drives and familial others. The boy's story is more
seamless and continuous since he retains his phallic pleasure and,
although he must displace the immediate object of his desire (no
longer the mother, but someone like her), can look forward to
substitute objects. The boy's Oedipal attachment to the mother
follows uninterruptedly from a pre-Oedipal attachment and it is
brought to an end by the threat of castration emanating from the
father. At the conclusion of the Oedipal Complex the boy identifies
with the father, establishes a super-ego within, and abandons the
immediate object of desire with the promise that he too will one day
possess a similar object modeled on the mother. But the girl's
Oedipal Complex is necessarily more complicated since it can only be
instigated by a break from the pre-Oedipal relation to the mother and
is therefore a secondary formation. Freud postulates that it is the
realization that the beloved mother is castrated that prompts the
little girl to turn her love toward her father. For the girl, in other
words, castration does not resolve the Oedipal Complex but leads her
to enter it, and for this reason Freud claims that it is never wholly
brought to a conclusion or demolished, thus accounting, in his view,
for girls' weaker super-egos and lesser capacity for
sublimation. The girl turns from her mother not in fear but in
contempt and because of envy for what the mother does not possess. The
father represents for her neither a threat (she finds herself already
castrated) nor the prospect of a fulfilled desire in the future (the
only replacement for the missing penis is a child of her own), as he
does for the boy who can identify with him and hope to eventually have
what he has. The father's only promise is thus as a refuge from
loss, represented by the mother who bears this loss and who is at
fault for the girl's own. In the girl's Oedipal scenario,
the father, unlike the castrated mother, stands for the virile
capacity of desire itself, which she herself lacks but might reclaim
through another man's provision of the opportunity to have a
child. In the trajectory of the girl's Oedipal Complex,
femininity is realized as the desire to be the object of masculine
desire.



Freud's theories of sexuality and the unconscious implicate not
only individual psychology but also the constitution of social life.
Formed in ambivalent relation to others, sexuality and sexual identity
permeate the bonds of civilization and ramify throughout all social
relations. In turning his attention to broader cultural questions,
Freud offers a story or myth of the origin of political structures
that parallels and echoes his understanding of the individual psyche.
To understand the political import of the Oedipal Complex, it will be
helpful to place it more generally within the scope of Freud's
understanding of group psychology. In *Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego* (1921), Freud contests
any clear-cut opposition between group and individual psychology and
alleges that human infancy is from the beginning immersed in a world
of others. Even in ostensibly individual psychology, there is always
another involved, as model or object, as site of identification or as
object of love. Identification and love, which form the core of
identity, are already "social phenomena" and, inversely
social relations are themselves premised on developments that occur in
the family. It is thus mistaken to sever individual from group
psychology as though they were not by nature intermingled or to
suppose that there is some kind of special social instinct separate
from the drives that energize the individual. Put another way, the
individual subject is neither formed wholly independently in a kind of
solitary interiority nor formed as merely an effect of exterior social
forces.



*Totem and Taboo* (1913) is Freud's attempt to
explain the origin of social life, the bonds that, on his account,
hold *men* together, on the basis of psychic phenomena. Freud
envisages a primitive pre-political sociality in which a primal horde
of brothers is oppressed by a powerful father who claims for himself
all the women, all the enjoyment, available in the community. The
brothers are deprived or exiled, and they are motivated to bond
together to overthrow the father; they aim, that is, to kill the
father and take for themselves his women, offenses that mirror, at a
collective level, the Oedipal desires of male children. In
Freud's story, the father's murder results not in lawless
freedom and unlimited access to sexual objects (a fraternal civil
war), but rather in the creation of totems and taboos--the primal
father becomes a totemic figure, a revered ancestral object, and the
brother's actions in killing him and claiming his women are
reconceived as the prohibited transgressions of murder and incest. The
two blood taboos that are instituted as law, the prohibitions on
incest and murder, thus have a common origin and emerge
simultaneously, and together they mandate the social processes of
exogamy (marriage outside one's own kin) and totemism (communal
bonds of affiliation established through the medium of a common
ancestor). Freud thereby allies political formation with the two
primal wishes of children and the two crimes of Oedipus, predicating
exogamy on the incest taboo, and fraternal bonds on the sacralization
of life and the prohibition on murder. Totemism and exogamy also
entail fraternal equality: in order that no one take the place of the
father and assume his singular power, the brothers are equally
constrained and equally respected, the distribution of women equally
allotted. Depicting the creation of a stable society grounded in law
(though founded in violence), Freud's tale serves as a paradigm
for not only rudimentary, but also enduring and contemporary,
political relations, which he views as rooted in unconscious drives
but oriented toward achieving a stabilization or equilibrium of those
drives at the communal level. In Freud's narrative, it is the
father/son relationship that matters for the establishment of this
semi-stable political relation, a band of brothers with equal rights.
This lineage founds political order in murderous fraternity, with
women as objects of exchange not citizen-subjects.



Moreover, in explaining the advent of lawful existence, Freud
identifies something recalcitrant, intractable in social
arrangements--a kind of self-assault (the super-ego) that links
pleasure with aggression, and thus that carries a potentially
destabilizing force. The sons' attitude toward the father is one
of ambivalence, hatred qualified by admiration, murder followed by
guilt and remorse. The brothers commemorate this loss and maintain
their bond with one another in the public ceremony of the totem meal
where together they consume a common substance (the father's
body transubstantiated into the sacrificed totem), and thereby affirm
their fellowship and mutual obligation. This confirmation of shared
paternal substance and kinship, and the collective affect of love,
loss, guilt, and mourning, maintains ties of identity. The law that
emerges from the father's murder ritualizes and enforces his
edicts, forbidding murder and incest in the public realm, and takes
hold internally in the superegoic 'no' of prohibition,
producing a permanent sense of guilt that drives civilization and
renders it a perpetual source of discontent. Women, however, appear
not as subjects of the law but as objects of its exchange; moreover,
given the indefinite prolongation of their Oedipal Complex, women will
be more likely to be hostile to the edicts of civilization insofar as
these infringe upon family life.



The relation between father and son is also contained, if concealed,
in the account Freud offers in *The Ego and the Id* (1923) of
how the ego emerges. There Freud writes that identification is
"the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another
person" (Freud 1923 [1968: 37]), i.e., it is prior to
object-cathexes or relations of desire. The primordial libidinal, but
non-objectal, attachment is with the father of "personal
prehistory" (Freud 1923 [1968: 37]). The subsequent and
recurring retreat from object-cathexis (investment of instinctual
energy in an object) to identification (withdrawal of that energy into
the self), is the primary mechanism of ego-formation, taking the lost
object into oneself. Since the ego is the "precipitate" of
abandoned objects, it is configured through loss, in a melancholy
reabsorption that incorporates via identification objects from which
the ego would otherwise be exiled. Just as the father retains
dominance in political life after his death, so he dominates psychic
life even prior to the ego's formation. In Freudian theory, the
father's reign is pervasive, his sovereignty extended in every
domain. Freud's privileging of paternal and fraternal
relations provides the impetus for much of psychoanalytic
feminism, as will be discussed below.


## 2. Feminist Criticism of Psychoanalysis



Even in Freud's circle, not all analysts agreed with
Freud's assessment and there were debates concerning
women's sexuality and the roles of castration and penis envy
therein, notably among Karl Abraham, Ernest Jones, Helene Deutsch, and
Karen Horney. Horney in particular argued for an inherent feminine
disposition that is not merely a secondary formation premised on
castration and she took issue with the ostensible effects of penis
envy and women's supposed feelings of inferiority. As with some
later feminist criticisms of Freud, Horney attempted to retrieve
female sexuality, and by extension a valid form of feminine existence,
by appealing to a genuinely independent nature and holding culture
culpable for women's subordinate status. By thus reasserting the
primacy of biological and social forces, however, Horney disputes
precisely the idea that is central to Freud's hypothesis and
that marks psychoanalysis as a unique field of inquiry, that of a
distinctive psychical realm of representation that is unconscious.



Somewhat later, Simone de Beauvoir addressed the discourse of
psychoanalysis in
*The Second Sex* (1949), devoting an early chapter to her
distrust of "The Psychoanalytic Point of View" (Beauvoir
1949 [1989: 38-52]). Like Horney, Beauvoir denounces
Freud's idea that there is but one, masculine, libido and no
feminine libido with "its own original nature" (1949
[1989: 39]). Freud, in her view, takes for granted what he needs to
account for, namely the value placed on virility. Beauvoir takes Freud
to task for not considering the social origins of masculine and
paternal power and privilege and deems his theory inadequate to
account for woman's otherness. If women envy men, she argues, it
is because of the social power and privilege they enjoy, and not
because of anatomical superiority. Unlike the determinisms and
objectifications of human life offered by biological science (which
treats human beings as determinate objects in the natural world and
thus not as free or self-determining subjects with agency), but
similar to the "economic monism" of historical materialism
(1949 [1989: 52]), psychoanalysis is characterized by Beauvoir as
"sexual monism" (1949 [1989: 52]): everything in its
purview is interpreted through a single lens. Beauvoir indicates at
the opening of the chapter that psychoanalysis offers a perspective
which she does "not intend to criticize as a whole" (1949
[1989: 38]), especially since it does understand that "no factor
becomes involved in the psychic life without having taken on human
significance" (1949 [1989: 38]), but she questions both its
~~dogmatic~~ reliance on determinate elements of development and
its "embarrassing flexibility on a basis of rigid
concepts" (1949 [1989: 38]). Most seriously, in Beauvoir's
view, psychoanalysis allots to women the same destiny of self-division
and conflict between subjectivity and femininity that follows from
social dictates and biological norms. Psychoanalysis presents the
characteristics of femininity and subjectivity as divergent paths,
incompatible with one another. Women might be able to be full persons,
subjects with agency, but only at the expense of their femininity; or
they can embark on the course of femininity, but only by sacrificing
their independence and agency. This either/or between the
masculinization of subjectivity and the submission to femininity
retains the moral, political, and metaphysical opposition between free
self-creation and corporeal incarceration that precludes the
possibility of being both a woman and a subject.



Beauvoir alleges that psychoanalysis holds women to a fixed destiny, a
developmental and teleological life process, precisely insofar as it
defines subjects with reference to a past beyond their control. By
assigning to women an essence or determinate identity, the
psychoanalytic reliance on sexual categories once again renders woman
as the other to a subject rather than a subject herself, and
thereby denies her existential freedom. In Beauvoir's view,
however, if women are not themselves subjects, but that in contrast
with which men's subjectivities are constituted, they are still
freely responsible for this situation, insofar as women collaborate in
this process by seeing themselves through the eyes of men, justifying
their existence through their romantic relationships, and attempting
to mirror men's being. By casting women's otherness as an
effect not only of their social situation (with its power relations),
but also of their choices (and hence responsibility), Beauvoir
preserves women's freedom, unlike the psychoanalytic discourse
that she claims rejects "the idea of choice and the correlated
concept of value" (Beauvoir 1949 [1989: 45]).



Beauvoir's misgivings about Freud's account of femininity
stem from two sources, a feminist suspicion that women, in
psychoanalytic discourse, are understood on the basis of a masculine
model, and an existentialist conviction that human beings are
self-defining, choosing themselves through their own actions.
Following her existentialist convictions, Beauvoir insists that even
when women abdicate their freedom, they do so as agents responsible
for their own destinies, not merely as passive victims following a
developmentally determined fate. Following her feminist convictions,
Beauvoir recognizes that women's choices may be constrained by
powerful social and bodily forces, but insists that women nonetheless
bear ultimate responsibility for realizing their own possibilities by
emancipating themselves. Her reading of Freud is thus largely directed
against the perceived determinism of psychoanalysis and less against
the idea of an unconscious per se, although she does want to defend
the notion of a unitary subject at the origin of choice, insisting
that "psychic life is not a mosaic, it is a single whole in
every one of its aspects and we must respect that unity"
(Beauvoir 1949 [1989: 44]), a supposition that certainly limits the
affinities between existentialism and psychoanalysis. Nonetheless,
Beauvoir's dispute with Freud appears to be less about whether
constraint is part of our being in the world, and more about where
that constraint is located: psychoanalysis locates constraint
internally, in the constitution of the psyche itself, not only in the
situations of social life, whereas Beauvoir locates it externally, in
the cultural forces that impact even the most intimate sense of our
own agency. Beauvoir thus claims that her own interpretations of
women's femininity will disclose women in their liberty,
oriented freely by the future and not simply explained by a past. She
thereby ratifies the promise of existentialism for feminism.



Beauvoir's own project of elucidating the paradoxical relation
between femininity and subjectivity is nonetheless influenced by
psychoanalytic concepts and appropriates its theoretical insights in
various ways. The *Second Sex* highlights the practices by
which women become women through their appropriation of bodily
(sexual) difference, as well as the manner in which a human being
generally is limited and compelled by bodily and unconscious forces.
Indeed Beauvoir and Freud seem to agree that one is not born but
becomes a woman, i.e., that femininity involves some sort of (social
or psychical) process rather than a biological or natural given. Both
are interested in the 'how' of this process, how one
becomes a woman, although, as discussed above, they disagree about
what this 'how' is. Moreover, in her articulation of
women's ambivalent attitudes toward embodiment, sexuality, and
maternity, Beauvoir is clearly indebted to the attention
psychoanalytic practice gives to listening to women's first
person narratives, interpreting the emotional impact of events that
can not be easily categorized, and heeding attachments that carry both
affection and resentment. Like Freud, Beauvoir recognizes that we are
embodied as sexual beings and that our bodies not only testify to our
own finitude and limits but also matter as sites of encounters with
others, encounters that are multivalent--including loving
connections and threatening defenses, moments of affirmation and of
dissolution. Beauvoir refuses any political program that demands we
deny our bodily possibilities in order to be fully human and proclaims
that bodies and bodily difference are integral to projects of
selfhood, and not merely accidental contingencies of a rational and
disembodied mind. For Beauvoir, as for Freud, there is no such thing
as a disembodied, non-sexed human being; any ideal of the human apart
from sexual identity or difference is an abstraction that can only be
affirmed on the basis of a mind/body dualism. Femininity for her is
not merely a mystification that imprisons women's subjectivity
(even if its social construal has had this effect). Finally, like
Freud, Beauvoir is fully aware of the impact on children of their
domestic situation, the way familial life resonates with meaning that
informs not only intimate relations but relations to the larger
world.



Beauvoir's portrayal of living a feminine existence, of sexual
difference as an embodied situation, developed through a series of
phenomenological descriptions, tries to understand how women have been
cast as other in the drama of masculine subjectivity and doubts the
premise that this is an historical event, occurring at some definitive
point in time. Beauvoir herself has often been (mis)read in a way
analogous to her (mis)reading of psychoanalysis, as proferring a
determinate succession of experiences for women, rather than
describing socially extant processes. But *The Second Sex*
depicts the effects on women's character of inequitable social
arrangements; it neither proffers a normalized destiny for women nor
presupposes a common metaphysical identity. Even so, in many ways
Beauvoir's work is more easily aligned with the sociologically
oriented Anglo-American feminists than with Irigaray and Kristeva.


## 3. Language, Law, and Sexual Difference



In considering the background of psychoanalytic feminism, a large
portion of which is rooted in or aligned with what gets called French
Feminism, the French context of psychoanalytic theory is also crucial,
and in particular the work of Jacques Lacan. Lacan's work has
been both a powerful influence on, and an object of critique for,
feminist appropriations of psychoanalysis, and his ideas have been
taken up, transformed, and challenged by Luce Irigaray and Julia
Kristeva (both of whom are discussed below), among others.
Lacan's work is both praised for its de-biologization of Freud
and pilloried for its phallocentrism. These two aspects are in fact
imbricated, as both hinge on Lacan's elaboration of language as
a symbolic order that precedes and makes possible human subjectivity.
In order to stay focused on the feminist deployment of the
psychoanalytic theoretical apparatus, I will concentrate first on
Lacan's understanding of the intersection of language and law in
the symbolic order, and then on his account of the ego's
formation in the imaginary order. The imaginary and symbolic are modes
of representation that make the world and the self intelligible. The
symbolic is Lacan's term for the way in which reality becomes
intelligible and takes on meaning and significance, through words; the
imaginary refers to the mode of intelligibility offered by images. The
concordant and conflicting mediation of the world by images and words
coordinates, or makes sense of, reality and instigates both
subjectivity and social relations. As with Freud, maternal and
paternal figures are central to his account of subjectivity. 



Lacan characterizes his own work as fundamentally a return to Freud,
albeit one that brings the insights of structural linguistics,
especially Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, and structural
anthropology, primarily Claude Levi-Strauss, into the domain of
psychoanalysis. Even so, his returns are also revisions; he not only
retrieves but ~~renovates~~ Freud's central concepts.
According to Lacan, Freud's theory of sexuality anticipates a
theory of signification that he could not yet elaborate. The
anthropological and linguistic lineage of Lacan's thought is
central to this conceptualization of a "symbolic ~~universe~~
domain." Lacan explicitly endorses Levi-Strauss's
conception of the transcendental law at the origin of human sociality
as the incest taboo; he writes that "the fundamental or primary
law, the one where culture begins in opposition to nature, is the law
of the prohibition of incest" (Lacan 1986 [1992: 66-7]).
The intrusion of language and law institutes a break with nature, one
that transfigures the world by imbuing it with meaning. Following the
logic of *Totem and Taboo*, social identities are constituted
on the basis of exclusions that establish kinship networks. These
social bonds are maintained through mandates and prohibitions (what is
required and what is forbidden), and in particular through the mandate
of exogamy (with its structures of exchange) which determines that
"the Oedipus complex is both universal and contingent"
(Lacan 1978 [1991b: 33]): paternal prohibition provides the conditions
for human sociality without the prohibition itself being innate. Lacan
thus accounts for the transgenerational transmission of elementary
structures of kinship without appealing to any natural necessity.
Lacan takes this law of kinship (dictating desire and its limits) to
be fundamentally co-terminous with the order of language since it is
instituted through a symbolic articulation.



Lacan calls the paternal prohibition (the incest taboo) the 'law
of the father,' and he develops the connection between law and
language by way of a pun. In French *Non* (No) and *Nom*
(Name) sound alike. The no that prohibits (the father's law) and
the name that establishes authority (the father's name or the
proper name) are conferred simultaneously. By submitting to the law of
the father (his no and name) the child assumes a symbolic identity and
place in the human universe of meaning, i.e., the child becomes a
subject, bound by law and bearer of language. With this compliance,
the child takes on a life of desire and incompletion, pursuing lost
objects with no firm ground or fixed purpose, a lack of plenitude in
being that Lacan designates as castration. 



As discussed above in the section on Freud, Freud understands women to
be 'castrated,' deprived of a penis, and men to live under
the threat of castration. Lacan complicates this theoretical
perspective by deeming all subjects, all speaking beings, to be
castrated, by which he means deprived of the phallus, which is not the
same as the penis. While the penis is a biological organ, the phallus
is a signifier which invokes or points toward other signifiers, or
toward a system of signifiers. The moment of
castration is the primordial moment of loss, the fracturing of being
by language. With entry into the reign of law and language, subjects
are cut off from the immediacy of bodily experience; relations to
things, and to oneself and others, are now mediated by words and
representations. 



Castration takes place when the child recognizes lack in the mother
and her maternal omnipotence is annulled. The mother, for the child,
ceases to be the all-powerful provider of every satisfaction as she
herself is a desiring being deprived of satisfaction. This conundrum
of maternal desire points elsewhere, toward "the law introduced
by the father" (Lacan 1966 [2006: 582]). The paternal
prohibition intervenes to warn the child that s/he is not the answer
to the question of the mother's desire. Galvanized by the
mother's lack, the law of the father (which need not be embodied
in an actual person) takes the place of the desire of the mother,
substitutes for it, occludes it. Indeed the paternal function, working
through name and law, indicates a dead father, just as Freud
understands in *Totem and Taboo* that the murdered father, the
precondition of law, is stronger than the living one. In the Lacanian
version of the Oedipal Complex, human beings achieve a sexual position
by traversing the Oedipal Complex, i.e., by submitting to castration,
also called the phallic function, and thereby entering into
signification. There is thus no sexual difference prior to
representation.



Here we arrive at the phallocentrism, if not the patriarchalism, of
Lacan's thought, the central role of the phallus in his thinking
about subjectivity and sexual difference. According to Lacan, the
phallus instates the signifier into the subject regardless of any
"anatomical distinction between the sexes" (Lacan 1966
[2006: 576]). The phallus, in other words, is responsible for the
child's passage from immersion in perceptual immediacy to a
representational domain in which the world takes on meaning. It is
this claim that de-biologizes Freud, since it articulates the function
of the phallus apart from any particular bodily attributes. Lacan
insists that the phallus is a signifier, not an image or bodily organ,
and that in relation to it all are castrated. The father's No
effectively says to the child 'you are not the object of the
mother's desire' or 'you are not her phallus, the
thing that fulfills her.' As such, it also conveys the message
that the child too is lacking or desiring. Although Lacan
distinguishes between a 'seeming to be' which
characterizes femininity, in the attempt to be the phallus that one is
not (to be the object of desire), from a 'seeming to have'
which characterizes masculinity in the attempt to have the phallus
that one does not have (to possess the object of desire), he still
maintains that everyone is lacking the phallus in some way, either in
the mode of not being it or in the mode of not having it. Nonetheless,
while Lacan centers human experience not on the supposed biological
fixity of anatomical distinctions, but on a representational economy,
the phallus retains its associations with masculinity and remains the
focal point of sexual identity. 



As already discussed, Freud had theorized that there is only one
libido and it is masculine. In "The Signification of the
Phallus," Lacan explicitly addresses, and criticizes, the
alternative view that there might be two libidos, which he satirizes
as a kind of sexual equality, the "equality of natural
rights" (Lacan 1966 [2006: 577]). This is the view I earlier
mentioned as belonging to Karen Horney who defends the idea of an
inherent, underived, biologically-based, nature of feminine sexuality.
Lacan also disparages the idea that the final stage of genital
sexuality is directed toward the entire person in his or her
personhood, the achievement of a kind of tenderness toward the whole
being of another (Lacan 1966 [2006: 580]). Lacan disputes both of
these positions as normalizing and biologizing and claims that the
psyche is not harmonized with nature in either of these ways. In
contrast to this fantasy of sexual complementarity, the idea that
men's and women's sexual interests converge, Freud, Lacan
claims, understood "the essential disturbance of human
sexuality" (1966 [2006: 575]), that we are always lacking,
always in search of aims and objects, "the deviation of
man's needs due to the fact that he speaks" (1966 [2006:
579]), and that this discordance means also that there is no
symmetrical or harmonious sexual relation between well-integrated and
self-realized men and women.



This symbolic dimension of human relations must be clearly
distinguished from the imaginary as the domain of the ego. The
imaginary order is most fundamentally and plainly elucidated in
Lacan's essay "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the
*I* Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,"
where he elaborates Freud's insights in *The Ego and the
Id*, taking up the idea that the ego is first and foremost a
bodily ego formed through the "projection of a surface"
(Freud 1923 [1968: 27]), a visual representation of an external veneer
or facade. Lacan concurs, writing that consciousness occurs
"each time ... there's a surface such that it can
produce what is called *an image*" (Lacan 1978 [1991b:
49]). The mirror stage commences, pre-Oedipally, when the infant is
around 6 months old. The infant at this age is literally
*infans*, without speech and moreover, without bodily
coordination or motor control. Born prematurely, at a point prior to
any adequate capacity for self-care, the infant is wholly
instinctually inept. By identifying itself with an image, a coherent
unity that contrasts to its own fragmented and dispersed bodily
existence, the infant forms a preliminary self, one animated by an
illusion but an illusion that allows it to anticipate its own future
organization.



Lacan's account of the mirror stage establishes the ego as
fundamentally imaginary, formed through the infant's specular
captivation with the unitary form presented in images of itself which
it assumes as its own through identification. This perceptual image of
coherent bodily contours and boundaries is at odds with the
infant's motor incapacity and the "turbulent
movements" or fragmented drives that animate its own body and
processes. The ego, with its illusion of self-mastery and containment,
is formed through misrecognition, an anticipatory identification with
an idealized, stable, self-enclosed, citadel of self. This
identification with an image of oneself sets up the ego as rivalrous,
narcissistic, and aggressive. While the act of misrecognition becomes
the basis for a sense of self or for self-consciousness, it is also an
act of alienation, exclusion, or self-division; by erecting an
imaginary ideal, representing oneself in a perfected image, the self
is also split and rendered unconscious to itself, cut off from the
multiplicity of dispersed drives. 



For Lacan, the ego is a "knot of imaginary servitude"
(Lacan 1966 [2006: 80]) and thus the site of the subject's
stagnancy and inertia. The mirror stage also forms the basis of
Lacan's critique of ego psychology; whereas the latter takes
strengthening the ego to be the aim of analytic practice, Lacan takes
the aspirations of the ego to be a "lure" (1966 [2006:
78]) of self-possession, an armor that rigidifies the subject and
resists freedom and movement, a defensive structure that provides an
alienating identity. With this theory of the ego, Lacan presents a
subject at odds with itself, non-self-identical, in "primordial
Discord" (1966 [2006: 78]), torn between unity and anarchy,
organization and chaos, integration and fragmentation. The withdrawal
of the self from itself proceeds from the reflexivity of
representational practices of language. The ego as object is trapped
in oppositional relationships, including with itself, and cannot
therefore be equated with the subject as speaking being who, in the
use of words, signifiers that are differentially related to one
another, is capable of more complex plays of presence and absence;
language, unlike perception (I perceive an object or I don't),
can evoke simultaneously the presence and the absence of the thing (I
can represent objects that are not present).



While the advent of the symbolic order is tied to Oedipalization, and
the imaginary order is tied to the pre-Oedipal period, it would be
mistaken to think of the imaginary and symbolic in only developmental
or chronological terms as they are also ongoing structures of
experience. Even in the seemingly dyadic relation between mother and
child, Lacan argues, a third term is always at work. Initially this
third term is simply a question, the question of the mother's
desire, of what she wants, but already this question interrupts or
destabilizes the child's position, rents dyadic unity, even as
the child takes itself to be this object of desire, since it indicates
in a preliminary way that the mother is lacking, that she is not
whole, entire, omnipotent. The question of desire, in other words,
means that the phallic mother of the imaginary is already the
castrated mother of the symbolic, and that the imaginary unity of the
ego, with its oppositional relations, is bound to be sublated into a
symbolic relation of difference.



It is important, however, not to conflate the mother with the woman or
maternity with femininity. Lacan famously declares that
"there's no such thing as Woman, Woman with a capital
*W* indicating the universal" (1975 [1998: 72]), a
metaphysical concept with determinate and substantive content. In
asserting that 'The Woman' does not exist, Lacan indicates
that something of the psyche escapes castration, limitation,
signification, and the demands of the law of the father. Symbolic and
imaginary representations leave something out, hit their limit,
produce an impasse that presents a fracture or fissure in the symbolic
order. While sexual difference is mediated by representation, it
cannot be fully contained within its terms.




The idea that sexual difference is not biologically innate but
established through language and law has led some feminists to conclude
that Lacan is on the side of social constructionism but this would be
mistaken. Lacan is adamant that the choice between nature and
culture is a false one, and that language is not a "social
phenomenon" (Lacan 2006 [1970], 578). Language and law,
personified by the name of the father, are irreducible to social
practices and processes and are in fact the condition of their
possibility. While Lacan is criticized for constituting sexual
difference on the basis of the phallic function and subjectivity on the
basis of paternal authority, what the Lacanian project does provide for
feminism is not the idea of a malleable culture, susceptible to human
mastery, as distinct from a fixed nature that escapes it, but the more
disconcerting idea that human mastery, of ourselves, of others, of
nature and culture, is itself illusory. Rather than the promise
of a rational progress toward greater and greater equality, respect for
individual difference, and universality, Lacan's insights, like
Freud's, point toward the precariousness of identity and social
bonds and to the instability of the drives that attach us to one
another. Subjectivity and sexuality are not natural adaptations
but deviations, detours, breaks from nature that undermine identity and
divide or limit any unity of self or community. In addition to
the distinctiveness of his method, focus, and insight, this willingness
to grapple with the limits of self-mastery is one reason why Lacan has been taken
as an innovative and amenable resource for some feminist theorists.
In exposing the inadequacies of social or empirical accounts of
sexual difference, identity, and the power relations built upon them,
Lacan confronts the fundamental structures at the root of empirical
socio-historical circumstances.


## 4. French Feminism



French Feminism is in many ways a misnomer since the authors thus
characterized are rarely of French origin or nationality (although
French is the predominant language of their writing) and not
necessarily overtly self-identified as feminist. The writers
affiliated with French Feminism, including Luce Irigaray, Julia
Kristeva, Sarah Kofman, Catherine Clement, and Helene Cixous, among
others, variously ask about the relation between the maternal and the
feminine, doubt that we can say what a woman is, worry about
Freud's lack of attention to mothers, play with writing style,
wonder about feminine subjectivity, ask if women can be subjects or
citizens without adapting to masculine norms, impeach Lacan's
phallocentrism, and suspect that access to language assimilates women
into neutralized brothers. Unlike Beauvoir, they are philosophically
and temperamentally more sympathetic to the split of subjectivity
detailed by psychoanalysis, the idea that I am not I, that
self-division rather than self-identity is the fundamental feature of
human existence, and therefore that the subject is not a unitary point
of origin for choice. Like Beauvoir, they ask whether the structures
of femininity and the structures of subjectivity are compatible,
commensurable, reconcilable, and are vexed by the apprehension that
they are fundamentally at odds. While they aim to disentangle
femininity from maternity, and provide a critique of their conflation,
they also take seriously the significance of maternity for women and
for children of both sexes. Because they concede the limits of
socio-cultural explanations for women's lack of standing in the
social contract, and take femininity and the feminine body as points
of departure for speech or writing, they have often been accused of
essentialism. Below I focus on the work of Irigaray and Kristeva,
examining how they engage with and transform the ideas of Freud and
Lacan, and how they articulate sexual difference as integrally
connected to the foundation, and disruption, of a symbolic order.


### 4.1 The Impasse of Feminine Subjectivity



Irigaray characterizes her own project as taking place in three
stages: first, deconstructing the masculine subject; second, figuring
the possibility for a feminine subject; and third, construing an
intersubjectivity that respects sexual difference (Irigaray 1995a:
96). Sexual difference, in her view, is not a system of domination to
be overcome but a cultural process and practice to be achieved and
nourished; the actual relations of domination and subordination that
characterize Western politics, society, history, literature, language,
and law, epitomize for Irigaray the reign of *sexual
indifference*, the fraternal order of equal brothers/citizens that
is inattentive to the self-division of nature, its immanent sexual
differentiation. Irigaray's writings implicate Freud in this
culture of sexual indifference, his work a symptom of masculine
metaphysics and its dream of self-identity and self-mastery. I will
discuss Irigaray's understanding of sexual indifference further
below, after first describing and elucidating her style of
writing.



Irigaray's writing style is often mimetic, an approach that she
claims has been "historically assigned to the feminine"
(Irigaray 1977 [1985b: 76]) and therefore that she adopts deliberately
in order to "try to recover the place of her exploitation by
discourse" (1977 [1985b: 76]). Irigaray's writing does not
proceed propositionally, laying down theses and supporting arguments,
nor is it formulated through conventionally linear explanations. This
is not to say, of course, that she does not draw conclusions or that
her writing is empty of insight. But these insights are reached by
mirroring the text she is reading, allowing it to play out its
tensions and contradictions, juxtaposing, transfiguring, and
intensifying its crises and putting its parapraxes (its textual and
conceptual slips of the tongue) on display. Her writing is driven by
the vagaries of the author before her, and makes appear, or unmasks,
the structuring forces of the text and its impasses and limits. This
reading strategy goes to work on the unconscious logic of a text,
revealing the author's underlying fantasies and anxieties by
amplifying and reflecting them, and thereby attempting to loosen the
masculine hold on the symbolic by conveying its unstated postulates
and conversing from a different perspective. Intently attentive to the
signifer, to the words and silences of psychoanalytic texts, she aims
to retrieve the bodily in language, something underlying symbolic
processes of representation, and to invent a new language and imagine
new forms.



*Speculum of the Other Woman* (her dissertation and the work
that got her exiled from the Lacanian school) includes "The
Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry," Irigaray's long
essay on Freud's writings on femininity. Irigaray's essay
on Freud begins by tackling head-on his articulation of the riddle of
femininity (Irigaray 1974 [1985a: 13]) in his lecture on
"Femininity." Here already we can recognize both
Irigaray's unique style and her critical project, and the way
these two features of her writing are imbricated and entangled with
one another, propelling a distinctively mimetic method of reading,
repeating, and reproducing the text, mirroring Freud's
speculative discourse but also transforming and sabotaging its terms.
Her text opens as Freud's does, with his words, and is comprised
of long quotations that follow the course of Freud's essay.
Insofar as this appropriation might at first appear as the passive
listening of a dutiful daughter, Irigaray performs a kind of
masquerade of femininity: receptive, submissive, obedient. But this
performance does not merely reiterate or reproduce; in exemplifying
the ways in which women have no language of their own, can only speak
in or through the voice of the father, she is establishing the
symbolic terrain upon which any critique must move while also
subverting its presuppositions. Her own words are inserted as
commentary, question, counterpoint, breaking open the Freudian text,
usurping its privileges, revealing its wounds. By engaging Freud in a
conversation, she insists on her own status as a speaking subject, and
not merely an object of study in support of the expansion of a
sexist science.



Irigaray's insistence on her own speech is especially crucial
given Freud's reprimand to women: "you are yourselves the
problem" (Freud 1933 [1968: 113]). Freud's lecture had
ventured to address the question of sexual difference, and had
endeavored to complicate rather than simplify our perceptions and
certainties concerning its meaning and status. Irigaray, however, by
retrieving and replaying Freud's voice, attempts to show that he
remains caught up in certainties and dogmatisms about sex, so that
ultimately his discourse is one of sexual *indifference*, as I
will discuss next. Freud is thus not the master of Irigaray's
essay: his words do not so much determine her trajectory as reveal
their own (freely) associative character, his own unmastery, the egoic
and identificatory fantasies that haunt his texts on femininity.



According to Irigaray, Freud's work is sexually indifferent
because of its assumption of a kind of symmetry or harmony between
masculine and feminine identities and sexualities. With regard to
sexual desire, Freud assumes that 'normal' women will
desire men and be desired by them and thus that each sex can fulfill
the longings of the other. With regard to sexual identity, Freud
models the feminine Oedipal Complex on a masculine paradigm and
origin, with the feminine as its distorted copy. In both cases, Freud
contrives to understand women as the complementary other to men, an
other modeled on the same. Irigaray considers this to be a monosexual,
homosocial economy governed by specular opposition or mirroring. It is
this sexual indifference that is referenced in the title of
Irigaray's essay as "the old dream of symmetry."
But, as also indicated by her title, Irigaray believes this dream is
premised on a "blindspot." Freud characterizes the
girl's relation to the maternal figure as an "especially
inexorable repression" (Freud 1931 [1968: 226]) and views the
little girl as a little man; the mother/daughter relation is not seen
or apprehended by him. The crime here, in Irigaray's view, is
matricide and the suppression of maternal genealogies or lines of
descent. The law of the father, the patrimonial order by which sons
inherit the father's name by submitting to his prohibitions,
privileging this name over the maternal body, appropriates even birth
to the father. The maternal lineage is suppressed. Irigaray argues
that this means that a pre-Oedipal mother-daughter relationship has
not been taken up by the signifying order; in fact that order
retroactively denies that such a relation ever existed, since a
daughter becomes a daughter properly, becomes feminized or sexually
differentiated (as a girl or woman), only post-Oedipally. In Lacanian
terms, Freud excludes the mother/daughter relation from the symbolic
order. Not only is the maternal connection lost or repressed, but the
ability to name or identify the loss as a loss is also barred.
Banished from memory, the loss of the mother cannot be mourned.
Irigaray claims that it is this genealogical asymmetry, with the
father's name memorialized and the mother's body
sacrificed to it, that sustains the legitimacy of patriarchy and
propels the fantasy of a harmony of sexual difference, the conviction
that the sexes are reciprocal and complementary in their identities
and desires.



Sexual difference, in Irigaray's reading of Freud, is thus
subsumed under or derived from "the problematics of
sameness" (Irigaray 1974 [1985a: 26]) and oriented by the
fantasy of auto-genesis, being one's own origin, an ideal of
self-mastery that is not threatened by any real difference.
Freud's account of sexuality presupposes that the sexual subject
is male, and even that there are no women, only mothers or those
destined to become mothers, that is that the meaning of being a woman
is fully exhausted in the meaning of being a mother. In the psychical
pre-history of the little girl as elaborated in the idea that
"the little girl is a little man" (Freud 1933 [1968:
118]), she will not have been a daughter. As little girls diverge from
little boys, as they cease to be little men, they are expected to be
appealing visual objects, the mirror of men's desires, enabling
men to represent themselves, shore up their self-image with an adoring
reflection. Irigaray sees in this account a masculine desire for
women's desire to be directed toward men. Women are expected to
provide the mirror that supports men's projects, nurtures and
nourishes their identities, energizes their drive for mastery, by
presenting themselves as an alter ego. This imaginary, specular, order
is matricidal, feeding on the blood of women, leaving unpaid its
fundamental debt to the mother, and abandoning the subjectivity of the
daughter. By repressing dependence on the maternal origin of life, the
masculine is marked as originary, that from which differentiation
proceeds. What functions as a primal loss for boys/sons, the cause of
their desire, can only function as a gap in language, an absence of
meaning for girls/daughters, an exile from desire, language, and other
women, an irretrievable void that cannot be recuperated in language
because it is instigated by language, by the entry into symbolic order
called forth by the paternal prohibition of the father's
no/name. Irigaray's concern is that for Freud, the mother is
only a mirror and her relationship is always to a son; there are no
mother/daughter relations. Not only is Western culture premised on
matricide, which she claims is more primordial than the patricide of
*Totem and Taboo*, but this matricide is forgotten and the
mother remains unmourned.



Repressing any maternal genealogy, political life has been predicated
on the lineage between fathers and sons and the bonds of brotherhood,
appropriating universality and citizenship to men and rendering women
as objects of their desire and exchange. The exploitation of women is
not merely a phenomenon that takes place within the social order, it
is its very foundation and premise. Irigaray calls the fraternal order
"hom(m)osexuality," meaning both that it is an order of
the same (homo) and that it is the order of men (homme): the regime of
sexual indifference ignores relations among women, and especially
between mothers and daughters, and situates women as the medium of
men's alliances with one another, as the buried support and
energetic reserves of the body politic. This forgetting of the mother
supports vertical and horizontal relations between men but leaves
women unrepresented in language (as subjects) and incapable of
achieving representation in the body politic (as citizens).
Irigaray's own project thus aims to criticize the hom(m)osexual
order and its specular economy, to reinvigorate mother/daughter
relations to make possible a feminine subjectivity, and to cultivate
sexual difference in the political realm, in civil identity.
Developing the resources for transformation, i.e., for women to become
citizens and subjects, entails disrupting the transmission of power
between men and rethinking the passage from nature to culture
represented by the Oedipal Complex. This task requires intervening in
the symbolic and imaginary realms, creating a new language that would
not be severed from the body and ending the division of labor between
love and law.



The structure of the representational economy, its association of
subjectivity with masculinity, precludes the convergence of being a
woman and being a speaking being. Although of course there are words
for women, these words constitute her only with reference to
masculinity, as a photographic negative of man, or in response to a
patriarchal exertion of feminine norms and expectations. They secure
her in a masculine universe, they say in advance what she is, they
render her captive to an idea of feminine essence. By contrast,
Irigaray seeks to create a representation for women that would not be
a designation of what she is, defining her by and holding her to some
concrete essence, but would allow her to exist on her own terms and
speak for herself. Irigaray believes that this type of
self-determination is barred by the exclusion of mother-daughter
genealogies, an exclusion that works to assign woman to a maternal
destiny (as mothers of men). Neither denotative nor expressive,
neither speaking of woman (as though woman were a determinate object
of study) nor speaking as one (as though the aim were to express an
inner essence), Irigaray's writing establishes a reflexive
relation to language. By acquiescing, in her mimetic writing style, to
the cultural expectation of feminine artifice, Irigaray stages her own
exiled agency and thereby extends the possibilities for being a woman
to include being not only an object in or reference of language but a
transformer of language. Without claiming to say what a woman really
is, to get right what the symbolic order gets wrong, she shows that in
speaking differently, the very meaning of being a woman (or being a
man) can be transformed, so that sexual difference remains open to new
possibilities. She thus does not so much refute Freud's account
of the Oedipal Complex and the little girl's purported
masculinity as re-present its primal crime against women, the Oedipal
exclusion of maternal dependency, thereby altering the scene of its
representation.



Irigaray also challenges the Lacanian idea of the law of the father
and the phallic signifier, pillorying the way in which natural birth
has been assigned to maternity while cultural birth is assigned to
paternity, equating the woman-mother with body and the man-father with
language and law, and relegating the bodily process of parturition
(maternity) to mute nature while valorizing the symbolic process of
legitimation (paternity) as constitutive of civilization. Human
subjectivity has been masculinized, while human flesh is both
feminized and animalized. Irigaray aims to provoke a legitimation
crisis in the paternal legacy and the name of the father that bestows
on the child a political and familial identity.



The erasure of sexual difference enables a metaphysics of substance in
which sexual identity is a matter of fixed and pre-determined being,
of underlying essences or common properties, rather than a form of
becoming and self-generation. Irigaray's genealogical account of
sexual difference resists both the idea of an invariant universal (and
hence sexually neutral) human essence that subtends (and thereby
expels) human multiplicity and the idea of sexual essences that
consist in self-enclosed identities between which there is an
uncrossable divide. That is, she rejects the ontological assumptions
of both universal equality and separatism, taking both to be
implicitly masculine and patriarchal, bound to a metaphysical
essentialism that aims to capture diversity in first or final
principles, or to subsume particulars under general concepts.
Challenging the logic of the one and the many, Irigaray takes the
self-division of nature, its being-two, as a model of autonomous
self-development. When Irigaray says that human nature is two, she
does not mean that there are two fixed sexual substances, but that to
be natural is to be embodied, finite, divided, that the fundamental
character of nature is growth through differentiation. Human nature,
in her view, is not disembodied or neutral; it is always distinctively
sexed or sexuate, a neologism for sexed, but not necessarily erotic,
bodily difference. Viewing the natural body as self-differentiating
rather than self-identical, Irigaray also articulates distinctive
capacities for generation corresponding to differing morphological
possibilities (the possibilities of bodily form) that entail
"different subjective configurations" (Irigaray 1994
[2001: 137]).



If human nature is two, and always divided, Irigaray argues, then
civil identity is also two and divided; the two of nature needs to be
brought into the two of culture. The one is an illusion of patriarchy,
while the two threatens the phallocentric order and challenges the
supposition that universality must be singular. The scandalous idea of
a feminine subjectivity means that the universal must be doubled.
Doubling the universal does not, for Irigaray, mean merely replacing a
neutral universality (something that holds true for all human beings)
with two wholly distinct and separate truths. A universal that has
been doubled has also been split or divided from itself, no longer
one, and Irigaray sees in this the possibility for cultivating sexual
difference and overcoming a culture of sexual indifference that is
dependent on the idea of the generic human.



If the other has always been formulated on the basis of the same, as
merely a specific difference from some underlying generic identity,
there has only been complementarity and opposition, there has never
been an actual other subject, each with its own path of development.
Women have mirrored men's subjectivities, reflected their egos
back to them in an illusion of wholeness and unity, submitted to the
demand that they perform or masquerade femininity. Given this
criticism of the exploitation of otherness, and despite her criticism
of a feminist politics of equality, Irigaray thus cannot be
simplistically aligned with the project of difference, if this means
asserting features of women's biological or social specificity
as essential and innately valuable attributes, since these Irigaray
takes to be framed already and in advance by a patriarchal symbolic
and imaginary order. Irigaray's affirmation of sexual difference
does not mean affirming the feminine traits that have been ascribed to
women, since these are actually, in her view, the traits of sexual
indifference, defined only with reference to men. Sexual difference
has yet to appear and it is her task to bring it into being.



Being-two is counterposed to the metaphysical alteration between the
one and the many, with its incessant oscillation between the
essentialism of a rigid identity and the laissez-faire contingency,
independent of any determining essence, of unlimited multiplicity and
atomistic individualism. It is on the basis of this being-two that
Irigaray attempts to build an ethics of sexual difference, a political
relation between-two, with civil rights appropriate to sexuate
identity, so that one's identity as a citizen is not cut off
from the body, and law is not severed from nature. If sexual
difference is not simply an effect of oppression, then freedom does
not mean freedom from sexed embodiment. While political neutrality can
only recognize disembodied subjects deprived of their bodily life, for
Irigaray, citizens are not abstractions. The doubled, non-neutral,
universal allows for distinctively feminine (and distinctively
masculine) subjects to be recognized politically.



Similarly to Beauvoir, who ascertains that language and culture
constitute the subject as masculine, and the feminine as other to him,
Irigaray maintains that inhabiting a feminine subjectivity is
paradoxical in a fraternal social order. But, for Irigaray, both
Beauvoir and Freud fail to address sexual difference insofar as they
retain a singular notion of masculine subjectivity, Freud because he
presumes the libido is always masculine, and Beauvoir because she
reckons the aim of women's emancipation as equality with men
(for instance by concluding the *Second Sex* with a call to
brotherhood and seeming, arguably, to be calling for women to
assimilate to masculine norms of selfhood). Irigaray rejects the
project of equality, since 'equality' can only ever mean
equality to men, and proposes instead doubling the notion of
subjectivity in line with the subject's own self-division. This
might seem unnecessary, especially to equality-oriented feminists,
since of course, women can, at least in much of the liberal,
democratic world, be citizen-subjects, just like men. But
Irigaray's point is that women can have the rights of men only
so long as they are like men, i.e., insofar as they are brothers,
subsumed into the neutral individuality of the liberal social
contract. This purportedly equal access to citizenship and
subjectivity thus does not resolve the paradox, since it merely takes
the side of subjectivity over that of femininity, retaining the
constitution of the feminine as lack, the inverted image of man, the
other of the same, that which stands in the way of political agency
and obstructs autonomy, and which thus must be overcome in order to
achieve self-determination. In the prevailing social contract,
femininity and subjectivity remain opposed.



Irigaray does not think she can say what a woman is or what femininity
is. Familial, social, and symbolic mechanisms of exchange have denied
femininity its own images and language, fashioning women through
men's language, images, and desires, and thereby producing an
apparent, but false, symmetry within a single, monotonous, language.
Against this homogeny, with its same and its other, Irigaray construes
the production or work of sexual difference, sexual difference as a
relation between-two, to be the path toward liberating both femininity
and masculinity from their metaphysical and political constraints by
allowing them each to cultivate their own interdependent natures. The
idea of a between-two does not mean a singular path that is shared by
both, but rather indicates, in addition to the value of a specifically
feminine sexual identity and a specifically masculine sexual identity,
the ethical path of an intersubjective relationality that allows them
to appreciate and value one another. Since the between-two is premised
on being-two (self-differentiated), it is in the cultivation of this
sexual difference that we will find the possibility of an ethical
sexual relation, what Irigaray calls an ethics of sexual difference.
For Irigaray, then, contra Lacan, there can be a sexual relation.
Irigaray's undertaking thus involves not merely an assertion of
difference against equality, nor certainly a simple reversal; such
stances take place on the basis of an already existing symbolic order
and imaginary relation and are themselves what need to be
interrogated. To find a language for feminine sexuality and feminine
subjectivity, we must go "back through the dominant
discourse" (Irigaray 1977 [1985b: 119]) with its metaphysical
assumptions of substance or essence, and its concept of identity which
adheres to the regime of sexual indifference.



Although Irigaray often invokes the maternal as the source of life and
subjectivity, she does not equate maternity with femininity or the
mother with the woman. Among many others, Jessica Benjamin (whose work
will be discussed below) seems to share the mistaken view that
Irigaray's theoretical project is premised upon valorizing
"female genitals as a starting point for a different
desire" (Benjamin 1988: 276). No doubt this (mis)interpretation
stems from Irigaray's text "When Our Lips Speak
Together." But what Irigaray means by 'speaking from the
body' is moving away from a singular conception of origin and
desire, and most especially the origin of desire. Her writing of
women's bodies, like her retrieval of mother/daughter
genealogies is a strategy of language and imagination, situating the
body as fluid border, the site of the overflow of culture into nature
and vice versa, rather than a self-enclosed egoic center. She is not
an essentialist who views women's biology as their destiny.
Instead she challenges the nature/culture divide, and the either/or of
biology or civilization.


### 4.2 Subjectivity, Alterity, and Alienation



While often grouped together in cursory overviews of so-called French
Feminism, Irigaray and Kristeva have fundamentally disparate projects
(and locations in the academy), both with regard to their critical
analyses and with regard to their political enterprises. Whereas
Irigaray was a student of Lacan who breaks with (even as she is
inspired by) his teachings from her earliest work, Kristeva has a much
more ambiguous relationship to his school of thought and was never his
student or attended his seminars. Their respective views can perhaps
best be captured with respect to their attitude toward the symbolic
violence of castration (the Oedipal Complex) and the social contract.
As explained above, Irigaray envisions a sexuate culture that would
overcome the Oedipal demands of a sacrificial economy and restore
feminine genealogies to the work of civilization. Kristeva, by
contrast, argues that there is no subjectivity beyond sacrifice and
does not believe Oedipus can or should be overcome. Kristeva and
Irigaray do not form a cohort and they do not respond to each
other's writings. But they both have psychoanalytic training and
practices and both attend to the body and the drives, taking up the
theme of loss or exile of the mother's body and the impact of
matricide on social relations. Kristeva even (echoing Irigaray)
condemns humanism as "the fraternity of the same"
(Kristeva 1998: 168) and, like Irigaray, she plays with writing style,
offering experimental, innovative, sometimes imagistic portraits of
psychical moods, maternal practices, and artistic endeavors.



Kristeva's connection to feminist thought is also unsettled and
volatile, although her focus on questions pertaining to language,
femininity, and the maternal body has made her work amenable to
feminist interest and development. In her essay "Women's
Time," she classifies the feminist movement into three distinct
times or generations, each with its own approach to and vision of
justice. The first generation is universalist in principle and aspires
to give women a place within history and the social contract; this
generation takes equality as its mission and asserts women's
identification with the dominant values of rationality. Kristeva
aligns Beauvoir with this project of pursuing access to universal
subjectivity. The second generation is reactive, rejecting the idea of
assimilation to values taken to be masculine; this generation insists
on feminine difference. While Kristeva does not mention Irigaray, it
seems clear that Kristeva would align her with this strategy and the
project of recognizing feminine specificity. In Kristeva's view,
the first generation is so committed to universal equality that it
denies bodily difference, and the second generation is so committed to
difference that it refuses to partake of a history it deems to be
masculine. The third generation follows neither the path of fixing
identity nor the path of neutralizing difference in the medium of
universality. Instead it embraces ambiguity and non-identity,
respecting both the value of participating in historical time and the
ineluctability of bodily difference. The third generation recognizes
that it is as embodied beings that we enter into the social contract
and community with others.



Since Kristeva believes that there is no subjectivity and no sociality
without the violence of the symbolic contract and the splitting of
subjectivity, the feminism that she proposes would not take refuge
from this violence either by standing outside history (as the second
generation does), or by denying women's bodies and desires (as
the first generation does). Taking seriously the intransigence of
sexual difference, and the violent fractures within and of identity,
Kristeva advocates feminist support for alienation that would not
pretend to reconcile the rupture between body and law (what Lacan
calls castration) and would refuse the solace of identity.
Kristeva mentions the bodily experience of pregnancy, an experience of
being split, of being two in one, as manifesting the instability of,
and alterity within, identity.



This insistence on the fragility and precariousness of identity can be
grasped in the first instance by looking at Kristeva's
understanding of the drives and language. Kristeva introduces the
notion of the semiotic as the affective dimension of language that
facilitates its energetic movement. The semiotic is the materiality of
language, its tonal and rhythmic qualities, its bodily force. In
Kristeva's account, the drives are not simply excluded by
language but also inscribed as an alien element within it. While more
primitive than signification, the semiotic participates in signifying
practices.



Kristeva's elaboration of the semiotic situates it at a point
prior to the Lacanian imaginary, i.e., prior to the moment at which
the infant identifies with its own ego and distinguishes itself from
an object. Still in porous relation to another body, without clear
borders or limits, the infant is propelled by the anarchic,
heterogenous, rhythmic flow of drive energy "which has no thesis
and no position" (Kristeva 1974 [1984: 26]). Mobile and
provisional, moving through the body of the not-yet subject, the
semiotic is a chaotic force anterior to language, unlocalizable
because it courses through an as yet undifferentiated materiality in
which the infantile body is not yet distinct from the maternal body.
Kristeva calls this stage pre-thetic since it is prior to the reign of
propositions, judgments, positions, and theses, these being subsequent
possibilities that might arrest or seize a movement that always
exceeds them. Since the image is itself a kind of sign, a first
representation, the advent of the imaginary demarcates the first
thetic break, a break from nature and into the realm of convention.
What Kristeva means by the thetic then includes both the imaginary
(the mirror stage) and the symbolic (the Oedipal Complex) dimensions
of Lacan. Only with the advent of the thetic phase, the
"threshold of language" (Kristeva 1974 [1984: 45]), can
there be said to be signification proper along with negation as
judgment. In thereby altering Lacan's understanding of the
imaginary or mirror stage, she attends to the pre-Oedipal mother/child
relation in a way he does not, while also elaborating on an
underdeveloped theme in Freud's work.



Freud distinguishes between auto-erotism and primary narcissism,
attributing to the latter a new psychical action. While auto-erotism
precedes the formation of the ego and the individuation of the self,
primary narcissism only ensues with the preliminary development of
egoic unity, when the ego is able to demarcate itself from the
surrounding world and take itself for an object. The semiotic
corresponds to the diffuse drive energy of auto-erotism and Kristeva
takes up Freud's challenge to assess the psychical action of
ego-formation that enables primary narcissism, which she attributes to
a primary identification with the imaginary father. In *Tales of
Love*, which jumps off from Freud's claim in *The Ego and
the Id* that identification with the father of individual
pre-history is prior to and more primary than object-cathexis,
Kristeva offers an original account of the pre-Oedipal period, finding
a paternal figure there. Since the bond of identification precedes any
bond with objects, the imaginary father is what makes possible the
initial separation between ego and object, or rather proto-ego and
proto-object. This father is not the first object, but the first
identification, making language and love possible, movement within and
among a world of others. This identification, Kristeva hypothesizes,
alters maternal space, interrupts it with something beyond its
borders. But it also indicates that there is a preliminary pre-thetic
symbolic capacity at work in infantile life. As the drives expel,
detach, or isolate a proto-object, the space of differentiation is
supported by identification with the imaginary father, who holds it
open. The imaginary father is here associated with love (unlike the
symbolic father who is associated with law), an invitation to language
and subjectivity, to become a being who can have relations with
others.



Kristeva accepts Freud's insight that the thetic break, or the
prohibitory break of the Oedipal Complex and the dead father, that
founds law and sociality is violent and murderous (Kristeva 1974
[1984: 70]). The capacity for representation transforms our perceptual
universe, entailing that no bodily immediacy is possible, that all
experience will be mediated by significatory practices and filtered
through the ego's organization. But although this rent in
experience is suffered by the signifying child as a loss to be
mourned, it is also, Kristeva claims, a gift, the gift of a self that
can navigate language. With words and memories available, the child
can compensate for the loss of objects in perception (in the exemplary
case, learning to endure the mother's absence). On
Kristeva's view, "the structural violence of
language's irruption as the murder of soma, the transformation
of the body, the captation of drives" (Kristeva 1974 [1984:
75]), is preceded by a loving father who makes possible the
preliminary individuation of the infant from the mother. Although
symbolic violence is integral to the maintenance of a social order,
the promise of language on Kristeva's account is initially
brought forward by love, not by law. Unlike Irigaray, who wants to
retrieve the pre-Oedipal period in order to reclaim feminine
genealogies, Kristeva wants only to redescribe it in order to reassess
its import for individuation and creative self-transformation. She
takes infantile matricide (separation from the mother) to be a
necessary condition of subjectivity and not a remnant of patriarchal
violence.



Still, Kristeva charts differing arcs for the paternal and maternal
relationships in the constitution of subjectivity. The imaginary
father empowers a new psychic space premised on the distinction
between internal and external, self and other. The breaking in of the
signifier inaugurates individuation, the assumption of bodily form and
corporeal unity, and thereby entails loss of the maternal body. In
Kristeva's view, matricide, repression of the maternal body, is
a necessary event on the way to subjectivity. The bodily exchange
between mother and child can serve as a barrier to love, imprisoning
the child in an overwhelming bond. The loving mother provides the
first approach to language and law by demonstrating love for an object
who is not the child, a third outside this dyad who makes the dyadic
relationship itself possible and releases the emotional pressure of
it. The loving father proffers a kind of promise, even as he disrupts
fusion with the mother, allowing and encouraging the child to
represent itself. Kristeva's thought here follows Lacan's
idea that a mother whose only object of desire is her child will
produce a child who cannot move beyond the psychosis of being the
phallus for her.



Signification and language are sites of sublimation, creative workings
out of the drives, but they can be stalled by abjection and
melancholia which are both preconditions for, but also limits to,
subjectification. Kristeva identifies abjection and melancholia as
sites of psychical (and social) crisis rooted in narcissistic
disorder. In them, the tenuous processes of ego-formation risk
collapse; faced with difficulty clarifying the boundaries of the self,
the subject reverts to ambivalent aggressivity. While Kristeva
understands narcissism to be a fundamental, if unstable, structure of
the psyche, abjection and melancholia are problematic relations to the
maternal body and its loss (or the malfunctioning of its loss). They
are experiences of disintegration or dissolution of the ego without
reorganization, but also of its rabid fortification.



In *Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection*, the abject is
described as neither inside nor outside, neither subject nor object,
neither self nor other, troubling identity and order with the
instability of boundaries, borders, and limits. Kristeva offers the
examples of bodily fluids, sweat, blood, pus, milk, as non-objects
that are banished in the course of ego-formation. These non-objects
also include the mother's body; indeed the maternal body is a
privileged site of abjection, as it is that which must be excluded in
order for individuation and separation to take place, so that one can
distinguish self from other and establish a dyadic (imaginary)
relation out of undifferentiated maternal space or the semiotic
*chora*, the pre-spatial relation of fluid (although not
entirely unregulated) drives. The abject can then also be called the
primally repressed, primal because prior not only to the secondary
symbolic prohibition of the incest taboo or Oedipal Complex, but also
prior to the establishment of any identity.



The abject is horrifying, repellent, but also fascinating; it is
strange but familiar. The process of abjection is not merely a symptom
of phobia or borderline disorder, but a necessary and even recurring
ordeal in any subject's transition to identification with the
father and accession to language. It is the most archaic form of
negativity, an exclusion or expulsion which functions by securing the
borders of self, carving a space, marking a divide, out of which the
ego can emerge. Kristeva calls it the violent attempt "to
release the hold of *maternal* entity" (Kristeva 1980
[1982: 13]) or rather what will have been the mother, since this
process establishes the distinction between the maternal body and the
infant in the first place, making possible primary narcissism. The
abject exposes the precariousness of the subject/object divide, the
fragility of identity, the need to constitute oneself against the
threat of, and desire for, dissolution.



Although this is not primarily Kristeva's concern, abjection can
also be understood as a social phenomenon, one with political
implications. The psychically primitive experience of egoic
instability can be propelled into the political realm, and be socially
accentuated or reinforced. In abjection, subjects confront what they
must exclude or expel in order to maintain identity, that is, they
confront their own dependency, mortality, finitude, and materiality.
This strangeness experienced at the porous edges of identity can
rebound into troubling relations with others, including especially
with others who are perceived as lacking intelligible identity,
socially marginal, or refusing cultural assimilation. While
Kristeva's own focus is less on what is abjected than the
process of abjection, that is, less on the expelled non-object than on
the violence of separation that brings objects (and others) into
being, her work provides the theoretical underpinnings to ask
questions about who bears the burden of abjection, how and why some
are figured as inhuman, animal, or alien. Her analysis of abjection
exposes the ways in which social life is dependent on jettisoning or
containing disorder and disruption, and managing the fear of
contamination.



The confusion of borders, the ambivalent relation to maternal space at
the outskirts of narcissism, also motivates melancholia. The idea of
the maternal as the primally repressed recurs in *Black Sun:
Depression and Melancholia*, where Kristeva claims,
"matricide is our vital necessity" (Kristeva 1987 [1989:
27]), the founding partition that facilitates the birth and growth of
the ego. Kristeva praises the child, the "intrepid
wanderer" who "leaves the crib to meet the mother in the
realm of representations" (1987 [1989: 41]). Maintaining that
the organization of the psyche is premised on loss, Kristeva also
understands that the suffering entailed by loss can derail the
formation of a self, that loss itself can become the dominant reality
for some who are unable to establish a secure relation to themselves.
While mourning, for Kristeva as for Freud, enables a
subject to, gradually and painfully, let go of loss by establishing a
relation in language to it, melancholia is a practice which enables
the subject to hold onto lost objects, most especially the mother or,
better, the dead (or repressed) mother. The loving father facilitates
mourning and linguistic creativity; the deadening mother disables
self-creation. The generation of the ego out of expulsion, the
division of unity, is not simply a mournful moment, but also
potentially a joyous one, in which the advent of language, the promise
of the father, offers reparation and life with a world of others, so
that words can provide the nourishment that the breast previously had.
The father makes it possible to fill the void with language and the
formation of signifying bonds.



In Kristeva's understanding of melancholic breakdown, the
problem is similar to the one discussed above in the section on
Irigaray, namely that loss goes unnamed and unmourned but thereby
stays unprocessed within, leaving the subject stagnant and inert.
Women, in Kristeva's view, suffer the loss of creativity, the
incapacity for sublimation, more severely than men. Women's
access to language, and creative self-transformation, is more
vulnerable to disturbance both because of the (previously discussed)
inexorable repression of their pre-Oedipal relation to the mother and
because they have greater difficulty establishing a primary
identification with the father. Whereas the loss of the archaic bond
with the maternal body is (potentially) sublated by men into the
rhythms of language, for women it often becomes a dead space where
once there was life, filled only with loss and emptiness. Imprisoned
by an undead, unmourned, mother, excluded from language or
representation, women are vulnerable to the devastations of symbolic
sacrifice without recompense.



Psychoanalysis is presented as a counter-depressant, as are art and
writing, able not only to keep the drives or semiotic forces moving
through language but also to foster their revolutionary potential to
transgress symbolic limits and laws and to creatively rework self and
society. Accessing the drives and rhythms that symbolic law and order
typically repress, psychoanalytic practice, like the poetic text,
revitalizes or reactivates the semiotic *chora*, a connection
to the maternal body or to femininity. Such practices let loose the
disorganizing energies of the body, the pleasurable rupture of sense
and nonsense. They take productive advantage of the dialectical
discord between semiotic and symbolic and thus keep this discord
oriented toward dissent and protest rather than inner collapse.



Although the semiotic resists the symbolic order, or cannot be
contained by it, the two are always entangled and imbricated in
language; drives both support and subvert the symbolic operation,
bringing bodily rhythms and forces to signification, both impelling
and pulling apart its organization and stases. This disruptive
potential of semiotic drives and rhythms is associated with negativity
as a force of revolt, an excess, most archaically, the force of bodily
expulsion, but more generally the forces that continually spur the
dissolution of one's own organization. Negativity maintains
life, keeps it going by circulating energy, rendering the subject
always in process. Through its movement, the subject is not a rigid
identity, but always developing, reconfiguring itself through the
interplay of drives and language, in the tensions between body and
mirror image and between mirror image and self.



While Kristeva advocates for 'poetic revolution,' (meaning
the ongoing process of reconfiguring language and oneself by
exploiting the heterogeneities between semiotic and symbolic
elements), she is sometimes read as a conservative thinker because of
her commitment to maintaining a symbolic order and social contract.
The danger of a too strong or too weak symbolic order is that it
encourages a return to abjection or melancholia, to the point prior to
ego-formation, to a dissolution of the borders that maintain social
life and creative subjectivity, contributing to the ego's
collapse into an empty abyssal void and discouraging semiotic
creativity. Such a fragile, fragmented, disintegrating ego, always in
search of objects to heal the rift of being, dreaming of a return to
unity but suffering the nightmare of upheaval and collapse of
identity, is especially susceptible to the traumatic impact of
encountering the stranger, the unfamiliar other or alien who provokes
turmoil and who is repudiated in a rebound to delirious narcissism and
a reassertion of self-mastery and self-identity. The stranger disturbs
boundaries, indicating the failure to fully eliminate the refuse of
identity and purify oneself. Kristeva sees in the ethics of
psychoanalysis, premised on self-division, being strange to oneself,
the possibility of establishing an ethical relation to alterity,
inviting it into our political bonds (and warding off the most
virulent forms of abjection). Where Irigaray aims to introduce sexual
difference into the social contract and the domain of law and rights,
Kristeva proposes that we introduce self-discord.


## 5. Anglo-American Psychoanalytic Feminism



There are a number of Anglo-American (and Australian) feminist
theorists and scholars who read Lacan and laid the groundwork for the
passage from French to English and from France to the US, Britain, and
Australia in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. Among these are Juliet
Mitchell (*Psychoanalysis and Feminism*, 1974), Teresa Brennan
(*The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity*,
1992), Elizabeth Grosz (*Jacques Lacan: A Feminist
Introduction*, 1990), Jane Gallop (*Reading Lacan* [1985]
and *The Daughter's Seduction* [1982]), and Jacqueline
Rose (*Sexuality in the Field of Vision*, 1986). While writing
in English, these theorists take their bearings from the French
Lacanian approach to psychoanalysis and can generally be classified in
the field of what today gets called "Continental
Feminism." Responsible for revitalizing psychoanalysis for
feminist thought and countering earlier feminist dismissals, they aim
to reclaim Freud's central analyses for feminist purposes.
Juliet Mitchell, for instance, develops the insight indispensable to
any feminist reading, that "psychoanalysis is not a
recommendation *for* a patriarchal society, but an analysis
*of* one" (Mitchell 1974: xiii). Mitchell and Rose are
also the co-editors of *Feminine Sexuality*, a selection from
Lacan's seminars, for which both editors wrote influential
introductions.



This section will address, however, not the Lacanian inspired feminist
appropriation of psychoanalysis in the English speaking world, but the
Anglo-American development of feminist psychoanalysis that has
descended from and is indebted to British object relations theory and
its focus on the pre-Oedipal mother-child bond, especially the work of
Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott. Authors who work in this vein
include Nancy Chodorow (*The Reproduction of Mothering*, 1978),
Dorothy Dinnerstein (*The Mermaid and the Minotaur*, 1976), and
Jessica Benjamin (*Bonds of Love* [1988] and *Like Subjects,
Love Objects* [1995]). What distinguishes this Anglo-American
tradition from the French-influenced one is its emphasis on
pre-Oedipal sociality or intersubjectivity and its focus on the values
of integration, harmony, and wholeness, as opposed to those of
self-division and respecting the alien within. 



The remainder of this section will focus on the work of Benjamin as
exemplary of the Anglo-American approach, and clarify its differences
from and similarities with the French approach. Like Irigaray,
Benjamin is perturbed by the psychoanalytic depiction of social life
as the world of men, developed on the basis of the father-son relation
and its aggression, hostility, love, and mourning. Deploring this
"struggle for power" (Benjamin 1988: 6) in which women are
merely the triangulating object of desire, Benjamin argues that, in
the formation of identity, subjects become bound by love to oppressive
social relations. She worries that "domination is anchored in
the hearts of the dominated" (1988: 5), that women are
erotically attached to patriarchal power, and she believes that
psychoanalysis can help explain how and why this is so. Psychoanalysis
thus offers to Benjamin insights not only into the individual psyche
but also into the organization, structure, and distribution of
political power and hierarchy. Her aim is "to grasp the deep
structure of gender as a binary opposition which is common to psychic
and cultural representations" (1988: 218). Unlike Kristeva and
Irigaray, both of whom problematize the duality and comprehensiveness
of the nature/culture distinction, and emphasize transformation of
symbolic bonds, Benjamin highlights the role of (contradictory)
cultural stereotypes in bringing forth gender as we know and live it,
and emphasizes the need for social transformation.



Taking what she calls an eclectic approach, and eschewing
methodological orthodoxy with regard to Freudian metapsychology and
the theory of the instincts, Benjamin establishes her project on the
basis of a two person relational perspective, with the other as a
separate independent subject. Rather than an undifferentiated unity
governing early infantile life in the pre-Oedipal period, which would
make of the infant merely a "monadic energy system"
(Benjamin 1988: 17), she maintains that a genuine duality and
relationality exists from the start and that the process of growth
entails development within relationships rather than a development of
them. The infant, she postulates, is a fundamentally active and social
creature, reaching out to the world and expressing a desire for
recognition. The knots of identity are formed via the interplay of
this desire with the response of another who variously affirms or
defies the child. Benjamin claims that this emphasis on sociality and
intersubjectivity is not intended to disregard the intrapsychic
elements of subject formation, and in fact she argues for "the
interaction between the psyche and social life" (1988: 5). She
holds that the inner and the outer are not competitive but
complementary theoretical perspectives. Nonetheless, she does want to
situate identity generally, and gendered identity more specifically,
within the purview of the subject's multiple and ambiguous
social identifications.



Domination, she argues, ensues from the failures of recognition built
into the political and social order, not merely failures that take
place at the personal or individual level in a single relationship.
Borrowing an initial insight from Foucault, Benjamin looks at the way
power shapes and forms identities and desires, producing gendered
relations (Benjamin 1988: 4). Borrowing another insight from Hegel,
Benjamin depicts the dialectic of recognition in the struggle for
identity as a "conflict between independence and
dependence" (1988: 33). In her view, however, the Hegelian tale,
like the Freudian one, erroneously begins with a "monadic,
self-interested ego" (1988: 33) and it thus concludes with the
inevitability of breakdown and domination. According to Benjamin,
Winnicott resolves the Hegelian and Freudian dilemma (Benjamin 1988:
38), the solitary egoism of the fight to the death, by reformulating
the problem of recognition at the level of fantasy and distinguishing
between internal and external worlds. The infant feels confident in
asserting its independence, and destroying its object in fantasy, so
long as that object is discovered to have a secure external existence
in reality. In other words, the fantasy of destruction is appeased by
its failure; the infant destroys internally but externally is relieved
to still have an object to address and interact with. More
particularly, the infant destroys or separates from the mother
internally and in fantasy, but simultaneously retains a relation to
her externally and in reality. The good enough mother must foster this
relationship between two separate egos, neither allowing the child to
succeed in destroying or dominating her, nor allowing herself to
squash the child's nascent attempts at self-assertion. The
mother-child relation is then a kind of revised neo-Hegelian struggle
for power, retaining the aim of mutual recognition or respect, but
risking domination and rebellion. The violent conflicts within are not
repressed but neutralized and pacified in the reality of
intersubjective life that affirms and recognizes autonomy.



Asking, as do Chodorow and Dinnerstein, about the genesis of
patriarchal power, Benjamin concludes, as they also do, that a main
source or component lies in exclusive childrearing by women/mothers,
which occasions the related risks of collapsing maternal authority
into mere dominance, supporting the fantasy of maternal omnipotence,
centering potent ambivalence on the mother, and fostering rigid gender
identities and identifications. While the boy attains autonomy via
loving identification with the father and separation from the mother,
the girl's relation to paternal power is complicated by its
inaccessibility to her. If she seeks "liberation in the
father" (Benjamin 1988: 99), she connects her femininity to
submission rather than agency, and attaches to masculinity as an
idealized object of love (and as its love-object), conferring on it
value while devaluing the mother, and creating a divide between
feminine sexuality and autonomous subjectivity. Benjamin argues,
however, that the "protean impersonality" (Benjamin 1988:
216) of male domination cannot be addressed by a critique that focuses
solely on the family and childcare and that power relations cannot be
overcome solely through a transformation in caretaking roles, although
the equation of women with motherhood is certainly one component of
the problem. If gendered identities are encouraged by social power
relations--masculinity is developed as a denial of dependency and
assertion of independence, while femininity is developed in an
identification with nurturing and concession of autonomy--then
real transformation requires attention to social roles and
"cultural representations" (Benjamin 1988: 217), since
"the core feature of the gender system--promoting
masculinity as separation from and femininity as continuity with the
primary bond--is maintained even when mother and father
participate equally in that bond" (Benjamin 1988: 217). In
Benjamin's theoretical model, children are responsive not only
to their social environment, but also to ideas with opaque meanings
(mandates, expectations, prohibitions, exhortations, etc.) that are
often covertly, indirectly, or unknowingly conveyed in parental
language and edicts. Gender equality thus requires that women be
recognized, by themselves and by men, as subjects in culture and that
intersubjectivity itself be revalued.



Benjamin's analysis can be distinguished from those of Irigaray
and Kristeva precisely by the way in which it tends to conflate or
collapse the distinction between representation and social roles.
While Anglo-American psychoanalytic feminism theorizes gender as
derived from or dependent on social (including familial) inequalities
and power relations, and thus aims to reduce its psychic effects by
redressing social and familial domination/subordination, French
feminism does not calibrate the psyche on socio-cultural relations but
on imaginary and symbolic representations. Benjamin's
partitioning of intrapsychic life into internal and external
relations, and her vision of intersubjective equilibrium is, in
contrast to Irigaray and Kristeva's assertion of discord within
and between subjects, oriented by the conviction that social harmony
is desirable and attainable.


## 6. Conclusion



Psychoanalysis presents a critical and diagnostic project, not
necessarily a normative or liberatory one. In developing a theory of
the drives and the non-rational forces that move and impel us, the
idea that we are opaque rather than transparent to ourselves,
incapable of complete self-knowledge or self-mastery, psychoanalytic
theory also challenges the rationalist, humanist ego and proposes that
our ethical characters and political communities are not perfectable,
exposing the precariousness of both psychic and political identity.
The unconscious cannot be assumed to be inherently either a
transgressive or a conservative force, but an unreliable one,
promoting revolt or rebellion sometimes, intransigence and rigid
border preservation at other times.



Although they are in often uneasy alliance, the psychoanalytic account
of the unconscious provides feminist theory with resources for both
political and ontological inquiry. Ontologically, psychoanalysis
offers a distinctively psychical understanding of sexual difference,
how we come to inhabit our bodies and our identities, and misinhabit
them, an analysis reducible to neither social nor biological
categories. Politically, psychoanalysis offers a depiction of the
forces that impel us to organize, disorganize, and reorganize the
bonds that hold us together. By offering insight into the formation of
subjectivity and the animating fantasies of social life,
psychoanalysis thus also facilitates feminist analysis of the obdurate
elements of patriarchal social relations, including the symbolic bonds
and internal forces that undergird identity and attach sexed subjects
to relations of dominance and subordination. Psychoanalytic feminist
attention to the core constituents of civilization, to the nuclei of
sexual difference and communal affiliation, helps explain the
perpetuation of masculine power and enables feminist theorists to
articulate possible correctives, challenges, routes of amelioration,
or ethical interruptions that go to the roots of political life and to
its beyond and do not simply operate on the given social terrain.