Hélène Cixous

Starting points:

• Lacan
• Derrida

Contexto general: Lacan y el feminismo

"El feminismo le critica a Lacan que plantea una teoría donde el objeto en torno a lo cual se organiza todo es un objeto masculino y los sujetos se definen en torno a tenerlo o no tenerlo. El tener está positivizado y, en ese sentido, es una teoría machista o que refuerza la dominación masculina. En realidad, en Lacan los hombres tampoco lo tienen, nadie lo tiene. El significante fálico es como la carta: un elemento que se desplaza y lo que hay son diferentes formas de hacer con ese hecho de que nadie lo tiene."

• Although Lacan radicalizes and tries to criticize Freud, Lacan carries the baggage of inherent patriarchy in Freud’s work.

• If the father blocks the child’s desire for the mother through the symbolic order, through his name and his "no", what happens to girls? Do they also desire to go back to the mother?

• Although highly problematic, Lacanian psychoanalysis has served as starting point for designating the "feminine".

• (Phal)logocentrism: castration anxiety and penis envy are the reactions -male an female- to the problem of the presence of the phalus. -should we leave the opposition intact and think of its hierarchy only? or whould we deconstruct the dichotomy itself as it is the product of phallogocentric thinking?

• Can we even speak of problems of gender without going back to the essentialist thinking that created these categories?

Cixous’ contribution

• What needs to be deconstructed is the male/female dichotomy

• She argues that we cannot assume a clear cut dichotomy between female/male.

• But we must put into question the structure behinds dichotomy first. As well as the fact that the binary is never pure in itself but result of difference, not original, nor present.

• the dichotomies are not innocent, always hierarchical

• Behind man woman dichotomy: another one: father/son

• Hidden desire to be the origin: of a phallocentric and of the origin of fatherhood. men can never sure about wether they are the origin of their children.

The new born woman

The opposition assumes that the poles are stable identities, from which the differences can be drawn.

• What is so highly patriarchal is that these dichotomies are never innocent.
• The male pole is always the reference point (presence of phalos) and the absence of phalos on the female side.
• What seems to be an innocent opposition of logical opposites is already marked by patriarchy, which not only constitutes them but infuses them by clear cut and normative distinctions.
• "the same" cannot possibly invent anything, invention implies otherness
• ultrasubjectives: the outside of the subject
• it is woman that is able to enjoy this form of homosexuality which helps her escape the dichotomic thinking that we need to overcome
• this bisexuality does not threaten castration but wards off castration and the fear of castration
• this bisexuality does not annihilate differences but encourages themthe ability to transcend heterosexuality allows woman to opnen up to the other (which is always connoted in negative ways)
• there is notas female and a male pole. her proposition of the female embodies an alternative to dichotomic thinking itself which tends to be always inherently patriarchic.
  • is she not replacing one definition of woman by the other?

Female otherness

• Woman not only is the opposite of man but the opposite of opposites
• includes the other
• BUT: lingering essentialism: located in women’s reproductive possibilities: the woman can carry someone else but even the other sex inside her (puts into question dichotomic oppositions). essentialism or trying to overcome essentialism? (clear cut different between original unities: male and female)

Passivity

• asssociated with female and feared by men
• but: being able to put oneself into question as a unified self in this state of pregnancy (creativity, invention).
• passivity as opening up to otherness is at the core of normal biological process of creation but also at the core of everything that is able to overcome a stable concept of sameness
• a female redefinition of passivity: from a concept that is designated by patriarchy to the female (weakness, submission), to the idea of creating something new (passivity, letting something into you, is a condition of creating something new).
• woman represents the impure. does such a split indentity need to be considered pathological?
  • psychoanalysis is structured around how things to be: unified selves. Not being that is pathological. Normativity built into this discourse. Cixous tries to subvert this idea: being split doe snot have to be pathological.
  • is psychic wholeness a patriarchic mistaken/arbitrary assumption
  • unified self: legal/moral context. if selves are multiple and split, can they be accountable?
• QUESTION: Should be turn around the normativities within a binary system or will we have to abandon the entire system? re-evaluation of values is not called for (Derrida says it is an important step but ultimately the entire system needs to be overturned)